I took Nana and Riley out to lunch today, something I'm thinking of making a regular Thursday outing. Today we went to Cheeburger Cheeburger (note the surprising lack of "s") in Frazer, and had some yummy burgers. Nana said she hasn't had such a good burger in years, and I learned that she likes mayonnaise and fried onions on her burgers.

After we sat, a group of ladies came in and sat at the table behind me. I don't know if it was just one of them, or the whole group, but the terribly overpowering odor of baby powder slammed into my nostrils. It was so powerful, I nearly gagged and I could occasionally (depending on wind shift) barely taste my food.

I'm not sure what it is that possesses some people to odorify themselves like this. I mean, you might do this if you absolutely had to cover some other less attractive odor, but by all means, take care of that problem before slathering yourself with some other more powerful odor. I really don't see how that helps the problem, and I can only imagine what I wasn't smelling underneath all of the overlying stink.

Outside the restaurant, too, there was a lady who was walking between offices. She smelled so strongly of perfume, I caught her scent when she was 5 feet away. This is outdoors, for pity's sake!

Is there a polite way to say, "You stink"? Nana suggested that we switch tables. It really was that bad. But there wasn't anywhere to left to sit because the restaurant was busy. I should bring nose plugs with me when I go out.

We had a conference with Abby's first grade teacher recently, during which she expressed mild concern over Abby's interest in school. She asked us specifically if anything really motivates Abby, since she doesn't seem to do anything more than the necessary work in her academics. While she's perfectly capable of doing the work, she doesn't really get enthusiastic about it.

Abby's always been her own self, and the one thing that she really does get enthused about is art. Abby really likes to draw, and even her teacher remarked that she's significantly advanced compared to her peers. She notices details that they don't and I have noticed that she is able to put abstract images on paper that I wouldn't even have thought of.

There is one particular crayon-coloring that sticks in memory. It was one of those "color this - win lunch" things that they give the kids at Ron's Schoolhouse - a picture of a backpack. I think Berta or I idly asked her to draw some things in around the backpack, not really specifying, but I was really expecting some basic school-related doodles. Instead, Abby drew a bunch of things to scale with the backpack. Some in the foreground, some in the background. There was even someone's foot and leg visible from behind the bag, and it amazed me that she could put the backpack in this whole scene - just see it in her mind and draw it.

So we haven't yet taken Abby's teacher's advice for getting Abby outside art lessons, but I have been trying to think of ways that we can expand her interest in reading and writing by way of art. I was hoping to continue the book writing that we started a long while ago, where she would dictate stories and I would write them in a notebook. Then, she could draw pictures to go along with each story.

Today, Abby came home with a poem she had written, I think as part of her free time, because it wasn't graded or marked-up. Nonetheless, Abby's teacher was extremely complimentary of her work in class. I think this poem is an important step in a long journey of relating written word to art for her. For a six-year-old, I think this poem is outright amazing, even considering that I could simply be a proud dad.

In any case, here is Abby's poem, entitled I Can't Wait.

I can't wait til Christmas.
There is snow all around.
Please, my little dear, 
just lay your head down.
The chimneys are smoking,
lights all around.
Please, my little dear,
lay your head down.

I'm taking on some more server-management related responsibilities for work, and I'm trying to be a little proactive with getting things under control so that I still have time to code. One thing that I would like to do is have a server configuration that we can standardize on so that when something goes wrong on a server we have many benefits.

The advantages of having a pre-configured system are that we'll have a way to set up a server again quickly that we know will work with the software we already have on the system. If something goes wrong with one of them that is related to the system settings, we'll know what we need to fix on all of the servers to make them right, not guess at whether the fix needs to be applied to each.

The process of standardizing allows us to pick the tools that we want to be on the system without having to rely on them being provided by a host. This gets particularly hairy when we try to build tools on a hosted environment and we're not sure what other tools might be on the system that could be affected or affect the tool we're trying to build. There are too many questions.

One way I would like to mitigate these issues is to have a go-to OS platform that we use to build systems. One reason I would like to steer away from RedHat Enterprise Linux is that we're not easily able to replicate those systems locally for testing. The free version of RHEL is not identical to RHEL, and who knows what trouble minute version differences might cause.

For that reason, and some others, I'd like to standardize on Debian. Debian seems to have a good track record with testing and I like the way they deploy packages in separate stable/testing packages. It's great that you can upgrade anything in-place, and that the repositories for adding new software are the same for what we would use on the live server as what we would use for local testing.

I need a way to convince my coworkers that this will suit us well in the future, that it's not so much of a change to what they're used to, and that the additional benefits of the OS and the system I'm devising will be of immediate use to them.

I've spent the last couple of nights building a script that will deploy a working LAMP server with all of the tools I like to use to a bare Debian Etch installation. I know that the host provides images with LAMP tools already on it, but like I said, if I control what goes on, then I know how the things on it interact.

I've managed to put together a pretty comprehensive script that works really well with VPSLink, a host I've found that offers affordable Virtual Private Servers with Debian installs. The script deploys Apache 2.2, PHP5, and MySQL 5. It builds the environment with mod_vhost_alias so that creating a new domain or subdomain is as easy as creating a new directory for it. It also has APC pre-installed so that all of the work I've done recently to increase server speed on some of our clients' servers won't need to be a thing that we add on later, and it comes with svn pre-configured and ready to use as either a client or a server.

I've got the basics pretty well set, and the server runs smoothly. There are still a few things that I need to improve.

I've been writing a script to install postfix and dovecot to work together with a mysql user database. This will let the VPS have unlimited virtual users without having to touch configuration files. You could write a front-end to it in any CMS, and such a thing would be a great value-add to our customers who frequently use Drupal.

Unfortunately, the script is not yet complete. I get really close to having everything work, but then I have to rebuild the server to make sure that changes to the script apply cleanly. Thank goodness the server setup script only takes 5 minutes to create a fully-functional server out of a blank slate.

I would also like to tie in some more basic tools with the install so that they're standard on the system. A reporting tool that reports back to us when one of our clients' servers is down would be great. Also, a tool that does periodic backups of vital data - email, web - to an external location would be very nice. Something that logs traffic and server load over time, and perhaps outputs MRTG graphs, would be nice. And to put the icing on the cake, a mysql performance monitoring tool would be great, since although I've had plenty of ISPs tell me that my site's queries are taxing the server, none of them have been able to tell me which ones.

If I really wanted to get fancy, I would also include a standard install of lighttpd, for use as either a caching proxy or a faster, lighter web server. One of my VPSLink VPSes runs Habari on lighttpd with sqlite in a scant 64MB of RAM without a hiccup. For $8/month and the option to upgrade in-place to something more roomy, there's no reason to go to a more expensive shared host.

Primarily, if I can get the email working via this script, I'll be in really good shape. But I'm impressed so far with what I've been able to build in a couple of days, and how much it will reduce my personal time for server setup.

I had a most amazing experience today. At lunch I finally stopped at a place that I've been eyeing for months. It's a "traditional" barber shop called "Shaving Grace".

I've been needing a good haircut for weeks now, my last cut falling woefully short of adequate. My bangs have been falling forward onto my forehead in an annoyingly straight line. The most remarkable thing about the woman who cut my hair was not her skill, but the hacking smoker's cough she'd erupt into occaasionally. Ick.

So this barber shop... In the lobby were pool tables, comfy leather couches, and boxes of cigars. See? Not so much a hair stylist as an actual barber. A good first impression.

Deeper in it gets better. A couple of attractive ladies invited me in and asked how they could help me. I inquired about getting my hair cut, and they referred me to their menu. Agreeing to the price, she called Jody, a male barber, who came to take care of me and offered me complimentary drinks (yes, including beer).

I should emphasize that apart from the luxurious accommodations, Jody was a deft barber. He was not the usual "I cut my friends' hair" chick that fills most of those hair "studios". He actually used the straight razor for several operations, drawing no blood whatsoever.

This was the most satisfying haircut I've had since college.

I think I've found someplace I can go regularly for my hair needs. An in fact, I have resolved to return for their shave services, at least to try it, and possibly to make it a monthly regular practice. Their year "subscription" plan seems quite attractive, and might make an interesting Christmas gift for a man with hair grooming needs.

Last Tuesday was Riley's third birthday. Berta stayed home to prepare things for the day. She took Riley out and bought a lot of balloons and a cookies-n-creme cake that he picked out himself.

Since we ordered a few things for him from the mail-order toy catalogs as gifts, they were a bit delayed in coming, so we didn't have any gifts to give him on his birthday. Instead, we all went to the toy store and picked out a few things that Riley liked.

He picked out one of those claw/grabber things, where you squeeze the handle and the claw at the end of the extension arm closes. He also picked out a big two-headed rubber dragon from among the rubber dinosaurs. We convinced him that he might like this staff-glider toy that comes from the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's a "wooden" staff that turns into an air glider, and he's been flying around on it often since then.

Riley's a good kid for three years. We've got the regular three-year-old torture to deal with. People say that the twos are terrible, but they don't talk about the threes. The usual frustration at two years that causes the terror is their inability to communicate what they want, but our kids have been talking for quite a while. It's in the three-year-old's independence and need to do things for himself that causes the difficulty with Riley these days. And he sure is stubborn about some things.

In the relatively short time he's been around, he always seemed like he was going to stay small forever. Comparing him to pictures of himself when he was younger, you can see how big he's really getting. It's hard to imagine that he's going to continue to grow up, but I guess that's part of what these birthday milestones are about.