Asymptomatic

In sixth grade, I had an interesting science teacher. After our late-year lesson on simple machines - levers, pulleys, screws, etc. - we were offered a challenge: Create a device that used a simple machine in some fashion to launch an egg as far as you possibly can. The boy and girl that flung their eggs the farthest would be treated to a nice dinner out with the teacher.

The game was on! I came up with a few crazy designs on paper, but basically stuck to the same principle - using compressed air. Yeah, ok, not much of a simple machine, but in the end there wasn't much to the device beyond a simple lever.

My dad got a giant tank of compressed air and attached a valve to it (the lever), and to the valve, we attached a long clear plastic tube. As you might guess, the tube was the diameter of an egg....

I wrote this entry on June 20, 2006, but did not post it until today.

After a nice evening dinner and playtime in the park - spawned by yet another evening of a completely uninhabitable eating area at home - we returned home to prep the kids for bed and another day's cycle of painters-gone-wild self-inflicted eviction.

Riley was the first to bathe, and Abby whined insistantly (a habit that I am soon to break her of in likely unpleasant ways) that she wanted to spend a few minutes across the street with her friends. With Berta occupied, I was the only one "available" for the task, in spite of the growing mound of after-hours work that isn't being done due to - dare I mention it again? - the blasted painters. ...

This "best birthday ever" began on Friday when I decided that I would reboot my computer to allow a few Windows Update items to refresh. As I detailed in another post, the computer took a dive. I spent most of my spare time over the weekend fixing that. It's still not complete, but I do have a working OS now. And that's just the beginning of the fun.

Saturday morning while I was working on the computer and Berta was moving some laundry around, the kids decided to play on the stairs against all other instructions not to, and yes, there was an incident. Abby came out pretty much unscathed. Riley looks pretty beat up, like he landed on his nose. They had a good hour's cry and nobody was happy.

Also that morning (before the falling incident), Riley started rubbing his ear like there was something wrong with it. Infection? Well, both he and I have colds now, including stuffed/runny nose and resulting post-nasal sore throat. ...

A thread on the support forum recently crossed my radar, wherein help is sought for a sick WordPress. It seems that the popularity of some blogs, especially those with high number of commenters, is causing issues on those servers.

Having recently gone through some operations to optimize the user experience on my blog, I have some personal involvement in trying to optimize my own site. I have a lot of control over my own server (I run this site on a VPS) so many of these changes were easy to implement. Some of them would still work if I was using shared hosting, and it still may be worthwhile to know these things when talking to a shared host if you can make any performance suggestions.

You can use these tips to keep your site running ultra-smooth, because keeping your server online is one of the more important aspects of running a web site. more

I was talking online with some folks the other day, and I suggested that we all create a new post of our worst job interview ever, and build a big linkfest. Well, here's my interview post, and everyone else is welcome to join in.

I was working at Arby's at the time, my first job after college. The pay sucked and the work was worse (meat jello?) and I was anxious to get out of the food business entirely and do something productive. That's when I found the ad.

The help wanted ad wasn't very descriptive. I don't recall exactly the wording of it now, since it was so long ago, or what really drew my eye to it. I think it read something like, "Self-starters with management potential wanted. Start on ground floor of art warehousing business. Great money, great hours." In all, anything was more attractive than slicing meat for 20 hours a week, so I called the number. The job, while still not explicitly defined during my phone call, sounded intriguing. They invited me to an interview to check out the operation and learn more about the job. So began my wildest interview ever... more