Asymptomatic

This post has very little to do with cats, except that they've been rampant distractions while I've been reading lately. They attacked a box of Rice-A-Roni in the pantry, leaving little noodles all over the floor, and also shredded a volleyball with a soft foam exterior. The cardboard scratching things are still used - I think it's just a matter of getting in there and clipping claws. But enough cat news.

I've finished reading a few books recently. The first book is Practical Demonkeeping by Christopher Moore. Practical Demonkeeping is about a demon named Catch (what a preposterous name) who eats people, and his master, Travis, visiting Moore's fictional town of Pine Cove - the setting of many of his books. There, Travis seeks out the device that would free him from the demon that "serves" him, and Catch seeks out a new master that would free him from Travis. Of course, the interaction with the townsfolk leads to much drama, which is the crux of all of Moore's books.

I liked Practical Demonkeeping in that it was light and entertaining. It's certainly not the best of Moore's books. I preferred You Suck and A Dirty Job, as well as the Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove. Still, it was entertaining. Not as many of the characters carry over in this book, and I found myself missing Theo and Molly from The Stupidest Angel. Man, I've read a lot of Moore, haven't I? Another author I'm beginning to think I've read plenty of is Philip Pullman....

I've been offering some of my most valuable educational advice to Abby over the past year, and I think the number one thing that I tell her is also the number one thing that will help her be most successful. Cheat.

I think that many people miss this lesson in school, mostly because they don't teach it. It's one of my personal aims to make sure that Abby gets these important lessons early. For example, it's always important to question everything; teachers are often right but can be wrong just like anyone. And one of the more important of the important lessons is that you should cheat.

You might be concerned that I'm teaching Abby to copy answers from her classmates' papers. When Berta first heard me telling Abby to cheat on her homework, she was a little anxious and confused. I guess some explanation is in order....

Man, this week has been difficult. We've had a few server issues with work clients, and I've been playing around with my own servers, and it's just been a mess that I'm hoping will be in the past come next week. But I've learned some lessons, and I figure I might as well pass them on because people are apparently still buying hosting from really bad places.

What do I need? This is the most basic question you need to start asking yourself before you even hunt for hosts. Having some idea of your demands, both from a technical perspective and a logistical perspective can save you some pain in the future. Here are some really basic considerations:

Shared/VPS/Dedicated -- What level of hosting you choose will depend on the types of service you intend to run and the affordability of storage space. Shared hosting is for small, single, low-traffic installations, like a single blog or a low-traffic forum. VPS hosting allows you to interact with the server configuration directly, to host more complex applications and more of them. Dedicated hosting gives you full control over what runs on your system, plus often includes dedicated storage that is many times what you'd get from the other options. But there are more things to consider....

Abby is in first grade and she has daily homework. Much of it involves writing. One thing that she is not good at so far in school is using that ridiculous three-line ruled paper, probably because she's been using the plain lined paper for so long already, even in kindergarten.

The problem with this paper is that there simply doesn't seem to be anywhere to obtain it easily.

While I would love to run out and pick up a ream of the stuff to use as scrap paper after Abby switches to college-ruled for second grade, it seems like a waste. Plus, even if I order the special paper, when I run out of it, there's no trekking to the grocery store to get a new pack. But I have a solution....

When I was little, my brother and I would play in the basement in the dark. The basement was our spaceship. We drew ship controls on paper in markers and crayons and used masking tape to tape them onto work tables in the basement. We'd pretend we were going to far away places, pushing the buttons of our controls to operate our space ship.

I have a memory of receiving my first telescope. We were at my uncle's house and there was snow on the ground. We set it up in the frigid air and looked at the craters in the surface of the full moon. It was awesome.

My grandfather used to teach me constellations that he learned while manning ships in the US Navy. I never learned them as well as I should have, but I looked for them whenever there was enough night to see stars. I knew that if I kept at it, I would get closer to them one day, even if it was on a derelict battleship converted into a spacecraft with a giant energy weapon carving a hole through its center, or perhaps even inside of a spaceship shaped like a lion....