Asymptomatic

On IRC a few weeks ago this question was posed by an unassuming visitor:

What makes Habari different from any other blog application like WordPress?

I blew a mental gasket sitting at my desk, but managed to scrawl out a few words that managed to be quoted here and there by folks in the community. It may have sounded profound to others, but it was really offered up in haste and without much consideration.

Since then I've been thinking: If I had to give a serious elevator pitch about Habari, what would I say? more

Excuse me if this doesn't make any sense, I'm a bit endorphin high. I just got finished mowing the front lawn -- with an electric push-mower.

The lawn has been a battle. We discontinued last year's lawn service because they were doing things that we asked them not to do, resulting in large dirt patches in our lawn. So this year, with no service, our lawn has been growing uncontrolled, much to the chagrin of our mower-loving neighbors.

The riding mower that came with our house has a dead battery from the kids leaving the headlights on (why does the mower have these?) so I tried for a good bit this afternoon to get that working again, to no avail. And in the end, I bought a new corded electric push-mower from Home Depot. It's corded, because the battery on the last one went kaput. Speaking of going crazy while mowing the lawn, Bill Clinton called me today. Don't believe me?Bill! more

I had a strange confluence of events over the past couple days. In the mail, I have received a few notices about services that I can attach to my Fios connection at home. I don't have interest in Fios TV now that Verizon dropped the ball and we went ahead with satellite instead, but the new 15/15 service is very attractive. I would love to be able to push as much data out as I pull down.

The same day that notice arrived in the mail, I got email on the Verizon billing account. Apparently, the credit card attached to that account is about to expire, and if I want the autopay to continue then I need to update the number via the site they provide. So I decided to update my billing info and see if there was a way to update my service to 15/15 at the same time.

I logged into the site, and to make a hideous story short: I couldn't do it. I'd get as far as entering some information, and it would tell me that the tool (for payment, mind you) was unavailable. Also unavailable was my ability to read email through their web interface. What kind of ISP is so broken that they don't let you pay or read email? Verizon, apparently....

Not completely unrelated to the new year, I've been thinking about what I can do to improve my hindsight impression on 2008 over 2007. There are a few things I'd like to simply list out and see if I can make them happen. Some are kind of mundane, and others are more big-picture, but they're all something I think I can work on if I keep them in mind over the coming year.

Do more stuff with the kids - I want to create a separate list of things I can do with the kids that we'll both enjoy. Most of the time I think I am not as close to them as I could be, and as much as I desperately want them to like me, I don't know what to do to make that happen. A concerted effort is necessary. Begin today.

Get a regular schedule - The last quarter of 07 was a wasteland of early mornings, late nights, little sleep, zombie-like behavior and a miasma of unmemorable days. To affect this change, I need to get back into a healthy mental routine that I enforce on myself. Sure, it's ok to slack here and there as I can afford it, but silly things like shaving every morning make a subtle but additive impact. Keeping a reasonably regular schedule should help make time during the day for the rest of the stuff in this list, and make more days seem memorable and significant....

After my debacle with the monitor this week, I decided that I needed a new screensaver. Primarily I was thinking of disabling the login display when returning to the OS from the screensaver, but I have been thinking I wanted something more for a while now. And since my new monitor does not recover from power-save mode, I need something good to prevent the burn-in that I saw on the monitor at Best Buy.

I've been using the basic My Pictures slideshow screensaver that comes with Windows XP for a while. I have a lot of pictures, and the kids like to see my computer showing them photos of us on all of our vacations. Abby actually asked me why I had changed my screensaver once, which prompted me to restore the photo one.

The thing is, the one that comes with Windows is pretty lame. It'll only show photos on one monitor at a time, unless you turn on the "animation" feature, which simply drags the single photo across all three screens very slowly. I'm looking for something that does a little bit more....