Asymptomatic

I found a list of events that Abby's going to participate in with her Girl Scout's Brownie troop over the next couple of months. Apparently, Berta gets emails from their scout leader every so often with a list of updated events and notices. I think this is an effective way to keep in touch with the troupe, but I think there's room for improvement technologically.

It might be nice to have a published calendar of events, along with a feed that parents could consume in Outlook, Google Calendar, or in my case, Lightning. I've discovered that meetup.com provides iCal feeds that make it easy to subscribe to events. Of course, there are my usual misgivings with meetup.com, particularly that it's a paid service and that they retain control of the data so that you can't move it elsewhere when you decide you can't pay them anymore. So I think there should be a better, open solution.

That's where I think Habari can step in. This isn't meant to sound like an advertisement, because I really think there's something here. First off, having a blog gives you a centralized location to publish event information (and results!), which is the important part. There is apparently already a plugin (yes, the Habari scene is now moving so fast that I can't keep track of everything going on anymore) that will track events as a separate content type within Habari. So it should be easy to segregate a scheduled event from a news posting or a page of contact data. There are still a couple of important pieces missing....

I don't know if I had mentioned this before. I say it frequently enough, so you might have heard me talking about it. The bottom line is this: I'm evil.

I used to think I was marginally "good", but you know what? It's hard work and doesn't really pay off. So I've just given up on the idea altogether. What does this mean for you?

Well, evil isn't always as rotten as it might seem. I mean, evil inspires self-interest. So for example, if I was walking behind you and you passed out - for lack of any good premise - I might still provide assistance, but not for your sake. Instead, any aid would be motivated by wanting to remain innocent of charges that I caused the incident.

I bring all of this up because I was being evil to the kids tonight at dinner. more

Ah, I've finally made it out of the house. I've been cooped up there all week for one reason or another. Until yesterday, I hadn't even been outside of the house other than to get packages of of the covered porch - a crime, considering the weather. But today, today is a good day.

Clients seem appeased, and work - although steady and challenging - is not frantic and stress-inducing like it often has the capacity to be. Also, we've got new projects and new people coming in, which is exciting. I'm particularly pleased with a little side project I've been coding for use at work - a Drupal module that replaces and vastly improves on Campfire's chat capabilities.

I've been able today to run a couple of errands, too. I got a note into Abby's school to let her stay for her Girl Scout meeting this afternoon, and also payment for her class photo. Currently, I'm finishing lunch at Stadium Grille, which I've missed since I stopped taking Abby to Kindergarten every other day. I'm really jazzed about not having to eat another Hot Pocket. My burger was phenomenal. As they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and the same can be true for food that you like....

When we used to travel as kids, the entertainment in the car consisted of counting cows out the window, playing the "I'm going on a trip" memory game, looking at the maps stuffed into the pocket in back of the driver's seat, and as a special treat, those "magic ink" puzzle books. But what we most often did in family car trips was sing songs.

It's a very unusual idea now to think of singing songs in the car, since the advent of in-car DVD players, MP3 players, and the GameBoy, but for little kids who don't have the toys or aren't interested in those things, some interaction with the family via singing in the car can be fun.

This morning, the kids woke me up by playing a CD of kids songs and nursery rhymes far too loud. Some of these songs were songs we used to sing in the car on our long-ish trip from home to the Bay. There were many songs that we sang that were not on their CD, and quite a few nursery rhymes that I didn't know anyone had put a tune to....

During the summer when I was 12, my parents decided that it would be a good idea to get me out of their hair while they dug up the back yard to get at the sewer system. So on that week, they sent me on a special trip to Camp Sandy Hill.

Camp Sandy Hill is a Christian camp. They do things that regular camps do, but with a Christian spirit and other Christian activities mixed in. There are regular prayer times, and all of the camp songs are about Jesus or God or the bounty of God or how God smote someone bad or raised up soemone who was good or maybe Noah. You get the idea.

I wouldn't actually be staying at the camp. I would be part of a group of hikers taking backpacks across many miles of the Appalachian Trail. As a former scout, camping wasn't unknown to me, although this would be my first time out in the wilderness with only a backpack for supplies and feet for transportation. more