Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Bad Dad
May 22, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, I headed out of the house for a lunch meeting. It was 12:30 on a Friday, and both kids were at school. Being that it was a just a lunch, I didn’t think much of how it would affect the rest of my day.

The lunch ran a bit long. I didn’t leave until somewhere around 3:45, and I figured I would pick up a couple of things on the way home, including the weekend fish feeders that we needed for during our upcoming trip. Being that it was just lunch, it never even occurred to me that it was so late in the afternoon that Abby would be done school and waiting for me at home.

While driving home, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. Our neighbor across the street and a few doors down had heard Abby sobbing on our front porch. She took her up the street to stay with another of our neighbors, and that is who called me. How thoroughly mortifying.

It took me until 4:20 to get home, cursing traffic the whole way. I drove straight to my neighbor’s house, where I found Abby playing cheerfully. I was very glad that we have great neighbors that would help out like this, but thoroughly shamed that this escaped me.

Bye Melinda, Thank Goodness
May 18, 2007

I haven’t been paying attention to American Idol at all. I don’t ever really. What I do see is the tail end of the show when they replay clips of each of the contestants before House comes on. So I am at least familiar with them to that extent.

Melinda is a very nice singer, but if you take every song they give you and turn it into soul, you are not performing for this audience. If you won the contest, you might have been able to release a soul album, but you certainly would have been better off singing the genre of music you were given in the genre of music it was intended, or at least not perform every song like you were in a gospel choir.

HOA Site
May 18, 2007

My Home Owner’s Association has a web site that’s pretty sparse. I thought that I would take a bit of time to create a new site for them using Drupal, and increase my Drupal skills. There’s nothing like throwing yourself into the fire to get out of the comfort of the frying pan, you know? So I was thinking about some features that I might like as a home member of the association, and how I might accomplish them with Drupal.

The first thing I’m going to want to do is get a theme that pleases by aesthetic sensibilities. It’s not that the Drupal themes are ugly per se, but they all seem to offer the content in the same way - with the admin stuff exposed for anyone to see. I think that I want the full administrative side of the site to look different than the typical member-facing side. Rather than providing all of the functionality of Drupal the way Drupal does, I would like to select specifically what features appear on the site, and display them in an appealing fashion.

Gadgety Things
May 15, 2007

Every so often I get this urge to have things, things that I really shouldn’t buy. I usually end up making a list of these things and throwing them away. This is probably a good thing. But occasionally, I list them here so you can all see how materialistic I am.

I’ve been pricing out new desktop PCs lately. I’ve been trying to stay minimal but get the most for the money, knowing very little about individual components. My interest in knowing the minutia of component performance has waned over the years. What I’ve been pricing is a Core 2 Duo 2.67mhz (it seems that when you go Core 2, you might as well get the fastest one you can find), 4GB of RAM (I have 3 now, so I can’t do with less), a super-fast system drive and a giant secondary drive, the fastest pair of DL-DVD writers I can get, and a motherboard that supports dual 16x PCI Express slots to hold matching dual-head video cards. What are my needs here?