Happy Birthday to You, Jessica!

Today Jessica, the love of my earthly life, the bride of my youth and ‘elder’ years turns thirty.  I’m pretty sure that she’s tired of me saying it (not really), but she blesses my socks off.  She’s an amazing wife in so many ways and areas that I can’t believe that she’s mine.  Happy Birthday, Sweetheart!  The last 14 years have been amazing – may the rest, be just as amazing!

When the Lazy Man Married the Planaholic

Have I ever told you the story of my marriage with Jessica?  No, not that story.  The other story about how we’re two totally different people madly in love, and lovingly mad about stupid things because I’m lazy and she’s an over-planner?  Yeah, she’s amazing with the planning, she compensates for my laziness by 1000% by planning that I’ll be lazing, too.  She has to because otherwise I’d probably barely be able to change my clothes on a regular basis.  Its even worse that I work from home and so I don’t deal with the normal social strains of needing to bathe or shave or brush my teeth regularly.  I do those things because I’m crazy in love with my life-planner life-partner.

My wife and I see family events as two different opportunities.  I see the family event as a chance to hang out.  She sees it as an opportunity to plan out everyone’s well being.  She’s not trying to micro-manage, she just wants to be prepared in case the family, in a mutinous outcry, declares they’re “bored.”  By planning for their boredom she’ll be able to list off at least three wonderful alternatives guaranteed to give 90% or more of the people endorphins, which by my count, is well better than half.  I think it may be more, but I’m simply too lazy to count.  

The thing I’ve learned is that planning can be good for me.  It helps me grow and it helps others find me mostly reliable.  My wife has found that not planning everything down to a tee is good because that means she doesn’t have to sweat every detail.  Together we have grown fond of planning to not plan on some things.  

Of course I’m still lazy, but at least I planned on being that way

They’re Merely Five and Two

Tonight we went looking for a present for Jessica’s upcoming thirtieth birthday.  Abby and Evie and I went out on the ‘hunt.’  Abby kept eyeing rather expensive jewelry at the Target.  “That looks beautiful, lets get that!.”  I had to gently tell her no because the budget was not in the $120 range for the girls’ gift.  Evie liked everything that sparkled.  Upon discovering that Target didn’t have anything but a Wii, which I wanted to buy “for Jessica” but did not, we headed off to Kohl’s to find some jewelry there at Abby’s request.

At Kohls she spotted a pair of ear rings that had a strand of rainbow colored glass embedded in them.  A rainbow that certainly catches the eyes of the young onlookers.  I totally disappointed her by saying that mommy would probably not have an outfit to go with the ear rings.  Needless to say we did not find any jewelry at Kohl’s either because what the five year old liked the two year old didn’t like.  What the five and two year old liked daddy didn’t like.  And what daddy liked the five and two year old were sure would make mom look ‘boring’.  Next time we go out I’m bringing cash and eash one of them will get to pay for their respective gifts, and it’ll help them learn that the $400.00 necklace is really out of their reach.

We walked to the register with Abby telling me that she had enough money in her piggy bank at home for the gift she wished we were buying.  I love her confidence, we just need to work on the financial math 🙂

Pardon Me, Microsoft, But Would You Mind Implementing Your Own Technology?

I have tried two days in a row now to download the Windows Mobile 5 or 6 SDK.  Tried.  I have succeeded to actually download files, larger files that take some time to download.  Except that when I download the large files and try to execute the installers it warns me.  It warns me to keep me safe from bad files containing viruses.  It warns me that all hellfire and brimstone might take place due to the dangerous files that are encased in the cryptic MSI file.  It tells me that I cannot execute the installers – which I need for work – because it has an unknown publisher.  Clicking on the publisher link on the dialog shows that it is in fact Microsoft.  The author of the warning sofware is Microsoft.  The author of the SDK is Microsoft.  Microsoft department number one, would you please talk to department number two and make sure that your stuff works nicely with itself?

Thanks!

Is It Just Me?

This is a financial post on my non-financial blog [for other financial posts see: watchmymoneymaker.com].

Creative Commons: http://flickr.com/photos/hermida/1603854270/Is it just me or is the media, in all of its fear mongering ways, really hoping we’re in a recession?  By classical definition a recession is:

A decline in business activity. Often defined as two consecutive quarters with a real fall in gross national production. – Sterling Exchange

Money.CNN.com has been pimping the recession like they’ll make more money off everyone else’s recession or something.  The television media of course runs with it because there’s nothing like following the leader (which is again, CNN).

A recession is not a good thing, but as the media hypes the snot out of it and then we’re stuck sitting around saying, “We’re in a recession.  The TV/Internet/Survey told me so.”  Enough!  A recession may very well be going on, but you can’t tell until after two full quarters of negative growth have already happened.  We haven’t had that yet.  We’ve had a decline in business activity, but not two quarters of decline!  Stop the presses (if they’re used any more, we get a newspaper, but I think its produced with an etch-a-sketch and 1,000,000 monkeys on typewriters).  Stop the stupid FUD language, and lets move on and get something useful done with our economy.  The decline of the value of the dollar is based on a lot of things, but its not George Bush, its not automobile manufacturers, and its not sub-prime mortgage problems.  Those do in fact have impacts, but not solely by themselves.  The blame rests on the people of the country and their choices adding up to the funk that is the economy.

Personally, I blame the slow down, if there is one, on Windows Vista.  Just kidding, I blame it all on the death of the HD-DVD format, which clearly was going to save the universe.

Thuper Thimple Theme

I’ve switched to a different WordPress theme for this blog.  Its super simple.  Just like I’d like all of my life to be.  Except that life isn’t a sit-com, and therefore this theme may possibly be one of the more simple things in it.  That said, I hope that you find yourself also living a simple life – except without Paris Ritchie and Nicole Hilton.

WordPress 2.5: A Review

I’ve been using WordPress 2.5 for about three days now.  Wow.  If WordPress was arguably the best blogging software before, now its light years ahead of anything I’ve seen before.  Between the fine folks at Happy Cog working on the User Interface (UI), the quality of the performance improvements, and the fact that WordPress is so carefully thought about by Automattic, its just a fantastic release.  An amazing release.

I switched to WordPress back when it was version 1.2 from a home-rolled solution that was just getting me by.  WordPress was a big improvement to what I was using then, now its become even more impressive with the improved usability and added functionality to let users add in multi-media functionality and really take their sites from fun to a fun-fest.  If I could add anything to WordPress it would simply be the barbecue that Matt mentions periodically on his posts.

If you haven’t upgraded your installation, you should wait for the final release, backup your data, and then install the latest version.  Its worth every moment of the five second upgrade path.  Then get yourself some ‘Q’.

They Got it Right: TripIt Invite

I just got an invite from TripIt.com. Well, it was through TripIt.com, from my buddy Dave. When the invitation arrived it not only had a link, but it had a username (my email address) and password already in the email. Wow. The cost to click the link and join their social network was much smaller than sites where I know I’m going to be skating around forms for half an hour to get setup *cough* hotmail *cough*.

TripIt.com got it right. Now I just have to look for opportunities to use this same style, which I find QUITE inviting.

Reinstalling OS X Leopard on a Boot Camp Partitioned Drive

I did some Google searching over the last week and I could not find any posts or articles on the internet regarding the ability to re-install OS X Leopard on a Boot Camp partitioned drive that also had a Windows installation.  So last night I backed up both operating systems and took the plunge.

When I installed OS X, I chose the previous OS X partition so as to not over-write my Windows installation.  The OS X installation went just fine and I have a fresh, much faster than an upgrade, version of OS X Leopard running on the OS X partition.

Can you re-install OS X?  Yes.  Just back everything up to an external harddrive first, just in case.