95% Chance of Hosery

Well, today the ‘adjuster’ came out and looked at my car.  I liked him, his name was Andy and he had a goatee.  It was like a taller version of myself with brown curly hair, a slender body and boots on.  Who has a different job.  Who lives in a different part of Colorado with a different family.  Yeah, we had a lot in common.

Andy told me that due to the fact that the outside and inside of the quarter panel and trunk had been damaged that most likely the auto-body people would tell him that it would cost a quadrillion-bazillion-trillion-finity dollars to fix the car and that it would be cheaper to buy a new one. Heck, I only paid tens of thousands for the car in the first place, with repair bills that high its a bit steep to put it in ‘ship shape’ condition.  Not that I want to go sailing in a Honda Civic.
So, in short there’s a 95% chance that I’m going to be making a deal with the devil car dealer soon so that I can drive a new pimped ride.

Lost Theories

A blog I read is written by another web developer, we’ve had limited email exchange in the last 6 months, it was actually only about one thing: The Lost TV Show.  Check out his new site dedicated to Lost Theories. This looks like a handy place to read up on others thoughts as well as post your own.  The site is really clean, works fast and is going to give me food for thought for some time 🙂

The Rental: Dodge Caliber Review

Tonight we picked up a 2006 Dodge Caliber from Enterprice Rent-A-Car so that we could get around town in a replacement vehicle since the Honda isn’t really road safe.  I shouldn’t have made fun of trans-gender folks in my previous May 26th post.  This vehicle is a trans-carstite.  It is like a car that wants to be a stationwagon that wants to be an SUV.  I swear I am not making this up.  It has the front end of the latest Dodge line of cars, the backend of a Mazda M3 stationwagon with depth perception problems and the cockpit of a Durango.  The top of the vehicle looks and unfortunately operates like a chopped-top hotrod (which in non-car terms means that the windows aren’t as tall as you’re used to).  Further, since we used to own a Dodge Stratus it feels really funny because the Stratus had a ‘cab forward’ design which is more like having an endless dashboard.  A car feels roomy with cab-forward, but this car feels large yet confined.  It is a bit oxymoronic, I know.

We’ll have it until at least Friday so we’ll give you more feedback then (by we I mean I’ll ask Jessica).

On the Extensibility of WordPress

Using plugins with WordPress is easy. Writing other applications and giving them a ‘voice’ in WordPress is also easy. Using the RunPHP plugin I can include a page from my other application in WordPress. It appears as a part of my site, and I didn’t have to write any special post conversion tool. The biggest problem at present is integrating my content into the RSS feed [I’ve used a URL redirect to get my application’s feed to replace WordPress’ default feed]. In the case of my church’s web site I have written a message administration interface that includes file uploads and the ability to track series, teachers and lessons. Getting that information into WordPress was a quick snap due to the ability of WordPress to handle the RunPHP plugin.

You can’t beat the efficiency of writing a small interface for your data and plugging it into WordPress. Here are some screen shots of the ‘MaMA’ interface [Message and Media Administration] and then what the presentation looks like in WordPress

The 'home' view

The Series View

The HHBC site page
To note, there are things that we’re still working on to add greater functionality. but it is quite awesome to have this tool at our disposal! Thanks Matt and Team!

Barry Bonds Did NOT Tie Babe Ruth

To my knowledge the famed baseball player Babe Ruth (after which the candy bar was named, and also after which my daughter Abby’s middle name was not derived) still holds the record for most home runs hit without steroid usage.  I could be all wrong.  Maybe the Babe secretly injected himself with hormones, steroids or twinkies.  Barry Bonds was a promising athlete, but as soon as he started enhancing his performance with testicle shrinking performance enhancing drugs, he lost the race.  Guiness Book of Whirled Records should totally reject his new record, or at least put a good disclaimer in there.

Customer Service Terms Lead to Turn-Offs

On the phone with a human being in India recently he related that he ‘owned’ my problem.  It was his problem to resolve and he would do it.  The problem, of course is that if he didn’t fix the problem then claiming that he owned the problem would just drive me to loathing hearing someone tell me that they were going to fix my problem by owning it.  One of the problems with script based help systems, just like a touch-tone system, is that the language becomes boring, it become irritating to customers, and it can cause the customer to perceive a poor support experience.  That is why live human being with a direction, but not a script, will be more useful.  That of course is problematic because that requires training to actually know the product.  It also requires people with personality and character.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourselves, but I’m writing it here just in case some CEO/Exec type person stumbles across it and decides he’s going to do something about it 🙂

Who Put Your Beard Back On?

Abby asked me last night who put my beard back on.  I had shaved it off a couple weeks ago and she didn’t like it, but apparently she had gotten used to it because now she’s irritated that my hairs poke her in the head when she sits on my lap and I rest my chin on her head 🙂

What am I to do?  I’ve got a bride who loves it and a child who wants me to look 14 again 😉

Happy Fifth of May

We used to get excited about Cinco de Mayo as kids because at school it meant that we could talk about the liberation of the Mexican people from Tyra Banks. Wait, no, the tyranny of the Spanish government. Not, really. The fifth of May was like any other day in May to us. As kids we didn’t care about what color our classmates’ skin was, we didn’t care about their immigration status it was much more important to have good playground game skills. I had a classmate named Jorge who disappeared one day. He just stopped coming to school. We didn’t know why. Some of us speculated that he’d moved. Some speculated aliens, and others just shrugged and moved on. Now, given all of the political hoopla about immigration, I wonder if his family was deported. I lived in California, and they have a lot of illegal immigrants.

But [not] seriously I actually look backwards to the fifth of May, mostly because any previous fifth of May I was younger than I am now, and I’m reaching thirty in a year and a half and getting into another decade of my life scares the crap out of me. Well, not literally or I’d be going through office chairs like kleenex on any episode of Mauri Povich wherein the girl finds out that it was the fifth guy she slept with who is the father of her child. It’s such a relief to find out which guy is the father. Speaking of which, being the father to my daughters becomes increasingly rough because they’re cute, but they’re rapidly torpedo-ing into girls and not babies, and from girlhood they will escalate into teenagers, and from there they might get married, make me a grandpa and then I will be officially older compared to a year and a half from thirty.

I have to stop now lest I start crying and my tears cause my wireless keyboard to electrocute me. Which wouln’t be all bad, if I died from keyboard electrocution Jess could probably sue Microsoft and be rich for decades.

Teleconference Snark Shark

I am listening in on a teleconference and watching a Powder Point [SIC] presentation.

As I hear dumb things from the sales person I’m going to share them, but instead of being negative, I’m going to try to turn things into a positive twist.

Salesman: “Looks how easy it is to submit issues.”

When I tell Jessica to submit, it causes issues. However, I like how software can be made to submit.
I just saw a PowerPoint slide with a fake person named Joe.  Joe needs to shave, but beyond that I’m sure that his underlings are happy to be working for a guy ten years their junior.  Happiness is a core point in all of the power point pictures.  Happy to use the software, happy to have bugs reported.  Happy.

Wow, this presentation is over and it was short on dumb statements.  Though apparently most of the staff at the headquarters quietly left the meeting since they didn’t have any interest in what was being said 😛