Weekend update

I wound up getting to take my day off on Friday for golf, which was nice. Since my team won the outing with a (for the outing) record 8 under score (59 on a par 67 course) it was even better. We had a nice evening out afterwards to boot, punctuated with a visit after dinner to my customer up in Manchester who had an iBook problem. I took it home with me, corrected it, and she came by Saturday afternoon to pick it up.

Saturday I had a nice 30 mile bike ride with Robert and one of his friends to prepare for Harbor to the Bay in three weeks, and yesterday the family went and played at the park for quite a while before the blah weather started to arrive. I'm stag most of this week - Jane and David left to head to New Jersey for a couple of days this morning, and I'm booked up most of the week while they're gone.

Mainly I expect to do some maintenance stuff while they're gone around the house. Last night the garbage disposal in our kitchen suffered a catastrophic failure, so the plumber is coming over at 1 to replace it and I have to finish cleaning up after it. Ah, glamour.

Chasing the little white ball

Whoo-hoo! I'm off tomorrow for a golf outing with my old co-workers!

Due to being wicked busy, I haven't played since the end of June, but no matter - it'll still be a lot of fun. Jane will be joining me tomorrow evening for the dinner afterwards, and thus is likely to end my golf season (I may get out a couple of times in September, but I'm not banking on it).

The four days I did work this week were very eventful. And I'm fully booked for three days already next week so far. I love my job!

Salmon Day

Today was one of those days. It started when I was on my bike ride this morning, and I broke a spoke out at the end of the Nahant causeway. I borrowed a passer-by's cell phone, and called Jane for a ride, but spent plenty of time waiting (like a schmuck, I neglected to bring money or my own phone along today - just my keys and some water). So that hosed much of my morning. Other than a nice interval doing some client work from around noon to 2, it was mainly "blah" all day. My highlight for today was getting a cable at Radio Shack tonight to re-feed my DVD input into the TV - I had to cannibalize my existing one yesterday to feed the new HDTV DVR box we got from the local cable monopoly. It's cool to finally see programming in 1080i, after having the HD set for nearly three years.

On the bright side, though, I got a copy of NASCAR 2003 Season for my Mac directly from Aspyr for only $10, and installed it over the weekend. Add one Logitech Momo Racing Wheel and it's a pretty darned cool game. The iMac G4 can easily keep up with the game even at full resolution - If I ever go to a G5 I can probably crank out sweet detail in the game. Cool stuff. I don't have the force feedback stuff quite worked out yet, though. And I didn't have time to play it at all tonight before David went to bed. It's way too loud for bedtime play.

Whizzing through life

David went potty at school yesterday. He's done it a few times (he refuses at home), but this is the usual pattern when I ask him:

Me: "David, did you go potty at school today?"

David (grinning): "Yeah"

Me: "Are you lying?"

David (grinning even bigger): "Yeah..."

But last night it was: "No! Miss Lindsay said she was very proud of me! I peed!"

So we praised the heck out of him, and this morning when I dropped him off his teacher confirmed it.

Nice evenings defined

When I picked up David (a little late, around 5:20), we headed home and met up with Jane, who'd been home about an hour working down in her office. We all collectively decided to get out of the house. So we packed up and started the evening by going to the park with all our stale bread and the like (including some old cereal), and fed the ducks through a fence. They recently had babies. Cool.

That was followed up by some nice beach walking - Jane and David went wading in the surf looking for clams and hermit crabs while I went to find a new knuckle bandage (I'd chopped it open at the office today by accident and it popped again tonight - now I have to get the blood out of my shorts pocket. Yuck). We had to go down to the drugstore for more bandages, so as long as we were there we decided to skip dinner at home and head over to Whole Foods for supper instead. Jane had pizza - David and I had sushi. He loves it - ate almost an entire tuna roll and a piece of the California-style (inside-out, with avocado and sesame seeds) tuna roll that came with my sashimi plate. He even managed to pick up a couple of the pieces with his chopsticks.

We followed that up with a trip to the driving range for the whole family and we all hit golf balls. I haven't played since the end of June, but I was hitting pretty well. There's hope yet for me. When we got home, David took a shower, and then Jane went out to the car and got him his surprise - a huge pile of bubble wrap! There's nothing better when you're three - and we all got to pop some. It'll last a few days. There was that much.

I'll be heading to bed in a few minutes, because tomorrow will be a minimum of a three-stop day. Possibly even four. But tonight did a great job of charging my mental batteries to get ready for it.

Not a trouble-free day

I wound up spending the whole day in the office - the machines are kicking my butt today (it happens, though not often). I've been fighting with a spyware-infested Win2K PC that a person got to keep from his old employer a couple of years ago - except it still has corporate security policies applied, which keeps me from the easy fixes now. I have it flushed, but it won't load the desktop. I can launch any program through Task Manager, except IE - so I can't go out to the Net to do the repair. After trying everything else, now I'm building a custom install of IE6 through IEAK on my Mac (with Virtual PC), and I will copy the resulting install to a USB drive and then bring it over to try rebuilding IE.

Then, more importantly, one of my major accounts had a crisis this morning - yesterday's MS patches (the second Tuesday of the month is Patch Tuesday for Microsoft) broke their Win 2003 SBS server. I think it was the APC agent software that hung it - I worked around the problem today for them and prepped the fix for tomorrow, when their office will be pretty much down for vacations.

Meanwhile, tomorrow I need to arrange a memory purchase for one customer, install Office Pro for another, and set up a wireless printer for a workgroup up at a third. And finish both today's projects. Somehow, among all this I found the time to process two payments I got and write out four of my bills. I have a few more but I need to deal with some other things first. I believe my first company hire will be a good, reliable bookkeeping service - it's taking up way too much of my time nowadays to keep up on billing, collections, and paying the bills.

It's easy when you have few expenses and no customers, but that isn't my problem anymore. Thank goodness.

Look for a rule change next season

With only a few races to go until the "Chase for the Cup" begins in NASCARland, I'm expecting a change in the rules next year. Given that some of their most popular drivers (Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kevin Harvick, Kasey Kahne) are out of contention under the current rules, NASCAR is faced with a potential lack of fan interest in the final 10-race run to the points championship.

The current rules say that the top 10 drivers plus anyone within 400 points of the leader qualify (everybody else keeps racing, but they aren't eligible for the overall championship). The rule was made after Matt Kenseth won in 2003, with the goal of making the race tighter. Unfortunately, it penalizes drivers who have a few bad races, or get knocked out by no fault of their own. It also takes away some incentive to try and win races for drivers in the front, because they get rewarded just for finishing.

SoI think next season the new rule will be: the top 10 in points, anyone within 400 points, and any driver who wins a race will be in the Chase. Interestingly, I picked the four drivers above as examples of popular drivers who are out of contention right now without looking at the standings or results for the year. Then, just for the heck of it I looked up the season results to-date - and all four of those drivers have won races and would be in the Chase under the rule change I just suggested (Gordon's won three races, the others one each). Consider this rule change a sure thing for 2006.

Career choices

David announced yesterday that he plans to be a doctor. This morning, I asked him whether he wanted to be a "kittycat doctor" (because he can't pronounce veterinarian) or a "people doctor", and he told me he wanted to be a people doctor.

So that's settled.

Mixed bag

First of all, let's hit Apple's product announcements from earlier today:

The Mac Mini and iBook lines both received upgrades today. There are now three base models of Mini - priced at $499, $599, and $699. The $499 model is unchanged, except for an upgrade to 512MB of RAM as standard. The $599 also gets the extra RAM, plus AirPort and Bluetooth are now standard as well. And the $699 model adds a SuperDrive to the mix. Nice incremental upgrade, but nothing major. I was kind of hoping Apple would also bump up the VRAM on the Mini series to 64MB, which would have made it a little better for low-to-mid level gaming. I don't think we'll see an explosion in Mini sales as a result of the upgrade, but it will improve the user experience for buyers. 256MB was woefully inadequate for running Mac OS X. And the low-end model includes a modem - but it is now an option on the two fancier models. So basically a modem was swapped for AirPort and Bluetooth.

The iBook now just consists of two base models. a 1.33 GHz 12" model, and a 1.42 GHz 14" model. AirPort and Bluetooth 2.0 are now standard, as are the scrolling trackpad and shock sensors from the PowerBook line. 512MB RAM is also standard across the line (the eMac is the only Mac left that ships with 256MB in any configuration), and the hard drive on the low-end iBook is now 40GB - an upgrade from 30GB. At $999 with all those features, the 12" iBook is now a pretty sweet value.

I think we'll see one more revision to each of those product lines along with the PowerBooks before the first Intel Macs start shipping next year. Expect a PowerBook tweak in a couple of months.

Now, for a quick visit to our home life, David is going through the "one step forward, two steps back" phase of development. On the plus side of the ledger, he's been learning to swim, and has gotten progressively braver in the water most days. He also is capable of drinking well from a normal cup, and we usually give him one at dinner. His tendency to destroy things is also down. And he now is getting to wear pull-ups ("underwear") during the day if he wants to. On the minus side, his table habits have gotten generally worse to the point where we have to threaten him with the baby seatbelt to get him to sit, he can be downright nasty verbally at times, and last night he pooped in the tub (which resulted in a one-day revocation of the underwear privilege).

It's called "being three", and he will outgrow it in a year or so. But it can be maddening at times.

In other home news, Gracie lost her final fang last week - she tried to follow Jane into the cellar, wandered up onto a ledge, and fell down, knocking it out. So she's going to have to rely on her claws to take out any mice that might come around. Our vet pulled the tooth Friday night - assuming it heals right it will be no biggie, but if it gets infected he'll have to go in for the root. It looks OK so far.

Also living in the "piece of crap" world

(a "Republicans suck" rant)

Welcome, Mitt Romney, to Craphood! Why? To commemorate your rushing down from vacation in New Hampshire to veto the "morning-after pill" law. Sure, the bill passed with a veto-proof majority. And sure, you let your lapdog of a Lt. Governor say that she'd sign it if it came up while she was watching the state for you. So the only reason you vetoed the bill was to make even more of a show come Republican primary season in 2008. Because it's going to pass with or without you - and you need to try and make a strong showing with the hard right because you'll probably get tossed out of office as a one-termer here. And losing a re-election bid doesn't look too good on the old Republican resume, bucko.

I've been asked to say something about the other crapmeister in the news, Karl Rove. I'm declining that one - partly because I don't want to get too worked up about that pasty bag of human garbage, and partly because so many others have ripped into him better than I ever could.

I've been a Libertarian for a number of years, and I still believe in libertarianism as my basic worldview. But the Republicans have led me to walk out of the only party I've ever bothered to belong to, and re-register as a Democrat. I may have to hold my nose a tad to do so, but though I'm not a huge fan of Democrats I despise the Republican Party, and I want to contribute what little I can to throwing as many of the bastards out of office as possible. Starting here, and hopefully eventually across the nation. In the spring of 2000, the right-wing activists that run the Republican Party made a choice in South Carolina that threw this country on a fast track to irrelevance. Between the Democrats and hopefully a few reasonable Republicans with cojones, maybe someday we can fix that.