Author: cosmo

I love this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, where he gets his school pictures taken:

To that I say …

… mission accomplished.

I have a client who’s been hosting a one-page web site for about a year. It’s simply the company logo and contact information, nothing exciting.

Apparently some people have been wondering when things are going to change, and are contacting his company (in droves, I guess) asking about the web site. So today he wrote to me and asked if I could put a little message on the page saying it’s “under construction”.

That’s so… 1994.

Then he followed up with an even better idea:

I was speechless. I thought the little animated GIF’s of guys in hard hats digging from a pile of rocks had died with GeoCities. But I guess not.

I resisted the urge to use an animated guy digging, but I added a little yellow icon and an “under construction” message. Hey, he’s the client, right?

Kyra’s science class is studying the elements, and each student was assigned an element. They were tasked with coming up with a creative way to demonstrate the element, its properties, uses, or whatever.

She was assigned boron.

Boron! Wow, what do you do with that? As it turns out, Kyra had a brilliant idea: cupcakes.

That’s right, a boron cupcake. She made about thirty of them, and after a thin layer of frosting she used homemade fondant to create the atomic structure. The pink balls are protons, the green ones are neutrons, and of course the blue ones are electrons zipping around their orange orbits.

I was very impressed. Science can sure be fun.

On my trip I rented a car, and was given a Ford Fiesta. Wow. I think the only time I even had the thought of “fiesta” in my mind was when I was returning it at the end of my trip, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to drive that little party wagon around any more. What a piece of cheap junk.

Here at Google headquarters, when you use the urinal you get to read Learning on the Loo, which is a one-page document placed at eye level right in front of you. It has tips and tricks about how to be more efficient at your job. There’s also Coding on the Commode, which is specifically about better programming methodologies. Unfortunately both of them are pretty long– a full page– which makes them hard to read in one session. I suppose you could drink a lot of water and kind of “save it up” until you really have to go, and that way you’ll be able to get through the full article.

I’m in San Francisco, sitting at a little pizzeria and enjoying the sunshine and gorgeous 55-degree weather. On the sidewalk, people are walking past in sweaters and scarves, acting as if it’s frigid.

When I left the house this morning (in Denver) it was 1 degree. Today’s high there is supposed to be in the teens. So 55 is amazing and warm. How funny that the “natives” here think it’s cold enough for a scarf.

Alex will be fifteen next month (yikes!) so we’re starting the exciting journey of driver’s ed and making the long march to his driver’s license. Colorado has a crazy set of rules and processes, and we finally figured out what steps we need to take.

He’ll be starting driver’s ed next week and finishing the course in February. We’re considering whether to buy an old clunker car– something for a few hundred bucks– so he can learn to drive without the hassle of (1) a manual transmission like my car, or (2) a big awkward vehicle like La’s van. Plus, let’s be honest: if he’s going to wreck the car like most teenage boys somehow end up doing, it would be better to wreck something that’s not going to make me cry.

So I was poking around Craigslist with my search criteria set to “for sale by owner, under $1,000”. This sweet little guy caught my eye:

Ahh, the 1975 El Camino. Now that brings back memories. Can you imagine how cool Alex would feel as he tooled around town in this baby?

Wow.

The end of an era is upon me. I’ve been hosting and managing a server for a client of mine, and it’s been running non-stop for years. I’ve blogged about it a few times here, here, here, and here. As of right now, I’m at 2,105 days:

That’s almost six years. To be precise, the server first came online February 23, 2006 and it’s been going strong 24 hours a day since then. No reboots, no power outages, no network glitches– just running merrily as designed. Pretty impressive hardware.

But this Saturday I’m going to physically move the server, and that means I’ll have to (gasp) unplug it. Sure, it’ll only be offline for a few minutes, but my sweet uptime counter will reset at that point.

It may seem like a weird thing to brag about, but come on… this kind of thing is worth a ton of geek cred.

I got a new netbook today (Acer Aspires rock) and of course the first order of business was to peel off all the NASCAR-like stickers covering the thing. So long, “Optimized for Windows 7!” But I paused when I saw the sticker that said– in big red letters– “HD Internet!”

High definition internet?

I don’t know what that is, but apparently this netbook is awesome because of it. I’m excited to give it a spin and see what kind of high definition TCP/IP packets I can get over the wire…

Josh is on the phone with a client and is actually walking him through using Windows Paint to take a screenshot so he can send it to us for troubleshooting.

Windows Paint. Wow.