Year: 2012

The universe must be slightly askew today, because Laralee told me this morning how much she was craving a donut. She never craves donuts, so I figured I should take advantage of this strange mood. I headed over to the grocery store (I had to pick up some stuff for a party tonight anyway) and bought donuts for everyone.

My chocolate ring was only slightly contaminated by powder from Kyra’s neighboring donut, but it was still culinary ecstasy.

Many years ago, Thom picked up a couple of cheap cooler mugs at his local Big Lots. They were sweet mugs with hollow sides filled with water. You keep them in the freezer, where the water (obviously) turns to ice, and then when you pour a nice cool beverage into the mug, you can keep it cool without the need for ice cubes to water it down.

I’ve always envied him those mugs.

So finally I took action, and discovered that on Amazon there’s quite an assortment of cooler mugs: everything from the simple ones like Thom has to far more expensive ones whose technology is apparently far more advanced. I ended up going for one in the middle of that road– it has some kind of weird magic crystals in the sides, rather than water. I suppose they have a lower freezing point or something.

Now I have this awesome mug, and my orange juice (two quarts a day– just what a healthy boy needs) stays nice and cold. In fact, this thing is so cold that the juice usually turns to slush at the bottom before I can drink all of it. So I get the benefit of a nice cold drink followed by orange slushee. Can life get any better than this?

It’s been a long road, but we finally have the two new developers we need at Zing. We’ve been pursuing this for months now, and I even went down the road of hiring recruiters. As it turned out, the recruiters cost a lot of money and didn’t produce anything in the end. Lesson learned. But Brent, the new marketing genius at Zing, completely re-thought how we advertise for developers, and it was a wild success. We found two good guys within two weeks, made offers to them both, and they’ll be in the office by the end of the month. Woo hoo!

Does this mean I’ll finally accomplish my dream of working less than 60 hours a week? We’ll see…

I lost at ping pong today.

We’ve had the table in the office for three months and I’d never lost a game. At first, the games were blowouts. I’m not really all that good, but the other guys weren’t either. They’ve come a long way, and finally today Dustin took me down 21-18. So endeth the streak.

The other night, Laralee, Kyra, and I were driving home and La commented about the full moon overhead. She pointed out that it was actually a blue moon. Kyra asked what that meant, and I explained that it’s something that doesn’t happen very often. In fact, it happens once in a… uhh… blue moon.

Yes, I caught myself using the phrase “once in a blue moon” to describe how often a blue moon occurs. Hah.

For most of 2012 I’ve been looking for good web developers. We have a ton of work here at Zing (a good thing!) and not nearly enough people to do it. Due to some creative job postings, we’ve been getting a lot of interest lately. I’ve been reading several resumes a day from interested people.

This one really caught my eye, though:

This guy is amazing! He was using HTML thirteen years before it was invented! The last time I checked, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first draft specification for Hypertext Markup Language in 1991…

Woo hoo, it’s my lucky day! I got a star on my Tootsie Pop!

On Friday night we hosted our mostly-annual neighborhood s’mores night. We invited a bunch of people to our backyard, where we had a fire pit, a bunch of camp chairs, and a table full of marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers. A sure recipe for fun.

The party lasted a couple of hours and then the adults went home while the kids set up tents and camped in the back yard. They had music and dancing… well, the girls did; the boys huddled in their tent and watched YouTube videos or something. It was a gorgeous night: a little cool but not bad, with a few clouds. Unfortunately for them, around 5am Saturday morning the wind started howling. The tents collapsed and the kids all stumbled inside to sleep fitfully for another hour or two. Since they’d all stayed up until well past midnight and then been awakened a bit suddenly at five, it made for a long and somewhat grumpy Saturday.

Anyway, it was a success as usual. We had quite a bit left over, so for the past two nights I’ve cooked up my “indoor s’mores” and enjoyed them thoroughly. I start with the raw materials:

Then I pop them in the microwave on low heat for about two minutes, chuckling at bit as the marshmallows slowly expand, then contact, then expand again (why do they do that?). Finally, the finished product emerges:

Of course it’s an absolute mess to eat– I end up with chocolate smeared on my cheeks and melted marshmallow on my fingers. But hey, it’s all worth it.

Zack found an old deck of cards in our game closet. And I mean old… this is the very deck I used in high school as I played spades with Bech during lunch, or poker and sparts* with the gang. That means it’s probably around 24 years old.

The cards are kind of a yellow color, and so worn from being shuffled they’re actually soft… not the usual stiff cardboard of a crisp new deck. And they’re chock full of good memories.

* Sparts is an awesome combination of spades and hearts that we invented.

I’m working on an old web site for a client, and saw this in the HTML source:

Hah. Smart developers don’t use crappy products like Adobe Flex (and Flash) to build web sites.