BoomFlag

Today Kyra mentioned to me that she’s having a friendly competition with her friend Hannah to see who can score the highest in the Hot New App called “Don’t Touch the White Tiles”. Yeah, this game is all the rage, and the name pretty much sums up the entire premise. The screen has a set of four squares horizontally, one of which is black, and they scroll slowly upward. You have to tap the black one, and then the next row appears. It gets faster as you go along, and eventually the black and white tiles are just flying past. Truly this is a test of mental and physical dexterity.

I commented to Kyra that if all of the people who have spent hours playing apps like this would, instead, focus on something productive, it’s likely that humanity would have accomplished so much more by now. I suspect hundreds of millions of hours of productivity are lost every day to things like Don’t Touch the White Tiles, or Flappy Bird, or Farmville, or whatever else is the latest rage. If we’d channel that mental energy for good, we’d probably have flying cars and be living on Mars by now.

Mmm… I just received my shipment of fifteen new solid-state disk drives. These are enterprise-grade drives that I’ll be installing in a bunch of my servers.

I’ve found that once you’ve gone to SSD’s, you can never go back to traditional spinning-platter hard drives. Of course I still have those drives in the servers– it’s nice to have a terabyte of space that’s much cheaper, even if it’s slower.

I love these things, although $2,000 for 2TB of storage– no matter how fast– is a little steep. Hopefully they’ll keep going down in price.

I just received an email from my HOA about an upcoming “block party” event. This is the actual header graphic.

I’m speechless.

Also, is the second guy from the left Willis from “Diff’rent Strokes”?

Kyra is working on a final in U.S. History where she has to pick a decade and do a bunch of research about it. She picked the greatest decade of all time, which of course was the 80’s. For her assignment she interviewed me and Laralee about what it was like to grow up in the 80’s, including our favorite TV shows, books, music, things we did, and even phrases we used.

It was fun to reminisce about all of that stuff. Laralee was a huge Huey Lewis fan back in the 80’s… she had all of the albums (on cassette, of course), posters on her wall, and the highlight of her entire childhood was going to one of his concerts. I remembered that Dirk had one of the Huey Lewis albums, and we’d play it in his 1972 Plymouth Duster while we drove around getting beat up by kids on the highway by Taco Bell. Yeah, long story there.

Today Alex interviewed and was offered his first real* job. We’ve been encouraging him for the past few months to get a summer job, but he’s been sort of lackadaisical about doing it. (In his defense, he’s been pretty busy with homework, finals, projects, martial arts, Scouting, and church stuff!)

He went over to Papa John’s Pizza today, interviewed briefly, and was offered the job on the spot. He accepted and had to participate in some training where– according to him– the presentation focused largely on how much quality Papa John’s puts into its product while the other guys are basically feeding their customers something dredged from the bottom of a septic tank. He said they kept mentioning Domino’s and Pizza Hut by name, and how they’re not nearly as awesome as Papa John’s.

So anyway, he starts next week. It’ll be interesting to see how much pizza he brings home. Luckily Papa John’s pizza is pretty good… especially that garlic butter sauce, which I’m sure is chock full of quality.

* A “real” job means one where he’s not working for me or one of my friends.

Alex spent much of today running aerators to raise money for his high adventure Scout camp this summer. When he came home, he hopped in the shower and then decided he’d style his hair a bit.

I like this ‘do even better than his earlier experiments.

One exception to not huffing various spray cans is vanilla.

I was making some frosting for cupcakes, and couldn’t help but breathe deeply of the vanilla bottle. Wow, huffing that stuff is like snorting angels up your nose and having them play their harps inside your nasal passages. Or… something. Whatever, it’s amazing.

Today was one of those “get things done” days, where I did a whole bunch of stuff that’s been sitting on my to-do list for a while. One of them was to buy huge pieces of foam board so I could mount some new poster-size photo prints for my office.

I had to pick up some spray adhesive as well, which I sprayed on the foam boards before (carefully) laying the prints on them. I peeked at the warning label on the side of the can and hoo boy it was pretty serious.

This stuff contains hexane, acetone, propane, butane, toluene, and a bunch of other highly flammable gases. It has exciting warnings about how this can cause headaches and nausea, as well as permanent damage to the central nervous system. Wow.

I used it outside, because this stuff is super annoying if it gets on any surface (the surface feels tacky for the rest of eternity). Laralee told me I was going to be in trouble if the grass died where I’d over-sprayed the boards.

And I guess huffing this stuff is right out.

Wow, May 11 and it looks like this?

We only had a dusting… Boulder had at least six inches of snow!

I was reading an Amazon review and ran across this sweet quote:

And any time I think of sudo, I can’t help but remember the classic XKCD comic: