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Yesterday Kyra was asked on her first date by a guy named Ricky. It’s been a long time coming… about a year ago, he approached me to get permission to ask out Kyra when she turned 16 (our kids aren’t allowed to date until 16). Ricky is 16 and a good kid, so of course I said it was fine. He’s literally been waiting almost a year for her sweet sixteen birthday, and all of his friends– as well as Kyra– were well aware of his little crush.

Now that the deed is done and he has a date secured, Ricky asked Alex about going out on a group date. Why? Because Alex can drive, of course. At first Alex was willing to just be the chauffeur for Ricky, Kyra, and another couple, but I told him he wasn’t going to be the “fifth wheel” and he needed to get a date.

Of course Alex is a year and a half older than Kyra and hasn’t ever been on a date, so this is a pretty big deal. He pretended to really think about all of the girls he could ask, but everyone knew all along that it would be Brianna.

(Brianna is the pretty blond on the left.)

There are now two other boys in the posse, and today one of them asked out Kelsey, Brianna’s younger sister (and the girl to the right of Alex in the photo). Apparently when he was over at her house talking to her about it, Brianna said she was still waiting for Alex to ask. It’s funny that even she knows it’s coming.

Anyway, tonight Alex was brainstorming about how to ask her out in a funny and creative way. I tossed out a few ideas– it’ll be fun to see what he decides to do. Even more fun is the fact that Alex and Kyra will be on the same group date…

Kyra and I competed to see who has the most chins.

From what I can tell, she only has two. Amateur.

Zack got a shirt from Kyra for his birthday… it’s one of the crazy purple minions.

Somehow, it suits him.

Last week Zack was at Scout Camp. He and a dozen other boys went to a local lake and spent the week camping, hiking, and learning to wakeboard, kayak, and surf. He had a lot of fun. Heck, I was there for a day and I had a lot of fun too.

The day after he came home, he complained that his legs hurt. We peeked beneath his shorts and discovered that he had a ton of little bites. Laralee actually counted 46 of them, mostly on the back of his legs but also on the front. Here’s a photo of the back of his right thigh:

Yikes.

Strangely, they actually got worse over the next couple of days. They were very painful– so much that he couldn’t sit, and had to spend the day on his stomach reading books and such.

A bit of research indicated that they’re probably chigger bites. None of the other boys at camp had any problems like this, so the best we can figure is that Zack either had a bunch of them in his sleeping bag, or he sat down somewhere in the forest and managed to stir up a bunch of the little buggers.

It’s almost a week later and they’re finally subsiding, but it was pretty crazy for a while. Hopefully this isn’t all he remembers about Scout Camp years from now…

Here are a few artsy photos from the latest download from my camera…

Blinkenlights at my hosting facility:

Peering into the guts of a server:

And Skittles!

Over the past few months I’ve made a lot of progress trimming the amount of spam I receive. Every now and then something still manages to sneak through, but it’s nowhere near the flood I used to endure.

Today’s awesome sneak-through message? Toenail fungus cure!

I can’t imagine the sorts of people who click through on this. But I suspect it got through the filters simply because I wasn’t filtering for “toenail fungus”. Until now. Mwah ha haaaaa!

Today we had a conference call scheduled with a client. The purpose of the call was to decide how many opportunities the client’s customers (end users) would have to install a software license before the system told them they’d exhausted their attempts and would need to contact customer support.

Generally you don’t want to give customers just a single attempt, because something might go wrong during the installation process, or they might get a new computer and want to continue using the same license, and so forth. On the other hand, you don’t want to give them tens or hundreds of attempts because that opens the door for rampant piracy. So we knew going into it that the number would probably be in the neighborhood of 3 to 5.

Prior to the call, Ben commented that there really wasn’t any need for us (the development team) to even be a part of the call because in the end, it was a business decision for our client. We could save a lot of time– that’s billable time from us– if the client had this conversation internally and then spent two seconds telling us the number they decided to use. Unfortunately, they insisted we join the call so Ben and Josh spent 55 minutes listening on the conference line (not really even offering input) as about a dozen people at the client site debated the merits of 3 versus 4 and so forth.

I felt kind of bad that Ben and Josh had to endure that, because I came up to them after the call had ended and asked for the two-second summary. Ben said the number they chose was…

here it comes…

wait for it…

Ahh, meetings.

Pawel Kuczynski is a Polish artist who has just released a series of paintings with clever social commentary. Two of my favorites are these:

(Especially apropos given the situation in the Ukraine and other places.)

It’s a sad commentary on today’s world that so many countries and groups of people dislike each other we need some kind of “friendship chart” to understand the relationships. Not surprisingly, the Middle East is a prime example of this.

Slate just published this helpful friendship chart:

Note the legend in the top right: friends, enemies, and “it’s complicated”. I also can’t help but smile (in a sad way) about the correction at the bottom of the chart: the editors mistakenly thought two countries were friends, but alas they are not.

From experience with Kyra, I think this friendship-chart technology could also be used to help junior-high girls map their relationships with each other. So I suppose I’m saying, in the end, that the countries and groups in the Middle East are somewhat like a bunch of junior-high girls…