Blahging

I havn’t posted much in this blog lately, or any blog for that matter. I havn’t uploaded flickr pictures in a while, and the ones I have uploaded havn’t been tagged. My twitter feed is barren.

I’m not sure why, I have theories but it mostly boils down to: I’m not in the future yet, and I really want to be. I want to be able to twitter from halo and post kill pictures immediately. I want to twitter from my media center or effortlessly vlog from my cell phone. I can’t do that stuff yet and it’s irritating. The frictional overhead of posting things has dropped my online participation to a near standstill.

I can post halo pictures, but its quite a bit of work.

I can twitter from media center but its a laborious process.

My cell phone does record videos but posting them anywhere is a pain in the ass. I’m so close I can feel it but its not quiet simple enough yet. And thats simple by the standards of someone whose willing to write code to make things even simpler.

So no blogging lately. Except for this whining.

That sucked

I just finished writing a ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ email today to a guy I interviewed last week.

I hate doing those, I hate interviewing people. If somebodies clearly an idiot or trying to inflate their resume I don’t mind tossing them out, but there are a lot of people who are decent enough who just don’t fit. Not enough experience, not the right skills, or just not quite good enough. I empathize with those people, just trying to feed their families and make things better for themselves. And when the interviews start to go south I always feel bad about it. I’ve been in interviews and it’s excruciating. Whats worse is I’m not sure how good I am at picking out good people: One guy we hired I thought was a total tool (that’s you Chris). He’s worked out well. So maybe I’m getting lots of these really wrong. Who knows.

The good news is a guy I interviewed starts next monday. He had a picture of his three month old son paper clipped to copies of his resume. Like Scott said: Dirty pool. I can’t wait until all of our positions are filled, this sucks.

A lesson in Civics

How a stupid bill becomes a law leads us to this bill.

Requires universities and community colleges to provide a student with alternative coursework if the student deems regular coursework to be personally offensive.

Those liberal pansies and their political correctness. Can’t offend anyone, can’t make anyone feel bad. This country was founded on certain things: Hard work, God, Self Sufficiency and if our founding fathers felt that their culture was under attack you know what they did: They killed British people until things got better. And it worked. But now days everything has to be all ‘politically correct’ and white washed and we need to be inclusive and not ‘offend’ people. This is the kind of limp wristed effeminite buffoonary that will have us all speaking chinese in 10 years if left unchecked.

Just kidding, The bill is sponsored by Republicans. Apparently college age is still too early to let the big bad world in.

Crossing over into the darkside

I got a prodigious amount of starbucks gift cards for christmas, which means for the last three weeks I’ve been able to fund an extremely caffeine intensive lifestyle that cut the amound of sleep I need from 7 hours a night down to 5.

Unfortunatly yesterday I used up the last of my cards. Today marks my first day walking around without the ace in my sleeve of an instantaneous caffiene buzz. I told Kim this morning it was like walking without a tightrope. I meant to say: Like walking on a tightrope with no net. Between my attempt at metaphor and the actual metaphor you can get a sense for what I was going at.

It’s going to be a rough few days.

Dragging to the finish line

You’ve probably noticed that posting here at schulzone is down a bit. If you live in Phoenix you’ve probably also noticed I’ve been scarce at birthday, social calls, and home. And I can finally tell why:

The New ITtoolbox. Complete site redesign. All the underpinnings reworked. Code cleaned up, new functionality added. My favorite is This page, which if you refresh a few times you’ll notice that the contexually matching content is no longer limited to white papers, now blog entries and wiki entries show up. On the page I linked too a blog entry about trojans and malware found the next entry in that series and and a wiki article on virii.

It’s finally over, I’ve been killing myself this week, and working pretty hard for a few months and it’s finally over. I havn’t had dinner with Kyra all week, and I’m really missing her. So next week is ‘play with Kyra constantly’ week. And I’m very excited.

I Swear

If you ask Kyra where her fingers are she’ll take a second to sort out the recursive difficulties of pointing to her pointers and show you her fingers. That’s cool, but what’s really interesting is neither Kim nor I ever explained to her where her fingers are. From our conversation (which I should point out (pun intended) are not especially finger centric) she gleaned what fingers were.

This ability to parse english correctly spurred Kim and I to clean up our conversations. So we took the most cliched road we could think of: Swear Jar. Swear and you put 25 cents in. We decided it’s per incident not per word. Hard core George Carlin swearing is pretty well contained, but we have a serious weakness: suck.

Suck is one of the words which cost a quarter. And after two days of doing this we’ve put $4.50 into that jar: 18 incidents. And those 18 incidents are while Kyras awake, when she’s asleep we take a long slow trip through the wretched dank backwaters of my vocabulary as a counterbalance. And it’s all sucking. You would be amazed at how many things suck. Specific things suck, whole concepts suck, and a lot of times at the end of a story you can really show you got it by saying: ‘that sucks’. Now we’ll have to emphathize or sympathize, or understand, or just sit there mute.

Not being able to identify things that suck could turn into a serious impediment to conversation around here.

ps: I should note that the slow trip through the wretched thing was stolen from Hunter S Thompson. But I liked the way it sounded so much I had to use it, and in the context of a swear jar it fit perfectly.

Hot enough to melt cheese

Kim, Kyra, and I went to lunch today. It took us a while to figure out where we were going to go, so I started feeding Kyra cheese while we drove. When we got there I put the lid on, but put it on wrong… cheese everywhere. So we took all the cheese out of the car and dumped it onto the asphalt next to the car.

We went in to lunch, came back 45 minutes later and the cheese was fried. Melted into bright yellow puddles with bubbles all over it (like you see on a cheese crisp after you cook it too long).

It is currently 110 degrees here. It’s just hot.

While I’m whining: Our pool motor is fixed so I went swimming yesterday and the pool water was 86 degrees.

Wow

I got home today and Kim told me it was 80 degrees in the house.

I checked to make sure the cooler wasn’t broken, and it wasn’t, it’s fine. But when it’s 111 outside there’s only so much the thing can do.

111…. that’s just brutal.

I'm not homesick at all

But you can see where I Could be

It's a dry heat

It hit 108 today. I know because me and kim have been watching weather.com closely. Like you watch crash reports. It’s the same sick fascination except instead of shame when you talk about it you just feel embarresed and weak. Everybody talks about it and we all get the same masochistic thrill.

But for me and kim it’s also trying to get used to something that’s not really new, but we can’t quite remember. Everytime it gets hotter we try to imagine adding another 10 degrees to it and what that will feel like (answer: hot). 108 though is pretty much the top of our ability to differentiate degrees. It’s just hot. Thank God we have a pool. In fact our house is well suited for these insane temperatures. We only have one window that has direct sunlight and thats our bedroom in the morning. The rest of the day the sun can’t get to our windows, and our windows are all doublepaned so the normal radiator affect the glass has is stunted. Plus our Evap Cooler seems to work well (although we realized today that it was struggling to keep the temperature at 77, but 30 degrees off the top is a lot to ask) and if that should lag we have an air conditioner the size of a refrigerator to turn too. The thing is enormous and seemed to really impress the inspector when he looked at our house.

We also have fans in every room and tile floors that stay cool. Throw in the pool and we’re well equipped to handle even the roughest heat. But it’s not pretty and we’re going to complain about it, pretty much any time we do anything, ever. Go to the store: Damn its hot out. Go to the mailbox: Damn its hot out. Get a drink of water from the fridge: Damn it’s so hot outside we’re going through water like crazy.

It’ll get old once we get used to it, but for now it’s too incredible not to talk about: We chose to live here, along with a few million of our closest friends.