Category: Life

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Cars Life

I’m an idiot

True to form, I was in a hurry today for no particular reason, as a result fate smacked me in the back of the head.


I took the day off today to go with Paula up to Sausalito to get some tile for our bathroom.  On the way up there we were driving along highway 1 through San Francisco when the light in front of us turns yellow.  The truck next to us wasn’t slowing down so I thought, “what the heck, I’ll keep going too”.


There were two lights along the route with red light traffic cameras.  That was one of them.  There were two pretty flashes, one for the semi, one for me.  Great.


I guess the SF PD will be sending me a nice portrait via US Postal Service… I just hope my portrait turns out as nice as Steve’s (see bottom of page).

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Life

Words to live by

I love this quote from an interview with Richard Pryor on NPR’s Fresh Aire.  Mr. Pryor was talking about dealing with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), he said that his disease was a blessing and joked about it in his routines.  In the interview he said:

Life to me was like… not supposed to make sense, ’cause, hey, it’s I don’t care how you slice it, you ain’t getting out alive, so enjoy as much as you can.

Richard Pryor died this month at the age of 65, his wife said he was joking right up until the and and died with a smile on his face.

Photo of comedien Richard Pryor
AP/Lennox McLendon

Once again I’m humbled by the strength of others.  A tip of the hat to you Mr. Pryor, I’m sure you watching us and still laughing.

Categories
Books Idle Life

See… spot… run…

Does anyone else find it amusing that I have been reading “Faster” for several months now?

Categories
Idle Life Microsoft Tech

Thoughts on being a closet MS employee

I was always at odds with myself when I was working in the Mac group at Microsoft.  The team is a great, smart bunch of people who really love the Mac platform and really want to do right by the Mac and turn out cool software.  I knew we were doing good work but there is so much zealotry in the Mac community that it took me a long time to refer to Microsoft as “we”.  If you check out comments on Omar’s blog you can see first-hand some of the quasi-religious fervor that can follow any post which is construed as anti-Apple.


Well, it’s taken me a long time but I can finally say I’m proud to be a Microsoft employee.  Having worked at Microsoft for almost nine years now I’ve come to realize the public’s view of Microsoft as a big, evil company who’s sole purpose is to crush all opposition is both not the view of the majority of the public and also just not true.  The people with whom I’ve worked are, with few exceptions, driven to excel and truly passionate about producing great software for their customers.  We are a competitive lot, but while having another company (e.g. Google or Yahoo!) producing cool e-mail software may drive me to want to out-do them I no more want to destroy Yahoo! than I would want to injure an opponent when playing soccer (besides, if Yahoo was destroyed, I’d feel really bad for Hans, Rob and Randy… they’re great people).


Seeing as it’s past 2AM and I’m on the road, having trouble sleeping without my lovely wife around… I was thinking… Being a white, American male growing up in the ‘burbs (raised Christian to boot), working on Macintosh software at MS provided me with what is probably the closest experience I’ll ever have to true racism.  And I’m know it’s nothing compared to what blacks, gays, Muslims, handicapped etc. people may face. 


So, I suppose it’s no great triumph of human will against insurmountable odds… baby steps.

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Idle Life Web Weird

Hey, those are sweet!






 


So, I was thinking…


If I were cheap enough to steal the swanky hotel hangers, I would probably consider it a reasonable investment to buy a thinner closet rod so I could use them.


 

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Idle Life Sites Useful

Eye scream, you scream…

From high school biology I remember that blue eyes is recessive and brown eyes is dominant.  I have blue eyes… so I have two recessive blue eye genes… should I have children, that’s all I can pass on.  If my wife had brown eyes then I’d know that our children would likely have brown eyes but possibly blue.  My education was useful up to the point I married a green-eyed lady (who here is old enough to remember Sugarloaf? Raise your hand… but don’t pull anything, please).


The other day while discussing genetics and eugenics with Imran my curiosity got the better of my and I did a search for an eye color calculator.  My search turned up a very nice page which happens to be hosted by our local Tech Museum.  My question has finally been answered: 66% chance for green eyes, 33% chance for blue.  Want to know your chances?  Make sure you know your parents’ eye color, your mate’s parents’ eye color, your mate’s eye color and your eye color then go to the Tech’s eye color calculator.  Note, if you can’t remember your own eye color you’re in trouble… if you can’t remember your mate’s eye color you’re in really big trouble.


Now I now the odds for eye color… if I could just find out if they’ll inherit her good looks or my idiocy.


eyeColor.gif

Categories
Idle Life Travel

We ordered cheese sticks

Vegas in July, sounds like a great idea, right?  109 degrees in the shade… tourists in wife-beaters… wondering if the misters use “reclaimed” water.


Scary as it sounds we had a fab-tastic time.  We ate some great food at Delmonico Steakhouse (the waiter screwed up my order… but brought me something delicious… no harm no foul), we watched a great show, Zoomanity (the reviews were mixed on this cabaret-style twist on Cirque du Soleil but Paula and I loved it) and, above all, we had some great company.  It was a great way to spend Mike’s 40th birthday.


One fun part of the trip: Dick had never been to Vegas.  Claimed he was never going to go… would have anything to do with it.  Can you guess?  He loved it.  He’s going back.  In about a month.  My prediction: he’ll go every weekend for a year then we’ll need to perform an intervention.


Here’s a picture of some of the gang walking through the Venetian… looking very much like a still from a Vegas heist movie.


vegas_sm.jpg


What’s Omar looking at you ask?  I’d wager it’s his Treo™ 650 smartphone.  He’s the next one who will need an intervention after Dick.


Oh, and yes, the cheese sticks were very good.

Categories
Idle Life

Tell Ron I’m sorry

Paula has been doing a fantastic job of getting healthy.  She’s been exercising regularly, she’s been cooking healthy and, thankfully, she’s been encouraging me to eat well and exercise with her.  Yesterday was a pretty good day for me for exercise and quantity of food.  Typically I’ll have a snack or two during the day and/or have one really bad meal (e.g. hamburger, fries, soda and a milkshake) but yesterday I just had Wheaties (The Breakfast of ChampionsTM), an Italian sandwich (which isn’t especially healthy but I didn’t pile chips and a soda), a small handful of GORP and finally, for dinner, Paula made whole-wheat pasta with vegetables on top (she makes it with a touch of butter, olive oil and some parmesan on top… healthy and tasty).  After dinner Paula made us go running.  To top it off, I wound up staying up late (I blame Dick, Trina and Mike) which would typically dictate a late-night-snack before going to bed, but I resisted the temptation and just went to bed with a glass of water.


All this clean living must have a payoff, right?


So here’s the thing, I was out to breakfast eating my fruit cup when I realized the chef had screwed up and there was no fruit in my fruit cups (because if one fruit cup is good, two fruit cups are better).  All I had was just the pastry containers.  I wasn’t sure if I was right in expecting fruit so I asked Ron Howard, who was having breakfast with me, if he had fruit in his pastry cup.  He confirmed it, I was missing my fruit.  Ron was extraordinarily polite about it considering I really was making a fool of myself by teasing him mercilessly in front of Kiki Dee.  I was feeling pretty silly for making fun of Ron Howard but things only got worse when the Roman centurions were unable to control the crowd after throwing gold and treasure into the audience.  As the crowd spilled over into the center of the stadium the other gladiators and I were forced to grab the ropes of the Ligers to prevent them from attacking the crowd.  I figured if I could pull hard enough on the rope while planting my feet on the animal’s neck I’d be able to keep it from biting me but it was still able to squirm around and get a hold of my leg.  I compensated by sticking my foot in front of its face length-wise because I have size twelve and-a-half feet and it wouldn’t be able to open its mouth that wide.  Turns out it was very cute when it gnawed on my shoe.


I have the weirdest feakin’ dreams.  I think I’ll go make myself some breakfast… and I’m staying away from fruit cups for the foreseeable future.

Categories
Idle Life Net Tech

Migration

Well, it’s been a long time (10 years) with Network Solutions but I’ve finally gotten off my lazy butt and moved my domains over to GoDaddy.  The primary reason was to get away from paying $35 a year per domain and bring it down to closer to ten bucks a year.  A little effort to save a little money.

There will be only one casualty in the transfer: the history.  There isn’t much documented in the Network Solutions registration but I always enjoyed being able to go look at the whois record for doe.com and find the registration date.  I guess I’ll have to turn to this blog entry to reminisce from now on.

Doe.com – Record created on 27-Jul-1995

Along with this date I might as well record the story behind the registration.

Before working at Microsoft I had a job at a small “start-up” (it wasn’t starting, so I use the term “start-up” loosely) named ResNova Software, Inc.  ResNova’s primary product was a BBS which, among other things, had functionality to aggregate Usenet newsgroups.  Back then there was far less garbage in the newsgroups but there was, strangely enough, a large number of posting from some “John Doe” fellow with the address john@doe.com.  Being the curious sort I decided to investigate who owned doe.com… turns out no one did.  Being the mischievous sort I decided to register it (domain names were free back then… I’m also the cheap sort).  I used to periodically check the account and respond to the occasional “are you real?” or “test” e-mail messages (and they were occasional).  The account was also useful when I was a test lead on Outlook Express and Entourage for the Macintosh, lots of spam to throw at the product.  Sadly, I can no longer play celebrity as john@doe.com is overrun with e-mail.  Surprisingly the bulk of the mail is no longer spam, it’s bounce messages from all the test mail, junk mail and virus mail purporting to be from john@doe.com.  John@doe.com can receive around 250 bounce messages per minute (my previous ISP threatened to kick me off his servers because just the mail connection attempts to john@doe.com were melting his servers, there weren’t even any accounts set up).

Today doe.com is mainly a traffic generator for my blog.  People show up randomly looking for either the U.S. Department of Energy (which was doe.gov but is now energy.gov but still didn’t register energy.com, genius!) the Doe Fund (doe.org) and, at one time, the Canadian Department of Environment (which used to be www.doe.ca but appears to be no longer, it’s moved on, it’s an ex-site…*).  Just for grins I let my online life flow into the real world, my Volvo station wagon has the custom plate “doe com” (if you came here because I cut you off on the freeway, I honestly apologize… it had nothing to do with you, I’m just impatient and meant no offense).

The info above covers just about everything, but it doesn’t answer the most frequently asked question: “Is Doe.com for sale?”  The answer is, “yes”, of course, everything has its price.  Each time I’m asked I sit down and seriously consider selling the domain name.  I don’t, after all, have a mail server set up, I don’t use the domain name as the identity of my web site and even the traffic it generates is nothing but a cost to me.  Why not sell?  Turns out I’m very sentimental and really don’t want to sell it, but because everything has to have a price I’ve set the price at an $3 Million to cover legal fees, taxes and, of course, pain and suffering for the loss.  I figure that amount is suitably ridiculous to drive off almost all buyers and if someone does come along willing to pony up the ridiculous fee (heck, it’s a three-letter, easy to spell .com domain) I’ll take the money, give half to Uncle Sam, buy something really nice for my wife and put the rest in the bank for retirement.

Oh, I’ll spend a little on my car too, I need new tires for my Volvo… they don’t seem to last for some reason.  Must be something wrong with the car.

* Much love and many apologies to John Cleese

Note from Reeves to Reeves: Before moving the WhoIs showed “Little.org – Record created on 10-May-2002”.  I know the domain is older than that but I’ll have to do some research to find out when I first registered it.

Categories
Life

We are experiencing heavier than usual prayer volume…

So, according to the bible, God created the world in 6 days and rested on the seventh.  This is, quite simply, the reason there is a weekend.


Now, let’s say I’m looking at this from a very practical, non-religious point of view.  The weekend is the time of rest (especially Sunday, of course) when one is expected to relax and recoup.  The last thing anyone wants on their day off is the office calling with a bunch of demands.


Given that… isn’t it inconsiderate to hold church services on Sunday?  It amounts to the whole world calling God on God’s day off, demanding that God do stuff.  Sheesh, makes me glad I’m not a deity.