• Lessons from the twentieth century

    This morning Adam was angry about being abandoned by his mother. Cheryl and Beth snuck out early to hit Busch Gardens for a little mother daughter bonding. They left Adam in the clutches of the evil daddy, who had no desire for a return engagement with the full pull of Adam’s mass.

    Adam demanded to see his mommy and wasn’t going to do anything until he got his way, including eating breakfast.

    Who knew two year olds came with a built-in understanding of a hunger strike?

  • Boy discovers strategic value of gravity

    Yesterday my son and I were settling into our Friday evening routine, consisting of a daddy on the floor doing his best impression of a jungle gym. I was lying on the floor, when Adam decided to go old-school WWF on me. I didn’t know he could jump, let alone jump backwards, but facing the opposite direction he jumped backwards from a standing position, pulled his knees up and drove his but into the soft tissue of my abdomen.

    Holy crap that hurt!

  • Channel your inner geek

    The more elements of the unknown a given project contains, the more your brain is begging for a bruising. I have a passing acquaintance with the Movable Type publishing platform – whose software powers this blog. I have less experience with MySQL, an open source database environment. I have even less experience with Perl, the programming language utilized by the Movable Type publishing platform. DBD and DBI, which are necessary modules for Perl (and the Movable Type publishing platform) to interface with a MySQL database, might as well be written in an early Incan dialect. Of those things I mentioned above, only Perl comes as a standard install on Mac OS X, and it requires a special install from the Developer’s Tools CD in order to get add-on modules to properly install (with the particular flavor of OS X installed on my makeshift, home server). All of the above requires tinkering with a text editor and the command line (don’t get me started on UNIX).

    Why do I mention any of this? I thought it would be a good idea to convert my blog database to MySQL.

    How many of you have a burning desire to dive into some UNIX, Perl, MySQL, and database interfaces for web based applications? Those in the know (myself not included) are out there scoffing at the notion. “Piece of cake,” they’re thinking. For me… it’s a bitter pill washed down with vinegar. I am nowhere near the geek I aspire to be.

    Don’t pity me though, dear reader. The real victim in all of this, as always, is my wife. And don’t get her started on Halo…