What day is Sunday?  Oh yeah, it's "Throw up on Daddy at 4:00 AM day".  I don't remember all of this throwing up when I was  a kid.  Today, it was Alex, and I let an unwise internet search convince me that he had appendicitis, so I took him to the emergency room.  I bet doctors HATE the internet, because every time a kid sneezes, their parent reads about it on webmd or something and decides the kid has dropsy or gout or some funky thing.  I felt stupid when the doctor said "it's a stomach bug", but I would have felt a lot worse if it had turned out Alex had Ebola or Malaria or something like that.  Here's Al when he was healthier:

(I know, I know, he doesn't have his helmet on.  I told him that not wearing a helmet is what caused his sickness, so he was chastened).

Also, today is cleaning day, so after that's over, we're going to have a family class titled "How to find Mommy in the middle of the night when you need to puke".

As I may have mentioned, a few years ago someone broke into my house and stole my good computers (as well as other expensive things that were not nailed down).  The only thing that they got away with that couldn't be replaced were about 10,000 digital pictures, mostly of my kids (I love digital cameras, you can take pictures all day and it doesn't cost anything more).  I had some of them backed up to work, but for the most part, I was out of luck. 

Since then, I have been kind of obsessive about making backups of my pictures.  I have them on my home computer, my work computer (copied via robocopy and a terminal server session), on an external harddrive and finally backed up on Mozy. I LOVE mozy: you install a client application on your PC, tell it what to back up, and it will back you up to Mozy's servers somewhere in the cloud.  It's 50.00/year for unlimited space.  What a bargain.  The only limiter on mozy is the speed of your network connection: the initial backup of my photos took a couple of weeks, because I have about 40GB of photos and a 500-800 kb/s connection to the internet.

So anyway, I wiped and reinstalled my computer the other day, kind of as a spring cleaning sort of thing.  My biggest concern was that I would have to reupload my pics to mozy, which would saturate my cable modem for a week or so, and generally be a big pain in my butt.  So I sent an email to Mozy, asking what would happen if I did that.  It turns out that as long as the files are the same, Mozy wouldnt back them up again.  While that's great, and it means that i dont have to worry about re-backing up everything, what struck me about the email I got back was:

1. The support engineer understood me and I understood him
2. He didnt ask me for a bunch of extraneous information (like when they ask you for every conceivable piece of system info when you have a billing question)
3. He knew the answer to my problem and got it to me the first time.

I guess I have low expectations, but I was happy that at least one company seems to understand how support should work. Yay Mozy.

(And before anyone says that I am too harsh on support engineers, I used to be one.  When I started at Microsoft, I did phone support for Visual Basic for the first year or so I was there.  I understand how hard it is to do support.)

Jenny took Eric and Alex to the movies this afternoon, so Izzy and Jake and I made brownies.  Their favorite part was eating the extra batter.

So this morning I was up and ready to go...I got up about 5:00, got a shower and was heading out of my bathroom, when #1 Son came and told me that he had puked.  I almost said to him "Can't you see that Mommy is RIGHT OVER THERE!!!" (about 10 feet from where I was, but she was "asleep" (I bet she was really awake, but faking it so that I got stuck with puke duty)).  Cleaning up puke is DEFINETLY a mommy job.  But I didn't say that, and went and cleaned it up for him.  It was like Saturday night in the dorms.  Kid puke is nasty.  I told him that he puked because his hair is so long, and that attracts germs.

To restore my karma, I went outside and took some pictures of the moon before driving in...it's COLD here today (31F), I'm ready for shorts weather to come back...it's supposed to be in the middle seventies from tomorrow on, so hopefully we're done with the cold until next November or so.

Yesterday I was talking to some people on a call, and they were getting kind of off track.  When I am just a spectator at a call like that, I let my attention wander (it was a customer call, and the customer started going down a wormhole, so I didn't feel it was my place to get them back in focus).  As my attention was wandering, I came across this:

http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm

which is from the National Safety Foundation, and a list of causes of death in the US in 2004.  I'm morbid I guess, because I spent quite a while looking at it.  For example, did you know that while 44,933 people died in motor vehicle accidents in 2004, only 1 of them was a passenger in a streetcar?  3,229 people died of "Exposure to smoke, fire and flames", and 7 of them died by the "Ignition or melting of nightwear".  It's a good thing I don't use nightwear:  now it can't melt.  It's weird that 6 people died from venomous snakes and lizards, but 14 died from venomous spiders.   46 people were killed by lightning.  I couldn't see a category for "drowning because they went swimming less than an hour after eating"...that would be interesting to know.

It doesn't have a category for "Killed by Chuck Norris", but according to this website, it probably should. (The Chuck Norris website has some adult language that you may want to avoid if you are under age or don't like stuff like that)

Anyway, if you have a couple of minutes to waste, take a look...it's lots of fun.

Since the kids are out of school today, I'm up ALONE for a while.  I have to take the trash out in a bit, so I'm sure that will wake a couple of them (at least) up.  This is going to be a busy weekend, I'm taking everyone up to the lake to see my mom and dad, and drop Alex off (so he can spend some time with them) while picking up Will (my sister's boy, who is Eric's BEST FRIEND EVER).  It's going to be wild here for the next few days!

I didn't take any macro shots yesterday, but I did play around with taking a picture of the moon with my new lens.  I think it turned out OK.

So I went outside to get the mail today, and the gas bill was in it.  I like to schedule payments for bills on my bank's website whenever I get them, so I don't forget.  The bill was 519.00.  I about had a heart attack.  It turns out that I haven't paid the bill in 3 months. (I'm not the most organized person in the world, if you haven't already figured that out). I ran upstairs and paid it, before they sent a truck around to turn my gas off. 

When we lived in our old house, I forgot to pay the water bill for a couple of months once, and they turned my water off the day my in-laws came to visit.  It was for about 75.00 too.  It was really embarrassing to have my father in law say "are times hard?  I can take care of it for you if you need some help".  I about died.  Luckily, my wife is not easily embarrassed and didn't say a word to me about it (once the water was back on).

My macro lens got here yesterday afternoon, and I messed around with it some last night.  It's been rainy and windy here so I didn't get a chance to take it outside, but I played around with it a bit after the kids went to bed.  The weirdest thing about it was figuring out how far away I had to be in order to take a decent picture.  This is my favorite shot so far.

The weather is supposed to clear up today, so maybe I'll get a chance to go out and get some better shots later on.

(two posts in one day?  What am I thinking?  Some days I don't have anything to put here, other days the ideas flow...like diarrhea...anyway...)

Since daylight saving started a couple of weeks ago, we've changed the time the (big) boys have to be home from 5:30 to 6:00.  They also have to tell us where they will be, etc.  We know most of the people in our neighborhood, so we're a lot more relaxed than we were in our last neighborhood.

(And does anyone else remember people being freaked out about child abductions when we were kids?  I remember wandering around outside all day, every day...my mom would kick us outside and tell us to come back at dinner time.  I blame CNN:  every time some kid gets kidnapped anywhere in the US, it's all over the news, and every time I see it, even though I know that the chances of my kid getting abducted by strangers is about as much as them getting hit by lightning, I want to make them come inside and not leave until they go to college.  but anyway..)

At 6:00, Eric wasn't home. My rule (originally it was my parents rule when I was a teenager) is that you are grounded for a day for every minute you are late.  The two times Eric or Alex have been late, they were about 15 minutes late, and although I showed them mercy after about a week, they are pretty good about coming home on time now.  (The other rule about it is that my clock is the one we use to determine what time it is).  So at 6:05, I was kind of concerned.  At 6:10, I was a little bit more concerned.  At 6:15, I was really concerned.  So I called his two friends houses, and they hadn't seen him.  So I was starting to freak out.  Since Jenny isn't here, I had to put all of the kids in the car, and drive around the neighborhood.  No Eric.  By 6:35, I was ready to call the police, but in my haste to get in the car and look for him, I left my phone in the house.  So we drove back to the house and I ran inside to get the phone.  And there was Eric, coming down from the attic and saying "what's for dinner".  He had come in after school and gone to the attic, where he reads Artemis Fowl books and The Complete Far Side.  He looked at me like I was nuts when I yelled "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN" at him.

Since just about everyone was in the car, we went to Burger King for dinner.  I hate Burger King.  And I didn't let Jake take the toy to his room, either.

I think i should rename this blog "Things that Jake does to try to drive me crazy".  It's not that Jake's BAD, he's not mean or anything like that, he's just kind of wild. 

Before bed, we usually frisk Jake to make sure that he isnt smuggling any guns, knives, bombs, screwdrivers or other implements of destruction into his room.  The other day, he got a Happy Meal at McD's, and it came with a little Pirates of the Caribbean action figure.  Of course, the little toy pirate had a sword.  This is what resulted:

I had to walk out of the room for a couple of minutes after I saw it, because I was so mad at him. His excuse?  "I have issues".  He's the kind of kid who gets a spanking and then gets up, stops crying, and says "THAT DIDNT HURT".

Everyone says I'll look back on this and laugh. Maybe.  Right now I have to spackle and fix his wall.

UPDATE 3/19: Yes, he really says "I have issues", and he used the pirate sword to dig a hole in the wall.  Its a good thing he didnt have a fork or something, he would have gotten all the way through.

Jenny is off to Seattle again, to teach a class.  She's really working hard to make her mark, and she's a great employee: I'm really proud of her, but I miss her a lot too.  It was hard trying to be all happy-go-lucky today when she left. 

I'll be alright by tomorrow, but right now it sucks.  I made myself feel better by buying myself a macro lens...I used to buy my computer presents when she went out of town, now I guess I'm buying my CAMERA presents.

Luckily, this is the last trip for a while, because the week after next is spring break, and Eric's favorite cousin Will is coming to visit, so I'll need some help dealing with THAT.

The Extrovert is out at a consignment sale that she's been working at every evening this week (if I were the jealous or suspicious type, I'd be jealous or suspicious.  Good thing I'm not), so I was in charge of everyone tonight.  Friday is typically very informal as far as dinner goes around here, so I had a bagel, Izzy had yogurt and grapes, the big boys had hotdogs and Jake had some Chef-Boyardee lasagna.  I tried a bite of it, and it's not nearly as good as it was when I was about 5.  Jake seems to have enjoyed it though.

Today it's supposed to be about 75, and it was 70-ish yesterday too.  That means I can bring the shorts out again!  I'm so excited, I don't have to wear long pants until November or so, except for when I visit AOL or go to church.

It's weird, because last year "Shorts Day" came on March 14th as well.

Well, the babysitter was out today, and my wife the extrovert was busy, so I got to stay home with Jake and Izzy.  We were lucky in that spring appears to have arrived, because it was 70 and beautiful, so we went to the the playground in our neighborhood. 

We had a good time.  My son, OCD boy, went and found every rock he could, and lined them up on the wall around the play area.    My neighborhood is full of busybodies who email the entire neighborhood to report on any transgressions they see, so we'll all probably hear about the rocks later today.  I hate busybodies. Also, note the sword, he had to bring it because Ninjas always take their swords.

In other news, Eric got his report card and has made a miraculous change...instead of getting C's and D's, he got A's and B's (and one D (grrrr)).  I guess beating him worked. (Not really, but you know what I mean). I'm so proud of him, he's worked really hard to turn it around.  I'm so happy I'm going to let him pick dinner (he'll pick McDonalds, I can read him like a book).

Because they all have ugly kids compared to Izzy.  It's got to be hard on them.

Last night, Jennifer went out to eat with one of her friends, and she's going out with another friend tonight.  The problem with her traveling so much is that when she gets home, she has to catch up with everything that's going on here...and being an extrovert, she has a lot of catching up to do.  So today, I took some "Bill Time", and went downtown ALONE to see what there is to be seen.  The weather is kind of blah, it's 50 degrees and very windy, so my pictures look kind of gray.  I got to use my geotagging software though, so the day wasn't a total loss :-D

You can make your Visual Studio 2008 look like Borland C++ circa 1991 or so.

(my first project ever was in Borland C++.  With Turbo Vision for MS-DOS!)

I found this over at http://www.notimplementedexception.com/visual-studio-settings-files/

Last year, I tried giving Eric and Alex pocketknives, but took them away after Alex tried to cut his thumb off.  Last week, Eric got his whittling merit badge in webelos (the boyscouts who are older than cub scouts, but younger than boy scouts).  Anyway, as a reward, Eric got his very own swiss army knife.  He's very excited, and since he got his merit badge, he knows not to cut his thumb off with it too!

wow, two geeky posts in a row...what will everyone think?  Today was kind of exciting at work, because they released the first public version of the next release of Internet Explorer.  I watched the keynotes  from Charlotte, and grabbed the files as soon as we were able to get it.  IE8 has lots of cool new stuff in it, but it's definitely a beta, so remember that if you live on the bleeding edge, sometimes you get cut.

Go get it at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/getitnow.mspx

One of the great things about working where I work is that the company pays for my phone charges.  While a lot of my co-workers are tethered to their phones 24x7, I'm fortunate in that my customers are all developers, and they generally don't have mission critical applications break after the release: once the apps are released it's an operations problem, not a developer problem.  I currently have a Samsung Blackjack as my phone, and I have to say it's the most trouble-free phone I've ever had:  it works as a phone, it sends and receives email, and you can even browse the web with it. 

(On a side note, I remember I used to have a subscription to PC Magazine and various other trade magazines so that I would have something to do when I went to the restroom at work:  now, I just take the phone and play solitaire on it...I dont know how I got BY before.  But anyway...)

The blackjack was getting kind of long in the tooth though, so it was time to upgrade.  Today, I ordered an HTC Tilt. It's got all the bells and whistles and it's going to be here TOMORROW.  I was looking at the specs for it, and it has a dual core processor, 128MB of RAM, and 256MB of Flash ROM.  So I'm carrying, in my pocket, a computer that has a faster processor and more memory than the computer I had in 1995.  Woohoo!  I love technology.

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