This is cool:

VIDEO: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Highlight Reel | D5 | AllThingsD

While a lot of what goes on in the computer industry press is a whole lot of fluff about nothing, this is truly a historic interview.  In 50 years, people will remember Gates and Jobs sort of the way they remember Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie.

The Sun Online - News: Now snow's on the way

It wasn't because of religious freedom or anything like that, they left because it would get to be FORTY DEGREES IN MAY.

I delayed my trip to England this year from February until May, in the hopes that I would get nice weather. (I also had to wait until AOL decided which office to close, so it wasn't totally a weather related decision)  I suppose I will push next year's trip to July or so.

Getting away from home for a while is nice, especially if it's someplace cool like London.  By day two though, I am ready to go home, mostly because I miss Jenny and the kids. 

Today, I went to the British Museum, which is a really interesting place, and free to boot.  Then, I came back to the hotel, ate a burger for dinner, and am now making sure that my presentation is ready to go.  I always get nervous before a presentation, mainly because I hate talking in front of people, but this should be easy, since I am outlining the services that my customer gets for free.  People like free stuff. 

Last night, Jake got to stay up late because he didn't pee on himself all day (we have very low standards for rewards here at the Loytty's).   I figured that since he stayed up until 8:15, he would go right to sleep.  Instead of doing THAT, he decided to make a zipline for the Rescue Heroes.  (click on the image to see more detail).

Anyway, highlights of this act were:

1) He successfully got through the child lock on the closet. (It's a "keep them from messing around" lock, not a "keep them from drinking the lysol" lock, so it wasn't that hard to open).

2) He removed all of the knobs from his dresser.  Jake has a fascination with taking things apart; I am hoping he will become an engineer, rather than a sociopath.

3) He successfully snuck dental floss into his room.  He usually doesn't get to take anything in his room that he could make a mess with.  Or hurt himself with.  Or destroy something with.

5) Jake is why the expression "Unbreakable toys are useful for breaking other toys" resonates with me.

When asked why he did this, he replied with all seriousness "I have issues".

I usually dont use backup applications, I just robocopy things I need to save to different drives.  If it's really important, I take it to work too.  Backup applications have always been a big hassle, and they have a bad habit of changing file formats between versions, which makes it hard if you have to restore something you saved a couple of operating systems ago.

I tried to give Vista's new and improved backup a go, but gave up right after I started my first backup, and got this error:

At least with robocopy, I can tell what the error MEANS.

This is one of those "back in the day" posts.  Skip it if you like.

Prior to 1991, the only computer that I had used for more than playing games was an Apple ][+, with something like 48K of RAM.  I mostly just messed around with AppleBasic (written by a small Seattle company that we all know and love).  My friend Tom had a TRS-80 that he fully tricked out, he was the computer guy.  Anyway, I went to college, ran around in the woods, jumped out of airplanes and then ended up back in my hometown in 1991 with no skills.  I worked night shift at the cable plant, in a job that my dad got for me.  Because I had quit drinking (which up until then, had been my main form of recreation), I needed something to do on the nights when I wasn't working.  Not being very smart, I went and bought an AST 386/SX 20 (that's 20 MEGAhertz, not Gigahertz).  It had 2MB of RAM and an 80MB disk.  The videocard had 256K on it, enough to run 1024x768 (barely) on a really cool DOS Extender called "Windows 3.0".  My mom, when she found out how much I had spent (and on credit too), got all upset at me.

 For some reason, I was thinking about that last night while waiting for Jenny to come home from Washington.  I think I paid about 2000.00 for that machine (in 1991 dollars).  For about that same amount of money this year, I got something that I wouldn't even have been able to imagine back then.

So, I figured Eric (almost 9) is old enough for a small pocketknife.  All boys need one, right?  Well, I think Eric is probably mature enough to handle it.  Being an idiot, I figured that Alex was old enough too.  I was wrong.

30  minutes after Alex got his smaller, less functional swiss army knife, he cut his thumb pretty good.  After he did that, he ran around like a cartoon rabbit, spewing blood all over the place.  I was kind of nervous, until I got him to stop, and I could get a look at it.  Luckily, he just cut the meat on the side of his thumb; it bled a bit, but stopped pretty quickly.  I cleaned the cut, applied antiseptic ointment and put a Band-Aid on it, he should be fine.

Lesson learned:  just because one kid is old enough for a little more responsibility, doesn't mean that any of the others are too.

I tried to call Jenny to tell her about it, but she isn't taking my calls.  I hate when she does that.

I ordered the Dangerous Book for Boys for Eric and Alex.  It covers how to do boy things, from building a treehouse to making a go cart.  The video on the website referenced above shows the kid making a go cart and then riding it WITHOUT A HELMET.  I am surprised the child lived.

I highly recommend the book.

1.  I got to write some code for a change, instead of just being a nerd-herder. (The code was how to tell if a user on Vista is an administrator, and whether or not he is running elevated.)  It wasn't much, mostly pasting MSDN samples together, but I take what I can get.

2.  My customer sent me an email thanking me for doing a good job for them.  Reviews are coming up, so I will use it on my review as a reason why I shouldn't get fired for another year.

3.  Jenny got a new laptop at work, a Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad T60.  She used to have a Toshiba M4.  The M4 has never worked very well for her, especially with Vista, so she was glad to get a reliable rig.  The new machine is really nice;  I put Vista and Office and the standard applications on it, and I was impressed.  I can't wait to get rid of my M4, but since I got a new desktop at work last week, I am not due for a while. 

4.  We had a fire drill, so I got to leave about 25 minutes early.

5. We went for a walk around the neighborhood all together.  I took a toy golf club that I used to herd the children around. 

Today's word was "on-boarding", which is the process of taking a newly hired employee and teaching him the stuff he needs to know in order to do his job.

When they make me CEO, I am going to have a person whose only job will be firing people who make up stupid words like that.   Until then, I just create an inbox rule that automatically deletes email from that person.  Luckily, my manager doesn't use words like that, as I generally like to read email from him.

(I figure it will take me at least 3 weeks to mismanage a company of Microsoft's size into oblivion, so I probably wont get a chance to get rid of all of them)

This is my new favorite blog that isn't about technology or politics:  an english teacher answers questions about proper usage.   I could read it for hours. 

Link to Ask the English Teacher: Is or Are?