I was getting into bed last night and thought I’d turn on the TV to finish the night off. I was flipping around, when I caught a glimpse of a boy running around in the dark and banging his head on the wall.

It was a spooky to come into without any context, and I had to turn the channel.

But let me roll back the clock. I want to go back to when I was younger, probably in 8th or 9th grade maybe. I lived in Northern Virginia in a suburb of DC. Somehow (I’m sure my mom knows) I ended up doing some volunteer work at the local rec center.

It involved handicap children and swimming, my exact ward was a young boy with autism. I remember clearly, his tense body and jerky movements, like a flexed muscle of steel at all times. What amazed me then, and what I knew Don King was going to say when I went back to the channel and caught him and his son Beau swimming in the ocean, was that in water he was relaxed.

Posted in Family 2 Comments »

It’s Saturday again, and we all know what that means around my house - well what it means when the weather is nice.

It’s project time!

We started out knowing we needed to goto Lowes (trip 1) for some supplies. We got some fertilizer for the lawn, some paint brushes, various other little things. We also decided that since our ~7 year old craftsman screw gun has failed (I suspect the batteries) we better get a new - enter Karma (round 1).

There just happened to be a sign by the power tools that read something to the effect “Power Tool and Pneumatic combos 20% off”. My wife and I figured this would be great to help get us into a new one. So we grabbed one of these off the shelf. A WH12DAF2 12V Cordless Impact Driver. Which I thought was the right tool for the job.

Posted in Family, General 4 Comments »

It’s no secret that I’m quite white and nerdy. I do nerdy things, I know nerdy things, I am nerdy!

Well the other day I noticed some issues with the home internet. My wife said she had been experiencing some issues too.

I didn’t have time to mess with it before I went to bed, but I woke up and found I was still having trouble, and I almost made myself late for work because I started fiddling with it.

As any nerd my know, once you engross yourself into something you could space off hours real quick, luckily I still didn’t have my pants on, so when our cat rubbed against my leg my concentration broke.

I decided I would deal with later, I suspected a DNS issue and figured I’d work on it from work. Then that wasn’t working either.

Posted in Computers, Nerdom, Networking 2 Comments »

The other day we were out tearing down our old gate so we could rebuild it and get it to actually open and close without too much trouble.

Some how after I got the bolts out holding the gate up, I got tasked with watching the little girl (Sydney), but she wanted to ride on her little trike, so I went about rummaging through the garage to see what my parents had left when they moved. They dumped gave a lot of stuff to us so they could lighten their load during the move.

Well as I was going through, I found an old helmet that had always been a favorite of mine as a kid. It’s a middle eastern type (I only know this because it has some Arabic writing on it). It has a large spike on top and what looks like two feather holders one on each side. It also has some chain mail to protect the sides and back of the wearer’s neck.

Posted in Family 2 Comments »

I’m only a bit into it, but something struck me this morning. He is quoted as saying (during a trial in 1770 I think, for the the commander of a group of English soldiers) , that “any man in a free country deserves a fair trial” [paraphrased]. It got me thinking about how it works today, which isn’t how it work.

Posted in Quick Note No Comments »

So I finally finished it, the audio book that took forever.

I have to say, I was rather unimpressed. I can’t tell you why exactly, if it had to do with the pitiful miniseries or because ti took so long (I’m going to lean towards that though). But I just wasn’t very thrilled at the end.

I’m trying to remember why I liked it before, and why others seem to think it was such a great book. It seemed a little anticlimactic in the end, and seemed a little thin on the macabre.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about characters, because he [Stephen King] does a great job of introducing and developing the characters in the book, in fact I’m afriad I’m not going to spend much time at all on it.

Posted in Books, Reviews 1 Comment »

I don’t think it’s gotten as bad as I’m going to make it out to be, but it’s something to consider for those who use a computer for a majority of their life, and those who have kids who are growing up using computers for everything.

I remember when when I was a kid being graded on penmanship, hey wait - I’m not that old, but I remember taking pride in my small neat cursive and getting marked accordingly. As I grew so did my writing, into a haberdashery of cursive mixed with block letters and scribbles. My signature is never the same even on one document (they loved me when I signed for my house). But what does it matter now? I don’t write much on paper, unless it’s to jot down a note or two or if I have to sign a receipt. In fact, except for the occasional thank you note I don’t think I’ve actually sat down and written a sentence in years.

Posted in Computers, General, Nerdom 3 Comments »

Finally, got the pics processed and uploaded, soon I might even post about it! You can view theme here !

Posted in Quick Note 3 Comments »

If you run around the web, you may have noticed a trend out there with the themes people run. I’m not sure what anyone else calls it, but I call them Lifted Corners and I figured out a simple way to achieve it in Fireworks 8 (should be the same in most later versions.

There’s really not a lot of steps here and it’s pretty simple.

1.

You can do this a couple of ways, for the sake of this tutorial I’m going to use the Canvas as my background. So saying that, choose a color for your background. I would suggest white for now, it shows the shadows the best.

Another thing to think about is the width of your theme, say the content would be 780px, if that is the case I would suggest anywhere from 800 to 820 for the width of your canvas. The reason why is to allow for the shadow width.

Posted in Computers, Fireworks, Tutorial No Comments »

Alright, I can get the library back, but it’s not pretty. Not pretty URLs I mean. It’ll work, but not with well formed urls like the rest of the site. It livable, but not perfect.

Posted in Quick Note 2 Comments »