Recovering Baptist

I don’t know how they do it, but Hollywood reports its weekend results around mid-evening Saturday. Tonight I’m following their lead. It’s been a pretty damned good weekend.

For starters, Thursday and Friday were good on the job front. No breaking news, but I’ve got more leads than I’ve had to now. OK, that’s enough of that. No more job discussion, allright?

Friday morning marked the end of our kids’ VBS at Chamblee Methodist. They do a great job there, and even the end-of-week program was bearable. Even better, the boys went straight home with my folks, leaving us free for 20 or so hours. Ahhhh.

Later that night my wife and I set up for a concert in one of the coolest office spaces in town. The challenge is that a cool office space with concrete floors and metal ceilings usually doesn’t make for a good club feel. But, if I do say so myself, we made it sound pretty good. Oh yeah, the fact that Ming Dynasty and Lil’ Jen gave me good stuff to work with helped a bit, too.

Saturday morning my parents dropped by the house and picked me up. The five of us headed out to the family farm, leaving my wife at home to work on cabinet doors. The weather was a bit threatening, but the rain held off until after we left the farm. The boys spent most of the day fishing with my dad while my mom and I gathered blackberries. I’m covered with scratches, and my fingers are purple, but it’s awesome.

And now I’m blogging from the kitchen where I have 20 cups worth of blackberries cooking with 15 cups of sugar. I’m attempting to make something of a cross between a jelly and a jam or preserve. Hopefully I’ll have enough to satisfy my needs and share just a bit. And yes, I did leave enough to make a cobbler, too.

So yes, I can already say that this was a great weekend. buy cialisbuy cialisbuy levitrabuy levitrabuy propeciabuy propeciabuy somabuy somabuy levitrabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy levitrabuy propeciabuy soma

Honestly, does it get much better than riding your bike home in the rain from a friend’s house with a slight pipe tobacco and alcohol buzz?

The latest version of Ubuntu Linux makes a huge claim. For starters, as always, it’s totally free. Free as in beer (who doesn’t like good, free beer?) and free as in speech (that is, you have total freedom to change the code and redistribute it for free). Upgrades are completely free, and if I decide that I want a different version of Linux, I’m free to try something else, you guessed it, for free.

The nice thing about a free OS is that it frees up money for other things, like killer hardware. I could go into all of what makes this machine so great, but let’s just say that the specs are more than good enough. I can watch a DVD while watching a youtube video AND pulling off all the nifty desktop tricks. Which brings me to…

Wow, does Linux now have some really killer tricks. No, pretty desktop tricks are really not that important. But they do make things nice. Honestly, that’s half of what made OSX so important for the Mac. Yes, the Mac just works, but it looks good doing it. And just as soon as I figure out how to record a video I’ll show here just how pretty it is. Let’s just say that I’ve got six different “desktops”, and I can rotate from one to another in all sorts of really cool ways. The videos I’ve seen online don’t do the compiz cube justice, partly because the quality is never high enough. I’m pretty jaded, but I find myself moving from one side of the cube (which is misnamed, since I’ve chosen something that has eight faces) to another just for laughs. Yeah, I’m a geek.

So, yes, I’m baiting my Mac friends. Don’t get me wrong, your machines are great. But so is mine, and it’s half the price with free upgrades for life and my choice of hardware. Oh yeah, and our commercials don’t exist, but if they did, they wouldn’t have the funnier guy representing the other guy’s product…

Unemployment shrinks the world. It’s the kind of thing that makes a pseudo-introvert like me talk to total strangers in hope of meeting someone who will introduce me to someone who might get me a job. It drives non-geeks to places like linkedin. Former salesmen suddenly have a renewed relationship with people who constantly turned down their pitches in hopes that both of them can find a job.

I ran into a guy who used to try to sell me software. I turned him down at every opportunity. He’s a good guy, I just didn’t like his company at the time. But our conversation yesterday was great, and he invited me to an industry organization. I didn’t think of it then, but now that I look at their website, I’m not so sure that I want to be a part of an organization that calls itself WTF.

Update: OK, so whoever named the organization didn’t realize that their initials would ultimately become IM shorthand for dropping a major profanity. However, the meeting was worth attending. The speaker was more interesting than I expected, and he opened my eyes to additional ways that my background might be useful either in or outside of telecom. I also met some great people, and I’m looking forward to talking to them again in the future.

Things were going great in the kitchen. All the faceframes are up; the drawers are custom built and all but two are installed; the undercounter lights are installed. Our four year-old was off at a friend’s playing today, so it seemed like a perfect day to rip some maple and start creating our twenty-plus cabinet doors. I was working on the router when I looked over and saw my wife jumping around.

Jumping is not something you want to see when someone has been running a tablesaw. I saw her let go of her thumb long enough to remove a board from the saw so it wouldn’t take off; she also managed to turn the saw off. Then came the questions. What happened? How bad was it? Was this a hospital type of cut, or was it just a little nick?

Five minutes after thumb met blade we were on the road, two year old in hand. We threw him out the door as we drove by a friends’ house and headed to Northside Hospital where we figured out a couple of strange coincidences. First, this was the last day that our insurance was officially covered by my company before COBRA kicked in. There’s something a bit strange about going into a place like that and telling them that you’re unemployed. Second, our friends first baby was born 13 hours before my wife’s accident, and they were on the other side of the same hospital. How often does a new dad get the call, “hey, we just happened to be at the hospital today, too. Mind if we drop by and meet your new daughter? Oh yeah, never mind my wife’s bloody hand or that we’re covered in sawdust..” Maybe it’s best that the need for drugs was stronger than the desire to meet a new, little person.

My favorite line of the day came from yours truly. The nurse practitioner asked what we were doing, and we explained that hiring someone to remodel your kitchen costs and arm and a leg. To which I added that doing it ourselves only cost a thumb.