Recovering Baptist

It wasn’t supposed to be this way

RB — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:29:38 +0000

Several weeks ago the in-laws told us of their plans to join the rest of their family in North Carolina for the July 4 weekend. My father-in-law’s family is generally fun enough, so I thought we would probably join them. I’d rather stay home, but there are some times you just go with the flow. A week or two later things got better, the in-laws offered to take the boys to the reunion, leaving my wife and me at home for the long weekend without kids. Oh yeah, we can crash at their place which has the best hot tub and pool backyard I’ve ever seen, plus there’s a pool table, sauna, and a stocked bar. Now THAT’s how to spend a holiday weekend.

And things were looking great. Last weekend rocked, but both my wife and I noticed that our sinuses were starting to act up a bit. “No problem,” we figured, “it should be through this in a day or two.” Alas. The boys went to the doctor this week; one has an ear infection, and they put the other on antibiotics, just in case. Meanwhile, I spent a whole day in bed, and I couldn’t sleep through the night because my throat hurt too much. Today we headed over to the Minute Clinic (which totally beats a normal doctor, btw) to see what we could find out. Go figure, it’s strep and an ear infection for me and a sinus infection with exposure to strep for her.

So instead of an alcohol fueled weekend in the pool, it looks like we’ll be spending the weekend drugged up and lying on the couch.

Happy independence day. I’m hoping yours is more festive than ours.

What a weekend

RB — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 03:42:13 +0000

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.

Ahhhh

RB — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:22:14 +0000

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?

Prettier than a Mac, cheaper than a PC

RB — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:21:06 +0000

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…

Fire the branding manager

RB — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:31:58 +0000

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.

Blood and sawdust

RB — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:12:07 +0000

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.

Shades of the millineum

RB — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:04:22 +0000

One of the worst things about losing my job was losing my laptop. Yeah, I know that’s stupid, but it’s true. The more I look back at it, that job and I really weren’t meant for each other, but that laptop, well, it was nice. It ran Microsoft Windows XP. One of the last things I did on it was to master some music.

Before packing up the laptop, I copied all of my files over to my linux server. No problem. Everything worked nicely. Now I need to create some music CD’s from the files I copied to my server. Simple enough. I figured that this morning was a good time to fire up my wife’s laptop, which is running Vista, to take care of that. Sounded easy enough. Nope. So far this morning I’ve had everything from networking problems to having the computer completely hang. At least older versions of Windows had the grace to give a blue screen when things were totally FUBARed.

So now I’m using my ancient XP laptop to get the files I need. I’m having to copy the files to an external drive so I can then connect that to the Vista machine and burn the CD’s. I can’t wait for my new linux desktop to be up and running so I can bypass all of this Microsoft mess.

When tools attack

RB — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:37:00 +0000

It took Fox a long time to be accepted as a “real” network. If you watch Simpsons reruns, you’ll hear the occasional crack at their own network. And, let’s be honest, it’s hard to take Fox seriously when it airs shows like “When Cars Attack!” Too bad the cameras weren’t rolling in my garage yesterday.

I’m still in the process of becoming proficient with the router table. I used a bit like this to route the slots in the sides of our new drawers. That’s the same bit shown twice. When set up like on the left it creates a slot, and when set up as shown on the right, it creates a tongue which fits into the slot. I was feeling pretty good that I managed to set things up to create a nice, consistent slot for the plywood bottoms for our drawers. After switching bits to route the tops of the drawer sides, I put the tongue and groove bit back in the router to experiment with it some more.

We’ll be using this bit for our doors and drawer fronts. We’ll create a slot in all four sides of the door and then reconfigure the bit to create a tongue so the top and bottom pieces of the door fit snugly into the sides. It’s a nice look. And I needed to practice getting the bit set up right. The guy at Rockwell made it sound so easy; everything is supposed to just line up. But it wasn’t. After ruining about 10 pieces of scrap I was getting frustrated. I should have stopped, especially when I noticed the router sounded a bit different than usual. But who wants to be beat by their own tool? I made another adjustment and started routing yet another piece of wood when the router bit went airborne. You know those kids toys where you pull the string and a disk flys like a helicopter? Think of that, only with a very, very heavy and sharp router bit. As soon as I realized it wasn’t on the table any more I hit the deck and covered my head. The bit landed 6 inches from my head, maybe less.

I changed my shorts, grabbed a beer, and called it a day. Fox’s producers would have loved it.

At least I’m not alone

RB — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:42:19 +0000

One of the strange aspects of losing your job due to a “reduction in force” is that you might find yourself holding a lot of paperwork. One document that I have lists every every employee by position only (no names) and age. It’s to show that there’s no age discrimination going on. When I first looked at it I was pretty pissed off. I had been told that my employer was laying off 10% of its workforce, and I didn’t see that many cuts in this document.

As it turns out, my ex-employer is updating the document daily. I just found out that another person from my group lost his job today, and so far 29 people in my division are gone. That’s a pretty big chunk. My ex-coworker also ended up revealing more than she intended. I now have in my head at least one more person that I’m quite confident will get cut, and I know at least one person who is safe.

I’m torn. I’d love to tell my friends that I KNOW their job is in danger, more than they thought. But, that won’t really help anyone. So I guess it’s back to career assessments for me. It did feel good to tell my ex-coworker that if she wanted my help she could hire me.

I’m such a geek…

RB — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:34:45 +0000

One of the many annoyances of losing my job is that I’m losing my laptop. That’s a shame, because it’s a killer machine. So what to do next?

I thought about buying a laptop, but even my killer laptop has some quirks. And if I want something portable, then I want it very portable. I considered something ultra tiny (I found one cool HP machine with a 9″ screen and no moving parts). But I also need something with enough horsepower to edit audio. And I’d like my desktop to look totally awesome.

Since I can’t afford a Mac, the only way to have a great computer experience is with linux. Specifically I plan on using Ubuntu’s latest Hardy Heron release. From everything I’ve heard, it’s as pretty as, if not prettier than, Mac. And it’s free. Want to upgrade the OS when it comes out? $0 Want some new software? Free Need some support? Plenty of help online.

I just placed an order for the parts for my new computer. I’ve never built one completely from scratch, but I’m looking forward to trying it. And I’ve got plenty of time on my hands these days. And for those Mac nuts who are going to say that PC and Mac work out when you consider what you’re getting for your money, that’s not true when you build it yourself. Assuming I got all the parts I need (I might be missing a cable or something stupid like that), the total for this new machine is $454, and it’s completely loaded. I can’t wait to get it up and running, but while I’m waiting for the parts to arrive, I guess I’ll work on the kitchen. Time to climb into the attic and run some electric cables…