420 Summit

Personal

Hi-ho, hi-ho...

It’s off to the woods we go.

If you need me, my cell is on.

You don’t know the number?

Oh my, that is unfortunate.

Posted: Jul 24, 07:22 PM | Comment ?

Gettin' grouchy

I damn near broke a desk, pounding my fist in frustration, over a silly little ad. All I wanted to do was research a host on a popular forum and I simply could not search for it. Each time I would click the search box that stupid little ad would fly open. I’d click to close, try again and it would fly open again. It made me fucking nuts. A little ad on the web should not make me this angry. And I was angry.

I couldn’t do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it.

Eventually, I had to step away and take a good look at what was really going on — what it boils down to is: I want to use. Something. Anything. Just so long as there is plenty of it.

Posted: Jul 22, 12:07 PM | Comment ?

For a friend

See, a wee bit o’ paradise waiting for you.

Didn’t believe I really watered them, did you?

Posted: Jul 17, 04:56 PM | Comment ? [2]

Two summers

We dropped Amanda (or Pooh, or RnBMandy, or Manders, or whatever the hell she is calling herself these days) off at camp yesterday. A wonderful camp that we are all very happy — thank-you Christine — she fell into.

The downside: my baby girl looked so very small next to that big building.

Then we have Nicholas — who doesn’t call himself anything other than grouchy — who should be hanging himself from cliffs in Yosemite as I write this. But he’s not.

He managed to break his arm three days before summer vacation started. Effectively ruling out Outward Bound, and pretty much anything else, for the rest of the summer. So, he gets to spend the summer at home and at the doctors, playing video games and watching his sister pack.

I think I’d be grouchy too.

Posted: Jul 14, 05:11 PM | Comment ?

Downpressor Man

I’m not big on self-pity and blaming others for personal problems. My general attitude has always been along the lines of: “Get a job,” “Stop doing drugs,” “Act civilized!”

I may not actually do any of this, certainly not all three at the same time, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sound advice.

But, and it’s a big one, sometimes doing the right thing just isn’t good enough. Sometimes, people mess with you and yours, for no good reason. They do it because they are ignorant, feel threatened or are just plain mean. They do it because twelve bucks an hour is more important than a person. They do it because they don’t know any better. They do it because they have been taught that the best defense is a good offense and might makes right. They do it because they believe poor people are stupid, addicts lack self control, and homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. They do it because black kids don’t have fathers and Latino kids have three.

They do it because nobody tells them they can’t.

Posted: Jul 6, 03:04 PM | Comment ?

A simple solution

I’m not sure how this works with the whole rigorous honesty thing, but I’ve found an effective way to deal with email overload.

“I’m sorry. I have accidentally deleted all of your previous correspondence. If urgent, please resend at your earliest convenience.”

Make this a signature and you have a one-click solution for all of those people you were going to get right back to. That’s it. Two sentences and all of your email woes are solved.

Nobody ever, hardly, resends. Do this enough and they don’t even want to talk to you anymore. It’s magic. Between Google spam filtering and this handy response, my email takes all of three minutes a day to manage.

Posted: Jul 1, 06:08 PM | Comment ?

Ka-blooey

I have broken the Internet.

Three locations.

Two days.

All perfectly good connections until I touched them.

Posted: Jun 23, 11:19 AM | Comment ?

Vacating

Posted: Jun 21, 11:35 AM | Comment ? [2]

Quarantined

This hasn’t been my most productive week.

Early on, one of the kids — yeah, I know who you are and don’t think that because I can’t prove it you won’t suffer — decided to circumvent every last bit of security on our home network. Ports, all of them, were opened. Firewalls were disabled and anti-virus software managed to accidentally get removed. Just to round things out one of them decided to do me a favor and ‘tweak’ the router. Because, you know, latency is much more a concern to me, a guy who runs Photoshop and sends email, than it is to… say, a kid playing first person shooters.

It took me a day to notice and by that time every single machine on the network had slowed to a crawl. Two of them were running out of memory before a single program could be launched and another went right to a kernel dump. This was not a great deal of fun to repair and the little darlings can spend a week or two trying to guess passwords and begging.

The second infestation was easier, though much more expensive, to fix.

Posted: Jun 8, 12:25 AM | Comment ? [2]

Big Girl Hair

With a summer of, as she puts it, elite camps ahead of her, Amanda decided it was time for a haircut. This was her first. Sure, she has had a few trims and a couple of gum removal surgeries, but never a haircut. In a real salon. By someone both sober and trained.

This way she will be prepared for both Vassar and Concordia. Yep, thanks to some kind folks and a bit of creative financing, Ms. Amanda should have an interesting summer.

Posted: Apr 26, 11:13 PM | Comment?