Earlier today we all went to Costco. When we returned from Costco I was busy unloading the car when Connor suddenly decided to start kicking the living poop out of the car.
As a result I ended up taking his shoes off and putting them up on the roof while I scolded him about kicking the car. I then proceeded to promptly forget I had put his shoes up there and continued about my unloading.
A few hours later I got into Jen’s car and headed off to pickup a Cozy Coupe car that I wanted to buy off craigslist. I get there and back in about an hour and a half and life is good. Then about two hours later we start to go outside and Jen asks me where his shoes are.
I have no idea.
Those darn shoes cost more than 40 bucks (stride rite) so as I’m looking at her it dawns on me where I last had them. “you did not drive off with them on top of the car did you?!” she asks as my jaw drops lower and lower toward the ground. Sure as heck I took off to go pick up that toy without noticing them at all. So I head out side hoping that they fell off on our street or at least nearby.
This is where they were. Even after 60mph + speeds.
As Jen said…”you just used up all your luck for the year”.
I have used up all my luck for the year.
Sadly the ball pit box is no more...
It all started a few months ago when we got a new upright freezer for our basement and I decided to keep the box. I’m sorry to say that sometime last week at an unknown time the box was squished without mercy by a suspect weighing about 35lbs with brownish hair and about three feet tall.
Eventually, even though he was hanging on, we had to pull the plug on ol’ boxy. Later that night after the kids were asleep I took him out back and recycled him.
However the next morning Amelia found something new to play with…..Jen’s Xbox controller:
Kids sure do move on quickly don’t they….
Time to oil masters brain...
Maybe she’ll just bring sarah connor coffee?
UltraVNC and single click
For years I’ve been using realvnc as a solution for remote computer support. I’ve had a lot of good luck with it and when setup properly it can be a life saver.
The only problem though has always been NAT routers. I’ve done a lot of port forwarding over the years and let me tell you what a pain in the ass it can be to walk a non technical person through adding a port forward to a router you’ve never touched before.
As a result I’ve known for years that I need to get around to figuring out how to configure a system that would allow somebody to generate a call out to a dedicated server. That’s where UltraVNC and it’s ability to execute a “single click” enters.
Now basically somebody has to do is download a single file (dennisremote.exe) and run it. That’s it….no messing with 50 bazillion routers, or getting people to drop to dos to give me their IP…it just connects to my VNC viewer (assuming I’m running it of course).
It’s pretty cool. Sure there are some bugs to still be ironed out with Vista and UAC, but the time it saves alone in setup is worth it. Plus the exe is only like 213kb.
TGIF...the F stands for never ending FUN!
Just some pictures we took tonight of the kids being….well…kid like…
And here’s a pic we took a while ago of the ball pit tipped up on its end. We like to call it baby jail. 
creating a random variable in shell script
So I’ve been working alot with shell scripting, and needed to define a random variable in a script so I could prepend some file names with a unique identifier to prevent other executions of the script from overwritting files.
Well shell scripting is really just glorified qbasic in the programming world, but I think I ran across an interesting problem and wanted to share my solution.
ps=`ps -ef | sum | cut -c4-5`
date=`date +%H%M%S`
ps2=`echo “$ps” + 1 | bc`
rndm=`echo “$date” / “$ps2″ | bc`
So there you go….the variable $rndm is now random. Originally I was going to use `expr` but after running several test I ran into quite a few bugs with floating decimal points and the fact that `ps -ef` can in fact return a zero which leads to dividing by zero…..and we all know how that turns out…
Our new bed is coming....via UPS???
I sit professionally for a living. I’ll be the first person to tell you that…and while computers have been slowly rendering my blind over the course of my life it seems they are also doing their best at paralyzing me. Right around the time of my statistics final (and a pretty hellish month at work involving travel during afore mentioned final) my back started seizing up on me.
I think when it got to the point where I was popping asprin like tic tac’s is when I decided it was time to go see a professional. So in my quest to restore my ability to look to my left without screaming I’ve been visiting a chiropractor for the last week.
Honestly I’m still at the “oh dear god it hurts” stage of the treatments, but I think they’re starting to help me in the right direction. The xrays of my neck apparently show that my vertebrae are aligned as straight as a pencil and my muscles are tight enough to pretty much pop.
So I’m getting stretched and electrocuted…but one of the other things coming out of this is replacing our mattress. Since we’re looking for something more back friendly we ordered a select comfort king mattress, which uses an air bladder system. The idea there being no metal to eventually fatigue and start to sag. At the very least I’m going for a “not waking up in screaming pain” feeling from it.
The crazy thing about it though is that it’s coming to us via UPS. In like six boxes…but still a bed delivered via UPS is kind of a crazy thing. The other wacky thing is that ordering it online was cheaper than going into a store and buying it there. We had both thought that if we went into the store they’d be willing to wheel and deal, but they pretty much just gave us the same deal the online website did…which is stupid because it was cheaper via the website. I mean com’n….knock off the setup fee or something and you’ll get my business but why would I pay more to buy it from the store? It’s like the business is cutting itself off at the ankles unless they’re franchises in which case they’re kinda screwed.
Anyways the whole point of this is that I find is mildly surreal that a king size mattress is coming via UPS. Maybe it’s just me.
Not dead just looping
I’ve been busy working on learning how to shell script, and only just finished my statistics class a few weeks ago.
I’ve been meaning to update but to be honest I’ve been sidetracked with a pretty painful back injury that I’m getting treatments for. Unfortunately it seems that trying to undo 15+ years of concentrated stress is a very painful process.
Anyways for the two people who visit this site, I’ll probably update soon. I promise.
