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Please bear with me while I go geek again, although this might be useful to the non-geeks too.

My startup times, which I’ve had to put up with entirely too much lately, have always been monstrous. Not the time it takes to get a login prompt, but the time it takes between logging in and being able to use my computer. All the stuff I want running all the time isn’t a problem when it’s running, I have enough memory for that. But starting up all those programs at once, during launch, made my machine flail around like Jim Carrey on Pixie Sticks.

Enter <a href=”http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=startdelay”>Startup Delayer</a>, one of the most self evident names I’ve ever seen. You install it and let it take control of some or all of the things that are starting up. So now after I log in I can almost immediately start doing the stuff I want. Then 2 minutes later, my calendar will pop up. 2 minutes later, itunes. etc, etc.

If anyone is having similar startup woes, I highly recommend it.

I received this message working in Eclipse, the IDE for a new product we recently purchased. I love it.

That kids adopt the general sleep cycle of their parents is probably no surprise. Following that trend, our kids have never seen a midnight they don’t like, nor a dawn that they do. So this year, with both of them going to school all day and needing to get up at 7, promised to be a bear. But they’ve mustered along surprisingly well. In fact things went so well this morning we had some time to kill before heading out of the house. Jane woke up with the alarm at 7 and got right out of bed. Isaac only took one “Good morning!” to roll out of bed. They were both fully awake and dressed at 7:10, and didn’t argue a stitch over breakfast. The whole thing was surreal, almost like watching a movie starring your kids, in roles they don’t normally play. :)

There’s some kind of security whole in the driver for the Intel wireless card in my laptop. No big deal, these things happen. But the update to fix it is 50 MB! What kind of a monster driver am I downloading? It’s probably a 500kb driver and 49.50MB of crap I don’t want.

My daughter had to fill out a few questions for her 1st grade teacher. And I thought it might make an interesting meme.

I am good at: listening, debugging, sleeping.
I need help with: overcoming sloth.
This year, I would like to learn: more .net and more patience. I could use some GTD skills too.
Something new I would like to do this year is: Finally make a trip back east to see friends and the Smithsonian.
My family can help me the most this year by: continuing to be so damn cute and sexy. Wife with the sexy and kids with the cute, just to clear up any confusion.

Yesterday I screwed up at work a little. Just a little, but the systems screwed up a whole bunch to compliment me. It’s the week before school and it wasn’t a good time to lock some users out for 5 hours. We got 50 website requests for help, at least an order of magnitude more than normal.

Here’s where the credit part comes. I have to give them props for keeping it civil. In a sample size that large, at least a few people get pretty pissy about the situation. Every single one of them kept a civil tone. They explained what they were trying to do and asked what was going on. Except for the idiot that sent me his password, it’s one of the best failures we’ve had, user wise.

part one-
I wasn’t much of a belt man in a my yoot, but it turns out they’re pretty useful for holding up pants. And you can put stuff on it. The last belt I had for quite a few years, and I wore it daily. In addition to be fairly tattered from time, I had also poked quite a few holes in it as my waist line shrunk, and that’s a damn fine feeling. Eventually it completely tore near the buckle making it almost useless.

Despite being an article of clothing I wear daily, and get years of use out of, I couldn’t bring myself to spend $15 to replace it. I knew I could do better, damnit! It didn’t help that most the belts had big thick buckles I didn’t want any part of. Eventually fate intervened, and I finally found my belt. On Clearance! For $5.00! At a Walgreens! In Albuquerque! At 2am!

part 2-
I’ve been on hiatus from the gym for about two months. June was mad crazy. Some friends bought a house so there was moving into that, out of 2 other houses, and helping with a few home improvement things. Cass took a class, so I was working half days at work. My workload didn’t stop of course, and I was preparing to take off for a month of vacation. Then there was the month of vacation.

But we recently picked up the gym habit again. Last time was my 300th fitlinxx entry, and we’ve been going a little over 3 years now. In that time I’ve logged 136 hours of cardio, for 113,000 calories. It was really nice to get back to the gym, and getting back to that rhythm even got me to walk home tonight, although it’s still a little warm for that.

Where part one meets part 2 –
I moved my new belt up another notch today. Woohoo!

Jane had her 2nd ballet recital last night. At her first recital she was in the 4th or 5th group to perform. So, naturally, she was the 4th or 5th *last* group to perform this time around, which put her at the 25th group to perform. I burst with pride when she performed, and it was fantastic. Hers was one of the few groups to even attempt to dance, and they were doing a tiny bit from Swan Lake.

Leading up to that, however, it was like the scene from A Clockwork Orange where his eyes are pried open, except this time he’s being forced to watch America’s Funniest Home Videos for two hours. And there’s a 4 year old crawling on him. “Daddy, I’m bored!” “Daddy, I’m thirsty!” “Daddy, I’m hungry!” “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, loook at that!”

Some songs need to be sung along with to be enjoyed. One such song is “A Little Respect” by Erasure.

I wish I would have realized this somewhere other than on the bus, though.

We got home yesterday after driving through the night. We left Springfield, MO and arrived 26 hours later, which included 3 hours of quality sleep at a rest area as well as requisite food, gas, and fluid disposal stops. That’s 1370 miles of driving, a pretty decent clip.

It is so good to be home, to be surrounded by your own creature comforts, to sleep in your own bed.

The trip was an unqualified success. There was a torrential downpour as we left
Tucson, a diluvian rain while in Colorado, and a solid wall of thunderstorms the entire time we driving through Wisconsin. For a few days it was over 100 degrees while we were in the upper midwest, which was absolutely miserable. I’ll take a month of Tucson at 105 any day over a single day of it in North Dakota.

There were a few casualties on the way. We have some light up tinkerbell shoes still MIA. Our copy of “Bride and Prejudice” is in my grandma’s DVD player. There’s a lonely pink shirt stranded in Illinois. That’s about average for one of our trips, not including my glasses. Those are still somewhere in Pueblo, CO, although it rained so much that night I picture them floating away to a river and washing up hundreds of miles downstream.

I was looking forward to this trip a lot more than I had in a while, mostly because the kids were of an age to really be part of the vacation rather than just along for the ride. Boy did they not dissapoint. I’m downright bursting with pride at how well they did for almost the whole trip. And maybe the coolest part? Despite all the places we went and things we saw, when asked what their favorite part of the trip was they both talked about people they had seen. I love that they remember the connections we made more than the things we did, because that’s so much more important in life.