atomicthoughts.com

I’ve very recently started reading Rebel Dad: the stay-at-home dad revolution, online. It’s had very ittle activity since I started, but this absolute gem came up today. I should get this laminated and put it in my wallet. :)

slowing down to your child’s pace is incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding. I have to consciously do it — my instinct is to rush through Target as quickly as possible, rather than to crawl inside the circular clothing racks and pretend I’m a penguin. But if I can get myself to switch viewpoint, I rarely regret it.

Testing my LJ Crosspost plugin, since I’ve upgraded to Movable Type 3.2. Here goes nothin’!

didn’t work, trying again.

I spent some time fiddling with Thunderbird this weekend, spurned on mostly by this article: entropic principal: Using Thunderbird to Get Things Done. I’ve been having an email management problem for a while now and thought this might do the trick.

So I set up some saved-search folders like the site recommended. I had played around with those a little before and was pleasantly surprised by the performance. I was quckly frustrated with assigning labels though. It was taking 2 keystrokes and that’s just not acceptable! So I downloaded the keyconfig extension and remapped some keys to apply the label and move to the next unread message in one shot. Now I can really plow through my inbox.

I also downloaded 2 other extensions I hadn’t known about. One, Mail Redirect adds the much needed “bounce” feature to Thunderbird. I forward a fair amount of feedback to other departments, and it was probably the last feature from Pine that I really missed. (The other was the ability to file messages using just the keyboard, but that was fixed with Quick File).

The other handy utility which I finally found was the ability to sync my address book between work and home. It uses Plaxo as the intermediary so I had to sign up for yet another free web account, but I had been looking for this for weeks, and it works seemlessly. Plaxo 1.62 (Beta)

I had a follow up doctor appointment today. My cholesterol is good. 164. But my hdl is low (31) and my tryglecerides are high (179). More aerobics and less weight is the prescription at this point.

My blood pressure had also been on the watch list over the last year or so, but at my visit a week ago it was perfectly normal, 120 over something something. I thought it was a little strange, Ihad been monitoring it myself on the little blood pressure machines at pharmacies and it was constantly 130+. So I had him check it again today just in case, and it was 117 over something something. I mentioned it to him and he had a few theories. Most interestingly, he pointed to his wall and said “This is a mercury sphigmometer, which they don’t use anymore. OSHA won’t allow it.” So the baseline’s weren’t the same. The OSHA bit was interesting though.

A power washer (and nearly anything that says Briggs and Stratton) is a cool power toy you really want to play with. But after the 2nd hour of stripping paint it gets a little monotonous. In the 3rd hour you start playing tic tac toe with the stream. I’ve probably got 6 or 8 hours left. I’m going to go a little batty.

The hit songs meme looks too time consuming. ;) I was surprised to not see The Doors on my ’72 list though. I didn’t realize their last album was in ’71.

Number 99 on the list, “Good Foot, Pt. 1, James Brown”, I listen to at least once a week. “Layla” is also on the list. I got my fill of that from Midnight Cafe. ;)

I should also get extra credit since I’ve actually been to Ely, MN.

1. Go here.
2. Pass it on.
(more…)

This one a lot more thought provoking:

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Here’s a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if two planes almost collide it’s a near miss. Nope, my friend. It’s a near hit! A collision is a near miss.

— George Carlin

A downpour. Severe thunderstorm. A tree. A satellite dish. A saw. Lightning. What could possibly go wrong?

Nothing, it turns out. But this entry would have been a lot longer if I had been struck by lightning.