Month: September 2003

Gonna give you some thought pebbles today, as I’m busy and tired and can’t really string together long coherent thoughts. Oh, unless it’s for work. I’m coherent at work. Really.

• I am stunned the John Ritter died yesterday. My first thought was of his wife (actress Amy Yasbeck) and their little girl. Man, he was wayyyy too young. How does one go about arranging to have all her undetected heart problems detected? Cause man, I’d like to know if I have a time bomb ticking in my chest.
• I guess I have to mention Johnny Cash if I’m going to mention John Ritter, or people will comment. I wasn’t really a fan, I don’t like country music, but, well, I can appreciate how well-loved he was by so many. I’m pretty sure he was just biding him time these past few months until he could follow his June.
• Puzzle still isn’t finished, I’m going to finish it myself, I swear.
• Oh yeah. It’s been freaking beautiful out all week, and now it’s going to rain all weekend.
• After setting up the Curious Furious website I’m getting the itch to make some changes around here – maybe even do more real writing for it. But my time is rather limited, given that I do his site and content updates and the content updates for the Daily Probe on a weekly basis.
• In the “Things I Probably Shouldn’t Have Said” file: “You could put dog poop in puff pastry and I’d eat it.” (On my love of puff pastry, to the woman serving the hot meals in the cafeteria.)

I just wanted to make sure you were all kept up-to-date on the puzzle situation.

I’m wearing my red, white and blue sweater today. I wasn’t going to, but then I thought “why not?” I bought it just after 9/11 – red sleeves, blue torso, with a white star in the middle. Someone saw me and said “Star of the day!” and I wondered it I should just agree, or if it was necessary to point out why I’m wearing this thing.

That interaction made me a little self-conscious, and looking around, I don’t see too many other people in flag-mode. Last year I was unemployed on the 1st anniversary, so I wore a denim shirt that has a flag decal sewn over the pocket, like I’m a patriotic car mechanic. I was working at Vibren on 9.11.01 and we filled the office with flags and red, white and blue bunting in the weeks that followed. I’m not going to go into my “here was my experience that morning” but you can believe I can remember every minute of that day like it was yesterday. So ya, I’m wearing red, white and blue today, and I’m happy I am.

As a parent, you spend your whole life drawing lines and making rules for your child and for yourself. How far do I go? How far do I let him go? Some of the lines are very serious and must be enforced (You must hold a grown-ups hand when you are walking in a parking lot because you are too short and the drivers can’t see you). And then there are those like last night.

I bought Junior a 100 piece Power Rangers puzzle last night. I thought it would be good for the old noggin after 5 straight years of cartoons. (Okay, only a slight exaggeration) Now a 100 piece puzzle for a 5-year-old is actually a tricky thing, and in our case, he is still building the skills that allow him to look at the picture on the box and match what he sees on the individual pieces to that picture.

It’s a total exercise in frustration for me. I’ll admit it. It’s one of the few things that drives me buggy. We try to do the outside edge first, like good Americans, and I clench my fists every time I have to repeat “No, you need a piece that’s straight on one side”. We worked on the puzzle for quite a while – eventually his interest lagged and I didn’t want to force him to stay there and finish the danged puzzle. What kind of freak would that make me? And I didn’t want to do the puzzle for him. That’s the line I’m talking about. How much should I help him, and at what point is it no longer help? As a toddler, he was notorious for saying “you do it” for everything. And sometimes it’s just easier to say “here, let me finish that so we can get on with our lives”. But I want him to learn how to do a puzzle.

Maybe we’ll finish it tonight.

Okay, another few hundred copies of sobig today. Tell me…is this thing just living on it’s own out in the wild now, feeding on nuts and berries and drinking water out of puddles, or are there still a whole pack of mouth-breathers out there who haven’t heard the news that there IS no screensaver, that “That Movie” isn’t really a movie, and that nobody is actually thanking you for anything. Seriously, we’re a month into this now, I personally know people who have received TENS OF THOUSANDS of copies, and just when it slows a little, there’s a banner day like today.

Also – I would really appreciate it if ISPs (including my own, for goodness sake) would turn off the auto-notification that a received email contained a virus. People, I did NOT send out all those emails. Do NOT send an autoreply to a forged header saying that my system might be infected. Do you understand that you are ADDING TO THE PROBLEM? I’m getting 40 tons of crap email a day now, and if 10 percent of the crap is from ISPs being pro-active, that’s 10% too much. They KNOW the headers are forged. I’m begging my ISP – check the logs. I’m not sending any messages with those titles. Stop threatening to tell my ISP on me! You ARE my ISP!

p.s Can someone please tell me how to get Microsoft’s .net messenger OFF of my system? I don’t want it, I don’t use it. And now on a daily basis it launches itself to tell me I need an important upgrade. Yet, there’s nothing listed anywhere for me to uninstall this beast. I’m getting Mighty cranky about this.