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I ended up getting home around 5am Thursday morning. I almost napped for an hour before there were kids crawling over me, demanding to know when we would leave for the zoo. I was slow and groggy, but we made it out of the house eventually. Not quite on schedule with our grand plan, but we made it out.

The first three zoo lots we tried were full, and not realizing there were more lots around the other side of the zoo (it looked like the road turned into a service road, so we didn’t even try), we went in search of street parking that wasn’t metered or time restricted (though towards the end, I was just looking for someplace that I could get the van into). Ended up parking just over a half mile away, at the bottom of a hill. Great for the return trip when we were exhausted, not so great for this horribly out of shape dad of three.

The girls had an absolute blast (pics coming soon). I don’t think they got to see every animal in the kingdom, but as much as they could they saw. It was well worth doing, running on fumes or not, although at the end of the day Kim and I came to two conclusions. First, next time we do this, it either needs to be in the spring or the fall. 90+ degree temperatures, with who knows what the heat index added to it, not to mention the hilly terrain, made spending the day at the zoo a real workout for us. Which brings me to the second realization, and the title for this post: we knew we were out of shape (if you know me in real life, that kinda goes without saying), but *wow*, that trip kicked our collective butts. Which in the end made that downhill trek all the better, since I think the last thing we could have done was clime over a quarter mile uphill.

Now, two days later, my calves ar still aching, and in a sick way it feels good. I really want to see if I can start working something into my routine to make this ache last, deranged as that may sound.

Yes, it’s 2:30 am, and after waiting 8 hours for a major NAS provider to provide replacement parts (their first try brought us parts in the first 4 hours - granted, parts we didn’t need…) and listening to 181.FM (streaming station “The Buzz,” a lifesaver in a building without reception), I’m hoping to head home soon.

Soon, apparently, being a relative term. This makes tomorrow/today (sleep clock vs real world clock) a really tough thing for me. I am off that day, whenever it is the calanders say it is, and the plan all week has been to take the girls to the National Zoo. They are being excited at the prospect - this isn’t the rinky dink Richmond Zoo (sorry Richmonders), this is the National Zoo, home to pandas, and lions, and bears, oh my. And even if the new parts fit and work and the NAS device comes back up, we still need to cycle all of the boxes that use it (after 8+ hours of missing mounts, you know they aren’t just going to snap back into place and be happy campers). So instead, I am facing the desctruction of my children’s dreams for the week.

And through all of this, because tonight’s killer shift at work is only the culmination of (unrelated) weekend and evening work for the last week, my wife continues to shine.  I listen to the water cooler talk, I know what other guys go through, the way they gripe or comment. I listen and wallflower, because I have no gripes. Not suggesting everything is roses all the time - we have our  differences, and we’re both pretty stubborn when it comes down to it. But I can’t imagine being married to a more perfect person (guess that’s a good thing, eh? )

So if you’re reading this sweety, this one goes out to you at almost 3 in the morning now. My faculties may be damaged right now, but I know two things. How to reboot a server, and how to appreciate the best wife ever.

Realized this morning I haven’t updated since my last post. I spent a whopping day or two and prototyped something using a mashup of borrowed js, ajax, and php to accomplish what I wanted. There’s a ton more to do with it, and if you look under the hood you’ll quickly see that all I’ve written lately are shell scripts, because my php reads like one long, convoluted shell script with nested if’s and while’s looping through pages of bad code. That and in the interest of speed I tended to copy paste ‘good’ blocks, and I really should go back and break those out into something, well, manageble. But the plus side of it is I currently have something that completely replaces tellico, is easily accessible to me, and has all of the missing features I needed (like multiple dup’s, etc.) Once my fear of public humiliation fades, and I’ve had a chance to optimize some of it, I’ll post the link, promise. In the interim, I’ll try and get some screenies up this weekend for those interested.

It certainly doesn’t qualify as coding. Or even scripting, really. But for the first time in a long while, I find myself behind a keyboard on the tail end of a heavy caffeine rush trying to get something up and running.

The story begins with one of those cursed KDE apps that you find yourself addicted to, even though you consider KDE to be worse bloat than, well, other bloaty things. In my case, it was tellico. For the briefest of overviews, its a collection manager that includes a means for managing a stamp collection. Aha, I said to myself, saved! And I began using it to catalog my collection. In the interim, I had those computer woes, and now I’m running on the kids old machine and tellico just drags when working with my 2000+ stamp catalog - and that’s not too acceptable given i’ve only scratched the surface.

Now, I realize, a large factor is the speed (or lack thereof) of my machine. When I load the same data collection in a fast machine, its nice and speedy. But I still let it get under my skin, because this box meets all of my other needs, namely a keyboard and a web browser.

So I’ve decided to do what every good closet geek would do when faced with a program that doesn’t quite meet the needs and speed requirements that his crappy system has to offer. I’m rewriting it as a crappy ajax/php app.

I need to add some reporting options, and the big feature I think tellico could use - dup’ing multiple times in one swing, ie to pick a catalog object and say you want 20 copies of it with the following field changes, and pow, done. To have to manually copy a record X number of times (or select multiple coppies, dup them, and repeat until you have your desired number) is a real pita when the app is chewing away at resources with nothing to show for it, especially when you still need to make a change to those records.

Meh. At least I’m using the computer as something more than a web frontend this week

Let me start off by saying my wife has the patience of a saint. A frazzled, worn out, overwhelmed saint, but a saint nonetheless (hey, we have 3 girls 6 and under, not all of that is my doing!).

This past weekend (let’s not say its Father’s Day related, but in a lot of ways it was), I made it out to Borders with the kids and finally got Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. Allow me to just say *wow* - I’m hooked, even realizing this is just book one of a long series. I’ve been reading a lot lately, so its not that I’m unused to the occasional surprise spellbinder, but even so, I wasn’t expecting something so rich and deep. I think my only complaint, knowing that this is the first book, is that it took wikipedia for me to understand some of the underlying rules of the world this takes place in, chiefly the whole warren thing (it wasn’t clear reading, and there was no explanation). I understand the literary technique of not explaining anything and letting your audience learn through exposure, but at least a little hint would have been nice I also picked up Feast For Crows by Martin, and a book that caught my eye by accident, Eyes of God by John Marco. I’m trying not to rip through an entire series in one fell swoop, but break it out across multiple books at a time, mostly so I don’t get so involved that I get bored (which can happen if you’ve ever tried playing catch up on a 4+ book series - you just get to a point where that lack of breaks in between segments makes the whole work drag a little).

Unfortunately, this plethora of reading has not translated into my writing much lately. I’ve been inspired, to be sure, and I write down little snippets of plot and dialogue as they come to me, if only that weren’t usually on the drive home, but I have yet to sit down and write anything substantial. I’m kidding myself by saying that I’m letting the story mature, but mostly I think it’s just festering in my brain.