Tersosity & Verbosity

• @kcarruthers Star Wars reference. Midichlorians are by some Jedi reckonings the source of The Force & are high in relation to your power. #
• @michellis7 Poor kid. I thought that was your sister’s job. Guess you’ll have to learn… #
• Val just joined Sadie in tub, so it was Val’s 2nd bath, and was inspired to use all of our shampoo to make bubbles. Half a bottle. #
• Which means it cost me 75 cents to wash a handful of dishes in peace rather than supervising them the whole time, for which they are too old #
• Except apparently the twerps are not to be trusted. Bedtime will be momentarily and no nonsense. $1.46 should be too little to anger me. #
• If the kid is going to limit my sleep, it’d be nice if he didn’t also have to be on me the first hour+ we’re out of bed. #
• Local says 81 or 83 high, Boston says 87. Now 73 and feeling all 100 of that % humidity. #
• Wondering if neighbors are actually on vacation & that might make firepit Monday moot. That’d be nice. #
• There’s a useful day in here somewhere, at least given sufficient caffeine. 3 Mugs of coffee is barely a dent. #
• I can read Twitter fine, at least. Too bad it won’t let me tweet. #
• Of course, saying that was a sure way to make it work… #
• Just talked to a recruiter and need to update resume, which I did anyway, so guess that’s rest of day task. #
• Trying to decide whether to concoct sweet & sour kielbasa for supper, on rice, or something else entirely. #
• Good way to use a can of cranberry sauce already on-hand. Kielbasa slices simmering away. #
• @robmay That’s a great quote. Instead of the path less traveled, why not one of the infinite not-yet paths? Makes all the difference. #
• Sadie keeps surprising me by being a full-fledged kid. It’s like… already? #
• That was yummy. Poor Val fell asleep & hasn’t eaten yet. Poor Henry fell off our bed for another bloody nose. Good thing he bounces. #

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The kids have a glass of water after each glass of Kool-Aid, no matter how much they love the flavor. The blue raspberry lemon went over extrmely well.

Just talked with a recruiter who apparently found me on Monster.com, and had a very favorable impression of him. I’m not a fit with the specific opening he had in mind, which would have required Foxpro background, but I’m going up to Burlington Monday for the quick get to know you meeting so it’s easy for them to send me out if they do come up with matches.

This means it’s time to update the resume, which is on my to do short list anyway, because they’re asking me to send an updated version in Word format, and references. It’s silly it’s not changed to speak of since I finally had something worthy of uploading to Monster.

I was going to tweet this, but Twitter is acting up and won’t take anything from me, and this allowed for a longer bit of text. I am so close to just “tweeting” here, since I can post so easily. Even from the Blackberry if needed.

Apart from cost and fussiness, depending on model, I actually like the compact florescents, and what they did to the electric bill. At least, until the electric usage we were getting billed for nearly doubled for no apparent reason. One of the things I don’t like is that you can’t or couldn’t, put the new ones in covered fixtures, requiring old style in some cases. I mentioned that to someone the other day and surprised them, as they’d not read the directions/warnings and used them that way without apparent issue. At any rate, I can completely understand hoarding incandescent bulbs for various reasons. It should be up to the market to encourage the switching, not government decree.

On an amusingly related not to my consulting fees post the other day, here’s a post on how to sell overpriced services. The dressing part feels tongue in cheek, even though it’s tried and true advice I first saw decades ago, and so not me. The part about being right up front is something I’ve flirted with and lately come around to wanting to do again, though in my situation there may be a balance between every scrap of marginal revenue being vital and it being worthwhile to make the most of what work can be landed at real rates, allowing focus on clients willing to pay realistically.

• The baby couldn’t get enough of my salty garlic & rosemary fries I made to go with burgers for supper. #
• He’ll be 1 in less than 2 months, so the days of saying “the baby” are numbered, I guess. #
• What a weird dream, #
• @andrewbarnett The one time I took valium was to get my blood pressure low enough the dentist would be willing to pull tooth. Powerful stuff #
• Going to try taking kids to grandma’s today. That’s the main reason for the car that holds them, & she was 92 & my sister 51 this week. Cake #
• @kcarruthers Are @BasementCat & @CeilingCat the ones with the highest kittychlorians? #
• The girls make limiting baby’s diet HARD!! He just got good drink of Val’s coffee, hasn’t yet recovered from their Kool-Aid yesterday. #
• The heat. It is oppressive. And damp. Ah, 80.3 and 100% humidity. That’d do it. #
• Being mothed by small humans who are heat sources. #
• @mriggen I think you have to be a snowmobiler to love Vermont in winter. Or skier. Not sure who might like mud season. #
• Kids. #
• Wow. I said to myself I’d want to start getting them ready at 10:30 or so & we’re already then. Baby needs nap, sadly. #
• @michellis7 Hey there! I am in gram’s driveway. modern technology! #
• It’ll be interesting when Sadie someday learns the significance of my calling her Veruca. #
• Thar she blows! #
• For supper I am to making French fries again. Right. Now. Being out of potatoes is Not Acceptable. Just make fries. #
• @michellis7 Huh me? Or huh something else? #

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• Out from under sleeping baby. Time to cool my throat and toss the girls into bed. #
• Had a dream in which a neighbor I ran into on vacation told me no offense but we were way too loud too often yelling at the kids. #
• Trying to decide what to do exactly. Almost feel number crunchy as well as organizy, the latter of which would apply well to office cleanup. #
• Also had dream in which our landlord was a guy named Cris and he gave me $1000 he’d had stashed in our cellar toward the $3000 I needed… #
• And he was going to take it back later by not charging me the $200 am month for a utility fee after upgrades were done on my street, and… #
• he didn’t comprehend when I tried to tell him I should pay him more to repay it, not him charge me less, it was backward. #
• In both dream sequences we were in a little house on what looked like my cousin’s street in Bridgewater, even closer together than here… #
• Which played into the dream about the neighbors hearing us yell at kids. #
• What is it with cellars? Night before it was my father in a palatial yet rundown house with giant decrepit cellar central setting. #
• Kids are way too quiet… #
• Yep, too quiet. #
• @Shurakai That’s good to hear. I’d love to see both, but someday there’s DVD. Did you know median income for MA fam of 5 is 97k? #

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This is mainly a local interest Massachusetts link, received in e-mail, to an Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields site. It’s of particular interest for the first one on the page, as my grandfather worked for George Clark and lived for a time in that area. I grew up on a street called, before it was later renamed, Clark Ave., surrounded extensive land originally owned by Clark. Yet this is one local airport I’d not even heard of before, no doubt because it was so far before my time. I actually flew for the first time in a small plane out of Taunton, lived near Hanson Airport and a lake with seaplane activity, and was familiar with some of the local airports like Plymouth, as well as curiosities like the small private strip in Plympton that went to trees many years ago.

Sounding sensible? Apparently it can happen.

This is good post on determining consulting fees, even if it does date back to January. I famously have trouble with pricing, which may be tied up somewhat with self-esteem and excessive desire to please others on my part, and ironically it’s probably low pricing that’s left me with a lack of business and prospects. Obviously you can’t sell to those who can’t or won’t pay a given amount, and competition is ever a factor, but in all reality I need to charge $100 n hour and put in plenty of hours in order to earn realistic income from a support the family perspective. That should be a powerful incentive not to charge $50 to spend 6 hours updating a web site, or $80 to spend 4 hours, or $112.50 for 9+ hours on a POS system update underpriced and misleadingly described. Or you would think.

That there will be things like the 2 year old using the potty, then using the toilet with inset to sit for half a roll of wiping, followed by screaming hysteria for 20 minutes, prostrate on the floor, after being told - gently! - not to use so much toilet paper.

• It’s a raccoon eyed morning. Maybe tonight I’ll sleep more. #
• Wow. Got Wall-E review from Steve Rhodes & he says it’s nothing less than one of the best movies ever made, easily best Pixar. Unexpected. #
• Hate not being able to remember what I wanted to do. Maybe part of the weight loss is in my brain. #
• Maybe it’s good Sadie covered office floor in blocks & other toys, as Henry is enthralled after crawling in here presumably to cling. #
• He only just got up minutes ago, with Sadie beating him by maybe 10. #
• The kids are leaving me alone so well, I should do something useful so they stop that silly aberration. #
• A small glass of Kool-Aid shouldn’t make me feel woozy, dizzy and vaguely ill after drinking it. Maybe I need to avoid preservatives etc too #
• FWIW I was up a lb this AM, no surprise but at least been there for a few days now, & still only 3 to hit -60, 21 to hit goal in mind. #
• Of course, since I’m not trying, I could fly right past the goal. It took effort to maintain circa 103 below my peak, but most of rest… #
• was impacted by meds and their metabolism impact. But I’m eating even better diet than when I maintained that low weight. #
• @chucksimmins Heh. I made a cult joke to the kids yesterday. Talk about going over the heads of the audience. #
• Short sleep catching up with me. Should be napping with the boy. Which I was, for a couple minute when he was on my lap going to sleep. #
• I come back to find that Twitter works, for the second, and there is now a failwhale.com site in the maligned whale’s honor. #
• MedicDad strikes again! Hope the Band-Aids stay on Val’s thumb long enough to stop the flow of razor-induced blood. #
• I keep telling her we say, no, don’t, never touch that, get down, don’t climb there, don’t do that, etc. for reasons. Mostly. #
• @pixxiespaz Doh! Doh? Was it at least deserved or provoked? #
• I keep forgetting that search on Vista is faster than I could ever imagine. By the time I finished typing “training” it had results done. #
• A shame the file I want is not on that machine. #

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The baby was away, lunging in bed with the girls taking care of him, having a blast. Now to get him something to eat, drinks all around, and maybe do some cleaning that won’t hurt my hand the way mouse and keyboard usage is doing. Seldom had it hurt that much.

Right, waiting for the baby to wake up, surely any second, and needing to continue on and do work on the house or something.

If Twitter weren’t down so utterly there’s not even a whale, this might have gone there. Perhaps it’s time for a change.

As I always say, The Constituion Means What It Says. I think Scalia is my new favorite. Wait. Did I have a favorite before?

Trouble is, it means what it says about takings, too. Poor Kelo.

Like I said, the Court’s vote on Heller was way too close, even if the majority opinion was relatively sensible and unambiguous.

This blog is supposed to be links and short takes, almost Twitter-like but with more room and obviously the ability to make exceptions. So it’s ironic that since I changed Twitter Tools to post a digest rather than each tweet individually, the Twitter updates are my long posts. I still like the format better than having individual tweets with crappy titles and no context. The digests read in a compact, sequential way, and are only confusing where they may cut things off from one day to the next.

Who’s who and reunion for the famous picture of Microsoft’s early employees.

Via Dan, this is an amusing, lengthy article in which Bill Gates e-mails complaints about Microsoft end user experience to his own staff, which apparently was something he did regularly. I have to agree in general with Dan about Vista.

• At least fireworks the upstairs people tossed out the window last night weren’t the loudest I’ve ever heard, unlike other locals tonight. #
• Trying to figure out, besides how to raise $3000 in the next 6 weeks or so, why our electric usage as much as double starting last Sept. #
• You don’t go from using 700 to using 1300 like that. #
• Upstairs people moved in circa April last year, so if they tapped in it wasn’t immediate. Tempted to throw the breakers for an hour. #
• Seeing if anyone in the building freaks would rule that in nicely. #
• Partway through that tweet the baby dumped my coffee… again. He’s way too tall and obtrusive. #
• Saved! By the girls waking up inexplicably early & suddenly at 8:02. Baby was on my to fall back asleep but wasn’t falling. Now with them. #
• Sad to have to tell someone I’m not *really* qualified to be a network admin for 20 servers and 350 seats. #
• The kids were watching Peter Pan, but have now invaded my office. Where did I go wrong? Oh right, it was that tab & slot thing. #
• NOW he wants to be on me to nap? NOW? #
• My Vista machine seems to have decided to die. Things just get better and better. Wonder how long the baby will sleep in bed before waking. #
• I knew I hated SATA. Let’s see if the disk read error means drive failure or something more benign… #
• Oh well, now that I broke Twitter, Sadie needs a drink and I should open that computer. #
• Hooray on Heller! The Supremes can, you know, read and stuff. #
• This year, at least, but the members were different for Kelo. #
• Heck, it’s actually bad that the vote was 5-4, because that means 4 of them can’t read and think and stuff. #
• Got so excited about Heller I forgot to say thank the FSM that reseating SATA cable into different slot fixed drive read error. #
• The Supreme Court cited Eugene Volokh. Cool! #
• OK, checking on baby. For all I know he woke and got out of bed himself and it with the girls. #
• Sadie: ” my blue in lemon blue potty.” This the 3rd try repeating her urgent point. Me, whinily: Sadie, you can talk clearly!” #
• Sadie, crisply: “Mmm… I can!” #
• Down another pound today, btw, to a number ending in 0, and which means 2 more will be total loss of 60 so far, 50 this year. #
• @danabrit We’ve both wondered the same thing, but concluded we couldn’t afford it. #
• Baby sleeping again at an odd time, soundly, after extended up time. Kids have been pretty good today, overall. #
• With all the Twitter trouble I am tempted to use solojay.com for much of what I’d say here, using w.bloggar to make it as easy to post. #
• @chelpixie Been a bit busy with LinkedIn, eh? #

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