The sticky notes at the front of the page
for my 3 MPs (no, not my MP3s...)
Blogroll has moved to a
new page. It was just too huge (close to 1000 blogs in Bloglines) and helps the page load time tremendously. Blogrolling.com just sucks, and Bloglines has too much. Oh, and I have updated Blogrolling.
Have a nice day!
Tuesday, December 28
Some good news today…
After my ISP got slammed by the Santy worm, I had to wait for FTP to return to do any updating, which I didn't know about until
after I tried to post a submission.
Today, it returned! Because if it hadn't you still wouldn't be reading this!
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/28/2004 06:51:00 PM 
0 comments
Friday, December 24
Merry Christmas!
This is liable to be my last post till the start of 2005, so have a nice Christmas, a Happy New Year, and I'll see you on the flip side!
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/24/2004 02:59:00 PM
0 comments
Sunday, December 19
Sunday lyrics
Flower
by Moby
Green sally up
And green sally down
Lift and squat
Gotta tear the ground
Ol' Miss Lucy's dead and gone
Left me hear to weep and moan
Green sally up
And green sally down
Lift and squat
Gotta tear the ground
Ol' Miss Lucy's dead and gone
Left me hear to weep and moan
Green sally up
And green sally down
Lift and squat
Gotta tear the ground
Ol' Miss Lucy's dead and gone
Left me hear to weep and moan
Green sally up
And green sally down
Lift and squat
Gotta tear the ground
Ol' Miss Lucy's dead and gone
Left me hear to weep and moan
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/19/2004 10:37:00 PM
1 comments
Step children
I've been married almost 3½ years now. Raising step-children the best way that I can think of, which hasn't been a total success. It hasn't been a total failure either, although at times it's felt like it has been.
Let's (or should I say, Let me…) face it, after 43 years of not having kids, and not really looking at dealing with kids except on an "Uncle" basis, I have been totally unprepared. I
know that I was raised in a good way. Certain behaviors were impressed into me before I even started school. Behaviors that seem to be foreign to my 19 yos, let alone the 14 yos. And I've been wondering why.
Some of this I've just passed off as differences to their being raised with siblings versus me being raised as an only child. Yes, my half sister was still home with our mother when I was born, but she was already married and moved out by the time I have my first memories. So my parents weren't complete
noobs when it came to raising me. Was I a spoiled child? Probably. Was I spoiled as much as I could have been? No way in hell. But being an only child also has the downfall that when something happens, there is no other sibling that you can possibly pin the blame on. No way, ain't gonna happen, you can't escape the blame.
These step kids do everything they possibly can to make sure that they are not to blame. The finger pointing never stops, the arguments go on sometimes for days. It drives me nuts. Especially when all I want to say is, "Don't do that again!", but they are too afraid of what the possible consequence may be to actually accept blame.
I bring this up because my step-daughter and I had a knock-out drag-out fight over her breaking the vent to the microwave. The right side was already broke (unbeknownst to either of us), and she proceeded to pull the whole vent from the oven. That broke the left side, which had been in nice and tight. The reason why it broke is because the front vent was screwed in from the top. Slamming of the door had probably broken the right side, and now we've got a broken left side. She would absolutely not take any blame for breaking it. She ran off, and I ran off. Now, up to this point, I've been feeling outright putrid sick (stomache flu) for 5 days at this point. Let alone, I'm in the worst week of the year for me (between my birthday and Christmas), and the oldest took off with the youngest at noon on my birthday, the day before this argument, without asking, knowing that we were going to have a birthday dinner that evening, having just shoved what was supposed to be my birthday cake into the oven, and then proceeded to keep them out until 8PM. More on that day in a later entry.
I was pissed, I was upset. But I did manage to have an epiphany. They were so used to their father disciplining them, badly it seems, that they do anything they possibly can to get out of it. This explains a
lot to me, especially with the older ones, and the battles that I've fought with them.
This is not the way that I was brought up! Not even close. But it
is the way that they've been brought up. I'm not out to
discipline the kids. I'm out to
correct the kids. These kids are not stupid. None of the four are. Correction should not automatically lead to punishment, which is what I think has to be the way that their father treated them.
And since my wife was the breadwinner for the family since they'd been married, their father is the one that has the most influence on the way that they were raised. He even went on to tell my wife that she didn't know how to raise children. She was no expert, but I have a feeling that if she had been the one to actually raise them, things would be a little different, and not quite so hairy now. When I ask my children to do something, I expect cooperation. Lots of cooperation. I don't get it. I have to pull and shove to get them to do a lot of things, including bribing. I'm not impressed with that. And of course my wife's ex blames every situation that we now have on her, which isn't even close to being fair.
I've decided that we are going to have a family meeting. I'd love to include the older two as well (one of them certainly needs a good talking to, but even this meeting wouldn't solve his issues), but it's intended toward the two little ones. I'm declaring myself absolute Alpha, ruling absolutely. The argument amount who did or didn't do anything is over. But in return, I promise to only correct them, not to discipline or punish them, unless the problem is a repeated serious violation. And I will make it very clear that arguing with me over who gets blamed for what will be
punished if my first correction about it is not followed. I'm going to make it sound more like a test at school. "Yes, you make mistakes, that is why you don't have straight A's. But you should (and better!) be learning from your test scores in order to bring your grades up."
I'm hoping that getting this out in the open air, and spelling things out a bit, and reducing their fear that they are going to get punished for the least little infraction will change the attitude around here. I wish I had this epiphany a few years earlier. Then again, live and learn. It's been awhile since I've been a kid, so my memories are definately clouded with age. I've known that these kids were not raised the same way that I was. I just didn't realize how big a difference it actually was till now.
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/19/2004 02:55:00 PM
0 comments
Thursday, December 16
Boy the Bear's Age Gauge
From
Boy the Bear's Age Gauge:
Happy Birthday Bryan!
Today you are 47 years old and about:
41 years 1 month younger than Walter Cronkite, age 88
37 years 7 months younger than Pope John Paul II, age 84
33 years 6 months younger than George Herbert Bush, age 80
26 years 3 months younger than Barbara Walters, age 73
24 years 1 month younger than Larry King, age 71
17 years 10 months younger than Ted Koppel, age 64
14 years 5 months younger than Geraldo Rivera, age 61
11 years 5 months younger than George W. Bush, age 58
6 years 5 months younger than Jesse Ventura, age 53
2 years 2 months younger than Bill Gates, age 49
2 years 8 months older than Cal Ripken Jr., age 44
8 years 6 months older than Mike Tyson, age 38
12 years 7 months older than Jennifer Lopez, age 34
18 years 0 months older than Tiger Woods, age 28
24 years 6 months older than Prince William, age 22
This also means you were:
43 years old at the time of the 9-11 attack on America
42 years old on the first day of Y2K
39 years old when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash
37 years old at the time of Oklahoma City bombing
36 years old when O. J. Simpson was charged with murder
35 years old at the time of the 93 bombing of the World Trade Center
33 years old when Operation Desert Storm began
31 years old during the fall of the Berlin Wall
28 years old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded
26 years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh
25 years old during Sally Ride's travel in space
23 years old when Pres. Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr.
21 years old at the time the Iran hostage crisis began
18 years old on the U.S.'s bicentennial Fourth of July
16 years old when President Nixon left office
14 years old when Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was shot
11 years old at the time the first man stepped on the moon
10 years old when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated
7 years old during the Watts riot
5 years old at the time President Kennedy was assassinated
a 1 year old when Hawaii was admitted as the 50th state
Happy birthday to me! (technically, I was born at
4 5:36AM CST, the 17th, Clinton, IL)
Relevant Link
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/16/2004 01:08:00 PM
0 comments
Saturday, December 11
Administrivia
I have updated the blogkomments software. A big pain in the ass. Some typos in the generated code snippets, problems with handling blogs in subdirectories, and some missing instructions (and bad coding preventing me from seeing what those instructions where). But it's there. I've got some changes I want done,
like the old way I present the comments, and putting dynamic previewing back in.
There's some issues with generating valid XHTML, but that looks to be a coding issue with PHP, as I can't see where the crap I'm looking at is coming from.
I've also rid the template of more JavaScript code, using PHP code to generate my blogroll on the side, which should help some search engines and whatnot. Other than my email generating script, there shouldn't be much JS code left. I did get my From: header worked out in my Google bot detection and notification code. I'm thinking about adding MSN, Altavista, Yahoo!, Technorati, and who knows what else later.
Modified some dates. I've also modified my old home page to point to here, which should maybe drive some traffic here, since it's the number 1 choice for Google for a couple of terms (at least, until the next Google dance, which IIRC, the last one was about a year ago).
Todo:
- Get the admin functionality working, since it works differently now.
- Fix
the color scheme and sizes of the Blogkomm module, which may be just a matter of blowing away the color settings in the .css file, and moving the rest of it into my .css file. The above mentioned changes for comments- Give the emailer a real email address
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/11/2004 01:09:00 PM
0 comments
Friday, December 10
Upgrades…
My comment software (since I don't have access to SQL or any database on my current host) has been upgraded. It still doesn't use a database (it uses a flat file actually), and it has some upgrades that I need desperately, like email notification. I don't get that many comments, and the only way I know that I have new is to go into the admin section and see what's the latest. Not the greatest/easiest way. I'm backing up my site now (complete site I might add…), so maybe I'll get it installed now, and see how it goes.
Relevant Link
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/10/2004 09:42:00 PM
0 comments
Jobs and security clearances…
John Robb's Weblog:
The US has a backlog of more than ½ million security clearances!! This is total BS. Frankly, the whole system is wrong-headed.
It's no wonder that employers want people who already have a security clearance to work for them, regardless of how limiting such a situation is, to both pool of potential employees, and to the money they have to pay. It's at least 6 months (I've heard, and that may now be longer since it's been awhile…) to get a security clearance done, and when you're looking at paying somebody to just sit in an office waiting for the security clearance to go through, ouch!
Relevant Link
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/10/2004 04:01:00 PM
0 comments
Ripples: We live in unstable times...
From
Ripples: We live in unstable times...:
Tom Peters opines that ninety percent of white-collar jobs as we know them will be disemboweled in the next 15 years. Done. Gone. kaput. This is just one of the fascinating topics dealt with in his new book, Project04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times.
I happen to think that Tom is right on the percentage, but his time scale is way off. I see the change happening in the next five to seven years. I don't take this change as doom, gloom, and disaster, it is change, as in obsolescence, renewal and growth. It is a natural process, just speeded up by the internet. Like it or not, we are all living on internet time now, which is generally 5x faster than conventional, pre-internet time.
The question is, can the people take to living that fast in Internet time? Is society ready, able and willing to deal with the issues that are going to arise because
everybody (and I do mean everybody, not just here in the US, or the G8) will be living in Internet time?
With the intolerance that I see happening everyday, living in or on Internet time means that we might get up to speed, but the friction is going to tear everything apart, and what might have been gained in the short run will eventually be totally lost and reversed. Basically, if we don't have all our ducks in a row, I don't care how good the excellence is for
some people, if the majority aren't also on board when this happens, it is something that could be over before it truly does begin.
It also means that long term planning can only look forward about 15 years, shorter if Mr. St. Lawrence is correct. You say SSI needs to be fixed, how can you know? That's 40-50 years away from breaking at the current system. That's past the curtain of knowability, going by Internet time, so is SSI really broke then? Man on Mars? Well, we can try to plan for it, but whatever we plan today, won't be the plan we actually follow when it happens, since the curtain of knowability is shorter than the actual time period that we are looking at. Unstable times indeed!
The US, being the tech power house that it is, should be ready for Internet time. I posit that it is not. Living in Internet time demands a lot of trust that that the information you are given to process is basically correct. In a nation where the difference in choosing one leader over the other is 51% to 49%, and 119,000 votes cast differently in one state would have changed the result, even with that small difference there is no trusting information. When a majority of voters just months before the election thought that Saddam Hussein had some kind of responsibility for the attacks on 9/11/2001, when the facts repudiated that, let alone did not even hint at that, just where does that leave information believability? Totally out the window. The problem with the mass media outlets is that they are now more interested in making money instead of trying to inform the population.
You have right wing and left wing bloggers going at each other. The right wingers go after the Dan Rather story about how some memos have been manufactured, but totally disregard if the information is actually true. Of course, the right wingers proceed to push the Swift Boat Vets against Kerry, and totally accept that pablum as complete truth, despite multiple people waffling back and forth on what they said, which had they been for Kerry, would have instantly tarnished them forever. I'm sure the left wing blogs pulled similar stunts. But the
truth, and the truth was out there to be told, was totally ignored, as the reasons for Bush to go to war were total lies and myth. Either people didn't care, or the message was so drowned out by the other crap it never registered. Truly sad.
There are other signs that we are not prepared to live in Internet time, but those will have to wait for another day.
Relevant Link
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/10/2004 03:08:00 PM
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Bytehead from Columbus
I've signed up for Microsoft's Spaces blogging experiment. I decided to grab it while I can. It is
Bytehead from Columbus, and I grabbed bytehead while it was available. Sorry bytehead@msn.com! I was the original bytehead@msn.com when they were doing beta testing.
I've been trying to do some stuff, like add to the "Custom list" which seems to be a blog roll (though it really doesn't say that, but when you have to enter the name, URL, and description, go figure. When I tried it, it didn't work. You can't add anything at this point but blog entries it seems.
Relevant Link
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/02/2004 09:47:00 AM
0 comments
I'm now down to fifth place when I used to be #1.
Blogger's about me: Your usual fat computer geek. Currently looking for work in the Jacksonville area and in Columbus. Network Administrator for hire!
♥ Sparx
♥ wookiemp164 aka Garfield116(x)
