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OK, ’tis snowing. NOW you can show me the news anchors and how deep it is and how bad the road conditions are. I’ll watch from my couch, where I’ll be loafing around the house today. Wait a minute – that was my dreamy, not-quite-yet awake self talking. I’ll be chasing my daughter around the house, catching up on some cleaning, putting up my Christmas decorations, and hopefully even getting a crack at playing with some J2EE.

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Our local area’s under some sort of snow advisory. We are advised that it’s going to snow. A lot. Judging by the hype on the news, an awful lot. Every news anchor that they can find, they’ve stuck outside with a microphone to tell us if it’s snowing yet where they are. I don’t care if it’s snowing where they are. I don’t even really care if it’s snowing where I am. I’ll care in the morning whether I have to shovel my car out from a lot of snow or a little snow, and I’ll care if it’s still snowing then and expected to snow more, but I don’t care if it snows while I sleep. I do feel bad for the news anchors out there in the cold, though. Snowing or not, it’s freezing out there!

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Baby puke. . . our first exposure to it was this morning. Smelly, nasty, all through her hair baby puke. The picture I should have gotten was her, being held by her Daddy who’d just unhappily discovered the night’s results. Her hair was sticking up and matted with bits of her dinner from the previous night and she positively reeked, but she had her normal morning wondrously happy to see us face. Funny, just to see the difference between her face and Daddy’s.

She seems fine. We think it was either the beginnings of the cold Jas and I both have, or that the turkey deli meat we gave her the previous evening _really_ didn’t agree with her. Either way, no further episodes, no fever, happy baby, and seriously cleaned crib sheets.

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Michael’s craft stores are open until 10:00 for the holiday season! Hurrah! That they’re open later, giving me the opportunity to shop in peace after my daughter’s gone to bed, doesn’t in any way mean that I have any more time to do all of the various projects that I’d buy supplies for. But, hey, buying the supplies is the first step! Of course, judging by the supplies stacked in various spots in my basement, I’ve already taken too many first steps. . .

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I’ve spent the weekend contemplating friendship, off and on. Saturday I got to spend some time with a friend, just sort of hanging out. Sunday I was at a baby shower where the guest of honor was surrounded by lots of friends who had known her from various stages in her life. And then yesterday I finally put in that phone call to another friend I hadn’t talked to in close to two months (and I count her as a really good friend – shame on me!). Had to put in that phone call – seeing the folks at the shower made me think about whether I’m putting in enough into some of those relationships – whether I’m letting them wither on the vine, and if so, why.

Folks claim that life is busy – that there’s just no time to cultivate friendships. But I look back at folks in times past, and I really can’t see that they were any less busy. If you go back to a farming era, well, cows certainly don’t let you put them on hold or screen their moos for milking. And if you worked in a factory, the 40 hour workweek is a relatively recent idea. Life is always busy – that’s probably just a characteristic of life, whether you’d count a busy life as well-lived or not.

I have a working theory that we don’t put enough priority on our friendships because those folks aren’t stuck with us the way our spouses and families are – because we actually have to pay attention to something other than just us. And we don’t, and we just sort of justify it with the excuse of ‘busyness’. Was I too busy to play too many rounds of GLine (my latest stupid PC game addiction, replacing Minesweeper), or to browse JavaRanch, or to write this blog entry? Couldn’t I have put in a call, tried to make some sort of connection\?

Wish I had a magic potion answer, a resolution that I’d avow to keep. Unfortunately, I know me too well. . . I’ll make more of an effort, to be sure, but it’s just too easy to say, well, they haven’t called me, either. Periodically I’ll poke my head up and look at the ‘fruits’ of my friendships, and realize they’re woefully underfed. And I’ll mentally whine about it, and then go back to putting dots on a GLines gameboard.

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I just loved this sidebar title. . . Is it an Acorn or a Rabbit Turd??

A couple of other quotes of interest (all from the same article)
* “But by definition, innovation is wasteful in the short term: It takes a lot of acorns to grow an oak tree.”
* “You need 1000 crazy ideas to find 100 plans that are worth funding experimentally so that you can then identify 10 projects that are worth pursuing seriously in hopes of coming up with one or two strategies that have true transformative power.”

Inspired me enough to fire off an email to my boss. That goes against the grain of this article – I should supposedly just ‘do’, but I’d really like this to spin off into a new mission/task/plan for me. I’m fired up with the idea of getting to hunt out new business software/system ideas. I knew a guy who had something like that job title, but I don’t think it ever translated into anything real. I may end up just ‘doing’ anyway – feeding system synopsis to someone who then gets a sales commission if they actually sell ‘my’ vision. But it sure would be nice for that to be at least part of my job.

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Laura’s blog for today mentioned baby shower games that have the attendees distinguishing baby food carrots from squash. We’ve tasted each of the flavors of baby food that we’ve given Cora, and for the most part, they’re pretty awful. The veggies and fruit are OK, but when you get to the meats, bleccch! What evils we do to our childrens’ tastebuds in the name of what? It’s not nutrition, since at this age our daughter’s still getting most of her nutrients from formula. We’re gradually transitioning more and more to solid food, but she’s still probably getting 50% of her food intake from a bottle.

Speaking of baby food, Grandma C. let us know yesterday that she had heard of an infant formula recall. Scary things – they tell you that there’s some organism that may be in your child’s formula and that may (emphasis on may, as in, in this case, very minute chance) make her very ill. For car seats, cribs, toys, etc, you’re supposed to fill out a product safety card so that they can let you know that some piece may break off if your child manipulates the product in ways hithertofor unseen by humans. But for formula, that stuff you’re putting directly into your child’s system, the recall information is buried on the health section of CNN. And it’s not even a lead news story on the Health section of CNN! For that kind of thing, I want bells and whistles to start flashing, my home phone to start ringing, the formula can itself to lock itself shut. . .

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Cynicism among engineers isn’t a character flaw. It is key to their strength. And for the Dilbert view. . .

Cynicism reigns! “I will worship no more false [optimists].” – misquote of The Tempest’s Caliban [actually, the misquote started as a pure misquote in a 12th grade English paper – a paper explaining/reference a quote that apparently doesn’t exist in The Tempest, by Caliban or any other character. Hey, it was an in-class writing where we couldn’t reference the play – not an intentional whole-cloth misrepresentation of the play]

[My apologies for the mild incoherence of this entry. . . Too much caffeine already.]

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For machines that supposedly have no true intelligence, computers are the most infernally arrogant personalities that I have ever met! I suspect that that’s why I like working with/on them: by crafting a well-designed, well-implemented (both are important!) program, I solve both the problem at hand and clamp down on any future insurrections (via bugs introduced later through program revisions). Lately, though, I’ve felt like I’ve been losing the battle. I’ve been working on a GIS system on the one project, and on a project involving servlets and web services on the other. I’ve run into so many interesting ways to blunder that I created a HardKnocks document into which I’ve been pouring my notes for the next hapless adventurer in Java web services. The GIS system is deployed on a Solaris machine – completely different than administering a Windows machine. Very interesting. . . and I’m getting the crash refresher course in all the Unix command stuff I briefly learned in college to figure out such things as why an 18MB download doesn’t fit on a drive that has 40MB+ free space.

I used to have (still have?) a cartoon somewhere in which a programmer is standing in front of a large (think full room-sized) mainframe. The gentleman is holding a bell, a candle, and a knife, and appears to be sacrificing a woman to the infernal machine. I found the cartoon amusing ten years ago as a newbie developer, and find it even more amusing now that I’m quite a bit more seasoned. We don’t sacrifice women, but we do sacrifice time and stress; we don’t give the machine offerings of food, but we offer it more RAM and disk space; we don’t read tomes of prophecy, but we do pore over volumes of design patterns, language references, and coding techniques.

Think I’ll try to dig up that cartoon and hang it in my office. . . maybe with a candle next to it.