Personal

In memoriam: Angel, 2005-2022, best dog ever

Dave Farquhar Personal
In memoriam: Angel, 2005-2022, best dog ever

It was the summer of 2006. We had been married a little over a year, and we decided together it was time to get a dog. We started looking, and buying the stuff we needed. Then one fateful Saturday, we took a trip to the Humane Society on Macklind Avenue.

We had a good idea what we were looking for. We had no idea we were going to find all that and more.

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A personal announcement regarding the blog

Dave Farquhar Personal

A rather large backlog of comments is requiring me to make an announcement and make some changes. Since early this summer I have been dealing with a recurrence of my carpal tunnel syndrome, and that has forced a number of changes in the way I have to blog.

For the past several months, I have been using voice recognition to produce my content. This is working much better than it did the last time I tried to use it, but we are talking c+ quality as opposed to d minus quality. There is a significant uptick in the number of mistakes, there are large numbers of words it doesn’t understand, and hyperlinks are difficult. For the majority of my audience, I hope it is better than not posting at all.

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Dave Farquhar, lunch ninja

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire, Personal, War Stories , , , , ,

My boss doesn’t think I’m human. His proof: He asks anyone who knows me if he or she has ever seen me eat. No one has.

They’ve seen evidence of me eating. But actually taking a bite? No. Not even the time we went out for BBQ.

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Just reach for it.

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

I lost a college classmate this week.

We weren’t close, so I didn’t take it as hard as some of our newsroom-mates undoubtedly did. But at the very least, as a human being with a soul and with two kids, I feel bad for the wife and two kids he left behind. It shook me up enough that a couple of my coworkers asked me Wednesday morning what was going on. I told them.

“Don’t try to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense,” the smartest guy in the room said. Read more

Memories of the land of blue shirts

Dave Farquhar Personal, Retro Computing , ,
Memories of the land of blue shirts

Internet pal Rob O’Hara reminisced about opening a Best Buy (presumably) megastore in 1994. Interestingly, that summer I was doing basically the same thing, only in Illinois. And I lived within driving distance, so they didn’t put me up for the night, though as I recall they did provide at least one meal a day, and I really think they provided two. After all, we worked really long shifts.

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My nocturnal-minded son

Dave Farquhar Parenting, Personal

My preschool-aged son and I were running errands one evening when his mind tracked towards our dog and the last time we put her in the kennel.

This was a subject of great concern to him, which reminded me of how great it would be to be four again.
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Losing my lunch

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

The worst Mondays have to be the day after a long weekend, or, as I’m fond of putting it, when Monday happens on Tuesday.

This particular Monday-on-a-Tuesday didn’t start well. I staggered in to work at 6 AM, and my boss said, well, let’s just say he didn’t say I looked well.

At 11 AM, lunchtime finally came. My lunchtime routine for years now has been to bring a frozen meal from home and microwave it. Everyone knows it. But not today, I didn’t. I went looking for my lunch, and couldn’t find it. “What are you doing?” my boss asked. “And why do you have your coat?”

“I lost my lunch,” I told my boss. That phrase has some history in my parts. Read more

My Wright City adventure

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

My wife and I trekked out to Wright City this weekend for a surprise anniversary party for one of her uncles. It was in a park in Wright City. Wright City is a small town roughly an hour west of St. Louis on I-70. It’s most famous for Big Boy’s, a roadside hole-in-the-wall restaurant that predated the national chain by a couple of decades, and for the defunct Elvis Is Alive Museum, an old laundromat that a Baptist preacher converted into a tribute to the other Elvis (Presley, not Costello), where he spun theories about what Elvis did after faking his death.

I’ve driven through Wright City more times than I can count, since it’s along I-70 in between St. Louis and Kansas City, but up until this weekend, I’ve never stopped there, even for gas.

More on all that in a minute.

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The phone in the fridge, from generation to generation

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

We took our kids to a good friend’s birthday party this weekend. Unlike the last birthday party they attended, we only had one meltdown, and it was relatively minor. When I heard the unmistakable sound of two mini-Daves screaming at each other, I excused myself to investigate.

My boys were playing with my friend’s daughters’ kitchen set, and arguing about what you could and couldn’t put in the fridge.

“It’s ironic that my two sons would be arguing about what you can put in a fridge,” I said upon my return. Read more

New digs

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

Tuesday was my first day on the new job. Who starts a new job the day before a holiday? Me. Hey, I tried to start one the day after Christmas one year. This is completely in character.

The new job uses the pieces of the CISSP I wasn’t using. It’s a stretch. Stretching is good. My new boss handed me a schedule for the next six weeks, with objectives for each week. It’s good to go in knowing what’s expected. He also said I’ll be doing a little Unix work. I was glad to hear that.