Personal

Recovery fluff

Dave Farquhar Personal

I did not feel good this morning, and it didn’t get much better during the day. By lunch, it felt like someone had crammed a tennis ball down my throat and it didn’t seem to matter how many cough drops I sucked down.
I stumbled home, took an ibuprofen, and slept for an hour. When I woke up I felt a lot better. The swelling had subsided and my throat felt almost normal.

I got up and fixed dinner and bound a book–Democracy in America, Vol. 1 by Alexis de Tocqueville. It looks so good to finally have that book on my shelf. It’ll be even better when the glue has dried on the spine and I’ll be able to read it.

After doing a Japanese punch-bind, I glued a strip of paper with the title onto the spine for extra strength and to make the book look more like a commercial paperback. Normally you want to show off the punch-binding, but this early effort is nothing to look at. It needed to be covered.

My what-I-did-tonight piece

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , , , ,

I hate to do a boring this-is-what-I-did-tonight post, but I figure the occasional one of those is better than silence from my direction.
I’m sick again. I think this is some kind of record. This pattern of five-day breaks between illnesses really better not last much longer.

So I went out to stock up on sick supplies. You know the drill: chicken soup, zinc lozenges, vitamins. I went in to get my vitamins, then found myself blocked in, so I continued down the aisle and found the first vacant aisle to cut through. Of course it was the make-up section. I felt especially manly cutting through the make-up section, especially considering my next stop was… the sewing section. I needed a needle and thread, for two reasons. I’ve got two shirts with buttons popped off, and I learned a cool way to bind books, but you need a drill (which I have) and a needle and thread (which I didn’t) in order to do it.

So I picked up a couple different colors of thread, then wandered aimlessly for a while until I stumbled across the needles. I found a 25-pack for 64 cents. Good deal.

I really, really hope I looked as lost as I felt.

So when I got home I bound a short book. The idea is this: You drill holes a quarter inch from the top and the bottom, then drill two more holes spaced two inches apart. Cut a length of thread about four times as long as the book is high. You can get the sewing technique from this PDF file. Traditionally, you use Japanese stab binding for short books of drawings, poetry, or journals. But I found it works just fine for everyday stuff. I recently printed a few public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and this provides me with an easy and extremely cheap way to bind them.

I was trying unsuccessfully to sew on a button when my phone rang. It was my girlfriend. She asked what I was doing. I told her I was making a fool of myself trying to remember how to sew on a button. She described a technique to me, and when I got off the phone with her, I gave it another try. I think I ended up using a combination of her technique and my mom’s, but it worked. The button’s not going anywhere.

Something she said gave me my masculinity back. She asked how I was at threading needles. I said I had some trouble doing it. She said part of the reason sewing is traditionally a women’s thing is because women have smaller hands, which are more adept to the fine movements that sewing requires. My hands aren’t huge, but they’re bigger than most women’s. She said threading a needle requires good vision, concentration, and a steady hand. I’ve got good vision and concentration. But every time I tried to do something that required a steady hand, my dad just shook his head and said, “You’ll never be a surgeon.” And they’ve only gotten worse with age.

And before all this, I spent some time writing up a piece talking about all the lovely things Microsoft did to DR DOS in the late 1980s. This is in response to some mudslinging that happened over at my recent anti-Microsoft piece. Normally I’d just ignore a troll who doesn’t even have enough guts to put his name on his taunts–all I know about him is his IP address is 12.209.152.69, which tells me he’s using a cable modem attached to AT&T’s network, he lives in or around Salt Lake City, Utah, and at this moment he’s not online–but I think this story needs to be told anyway. Depth is good. Sources are good. And there’s a wealth of information in the legal filings from Caldera. And those filings prove that my memory of these events–I remember reading about the dirty tricks in the early 1990s on local St. Louis BBSs–was pretty accurate.

I’m not surprised. I have a knack for remembering this stuff, and I had occasion to meet an awful lot of really knowledgeable people back then.

If I can still remember that Commodore’s single-sided 170K 5.25″ drive was the 1541, its double-sided 340K drive was the 1571, and its 800K 3.5″ drive was the 1581 and I remember the command to make the 1571 emulate the 1541, and why you would want to emulate a 1541, I can probably just as easily remember what you had to do to get Windows 3.1 running under DR DOS and what the reasons were for jumping through those hoops. That history is more recent, and at this stage in my life, I’m a lot more likely to have occasion to use it.

Not that I’m trying to brag. I can remember the names of the DR DOS system files, and I can remember George Brett’s batting average in 1983, but at the end of a five-minute conversation with someone I just met, I’ll probably struggle to remember a name. Or if you send me to the store, you’d better give me a list, because I’m good at forgetting that kind of stuff.

I suspect the DR DOS piece is half done. I might just get it posted this week.

Will this go down as my greatest crime against humanity?

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

I can’t decide if I should feel distressed that one of my Wikipedia entries directly led to the creation of the Martha Stewart entry on Wikipedia.
Allow me to explain myself. A link to a non-existant article about Frank W. Woolworth on a page in my watchlist was bugging me. So I wrote up Mr. Woolworth, which led me to do a writeup about the company he founded. Now I was born long after the five-and-dime’s heyday, but the concept was so central to many people’s memory of the 20th century that it bothered me that it wasn’t there. And even though Woolworth’s company is a shadow of its former self today–so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought it was out of business–Frank Woolworth invented the techniques that made Sam Walton the richest man in America.

I guess a cynical take on history could be that Frank Woolworth dramatically changed the look of downtown America, a century before Sam Walton destroyed it.

Woolworth’s five-and-dime stores evolved into the modern discount store we know today, which led me to write up an entry on Target Corporation and make significant additions to the entry on Kmart Corporation, since Woolworth at one time had two chains that competed directly with two of Kresge’s (now Kmart’s) chains.

Then someone noticed the Kmart entry didn’t mention Martha Stewart. Next thing I know, Martha Stewart has an entry in the Wikipedia.

Now Martha Stewart joins the long list of pop-culture icons who have entries in the Wikipedia.

I guess I really should go back to researching Microsoft.

Am I better than 50%?

Dave Farquhar Personal

I did a server migration, mostly from home, today. We’ll find out at what cost later. Batch files did the bulk of the work, but I underestimated a few quotas when I prepped in advance a few weeks ago, and it took a few hours to straighten that out. Funny how a handful of users always eat up your time. And it’s almost always the same users.
I couldn’t help but notice some of the filenames flying by as my manual copies went on. Now I know who installs software on their network drives. And one or two other people appeared to have dumped their Windows system directories to network drives, which left me wondering why? If Windows breaks, it’s right there on the CD. I don’t understand end-users anymore. Maybe I never did.

I watched Eight Men Out afterward. I remember watching that movie with my dad, years and years ago. It had too little baseball and too much behind-the-scenes stuff in it for me then. I liked it better this time around. It was as much the story of a pitcher facing the end of his career trying to take care of his family as it was the story of a handful of guys throwing the World Series. I guess I had to be older to appreciate that aspect.

I’m hoping I’ll be back up to speed tomorrow. But now, I’m headed off to bed.

My experience with online dating doesn’t match PC Magazine’s

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , ,

OK, I guess it’s time I come out of hiding and make a confession: I’ve used an online dating service. And, if I found myself single and unattached again, I’d probably do it again.
I don’t know if the stigma around online dating still exists, but the inescapable fact is I’m terribly shy in person, especially with women. But I can write a little and when you read a little bit of what I’ve written, you get to know me pretty well. So the computer allows me to get past that shyness.

I saw the service I used reviewed on PC Magazine’s web site this week. It was pretty critical. Every other review I’ve heard about it gushed. And truth be told, in early September I was gushing pretty nasty things about it. I even told some people to stay away from it. It turned things around after a month. Maybe two. I can’t remember the time frame anymore.

The service is eharmony.com. I got that out of the way. Now let me tell you that if you heard about it on Dr. Dobson, which was the original source I heard about it from second- or third-hand, Dobson was gushing about it. Frankly I don’t care much what Dobson has to say about singlehood. Live 10 years listening to people ask you what’s wrong with you because you don’t have a girlfriend, and then I’ll listen to you. I’m not terribly interested in the opinions of this week’s fifty-something who got married in his early 20s on how to cure the disease called singlehood in the early 21st century. (Since when is it a disease anyway?)

Contrary to what Dobson’s gushing might have you believe, eharmony isn’t a magic bullet. Now don’t get me wrong: It does have potential. When one of my friends called me up all excited about it and he described its process, I was willing to humor him. It starts out with a psychological profile. I remember doing a psychological profile using a program called Mind Prober on a Commodore 64 in the late 1980s. It did a pretty good job of profiling me. It got a few details wrong, but I grew into those. Spooky, huh? So if a computer with 64K of memory, 1 megahertz of processing power, and 340K of available secondary storage could profile me, a modern computer could do just fine so long as the profiling algorithm and data is good. So I believe in computer psychological profiling.

Another part of the idea is that you interview thousands of married couples. Happily married couples who’ve been that way for a very long time. That’s a small percentage of people who get married. Take a large sample set, profile them, and you can eventually get an idea of what personality traits are compatible long-term. Nice theory. I buy that. I’ll definitely take it over guesswork.

PC Magazine expressed doubts over use of science in finding love. Considering the success rate of the traditional methods, I’ll take whatever edge I can get.

Here’s what happened with me.

PC Magazine’s reviewer bemoaned her lack of initial matches. I was the opposite. Christian males seem to be a rarity, or at the very least, highly outnumbered. But I think I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

It started off with a questionaire. It took PC Magazine’s reviewer 45 minutes to fill it out. I’m pretty sure it took me closer to an hour and a half. It’s important to consider the questions carefully and answer honestly. A lot of the questions were things I hadn’t thought about in a long time, if ever. By the time I was done, I felt like eharmony’s computer probably knew me better than most of my closest friends. It was that exhaustive. Some of the questions are about you, and some of them are about what you’re looking for. Again, it’s important to be honest. And specific. And picky. The important questions for me were about faith. I won’t date someone who doesn’t share that with me, period. It understood that. It went so far as to give me a list of denominations and ask which ones were OK and which ones weren’t. I ticked off all of the evangelical-minded denominations, then I ticked Lutheran, just because it felt weird to leave my own out. Then I un-checked Presbyterian, only because the girl who will always have the title of The Ex-Girlfriend was/is Presbyterian. We all have baggage, and that’s some of mine.

The system immediately found four matches. Over the course of 2-3 months (I don’t remember how long I stayed) it would find close to 20. I started exchanging questions with one of them right away. I don’t remember the exact process right now. I know early on you’d read a superficial profile of the person–excerpts from their interview. You’d learn things like where they’re from and how to make them smile. If you’re both interested in talking, you pick from a list of questions to exchange back and forth. The first set is multiple choice. One question I asked everyone, without fail, was “If you were going out to dinner with a friend, what kind of restaurant would you choose?” And there were four answers, ranging from a fancy restaurant to a greasy spoon. I wanted to weed out the snobs, which was why I asked that one. I think you got a second round, where the questions were still canned, but you got to write out your own answers, limited to a couple of paragraphs. (I usually pushed the limit. Surprise!) I don’t recall if there was a third, but if there was, it was a shorter-still number of questions, permitting a longer answer. When you got through that round, you entered “Open Communication,” which is basically e-mail, with no restrictions.

The first girl I talked to was from Defiance, Missouri, which is about 45 minutes northwest of St. Louis proper. As I recall, she was 30 and she worked in sales. She was really interested at first but got pretty cyclical. We’d talk a couple of times one day, then a week might pass. It didn’t pan out–one day I got the notice she’d chosen to close communication to concentrate on other matches. One nice thing about doing this online–rejection’s a lot easier when it’s not in person.

I can’t remember where the next girl I talked to was from. Across the river in Illinois but I don’t remember the town. She was 24 or 25, and worked in banking. We took off like a rocket. The first time we talked on the phone, we talked for three hours or something obnoxious like that. I had serious hopes for this match, until we met in person. Everything right had come out all at once, and then, everything wrong came out all at once. She found out I’m not as good at communicating in person as in writing. And she found out I can be distant. I had some red flags too. She seemed to want to move a lot faster than I would be able to, and there were personality traits that weren’t necessarily bad, but they just weren’t right for me. And I knew I would never live up to the expectations she had for me. I may be smart and I may be a nice guy, but I am still human. I felt pretty bad after this date. I stopped believing in the approach and took a serious look at what other options I might have.

Then along came the girl from Manchester, Missouri. She was a year older than me. She played guitar. She led Bible studies. She was a math teacher by trade. I was enamored before we even started talking. And it started off great. She answered every question with the response I was looking for. We started talking, and I thought we were going great. Then she got cold feet and started to withdraw. We talked on the phone a few times and it was pleasant, but she seemed to be big into rules and guidelines, whereas I’m more interested in learning the rules to follow and understanding them well enough to know when to break them. (The exception being 10 particular rules you never break, which you can find in Exodus.) We went on one double date. Once again I wasn’t as strong of a communicator as in writing, and I got the distinct impression she wasn’t very interested in continuing. I was questioning whether I was myself. I’ve still got her phone number somewhere but it’s been four or five months. I doubt I ever use it.

Meanwhile, the girl from Troy, Illinois came into the picture. She and the girl from Manchester were contemporaries, but the girl from Manchester got the head start. I’m pretty sure it was the guitar. She was a student, age 21. I was concerned about the age gap. That was the only question mark about her. Her answers to my questions were mostly the second-best answers. The questions she chose to ask me puzzled me a bit–I had trouble figuring out what it was she wanted to know about me. (With all of the other girls, it was plain as day what they were trying to find out.) We stumbled into open communication, talked for a while, and I still couldn’t get over that age thing. Finally she asked me, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but where’s this going? Do I ever get to meet you?”

So we met in Belleville, then went to O’Fallon, had dinner, and drove around O’Fallon for a couple of hours, talking. My eharmony subscription was up for renewal in a week or so. I let it lapse.

I won’t go into specifics because our relationship is half her business, and I don’t make it a habit to go putting other people’s business on my blog. For the first two months we dated, she got irritated with me once. I’m pretty sure that’s a world record. Most people are doing well if they only get irritated me once over a 24-hour period. Lately I screw up once or twice a month. Most couples I know are thrilled with just once or twice a day.

At one point I seriously questioned the relationship, even to the point where if I’d had to make a yes or no decision right then and there I would have ended it. But that’s not unusual and it’s healthy. And I’m used to being on the other end of that every couple of weeks.

The bottom line is, while we surprise each other, most of the surprises are good ones, and the bad surprises generally aren’t huge surprises. For about 25 years, the only women who understood me at all were my mom and my sister. She’s rocketed onto that list, and frankly, they all probably jockey for that #1 spot. Not bad for someone I first met in person in October. I think at this point my biggest complaint about her is that she doesn’t like mushrooms or olives. I’m sure she’s got bigger complaints about me but she keeps coming around anyway, so they can’t be too big.

I’m not going to say that eharmony is the only way to meet someone, and I won’t say it guarantees you’ll meet someone. I know in at least one case I was a girl’s only match, and it couldn’t have felt good when we flopped. It’s not a magic bullet, no matter what anyone says. I had 17 matches at one point and it still took three months to find someone I felt like I should be dating. Roughly a third were interested in me but I wasn’t interested in them, about a third I was interested in but they weren’t interested in me, and about a third had enough interest on both sides that we talked. If you’re looking for a date this week, you won’t find it on eharmony but you might very well find it somewhere else. And eharmony is definitely expensive.

But I was looking for something long-term, and I think I found it.

Like I said earlier, I’d go back. And that says something.

Dave goes to the doctor

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , ,

After spending the weekend in bed… wait, that sounds bad. After spending the weekend burning up and feeling like my tonsils were on fire… wait, that’s not much better. After spending the weekend sick, I called my doctor.
Actually, my girlfriend made me do it. From me describing the symptoms, she thought I probably had strep throat. Since she’s had it three times and since I would like to see her again sometime in the near future, I made the call this morning. He had an opening at three o’clock. I said I’d take it. I popped a couple of ibuprofen and crawled back into bed.

At 2:15, I ventured out into the bad, bad world. Let me clarify: Right now, anything that isn’t my bedroom or my bathroom qualifies as the bad, bad world. I went out Sunday for some sickie necessities and that was a big mistake. Not that it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. I can think of worse things that have happened to me. Getting my wisdom teeth taken out wasn’t one of them, however. I stopped off at the ATM to get some fast cash, which I hoped would cover my copay and my script. Then I headed for the doctor’s office, which thanks to the usual spectacular driving on Telegraph Road, took me the better part of half an hour. The doctor’s office is less than five miles away.

Apparently I hadn’t been there since 1999. Or that was the last time I filled out any paperwork, at least. I was pretty sure I’d been in more recently than that. But I wasn’t in any mood to argue. I wasn’t in much mood to fill out forms either, but that doesn’t have anything to do with being sick. I remember one time, early in college, when I had to fill out a questionaire. One of the entries asked us about our favorite activities. I wrote down, “filling out forms.” (Those who know me well know that I’m never, ever sarcastic. Never. Nunca jamas. I don’t even know the meaning of the word, or I wouldn’t if it hadn’t been a dictionary.com word of the day.)

So I filled out the form, including questions about my insurance coverage I had no way of knowing. Some of it was on my insurance card. I guessed about the rest. The time that passed between me filling it out and handing it in would be ample time for it all to change anyway. For all I knew, Aetna wouldn’t be my insurance provider five minutes later. For all I know, it hasn’t been since 2001 and I’ll be getting a really nice phone call in the morning.

But the form satisfied everyone enough that I got to go in to see my doctor. If I committed fraud in the process, well, hopefully they still allow one phone call after they haul you off to jail. I’ll call Benefits and tell them to make sure the doctor gets paid. And I’ll politely ask someone to let my Pastor know I’m in jail. You know Lutherans. They take an offering every opportunity they get, so they’ll welcome an opportunity to take up a collection to bail me out. I hope. He’ll probably do it if I say I’m supposed to be an usher on Sunday.

They put me in a little room with a padded table, a sink, and a couple of chairs. There were certificates on the wall that said my doctor had been in the Army in the early 1980s and had studied at various military academies. There were a couple of expired AOA and AMA certifications. And nowhere was there any indication of where he’d gone to school. There are only two places for a doctor to go to school, of course: Kansas City and Kirksville.

The doctor came in and asked how I was feeling today. In that usual cheerful voice that people expect a terse “fine.” But I didn’t feel fine. I felt like I had a basketball in my throat and I wanted it out. So I told him my throat hurt. He asked how long my throat had hurt. I said since Saturday. He shined a light into my mouth and told me to say ah. After two minutes of trying to see what he needed to see, he gave up, got a tongue depresser, and shoved whatever had been blocking his view out of the way. I could tell you what he said he saw, but it’s gross. It also was something I could have told him if he’d just asked.

As he got out a long cotton swab, he consulted my records to get some basics on my life so he could ask the kinds of questions that made it sound like he knew me. His acting skills didn’t impress me. Then he took a culture. I didn’t quite cough up a lung while he was doing that, but I tried.

He told me there lots of diseases that can cause a throat to hurt. Then I got an 8th grade Biology lesson. He told me there were two basic types of organisms that can infect your throat. He paused for a really, really long time as he put the culture in its test gizmo and wrote stuff down on my chart. Then he continued: “What I was getting at is that your throat can be infected by bacteria, or it can be infected by viruses.” Then I figured out that he was in the process of explaining to me why he didn’t just automatically write me a prescription for penicillin. So I finished the paragraph for him: “But if it’s a virus there’s no point in giving me an antibiotic because an antibiotic can’t kill a virus.”

I’m pretty sure that 8th grade Biology was the last A that I ever got in a science class. Well, other than Computer Science 103 in college, but that doesn’t count. Even a dumb journalist can get an A in that class.

But yes, I remember my basic biology.

I tested negative for strep. The doctor asked how old I was. I said 28. I hadn’t figured out yet where he was going. He put his hands around my throat–something a lot of people have longed to do for a very long time–and looked for enlarged glands. Then he had me lay back and he felt around my abdomen. Then he checked my breathing.

Then he started telling me about a virus that can make your throat sore: Mononucleosis.

“Mono!?” I interrupted him. I know about mono. I know it’s the bane of college students everywhere. College students tend to get it and it tends to ruin their careers. I remember an uptight health teacher citing mono as a reason why people shouldn’t kiss. Probably the same health teacher who had both of his kids through artificial insemination. With his wife. He was the donor. Yes, he was a bit paranoid. And weird. But I’m getting off topic for about the 47th time today.

“Have you been around anyone lately who has mono?” he asked.

“Not that I know of,” I said. And that’s true. No, I still won’t tell you where I work, but it’s hard to imagine anyone there running around with mono. We’re talking a place where you’re not considered an adult until all of your kids have graduated college. Not to mention that some of those guys’ attitudes about women make me wonder how they ever would have had the opportunity to ever be exposed to mono, let alone the opportunity to have kids who would then grow to college age…

And as far as–ahem–extracurricular opportunities to be exposed to mono, I come up blank there too. I’m not exactly the kind of guy who kisses everything that walks upright and breathes oxygen.

“Well, you’re too old for mono to be very likely,” he said, snapping me back to the present reality. “So I’m going to give you penicillin. But I’m going to order blood work.”

And then I was off for another one of my all-time favorite activities–having blood drawn–but there wasn’t really anything interesting about that. I didn’t look, as usual, it hurt, as usual, and I didn’t know when it was over, as usual, and they put a piece of cotton the size of Texas on it afterward, as usual, held in place by an impossibly tiny band-aid, as usual. The only thing unusual about it was the band-aid had Bugs Bunny on it. Good thing I wasn’t going to work afterward. I’d get teased about that. Good thing only the Internet’s going to know about that.

Then my Bugs Bunny band-aid and I went off to get my penicillin, where I found out that my prescription card is no good. Great, another phone call… The pharmacist said penicillin is really cheap though, so he asked if he should just check the cash price. I said fine. Not having to wait until Tuesday to start my dosage was worth a few bucks to me. The price came up $9.53, Tax Man Carnahan Holden’s cut included. I’m pretty sure my copayment would have been 20 bucks. So not having a working insurance card worked to my advantage, to the tune of 10 bucks.

Then I went home. No light blinking on my answering machine. That’s good, at least if you ascribe to the theory that bad news travels fast, which I do. I popped my first penicillin, and started to wait the 8 hours until my next.

And I checked the usual symptoms of mono. The only ones I have–sore throat, achy joints, diminished appetite–can be symptoms of absolutely anything.

So we’ll see.

So this is how Worldcom does business?

Dave Farquhar Personal

I’ve heard horror stories about Worldcom before, but never experienced them firsthand–to my knowledge.
Then I noticed yesterday that MCI (a division of Worldcom–they’re distancing themselves from the name now) has been charging me for long-distance service at my apartment. I vacated my apartment several months ago. I switched long-distance providers from MCI months before that. Like August. I waited on hold nearly half an hour before I got to talk to a customer service rep, who refused to do anything about it. I told her I’d call Discover and have them dispute the charges. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, is there anything else I can help you with tonight?”

“Obviously not,” I said. I called Discover. Within five minutes, they’d begun the dispute process and credited my account.

Now I understand Worldcom’s plan for making money.

“In order to better serve our shareholders, we have scaled back our customer service operations in order to concentrate on billing our former customers for services not rendered…”

After I got off the phone with the much friendlier, much more helpful people at Discover, I took one of those phone calls you never want to take. A friend, betrayed by another friend, life now falling apart in part because of the betrayal. A prideful but immature Christian crossed the line between genuine Christian concern and churchy gossip. And there’s nothing I can do about any of it.

Well, I can prevent it from happening again. And I will.

So that’s why the content I intended to have posted today isn’t posted. We’ll push things off for a day.

Vaguely productive Saturday

Dave Farquhar Personal

When I gained consciousness Saturday morning, I was on the phone.
I don’t remember it ringing. I don’t remember the caller identifying himself. All I remember is a coworker describing a problem with a tape backup. I had to ask him at least three times which server it was, and it took me a few minutes to figure out where that server was and what it did.

That was about 5:15 this morning. By about 6, I’d figured out what went wrong with the backup, gotten it running, and crawled back into bed.

Such is the life of the professional sysadmin. The 1-AM road trips to Miami Street in south St. Louis or to Highway 40 and Mason Ridge in Town & Country are nearly as delightful. But having a regular paycheck really is delightful.

The phone rang again about 9. I’d told the world I’d be up by then. But I hadn’t counted on being roused from a deep sleep when I was half done. I was slightly more coherent this time–I remember the phone ringing, I remember clumsily knocking the phone and the base off my nightstand, and I remember picking it up and saying hello. I didn’t remember I’d promised to edit video that morning.

So I spent much of the day assembling clips, hunting down stray frames, and generally polishing a pair of just-over-two-minute videos.

During my breaks, I investigated the possibility of upgrading to the latest version of b2 0.61. It works and its feature list is impressive–not far off from offering what Movable Type offers out of the box and in some ways superior–but I couldn’t get all of Steve’s custom code to work with it yet so I haven’t gone live with it.

My girlfriend called around 8 pm. I told her I was tired. She called me an old man. I was too tired to protest. She told me she replaced her Vin Diesel wallpaper on her computer with a picture of the two of us.

I’m moving up in the world.

Or maybe I dreamt that last part.

Pretty Boy rides again (unfortunately)

Dave Farquhar Personal

I was at the grocery store on Sunday with my girlfriend, Amanda, stocking up on whatever was on sale. Since I’ve got a pantry now, I’m gonna use it. As we went through the store, we passed a petite girl, around 5’4″, with sandy blonde hair.
Then her boyfriend and her (maybe their) daughter appeared. He was about six feet, with short, cropped dark hair. It was longer on top and it was teased out at the edges. It was styled more than most guys bother with, and he didn’t look all that happy to be there or all that happy to be with her. He had lots of words written all over him: Cocky. Pretty Boy. Arrogant. Jerk.

She and I made eye contact, briefly. There was an intense sense of curiosity and at least a hint of longing in her eyes, as if she was wondering if I was like her guy. If all guys are like her guy.

I didn’t think much of it until we went to the checkout line. The trio came around just after we did. She went into the checkout lane next to the one we were in. Pretty Boy got into the checkout lane behind us. After I paid, I walked down to the end to start bagging, and Amanda stayed behind in the lane, feeding the remaining groceries down the conveyer belt to me. As she fed the last couple of items down to me, Pretty Boy rammed his cart into her back. “Excuse me,” he said, very loudly and impatiently. She scurried out of his way.

I bagged the last couple of items as Amanda walked around beside me. I swung the cart around towards the exit, pushed it a few inches, then turned around to Pretty Boy. “Next time, why don’t you say ‘Excuse me,’ before you mow her down with the cart?” I asked.

“Oh, shut up,” Pretty Boy said angrily.

Ah, so I’d come upon the center of the universe and I was in the wrong for not acknowledging that. In his mind. (The rest of us don’t live in that world, fortunately.)

I looked Pretty Boy straight in the eye. “Thanks for being a [one-syllable word that begins with “p” and rhymes with “kick”],” I said.

The cashier looked our direction. Pretty Boy looked around, then looked abck at me and mouthed a three-letter word that starts with “F” that’s derogatory to homosexual males.

Noting that he wasn’t worth any more expenditure of oxygen, I turned around and walked away.

Why Pretty Boy chose to question my sexuality with my girlfriend (who holds her own in the looks department too) standing right there, I’m not sure. I asked her about that after we got in the car. The best I could think of was that maybe he didn’t know what the word means. After all, “homosexual” is a complex idea and the word is three syllables more than the longest word he uttered in our presence, and the longest sentence he uttered was all of three words, including “Oh,” which is a common filler word thrown in to sentences to buy time as your brain searches for the right words to say. So Pretty Boy didn’t exactly bowl me over with his speaking ability or intelligence.

I also noted that my one friend who does happen to be homosexual is 6’2″ and wouldn’t have had any trouble whatsoever knocking Pretty Boy down on his cocky, arrogant butt and mopping the floor with it. And he probably wouldn’t have hesitated to do it either.

That’s overreacting. Calling attention to his behavior and letting his true colors shine through for all around to see ought to be pennance enough for what he did. She said he didn’t hurt her.

But if Pretty Boy’s behavior is indicative of how he treats women, I can’t help but think that if someone does overreact next time and sprawls Pretty Boy across the floor, the world will be a better place for it.

At least for the moment before he stands back up.

A moving story

Dave Farquhar Personal

My mom came in and helped me move this weekend. Moving is a pain, which is why I do it as little as possible. I’m hardly a neat freak, as any of my coworkers can attest to, which makes it harder.
But Mom told me a story.

Not long after she met my Dad, she helped him move. She came over to his apartment, and he handed her two boxes. One was a small box, slightly bigger than a shoebox. The other was a really big box. She pointed over to the box my 19″ monitor came in, and said the box he handed her was bigger than that one.

“Put the clean dishes in the small box, and the dirty dishes in the big box,” he told her.

She opened the cabinet and found a couple of dishes. She put them in the small box. She found a few dirty dishes in the sink.

“But there aren’t that many dirty dishes,” she said.

“Hold on,” he said. He opened the dishwasher. It was bursting. Then he walked over and opened up the oven. More dirty dishes. “And I think there are some in here too,” he said, opening up the freezer. There were.

“David, your dad was a slob,” Mom said.

Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about those times I waited until all my dishes were dirty before I washed them. I’ve never had to resort to putting dirty dishes in the oven and freezer.