Following Edge

I discovered an interesting security situation with a new software at work.

(This post has been briefly summarized for you due to possibly sensitive content.)

Today, Lauren bought her Melissa and Doug Folding Castle (which Keith was impressed to see has a working drawbridge, working portcullis, working jail cell and crenellation).

At $70.00, this is a major purchase for her. She has been saving since around Christmas for this purchase. She has squirreled away almost all of her $2/week allowance, most of the holiday cash from her grandmothers, and any spare change she has been able to find (including a pile of pocket change collected over time from Ron). In the last month, her wallet was bulging so badly that we had her open a savings account to keep her money, with the benefit that the bank gives her little toys for every $10 she deposits.

Even more than the process of saving money, we're especially proud that she has avoided spending it which she has been saving for the castle. Occasionally, she will come across a toy or treat she really thinks she needs and we have given her the option of using her money for the impulse purchase or saving it for her castle and, in almost every case, she has saved the money. I think it's a major accomplishment for a 4-year-old.

Her next goal... a tiny Strawberry Shortcake doll. Happily it's only a few dollars, so it will not be such an effort or wait.

We're expanding. Our chance finally came this week to purchase the property next to ours where we've had troubling conflicts with the renters. I don't anticipate that it will be a great investment (since we will have to pay more than usual to motivate the seller) and managing a rental is a real pain and a real worry. But, we really want to have more control both over the behavior of the renters and over how the place is maintained. Perhaps it can move up from looking like "Hee Haw" to looking more like "Green Acres".

Now to try and get together $20,000 to cover the down payment and closing. It couldn't be at a much worse time with $13,000 due to Anne Marie's school this summer. But, we're almost certain to get Lauren to loan us $12,000 for a few years at a pretty low 4% interest rate. We're still negotiating how many "points" we'll pay in jelly beans. My dad offered to help when he was here last week, so I'll have to hit him up as well. Even beyond those options, I can borrow the rest at 6.5% on a credit card for a while. It's nice to be at a place in our life that we have too many options to consider instead of too few.

Anyhow, I've been telling Anne Marie that we may hope to get the American dream: To own our own driveway. Given that the last two residents of our house have moved to 100-acre homesteads after living here, I'm hoping that increasing our land by 50% will short-circuit that kind of move. I just don't have the energy to manage any more than that.

That's right... it's cute picture day. Why? My day was spent relocating our office from it's previously new location to the next "cage" down. There's been some break-ins and theft in the "dungeon" where the office is, so some changes were necessary. Then, following the move, I fixed another bug in the Bindings Controller and completed a proxy server and forking daemon for database access in "the project". But, really, no one wants to hear about that exciting stuff. So... today is cute picture day.

The first picture is Lauren and a boy named Cabe at Ron's Funeral. Cabe is usually a handful, so his mother was surprised that Lauren was ordering him around.

The second picture is from a bike ride Lauren and I took last week. We saw two raccoons, a dead nutria, and this family of geese with baby goslings. The geese were definitely the cutest of the bunch.

The last picture is of Lauren during that bike ride. That day, she made great progress on learning to brake in addition to riding very fast. That's important since you should know how to stop if you're going to go!

Ron relaxing at my childhood
home, 1976?

Ron Brooks died last week. I've known him since I was Lauren's age. He was a good friend of both of my parents. My dad flew into town Wednesday and we all drove to his funeral in Coquille on Thursday. The ceremony didn't do much for me since I haven't known his family and since it seemed like his family hasn't known him well since he was a teenager. Even so, I enjoyed the drive and seeing the people I did know.

Ron was 59. I have lots of memories of him from my childhood when he was more active. He is someone you could never have an argument with, but who was always ready for friendly competition. If you could beat him at something or pull a trick on him, he would really appreciate the opportunity to do you one better the next time. I've had to compare these memories to more recent memories of him as he has lost mobility and much of his outgoing personality to Rheumatoid arthritis, hip problems, and the side effects of dozens of pills for those conditions. I wish I could spend some time with the Ron I remember from my childhood.

It's been a pleasant benefit in a sad week to see my dad. We saw David and went to the Saturday Market today. He's headed back to Chicago tomorrow.

Things were really jumping at the Eugene Weblogger Meetup tonight, and it wasn't just the half-dozen kids the party next to us had dragged into the pizza place.

There were quite a few new faces. The complete roster was Kat, Kinsey, Brooke, Jeff and his friend John, Ben, Mary, and Ben Utley.

I expected David to show up after his "wilderness survival class", but when he didn't show up, we wondered if he failed to survive the survival class. Hopefully, I'll hear from him soon.

Ben Utley is the first person to have found the meetup through meetup.com, and it seemed very ironic that he came for the first time this evening, since very shortly I'll be resigning from the Meetup site as previously discussed.

Thanks to everyone who attended. It made for a great time.

There will be no extended or witty entry today due to extreme fatigue and light misery. I am providing this blathering simply to prevent 4 days from passing as they did before the last entry.

The new doctor I saw on Friday is not going to be making any medication changes until after the results from some testing. I'm collecting Axillary Temperatures (basically sticking a thermometer under your arm in the middle of the night, when you'd normally be sleeping), I'll be going to have blood drawn for tests later this week, and, worst of all, I'll be spitting in 4 tubes tomorrow for salivary saliva hormone tests. Spitting into tubes isn't so bad, but I've had to go off of my hay fever medicine, because the steroid in is messes with the test.

I'm sure that my current thyroid level is too low, but while I wait for the doc to do something (probably add T3 hormone), I am feeling terribly tired, suffering hay fever symptoms, and "enjoying" cod liver oil, per the doctor's recommendation. Now, "cod", "liver", and "oil" might all be fine at times and in their place, but put the words together on a bottle and you might as well add "don't drink this" in big red letters just below that.

That is all.

After Meetup got me to become the organizer of two local Weblogging Meetup groups, and after experiencing a crisis by putting too much energy in the effort, Meetup has now decided to fund its web site by requiring $19 a month from the organizer of each Meetup.

While they are making an introductory offer of $9 a month and while they are currently offering both groups for the price of one (because their billing system can't support more than one right now), it seems like just a matter of time before I would get roped into a few hundred dollars a year to support these Meetup groups that I already decided I had been putting too much effort into.

Anyhow, Meetup.com hasn't been doing anything to support the group. A web-site with the time of the upcoming meeting and a way for people to RSVP (which they don't frequently do). And I send people to their web site from my monthly emails, but very few webloggers have found the group through their site. There are discussion boards and other features that I don't currently use. All in all, nothing that adds up to a monthly payment.

It seems to me that Meetup.com has organized a big site with little plan for how to support it. If my opinion is mirrored by other organizers, it's likely that this move will generate a small amount of cash while driving away most of its visitors. It doesn't seem wise to me.

Anyhow, following the upcoming Eugene Weblogger April Meetup, I will be resigning as the Meetup organizer for these groups and expect that the groups will be disbanded by Meetup.com next month unless someone takes on the monthly payments.

In the meantime, I will be organizing a "Eugene Weblogger Get-together" at the same time and place starting next month. Everyone can watch for further details at the appropriate spot on this blog.

Don't forget this month's Meetup is THIS WEEK: 6:30pm this Wednesday, April 20 at Track Town Pizza on Franklin Blvd in Eugene. Come and enjoy free pizza and the usual crowd on Eugene weblog personalities.

Ironically, I'm feeling positive about things despite feeling at my lowest energy level and either fighting off a cold or a really bad beginning to the allergy season.

Family life is good. Anne Marie is finishing her Masters degree next month. Lauren has gotten past her rude princess phase and is as enjoyable and helpful as ever. We're certainly having good luck with parenting. Nothing is falling apart around the house.

Work life is OK. I am not falling behind on the critical things and making some progress on projects. Keith is making great progress on the project I am working on with him.

Personal life is OK. I'm enjoying seeing David more often since his life slid into the gutter. I'm keeping the bills paid and reading enough magazines. Oh, and my new cell phone is great and gets "5 bars" of signal strength and 80Kbits of Internet speed everywhere, including underground where my old phone got no signal at all.

My biggest problem is not that I am not succeeding at or enjoying everything I do, but that there are many family, home, work and personal things I would like to get to that I cannot because of my very limited energy level. While it's frustrating to never get to or to make slow progress on many things, I have to think it's much better than having lots of energy to do things that don't work out or that are unenjoyable.

Slow progress in the right direction is what I have to resign myself to.

I love my new Nokia 6620 cell phone. Normally, I am on the "following edge" of technology, carefully shopping for the the equipment that has only the most important features and represents reliable, proven technology. For 12 of the 18 months I've owned my current cell phone, Anne Marie has become accustomed to watching me research cell phones every few weeks. "Buying a cell phone again?", she says. "Just looking", I say.

I had been holding out for a Linux-based cell phone, but I've decided that the "telephone" software for Linux handhelds may never become proven and stable. I need a cell phone that can browse the Internet, provide a complete email interface, and manage remote UNIX computers. The remaining options aside from Linux are Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian. I have already tried Palm and found it uninspired and I would never run Windows, so my choices eventually came down to cell phones running Symbian software.

With my previous phone, an Ericsson R520M, I had already been using Bluetooth to connect my computer to the Internet using GPRS data connection technology. I knew that I wanted to keep Bluetooth, but I also knew that GPRS was too slow at about 15Kbits/sec (on T-Mobile's data network). Cingular has upgraded their data network to support EDGE data connections all over the country. It offers 50Kbits/sec to 100Kbits/sec (faster than a regular computer modem) and is available in a $24.95/mo unlimited usage package. Compared to the slow service I was getting through T-Mobile for $19.99, this seemed like the way to go.

The options for cell phones with Symbian, Bluetooth and EDGE came down to the Nokia 9500 and the Nokia 6620. If I was a "leading edge" guy, I would have gotten the 9500, which has a bigger screen and a keyboard, but I decided to save a couple hundred dollars and use a separate keyboard instead.

I got my phone on Friday (from a1wireless.com -- the cheapest deal and with great customer service) and I have to say I am impressed. The phone is very responsive both as a phone and as an Internet device. The data service from Cingular is really quick and using the email client and the Opera web browser are a breeze. You can keep the email program open while you're running other programs or talking on the phone and it will update as new mail arrives. I have already downloaded a few add-on software packages from the Internet and tried out connections to my UNIX computers. Cool!

I have ordered a headset and a foldable keyboard to make this a complete tool. Next, I'll decide whether to get a Bluetooth GPS receiver to do mapping on my phone as I've been doing on my laptop. I'll have to see how good the cell phone GPS software is. It may be hard to beat the functionality I get on the laptop, but it'd be a lot more portable. And that's the really nice thing about doing all this on a cell phone. Now, I don't have to drag along my laptop "just in case".

In short... I love my new cell phone.

To really take advantage of my remaining vacation, David and I recently took Lauren to Portland. This post is simply an excuse to fill the space to the left of these cute pictures with words.

We went to Fry's Electronics (mostly for David and I, of course), Wacky Willy's (where Lauren said "Wacky Willy's is FUN"), OMSI, the Lloyd Center and enjoyed both lunch and dinner in Portland. Lots of fun.

I would have written about this sooner, but I was wiped out with fatigue on Thursday night and passed out from an insulin reaction on Friday night. My health is doing better since my thyroid dose change early this week, but not much better, obviously. I'm still looking forward to seeing the doctor in Portland on Friday. Our friend Judith invited me to stay overnight to make the early-morning appointment. It's a very nice possibility, but I am not sure yet if I want to stay away from home.

Tomorrow is my last day of vacation. Despite the feeling of many, I did manage to only work 31 hours in the last two weeks. Not a perfectly complete vacation and not quite my goal of only 20 hours, but I think I'm feeling a bit more normalized and I did manage to make a bit of progress on my medical treatment. It was so moderately successful, I may have to try it again sometime.

Still feeling sick, but helped move Keith and my office to a new location. Had a second chick hatch today, another coming Thursday.

(This post has been briefly summarized for you due to possibly sensitive content.)

I'll be working more closely with Keith, we got some pictures from the Geocache we hid a couple months ago, and I'm going to try a naturopath in Portland to try and get some improvement to my health.

(This post has been briefly summarized for you due to possibly sensitive content.)