Author: admin

791. Reflections on a Monday Night

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I found a moment to collect my thoughts amidst the steady din of three young souls crying out to be heard. Life has been good and hard and amazing and difficult and sad and never lonely. I spent the last 24 hrs living another man’s life, a carpenter’s life I suppose. I built an indoor treehouse. A loft really. It consists of 4 posts spread around a raised platform and anchored by a rim of boards. It looked odd and fell over a lot until I realized that the structure needed a crossbar to support the legs. I used the leftover wood to place two crossbars and voila! kid land.

Sadly, this does not make me a better or even happier father. It remains another moment of disappointment. The kids love the structure, but never bothered to acknowledge that I built it. Maybe deep down inside (maybe right at the surface) I feel the need to be recognized for my efforts, and It is really sad when not even your kids are willing to do so. Of course, this is the life I chose on a really basic level. I come from a home where my work, skills, and effort were thankless. I married into the same environment, and now I have kids that carry on that grand tradition. So, maybe the problem is with me and this seemingly foolish need for recognition (positive, because they’ll heap on the negative like pouring water on a fire).

What I do know is that tonight I stood in my backyard and listened to the world move around me. In that sound of barking dogs, distant trains, and families gathering around the television set I found a certain peace. It is the peace of knowing that I am a part of something that can be as wonderful as I allow it to be or as terrible. The power is in the perception.

I don’t get to have very many solitary moments in the summers, but I get to have time with my family. I get to wakeup well after the sun touches the sky. I get to play video games until I’m burned out on the games and often the systems. I get to stand outside feeling the warm summer breeze and enjoying the sounds of the world hustling along.

Doesn’t sound bad at all.

790. Losing is Never Easy

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It all started with a picture. I was surfing the web on a wednesday, looking for something cool  and techy to slap up on the blog. I saw a picture of a three monitor solution in widescreen. That led me to an incredible youtube clip of people playing first-person-shooters using three monitors in tandem. I was hooked. I wanted to do this in the worst possible way, never once considering that the worst possible way meant poor planning and research.

I went out and priced monitors. Too expensive. I went only to popular sites. Too expensive. I scoured ebay. Bingo. I finally found and won a monitor for $50 (with shipping included). Weeks later the monitor arrived and I was shocked to realize that the monitor’s aspect ratio of 16:9 was different than my 16:10 monitors. No biggie, I just couldn’t play at the ratio I wanted.

No, I couldn’t play at all.

I didn’t have a DVI-D cable. $25 later that problem resolved itself. However, I still could not play at any sensible speed or graphic capability.

Turns out you need to be working through a linkage called SLI in order to get smooth 3d play over three+ monitors and 2+ video cards. The set I’d collected over the years no longer had the SLI connector, so all the cash spent went for naught and now I find myself with an extra monitor and no opportunity to do the three screen solution without papering the problem with hundred dollar bills.

In other words, I need to concede defeat before blowing a wad o cash I don’t have on a problem that has minimal relevance to my daily life. The old me would have blown the cash. Today’s me is willing to concede. Sometimes concession yields nice things. Now I can save that money for something I really need,like a new S-belt.

I learn something new every day and today’s lesson is about stubbornness. Losing at such a small and insignificant thing used to crush me inside, but today it didn’t. It bothers the heck out of me, but I can move past it and focus on the larger challenges in life, like grading papers and building my boys a loft-fort.

More on that next time.

789. On Friendship & Marriage

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I think a lot of people get caught up in the knowledge that your life partner is supposed to be your best friend. This does not mean that partner is supposed to be your only friend. In fact it is healthy to have a life outside of your relationship. It creates a sense of ownership in your life. In other words, if you have friends beyond your partner and a life beyond your partner it means that you have something that belongs to you and something that you bring to the table, socially, that is different from what your partner brings.
All of this bubbled to the surface when I started thinking about how little time I spend with friends. I felt like being away from my friends was okay in one sense, because it meant more time with the wife. However, it also meant that I didn’t have access to that writer’s world (I tend to hang out with writers) nor did I have guy time. Both of these are incredibly important to maintaining who I am. This is probably the key part of having your own friends–you have a better chance of holding on to that core being that your partner married.
Some Thoughts:
1. I have been looking into evernote integration through wordpress. The software is called everpress and it allows me to upload posts from evermote-which I use on everything from my phone to my desktop–directly to my 10 minute rule. I am also looking into Canvas integration for school-based blogs. Oh the ways web 2.0 is shaping our interactions.
2. Speaking of evernote, I’m blogging through evernote right now, expecting to cut and paste the words to either my iweb or the wordpress, provided I get that working. The problems have been narrowed to 3: importing all the old stuff, incorporating a theme that doesn’t crash the entire blog (happened twice), and upgrading to 3.4. Currently working with the capable ixwebhosting folks to resolve said problems.