musings from the sleep deprived

Ok, so this is awesome. Yeah, sure, we all get spam email all the time. This one, however, caught my eye for no good reason I can think of. Once I read it all the way through, I saved it for posterity’s sake. Also, this is probably only going to be funny to those who know of TrippyMUSH. Here is the email, with bits knocked out to protect … well, me, probably.

Greetings,

My name is xxxxxx xxxxxxx, and I would like to present you with a business opportunity that offers the potential for considerable earnings.

I work for a privately held manufacturing company, which currently purchases a specific product vital to its processing operations at a price significantly above the manufacturing cost. In my proposed business venture, you would act as a stand-in supplier, providing this key material while retaining the same profit margins. My role would be to introduce you to my company as the supplier and to obtain a contract between you and my employer.

I understand that your experience with TrippyMUSH Inc doesn’t directly relate to my field. However, this venture is more in line with your personal capabilities rather than your professional experience.

I would like to confirm your current phone number xxx-xxx-xxxx. Please send a return email to verify your contact number and to schedule the most convenient time to discuss these possibilities in detail. I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Kindest Regards,

Awesomesauce. Pure … awesomesauce. Ok, maybe its only funny to me. Who knows.

I had a conversation last weekend reminding me that we all too often spend our mental energy on all the wrong sorts of anxieties. I don’t mean our passions or interests… I mean the things we choose to stress or worry about.

So, due to circumstances that are often out of our own control, we sometimes find ourselves separated from our loved ones, sometimes for extended periods of time. Imagine for a moment that loved one is your son (or daughter), and that you haven’t seen them in 15 years. And when you did, they were 14 years old. Yes, you might argue… that is perhaps an extreme case, and you’d be right. But uncommon? Unheard of? No… I think probably all too common, in fact. Anyway…

Now imagine that you head back to your hometown for a family gathering of some sort. You hear that your son is in town, but really have no way of knowing how to reach them or meet up. Imagine that you decide to hit the old haunts on a particular evening, and then, without any warning, you see your now 29 year old son sitting at the end of the bar, throwing back a beer. You approach, and the following conversation ensues…

him : Do I know you?
you : Yes, you do.
him : How long have I known you?
you : 29 years
him : Are you saying what I think you’re saying?

And then for the next several hours, you find yourselves picking up the pieces and learning about each other again, discovering and sharing.

Makes all of the other crap infesting my brain all seem rather trite by comparison. It also started another thread internally that I haven’t quite flushed out yet, but will post about soon.

Thanks for sharing, Tom. I won’t soon forget this.

Its been a fairly busy weekend, all told. Saturday we went down to Larkspur to get the FishTankFromHell(tm). Thanks to Geoff and Tom for their heroic assistance in that move. We got everything moved, including about 40 gallons of the existing water. I think there were a total of … 15 fish? Something like that. We lost one already, I think just due to the “shock” of the move. We will probably lose one more if my guess is on. But I think, given what they went through to get to my house, that is about as well a result as can be expected. The rest look great, their color has returned, swimming around well, etc etc.

We had our friend Simon come over this morning to try to get some pictures of us and the kids. They were well behaved, but didn’t sit still very well. We’ll see how they turn out. We will post pics once we have them, and of course provide Simon with some advertising for his trouble! Thanks Simon!

I left from DIA at 3:44 bound for Seattle and arrived relatively unscathed. Somewhere in the mix of security scanning and getting to my seat on the plane, I dropped my cash. I didn’t realize it. When we deplaned in Seattle, the lady sitting behind me passed me on the jetway, and handed me something, asking if it looked familiar. It was my billfold, all $150 or so it, plus receipts. I do believe at least some of my faith in honesty is restored. So thank you, nice lady sitting behind me. I do appreciate it.

Taxi to hotel, checked in. Dinner at Buckley’s. I also managed to get in touch with Johnny Rockstar, who I will be dining with on Wednesday evening. He is going to try and coerce Gamber to come along as well, who I haven’t seen in ages, so that would be great, of course. And I should be meeting Susan Ramsey and her beau for a drink or dinner or both tomorrow evening as well. Its good to be the king, is all I’ve gotta say.

Ah Seattle. I do like it here. I like the climate, could do with fewer hills. Could do with not being on a major fault line. But otherwise, I dig it. Now time to finish off my book and head for bed.

I have disabled comments on the blog here. I don’t really see the point of leaving them on. I do imagine that there are a couple of you who pull in my posts here via RSS, and maybe it would be easier to “reply” via whatever reader you’re using. Fair enough. I do, however, crosspost the link to the post from both Facebook and G+. I guess it is my expectation that the “social” aspect, or discussion of a post, if that is going to happen, would happen there. Ideally, I would be able to get rid of Facebook entirely, but I think its probably not something that is likely to happen anytime in the near future. So be it. I can handle two places where discussion can theoretically be generated. For reference, it is not my intent to turn off RSS here. I assume it is working. I don’t subscribe to myself, so I guess I don’t really know. Heh.

Feel free to let me know if you have another preference. I guess I just prefer to consolidate things to the smallest footprint, when possible.

So after not really getting any better feedback about a way to organize desktop clutter from thar Interwebzorz, I went back and took another look at ObjectDock. I still own a license. I believe it had upgraded at least once since I last used it, but not to any significant degree.

For those that aren’t aware of it, imagine the Mac dock, expanded into a “tabbed” interface so that you can create categories of icons. I can make it do the funky glowing, expanding icon thing on it if I want when I mouseover, but honestly, I’d just prefer not. The icon does grow very slightly (maybe 5-10% again above normal size), but I ignore it.

Most icons can just be dragged up into the new bars/tabs, and everything just works. A few things, notably Steam games, don’t work “out of the box”, and you have to manually redo those. The URL wasn’t something it grokked, since they use a funky Steam:URL format, like “steam://rungameid/57900”, for example (that one is Duke Nukem Forever). So I had to redo those by hand, but otherwise it just works. My desktop is once again clutter free. Phew.

As part of all the aforementioned effort to make my online life more simple, I’ve also experimented in getting a gallery to be static content as well.
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So, adventure #1. As mentioned in a previous post, I’m trying to use Amazon’s free service to its maximum extent. Here is how that went down: Read more

If you go around EC2, and just use the S3 storage facilities, there’s a lot to be gained here. The huge caveat is that you’re not dealing with a fully functional, cgi-enabled, php or other dynamic generated thing. This is just a raw mapping of files to an very simple httpd daemon. Thats it. Nothing else. So all said, your whole site has to be static content, with no funky stuff. Read more

I spent a bit of time today moving the blog up to my hosting provider. Ultimately, I’m trying to slowly relieve my dependence on the machine I have at home to just the core services that I can’t move. Things like MUSHes, minecraft server, mailing lists, etc. Read more

New baby, books, WoW. Oh yeah… Read more

See, if I wasn’t so lazy about updating this, I would not face this particular conundrum. Read more

It was a relatively eventful day, with much ado about… eventually, nothing. Read more

This is a concept that I’ve struggled with for a very long time. Maybe, like with most things philosophical, its something I probably won’t ever stop thinking about, at least in some sense. Read more

Alright, so I believe I have everything cleaned up. I have, I think, a fresh start here, and can begin posting without further ado.
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After some recent reading of friend’s blogs, I’ve decided to give this a go, again. I’ve said this before, and maybe this is just another “on” cycle for me, but we’ll see. Anyway, I’m going to clean up links and such, maybe do some touch up on the theme, and then hopefully get some posts going again. We’ll see.