So You Think You Can Dance

Tonight we watched the So You Think You Can Dance results show.  We’ve been watching the show all season (and the last few seasons).   Tonight they picked the top four dancers to be in the finale.  I like this show because they dance choreographed routines that I find entertaining.  There is a lot of down time where they talk and the judges talk but the dancing makes up for it.

McDonalds Playland

Tonight, D went to a wine something party at her friends house.  It was one of those girl parties where everyone who comes is supposed to buy something.  Don’t worry.. she bought some stuff

I took some things to GoodWill and then stopped at McDonald’s playland with the kids.  The climbed all over the play gym and worked up a sweat and then we came home.   They love that place for the play area and the toys.  I don’t think they even care what the food tastes like!

Blog Consolidation

I had too many blogs. Now I have consolidated them down to 2 wordpress blogs. I have this blog which is the consolidation of (my personal blog, my Smallalk news blog and my entertainment blog). I still have my colic business blog (which I haven’t posted to in a while). Hopefully this consolidation will make my life easier. It does have 1 obvious advantage. Now I can blog in 1 place only and backup 1 place only for everything other than my colic business.

I hope this consolidation doesn’t confuse anyone too much. Please keep coming back and reading!

Play It Again Sports

Today I sold my inversion table to Play It Again Sports. It is a sports store that buys used equipment and resells it. I paid $99 for the inversion table about 4 months ago at Walmart. I sold it to Play It Again Sports for $45. I got to try it out for several months. I proved that it worked pretty well at inverting me and that it didn’t help my back troubles at all. I’m pretty happy I was able to sell it to them and that it didn’t go to waste. Someone will buy it and be pretty happy with it I think.

I’ve decided that my back pain is caused mostly by weak muscles.

Kennywood

I took the day off of work yesterday and we drove to Kennywood amusement park in PA. The kids hadn’t been to a real amusement park so this was their first time. Right inside the park the kids got to drive the electric cars around a track and then we decided they could try out their first roller coaster – the Jack Rabbit. It didn’t look too bad but after the first hill it was clear that it was too scary for the kids (and also too late to change our minds). The kids held on for dear life and at the end Z looked like he might cry. M relaxed once he was off and after that they decided they wanted to stick to smaller rides (good plan). They have a bunch of kiddie rides and kiddie games and the rest of the day was a lot of fun. The kids were great all day long. We ate at Applebees and then drove home. Mark it up.. first amusement park – check; first roller-coaster – check.

Productive Day

Today was a pretty productive day. I moved and trimmed the lawn, cleaned out our two cars, got gas from GetGo (filled up a few gas cans to get to the max 30 gallons), cleaned up the kitchen, let the kids play outside for a long time while I did all that and still managed to get a little bit of work done on my side business project.

Squeak Persistence

I recently started building an application using Squeak and Seaside and was hunting for a persistence scheme. I looked at postgres and mysql. I looked at some magma examples, minnestore, goods. I settled on just doing something quick and easy – sixx xml to disk. This way I can load everything on start up, work out of an in memory db, write changes to disk and in the event of a crash we’re covered. This scheme is not super robust and won’t scale past a single seaside image but it should be enough to get us through the proof of concept phase. I want it to last a year and take us to the point where we start turning a profit.

Lung Cancer

A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. I’m so terribly sad about it. I think they caught it early so there is still a lot of hope that he can be treated and recover. He is a really good person and one of the most talented computer programmers I’ve ever worked with. I feel so bad for him and his family. The road ahead I think will be a hard fight for him and I wish I could do something to help. Some things in life just don’t seem fair – this is one of them.

I need to remember this sad feeling the next time I want to sneak a smoke. I smoked for about 15 years and then quit. I was smoke free for several years but in the last few I started sneaking them when I was out of town, on vacation, at a party or with friends who smoked. I have never had one in front of the kids but that doesn’t make them good for me. Maybe my friend’s battle can help me stay clean.

Baseball Camp

Lately D has been taking the kids to baseball camp at a church near our house. It is free all week. The kids like it and it means I get some time to myself (although I haven’t been able to use it for anything other than work). The kids seem to like it. I’d like to go one day this week and see what they do at the camp. We’ll see.

Good Meeting With Partners

I had a good meeting last night with my business partners. I showed them the work I have done over the last few weeks and they seemed happy so far. We spent some time talking about what the best payment model will be. We’re trying to find the sweet spot so that we charge the right parties the right amount of money. We are planning on doing a demo with prospective customers soon so we need to decide exactly what functionality is required for that demo. Overall it was a good meeting.