*blank stare*

July 1st, 2008 Troy

My wife just informed me that our 3 year old was playing on his computer this morning, and she went up and asked him, “Do you want to come outside and play?”

In the past, Ethan will usually jump at any opportunity to go outside to play. Last summer, he LIVED outside.

Well today, my wife was ignored. This, in and of itself is not surprising. Ethan has inherited my talent for selective listening. You see, Ethan and I have very… shall we say, focused attention spans. So we come pre-built with a sort of sub-processor in our ears. It is able to evaluate the auditory signals coming in and determine if they are important enough to interrupt the primary process being handled by our brains. If so, our attention will be shifted. If not, it truly is just as if you never said anything at all.

So Ethan ignoring Missy isn’t terribly uncommon. But until today, Going Outside > Playing Computer Games.

As my wife said, “So it begins.” One more thing Ethan and I have in common.

Tags: computers, selective listening
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plague of locusts

June 30th, 2008 Troy

In preparation for the 10k I will be running on Friday, I needed to run at least 5.5 miles on Sunday of this past weekend. I generally prefer to run early in the morning, but on Sundays it works out with our schedule to run in the evening.

So Sunday night I put Ethan to bed at about 7:30 and headed out. It was just approaching dusk, so I knew it would be dark before I was done. No biggie, I like running at night actually.

Before I even got out of my neighborhood, I noticed that I was getting pelted in the face by little flying bugs with increasing frequency. It was annoying at worst, so I kept on running. Occasionally I’d see a swarm of these things ahead of me, so I’d veer to the other side of the street to try to avoid them.

Before I had even gone 3 miles, they were EVERYWHERE. It was like one solid mile-long swarm of little flying ants. Since I was sweating, they would stick to my face, my arms, my shirt… It was disgusting! I couldn’t run for 30 seconds without having to wipe a dozen of these things off my forehead.

Annoyance is one thing. I pride myself on being able to endure annoyance, ignore it all together even, to get my task accomplished. But these little bugs were getting in my eyes and in my mouth, so I finally had to stop.

About 10 minutes after the sun went down, they all just disappeared. Back to their holes or nests or wherever tiny red flying ants go when they aren’t flying suicide missions into my lungs. It was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever witnessed.

So I finished my run, and ran an extra half a mile to try to make up for my bug break in the middle. Barring any further vermin infestations, I hope to be able to run the 10k averaging under 10 minute miles. Wish me luck!

Tags: flying ants, night running, Running
Posted in Running | 3 Comments »

weekend adventures

June 23rd, 2008 Troy

My wife is the master and commander of the interwebs. All of them. One useful service that is under her great dominion is a Yahoo group for our area called Freecycle. People list various things there that they would like to give away. Missy has secured for us from Freecycle the following items, in no particular order: a 35″ flatscreen HDTV (needed a $120 fix), a 14′ trampoline, a swingset/slide, a dresser for Ethan’s room, a computer speaker/subwoofer set, a full size futon and mattress, and many other things, the list goes on and on.

Last week she called dibs on a full size freezer for our garage. Being that it was full sized, the minivan was not going to cut it as a transportation mechanism for this prize. So I called upon a friend who has a truck with a hydraulic lift on the back to help me move it.

The truck was at my friend’s dad’s house, but he wanted to get it back to his house so this seemed like a great opportunity to kill stuff. Birds that is. With a stone. The other hurdle was that the truck had a bed cap which would need to be removed to be able to fit the tall freezer in the back. No problem, the plan was to load the truck cap onto a trailer that my friend’s wife would be pulling along with a whole load of things going from his dad’s house to theirs. Thus allowing us to pick up the freezer, and the truck and the cap would be reunited at my friend’s house. Beautiful. Somewhat complicated, but beautiful.

So we’re half-way through this plan, heading down the highway from his dad’s house to the free freezer, or free-zer, as I like to call it, in the now cap-less truck. We came up over a hill on the highway, and lo and behold, a truck cap, not dissimilar to the one we had tied to the trailer just a few short minutes ago, seemed to have wandered it’s way out onto that busy 2 lane highway. “Someone should wrangle that thing up, tie it down in the same fashion that we just tied ours down just a few short minutes ago,” I said.

As I’m sure it’s obvious by now, that wasn’t our truck cap and we went merrily on our way. Just kidding, it was ours and had just flipped off the back of the trailer and smashed right in front of an oncoming car.

We pulled off the road and dragged it to the side while we tried to figure out the next step. I did what any caring, helpful, selfless friend would do: examined the rope to be sure that the side that I tied hadn’t come loose. The rope had snapped, my knot had held, so I was off the hook. That was a relief. I didn’t really pay attention to whatever happened next, I was free and clear.

In the end, we resisted the urge to dump the mangled mess of metal and plexiglass in a nearby creek, and instead responsibly reloaded it and took it to the dump. And by dump I don’t mean the nearest construction dumpster, though we briefly entertained the thought.

A valueable lesson was learned that day. When I am able to decipher what it was, I will be sure to blog about it.

Tags: freecycle, moving, truck cap
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geek inherited

June 20th, 2008 Troy

I’m a geek, and I make no excuses for that. I read every newegg.com newsletter that comes into my email. I find great joy in writing scripts that run on my work computer that allow me to perform complex, multi-step procedures with a single keystroke, like changing my IM status, status message, and locking the workstation.

And my wife is a closet-geek. She pnws me at Halo 3, she has played more World of Warcraft than me, and she frequently quotes PC Magazine and Popular Science to me.

So it is no wonder that our son is into computers. He’s genetically predisposed to it. Even at the age of 3 he has tremendous problem solving skills when it comes to computers. He’s becoming more patient with them every day, and he’ll just try things, poke around until it does what he wants. Click things, drag it over here, shut it down and start it back up if he gets to a place he can’t get back from, it’s truly amazing to see.

Given his inherited geekiness, I’m trying to always put challenges in front of him so he can keep learning, especially since he’s interested and passionate. So last night I swapped his Windows XP computer for an Ubuntu linux box. On the surface, they aren’t terribly different, but as he grows and trys new stuff, I want him to be able to learn to use linux along the way. I certainly would have had an advantage getting into my field if I had experience on a platform other than Windows.

Plus it’s just plain cool that my 3 year old runs linux.

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fathering like the father

June 18th, 2008 Troy

I just finished the book Fathering Like the Father by Kenn and Jeff Gangel. In it, the authors outline several key character qualities that Christian fathers should strive to have as demonstrated by our heavenly Father’s example for us.

Each chapter discusses one of these qualities (trustworthiness, faithfulness, love, kindness, etc) and begins with somewhat of a scripture dump, then dives into the practical application of this quality in our lives. Since a father/son duo wrote the book, they take turns at the end of each chapter relating experiences about or expounding upon the character trait of the chapter.

My biggest take-away from the book was the fact that not only do I need to be conscious of my interactions with my son in regard to the qualities of this book, but I need to be aware that my interactions with my wife are being studied by my son as well. He will learn how to treat her, and ultimately how to treat his future wife, by watching how I treat her. I need to be as focused on showing my wife love, affection, forgiveness, trustworthiness, etc for Ethan’s benefit as I am on showing those things directly to Ethan.

My only criticism of the book would be that the pattern that each chapter follows gets a bit monotonous. Overall though, I thought it was entertaining and well written, and I’d recommend it to any father wanting to improve themself.

Tags: book review, fathering like the father, gangel
Posted in Book Reviews, Uncategorized | No Comments » « Previous Entries