Sibling Rivalry-- or lack thereof.

As a first semester graduate student, there is a lot of downtime that I never anticipated before we left Pittsburgh. Anyone who knows me knows that I have difficulty when left to my own devices, and that I need structure or the ability to create my own structure in order to thrive. What this boils down to is that I spend a lot of time watching TV or reading during the day.

The other thing that this means is that I have sort of adapted to the lifestyle of a stay-at-home mom. From 7:30 in the morning, when Anthony leaves for work, until whenever I have to head to campus or when Anthony comes home (which is any time between 2 pm and 7 pm), it's just myself and the animals. It's actually been an incredibly entertaining experience to watch their relationship develop. They even have a routine of sorts, which I doubt they'd cop to if confronted by it.

7:30 a.m.: Brontë wanders upstairs where Dickens and I are having a bit of a lie-in. She meows piteously, but refuses to come any further than the doorway of our room. Within moments, Dickens is fully awake, and he launches himself from the bed and gives chase.

7:30-8:00 a.m.: I try to get a few more minutes of sleep as the siblings run up and down the stairs, yowling and barking respectively.

8:00 a.m.: I get up, head downstairs, and make myself coffee/breakfast/a couch nest and attempt to wake up.

8:00 a.m.- 9:00 a.m.: The chasing up and down the stairs continues at intervals, interspersed with things being knocked off of dressers/bathroom counters by cat. At this point, the slightly unnerving silence begins, and I usually fall back asleep.

10:30 a.m.: I go upstairs to shower/use the bathroom/whatever. Once I walk into the bedroom, I always find the two snuggled up in our bed together or a few inches away from each other. Dickens always lifts his head before scooting closer to his sister and laying back down. Brontë always makes her little trilling meow and curls up more tightly. And I always just leave them there because how could anyone break up a snuggle-fest like that?

Dads are weird

I know dads are supposed to be weird, (sometimes I watch the Disney Channel and all those dads are weird) but my Dad is especially weird. One of his weirdest parts however is he sometimes reads books and then believes he is like the people in the books. For a week after reading the book he pretends to have some new skill that most of the time he does not have. If he reads a poetry book, he'd write poetry for a week. If he reads a mystery book, he's a detective. Science fiction means he's a scientist.

So last week he read a book that was narrated by a dog wherein the dog's dad told him all kinds of stories about his day and explained the many parts of his work to the dog and the dog became as much of an expert as his dad. So, my Dad has started to talk to me about all the things he does at work and all the things he knows stuff about. There's only one problem.

The stuff Dad does is BORING.

The dad in Dad's book was a race car driver (I know this because I heard about it when researching motorcycles and dogs). Race car driving is awesome, you reach top speed and zip around as fast as you can with the wind in your face and barking into the wind. Dad... does computers. And computers are just a reason not to play with me. I do not care about "I Pees" and "See Pee Yous." The only pees I care about are the ones that allow me to go on walks with my Dad. I do not need to know See Plus Plus or how to set up Dadbases. I only want him to chase me around more!

So a message to all dads, your sons don't need to know everything about what you do. We do need your love and attention to grow up into big strong boys though, so throw in an extra hour of playtime yeah?

Things Dickens Loves #1: The Motorcycle

For my first ever edition of Things I Love I decided to go with a California special. To be fair, I don't know if he ever ventures elsewhere. I can only tell you he frequents our house often. I am of course talking about The Motorcycle.

Now I don't have to tell you that cars are stupid as the reasons are obvious. They're ugly, loud, annoying, and slippery inside. I am still very upset because Dad says they're the only way to get to the beach (something I don't wholy believe) but as of now it seems dear reader that if we wish to enjoy the many perks outside we will have to endure a painful car trip.

Unless we can extort the secrets of The Motorcycle.

Half man, half machine, The Motorcycle seems to have replaced his lower extremeties with a series of wheels and motors that enable him to go faster than any being on this planet. He can cross the street in an instant and even when not encumbered by a slow-footed human I still cannot even reach half his speed.

I hope to one day gain his secrets as I endlessly pursue him during his frequent passage down our street. I would wonder what he's searching for but I know with his speed anything he could possibly have sought since the beginning of time is already in his possession.

And so I close with a message to The Motorcycle if you ever read this: How were you able to exchange your fallible legs for an infallible set of wheels and are they available in beast size? I would be able to become king of the beach as no being great or small would be able to compete with my speed.

Someday, someday...

RFC #384723: A wireless grocery and recipe tracking database

There's an unusual habit that I have developed as I left the world of academia and have begun to become a career man. Specifically, I find myself becoming more of a "tinkerer" and continue to try to use the things I do everyday at work (e.g. wireless technologies, database design) to solve simple, yet not egregious problems in a needlessly convulated way to satisfy my nerd urges and also prevent myself from renewing my World of Warcraft subscription. One such instance was developing an internal home media network to facilitate watching digital media on our large tv rather than balancing it needlessly on our knees in bed. XMBC has helped with that nicely and while there remains a considerable amount of work to be done (especially because I broke my server computer Sunday...) it wasn't as investing as a project should be. However, I have begun work on a different project which I have been wanting to work on for a long time.

I would like to address the issue I experience frequently when at the grocery store where I am left debating whether or not we have item x, something that could make or break dinner for the evening. Having an online grocery database storage system would allow me to keep constant track of whether or not we have items as well as quickly query if any such items are expired. Further, if extended to also manage recipes, we could quickly build grocery lists, evaluate what we can make for dinner right now, and appropriately decrement our virtual pantry with one click.

The most necessary requirement for this project is usability. While I have plenty of nerd bones that would glad facilitate a tedious process to maintain a constant stock, I am not the only one who exhausts our pantry and consequently not the only one who should maintain this application. The application should be user friendly enough such that Kate also feels it's quick and seemless and the payout must be significantly greater than the investment.

Consequently, the project will require the development of 4 components:
1: A "Virtual Pantry": An SQL Database which maintains pantry state as well as groceries
2: A web application for making quick recipe entry and updates to the virtual pantry
3: An android application for maintaining a grocery list that queries current pantry state and push a shopping list to the database
4: (Future, depending on if QUALCOMM puts chips in any of the Android tablets) A tablet application optimized for recipe lookup and decrementing the pantry.

This has been largely facilitated by the development of converting Pogoplug devices in tiny LAMP servers with minimal power consumption. I tested one and was able to set up my device this weekend with a crap USB drive I had lying arojund. I have purchased a pair of 4 GB flash drives off newegg (one for this, one to repair my linux server) which will be used for this database.

More to come as the project continues.

Not. Cool.

There is a thing in my house.

It is probably like, ten times SMALLER than me.

It's injured. Or sick. Or something. I mean, this thing would not make it through natural selection.

It poops in a BOX. I know, I smelled the box. I wasn't allowed to climb into it though, so I don't know why that THING was.

I am FOR REALS terrified of this thing though.

I know I'm getting to be a big boy (I turned nine months old yesterday!) but you guys don't even know. She has only been here two days and she is already smacking me around and making creepy noises with her mouth.

Do you want to know the worst part?

Mom and Dad say she's my SISTER.

Shit. Just. Got. Real.

My dog doesn't have spatial awareness

It's something I've known for a while but it was particularly interesting today.

He has a rather large moose toy that is one of his absolute favorites and he was playing with it by a door today and he managed to get the tiniest bit under the door so that it stuck out on the other side. For some reason he felt this was the part he absolutely must chomp immediately so he had his head sideways on the ground trying to get his mouth as low as possible to try to pull this piece of the moose out beneath the door while the entire rest of the moose was on the other side of the door.

I attempted to show Dickens that if we just push the door a little bit we have the entire moose on the other side of the door. He immediately pushed the door back and continued to tug at the tiny piece of moose. When he had a firm grip on it, he pulled it around the bottom of the door so that he was on the other side and now that he had the complete moose took it downstairs.

I can't tell if he's getting smarter or dumber.

Working on his Blog

Working on my Blog, originally uploaded by bombnomnom.

Sometimes Dickens needs help writing his blogs.