I just got a new car!

I wrecked my 1997 Honda Civic last December on the “freak night of ice” we had before Christmas. Sucky, sucky end to a great day.

Since then, I’ve test drove a number of cars – Accords, Civics, Civic SI, Fit, Prius, Civic Hybrids… I hit up Honda Marysville (where I got my CRV) and I still favor them (because they’ve never let me down) but this time I opted for John Hinderer Honda in Heath, Ohio. Needless to say, they bear Honda Marysville in price, they beat CarMax in many ways (I was not real happy with my service there) and they beat Rousch Honda (I felt like I was “inconveniencing” the sales rep when I was there).

The Honda Fit wins on many levels.

My new car. Lovelovelove.

I decided on the Fit over the Prius – and many people may whine about how the Prius is “saving the world” and all, or at the very least argue that a Prius would get much better gas mileage.

My problem is that even a used Prius was damned expensive. I’d love to own one, I really would. But seeing how ever place I hit wouldn’t talk about any kind of warrantee or guarantee on the hybrid battery (and most sales people tried to bullshit me about the battery – c’mon people, we’ve got the internet, ou just make yourself look bad when a sales guy lies!)

I researched – a lot – about cars, and what I *really needed* versus what I really wanted. It took a lot of consideration and debate between the misses and I about which was a better vehicle – she was ready to concede to me about getting a civic or a prius, but I felt I needed to research it further.

Needs versus Wants

I wanted a car with excellent fuel economy. I wanted a sporty car. I wanted something a car seat would fit in (just in case, mind you – I have a CRV that transports my son 99% of the time. I didn’t need to haul anything large, I didn’t care about cargo. I wanted fuel economy, I wanted a comfortable drive, and I wanted the ability for fast acceleration if I needed it.

From what I was finding about the Prius, a lot of people felt it was over priced – the savings in fuel were lost in the price of the car. In terms of “saving the world” I felt that was moot – we should want a greener car period. Savings be damned! I tried to keep this in mind.

Unfortunately, I am not made of money. The cost was more than its worth and the whole “perception” of me as I drive. (I don’t need a car that defines who I am, I need a car that gets me where I need to be!)

Enter The Fit

The Fit Sport – looks small. Then we started messing with the seats.

It’s damn roomy.

I was comfortable, my wife was, and we had my son and the salesman (Jack) in the back. Roomy, comfortable. The back seats fold up in two ways for either more cargo space or more storage for taller items (a small tree, perhaps? Maybe a bike?).

It’s economical! It’s estimated at around 38MPG – a far cry from the Prius’ 50MPG plus, but at the huge price cut in cost? I could live with that. It’s more economical than my CRV, less than a Prius. Not bad.

On the drive home, I got to play with the “paddle shifters” – it lets you drop/increase gears on the fly without a clutch. It was fun on the highway – instead of slamming on the gas to accelerate, I dropped a gear and smoothly accelerated. Very cool.

The bonuses:

Nice sound system, it can “fake” being a manual, and it’s roomy when it needs to be. It brings back memories of my CRX (in terms of sportiness and exterior size, not in interior roominess).

All in all, day one, I’m loving this car :)

So Mark @ Mashable wrote about YouTube updating their community guidelines against Hate speech.

He points out the obvious – people on the internet are retarded and this change means they are censoring us all, and we are fucked because all censorship is evil, and they have won because they can’t say their evil words online.

Freedom of speech is absolute.

If we can’t beat them without silencing their message, we obviously
aren’t being convincing enough to those they are converting. Fight them
with our own free speech and expression.

Overall – it’s a good read. YouTube doing a political nod (gee, just like Google did for China, and then did with Law Enforcement Agencies).

My only real issue with the article is the wrap-up:

We Need to be Smart About This
As Uncle Ben used to say, with great power comes great responsibility… If we want to keep it safe from the grubby paws of governmental intervention, companies like Google must implement and enforce standards
of policing the community.  Otherwise, the government will do that for
us, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we do not want that.

Google isn’t the little shop down the street. They’re a huge-ass corporation. If MSN was doing this people would be calling for Bill Gates head. If Steve Jobs did it, people would make shiny new logos promoting how innovative and forward thinking he’s being.

Instead, YouTube (which was purchased by Google) is taking it into their own hands. This shows the error of their “Do No Evil” slogan – nothing is really black and white. They can do something that a lot of people can consider evil – collecting user data, censoring hate speech, censoring anti-hate speech.

I do not welcome our new Internet Overlords.

Benjamin Franklin once said,

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

We continue to do so, and turn a blind eye to it. We say it’s for the best. It’s better this way. Think of the children. To me, this just shows how freaking worthless our rights are becoming. Services talk about how they’re for everything, but what’s going to happen in the future? For a citizen to express their discontentment, they’ll have to make a video, encrypt it, send it to a friend over seas to upload it to a “video sharing site” hosted on a derilect oil tanker in international waters that’s under siege by the U.S. Government for posting a video of someone saying “The Bill of Rights is an illusion.”

So what – how did I get all of this off a little YouTube censorship? Because Google was supposed to be that Little Big company. They’re supposed to be those guys that got big being good, making Microsoft look foolish for ever putting DRM on your computer. Instead they’re slowly transforming into “will this be good for the company?” type double-speak they can throw around in marketing and PR to make themselves look good.

How long until Google starts telling you what to write on your blog? “You said not nice things about Google, so we’re giving you a PR of 1, unless you delete those articles. By the way, we bought the rights to your domain, so when it expires, it’s ours unless you comply.”

Those who have the power, make the rules. Those that get the information can make their power. I know, I know, a bit paranoidal-freakish, but hey, political season stupidity always riles me up.

As a web developer, I get the wonderful job of constantly improving myself and my coding. I research, I test, I experiment, and I try to come up with consistent methods that, in my opinion, are a best practice in my work, and can be shown to other people to help them improve their skills. That being said, sometimes you are so damn busy you seldom have the time you’d like to properly coach (and be coached).

Personally, I love constructive criticism.

I really, really, really, do. It’s an excellent way to accurately better yourself – someone else critiques you. It’s even better when the person is someone you admire and respect – because then you’re more likely to take it to heart.

I know I’ve written bad code in the past (haven’t we all at some point?) and I know sometimes I’ll work on a bit of code and see a way to better myself, or improve upon others work (as I often do with mootools scripts, and jquery/javascript conversions). But I don’t just lock it away. I post on forums and groups. I send out emails to friends and colleagues. I ask for feedback, and I take feedback even when I don’t ask for it.

Because I have a desire to better myself. Because I recognize I am not perfect, and I can improve.

I could get all zen on you and go into a personal rant, but that’ll have to hold off for another day.

The point is – especially as a web developer in this new media age - you need to get criticism, give criticism, and improve your coding abilities. You can specialize – front-end, back-end, ATG, CSS, XHTML, WTF-Kung-Fu-BBQ, RoR, etc. etc. and so on and so on… but…

…unless you work on improving yourself you’ll always end up at the bottom rung.

Just my piece in politics. I’ve talked to him, and he’s very genuine – a rare trait I’ve ever gotten from talking to anyone involved in politics.

Robert Owens on youTube?

That is correct, friend!

I’m really digging how politicians are starting to utilize new media methods to get their message out. Most recently, we’ve heard of Ron Paul’s online money raising that really helped point out the power of the people online. Then we see Obama has emulated the online presence – and they use their staff at hand to help tailor the experience to the potential voter. The undecided voters get one message, the supported get a different set – maybe facebook reminders, tweets, IMs, etc.

Very cool – I’m looking forward to the 2012 elections just to see how much the Internet is involved – maybe they’ll have mobile voting figured out by then, or maybe even electronic voting machines secured!

I was in D.C. visiting some relatives the past weekend – trying to work on my terror level and maybe get a few good jokes on the way. Unfortunately, Bush wasn’t in, so I had no one to do blow with while I was in town (Zing!) so I had to settle for martinis and some excellent conversation.

Now, my friends, the relatives have two SUVs. One Land Rover, one Lexus SUV (and for a point of understanding, this guy had a FREAKING ASTON MARTIN until the wife convinced him to go to a Land Rover Family Car). On one drive, he pointed out the Land Rover has more horsepower than the Lexus, and it leads to the conversation of how back in the day, people sacrificed economy for horsepower.

I’ve got a brother-in-law with a 1969 Firebird – you think that gets great fuel mileage?

Will we replace Horsepower with Fuel Economy?

I’m really curious about this. We used to be about Trans Ams, Camaros, Hemis… and to a degree we, as Americans, have given up the SUVs from “compact” SUVs and cross-overs with huge engines (and mildly better fuel economy).

Will we start shelling out for hybrids instead of a mini-tank? Or will mini-cars show up as the dominant driving force? Point in case – the Smart Fortwo. A cool little two-seater that can go up to 90mph and gets 33/41 mpg. From SmartUSA:

According to information obtained on fueleconomy.gov, the smart fortwo is the most fuel-efficient non-hybrid
gasoline-powered vehicle in the USA today. The gas tank of the smart fortwo is 8.7 gallons.

For reals? For reals!

This is kind of cool – I know SOMEONE downtown has one of these, because whenever I walk over to the Northmarket for lunch, and sometimes on my way home from work, I see a woman driving one. I believe you can get one over by Easton – I think it’s an Acura dealership as well.

Basically, this keeps piqueing my interest – I want a small, fast compact car. Fuel Economy? MosDef.

As my current car – a 1997 Honda Civic starts to approach the end of its life, my journey in the realm of “new age vehicles” will begin.

Over the next few weeks (or less, or more) I plan on doing some research into Social Media. Now the irony here, is that traditional research would require book research, texts, etc. to get the information.

Social Media – it’s the new Internets!

Since Social Media is an online phenomenon, I’ll be doing most of my research here – the various sites, clouds, tubes, et. al. to get a “definitive” answer on Social Media. I’ve all ready stumbled on some early marketing materials, and a couple educational publications doting on Social Media’s rich history (since 1996!)

This will be the first in a small series, and it’ll continue for as long as I can dig up the short lived history of social media.

Social Media Quick Facts:

1. The first social media site is generaly considered to be “SixDegrees.com”
   • Please note – I’m talking about Social Media sites. I may delve into the history a little further, but that may be overkill and bore us all to tears.
2. The Six Degrees site was based off of the idea of “small world phenomenon” most frequently cited as “any person is no more than six degrees away from knowing everyone,” which also became attributed to Kevin Bacon being the center of the Hollywood Universe (which, itself is constantly shifting).
3. Kevin Bacon set up http://www.sixdegrees.org as a charity, and has parodied his “game” numerous times.

Next up – a little more into the history of Social Media and its backstory!

I know I’ve made this into more a link dump as late – but I try to add a little flavor to my collections, and perhaps it’s time to reveal what’s been taking up my time.

I recently returned from my brother’s wedding in Denver (Congratulations, bro!), was able to enjoy Wynkoop’s
, check out the Denver Zoo and Denver’s Museum of
Nature and Science,
hangout with the family (one of whom
it’s been nearly two years since I saw him last).
If I paid for flicker, and if I ever uploaded my pictures, I’d share them. Needless to stay,
my break from school was quite full. I listened to a friend’s suggestion and picked up a couple Nintendo DS’s for the trip – and we’re glad we did, especially when my wife and I watched our American Airlines flight get delayed. And delayed. And delayed. At least it was delayed later in Chicago, otherwise we would’ve ended up there for awhile.

School has began once again at Columbus State,
so I’m still paying for my “sins” of taking the interesting stuff early, so I must trudge through more math this quarter. At least I’m in my groove and busting through it quickly. The ball is rolling for my transfer – but I’ve decided to get my Associate’s Degree in Science before transferring.

Work’s been busy, but in terms of “code outside of work” I’ve been working on flexing my Adobe Flex, Actionscript and MooTools skills. I’ve got a good plan of attack on that front, which lead to a few side projects.

1. BestPract.us – a site dedicated to best practices. Why BestPract.us? Because everything else was taken. It’s built on DokuWiki! No databases. It’s totally open to be edited, and I haven’t settled on the format, the theme or anything.
2. MooForums – I’m *really* not happy with what’s been going on with MooTools. I plan on taking PhpBB and merging it with MooTools flavor and hopefully getting the MooTools community on board with it. Google Groups is not the home to a community – it’s too unorganized and closed off. It’s lost the family feeling it had (well, on the MooTools forums it was often like talking to your older brothers, sometimes you get help, sometimes you don’t).
3. MooTools Classes and Plug-ins – this ties into bestpract.us, as I plan on using it to hold my code and host it for general consumption. From my own findings, I can hopefully accurately document the best ways to write code (with everyone’s help).
4. TheFirmStance.com – when I get this fleshed out, I’ll get something there. For now, it’s a planned site ;

Now outside of work, I’ve been reading more – The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin – watching some Weeds, Venture Brothers, and Paul Giamatti’s AMAZING performance in John Adams.

I’m debating joining up in StartUp Weekend Columbus – the jury’s still out. It’s looking favorable.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. How about you?

What follows is a conversation I found waiting in my IM when I got home the other night. This is my friend *speaking* – it’s not me, it’s not my replies, and I dropped his IM name for the sake of everyone involved ;).

so today I’m talking to my dad on the phone and he asks me “so you still like Obama?” 9:36
and I say “yeah, why?” 9:37
turns out he’s been letting himself be brainwashed by right wing talk radio while he’s at work 9:37
he manages to keep finding things to say to make me think he’s a jackass 9:37
haha 9:38
so I ask him, what don’t you like about him? 9:38
and he starts off by saying he disagrees with national healthcare 9:38
what???? 9:38
who in their right mind could disagree with that? 9:39
so I ask if he saw ‘Sicko’ 9:39
and his answer is “oh that’s just propaganda” 9:39
THAT’S propaganda? 9:40
how about the right wing agenda-pushing one-sided brain-washing wool over the eyes bullshit you’re subjecting yourself to on a daily basis? 9:40
so that shit went straight to the top of his netflix 9:40
I swear to god, he blows my fucking mind sometimes 9:41
I’d respect it more if these were opinions he formed on his own after educating himself on both sides of the issues 9:41
but he’s just blindly eating whatever bullshit they’re shoving down his throat 9:41
I’m fucking baffled 9:42
he’ll end up voting for McCain too 9:43
cause he’s too lazy and disinterested to actually form his own opinions about these types of things 9:43
he’d rather stick with the zero effort pack mentality 9:44
which means listening to all his nigger-hating backwoods no-brain Urbana friends and swallowing whatever self-serving Fox news bullshit Rush Limbaugh regurgitates every day 9:44
I am officially ashamed 9:45
while his wife is running for office on the democratic ticket no less!!

• A novice still has room to learn
• An intermediate knows his stuff, but can still grow.
• An expert can teach others.
• A professional gets paid to do it.
• Don’t fall in th e”professional” trap.

I bring this up because, as you may or may not realize, I code for Resource Interactive.

Now I’ve coded “professionally”
for a few years – meaning I’ve been paid to code. Now, in terms of technology, I don’t believe you ever leave the “intermediate” stage, as you can always have room for improvement. There’s always a “better way” or a “new way” or even “a new style.”
Coding standards change and adapt – one day, you think you know exactly how to lay out your CSS file. Then you realize – hey, it’d be a lot easier if I alphabetized my css attributes.

Then, a few weeks later, you stumble on someone’s tips about better architecture in your CSS. Now, you start commenting your code before you minimize it.
You add in indents to give it more rhyme and reason, making it easier to figure out if you should hand it off to a new developer.

Now, in all this “cool stuff” you learn and do and integrate into your coding habits – do you sign your work?

A lot of famous artists sign their work. Michelangelo had hidden meaning in the Sistine Chapel. Hell, the real reason I came to this is after I heard alltop.com gave a tip of the hat to popurls in regards to their idea, I started poking around popurls’ source code (they use mootools!) and stumbled on this in their source code:

<!–
__   __
(  \,/  )
\_ | _/  IN THE FUTURE EVERY URL WILL BE POPULAR FOR 1.5 SECONDS
(_/ \_)                          – thomas and the wise butterfly

–>

I dug this – the only people that really delve into the source code are those that are interested in it. I.E. other developers. Web devs. Code monkes. CSS ninjas. Etc. People who would see these things and think one of two things – that’s cool, I think I want to start signing my code – or perhaps – I wonder how many milliseconds they could shave off my leaving that out…

To be 100% honest, transparent, and true, I usually fall into the latter half. I’m trying to squeeze EVERY IOTA of performance in my pages. Optimize that PNG. Minimize that HTML/CSS/JS. Squeeze it! Shave a few seconds, if that!

And then I stumbled on that little quote from popurls. I stumbled on code from a few other people, and very often I see people signing their JS more often than their HTML. I can kind of understand – companies like to think that they have total control on the code they use.
I understand that the code I write – the designs I’ve worked with – may have been inspired by something else
. I understand that it’s very easy to reuse something multiple times. Theme based on theme X by Y. But ultimately, when does it become no longer theirs? When does it become a separate entity?
Is it when the original creator looks at it and can’t recognize his work? Or should you just accept that
maybe code isn’t copyrightable. HTML code can be written man different ways for the same effect (have you seen how many reset CSS files are floating around?)
There’s a point when you can’t just say “person X did this first” because often times you find out that the person who did it first, or so you thought, wasn’t first. Or was it?
Does it matter? I don’t think so. If I pour time and effort into it, it’s just as much mine. I may make a little money for my effort, but I also fix issues, fix problems, address the things that come up.
I contribute BACK to the community!

And here-in lies the problem. What if I stumble across professional site Z and I dig the code. I like what they’ve done. I want to learn more. How’d they do that AJAX effect, how did it work cross browser so smoothly. This is the professional problem. Why not put in your contact info? Are you afraid a bunch of “newbs” will inundate you? That’s just it. Developers like to be paid for the work they do, and not tell other people how they did it. Too often the
answer is “look at the code.” “Figure it out yourself.”
Or maybe no response at all.
Why not? Why not say “I did this – it may not be perfect, but my hand was in it.” Be proud. Stand up for your work in all its shapes or forms.

This is a tweet of a post – something that may not hit the record mark in length, but something I feel is noteworthy.

I’ve added a new link to my side bar.

That would be Genuine Chris. Every time I talk to Chris I get a little more excited and a little more envious.
What he’s doing is something I’ve always wanted to do – be his own boss, write a selling a Loan Officer e-book, and blog.

Okay, maybe I don’t want to write a Loan Officer Survival book – but the point is – he’s writing, he’s selling, he’s being successful at being an entrepreneur. Those are the little things that matter – and he (seems) to be having fun doing it!

Crazy – having fun at writing stuff you’ve got experience in?

Where that leaves me.

Talking to someone like Chris, and getting that vibe of “why can’t I do this?” has lead me to turn my introspection psycho-analysis a little more inward to see what my problems are and see about doing something about it. Will I get an e-book? Maybe. Will I write a tv pilot? Maybe. Will I quit my job and move to California to leave on a beach? You never know – as I know my son would have a blast playing in sand for the first time.

In my efforts to play with wordpress and blogging at large, I’ve suffered from the dreaded duplicate content. Not posting twice, not posting two versions of the same thing – but the tweet posts (and twitter sidebar). Watching it from my side has been interesting, and I get the dreaded sense of overkill that comes with the buzzword Web two point oh. I can’t believe people put forth the effort so that everything they do is broadcast on every available channel.

Overkill much? – the downfall of Web 2.0

I aim to set a personal standard to walk away from that – I’ve got accounts on nearly every social medium, but to tie them all together? People set up their accounts so that each is what the other is. So now, they’ve got one place to update, but if they’ve got friends with the same services, doing the same thing, we get a barrage of spam – the same message five times (or more)! Is that necessary? Is it useful?

Personally, it’s a waste. It destroys the purpose of the machine if you make it your magic bullet. These services aren’t meant to be tied together so when I tweet, I also blog, pownce, IM, email and digg. I use the ones my friends are on, the ones that are recommended, and I try out the new ones to see if they may replace an older one (i.e. my recent PC conversion from Pidgin to Digsby).

The REAL benefit to social apps

I use twitter as my thought application process. I throw out ideas just because it’s like saying them in a crowded room. Thanks to twitter, I learned about Zappos corporate twitter machine – a very

innovative, fresh use for twitter. How do I want to use them? I use twitter to post about when I update any of my blogs. I use twitter to pass links I used to email to a couple people or send a quick IM. I use it to network with new people. I use it to tweet. That’s it.

I have the same social sites you do, with my own accounts (and I’ll eventually get them all listed on the sidebar!). I use them for what they’re worth – and not trying to hack them into one giant useless application that does nothing well except spam the net that “ikeif twitters – what the hell?”

I signed up for email alerts for The Personal MBA. I did so because they present this list of 69 business books (called – surprise! – the Personal MBA reading list) – and a few of the books I happened to all ready be reading. The emails aren’t exactly gold-star material, but they essentially spark a conversation well enough to show the true quality in the content.

The Personal MBA is basically a reading list compilation of some excellent books on a wide range of topics. The benefit of the email list, is some of the tidbits – like a story of a certain student who dropped out of college (because he didn’t like that the college tried to tell him what he could study) and focused his studies on what he wanted – to one day be asked to be a professor on the topic. Check out more on Joseph Campbell, a professor on comparative mythology and religion.

The point is not that this series of book will make me some kind of genius – the point is that perhaps some of the information will stick, make me think, and make me a more informed individual. I may not be the next Trump – but I could be a better boss, a better leader, a better employee, or maybe even a better teacher.

I am bloody exhausted.

This week, I’ve dealt with some rough issues, some weird projects, weird code, and a lack of sleep. My eating’s been better, though, except a couple iced coffee drinks and a “50 cent no-joke” McD’s ice cream cone.

My son was sick, so I skipped class that night as it was one of those “really don’t know what’s going on” issues. We did our best to hold out on freaking out, but last night while we were out our baby sitter called us and let us know he was getting sick (and I must say, she handled it like a trooper). This morning we opted to take him to the Doctor’s office (mostly for my peace of mind) – it’s something viral, and we may end up getting it. If it’s just a matter of keeping him fed and hydrated – I can deal with that.

Today, my focus is on class work – catching up, preparing for tests, wiping out issues, etc. etc. If I’m lucky, I’ll have time to play with PHP and break out my guitar (I had a late nap, I’m feeling a bit invigorated). So right now, I’m trying to take a break from, well, everything. Maybe I’ll get some writing, drawing and other creative outlets flowing as well…

Can’t rock out without a good song to jam to, y’know? Of course, the more I listen to QotSA the more I want to jam…

It’s awesome when you’re given a task of writing something you’ve looked into and think not enough has been said on the topic.

As well, it’s awesome to expand another’s work to see if you can – even better when you walk away with a better understanding.

More on those things later – except for my own lack of time for writing. My wheels are always turning. Always. My mind doesn’t shut off, and I find myself multi-tasking in conversations, often to my detriment – I ask people to repeat themselves often to make sure what is going through my head matches what they are saying, as I hate making assumptions, but at the same time, I like to be able to predict what you’re about to say (which comes from impatience, I suppose, which I certainly need to keep in check!)

Here recently I’ve generated a growing list of topics I’d like to write about – here, on my other blogs, and privately, but of course – who has the time? I usually get frustrated at this, and at not taking advantage of the many book son technologies I have in my possession to further my skill set.In one instance, I get upset – I’m not as strong a developer I would like. I’m not as well-versed in certain areas as my co-workers are. In the same light, I feel I’m stronger in certain areas that they aren’t, which is not a commentary on their “lack of” skills, but more-so my own observation on how different personalities approach tasks and see solutions.

From this, I see I’m not being vocal enough. I’m seeing my ideas/thoughts coming to life in tandem, without bringing them up – but this is from a lack of confidence in myself, being surrounded by great minds! I need to speak up a bit sooner (which, I’ve caught myself doing, trying to steer a couple items towards its inevitable destination).

IN TERMS OF WRITING, blogging, etc. etc…

I’m exhausted. I work 40 hours a week or more depending on my workload. I’m in school after work – often until 9 p.m. this quarter. I’m a husband. I’m a father. I’m an avid reader, coder, theorist, philosopher, xbox media center fan, and a number of other titles, some more useful than others. My plate is very full. It’s times like this, when I get to sit down with the wife and son in bed, with my dog by my side, sipping a drink, that I take that moment to meditate and come to the conclusion that I get a lot done – a lot more than I think. I’ve read several books this year. I nearly got a 4.0 last quarter. This quarter I expect the same – which leads me to my next revelation.

Last night, I was pounding away at Calculus, when I hit a problem I couldn’t figure out. I stared at it, re-read the chapter multiple times, took breaks to read some other books, and came back – to the same, mind-numbing answer of “w-t-f-mate?”

Today, I go to work, I relax, I code on a few projects that I’ve had in mind. Expanding mootools effects n’ such (more later). I get a lot done. I see a couple of others projects expanding as I imagined they would. I have some interesting conversations, read some interesting articles – and I head to class this evening. I come home to my son asleep, and I give the Wife a back-rub and tuck her in, and now, I’m in silence.

So I pull out my calc book, look at the chapter, and the answer hits me in the head. So. Freaking. Clearly. Sometimes you just need to take a days break away from your problem, and suddenly so many other things become more clearly. I can’t gurantee I’ll write as often as I’d like, but I’m trying – and I’ve got loads to discuss. :)