SRHuston Dot Net

I must be bad luck.  Every time we move, construction follows.  We moved to West Deptford, and 295 went under construction for a large section I had to travel daily.  We moved to Ewing, and various little construction bits popped up here and there.  We moved to Morrisville and the Route 1 bridge started construction.  Now that it’s almost completed, the Calhoun St. Bridge is now closed while they work in that.  I forgot the bridge was closed yesterday (though I don’t usually take it) and got to a logjam on Route 1 just in time to get off at 129, snaked down Cass St. to 29 and found all routes over to PA were jammed.  Drove up 29 towards Scudders Falls to find it too was crammed full of idiots.  Ended up taking an extra half hour to drive up to Washington’s Crossing and come back down – tonight I aim to head directly there instead.  Google tells me it’s a 52 minute drive, but 23 miles – so it adds about 10 miles to the commute, and a half hour.  Then again, I’m almost okay with a half hour longer commute if I get to keep driving the whole time and not deal with aggressive, moronic and mentally deficient drivers that appear to be the norm on Route 1 anyway.

Oh, and this is apparently the 200th post on here.  It’s only taken me what, seven years?  Not counting the Slashcode years anyway.

May has always been a little bit of a busy month for us, but got a lot more busy lately.  My mother-in-law’s birthday is in the beginning of the month, and our anniversary is on the 20th (just celebrated nine years!).  Emily’s birthday is on the 14th, but we decided to have her party today since it was a bit more convenient – for one, her uncle would be up from college and able to attend too.  Our friends Will & Megan have their daughter’s birthday one week after Emily’s, and their party was yesterday, so this weekend is filled with baby celebrations.  Plus throw a mother’s day in there too, and every weekend we’ve had something planned.  We’re pretty sure that June has an open date or two…

As I concluded in yesterday’s post, the combination of melatonin and light therapy seems to be working.  I started it all last Friday night, and though I could have stayed up late since it’s a weekend I wanted to get things moving towards my weekly schedule right away.  So at around 9:30 I took a melatonin and laid down to listen to a podcast and catch up on my RSS feeds.  After a half hour or so, Stephanie wasn’t up to bed yet but I was pretty tired, so I put everything down and went to sleep, with the sunrise setting on the Dia2 turned on but no alarm set.  I was surprised by the result.

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For decades (sucks that I can actually say that) I’ve had trouble sleeping.  I remember back in high school, getting up to get showered and out the door was always a chore that involved my mother almost pushing me around the house through each step.  In college, it was no better, and the only times that I ever seemed to sleep normally was the few months I worked the night shift at a gas station (22:00-06:00) and any time I was left to my own sleep schedule.  I’d go to bed anywhere between 2 and 4am, sometimes as late as 6, and wake up roughly 8 hours after falling asleep with no alarm clock or outside influence.  But even recently if I tried going to sleep between 9-10pm I still had trouble getting out of bed at 6:30.  Finally, I may have found the answer to what was going on, and a solution to keep me awake during the day – and sleeping all night – on what “normal society” considers a regular schedule.

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My wife has had a website for some time, and updates it infrequently.  Recently she started to get the bug to post more than just status updates on Facebook, and started a new site: Stephanie, AKA Mom.  Chock full of family goodness, recipes, money saving tips, and all other sorts of things my wife decides to tackle.  Go read it, subscribe to the RSS feed, send her comments and ideas and all that.  Tell her I sent you.

You probably didn’t notice (how could you!) but there’s now a mobile version of the site setup.  I would keep seeing this when I browsed to places like Nerdist, but never bothered to look into how it was done.  Finally I did, and while there’s a bunch of choices I went with the one that seems to look the nicest in each available platform.  At least each one I can see anyway.  There’s a link to turn off the mobile site if you look and don’t like it, so there’s no harm done – but it does load a bit faster with it on too.  I’ll probably tweak settings here and there so don’t get too used to how it looks yet.

I’ve had a lot of IM accounts over the years.  Powwow was I think my first, and then ICQ was a quick follow-up after that (which I had until some ‘tard decided it would be funny to brute-force the account and lock me out of it, and thanks to ICQ’s craptacular policies I have no way to get it back – so if you see 2109563 online, tell him he’s a fuckhead).  Anyway, the problem is disparity: With all these different networks, I have too many places to check for things.  For a while I used Bitlbee to keep all the networks together in one place which worked nicely – all of my chat logs where on my home computer which I could access from anywhere, no more searching through a few different machines to find that link that someone sent me, whatever.  The problem is with mobile access: I wanted to be able to IM Stephanie from my phone instead of using SMS messages all the time.  Combine that with the number of “friends” I would watch go online and offline and never say a word to me and I decided IM wasn’t worth it anyway.  When Meebo released their iPhone app, I decided to give it another go since Stephanie and I could use it instead of Google Voice for messaging each other.  It works very well – and I like being able to reply on the web site instead of being forced to use the phone when I’ve got a full keyboard in front of me – but I still have these networks like MSN, AIM and Yahoo where I rarely get messages, don’t want to ignore them, but don’t like that I can’t use whatever client from wherever whenever I want.  So I think I found a solution to the networks that don’t allow for multiple logins without extra complexity.  Using trigger.pl, an irssi script, I have a rule setup to automatically reply to someone who IMs me on AIM, Yahoo or MSN and tells them to use my Google Chat account instead.  If you don’t know the address, just send me an email and I’ll tell you!  This way, I can use whatever IM client I’m closest to and is most convenient, but they’re all connected in a way that I can seamlessly move from one to another – and still keep chat history in a single location.  It’s not as nice as having it all on my computer, since things like ‘grep -R’ aren’t available, but Google’s search works well enough that it’s not an issue.

Next step is to setup OTR messaging, but I have to dig around and see what has changed in the months since I last used OTR plugins in irssi.

I forgot to post this back when I noticed it, but a little while ago I found something interesting.  I loaded my Google profile, and lo and behold!  What’s that in the upper right corner?  It’s a list of domains where my email address has been verified.  Fancy that, the option to turn them on finally showed up, and I did so.  And it was good.  Don’t know if my previous post on the matter had anything to do with it, but if some random Googler found my plea and fixed it.. thanks :>

I seem to have formally ended my affiliation with the DVRA today.  This has been on the wall for some time apparently – there’s some who don’t seem to think I, or others that pay dues and help when they can, are doing enough and that we need to do more.  Of course, the problem was that when I brought in a bunch of new folks who were more than interested, eager and willing to do a lot more, they were all met with apathy and indifference, occasionally opposition.  A few times lately I’d get the snarky comments.. “Missed you at the meeting” (which I refrained from replying with, “I had a nice dinner with my family, you were not missed”) and more recently a flat-out “maybe if you showed up you’d know.”  I’m sorry, but isn’t it the dream of an organization, to which membership doesn’t cost the organization anything, to have members who send in dues and do nothing else?  What if that person sends in dues, and maintains websites, email lists, Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts and more?  Apparently, it’s still not enough as some now want to mandate that people must attend other functions, or – get this – give six months notice they’ll be unable to attend, so that other suitable tasks can be set aside for them.  You have got to be fucking kidding me, I thought.  Nope, all seriousness.  Give your money, give your time (or give more money), or you’re out.  Let me think about that.. oh yeah.  Good riddance.

A copy of my “farewell” letter is below the fold, for those morbidly interested in reading it.  I really do feel bad about this, and got a bit emotional writing it.  There’s a select few who appear to be running the organization into the ground as quickly as they can, and if not for the group there’s some very fine people I never would have met.  But some folks are just hell-bent on getting things their way at all costs… I wonder how many will be left in the group when others who have no desire – or ability – to participate in mandatory events take stock of what they really get out of the club, and what downsides there are to leaving it.  I certainly couldn’t think of one.

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