Mental Junk

After reading my last post I realized it sounds like I am really griping, when in reality, I'm not.  I was just trying to note that things do seem to happen in threes.  

The leak in the church could have been a lot worse.  It could have backed right up and done serious damage.  While the same goes for work and here at home.  The water heater at work could have blown last Friday – if that was the case then there would be a lot of water damage to product, equipment and walls.  Here at home, well, we have a concrete floor in the basement and live with spring run off every year, so our basement is used to being hosed down.

It's always amazing to me how things work out.  I don't think I would have even checked our furnace pump if I hadn't been joking about 'waiting for the third'.

Sunday we went to church and I found out that the nursery was moved from the nursery room to a room down the hall because of a flood.  I started poking around and found that the condensation pump on the side of the furnace failed and was overflowing.  I dug out a sopping box from beside the furnace and 'kick' started the pump.  That seemed to do the trick as it started pumping once again.  I suppose that the remaining water in the bottom of the pump became sludge and gummed up the pump.

Today, I found myself mopping up leaked water once again – this time at work.  The water heater seems to have sprung a leak somewhere and was leaking on the second floor – right above the men's washroom.  This water followed a sprinkler head and was dripping on the floor of the men's washroom.  After a quick investigation, I figured I couldn't do much other than turn off the water and mop up the water.

I jokingly said to Michelle I hope we aren't #3.  Karen came over tonight to pick Kris up for darts and again, I joked that I should check the basement.  Not expecting to find anything, I went down.

Our condensation pump is gummed.

So, instead of actually going down and fixing it – I am here bitching blogging about it.

Oh well.

This was really cool.  Golden Age of video – many staple images and audio clips from TV and Movies that have become part of western culture all overlayed a catchy beat – they even made the clips rhyme!

I didn't think to take a before pic of Nate's room, but here is the after:

Installing a retrofit window is actually relatively painless as long as the frame is good.  The only thing I have to watch out for in the next window is the crazy, all consuming, watch – out – it's going to eat everything, expanding foam.  I picked up the 'Low Expansion Formula' for windows and doors, and I was still worried that it would eat my kids!

Well, onto Cam's room.

Windows are in – going to install them – wish me luck (I've never done this before).  This should be fun, I don't get to walk around on the roof a whole lot now that I have to be a responsible dad and all that crap.

Facebook – you dirty rat!  Where is Michelle's profile gone??!!!???

ACCOUNT DISABLED!!???!

We got in last night at 12:30am (so… that would be this morning, then, right?).  The trip out was fantastic.  The boys were great in the car.

On the way home, however, Cameron just had enough and wanted his bed.  I don't blame him – I felt the same way, but I didn't cry (I just whined a lot and drove on the sleepy bars).

I felt bad for the guy, but there wasn't anything we could do.  Stopping the car just gave him a little reprieve,  but he still had to get back in to finish the journey.  We made it home and he simply whimpered quietly as I brought him straight in from the car to his bed.  I felt horrible for keeping him up so late – but it really is worth it.

The girls are simply amazing.  I love watching them interact – they are very well behaved and articulate!  I don't get to see many kids like them.  I hope Michelle and I do half a good a job as Gary and Jodi.

I tried to get Jodi to perform her 'Running Man' – but alas, she didn't want international fame.  She had this crazy idea I'd upload it to youtube.  I have no clue what gave her that idea. 

Tomorrow we are heading into Chatham to visit friends family.

It is approximately three and a half hours one way.  So, we have about 7 hours in the car ahead of us.  Neither of the boys have had to sit in the car that long without breaks, so this will be an experience.

I am expecting to have to make frequent stops if the boys are bored – just to get them out and look around at different scenery – otherwise they may (probably will) get cranky.

Years ago, Michelle and I both loved long car trips.  When we got our first car that is all we did.  We drove to Niagra Falls at 3 in the morning just for something to do.  We talked back then about making our kids come along for the long rides – eventually ending up camping or hiking.  So far, it just hasn't happened.  I know – they are only one and two – but still.  I was expecting a couple long trips in their lives already.

We'll see how they do – and whether we want to torture ourselves again like this.

I've been getting a lot of interest in the automatic Twitters I have
set up.  People are curious how I've done it and what it is about.

update:  the link to the feed is http://twitter.com/fortune_mod

Basically, I set up an automatic twitter every half hour, Monday to
Friday between 9am and 5pm.  These tweets are from a linux/unix program written by
many people over the years called Fortune.

Fortune is a simple program which pulls random entries from a database
of quotes, sayings, or anything else of trivial importance.  I believe the
original intent of the program was to provide a fortune cookie for
users who logged into a computer or other similar activity.  Over the
years I have seen it used more as being a generator for tag lines in emails
than anything else.  Each time an email is sent, a new fortune is
used as the tag line at the bottom of emails.  There are many tutorials
available to get this working on many email clients.

I was looking into the programmer's interface that is supplied by the
folks at Twitter and wanted to set up an automatic twitter.  I am using
fortune mainly because it's readily available.  I decided to write a
simple PHP script that would call fortune, and use the returned text as
the source of a posted tweet.  Here is the code:

// Auto Twitter feed
$message = shell_exec('fortune -s -n 140'); // Get a fortune that is less than 140 characters long
$message = urlencode($message); // encode the message to pass to Twitter
$curl_handle = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://twitter.com/statuses /update.xml');
// Set to use the XML interface
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1); // POST instead of GET
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, \"source=$source&status=$message\" ) ; 
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $USER_NAME . ':' . $PASSWORD);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle); // Send the tweet
curl_close($curl_handle); // Clean up

The next step is to add a cron job which would run the PHP script every half hour.  Cron is a program which runs every minute and looks at a table of entries to determine if there are any applications, scripts or processes that should be run.  Using Cron, you can make programs run automatically at different times, daily, weekly, monthly or every other day even.  For this, I want it to run every half hour only durning business hours.  Here is the cron entry:

*/30 9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17 * * * /usr/bin/php ~/twitter.php

Hope this helps!

Having a discussion the other day with a good friend we came across the word manipulate.  This is a word which in the context of getting other people to do what we want – has a negative connotation attached.  Don't get me wrong here – I don't want to loose the bad press that word has received – but I also don't want to avoid it.

If we intend to try to convince someone of doing something they normally won't do or intended to do – that is manipulation.  What our intentions are – that is where malice can lie.

I manipulate my son into doing things every day.  I hold up a toy and draw his attention away from the electrical plug he recently became aware of.  Or I move toys he is reaching for further out of his way so he has to crawl towards it.  I know – you say that's different – you are teaching him and keeping him safe.  Yes, that is true.  However, I am doing so through manipulation.  More specifically through misdirection and baiting, but those are just methods.

We are manipulated all the time.  Through advertising, the media in general, our employers and, yes, or family and friends.  The thing we have to be cognizant about is the intention behind these behavioral changes. The danger is when we no longer see the manipulations (or in many cases, never see) or recognize their sources.

The fear that I have is that we start recognizing the negative connotations that get associated with words and we become afraid to use those words – instead of looking for the root of the evil and fixing the actual problem. I saw a lot of this throughout the mid to late 90's during the political correct phase. As soon as a word is recognized in an unfavorable way, we stop using it and move on to another, cloaked form or phrase of the word. This solves nothing. At best, it masks a deeper problem within our society and at worst it makes our language more convoluted and ultimately meaningless.

So, go ahead – continue to manipulate the people around you. Just take a good look into your soul and determine the reason behind it. Is it to benefit you? Or them? If you can't tell the difference – then don't do it.