I was just thinking that I love Wordpress. No, not for the exceptional code that is in it. Or for several of the other reasons that one could really not like the application.
No, I love it for the ease of using it. I just updated my blog today and was very impressed with how fast and smooth the update went.
Step 1: (Optional) Delete old files
Step 2: Upload new files
Step 3: Run the upgrade script
Step 4: Enjoy the new digs
Yes, it was that easy. And the newest admin interface rocks hard. I was using the Tiger Admin interface but this one looks nice enough to use as is.
So to the Wordpress dev team, well done on this one. I am looking forward to the newer stuff coming out in the future.
I have discovered recently that emails sent from my blog to newly registered users may not be getting through. I am looking in to what might be causing this.
In the meantime, if you have registered on my blog and have not received your username and password email please email robert [@t] everah [d0t] com with the username you selected when registering and I will try to make it better for you.
And for security, email me from the email you used to register. Otherwise I won’t do anything. Thanks.
Somehow last week I totally skipped over the fact that Carly Smithson got evicted from the performers list of American Idol. This came as quite the shock to me since I thought for sure that Brooke White would have gotten the axe.
I was also surprised to see Syesha Mercado in the bottom three as well. I thought her performance last week was her best of the season. I was truly shocked last week.
Of course, the show is in the hands of the American public, so I am sure that I will disagree with most of the decisions made this year. But I think last week things just went way wrong.
Of course I still hold to my final two: David Cook and David Archuleta. But I am more interested in who gets the boot this week.
So putting last week behind me I will be watching in full attention tonight as the remaining five battle it out for a chance to make it to next week.
I am not trying, but it seems that the more terrible food I eat nowadays the more weight I am losing. I am not sure how this works, but it is working. And I am not complaining.
In my defense I am not eating terrible ALL the time. I have actually cut back quite a bit on high sodium foods, fast food and high fat foods. I have also started drinking a ton of water every day. This has helped tremendously.
One thing I have yet to do is get back to the gym. I want to. Ever so badly. But life situations do not allow for that at the moment. But I will get back there soon enough. And I am sure when I do I will lose even more weight.
Until then though I am happy with the way things are going. I am not feeling driven by weight loss, I am not feeling deprived or hungry.
I am, however, feeling better about myself since my clothes is feeling better and I am feeling better. I am hoping that changes for the better when things start heating up with me losing weight. But like I said, until then I am still happy.
And I am still wanting junk food late at night. But at least now I am telling myself no. Usually. 
PS It wasn’t a huge loss from the last time, but this weekend I was at 304.5. A loss is a loss. Especially when you are not trying all that hard.
For like the third time in the last week I woke up with a freight train barreling out of my head. Well, not really a freight train. But it feels like it.
I haven’t had headaches like this for a long time. And I am glad about that. But I am not glad about the fact that I am having them again.
The only thing I can think of that could be causing them is lack of sleep. I haven’t slept much the last week or so because Sandi has been out of commission for a that time and I have had to pick up quite a bit of other responsibilities that she would normally handle.
To offset the time I spend doing things that I wouldn’t normally do I stay up later to accomplish the things that I need to do. Like code for work. Or better, code for clients.
But that makes mornings almost unbearable, and as of late, very painful.
See these are not normal headaches. These are the kind of headaches that make your eyes feel heavy. They feel like there are a thousand strings attached to the bottom of your brain that get pulled on every time your body moves.
They are the kind of headaches that when you stand up you can hear your heartbeat just below your forehead. They hurt. Bad.
A few days ago I had a headache like this one and it eventually went away. At about 6:00 in the evening. Yeah, 12 hours of pounding from the inside of the your cranial cavity is enough to drive anyone insane. I still think I am a little crazy from the last one.
I am just hoping that this one doesn’t last that long. Because honestly it sucks. And with a wife that is just now becoming able to sleep I have five very loud and needy kids that are not going to change who they are just because daddy doesn’t feel good.
Pray for me. I am going to need it.
Ubuntu 8.04 was recently released out of beta. I have been awaiting this release for some time now because this release marks the first time since I can remember in which a Linux OS live install CD came with an installer that actually installs Linux as a Windows application.
So as soon as 8.04 came out of beta I downloaded it. I installed it today. And everything worked as cool as a cucumber out of the box. Except the wireless connection.
A brief search on Google turned up a great tutorial on getting Ubuntu 8.04 to work with a Broadcom wireless adapter on an HP dv6000 series computer. Seeing as my machine is a zv6000 I figured following the instructions was at least worth a shot.
I followed the instructions in the tutorial verbatim with two exceptions. The first is that the apt-get install build-essential did not work. For some reason apt could not find the package so instead I went to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and searched for “build essential”, selected it and installed it through the package manager.
The second exception is that I installed the firmware using sudo, which the tutorial did not do.
These are the steps I took:
# these bits handle getting, unpacking and making the broadcom firmware cutter
$ wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
$ tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
$ cd b43-fwcutter-011
$ make
$ cd ..
# These bits snag and install the firmware for the card
$ wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
$ tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
$ cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
$ sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o
After running the above processes I rebooted the computer and BINGO! My wireless card started and I was able to connect to my wireless network without incident.
I hope this helps. And I have to give mad props to the original writer of the tutorial, who goes by the name “Christopher” on his blog.
Today was supposed to be the day that our family went to Sacramento for a visit to the state capital. If you have read any of my posts from the last few days you’d know that there was an ice cube’s chance in hell that we would be taking that trip today.
With Sandi being as sick as she is there is little chance of us doing anything like this for quite a while. So instead we are spending our day cleaning, working, yadda yadda yadda.
What makes this a little more sick is that this morning I found out that Sandi is sick because of me. Well, according to some folks you ask anyway. Apparently because of some sin of mine Sandi is being made ill and she will not ever get better until I get this issue of sin squared away.
Sweet! At least I know what is causing all of this mess.
Seriously though, being told that your sin is causing your wife’s sickness and that her sickness exists to teach the entire family, especially you, a lesson is a little disconcerting. In fact, it kinda pissed me off.
But I got over it. I had to. There is way too much going on right to be bothered by senseless and stupid accusation like that. I have a wife to take care of. A family to support. A job to do. Clients to service.
So as I sat and thought, for the shortest of times, that being the cause of my wife’s sickness was really a twisted way to look at things I began to realize that this though has no basis in reality to begin with.
I have a tendency to beat myself up as it is anyway, and adding something else from someone else’s point of view could not, in any way, help that. So after a few hours I came to the conclusion that people get sick. It happens. Whether it is the flu, anxiety or depression sickness is sickness and if you don’t keep yourself out of harm’s way you are allowing yourself to be put in harm’s path.
It happens. Life happens. The less time you spend taking care of business and spend looking at things that are not going to impact life in a positive way the better the chances are that you will spend more time looking at life and not living it.
I don’t have time for that.
Yesterday, while I was working from home, it seemed that anything that could go wrong at work did. This is out of the norm for my job. In fact, yesterday was the first time in a long time that I had so many emergency-type things happen that time passed as though it wasn’t there.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I was working at home I might have enjoyed the exhilaration of all the excitement yesterday. Instead I was almost panicked by it since I was not available directly to handle some of the things that went down. But it’s all good.
Today was nice in that I was able to come to the office, spend a little time with coworkers going over the stuff that happened yesterday, plot some countermeasure strategies and begin implementation.
I was also able to take my Zend Certification Training class in the comfort of my cube, where I could effectively determine how I stack up against Object Oriented PHP Programming. I think rather well (and yes Paul, you can instantiate a singleton with new self;).
But as the day wore on I found myself a little preoccupied with how things at home were going. I became a little concerned when I got a call from my daughter asking me if they could go out back for a little while (was mom not available for this question?). it ended up being that mom was just a little bit occupied at the moment, but my daughters, in their quest to have everything done immediately and without haste, decided to call me at that moment to ask.
All was well. Mostly.
But I digress. In thinking about today I must say that I will probably try to come to work tomorrow. I will probably not make it but I will try. Not to be away from the home to actually wrap things up that needed wrapping up.
And if not, I guess I can work on those things from home on my day off. I am getting pretty good at that.
Today I spent another day at home. I was working, but still, working from home.
Depression, anxiety and exhaustion are terrible critters. They are difficult to contend with, difficult to see coming, difficult to understand and nearly impossible to treat without some type of heavy duty medication, counseling and therapy. Worse yet, the effects of an episode (whether it be emotional, spiritual or physical) generally seem to last for an extraordinary period of time.
When the person experiencing this condition is mom it makes the household really have to cover the slack. More so when mom is a stay at home mom. And in our case, more so even yet since we are a home schooling home.
What this means is that when mom gets sick, the house has to rally around that to handle the things that mom normally does. That means that things like preparing meals, getting the kids to school activities (field trips, co-ops, etc), getting younger ones ready foe the day, all of it, needs to be done by someone else.
When the someones else are a father and five young children, how many people know that things get a little rough?
And so it was today. I still had to work my day job. I still have a few client projects that I am working on. And I had a house to take care of today. And a household to take care of. Things were a little heavy today.
And they have been since Sandi broke down on Saturday.
Anyhow this is turning into a venting rant. The truth is I am the other half of the management team of our household. It should be my responsibility to take up the slack when it needs taking up. And so I do. Cheerfully at times, but whatever.
Tomorrow I have to go back to work. And honestly it will be a welcomed break. For a short time anyway. Most often when I go to work knowing how the household is in situations like this I end up spending most of my day worrying about my family.
I have Friday off though. I had taken it off to spend the day (and Saturday too) with my family in Sacramento on a field trip/family getaway. But that is being put on hold in favor of resting Sandi. I have missed two days being at work now so I may go in. But we’ll have to play that by ear.
Till then, thanks for listening, er, reading. I have no shoulders to lean on so this will just have to do.
The other day I got the bright idea to sign up for Skype. After all, I am a geek by trade and almost all geeks have a Skype account. Not wanting to feel left out I jumped on the bandwagon.
So I went to Staples and bought a Skype optimized headset from Logitech. It didn’t really work (the mic was way to short for my fat face) so I returned it and went to Best Buy where everyone knows the best electronics and computer equipment is sold. 
While there a headset from Microsoft caught my attention. It was the LifeChat LX 3000 and it looked pretty appealing.
Now before you call me a hypocrite know that the reason I chose Microsoft is that M$ has a way of making things that work with their own OS really well. I thought that since they made the headset it should work really well.
It did.
But not how I would have wanted it to.
See I installed Windows Live Messenger (because you have to install that before you install the software that drives the headset) then installed the headset driver software. Then I connected the headset. And turned on the sound.
The sound played. Through the speakers on my laptop. I did what the instructions in the headset manual said to do. But the sound still came from my computer rather than through my headset.
So I called M$ tech support and after about 30 minutes of trying to talk with a guy named Winston (Yeah right, his real was Sunil) I found out that the headset is designed in such a way as to become your default speakers. Yes, you heard that right. Microsoft expects you to use this headset as your default sound output handler. WTF?
After Sunil, er, Winston, remoted into my laptop and reset a bunch of settings to get the headset to play the sound, I told him I was going to remove the headset from the computer so I could listen to music from my computer. He told me I couldn’t do that without undoing all of the changes he just made. I told him I didn’t want to have to use the headset all the time but only when I wanted to make phone calls. He told me that was fine. As long as I changed my settings every time I connected the headset to my computer.
Thanks Microsoft.
Yes, the headset went straight back to Best Buy where I promptly traded them for a Plantronics headset. Which works as expected.