Robots!

Recently (for my wife’s birthday), our house according to our Son inherited two robots.   More specifically, we now have Roombas.

As my son went around yelling about how we had a Robot, and how it was sweeping the room for us.   It got me to thinking.   Remember back in the day when we all watched the Jetsons and wished for the day when we too had a Rosie to take care of our house?

I realized that while we don’t have a humanoid robot doing it for us, we do in fact have ‘robots’.   I mean, I have robots now that sweep my floors.  My ReplayTV takes care of knowing what shows I want to watch and recording them for me.  Various X10 appliances in my house can automatically turn on or off.

So I guess we have reached that day, just not exactly in the way we originally dreamed of it.

Amazon is great (I’ll say it again)

Ok, Amazon is in my opinion just one of the services out there right now. An earlier post of mine already said this, but this Christmas I’ve had more good experiences.

First of all I ordered some jewelry for my wife that was the wrong size. No issues, went online, a few clicks had me returning it for ‘wrong size’, and a new piece of jewelry was on the way. Oh, and they paid my return shipping!

Secondly, my wife got me an HD-DVD drive for my xbox 360. It worked for half-a-movie then stopped working. I tried calling Microsoft support 5 times, and got cut off every time. Finally I realized she had bought it through Amazon, and they have a 30 day no matter what return policy. She went online, clicked to return just as easily, printed out a free UPS label, and we had it on it’s way.

I got the new one and it worked fine. She even got an apology letter from Amazon stating how bad they felt that they shipped her defective merchandise.

End of year Summary

It’s that time of year again. A new year has come to pass, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on everything that happened last year.

• I presented at 5 conferences:
  • MySQL User conference 2007
  • PHP|tek 2007
  • PHP|works 2007
  • ZendCon 2007
  • DCPHP 2007
• I flew enough to get upgraded to Gold status with my preferred airline
• In the SCA I stepped down in my position of Kingdom Target Archery Marshal and stepped up in the position of Society Combat Archery Marshal
• I spent far too much time playing the following video games:  Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Halo (original), Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero III, and Rock Band
• I managed to bring a 1 year old baby up to a 2 year old ‘little man’ (rapidly going on 3)

I found my new editor

So, as a followup to a previous post where I was looking to find a new editor for PHP/HTML/JS/CSS work …

I finally found it.   I recently switched over to using a Mac as my primary machine (more on that later) … and fell in love with Textmate.  It seems to do ALMOST everything that I wanted.  The one missing fact is integrated FTP.  But the editor is so great that I’m overlooking that, and have written some rsync scripts to use instead.

Talks from DCPHP 2007 are up

Just finished my last talk at DCPHP, and so uploaded them to my conferences area.   Go get ‘em now!

9pm Bedtime for the kid, is hard

Not on him, but on the parents.   My son used to have a 7:30pm bedtime … and got up at 6:30am with his mother.

He went through a growth spurt, say, a month or so ago, and after that started really complaining when we went to put him to bed.  He just wasn’t sleepy.  We shifted bedtime later, and later, until we ended up stabalizing at 9pm.  It’s much better for him.  (He still takes a 2+ hour nap in the middle of the day).

It’s also better for us, in the sense that we get an extra 1.5 hours of awake time with him, so we are really spending much more time with him.

However, we’ve realized after a month of this, that it’s killing our ‘chores, tasks, hobbies’ … Since we used to use from 7:30pm to 9/10pm as chores/tasks/hobbies … then Heather would go to bed, and I would stay up until 11pm ‘decompressing’.

Now 9pm rolls around, and not only are we already behind on starting on anything, we are more tired having played with him.  So, we are ready for immediately decompression/bed, and not wanting to do chores or even hobbies that involve any amount of brain power.

Not sure what the answer, other than ‘welcome to parenthood phase 27′ is, and to wait until phase 28.

Cost of things in comparison

You might want to consider this a followon to my previous post about modern costs.

But yesterday/today just really put another problem in modern days in perspective to me. I remember when ‘general life stuff’, like gas, and eating out, was relatively cheap, compared to fun and/or luxury items.

That’s not the case anymore. And it makes trying to stick to a budget, to be selective in your choices, a really hard thing.

Yesterday my wife, son and I went to a little mom&pop restaurant and just got a couple subs, sodas, and a slice of pizza for my son. After tax/tip, it was $35. Today I had to fill up my truck, it was $68.

On Sunday Guitar Hero III was released, and we ran out and bought it immediately because I was foaming at the mouth for it. It was $89 (and was WELL worth the money). But we didn’t blink twice at buying that. Afterall, it was LESS money than filling up the truck and having a meal out.

Then we come to the present, where you find Eli having a really hard time NOT spending money on something that is ’such a good deal’. Right now a certain online retailer has the Xbox HD-DVD player on sale for $164, free shipping, 6 free HD-DVDs, plus the 1st season of Heroes on HD-DVD.

That’s an amazing deal! You basically are getting the player for free if you calculate up the cost of all those HD-DVD’s.

One side of my brain is telling me that it’s ONLY $164 … that’s like 2 truck fillups. Not much money at all. The other side of my brain is telling me that it’s $164!!! And that’s far too much to just drop on a whim (especially after doing that for some new GPS systems lately, and Guitar Hero II, etc).

This problem didn’t exist (at least that I remember) when a fillup was $5, and when eating out was $3 or $5 a person.

UPDATE:  This afternoon when picking up my son from daycare, I had to fill up the car as well, $31 there.  I then went into the 7-11 I was at to buy three drinks, which came to $5.   Now within a 24 hour period, $139 has been spent on Gas & FoodStuffs, yet, I hesitate to spend $164 on ‘cool technology’.

DCPHP Conference

So, next week I’ll be attending the only local PHP conference to me, DCPHP 2007. I went to it last year and had an absolute blast. It reminded me of the PHP conferences in New York that I once went to that were smaller, more intimate. Which is great. It’s the kind of conference that gives you a chance to sit down with speakers at a bar and chat with them in the evenings.

As usual, the ‘Local Crowd’ of PHP folks (Maryland/DC/Virginia) are well represented as speakers, including the likes of Chris Shiflett, Laura Thomson, and Keith Casey.

I’ll be giving my stock ‘High Performance’ talk, as well as a brand new one entitled: “Help, My Website has been Hacked! Now What?” … that’s supposed to be the ‘other side’ of security, IE, what to do when you failed at it.

I hope it goes well, and hey, I guess I better stop writing blog postings, and finish up those new slides!

PS. I updated my main website http://eliw.com/ to have links to almost all of my Social Network Profiles. Go check them out if you are interested, and add me as a friend/fan on Digg and Pownce if you would like.

Trimming my Bacn

Alright, so I realized recently that I get SO much Bacn … that I used to really like getting.  But now, I just don’t have the time to read it all.  So I’m trimming it down.  I’m sure I won’t find out about all those great deals at various stores, and other kinds of ’stuff’.  But you know what?  I was getting so much that I wasn’t reading it anyway.

So, bah.  Be gone!

I’m not a designer …

I’m certainly not a designer, but I’m also vain enough to never ask for help on my own websites.  And, ummm, that’s why they look like they do :)  I tend to get caught up into the ‘really cool thing’ that you can do with CSS, and focus my design around that.

But anyway, just wanted to point out that at ZendCon it got mentioned to me that my website wasn’t up to par.

I didn’t do much, but I made a few changes, namely removing the Bright Green Navigation … plus pulling my blog content onto my homepage.

I still like having my blog hosted at WordPress.com because of, well, being lazy and not wanting to admin my own blog.  But the least I can do is to pull in my blog content onto the front page of my website, so it at least ‘looks’ like I host my blog there.

Hope this makes your Blog Browsing experience a little less painful.