bobafred

Yesterday I took The Butt out to make number 2, like she likes to do from time to time. We went out the front door and down the steps of the front porch. We started to cross the front yard when out of nowhere something fell from the sky with a loud thud as it hit the ground. Whatever it was, it landed about 4 feet from us. It startled both of us.

We looked over and there was a squirrel lying on the ground. It got up, a little dazed, and dashed back to the “safety” of the nearest tree. We have giant old oak trees in our front yard, and the lowest branch on the tree it fell from is easily 30 feet in the air. I’m not exaggerating either. Our house has to be at least 15 feet tall, and it’s at least twice as high as the peak of our house. See look, I made a drawing on a photo:

After Molly realized what had happened, she lost it — barking, pulling, etc. This is probably the closest she has been to a real live squirrel without a window between them. She has this desire to eat squirrels. We think she might think they are mini-cats or something.

And, I don’t feel bad for the squirrel either, because:

1. Either this squirrel or one of his buddies throws spiny seed pod things at me when I walk under this tree sometimes. It would really hurt if I got hit by one.
2. The squirrels in our yard keep digging up our veggie garden. Assholes.

Anyway, it was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Tags: 9.8 m/s/s, fall, falling, fell, gravity, molly, not flying, oak, squirrel, tree

To read about the previous Secret Date Night, go here.

This time, I was the recipient of Secret Date Night, so that was awesome.

We began Saturday evening at Fritti. To start, we ordered the Calamari Fritti, which was light and crispy and delicious. There were super large tentacle clusters and perfectly tender rings. Really delicious. For my main I had the Frutti di Mare. It’s a cheeseless pizza topped with shrimp, scallops, calamari, and mussels. It was a little watery, most likely due to the water content of the seafood and the lack of cheese, but I loved it. Lori had the Crudo e Rucola, a pizza topped with arugula and prosciutto. Again, so good.

After dinner we headed across the street to Dad’s Garage for a performance of Song of the Living Dead. It’s a musical about love and zombies. The show was great — funny, bloody and totally inappropriate at times. Pretty much everything you’d expect. And who would have guessed that zombies could dance? If you get a chance to see this, you should. I had so much fun.

It’s awesome to have someone that knows me so well and can plan a perfect evening like this. I’m very lucky.

Tags: calamari, dad's garage, fritti, musical, pizza, secret date night, song of the living dead, zombie

I have a need to edit/update an MS Word .doc file. OpenOffice works mostly for this task, but I’ve found that when I save as .doc, it blows up the file size by about 100kbs. Also, some things just don’t seem to work right. For me, table dimensions and layout seem to not be saved correctly. I have a Windows XP partition with Office, but it’s a hassle to reboot whenever I want to do something Windows based.

Enter VirtualBox. I’ve been meaning to see if I could setup my already installed winxp partition in VirtualBox without too much work, so today I did some Googleing and found these resources:

Boot an existing XP (Physical HD) install with VirtualBox.
VirtualBox (virtualbox): How to boot from an existing Win XP partition under Ubuntu.

Follow them closely, especially the first one, and everything should work. Of course, if this destroys your machine it’s your fault and not mine.

A few things I found:

1. Don’t install what’s in the apt-get repos. You need the non-ose version. Get the .deb or whatever binary for your os from the VirtualBox Downloads Page.
2. Make sure to add yourself to the disk and vboxusers user groups. I missed the disk group at first and received errors.

Good luck.

Tags: 8.04, hardyheron, Linux, ubuntu, virtualbox, windows, xp

My friend Erlene passed away this past weekend as a result of a tragic accident.

I met Erlene on March 25, 2005 at a PGA.com happy hour event. From the first time I met her I could tell she was a very special person. I remember talking about different books and Atlanta and just thinking that she was an extremely friendly person. It was impossible to not instantly like this girl.

I started working with Erlene at Super Deluxe in February of 2006. We shared a corner office with a printer named George, where we sat across from each other at a conference table. As time went on and Super Deluxe grew, we moved to different offices and then to different sides of a large cube farm, but she would always stop by to talk both work and non-work things. She was an extremely hard worker, often times putting in extra hours over weekends and even holidays. She was passionate about her work and doing the best for Super Deluxe.

When Lori and I first started dating I remember how happy Erlene was for me, and us. I think she might have been as happy for me as I was for me. I always felt that she honestly cared for me and my happiness. She was a true friend.

A bunch of people metup the other night to remember our friend and the great times we all shared together. There was laughter and there were tears. Afterwards, we headed over to The Sword show, because that’s where she would have been and that’s where she would have wanted us to be. I can’t speak for others, but it was a way for me to feel close to my friend again.

Erlene was smart, funny, talented, and extremely genuine. She was taken from us far too early. There was so much more that she was meant to do in life. I will never forget our Korean barbecue discussions, how excited she was about the monster truck jam, her laugh, or the thousands of other memories that have slowly trickled back to my brain over the past few days.

My heart goes out to Erlene’s family, Aaron, and all her friends. As I read tributes to her around the web, I am reminded how extremely lucky I was to have known her, if only for just a brief time.

She will be dearly missed.

I spent the entire day yesterday thinking it was Wednesday. It wasn’t until after 10:30 pm when Lori was checking her Google calendar that I realized it was actually only Tuesday.

That’s all I got.

Tags: google calendar, ming, tuesday, wednesday

I turned on Gravatar support for comments last night. I had actually been messing around with writing a plugin for Gravatars about a year ago, but never really finished it. And, it seems that there are a bunch of plugins already written, so there’s really no need for me to finish it now. Some of the plugins will actually locally cache the images so that page load is faster. This seems like a nice feature, but now that Gravatar is part of Automattic, and seemingly running on their servers, retrieval is pretty zippy.

So, for now, I’m just using the WP 2.5 function get_avatar. Read about it’s usage here. There’s also lots of other great info on that page, including pre-2.5 implementations.

The get_avatar function returns an image tag with a class named avatar. So, it’s easy to style as needed. I’m using:

.avatar {
	float: right;
	padding: 2px;
	border-left: 1px solid #c0c0c0;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #c0c0c0;
}

All you need to do is create an account with the email address you leave on blog comments and upload an image to have your very own globally recognized avatar. It’s really a pretty nice service.

Tags: gravatar, wordpress