My So Called Life

Baldness

/ Shane / 4 Comments

My brother visited me this weekend, and while he was here I noticed a disturbing lack of hair on the top of his head. In fact, he kind of has like a blond spot on top combined with thicker, darker patches on the side, giving him a semi-unique look.

One of these guys is my brother

Now, obviously I’m not one to talk when it comes to baldness. But really, I see myself every day, so I don’t think much about my own baldness. This, of course, led to this picture:

Who's the baldest?

So I ask you, who has the most to worry about here?

The case against Nathan:

  • He is 5 years younger, and thus *should* have more hair.
  • His hair is longer, and thus doesn’t look as bald in the picture as it really is.
  • His hair is generally lighter, and his skin is generally darker, so the bald patches don’t show up as much.
  • His baldness is more diffuse, like a general thinning, instead of discreet and more drastic patches of baldness.

The case against Shane:

  • Look at that picture, my goodness.
  • There is an actual reflection on the top of his head from the flash.
  • His forehead (five-head) starts way over the dome of his head, half-way to his ears.

So, there you have it. Speak now or forever hold your peace:

So really, it was their own fault

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Rachael and Nathan were cleaning the gutters at my dad’s house. It is always dangerous to set foot in my dad’s house, because he’s always looking for people to put to work. Now, Rachael is afraid of heights, so she’s army crawling around on the roof, trying to be as careful as she can. Before long, my dad disappears for a little while. When he comes back, he is carrying bottle rockets, which he proceeds to shoot at them. Of course, being on the roof, it is hard for them to escape.

Eventually the bottle rockets ran out, and my siblings were able to descend from the roof. Later, Rachael was talking to my step-mom:

Rachael: “Do you think regular families ask their children to clean the gutters and then shoot bottle rockets at them?”
Sharon: “Well, maybe except that last part. I told you to get rid of those bottle rockets…”

So really, they have no one to blame except their selves. Besides, come on. This was my dad we’re talking about here. They grew up with the guy and they didn’t see that coming?

Mother’s day and the splinter

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Evie and I picked out a Mother’s Day present and card for Sara last weekend (Some lovely Pyrex containers for keeping leftovers, in case you were wondering. Nothing says love like BPA-free food), so Evie had to keep the secret for the whole week. She was struggling a little bit, but she managed to do it…at least right up until Saturday night. I felt so bad for her, I was getting out some of the old containers to clean up some leftovers, and Evie was like, “Oh, we’re using the ones we bought for mommy at Target?” Like, she didn’t mean to spill the beans, she was just commenting on what she saw. In fact, I think she thought, “Oh shoot, we already gave them to her and I missed it!” I don’t even know how she remembered what we got; it wasn’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world. I felt bad for her, but it certainly did nothing to diminish the pure glee she had on her face when she gave her mommy the card and gift the next morning. She was jumping up and down, it was really great. As hard as it is to believe, I think that her excitement might have been a gift even better than left over containers.

After a trip to the grocery store, in which Evie, Uncle Nathan and I managed to get all the right things without any help (okay, that sounds funny, but this was a major restocking mission with a $200 price tag!). After dropping Uncle Nathan off at the bus station, we hit up Mother’s Day brunch in the new garden! The food was really good and we got to meet and talk to some extremely nice neighbors. I’m really hoping we can get to know them better. It was a beautiful day and it was really nice to have a place to go outside. As usual, Evie was a big hit, especially with her garden shoes. Afterwards I felt a little guilty, because everybody went to work on the garden, and I just played with Evie. So I felt a little guilty since I was the only adult not doing anything. But Evie and I helped a little bit, stomping down the wood chips on the path.

Evie had some trouble walking on the wood chips in her garden shoes, so it was most likely during one of her many spills that she got the splinter. It wasn’t until much later, after we were home, that she came over and said, “Something is on my finger.” It was a pretty bad one too, and completely inside, without any part sticking out. It took quite a while to dig it out, including using a sewing needle to dig out one end. And through it all, Evie made not one little peep. I was so proud of her! I thought she would get upset as soon as she saw us coming at her with tweezers. She did have one small request though. In order for us to dig out the splinter, she insisted that we make a cave for her out of pillows and blankets, so that she could thrust only her arm out, and the rest of her would be covered. This was very odd, but it was a small request and it seemed to work, so who am I to complain? I tried to keep her talking so she wouldn’t get upset, but I’m not sure even that was necessary.

I’ll have to think about other situations where “making a cave” could help out. Could we make a nap-taking cave? A vegetable-eating cave? Who knows. But a pain cave works for splinters, so that’s what counts.

I’m Allergic to Global Warming…Literally

/ Shane / 3 Comments

I knew that my allergies were really really bad this year, worse than I ever remembered. I would start to question whether my allergy medicine was working or not, but then I would read somewhere else about how bad allergies were in general this year. It does make me feel a little better to think that it’s not just me, it’s everyone.

It turns out that there is a reason for all of this. I’m allergic to global warming. No joke. Basically, rising global temperatures and changing climates are resulting in warmer springs, which leads to higher pollen counts.

This article reads like the script of a horror story. We have some choice quotes like, “Pollen from ragweed, which triggers most cases of spring hay fever, is projected to increase up to 100% between now and 2085”, “ragweed pollen could become up to 70% more allergenic”, and “climate change, it turns out, is likely to favor trees that give off pollen as opposed to those that don’t”.

AAAAAH!

Now, all of a sudden, it’s personal. That’s certainly something I didn’t think about when looking at those lush scenes with dinosaurs….dinosaur sized ragweed spewing dinosaur sized pollen year round.

No thank you, my friend. Me and my scratchy red eyes are voting for an ice age.

I am a programming god

/ Shane / 4 Comments

I understand that most of you won’t understand this, but that’s okay. This post is for me!

At work I was put in a rough situation. If you tried to dream up the hardest, most ridiculous scenario for a programmer to be in as some kind of thought exercise, it would probably be better than what I had to deal with.

  1. The bug dealt with a goofy setup of a program that is pretty bad to begin with. So dealing with the program itself would be bad, but it was made worse by having the most counter-intuitive setup you could think of.
  2. The program has a huge history to wade through, with tons of legacy databases, none of which I am familiar with. So the tree sort of gets lost in the forest.
  3. The program uses abstract terminology that I’ve never encountered.
  4. The API to the program is in a proprietary language which I don’t know.
  5. The person who wrote the original code now lives in a different country.
  6. I was working under a deadline, namely, the end of the day. No pressure.
  7. I don’t have the program to interface with here at work. The guy who does have access to the program, doesn’t have a debugger. So neither of us are really in a position to debug.
  8. Did I mention that the program I’m supposed to access is in a different state? So, we are trying to work via a web conference. I can see his screen, but he can’t see mine. I basically send him files to try, which inevitably doesn’t work, rise, repeat.
  9. The guy on the other end of the web conference with the access to the tool isn’t a programmer, nor does he know anything about the program to interface with. So we are like the blind leading the blind.

So, to summarize, I have one day to fix a bug in code I didn’t write that interfaces with a horrible, backwards, customized, proprietary program which I’ve never used and don’t understand, and also which has a lot of history and obscuring details. On top of that, I don’t have direct access to the program, but I’m using an intermediary to type things for me in a different state, which I watch through a web meeting.

And I did it, baby. I did it. It took like 6 hours, but it got done. Booya!

And you reading this, much like my boss, probably had no clue how hard it was. Oh well.