Frenzied Daddy

I need one of these.

I’ve been seeing this phrase around, a spin on “I’m with stupid.” I was thinking maybe about getting “I’m no longer with stupid” and a little arrow pointing down the front of a t-shirt for a friend of mine who just tied the knot. But after seeing this phrase more and more, and seeing several of my Republican friends abandon their party lines … well I couldn’t resist.

Somthing about this calls “cafepress” to me

Two of my favorite comic strips have done nifty things in their plots lately. Francis pranked Brent which backfired. And now Erika is playing games with Largo (Um, I’m not sure those two scripts do justice to the story arc Largo has gone to help Erika with her computer. )

I’m not going to apologize for being quiet so long.

Ms B, as it turns out, had endometriosis, which led to some internal bleeding in the fallopian tubes, which caused necrosis, swelling, torsion, and the dainty little egg-chutes to do their damnedest to act like clown balloon animals. She’s had some surgery, we’ll try to get by with no more surgery and just a daily set of pills, but we’re open to the possibility that more surgery is necessary.

She’s been home with me since about September 18 (give or take). I’m sure it’s been enlightening to her as to what working from home’s like for me. Lately I’ve been getting up at five (I’m on a rotating on-call schedule), working for a while, taking Miss B to school, taking Miss K next door to be cared for by our neighbor. Then I “work” until about 12:30 when I have a conference call that’ll last anywhere from 1 to 2 hours, go get Miss B, go run some other errands, come home, fix dinner and work some more.

Working from home has been a challenge. On the one hand, my work desk is in the room with everyone else and the television, and I get all kinds of distractions. I’m getting better about focussing on the work though. This was an interesting discussion about the difficulties of working from home. Did you know there are offices you can rent that have receptionists, internet access, mail service– all the works of a normal office? I sure didn’t, but on reflection, that’s what CGI Production uses, for the most part. But I don’t think I’m ready for that yet; and it’d be an extra 200-500 out of my monthly budget (Yeah, I looked into it. Some “executive suites” are downtown!)

Speaking of “monthly budget.” That’s a laugh… I’m working hard at all my little projects, and I’m doing ok, but not well enough to pay all the bills on my own. Ms B has a good short term disability package, so that’ll be a big help … and now the washing machine has conked out.

So the quietness? Worry over Ms B, worry over finances, and some serious head-down work on some issues. But in an effort to “not work all the time,” which is my worst problem with working from home, I’m going to be making an effort to play with the kids more and to blog more. Because I like it.

I mean talk like a pirate day: September 19th. It was pretty cool- and I even got Miss B to talk like a pirate. A little heavy on the Arrrrrs tho

But the day after, when I tried to convince her it was ‘talk like a ninja day,’ Ms B blew it for me, and told me (loudly and in front of the girl) “Honey, don’t be silly, ninjas don’t talk.”

Well, duh!

We saw him tonight on “I Want That,” and it really clicked. Of course we’re in the 95% of parents who say “only 2 hours of television today…” and of course it doesn’t really stick. Miss B routinely gets plenty of television time, and of course Ms B and I can’t really keep her from the computer (We’re on the computers constantly, ourselves). We’re adding Bob to our wishlists though- he’s only about 100 bucks, and I think he’s pretty swell.

Ms B, on her way home from school yesterday, informed me that she was writing a success guide to Zoo Tycoon 2. Naturally, smelling “free content,” I said “wow, that sounds great honey, can I put it up on the website?” There was a pause from the back seat, and then she asked “Daddy, can kids have websites?” I responded in the affirmative, deftly swinging the car out into traffic. Then the question I hadn’t quite been prepared for… “Daddy, can I have a website?”

Hmm, Can she have a website. Well, the obvious answer was “yes.” If I register a domain in my name, and she follows some clear, absolute rules about posting on the website, and blah blah blah, yeah she could have a website. That’s what I told her. And I told her she had to come up with the eight bucks to register the domain, and the domain name. So she starts listing possible domain names: she’s really animal-oriented, she’s a girl, she loves playing Zoo Tycoon 2. So, she thought “zoogirls dot com” would be good. ahem It’s, uh, taken. And it’s not pretty, not family-oriented, and very not safe for work. It’s certainly not good for a nine-year-old. So we talked about other options too, and I left for work with her doing her homework and considering domain names.

I would certainly rather see her on her own site rather than facebook or myspace. Ugh!

I was thinking about that for quite a while. At first, I was thinking she wanted some sort of basic website with a couple of pages and stuff. We discussed it, and it came out that she wanted to post stories and art; and things like her Zoo Tycoon Success Story. So I talked about a WordPress site, like this one. She thought that’d be fine, as long as she could make changes to it and upload “spinning 3d pictures of animals and stuff.”

When I came home from work, I told her that there was a way she could get a “free website.” She could use Wordpress.com, a hosted Wordpress blog system, and she could use the themes they provide. She wants more control over the themes, but we worked it out that she can try with this, and we’ll see how well she likes it. We had to set up a new email address to get it, but now she’s all set up for her WordPress blog. She hasn’t posted anything yet, so don’t go running over there to look for it.

I figure hopefully it’ll help with writing and stuff, and since I have the administrator password, I can watch over her shoulder.

Palladium needs your help.

Palladium has been producing RPGs for over 25 years. They make quality products- if I weren’t such a sucker for computer games and for Dungeons and Dragons, I’d play in their ‘megaverse.’ Apparently, they’ve suffered some of the same fates that Cowboyz did when I worked for that crew. Backstabbing, embezzling … you know the type.

So they’re asking for help. Not just a “donation,” but the purchase of a specially-produced poster, for $50+ shipping and handling.

As you can see, I’ve finally joined the Flickr movement. Only after they were purchased by Yahoo, though. I prefer flickr over fotolog mainly because of their API, which enables me to upload images to Flickr and have them magically appear over on here. There’s a WordPress plugin which does all the heavy lifting for me. As a matter of fact, if you’re interested in using WordPress but don’t want to bother with your own site and suchlike, you could sign up for WP.com, which is a shared installation of Wordpress designed for that specifically.

In the spirit of signing up for stuff, I also finally met Del.Icio.Us.; it’s a “social bookmarking” site. Mainly, you can store your bookmarks there and have them available at any computer you happen to come across. It’s “social” because you can see how many other people have bookmarked the same web pages as you.

Both Flickr and Delicious make extensive use of “tags,” which is the new hotness when it comes to categorizing things. And, of course, there’s a tag plugin for Wordpress. Tags are sort of free-form categories, to make connections between “things” easier to track.

Which makes me wonder if there’s a way to match the Flickr tags to the Delicious tags to the Wordpress tags. That would be flickin’ delicious.