No Open Blockers

On Monday nights, I take care of my daughter after work so my wife can go to the gym and just have some general non-mommy time. Since the weather is getting nice lately, we usually walk around the neighborhood and go to the park down the street. Tonight it’s a bit cold and windy, but since I couldn’t bring myself to suffer another night of Elmo and trying to keep her from eating crayons, I decided we’d head to Game Stop and Barnes & Noble.

Yes, I know that sounds lame, but she likes running around taking the games/books off the shelves and unlike in the house, I don’t have to bother cleaning up after her.

I drove approximately 6 seconds from the house when Leanne starts asking for her Elmo CD. Shit, it’s in my wife’s car. I entertained her as best I could until we got to B&N and decided it was worth the trip to the music section to have some sort of backup CD in my car.

After wading through a sea of complete and utter shit (the inventor of Yo Gabba Gabba should be pushed off a cliff) I found a Disney CD of nursery rhymes. With the onset of Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers plagues, buying Disney these days is a bit of a risky venture. However, the large hackergotchis of Mickey and Minnie on the front of the CD offered a sense of reassurance.

After twenty minutes of chasing my daughter around B&N to try to wrangle her into the car, we found ourselves ready to listen to our newly bought Mickey CD. But instead of Mickey, it’s some dude singing. At least he wasn’t the creepy child molester type singer you normally find on these CDs, but the fact still remained that 5 songs into it, he was still singing. Not a single peep from Mickey or Minnie. I had at least hoped for an intro and maybe a few tracks here and there of him spouting off mind-numbing messages to children. Nope, not a single word from the iconic mouse.

I am so disappointed. Mickey, the symbol of the happiest place on earth, has whored himself out to sell 7 dollar CDs to toddlers.

I hate basketball. I’m actually not a fan of team sports in general, but I hate basketball as a game too. That said, I have a lot of Villanova pride. I’m surprised to find myself sucked into the NCAA tournament this year — well, Villanova’s progress at least. So today, the whole family is giving good karma to Villanova, including our little wildcat:

I hope.

Amazing how one stupid blank line could screw up so many parsers. I think I have it fixed with a dirty little PHP hack:

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$out = ob_get_contents();
$out = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\t", " "), "", $input);
ob_end_clean();

That basically strips out leading whitespace on the feed pages. Effective. Dirty, but effective.

Let me know if anyone’s readers still have issues.

I came across the above video from a non-Villanova circle of teachers. It brought on a pretty interesting series of comments from the teachers, many of whom I agree with.

In short, this is what college is about. The pictures on brochures of three students sitting in a class room with shocked looks of “I get it!” while a fourth writes long algebraic equations on the board… well, I’m sure it happens, but that’s not typical college.

In my circle of friends, we have what has become the infamous “Throw Ball Cup” story. I won’t get into the details since you had to be there to understand why it was so funny, but I’ll provide a quick summary. Junior year, two of my roommates were up at 3am studying for some sort of engineering test. Amidst being bogged down with whatever it is they were studying, they somehow invented a game they named “Throw Ball Cup” that involved — big surprise — throwing a ball into a cup. The story lives on in infamy among my friends because of the fact that students who lived in the apartment below us and happened to be in their class and studying for the same test came upstairs to complain that the ping pong ball bouncing was driving them insane. Apparently, the floors in Villanova’s apartments are made out of paper.

This video is these two girls’ “Throw Ball Cup”, even more so since they were smart enough to record it.

In college, you’re taught extensively about your particular major. You’re taught that you must have responsibility in doing what you need to, how to properly communicate, how to balance 6 different projects all due on the same day… and so on.

But no one places the proper amount of importance on how to juggle all of those without driving yourself mad in the process. These girls figured it out. My roommates and I figured it out. But I unfortunately knew too many students who didn’t understand this. Hours and hours of stress and lack of sleep for that extra .02 on their GPA. They are the same people who freak out at the littlest things even now that we’ve all graduated.

When was the last time you spontaneously broke out in dance?

I always get one of two reactions when I tell people I work from home:
“Oh man, that’s so great, I’d do no work.”
“How do you actually get any work done?”

I’ve been at Red Hat for two and a half years now, so by now I should hope I’ve settled in and found a way to get things done. A bunch of my students were curious about what my “home office” looks like (and I’m waiting on some really, really long test cases to run), so I figured I’d give a quick virtual tour.

Pro: I have a window with a view…
Con: … of nothing.

Above the windows are autographed pictures of MMA champions: Rich Franklin, Tito Ortiz, and Matt Hughes. The plant is hanging on for dear life and trying to survive the two months between when I actually remember to water it.

I think much better on a white board. I also tend to organize using colors, so the 12 pack of various markers has been a solid investment. And if I catch any of my students not recognizing that the spaceships are straight out of Space Invaders, you immediately fail.

One side of my desk is almost entirely devoted to monitors. For a while I was running dual-monitors with the center and right monitor, I just haven’t set it up again since my last install. The left monitor belongs to whatever random machine I have in my office at the time. That’s my work laptop on the left where I keep up on e-mail and my work chat rooms.

The Red Hat posters were an attempt to keep the office professional. As you can see, that failed pretty miserably. My office is the one area of the house that’s mine, so I felt inclined to go a bit overboard with the weird decorations.