I’ve been reading the A Series of Unfortunate Events series. I’m up to Book the Eighth, and my guess is that VFD stands for Volunteer Fire Department and that Count Olaf burned down the Baudelaire home.

I took a group of teens from my church to 6-Flags this week. We saw a sign advertising “Super Funnel cake Sunday,” which begs the question: “Are funnel cakes considered unleavened bread?”

I just picked up the keys to our new home. We’re moving on Friday. Yea!

They’re not really boring, just boring to talk about. Since I’m switiching to Linux I’ve flipped through a couple million computer books.

Here’s the key to reading books about coding. . .you don’t actually read them. You just flip through them scanning over things you already know and picking out fun pieces of code that you’ve never tried before.

If yout tried to grab a book on Java or C++ at the library and just work your way through it, I’m pretty sure most people would give up before they finished. I suppose you need to have at least a basic understanding of coding, but I got that in college.

I knew this was going to sooner or later. . .

This morning, when Isaac got up, he said he needed to go potty. I was thrilled. When we first got his potty (he was 18 months), he started using it without being prompted, so I was hopeful-as any parent would be-that he would be easy to potty train. But then he lost interest, and according to the experts, he’s too young to potty train, so we haven’t pushed the issue. When he said he wanted to go potty this morning I hoped he was rekindling his interest. I took off his pajamas, and started pulling his diaper off when I noticed (not quickly enough) that it was heavier than normal and the weight felt different. I was so surprised I tried to hold it out away from me, and wrap it up all at the same time, which resulted in me flipping the diaper into the air and launching the poo across the room.

The End

I just put my first post on astronomy.dougroyal.com

I’m working on putting together my walkthrough for the star projector.

Gerrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Yes, Flash web pages look cool, but they take FOREVER to load–and I’m working on DSL! Anybody who works with the internet enough to make a living building web pages should know better than to use Flash.

Why people, Why? Am I missing something? I can immitate the look of any Flash site using basic html and css. Maybe some of the video fetures would be missing, but who cares? Flash for web based games, okay. But do we really need things like Dr. Pepper’s floating bubbles menu? (Let me take this opportunity to apologize to Dr. Pepper. I love Dr. Pepper, and I hope this doesn’t strain our relationship. Also, I haven’t actually been to Dr.Pepper’s site in a while, so they might have fixed their page by now. . . but I doubt it.)

Maybe in a few years when our connection speeds are a million times faster, then Flash will be the way to go, and I’m sure Adobe will claim they were ahead of the game, which they are . . . but they’re too far ahead right now.

It’s amazing how much my mood affects my kids’s moods. Yesterday I got upset when I tripped over one of Isaac’s toys for the millionth time (a classic dad move). So I went into what I call “Angry Cleaning” mode–most of the time I’m okay with the mess that comes with kids, but sometimes it overwhelms me and I have to clean everything. Unfortunatly, Isaac is brilliant. He learns everything he sees. So when I got upset for a little while and cleaned the snot out of our appartment. He started acting upset too. It was obnoxious. . .he’s my little mirror. So no more “angry cleaning” which is a shame because “angry cleaning” is the most efficient and effective form of cleaning I know . . . I bet “angry cleaning” would be popular with Darth Vader.

Here’s a record of the changed I’ve made to my vimrc file:

I’m running a command line only Debian distribution of Linux on a laptop that’s so old I can’t put X on it. I want to use this computer to write on (I like it’s portability), so my goal is to make vim work more like a word processor than a code text editor.

Last night our washing machine broke. It got to the spin cycle, but stopped before draining any of the water out. We could hear the motor humming, but nothing I did would make the machine work.

I searched around the web for a couple hours and found these two great sites that described problems that seemed similar to mine:

Sannerud.com “This site had a great walk throug with pictures.

Partselect.com “This site has a couple of pics, and the problem he described is similar to mine.

Fixya.com “This site has a detailed write up of how to change the coupler. This write up along with the Sannerud pics got me through the ordeal.

The first step is to collect the proper equipment:

• 1 box Mike and Ike
  
• 1 can Diet Dr. Pepper (Cherry Vanilla optional)
  
• 1 book on tape (I chose Star Wars Jedi Quest: The Way of the Apprentice)
  

I spent a couple hours this morning driving around getting all the necessary parts and letting work know that I wouldn’t be in today. That got me through about half the book.

You’ll also need some kind of water pump to drain the washing machine. Here’s my water pump:

Keep in mind that these water pumps come in a variety of shapes and sizes,

so make sure you pick the water pump that fist your family’s needs and budget.

After I drained the tub, and followed the instructions on the pages above, I was disappointed to discovered that the coupling wasn’t in bad shape (apparently Gina had that problem fixed when we first started dating, and the heavy-duty coupling has held up pretty well), but that meant something else was wrong, like the transmission/gearbox. I sent out some emails, and while waiting for their responses, I pulled the washing machine’s water pump off in order to drain the last little bit of water in the tub. When I got the washer’s pump off, nothing came out. That’s because it was clogged by one of Lillian’s socks. And there is proof that washing machine’s eat socks.

I put everything back together, and it’s working about as well as it was before (which isn’t great, but it’ll do until we can afford the more expensive repairs).

When I was growing up I was always amazed that my dad knew how to fix everything. . . . I’m getting there Dad.