Not only am I a geek...

But I'm a geek who loves words. Imagine my excitement when I saw this review of the top word processors in use today. I myself use MS Word, primarily because all of my clients use it. As much as I cussed previous versions of the tool, Microsoft got some things write in its latest incarnation, Word 2007. If the thought of an easily drawn table with 12-point Garamond font flowing around it gets you inappropriately excited, you should definitely see what the Donation Coder has to say.

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Still here...

Several folks (OK...I only have two regular readers) have reminded me recently that I should post something to my blog. So here's something. I know this kind of post is a real cop-out, but just know that I'm not dead, lost at sea or comatose in a hospital. I'll rededicate myself to this endeavor soon.

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Dell Again Selling Windows XP

I recognize that few people besides me will care, but I find it completely fascinating that Microsoft made its new operating system, Vista, sufficiently expensive and feature-light that consumers are asking for the older, more tried and true Windows XP, which will still run pretty much everything a person could need.

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Boo-Boo Twin Powers Activate!

As I left daycare this afternoon with my three wild things -- Zoe, Finn and their cousin Braden -- Zoe scraped the knuckles of her right hand on the building's brick wall. While no adult would find this pleasant, for a five-year-old girl it signifies something akin to the pain of Armageddon combined with fingernail-pulling and topped with a dash of a hairbrush pulling through wet, tangled hair.

First came the Big Bad Wolf-like huffing and puffing which soon led to hyperventilated sobs. When this happens, I immediately shift into fight or flight mode. In any kind of physical pain situation, the kids would happily run from my side across three lanes of rush hour traffic to get to their mother. I've learned to accept this and usually look around to hand them off as soon as a scraped knee happens. Since Wendi was 2 miles away at home when Zoe got this particular war wound, I got ready to fight childhood fears with superior adult reasoning.

"Daddy!! Look, it's bleeding," she says as the tiniest bit of epidermis turned 2 shades darker than her top layer of skin.

"Zoe," I reply, "that doesn't look so bad. It's not really even bleeding. It's going to sting for a little bit but it will be alright soon."

"But Daddeee, it really hurts. Look," she says as she touches her right index finger to her left hand and shows me what looks like a perfectly dry finger tip. "Its already bleeding."

I can't fight 5-year-old imaginary boo-boo logic. Fearing a 15-minute howl-fest on the car ride home, I scrambled to come up with anything that will make her feel better. And then it hit me.

"Zoe, look at Daddy's hand. I scraped my hand in the same place as your boo-boo on the closet shelves the other day."

"So what...my hand still really hurts," she countered.

"That makes us boo-boo twins. See," I said as I held out my fist for her to inspect.

"Oh," she said as she touched her fresh scrape to my days-old-one. "That's cool, Daddy!"

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Nancy Giles Speaks

I adore Nancy Giles. She's one of the regular commentators on CBS Sunday Morning. You've probably heard her voice recently if you've paid any attention to your televised pharmaceutical ads. She does a lot of voice-over work. Her commentaries are often funny and always insightful.

Anyone in Fayetteville this Wednesday can see Nancy speak at the Fayetteville Public Library at 7 PM as part of the library's Big Read campaign. I doubt I'll get to make it. Someone go and tell me how good she was.

Just Stop It

We all have bad habits that we need to quit. Productivity501 [via Lifehacker] lists 17 things that we should all stop doing immediately.

I felt so alone

First off, I freely admit that I'm the world's worst blogger. I checked the date on my last post and saw that its been almost a month since I updated this thing. I have no excuse. Time passes and I just fail to notice it....

That said...my dog likes to dig and chew. She has a name, but for this post let's just call her Destructo the Wonder Dog. After we adopted her last year, she chewed some of the siding off our house, dug holes in the backyard and chewed some of the molding in our house. She had been relatively good for most of the winter, leading us to think that maybe she had grown out of this behavior.

Unfortunately, Destructo had other ideas. Last Friday night, the all the TVs in our house abruptly went silent and we had no Internet connectivity. Upon closer inspection I discovered that Destructo had dug up and chewed through the trunk line connecting our house to Cox's cable network. After yelling at her for a good 5 minutes, I was lucky enough to not only get a Cox CSR on the phone, but she was also nice enough to send a technician to my house the next morning.

The cable got repaired and life was good...until Monday morning when the damn dog chewed the damn line up again!!!!!! I work from home so the idea of no Internet first thing Monday morning scared the hell out of me. I called Cox back and this time they couldn't get anyone to the house until Wednesday. Wednesday!!!!! That's two whole days without TV or the Internet. I felt so cut off from the world and alone. To top off the Karmic smack-down, the data connection on my cell phone that would normally provide a slow Internet connection was down, too.

Unable to live with that I carried my happy ass to Lowe's, bought some cable splicing supplies and chicken wire, and managed to patch the cable back into working order. I strung the makeshift chicken wire fence around the cable terminal and prayed that Destructo would leave it alone until Wednesday.

The cable guys have since replaced the line and buried it outside the backyard fence. Life is good, but I'm always on alert for Destructo's next victim.