Musing, Muttering, Meandering Through Life

So my Twitter bud Matt aka mmWine, using his best evil laugh, meme tagged me for “Six Random Facts About Me”. Looking around the Net I see that this meme has been running around for a while and has stayed basically true to form. The main deviation is changing the number of random facts. Since I wanted to be able to get some sleep tonight, I’m very thankful that Matt is passing on the six facts meme and not the 8 facts meme.

Random Facts

Let’s consult “The Book of Don”.

Random Fact #1

As a kid, I usually minded pretty well, but in this case I “bent” the rules a bit. We lived on a ranch in Missouri that had several ponds. One day as I was heading out for some reason mom told me to not get wet. Not sure how she knew I was considering going swimming in the pond, but she must have had an idea. But, I really wanted to see what it was like to swim in early April after the ice had thawed. Solution: Skinny dippin and for the record it was cold, not too bad, but it also gave me the ability to sympathize with George Constanza years later. Oh and I returned home safe and dry.

Random Fact #2

Growing up on a ranch you also need certain skills, one of which is artificially breeding cattle. It’s one of those skills that I don’t think one can ever forget.

Random Fact #3

Laura and I got engaged after our third date. She lived in Amarillo at the time and I was still going to school at TCU. She had graduated a little earlier from TCU. Neither of us knew the other while we were at TCU. So three dates in less than a month and we’re engaged. I can still remember us telling her parents as we were putting up the Christmas tree. First words out of her father’s mouth … “Are you pregnant”.

It’s worked out pretty well, we just had our 21st anniversary.

Random Fact #4

I’ve worked on many different projects over the years but three consumer items that I worked on were.

1. Tandy Sensation the first Windows multimedia PC. Some one even put up a video of an old commercial
2. Tandy VIS a horribly flawed device that we actually made sort of work, but it failed miserably.
3. Gateway Destination PC item #20 towards the bottom of the page. First real attempt to have a converged device in the Den.

Random Fact #5

I’ve been growing my hair out for over 18 months. The story of which will appear in an upcoming blog post. In the spirit of baring oneself, most of the hair is on the sides and back; Not so much contributed from the top of my scalp.

Random Fact #6

Self-funded (read really similar to starving college days) Select Payment Processing, with some friends. It was successfully sold years later.

Tag You’re It

@jmthorp who is my brother and writes http://thorplife.wordpress.com/ after the kids crashed the hard drive on his old site.

John Munsch who has no twitter account, a long time friend, and writes http://www.johnmunsch.com/

@frizzle_fry Melissa Astle who also has no twitter account, whom I’ve worked with for years, never met, and writes http://randommisfires.wordpress.com

@dogwood who writes http://thedogwoodreport.blogspot.com/

@stevesaylor who writes http://stevesaylor.net/

@pprlisa who never writes but should at http://lemloo.wordpress.com/

The Rules

The rules to play are easy …
1. Link to the person who tagged you. Matt Tagged me here.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

I look forward to learning about y’all. Tag, you’re it!

I woke up at 4am, no idea why, if anyone does know, please fill me in. Anyway, I decided to catch up on the world around me so I fired up my FriendFeed and started browsing.

FriendFeed is a wonderful aggregation service that simplifies keeping in touch with friends and family. FriendFeed lets you publish the data from your blog, social network sites, photos, and other places for others to see without them having to visit each site individually. It also has an interesting twist in that you can create Imaginary Friends where you put in the services you want to watch even if the person doesn’t have a FriendFeed account.

While catching up on my brother Michael’s feed I stumbled upon two separate pictures of my niece and nephew that had to be mashed. Enjoy.

The Disappointed Princess

Some days it all comes together like a Seinfeld episode; you don’t know why your seeing what you’re seeing, but you hope it leads somewhere. Today was one of those days on Twitter. It started innocently with a single tweet and ended up with me laughing uncontrollably. Maybe it’s because it was Friday or possibly because I like slapstick humor, or most probably I’m a little further off the beaten path than I think. Anyway …

@Natallini was putting off mowing the yard. Feeling all considerate, it is a Friday after all I, suggested a Tyvek suit or a cabana boy.

If she just wanted to stay clean, then the suit should work great.
With a handsome cabana boy to work the mower, she could sit on the porch and have her favorite beverage.

Then she was attacked in her own home, by vicious little creatures.

For those of you fortunate enough to have never encountered the painful little creatures, count yourself lucky. The rest of you understand the primitive need to squish them all. If you’d like to know more about fire ants check out the Wikipedia article on Fire Ants If you’d like to see them in action, there is a short video below.

Then we had a slight burst of misunderstanding between me @donthorp, @Natallini, and @eeUS

And then the Serendipitous tweet.

Trust me we’re getting there. My first thought, obviously, was Google. Surely someone out there has fire ant proof suits; but sadly, I couldn’t find one. I did find a patent entitled Insect resistant geotextile. For the very curious among you it’s actually interesting how they tested for insect resistance, so give it a quick scan. The connection to this story is provided in the following quote.

EXAMPLE I

[0034] An extruded nonwoven, such as Tyvek® was used to form a bag which was sealed to prevent the ants escape. The ants penetrated the extruded nonwoven within two (2) hours.

Although it only gives her a two hour window to escape, that should be sufficient if she also tapes the cuffs.

Now you’re wondering why Grizzlies. Occasionally we’re granted a Google gift during a search that provides fodder for posts such as this. I originally searched for ant proof suit. Lost in the search euphoria, I didn’t save the set of keywords brought me to this, but here is the video that brought the laughter.

There is just something about the testing of that grizzly proof suit that brought me to tears. My first thought was, “That’s a whole lot of Mondays”.

Some of you may have recognized the source immediately, but I had to research to discover that the footage comes from a movie, available on Amazon, entitled Project Grizzly by Troy Hurtubise. It documents “Hurtubise’s diligent work to improve his homemade “grizzly-proof” suit of armour, his efforts to test its resilience, and his forays into the Rockies to track down the grizzlies he dreams of meeting.”

I really don’t know if the grizzly suit is fire ant proof or not, but I’m convinced that the testing of the suit for use with fire ants would provide hours of painful video.

The shower has been draining slowly for a few days. On her way to work this morning, Laura called to remind me to pour Drano down the shower drain. Having a little extra energy this morning, I decided to go the extra mile and see if I could clean it by hand before using chemicals. That way, the Drano would be much more effective and have much less work to do.

Click for Larger Image

I’ve wondered for years how the drain cover stays in place, but I never bothered to actually look. On close inspection there seemed to be four tabs holding it in place, so a little pressure and it popped right out. If you look closely, you’ll see a little bump on the tab that helps keep it below the rim.

After successfully pulling the cover off, I peered into the drain and was greeted by a glob of stuff that honestly, was probably alive. Reaching in the drain, I SLOWLY pulled and pulled and pulled, until finally with a soft plop, an ENTIRE ponytail looking creature was resting peacefully on the shower floor. Thankfully, it didn’t spring to life and attack.

For the squeamish among you, I won’t embed the pictures, but for the rest of you crazy people, head over to my SmugMug Gallery Drain Life.

Goodbye

Today is a day of transition from the known to the unknown. Last week I decided that I needed to take a break for a much needed rest. Two thousand three hundred thirty-five days ago on March 18, 2002, I said hello as employee number 18; Today on August 8, 2008 I say farewell. A thank you and best wishes to each and every one of the talented people I had the opportunity to travel with on that part of my journey.

Inflection Points

Every so often in my life an inflection point appears and when it does, I’ve learned to embrace it as a doorway to a new adventure. They’re not always joyous adventures, but like any good adventure they provide tales for telling. These tales fit me well at this stage of my life. There are several transitions that I might detail in the future, but I want to touch on several of them in this story.

I can remember the first real transition and it’s not a pleasant one. My dad passed away from cancer when I was 13 and a short while later mom told me that we’d have to move into town. I can remember clearly that my response was extreme frustration. I had lost dad and now I was losing access to all of the activities I loved: hunting, fishing, horseback riding, and even my chores. In a fury, I packed up all of my favorite items to get them out of my sight because I knew the enjoyable part of my life was done. It didn’t take long for me to come to terms with the transition and once I did, I embraced it.

I had a couple of education related inflection points. During Spring Break of my Junior year of High School, I visited my grandparents who were wintering in South Texas. I’m fuzzy on the exact timing, I can’t remember if I decided before or after break, but I knew when I returned that there was nothing left for me in High School. When I got home, I took the GED and started summer school at ORU where my step-dad was a professor.

I started off pre-med, the decided on pure Chemistry. I was enjoying the studies, but apparently I had approached another inflection point. I was standing in a lab three years later, having completed all of my Chemistry degree courses and one of my professors made a simple comment, “you are really good with computers, have you taken any courses?” Apparently that was the click of another door opening.

I had started programming on the TRS-80 model I when I was 13 or 14 and spent a large portion of my free time working with computers, but I had never really considered it as a profession. Shortly after the comment, I realized that while I liked Chemistry, I loved working with computers and the variety they presented. Before the end of the semester I started the transfer process to TCU and as soon as the semester ended, moved to Fort Worth, TX. I hadn’t even been accepted yet, but I knew that’s where I would be.

Near the end of my penultimate semester at TCU, Laura and I got engaged. Some of you are thinking OK, So? What you may not know is that we had only had 3 dates before the engagement. This transition was a little drawn out, but I graduated in May of 1987, started my first full time job in June of 1987, and got married on July 4th, 1987. For those of you trying to do the math, we’ve been married 21 years now. It may seem odd, but I knew that it was the correct door to step through.

Near the end of the .COM bubble, one of my good friends Bill and I decided to form a company. We had been contracting together doing software for the Destination PC and decided that we should open an office, which is a pretty big commitment. After a while, we decided to self-fund an idea and brought in another one of my good friends, John. John and I continued contracting to pay the bills and help part time on the project while Bill worked full time on the project. The story is too long to tell in full, but the short version is, John and I threw ourselves into the collapsing job market so that Bill could stay with Select Payment Processing to guide it through several tough years to a successful acquisition. If all three of us had stayed, the company would not have been able to survive the collapse of the bubble. That acquisition is helping allow me to discover my next adventure.

The Unknown or There’s a World Outside of Yonkers

This inflection point is a little different than the others in that I have nothing planned except rest. “Out There”, from Hello Dolly, has been on an endless playback loop in my head the last couple of weeks. I think it helps convey the hope that this change presents. Next week is a little busy, we’re going to have a HUGE garage sale, but I see that as part of the resting process.

My current short bio says “Overcommited, Developer, Entrepreneur, Part Time Trader”. My new short bio? “Adventurer in Waiting”. If you need to find me, look for a vista surveying a landscape of opportunity. Some where, out there, is the next doorway to adventure, I’m not sure where it is, but it’s there.

I use Gmail as a mail aggregator for many of my accounts. I honestly do strive for Inbox Zero but I’m not very consistent. As part of the quest, I’ve become relatively proficient at typing in advanced search query strings, but it is a real time sink to hand enter those every day. Enter Gmail Labs.

On June 5, 2008 Google announced Gmail Labs in the official Gmail Blog. Being an early adopter, I turned labs on in Gmail almost immediately after reading the post but didn’t look at the features closely. This morning I woke up and realized I was failing miserably in maintaining my inbox and decided to make a dent. The frustration led me to search gmail help to see if there was any way to save/bookmark advanced searches. That’s when I stumbled on to Quick Links.

Gmail Labs, being experimental, are not enabled by default. You may have to Manually Enable Gmail Labs in Your Account. Once labs are enabled, you are allowed to control the features on an individual basis. As you can see if the photo above, I have Quick Links enabled.

For example, the Twitter Quick Link shows all of the email from Twitter in my Inbox using the search below. One nice touch is that clicking on the Quick Link re-populates the search field allowing you to specify additional search criteria.

from:twitter in:inbox

I know this feature won’t solve all of my Inbox Zero issues, but I’m hoping it will help me quickly wade through items that I don’t want processed by a rule and want to look at before archiving or deleting. Happy Cleaning!

During the middle of last week, a person I follow on Twitter, Jack Stevison, published his recipe for Ten-Hour Beef. I’m not much of a beef person anymore, so I decided to see if I could adapt it to pork.

The Recipe

1 Pork roast (5 lbs)
2 Purple onions
4 Serrano peppers
1 Bottle Guinness Extra Stout
2 Bottles Jack Daniel’s® Hickory Brown Sugar Barbecue Sauce

Also needed: Salt, Pepper, Garlic, and Worcestershire Sauce

Trim excess fat off of the roast and slice into 3/8 strips. De-seed and slice the peppers into thin strips. Slice the onions and place half of them and half of the peppers on the bottom of the crock pot. Layer the pork slices on top of the onions and then cover with the remaining onions and peppers. Pour the Guinness and one bottle of the Jack Daniel’s sauce over the top. Cover and cook on high (6 hour setting on my crock pot) for 1.5 to 2 hours.

After the first two hours, stir gently to move things around and reduce the heat to low (8 hour setting). I stirred every hour for the next 7 hours. At this point pork should be tender and can be pulled apart with a fork, but does not disintegrate on touch.

This part came as a tip from my brother Michael.

Pre-heat the oven to 375. While it’s heating, lightly oil a cookie sheet, then transfer the solid materials with a slotted spoon from the crock pot to the cookie sheet. Using about half of the other bottle of barbecue sauce, cover the meat with a light (~1/16 inch to 1/8 inch) layer of sauce. I used a brush to make sure things were covered evenly. Once the oven is heated, place the cookie sheet in the oven and cook uncovered for an additional 15-25 minutes.

Take the sheet out of the oven and gently pull the pork apart with two forks. Mix lightly to spread the sauce and serve.

You may want to save some of the liquid from the crock pot to store with leftovers to keep it moist when re-heated.

I have to admit, I was part of the problem, but it is very hard to resist coming to the aid of another parent when challenged by a teenager. I woke up this morning and saw this tweet which I’ve edited to remove the actual phone number.

T+0h leolaporte My son Hank doesn’t believe I have so many followers. He says text him if you follow me here. 707 XXX-YYYY. Let’s see how many msgs he gets.

Not long after, this tweet appeared.

T+0h leolaporte OK that was a really bad idea.

I woke up in this period and couldn’t help but send my own text message to poor Hank. Telling him in fact that I did follow his dad on twitter.

Several hours later.

T+10h leolaporte Boy it sure is hard deleting old tweets. Pownce and Jaiku delete them right away. Guess Hank’s phone will be unusable today.

The damage assessment will come.

T+11h leolaporte I won’t know the total number of text messages Hank received until I get the bill, but it was in the thousands. He had to turn off the phone

And finally,

T+11h leolaporte I DDoSed my own son.

While it may be a little extreme you can’t help but cheer just a little. How many times are parents challenged with no real way to prove a child wrong. Will it prevent Hank from challenging Dad in the future, probably not, he is a teenager after all. Will it make him think twice, just maybe.

Oh and the score in the title, the number of Twitter users following Leo that had the opportunity to send a nice encouraging text to Hank.

Ok, if you’re on twitter, you need to jump over to the @rainbowteam and join by clicking follow. If you need to colorize your avatar Cali Lewis posted a rainbowteam.png to help you modify your avatar.

For the rest of you, zefrank wrote a post entitled "colorwar 2008" where he mused.

We used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc… and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball - sort of like the movie Meatballs, except all within the same camp.

During the summer we were divided into discreet units, older kids here, younger kids there, Hiawathans by the lake Tawasenthans by the ropes course, etc… But when it came time for color wars you had no idea who would be on your team. It was a release, and it was viciously fun.

So, for a while I’ve been thinking about how a color war might look online.

Corvida states Boredom Strikes On Twitter With Color!. Her summary statement

If this isn’t boredom, I don’t know what is, but at least it gives us something to do.

While I’m not sure how this is going to play out, and I’m probably too busy anyway, I decided to join and and see what the fun might be.

Twitter is a very interesting place.

Children are the spice of life.

While attending my youngest sister’s baby shower in Tulsa, Allison was able to capture this priceless video of my nephew trying to say “bridge”.