The Anderson Column

The harddrive in the machine hosting this website was old and miserable. So much so that eventually it decided to just crash on me. It’s taken a while to get everything back up and to restore data from the grumpy old disk, but it’s (I think, hope, knock-on-wood) all been recovered now.

Few other updates:
a) August is eight months now. He can stand on his own (with help from crib railings, etc). He’s a happy baby who is just awesome.

b) I’ve started a company – more about that later once everything is a bit more concrete. The best people are involved and I’m looking forward to it.

c) Tennis is a lot of fun. I should practice more, though.

d) My wife’s at the Zoo. I hope they take lots of pics.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been stupidly busy with a lot of things lately.
a) The baby has started to crawl/creep around a lot and demands a LOT of attention
b) The baby has started to teethe and this is pissing him off. Also quite a lot.
c) I’ve been trying to teach myself codeigniter – it’s going well
d) I’ve been trying to learn database design – also going well.

The good news is that I’ve been pretty disciplined about reading before sleeping and watching/reading tutorials online – so it’s been a productive few weeks.

I hope to be able to write juicier posts soon, but for now I’m on a strict learning mission.

And I’m just wondering what other people do to celebrate this scam of a day. I don’t mean to sound like a grump, but waiting in line with the rest of suburbia to get a seat at the Cheesecake Factory sounds neither romantic nor fun to me.
I don’t know what the solution is, but fortunately I have a wife who doesn’t seem to care that much about Valentine’s day either. This is good, because I hate roses and I can’t eat chocolate (I guess I don’t really understand the concept of -giving- all that well).

But I’m planning on cooking a nice meal at home and putting a movie on after the little guy goes to sleep. It’s not all that much different from some other days, but then again I’m not sure Valentine’s day should be – at least not if it means sitting with a black disk in your hand waiting for someone to call your name an hour later.

As my first blog post established, I’m really lightyears behind the trends when it comes to the Internet. I started blogging late and I’ve been stuck using the same version of AOL instant messenger for the last five or so years.

So it shouldn’t surprise you that I am hopelessly incompetent when it comes to modern internet phenomena like twitter. I’m not old or anything. I’m not a technophobe either, in fact I like nerding around with stuff a lot. It’s just that with these Internet memes turned amazing new technologies, I’m usually late to the hunt. I mean, it took me a long time to get facebook and I don’t have a myspace. Facebook happened because my wife thought I should have one.

Now I do have a twitter account – as you can see on this fine blog – and I am on facebook. Facebook has proven somewhat useful, I might add, because several people I don’t even remember going to school with have added me as their friend, so I am able to see what they’ve been up to. And that’s interesting. Beyond that, I’m still not sure what facebook is for if you’re into Mafia Wars or if you don’t have a desire to spam other people with your farming exploits. Twitter is a different beast. I think it provides a good challenge to write things in a limited format, but I have a feeling that twitter outgrew itself and became something that is too big to be what it was intended to be. Communication dies or becomes extremely one sided if the amount of participants is either too small or too big. I don’t know. I just keep posting random stuff there and as a result I get a lot of SEO spammers following me. Seems like a fun way to spend your afternoon.

In closing, I’m pretty sure my approach to social media is almost exactly the same as my father’s approach to PC’s in general. It’s complicated and I don’t really want to.

That would be me....

It’s official that Mrs Anderson has a new job now. She’s been working Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week which has left me at home with the little guy from 7am until roughly 4-5pm every day. And it’s been great. Not to say that I haven’t been exhausted from suddenly having to give him my full attention 100% of the time, but overall it’s been fantastic.

He’s starting to bond even more with me and smiles a lot more – probably a result of getting older and more sociable. He’s also taken quite an interest in football and we’ve been watching both the senior bowl and pro bowl practices today. He liked the senior bowl more, but who can blame him. I think he favors the North team – some might call that conjecture though.

In other news, Apple presented the iPad, which I’m sure will mean more vividly colored clowns on TV. So far around 4% of my facebook contacts have come out with praises such as “amazing,” “fantastic,” “pretty” and so forth. I don’t think it’s anything special given the fact that we already knew the design of the iPod Touch, but it certainly isn’t ugly. I don’t really have an informed opinion on the device itself, but from a quick study of the specs, I’m going to go with “I have no idea what the heck I would use it for.” This might mean that I’m devoid of imagination or it might be that the device itself and the application centered future for it shows lackluster vision from the company that put this device up as revolutionary. So far it seems as revolutionary as a Che Guevara t-shirt.

Revolutionary iPad

I’ve been using Linux or Unix in some form or another for at least 10 years now, but before I delve into the specifics of for what and which distributions, let me just stop and get to the point.

The point is that I setup a home media server, because I figured it would be awesome. A machine to stream and play music and movies and that would generally be pretty awesome. So I bought the hardware, put the pieces together and started to look around for solutions.

My machine is currently powered by Ubuntu and XBMC.

However this is probably about to change soon for the plethora of idiotic little headaches this machine is giving me. Let me assure you that I have RTFM’d (is that even a phrase anymore?), I’ve exchanged hardware, I’ve compiled and recompiled and all to no avail. The black shuttle box in my living room is not the two tons of awesome I set out to build (so that technically makes two black boxes in the living room that are not living up to expectations).

Over the last few months, I’ve had help fixing the machine from a friend, but through a misconfiguration, I accidentally ran an automated update which broke the sound on the machine once more. I’ve spent the better part of three weeks trying to restore it now and feel that I am close to the goal line. Sound works now, except in video playback in XBMC. So hopefully soon I’ll be good to go and will be able to watch a movie or two. I can’t wait to stress off after all this Ubuntu induced nonsense.

Tomorrow Mrs Anderson is heading out for a work-day interview at 6:45am. That means that until noon daddy has one of his first days in charge of four months old August. I’m crossing my fingers for lots of fun, lots of laughter and lots of sleep.
Don’t get me wrong, I love reading to our boy and making silly faces and tickling him, but nothing gets grumpier than our child when he’s too tired. It is NUTS!

Since I’ll be working from home (doing god knows what) and the Mrs will be out working in an office, this will be the first of many days when I’ll have to be a good father who takes good care of his son.
I just wish he was old enough that we could go out and throw a football around and immediately collapse for a nap afterwards.
Until that age, wish me luck!

My team clearly didn’t make it very far in these play offs. It doesn’t particularly bother me this year, but one thing that does is the fact that I’m torn between watching football, just because it’s the playoffs, and hating all the games played because my team is not in it.
So far, I’ve not watched much and I don’t plan on watching the games anytime soon. When I’m jonesing this bad already, it’ll be a long eight months until things start up again. Hopefully the draft can provide some relief and we might head up to Boston to check out the summer camp – get a little break out of it.

Anyway, since we’re not watching football, Mrs Anderson discovered The Tudors on Showtime. So far we’ve managed to watch some six episodes in three days and I have to admit that it’s not a bad show, despite historical inaccuracies. TV shows are such fantastic time wasters, it reminds me of the time when I first discovered The Wire and Battlestar Galactica. So much time spent watching these shows, I’m sure it won’t be long until we have people going into treatment from “tv show addiction”. Maybe someone already has?

It took me almost 10 minutes to delete all the viagra spam comments that had been left in my absense, but at least it made me feel like my blog had gotten some attention even when I was gone.

Everyone in the house is sick. Not terminally ill or anything grave, but just enough colds to keep Tylenol in business for another season or two. I know I’ll get over mine pretty quickly (even if it’s been a week or so now), but it breaks my heart to see the little guy with a boogery nose and crying because he has trouble breathing when he has his binky. So please make that stop!

Other than that it’s been pretty hectic and busy around here, but should be slowing down a lot in the time to come. Mrs Anderson should hopefully be starting work again soon and that leaves me alone to brainwash, I mean raise, our son in the day time. Hopefully he won’t be too emotionally scarred by that ordeal.

Anyway, about to head out to put New England Patriots auto stickers on the cars. Important tasks for important people, right?

Family made it here just in time! Just before the snow storm really set in, so now we’re drinking hot chocolate and watching movies.

I haven’t had much of a time to blog the past few days because of preparations for the visit, but have some interesting stuff lined up between Christmas and New Year. Stay tuned and have a merry Christmas everyone!

P.S. The tree is not so bad. Kinda cute actually.