Yaller Beltz

04.04.2005

This past Friday was belt test night at the dojo, and Jer and I were testing for our yellow belts. I was dreading the tet a little bit, mainly because I didn't know what to expect. Luckily, I ended up having a lot of fun, I think due to one simple thing:

Jerry and I are better than the other people at our level.

Yes, we old farts did a bang up job Friday. We even made Leonard proud. Unfortunately, Jer had to suffer at my hands during the wrestling portion of the test, although to be honest we really haven't practiced wrestling that much during class. I think if he had just grabbed a chair and whacked me on the head he would have done ok. As it was, my superior wrestling skills (from decades of watching Hulk Hogan) and mastering of physics (a 380lb body at rest is going to do pretty much what it wants) kept him in his place: On his back, wriggling around like a bug.

Now I've got to find an excuse to go wrestle some more....

Permalink random

A Long Day

04.01.2005

Today is the much awaited day of the karate belt test, where Jer and I advance from the lowly status of white belt (i.e. "so you say you want to learn karate") to yellow belt (i.e. "so you've been keeping at it for 3 months"). We learned yesterday that we've really already advanced in belt rank, the test is just a little something for show, more to get us ready for when the test counts, I imagine. Plus, it gives me an excuse to snicker an extra time this week as I watch Jerry try to tie his belt.

Today also marks the umpteenth anniversary of one of my favorite sayings garnered from a vocabulary building calendar: "Jerry is a slyboots". It being April 1st, be sure to read all the news reports with a wary eye.

Totally unrelated, but I've managed to get the JasonTracker working again - it parses one of the pages at the WWE site and has been broken since they converted the site to JSP (adding all kinds of banner ads in the process). If nothing else, it gave me an excuse to excercise the PHP portion of my brain a little.

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Time Keeps On Tickin'

03.28.2005

This past Friday was my grandfather's 84th birthday. I still have a hard time believing he's in his 80's, he pretty much looks like he did in his 60's (and in a good way - the man doesn't even need glasses unless he's reading).

On Sunday, one of my grandfather's brothers (the last remaining one, I think) passed away. It wasn't unexpected, so all of the family has been doing ok. I've been thinking of the timing - so close to my grandfather's birthday, Easter - and how there are times that a persons death seems more noticable if it falls close to a date you normally observe. I think and worry more about my grandfather and how he's taking all of this rather than how other people are doing - he's the one I'm closest to in all of this after all.

Then I started thinking of Gerry, and how I still think about him on a fairly regular basis. When Gerry died a part of me wondered how long I would think about him, remember him. I guess I was worried about forgetting. But the thing I've eventually learned since last June that once people make a true impact on your life, like Gerry did, like my grandfather has, you're never going to forget them.

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Surfing Archives

03.27.2005

I don't know how I got off on this particular tangent, but while doing a little harmless surfing Saturday I cam across a site that archives sites off the net. That led to about an hour looking at older versions of this site. It's amazing both how often my site designs change along with how different (at least to me) the designs seem.

Then I went on a little trip of Jer's old layouts and found that one the better pics of me had managed to be archived.

I've got so many things to do in the here and now and I waste a chunk of the weekend looking at old sites....

Permalink programming/interweb random

The Drive Thru

03.24.2005

Today at work we came upon a new saying. It spawned form the joy of .NET, and how today, for some inexplicable reason, both Jer and I were sticking code in places that were screwing us once the code ran. Since .NET has special events and whatnot that it triggers at seemingly random times, our code snippets would either fire when we didn't want them, or not fire when we did want them.

After the upteenth time, it occured that there should be a special place for putting these code snippets that were screwing us up. I have taken it upon myself to name this imaginary place as "The Drive Thru", in honor of one of the more famous Lethal Weapon 2 quotes. So the next time you write code that screws you, you can just assume you put it in the drive thru.

Permalink programming/interweb