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DeAnn and I just got back from the company's Circle of Excellence trip in Palm Springs, CA. Pics from the trip can be found here. While we were on the trip, we took in the Palm Springs Aerial Tram in which I will include video of my panic attack as soon as I can edit it a bit.
And yes, that is Chris Isaak who played in concert our last night there and won me over as a new fan.
Actually, it's "one more presentation" on my HUGE-MONOLOITIC paper on May 1st (happy May Day!) and I am 100% DONE and can graduate on May 13th with official "Piece of Paper" in hand.
And yes, I'm already starting to look towards my Master's Degree.
Living with ADHD children is always entertaining....tonight is no exception.
When it comes to homework, most kids just want to get through it and be done with it. Except for a couple of ours. They will write anything (and I mean anything) down just to fill in the paper and say "Its Done!". Except of course when mom and I read it and find out that the capital of Estonia is "I like Unicorns".
Tonight Tyler was doing his science homework and for the last half hour, we went through each sentence in a paragraph debating on why that sentence was not the answer. Here's an example.
Tyler: I CAN'T DO THIS!
Me: Yes you can, what is the question?
Tyler: WHY do PLANTS someTIMES have THICK STEMS?!
Me: OK, and what does the paragraph say?
Tyler: I DON'T KNOW!
Me: Well, maybe you should read it.
Tyler: OH MY GOD, I HAVE TO READ THE WHOLE THING (ed: paragraph is four sentences long).
Me: Yes, that's your homework, you need to read it.
Tyler; OH MY GOD, JUST FORGET IT, I'LL TAKE THE "F".
Me: No you won't. You will do this homework and if you don't, it will be waiting for you in the morning.
(insert 20 minutes of the same argument, of which I've walked away three times from his crap)
Me: Tyler, it's simple. Do it. You have wasted 20 minutes of play time complaining about the home work when you could have had it done!
Tyler: FINE, but I DON'T WANT TO!
Me; Finally, thank you.
(insert 30 seconds of writng the correct answer down).
On to Question #2.
Tyler: OH MY GOD!!!! MORE QUESTIONS!!!!!!!!!
So for the past few days, I've been trying to live the open source life. That is, using a non-windows machine.
I can pretty much do everything I need to do on this box as I could on my windows box (except for some programs, which I can live without like "Internet backgammon".
So after the paper is done (you know, the 70 page monster I need to finish by Monday to graduate), I'm going to reformat the laptop to dual boot Fedora and XP (and maybe mutli to OSX x86...) ;-) That is, if I can find a linux driver for my Dell widescreen...
One of the machines I use on a "semi-daily" basis has had problems for a while, which can be traced to a bad hard drive. So over the past few weeks I've been tearing it apart trying to figure out WTF was going on (after replacing the harddrive). Today, I figured it out.
Last night, in a fit of rage thinking my CD ROM was DOA, I decided to try to install abother operating system on my machine. You see, when the XP disk was inserted, all sorts of weird noises and buzzing came from the CD-ROM, which would then say "No OS found, have a bad day".
So late last night (after the kids were in bed, hell, after everyone was) I slapped in a small distro of Debian Linux to see if it would install. Within an hour, the system was up and running. So OK, something just needed a kick, go ahead and try the XP install again. Nope, same weird noises. OK, grab different disk of XP and try again. Same result.
talk to Derek this morning and he recommended RedHat since I'm what you would call "clueless" about Linux. grab the iso's, burn them, and an hour later the box is running Fedora. Put in the XP CD once again? Same sounds.
I've got a third disk of XP lying around somewhere. If it has the same reject symptoms, then I'm going to slap this thing on EBay so that some Linux guru can us it in their office.
A 3400 x 1600 radar display of the lower 48. Enjoy.