Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

I hope the ladies over at The Launching Pad don’t kill me for posting this.

Last week, Lynda (director of The Launching Pad, the daycare both my kids currently attend and have attended since birth) conspired with Susan to convince me to film, edit, and burn a video to DVD. The video was to consist of brief interviews with multiple Launching Pad teachers answering the following question: “What do you like best about working at The Launching Pad?” I think the video is going to be used for a grant, or a conference, or something. Doesn’t matter. The time frame was “yesterday” — as in, they needed a completed product ASAP.

I was also presented with a couple of large chocolate chip cookies to help convince me. Unfortunately, they were very delicious.

Filming was to take place Friday, but unfortunately due to a surprise security event at work I wasn’t able to get away from my desk. I sent Susan over to the daycare with our camcorder and some minimal instructions: “Put the camera on the tripod, ask the question, shoot slightly from the side.” She did, and returned the camera to me Friday evening with 13 interviews lasting 11 minutes (combined). Each interview followed this format: “My name is (A), I’ve worked for the Launching Pad for (B), and my favorite thing about working here is (C).”

After watching the footage it made sense to me to recut the whole thing and group all the “A” answers together, emphasizing how long some of the teachers at the Launching Pad have been there. Most of the footage we ended up with mentioned either “family” or enjoying being around the kids, so I group those together as well. After approximately three hours worth of editing, I ended up with the following:

I hope everybody over at the Launching Pad enjoys the final product. I know that after putting this together, I sure appreciate the Launching Pad and its staff a little more. Thank you guys (er, gals) for all you do.

Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

The following story is true. No names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Saturday: 2pm

Morgan has been talking about hermit crabs off and on since encountering them on the beach in Cozumel, so Susan decided to buy her one. After dropping Mason off over at a friend’s house to play, Susan, Morgan and I stopped by Alligator Alley off of NW10th and bought one. Well, two (they were on sale).

The hermit crabs we saw in Cozumel lived on the beach and ate algae and dead things. Imagine my surprise when I discovered domestic hermit crabs eat specially designed cookies, live in designer dirt, and need at least two different water sources. $30 later, we left with our $5 crabs: Lolly and Pop.

Saturday: 6pm

The crabs have been home for a couple of hours now and are happily living in their converted aquarium, which currently sits on the kitchen table. Both Morgan and Mommy have held the crabs and let them crawl all over their hands and arms. I have not, because they (both the girls and the crabs) are “icky”. Morgan has tried to pick up the crabs a couple of times on her own and we’ve had to stop her.

Sunday: 7am

When Susan and I awoke we found the aquarium sitting in the floor on its side. Dirt was scattered. Morgan was awake. The hermit crabs were gone.

Sunday: 7:30am

Susan and I ruled ourselves out as suspects; Mason was quickly eliminated as well. That left two primary suspects: Morgan, and Don Piano, the cat. Got basically the same information out of both of them.

Sunday: 2pm

Spent hours following wild goose chases. During different interrogations, Morgan has told use she (A) put the crabs in the bathroom drawers, (B) let them loose outside, (C) didn’t do it. I’m sure with a little more coaxing I could have got her to admit (D) sending them to the moon or (E) sticking them up her butt. This was hopeless.

Sunday: 4pm

Susan found Lolly hiding underneath the couch.

The whereabouts of Pop and the identity of the perpetrator are still unknown.

Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

Yesterday afternoon a door-to-door salesman came knock-knock-knocking. The kid was dressed in nice, conservative summer clothes (jean shorts, tucked in polo, baseball cap) with a clipboard in hand … probably twenty or so years old.

Unfortunately for me the wooden door was open so our friend could plainly see we were home. Morgan ran to the door to greet him; I followed closely behind. The guy greeted us with a big smile and introduced himself as “Seth from APX Security.” He then held up the badge hanging around his neck as if to say “See, that’s me.” Mentally I rolled my eyes. For years I had a badge hanging on my lanyard at work that said I was licensed to fly an X-Wing Fighter.

The first red flag … no wait, the first red was that he was selling security systems door-to-door. The second red flag was that the social engineering started right off the bat. I’m not an expert in detecting social engineering, but after attending a class by Kevin Mitnick I’d say I’m at least as good as the next guy.

“I suppose you know Roger, your neighbor. Well we just put in a system for him,” he said, still smiling.

“I make it a point not to know any of my neighbors,” I said back.

Things probably would have ended quickly if it weren’t for Susan, god bless her, who thinks both telemarketers and door-to-door salesmen are really humans and should be treated as such.

The questions continued, mostly about our current security system — and for a minute or two, I obliged him. He saw the security company sticker on our front window and commented on it. “Yup,” I said. Susan added, “we also have our own security engineer who lives here,” gesturing toward me.

“See these cameras?” I said, pointing to one of my cameras mounted near the porch. “They record everything, including this conversation, and send it across the internet to an off-site server.”

While the salesman eyed the camera, I continued.

“The home alarm is hooked both to a land line and a cell line. If the land line is cut, the cell phone notifies the security company. If the cell phone loses signal or detects it is being jammed, the land line contacts the security company.”

(I just made that up to see what he would say. He said nothing.)

He asked a couple more questions and after I made it clear we were good, we began to part ways. As he began to walk off he wheeled around and said, “oh, I didn’t catch your name.”

I held my hand out. “Mike,” I said.

“Nice to meet you, Mike,” he said. We both smiled, for different reasons, and parted ways for good.

Link: APX Door-to-door Alarm Sales

Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

Spindles full of DVDs surround my monitor. To the left of me is a stack of CDs waiting to be ripped to MP3; to the right are ones that have already been ripped. Various electronics lie scattered around my work area: a Palm Treo cell phone I haven’t used in two years, a stray pair of RCA cables, a couple of broken arcade buttons, a power supply that goes to something or other, dozens of random wires and wire connectors, and the mp3 player I used to use before the mp3 player I used before the one I use now. The pile of crap looms high these days. I feel less like I’m sitting at a desk and more like I’m enveloped in a cockpit.

Walking into my office is more like navigating a maze. There’s the big shipping box from NewEgg; I haven’t tossed it out yet because it would make a good trash box. Below my feet is a computer that would be good for “something”. I don’t know what that something is yet, but when I figure it out, I have a computer ready for it. On the futon behind me are plastic tubs full of stuff set aside to be sorted some other day: VHS tapes that I’ll convert to DVD someday (but probably never watch), books I haven’t read and probably never will, and cables that go to things.

The coup de gras is the small cardboard box full of little rubber monsters sitting before my keyboard. The monsters were made by Diener and were given away in the early 1980s in Happy Meals. There were eight different monsters, each of which were made in five different colors, for a grand total of 40 unique figures. I just spent $50 on eBay getting all 40. There’s a wolf-man, a bat-man, even a “Creature from the Black Lagoon”-man. Also in the box is an orange alien with a giant brain. He’s from Diener’s line of UFOs and aliens. There’s 40 of those too. I bought those last year.

For years and years I collected stuff. Neat stuff. On the shelf next to me is a hollow Coke can that doubles as a money safe, a drink cooler with an image of the “Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich” on it, and a “drivemocion”, an electronic sign you hang in your car’s rear window that displays one of five different emotions to people behind you, depending on the button you press. I have neat stuff … but I have run out of places to put it.

My office is full, the garage is full, the upstairs room is full, the outside arcade is full. If my life were a Dr. Seuss book, my piles of treasure would reach far into the sky, twisting and turning and towering far above anything else.

I am a museum curator without a museum.

I don’t have a good answer for those of you wondering “why doesn’t he just throw it all away?” I, for whatever reason, cannot deal with the regret — the fear of discarding something and regretting the decision later. The irony is, much of the stuff I save, I never use. I still have half a dozen old CRT computer monitors sitting out in the garage. I like to think I’ll use them someday, but the reality is if I were to build a system tomorrow I’d go buy a flat screen LCD monitor for it. I have miles of network cable, stacks of old computer cards and mountains of old parts, none of which have any practical value anymore.

And yet, they’re still there.

Mason has started showing an interest in having friends from school and (right now) daycare come over to visit, and later this evening one of them is. That means, essentially, the day is shot. Other than a brief lunch outing, we’ll be spending much of today like we do whenever we’re expecting company. Laundry and clutter will be shuffled to parts of the house people (hopefully) won’t see. Closet doors will bulge while protecting their secrets.

This time, for some reason, seems a little different. Susan is actually going through Mason’s room and getting rid of things: old toys, broken toys, unused furniture, etc. In a way I’m jealous. I wish I were seven-years-old and could just let stuff go like that. I can’t do it now — hell, I couldn’t do it when I was seven. I still have things from when I was seven!

Susan is on a mission this time though, starting with Mason’s room and working her way through the house. In a way, I’m scared as to what will happen when she gets to my stuff.

In a way, I’m looking forward to it.

Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

I’m not even looking forward to anything particular this weekend; I’m just looking forward to, well, not working for a couple of days.

Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

I run my own mail server. My mail server does a lousy job of stopping spam, but my e-mail client (Outlook Express running SpamBrave) does a pretty good job of it. What this means is that every spam message sent to my mail server comes to my computer, where it gets deleted. I get a little excited each morning when I open mail and see that I have 100 new messages. My excitement wanes as SpamBrave weeds out all the crap, leaving me with half a dozen or so messages left to peruse.

In the last 7 days I’ve had 996 spam e-mails hit my desktop, and received 97 legitimate messages. Probably 2/3 of those legitimate ones are what I call “legit spam”, messages from TigerDirect, NewEgg and Amazon begging me to spend even more money with them.

I really need to find a better spam filter at the server level …

Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

In 1982, my family attended the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was eight-years-old at the time and some of my strongest memories of that trip aren’t of the fair itself, but rather our stay in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. My dad once described Pigeon Forge as “a sideshow without a circus”, a fairly accurate depiction (they prefer the terms “tourist resort” and “family vacation hub”). Prior to 1982 the town’s biggest draws were Rebel Railroad and Silver Dollar City (later sold and redubbed “Dollywood”). After the location of the World’s Fair was announced, the town “initiated an aggressive economic plan that centered around theme parks, outlet malls, and live music venues. The first outlet mall, Factory Merchants, opened that same year.” (Link). We spent a full day at Magic World Theme Park and I will never forget the Magic Carpet ride or the dinosaur adventure.

This past weekend for the 4th of July, Susan and I wanted to do something different for the kids so we set our sights on Branson, Missouri, a place I had personally never been (which apparently is like living in Nevada and never visiting Las Vegas). Before we left Susan was talking about camping out in the 100 degree heat and (mercifully) those plans migrated into renting a two-story log cabin with A/C, three flat screen televisions, and wireless internet — now that’s my kind of camping!

Like Pigeon Forge, Branson, MO is another “side show without a circus”, unless maybe the circus is Silver Dollar City. It’s a lot like Vegas in a way; just replace all the casinos with go-kart rides and putt-putt courses, and all the shows with stuff like Shoji the Fiddler and Yakov Smirnoff, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Branson is like.

The four of us had a great time. One of our first stops was at Moonshine Beach, a beach at Table Rock Lake, only about five minutes from our cabin. The entrance fee is a buck a person and the facilities include showers, rest rooms and changing stalls. Definitely worth the price of admission. We swam for almost two hours before rain clouds rolled in and it began to drizzle. Unlike our friends and family back home in Oklahoma, we only got about fifteen minutes of light rain.

After the beach we headed over to the local fish hatchery, where the kids got to feed ravenous fish. I’m serious, I’ve never seen anything like it — it was like a scene from a killer piranha movie! Just a handful of fish food would cause those things to tumble over one another and jump out of the water!

Next up was lunch at the Uptown Cafe, a 50’s-style diner with entertainment by a karaoke-singing cowboy, and then finally back to the cabin for some rest and relaxation.

(Yeah, we know how to rough it.)

After a quick nap, we headed back out and took the kids to the Ripley’s Believe or Not Museum. I don’t think Susan was sold on the idea but I was adamant that we go and all three kids loved it (Mason, Morgan, and Me). Tomorrow I’m going to write up a more detailed review of Ripley’s.

That night we went back out to Table Rock Lake and watched one of the local fireworks shows. Despite the mountainous terrain, we could see fireworks going off in three different directions. The kids enjoyed the fireworks, Susan enjoyed being outside and I got eaten up by mosquitoes so there you go. Like every year, the kids enjoyed it and I endured it.

We spent the rest of our time driving around taking pictures of various buildings, restaurants and museums. Believe it or not I liked Branson much more than I thought I would and, only being a five(ish)-hour drive from the house, I can see another visit there in the not so distant future — if, for no other reason, to see the Hollywood Wax Museum (entrance pictured below).

If you read all of that and would like to see more pictures from our vacation, here they are.

Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

As I mentioned last year, back at Myers Elementary I was classmates with Jerry Buffington. In 1982, Jerry’s step-dad Tom Wayne recorded and released the hit single “We Called Him E.T.” The single sold “thousands of copies” according to Wayne’s website. My sister and I owned two of them. I also owned an autographed 8×10 of Tom Wayne, which hung on my wall until the E.T. craze blew over.

Although the 8×10 has been since misplaced, I still have the autographed single “We Called Him E.T.” (printed on translucent red vinyl). Unfortunately third graders aren’t known for taking good care of their records, and mine definitely shows its age; it’s slightly warped and covered in scratches.

Fast forward to last year, when I discovered that Tom Wayne’s ode to E.T. had been released on CD! The CD comes with two songs: Wayne’s original “We Called Him E.T.” (which has been renamed to “E.T. and Me”) and a new song, “Best Friends with E.T.” How can you go wrong with that?

Due to an ordering snafu I wasn’t sure that my order had gone through, but after receiving an e-mail from the man himself, everything got worked out and just a few days later I received my new most prized possession — an autographed “E.T. and Me” CD!

With each purchase, you also get a signed copy of the original vinyl single. Double score!

Susan and the kids are already sick of hearing E.T. in the car, so HO HO just wait until she discovered the chorus of We Called Him E.T. is now my default ring tone!! My favorite part is the sound effect when E.T. makes a wish. PING!

Susan’s official statement: “You have lost your damn mind.” I think she’s just jealous because I went to school with a kid whose step-dad KNOWS E.T.

If you are interested in ordering autographed copies of E.T. and Me on both CD and vinyl, please e-mail Tom Wayne directly and he will hook you up. Let him know you read about it here and maybe E.T. himself will pay you a visit!*

(*Probably not though.)

Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

Back when I was in elementary school we learned a song called “Fifty Nifty United States” (Lyrics). If nothing else, learning it is a great parlor trick; I’ve bet people I could recite all fifty states alphabetically in less than 30 seconds before and won.

As a kid singing that song I used to imagine visiting all 50 states someday. Last night someone on Facebook posted one of those quizzes asking “how many of the 50 states (plus DC) have you visited?” My final answer: 38. X’s denote states I have visited; O’s denote states I have lived in.

Alabama: X
Alaska
Arizona: X
Arkansas: X
California: X
Colorado: X
Connecticut: X
Delaware: X
Florida: X
Georgia: X
Hawaii
Idaho: X
Illinois: X
Indiana: X
Iowa
Kansas: X
Kentucky
Louisiana: X
Maine
Maryland: X
Massachusetts: X
Michigan
Minnesota: X
Mississippi: X
Missouri: X
Montana: X
Nebraska
Nevada: X
New Hampshire: X
New Jersey: X
New Mexico: X
New York
North Carolina: X
North Dakota
Ohio: X
Oklahoma: O
Oregon: X
Pennsylvania: X
Rhode Island: X
South Carolina: X
South Dakota
Tennessee: X
Texas: X
Utah
Vermont
Virginia: X
West Virginia: X
Wisconsin
Wyoming: X
Washington: O
Washington DC: X

To be sure, I’ve spent more time in some than others. Several of those I’ve merely driven through. I don’t even think I stopped in Delaware or Maryland as I cruised through them. I spent about ten minutes in California once; dad and I drove there from Vegas “just to say we had been there”. The most surprising omission on the list is probably New York.

If I have any upcoming road trips in the future I may have to alter my routes to pick up a few more. I doubt I’ll hit the far north east anytime soon and Alaska and Hawaii will be tough to collect, but places like Nebraska and the Dakotas are suddenly taunting me.

Originally published at robohara.com. Please leave any comments there.

Funny, when things get the busiest in my life I post the least. Then when things slow down I write posts that start off with “Boy, have I been busy!”

Like this one. Boy, have I been busy! I think it will be easier to go backwards, chronologically.

Sunday was Morgan’s 4th birthday. We had her birthday party at the spray ground off of Melrose, between Council and Rockwell. We had second thoughts about the location after having an issue with another “kid” (I use parenthesis because he was about 13 and dumping buckets of water on the heads of three and four year old little girls …), but after swiftly dealing with that we didn’t have any other issues.

Click here for pictures of Morgan’s birthday party.

The reason we wanted to have a simple birthday party for Morgan on Sunday was because our friend and co-worker Emily got married on Saturday. Susan, I, and a bunch of our friends all volunteered to help out with the wedding. My buddy Tim Dog and I were there at 8am to unload tables and chairs (Johnny and Paula’s boyfriend KJ helped out as well) and we were there at 2pm loading them back up. Unloading wasn’t so bad, as it was only 80 degrees and everything needed to go downhill. Moving everything uphill in 100+ degree temperatures sucked much worse.

Click here for pictures of Emily’s Wedding.

The day before that, Friday, was Susan’s birthday. We didn’t do much Friday night because Susan was exhausted. She was exhausted because, on Thursday night, she got home from Washington DC after midnight.

All of this explains why last night after dinner, I laid down and slept for 10 hours, got up for one, then went back to bed and slept for two more.