Marriage Advice
My friend, Jinksto wrote a whole month’s worth of emails to a couple who were getting married. While all his advice was good advice, Mrs. At Home and I have our own marriage advice.
Mrs. At Home
Mrs. At Home’s advice is sound, and simple:
You’re on the same team.
This means what it sounds like. Many couples seem to be in some sort of a Women are From Venus, Men are From Mars war. While men and women are quite different, that doesn’t mean it’s “us against them” or you against your spouse. And there are lots of important implications of being on the same team:
- You never talk bad about your teammates. Ever.
- If your spouse does something that could be construed as good or bad, it was probably the good one.
- Your job is to encourage and help your teammate for the good of the team, not to be rotten to them to the detriment of the team.
- If your spouse says something that could be either nice or ugly, they probably meant it the nice way. (Since Mrs. At Home has this assumption, it’s bailed me out many times since I’m not too good with vocabulary.)
My Advice
My advice can be summed up in two words:
Stay married.
This is largely stolen material from a Sunday school teacher, but he’s got many more years of successful marriage than me, and the way he puts it simplifies what I think we had already figured out.
If you’re going to stay married, regardless of the circumstances, it behooves you to make the circumstances good. Would you rather be unhappily married, unhappily divorced, or happily married? A study on marital happiness and divorce pretty well shows that those are your three options. To summarize the findings of the report:
- Those who were unhappily married and chose to divorce were no happier 5 years after the divorce
- Those who were unhappily married and chose to stay married were happier 5 years after the initial study
- 8 out of 10 of those who were very unhappy with their marriage stated they were happy with the marriage 5 years later.
A different study rates marriages on scales like very unhappy, unhappy, happy, or very happy, and it shows that 86% of those who “stuck it out” were happy, and 60% were now very happy.
So, the Sunday school teacher’s advice goes, if you’re considering divorce, take some time and do the most selfish thing you can do. Think of nothing but your own happiness. And stay married.
This has some implications in your marriage that aren’t unlike Mrs. At Home’s advice:
- If you’re going to stay married, make the marriage not stink. So stop doing the things your spouse doesn’t like you to do, and do more of the things your spouse likes you to do.
- If you’re going to be happy in your marriage, you need to be happy with your spouse. Perception is reality, so compliment your spouse often.
- Those things that you tend to think are bad things about your spouse are probably really good. Mrs. At Home likes to make decisions on a whim. And a lot of the things we’ve done as a couple, I never would have done on my own. (Case in point - when she and the girls are gone for an extended period, I actually find that I don’t leave my office for several days - let alone the house.)
- Never, ever, ever speak badly about your spouse. If you have a complaint, speak with them directly (and kindly) about it. Never to other people.
So that’s it.
Why Dissing Atlassian?
For April Fools’ this year, Atlassian released a “game” called Angry Nerds. And then when they released Confluence 4.0, they truly made a serious mob of Angry Nerds. There are long-ish threads on their site by folks who are stark-raving mad about Confluence 4.0
For the uninitiated, Confluence is a wiki - much like Mediawiki. The idea is that the community of readers is generally more knowledgeable about some subject than any one person. For geeks, this sort of “throw something out there and let the masses correct” mentality is our lifeblood. It’s far more civil than in the 90’s when all we had as a feedback mechanism was flame wars on Usenet (insert reference to Godwin’s Law here).
So what was the think that Confluence did that made everybody so furious? They removed the wiki editor. You might ask “how, exactly, does one edit a wiki without a wiki editor?quot; Geeks are asking the same question. Confluence 4.0 only has a Rich Text Editor (RTE) now, and no wiki markup editor. You can still type wiki markup into the Rich Text Editor, and it’s converted to XHTML on the client side. But it’s stored in XHTML on the server side.
For the non-technical, you might be thinking that this is sufficient - the geeks can still type in wiki markup and so should be happy, and Confluence gets to publish a single editor so non-technical people are happy, right? Wrong. There are a number of beautiful things about wiki markup as a storage format as well:
- The markup format itself is human-readable.
- The markup format is smaller in size
- The markup format can be retrieved to be edited in its wiki format again
- The markup format is simply created by scripts (without libraries for generating XHTML)
- The markup format can be read in its native format in a text editor, without a browser
Some of these are very similar to one another, but as a geek, they’re critical. To give an example of this ability to “go both ways” and retrieve the document later in the wiki markup format and be able to read it in plain text, take a look at these couple of pages. README.md from jQuery in HTML format - this is what the Markdown format for the README looks like when rendered in HTML. But the source reads well in a text editor. That last thing is the actual source for what you see on the first link.
In Confluence 3.0, you could edit pages in a similar format, and they were stored in that format, so you could later edit them in that same format, or edit them in a text editor, and it looked formatted even in the text editor.
In Confluence 4.0, the source for that above markup would look something like this:
<div id="readme" class="blob instapaper_body">
<div class="markdown-body"><h1>
<a href="http://jquery.com/">jQuery</a> - New Wave JavaScript</h1>
<h2>Contribution Guides</h2>
<p>In the spirit of open source software development, jQuery always encourages
community code contribution. To help you get started and before you jump into writing
code, be sure to read these important contribution guidelines thoroughly:</p>
<ol>
<li><a href="http://docs.jquery.com/Getting_Involved">Getting Involved</a></li>
<li><a href="http://docs.jquery.com/JQuery_Core_Style_Guidelines">Core Style
Guide</a></li>
<li><a href="http://docs.jquery.com/Tips_for_jQuery_Bug_Patching">Tips For Bug
Patching</a></li>
</ol><h2>What you need to build your own jQuery</h2>
That’s clearly not readable in a plain-text editor, so a developer must use a browser to even be able to read the content at all let alone with some semblance of emphasis, hierarchy, etc. Editing this by hand or programmatically is extremely error-prone.
And all that is not to mention there’s a ridiculous amount of complexity in securely handling data stored in that format. Just ask MySpace.
Oh yeah - I edit my blog posts in Markdown format, and they read just fine in a plain-text editor. And years down the line, if I decide I want to read all my posts in a text editor, they still read just fine there, too.
Dallas
Last night, Mrs. At Home and I saw a preview for Dallas the new series. Since it will be on in 2012 and we’ve lived in the Dallas area before, I figured I’d give some bullet points about Dallas and Texas in general so I could set the record straight on some things I know will be asked.
- No. Everybody in Dallas does not wear cowboy hats. Many people in Fort Worth do, however.
- No. Everybody in Dallas does not drive pickup trucks. Many people in Fort Worth do, however. And there are many more trucks on the road in East Texas than you will generally find elsewhere.
- People say they want to move to Texas. Then they say they want to move to Austin. You need to find out which - Austin is the capital of Texas, but it’s not Texas.
- The Dallas Cowboys are not America’s team. They’re not even Dallas’ team. Two reasons for this: ** Like most warm-weather cities, the Cowboys only have fans when they’re winning. When they’re losing, the weather is fine for golf. ** The Dallas Cowboys play in Arlington. Prior to that, they played in Irving. I think they played in the Cotton Bowl, which is in Dallas, long ago.
- Yes, there’s lots of oil in Texas. Many schools in East Texas have oil derricks on the school property.
- No, you can not drive from Dallas to El Paso and back in an afternoon. Yes, there have been shows which say this can be done.
- No, Dallas is not a bunch of tall buildings in the middle of a prairie. The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is huge - with no traffic, it would still take you 90 minutes to get from one side of the metroplex to the other. Could be longer if you consider Greenville part of the Metroplex (Greenville does).
- Texas is not part of the South. It’s “a whole ‘nother country”. I’ve never lived in a place with so much national pride.
- As Texas is not part of the South, there’s no need to ask for sweet tea. There is only tea (and it’s sweet.)
- Yes, there really is a South Fork ranch. It’s in Murphy, which is a suburb of Dallas. It’s a real working ranch. My sister used to keep a horse there, and we used to go to a concert there every year.
- There is no Catholic or Protestant in Texas. There is no Baptist or Presbyterian. There is no Evangelical or Charismatic. There is no Atheist or Religious. There is only Ford and there is only Chevy. You must choose one when filling out our application for your drivers’ license, and the Texas Highway Patrol will give you the appropriate Calvin-peeing-on-the-other-logo sticker for your window.
- What’s bigger in Texas than the Dallas Cowboys is local high-school football. That’s big all over the state (as far as I’ve seen).
- Some towns in East Texas are small enough that they’re named after parts of counties (I went to North Lamar), and some school districts are named after two cities because neither of the cities would be big enough on its own. Examples include Alba-Golden, Como-Pickton, and Scurry-Rosser (where Mrs. At Home did go to a classroom where they had first and second grade in the same classroom). Near where I grew up, there was a school where the two counties were small enough to have their own school district. Delmar (Delta and Lamar). Having sufficiently large schools is vital to high-school football.
- There is barbecue in Texas, but it’s different than elsewhere. In Texas, any dead or mostly dead animal roasted over a fire is barbecue. What is called brisket other places is known in Texas as barbecue brisket (even if it came from the oven) and is only to be eaten on Sunday after church (which is dinner - even at noon - because lunch comes in a paper bag).
- The national game of Texas is 42. Mrs. At Home and I would love to show you how to play. The longer you’ve been married, the better you automatically are at it.
Trinkets
I’ve mentioned before (I think) that I’m not really big on keeping trinkets around. I had a closet full of trophies in the home in which I grew up - debate, math, soccer, etc., and I had my sister take them all to the trophy shop to be taken apart and donated. I don’t have my high-school yearbooks. In fact, I didn’t even get a yearbook my senior year. I don’t have my letter jacket, or class rings. None of those things have much if any meaning to me.
The company where I work also gives trinkets. At certain anniversaries of enrollment, they give you a nice piece of lucite to commemorate the occasion. I’ve been with the company for 15 years, and I’ve gotten a bunch of lucite from them but don’t have any of them around anymore.
But there’s one trinket I’m hanging onto for now.
This year, I gave four presentations at various conferences. Each presentation was different, to a different audience, over a different set of material. All of those conferences had nice welcome dinners, get togethers for the speakers, opportunities to meet with others in the same industry, etc. However, at one of the presentations this year, I received another nice piece of lucite. On it, is inscribed simply:
Name of Conference
Thanks for being so smart!
2011
That’s all it says. I think the thank you line is a little silly. But this is my favorite trinket (aside from my wedding ring and any picture on the fridge) because this was given to me by geeks for being able to present to geeks.
A lot of the presentations I give are to more “professional” types. Stuffy people in suits who are just waiting for this geek who doesn’t even bother to wear a tie to mess up and say something stupid. And I do say stupid things - usually intentionally.
With geeks, I don’t change a thing. With geeks, though, I speak the same way not to raise eyebrows, bring attention to myself, or to shock, but just because that’s the way we geeks talk. I’m not professional. I don’t know about resource allocation, I know about resource injection. I don’t know about management structures, I know about data structures. We make statements like “YGWAGAM” “RTFM” and “play the wiki game” because those have meaning to us that’s just as meaningful as buzzword bingo words are for the Dilbert management set.
So this trinket, I appreciate. It was given to me by my people. And not because I achieved something, but because I had the pleasure of hanging out with people way smarter than me and sharing a little bit of what I’ve learned and hacked together through the years.
vim tips
I’ve mentioned in the past that I’ve been using vim as my primary
editor for some time, so I figure now is probably as good of a time as
any to give some tips I’ve picked up during my extensive use of vim.
First, people wonder why I use vim when I work primarily in GUI
environments:
- It’s available everywhere. On Windows, Mac, and all the non-GUI platforms I work on. So it’s quite handy to get really used to one editor and know it very well. TextMate isn’t available on Windows, Notepad++ isn’t available on Mac, and neither of them are available to me when I’m SSH’ed into a remote terminal with only terminal access.
- Once you get through some of the initial learning curve, it’s faster (for me) to move around than other editors - if for no other reason than that I’m not constantly reaching for the mouse.
- If you don’t like the way it does something, there’s probably a setting to change the way it behaves.
These aren’t necessarily any better than anybody else’s tips, just a random smattering of lessons I’ve learned along the way.
- Force yourself under whatever circumstances to use it. Set your
EDITORorVISUALenvironment variables, and begin deliberately forgetting to use-mwhen checking in code viagitorsvnso that you get forced to use it. vimtutor. Make yourself at least 30 minutes to go through the whole tutorial, and on multiple days. Do everything it says to do. You’ll only get better at usingvimby using it, so you have to do what the tutorial says to do in order to start developng the muscle emory required.- Learn the
f,t,F,T,;and.commands early. These shortcuts alone make me more efficient than most other editors. - Figure out something every day that you want customized, then learn
how to do that in your
.vimrc. Mine is pretty minimal, but I’m working on it. set paste. You’re welcome.- Language-specific settings can be set in
~/.vim/ftplugin/<type>.viminstead of using a bunch ofautocmd’s in your.vimrc. - Learn to use the
:helpcommand. First, just do:helpto learn how to bounce around within the help. (Ctrl-]will follow a tag, if you don’t bother to read that far initially). - Under no circumstances should you ever reach for the mouse or arrow
keys - especially early on. Learn to use
h,j,k, andlso that one of these days when you’re on a vt100 terminal and the arrow keys don’t work, you don’t suddenly get stuck with an editor that won’t work at all for you. (You can use the arrow keys if you’re inINSERTmode and don’t want to constantly switch back and forth - although I’d recommend figuring out how to accomplish what you want to do with normal mode.) - Lean to use some of the features which you don’t use religiously in
other editors - split panes, multiple buffers in a single tab, etc.
I’m not saying those features aren’t available in other editors, but
those are the types of things that tend to be buried a few menu
commands done, but with
vim, you’re kinda’ expected to be able to use them to your benefit. uis undo.Ctrl-ris redo. You’re welcome. (Incidentally,vim’s undo history is non-linear - if you make change 1, then 2, then undo back to 1, make change 3, you can go back to 2. There are some decent sites which explain how to make sense of this, but maybe:earlier 20swill do what you really need.)- I personally don’t use too many plugins, although there are tons of
them. The reason for this is that I want to be really good with the
core functionality so that when I’m on a system without my plugins, I
can still move about eficiently. The one plugin I do tend to
install is NERDTree. However, if you want
vimto do everything you want it to do, install some plugins. - Use it every day. Practice every day. Learn a new command every day, and then go looking for excuses to use those commands.
- I personally use
:set numberbecause a lot of the commands I use are easier to use by knowing line numbers. I don’t use visual mode too much (although I’m getting better). Because I use line numbers so much, but because on a terminal, they’ll be copied to the clipboard if you’re selecting something to put in an email, say - you’ll want a way to quickly turn those off. I use a keyboard shortcut, but:set nu!is not too slow if you’re only going to do it on occasion.
Adoption Stories: Citizenship Has Its Privileges
This post won’t be so much advice (not all of them are advice, just my personal experience of the adoption process) but a bit of a rant.
Since we adopted internationally, a lot of the work we had to do involved the INS - now USCIS. There are parts where we have to prepare paperwork to bring an orphan into the country and have her become a citizen, and parts have to do with our family going out of the country.
I don’t remember specifically which part of the process this was, but it was long before we traveled. We needed to visit the USCIS office to get lots of identification - fingerprints, thumbprints, palm prints, etc. done.
Now, I tend to reveal my politics a bit on this blog. I don’t like the idea of giving benefits to illegal aliens who aren’t paying into the tax base. But this is different. Folks who are illegal aliens and intend to stay that way generally don’t visit the USCIS offices. They tend to stay beneath the radar.
I have a great deal of respect for a person who can’t sufficiently provide for or care for their own family in their own country, so they decide to go to another country. I have a lot of respect for those who work to save up to move their families here if they choose to play by the rules - to get the right permits, to begin the process of becoming citizens. Part of the great diversity of our country is the folks who came over on boats and went through all the hoops necessary to become citizens.
When we arrived at the USCIS offices for our appointment, the office was filled with many, many, many people who would be waiting in line for most of the day for a piece of paperwork to fill out to become legal. We were also warned to get to the offices as soon as they opened because we would be in queue for several hours. K had to go with us as well (she was 4 at the time), and so we came well prepared to spend several hours at the USCIS offices.
We never sat down in the waiting room. We checked in at the front desk, explained what we were there for, and were immediately whisked past all the hundreds of waiting people straight to the task for which we came. We were given some sort of priority, either because our task was different from what everybody else was there for, or we were different from the folks who were there.
That frustrated me. Somehow we were chosen to be more important than people who were trying to make a legitimate living for their family. I’m glad we didn’t have to sit on queue for several hours. I just feel bad for those who chose to play by the rules who did have to sit on queue for several hours.
Wore Out
I’m wore out. Yeah
The kind of wore out you get when you take a couple of extra days vacation and start learning a new skill relevant to your work.
The kind of wore out you get when you sit in traffic on your way to the middle of nowhere.
The kind of wore out you get having a conversation about nothing and everything with a good friend.
The kind of wore out you get driving through the silent middle of nowhere seeing the leaves just barely starting to change.
The kind of wore out you get when you realize you’re not going to find a good place to camp because the Uwharrie Festival is going on.
The kind of wore out you get learning the physics behind a really wacky sway bar system.
The kind of wore out you get gathering firewood - including most of a whole tree.
The kind of wore out you get sitting around a campfire sharing the last of an apple pie with Jinksto.
The kind of wore out you can only get when it’s really cold out, but you’re just warm enough under a sleeping bag rated for 20-below.
The kind of wore out you get from waking up early to start the day’s work off.
The kind of wore out you get from spending some time at the Eldorado Outpost eating breakfast with a bunch of other people who are probably there for the same sort of stuff you are.
The kind of wore out you get from hiking several miles through the woods looking for the perfect spot to put a deer stand in a couple of months.
The kind of wore out you get from learning how deer mark their own paths, conserve energy, and move.
The kind of wore out you get from not saying much of anything but just listening to the woods.
The kind of wore out you get from making that trip far too short.
The kind of wore out you get from going back home to a family that loves you.
Yeah. That kind of wore out.
Adoption Stories: Don’t Change Anything
I had promised long ago that I would start posting some stories from the adoption, more from a man’s perspective.
Guys. If you’re going to adopt (I really do recommend it), the first tip I can give you is don’t change anything. For at least two years prior to the adoption, don’t change a thing, including:
- Don’t buy a house
- Don’t buy a car
- Don’t buy a boat
- Don’t have another child (although this often happens during the adoption process)
- Don’t get a raise
- Don’t change jobs
- Don’t get a new credit card
- Don’t paint your house
- Don’t get arrested
- Don’t get a traffic ticket
- Don’t pick up a second job
- Don’t refinance your house
- Don’t pay off a credit card
- Don’t change cell phone providers
- Don’t get a cavity
- Don’t get sick (unless you’re already sick, in which case you should stay that way until the adoption is finalized)
I’m almost tempted to say not to even buy a lawnmower. Your job for the two years prior to the adoption, aside from being supportive to your wife (and meeting her at whatever notary she’s at today) is to not change a thing.
You can change your shorts, but that’s about it.
Why is this? During the adoption process, you fill out 12 inches (yes - Mrs. At Home has a notebook of our copies of the stuff, and it’s 6 inches thick) of paperwork including information about your credit profile, home, criminal history, employment, salary, and dental history. You fill this information out long before the adoption.
And then something will change.
And then you’ll get a new piece of paper asking for the same information that you have already provided on a different piece of paper, except the form’s name will be different (one will be something like “Dental History” and then the new one will be called “History of Dentistry”). If any of the responses on the new form are different from the way they were 2 years prior, you’ll have to fill out a third form (something like “Explanation of Discrepancy Between Form Dental History and Form History of Dentistry”. This won’t happen until after all your other paperwork has been notarized and your notarizations have been notarized. So you’ll have to get the form “Explanation of Discrepancy Between Form Dental History and Form History of Dentistry” notarized, and then you’ll have to go to the courthouse of whatever county that notary lives in and have the notarization notarized. This will have to be FedExed to Washington D.C. Post-Haste Dispatch (which will cost you another bunch of money).
So I promise you - you should not change anything during the adoption process.
Colorizing Photos with the Gimp
There are a million tutorials on the ‘net on how to do this, but some folks at work mentioned they like the effect on occasion, and the way I do it is ever so slightly different than how others do it, and it’s a good opportunity for me to prove to myself that I’m getting the different layer modes.
We’ll start with this photo from our awesome cruise:
Open the file you want to de/re-colorize in the Gimp.
The first step is to add a new layer to the photo. Either click the New Layer button, right click in the Layers window and select New Layer, or just hit Ctrl+Shift+N. Give the layer a name like maybe B&W and make sure the Layer Fill Type is White.
Now, this adds a layer over the background, and the default mode for layers is “Normal” so it just covers your photo with white. We’ll change the mode of the layer so that it removes the Saturation - how much color shines through. When you select Saturation, then no color from the lower layer shines through, so it will appear black and white.
The next step is to apply a Layer Mask. If you learned anything from Custom QR Codes with the Gimp, you’ve learned that a Layer Mask is a part of the layer, which when turned black turns off part of the layer - allowing the underlying layer to just show through it - like a pinhole camera.
Right click on the Layer and select Add Layer Mask. PIck White for the color to initialize. This will set the mask to use the entire layer. We’ll color pieces of the mask black to colorize portions of the photo.
Now use the brush tool, and set the foreground color to black, and just draw over the parts of the photo you want in color.
Use progressively smaller brushes to get as detailed as you want in setting up the mask.
When you’re done, right click the mask and select Apply Layer Mask.
Like I said - this wasn’t the best photo for doing this. I’ve done others with flowers and such that work much more nicely.
Like these (Thanks Mrs. At Home:
Pin It! Button in iPad
Mrs. At Home has been playing with Pinterest lately. I haven’t bought in, haven’t joined or anything. It seems like a less functional version of Springpad, but it seems to be popular with the fairer gender.
But she couldn’t pin things from her iPad. There’s a link on their site for a “Pin It!” button, but those don’t drag on the iPad’s browser. So a little reverse-engineering and email go a long way.
If you’re on your iPad, click on the send icon, then Add Bookmark. Call the bookmark Pin It! Then copy the text below:
javascript:void((function(){var%20e=document.createElement('script');e.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');e.setAttribute('charset','UTF-8');e.setAttribute('src','http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinmarklet.js?r='+Math.random()*99999999);document.body.appendChild(e)})());
And then tap the bookmarks icon again, then tap Edit. Tap the arrow next to your Pin It! link, and paste in the code from above.
How’s that for driving up traffic here from the female demographic?
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