The sickness

Sometimes it just does not pay to get out of bed. As our beach vacation ended, everyone started getting sick. Our daughter got sick right before our vacation started and slowly it spread to the whole family. Every one but the two left handers in the family. This certainly is an odd illness that only affects right handed people! What is even more strange is that the disease affects every one differently. My wife got tonsillitis, which I thought only young kids got. In fact for her she got it quite often as a child and had not had it since. Also both my wife and daughter got really bad sores all over their tongues. My middle son who was the first to get it from my daughter never had a sore throat but had a cough and felt really run down. Our oldest son had the symptoms the longest and after the initial sore throat had a cough that lasted two weeks. For me I had a sore throat for over a week and then cough and then a sinus infection and now may have bronchitis. Recently any time I get a viral or bacteria infection it always spreads to my sinuses. Now can one illness spread by my daughter have so many different manifestations? I think someone has come up with a biologic weapon than finds the weakness in the person affected and takes advantage of it. The only problem with this theory is we are not important as a family for someone to try it out on us. The sickness mystery will have to remain unsolved - I just hope we get well soon.

Almost perfect vacation

As the kids get older, we seldom take vacations together. For the past two years we have made a weekly trip to the beach right after the kids got out of school. Last year we went to Surf City, NC and this year we were a couple of miles down the coast at Topsail Beach, NC. This small strip of NC beaches is almost all beach houses with very few hotels or condominiums. It forces us to relax, enjoy the beach and the kids. It is so interesting to watch the kids change how they interact with each other while on vacation together. At home, they all separate into their rooms and seldom interact. While at the beach, the play around in the surf together, play games in the rented beach house and talk to each other while taking a break to watch TV together. It is worth it to take a vacation just to see them talk to each other! For me, a vacation means no computer, no work and no thinking about work and spending time with my wife. In that regard this year was a perfect vacation.

Well I should say almost perfect as we all got sick except for my next to oldest son, who somehow avoided it. My daughter picked up some nasty virus the weekend before from her friend's family. She had a temperature of 104 last Thursday, right before we left on Saturday for the beach. Then our middle son got sick on Wednesday, but in desperation still made it to the beach each day as he had been waiting for a very long time to learn how to surf. Then our oldest son got sick on Thursday. Finally on Friday my wife got sick and today I am not feeling to well either. It starts with a sore throat, then a high temperature, then fever chills and finally after a couple of days it is over. That is pretty amazing that we could still say we had a great family vacation in spite of us getting sick, but it was that good. It may be our final family vacation together like this as our oldest son is joining the Navy soon and our next to oldest is talking of attending a recording studio school far, far away. This may be a year of major change ahead for us.

I must get back to the beach vacation to end on a positive note. My wife and I walked both morning and evening on the beach sand. We had a couple of thunderstorms but it did not really affect us as the kids normally spent a couple hours in the morning and a couple in the afternoon fighting the pounding waves and loving every minute. Even though my wife's parents live at the beach in Wilmington, NC just having a week of continuous beach activity makes them become immersed in it and enjoy it much more than a couple of hours during a weekend visit. The older boys all learning to surf to some degree and that kept them busy trying to conquer a new thing. We also did the ritual sand burying ceremony a couple of times to take a break. One night was especially nice as the full moon appeared in a yellow tint and the moon light reflecting on the water was really special as we could see it from our top floor balcony. Nearly every day we saw black dolphins swimming near the shore when we were in the water playing around. Normally we only see them in Wilmington in the winter, so that was nice.

One final thought on beaches. As a family we have stayed on all of the North Carolina beaches (except Cape Hatteras as it takes a very long time to get there) and all of the Texas beaches and the Gulf Shores in Alabama and Florida. The Texas beaches are not very nice, but were convenient when we lived in Houston and Austin. The drive to Gulf Shores was an all day event but worth it as that is one beautiful beach with white crystalline sand. All of the NC beaches are nice, with some nicer than others and some way more expensive than others. For now I must say that the memory of this last week was really special as it was more than just a beach trip but a true family vacation.

What was amazing to me was the vacation transformation quickly reverted back to normal life in our house as within 30 minutes of arriving, my daughter was on the phone talking to her friends, my next to oldest son took off in his car to see his friends and the other ones were on the computers - all back into their individual worlds as if they never left.

users

That is such a bad term for people who use computer software to help them get their job done. Sounds like a drug addict, who uses drugs to try to alleviate pain in their life. What a second, that does match. Computers are painful to use and most software does not really help; software just softens to emotional distress of sitting in front of a computer all day. Working with computers can definitely make a manual task automated, but there is so much more we can help our customers than what we are doing today.

I much say that I really enjoy visiting customers and observing them do their daily tasks. It reminds me of one of my previous jobs, where I did this daily. The technical term is contextual inquiry for shadowing a customer in their daily work environment. The more you observe and collect notes, the better you will understand exactly what problems and tasks they are trying to complete daily. Another favorite of mine is called task analysis where you try to understand the tasks and come up with a better or automated flow to help them do the task quicker or eliminate it altogether. For me, there is just no better way to learn about your customer than seeing them in action. Even though this was but a single day in my life, it was totally worth every minute. It also reminded me that I enjoy doing it and it was part of my life for two years. I need to incorporate it more into my life!

jail time

I have mentioned this before, but just have to say something more on this topic today. My oldest son got out of jail yesterday. It was his third trip to have some down time in jail and hopefully his last. All three were short stints, but for me it demonstrates how the world is changing. I did many stupid things when I was a young out of control teenager, but I only visited jail once and that was on a school field trip. I think it would be a good idea to re-introduce this kind of a field trip into public schools again today as there is way too much glory in going to jail. Of course it does not help that I am writing about it, but I have to blow of some steam. Jail up until recently was not a merit badge and had a derogatory aspect to it. For some odd reason that was lost somewhere along the way in the last few years. My son has been three times. The first time occurred when he was caught by police on a NC beach as a drunk underage 18 year old. Since he ran his mouth to the policeman and got out of control, they put him in jail for 36 hours. I remember talking to him about later on and he said that he never wanted to do that again as it was not a good experience at all. I guess that can be explained from massive alcohol consumption causing his good and bad brain cells to be lost. His second time was when he drove drunk after loosing his license last summer. They compounded his friend's car which he was driving and decided a little jail time was in order overnight to sober him up. The last time ended yesterday as it was a follow up visit to the previous time, and I have blogged about that already. I pick him up today, so will find out the details later as to whether it will be his last. He is joining the Navy finally and maybe all of this will be the final straw to teaching him a permanent life lesson. Hopefully jail will be a history lesson he does not want to repeat.

flexible in 3D

So at work I am using Adobe Flex and my current task is working in Flex 3D graphics. I have tried using Papervision3D and Away3D. This week I found a couple of new libraries that I may have to try this week if I have time. One of the libraries is FIVe3D. I found the site before but did not think much about it until I saw this site Everyday Flash.

One of the sites that is my current favorite is:

Eco da Zoo

Upon digging I found that the fellow who created this site can be found at:

Roxik

You must see his 3D presentation for Adobe MAX Japan, it the most amazing thing I have seen in 3D animation:

Presentation

I created my own character and published it on his site, which he automates:

we all have a story

For the last several weeks I have been sharing rides in a car pool. We are thinking of raising it up a notch by getting a van from the local transit authority. Since we have 30-40 minutes together twice a day we talk about all kinds of things. When I hopped into the car on Monday and was asked how my weekend was, I had to say not good, which then prompted me to explain myself. After I finished complaining, one of the women in the car said "every family has a story". It turns out that she had a rough time with one of her sons when he was 14-20 years old. The owners of the house we fixed up this weekend had a really hard time with one of their boys also. At least we are not even close to being alone in the battle for our kids sensibility over impulse. The key question for me is if everyone has a story, then maybe that is why blogging is so common as you get to share your story with who ever wants to listen. Every problem can feel like a notch is taken out of your heart, but knowing you are not alone somehow helps.

On a side note, after a long stressful weekend, my wife and I watched one of our favorite movies of all time as it was on TV. I don't understand why Hollywood does not make more movies like Second Hand Lions. This is a movie that tells a story, is not stupid, rude, violent or crude. Just a great movie to relax and enjoy after a hard weekend. Now I see the value of taking a day off as I did not get one this past weekend and I have felt tired so far this week at work. So that is why people rest on the Sabbath day.

wasted weekend

Our lives changed this week yet again, except this time it was not by our choice. Our son was removed from his house, but it was not a polite goodbye. The owners had enough of late payments or not payment at all. Of course it did not help that the previous month they did without water as they did not pay their bill. This month they did without electricity as they "forgot" to pay that bill as well. Then they did not pay their monthly rent and that was the end of the house for them all. My wife found out this last Tuesday that they all had to be out of the house immediately. We rented a truck from Home Depot in the evening and drove over to pick up all of his stuff from the house. The woman who oversees the rent told me when I dropped off the keys to the house that she would file a civil lawsuit against everyone who signed the leave to pay for the damages done to the house. I offered to do the repairs myself to save everyone from loosing even more money. Maybe I should have put more thought into it before saying such a thing. So for nine hours yesterday and seven hours today I worked on the house while my wife cleaned everything in the house. Yesterday I moved the lawn, picked up leaves and cleaned the gutters. By the end of the day I had around 30 trash bags and many pieces of old worthless furniture to be thrown away. I then proceeded into the house to start patching the five huge holes that one of my son's roommates had caused by his endless rage. Of course I had two broken windows and three messed up doors to fix also. Plus paint two rooms that had been poorly decorated with random painting techniques. After a full day of work I was so tired it was hard to fall asleep last night. Today we returned to finish off the unfinished tasks and to carry all of the trash away. One of my other sons helped with as he borrowed a friends truck. We had one load of nothing but trash bags. The other load was fun for him as he got to break up tons of furniture. I think he really enjoyed that a lot. So much for a weekend of rest around the house. I hope it was worth it somehow; even though I did talk to the owner of the house today and she told me they were going to redo the whole house. I feel liked a lost a weekend that I can never get back.