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Thu, 29 Dec 2005

"Are pointers and recursion the Latin and Greek of Computer Science?"

Joel Spolsky has an insightful article on his "Joel on software" blog about computer science curriculums and recent changes. He equates teaching of concepts like pointers and recursion to the teaching of Latin and Greek in the early 1900's. These things aren't taught because they have great practical purpose outside of school. They are taught because they train the mind to think about hard things. They are also taught because they help to weed out the students that aren't going to make it later on.

In Scouting, I've had an opportunity to counsel quite a few people that were starting to look at colleges and wanted advice on a career in programming. My advice has always been that the best schools are those that care more about teaching theory than teaching languages. Languages change. When I went to school, c++ was all the rage. Now, its Java. Who knows what it will be in 10 years? If all you know is Java, you're useless when Java goes away (just as programmers that only know Fortran are pretty much useless now). On the other hand, if you know the theory behind programming languages, then you are able to pick up new languages quickly and you are much more valuable.

Recently, I've been allowed to establish some of the criteria that is used to evaluate potential recruits for the programming team at work. For me, my priorities are on picking somebody that can be taught new things quickly, and that already has a concept of working with and maintaining big code. Sadly, that's just doesn't seem to be what schools are teaching. Applicants seem to want to wow us with their familiarity with XML and Java skills. But when I start asking about the projects they've been working on, things crumble. Most of them don't have experience maintaining things beyond a single homework assignment. Some of them have taken semester-long project courses, but even those courses have been boiled down to the point where they've been robbed of the process that goes along with the software life-cycle. Theory seems to be an up and down thing. Some people get it, where others seem to have missed it. I wonder if its one of those things that gets covered once and then forgotten by most.

My advice to people looking for a programming job: Knowing how to pick the school is critical! If you get sucked up going after the big names just for the name's sake, or if you go after the curriculum that seems the most exciting, you can be sure that in the end, you'll have a resume that contains lots of buzzwords but very little substance. You'll find yourself getting picked for lots of first interviews (the HR folks will love you), but you'll also find yourself getting called back (the non-HR folks will see right through you). Eventually, you'll find yourself a job, but it will be something like "systems analyst 1", which pretty much indicates that you know just a little bit more than the secretary does and will not be moving up any time soon. Instead, look for schools where the focus is on theory. These types of schools usually make you wait a few semesters before letting you program in a language you've actually heard of before. They give courses dedicated to nothing but data structures and discrete mathematics.

One final piece of advice: Don't look to your courses to give you all of the education that you'll need. Just as important is what you do outside of the curriculum. Join a CS club. Or, start writing your own software. Or, pick an open-source project you like, and just start hacking away at it. You'll be surprised just how much you can learn by trying to get somebody else's software to compile on your platform.


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Sat, 24 Dec 2005

Ho Ho Ho

This is just too cool.. if you have Google Earth installed, you can Track Santa Claus as he makes his rounds. As I type this, he is presently delivering toys to Miyazaki, Japan.

In other news, Christmas shopping was completed last weekend. That's probably a new record for me. Leanne and Natalie are up her parents right now, but will be coming back this evening. We'll be having Christmas dinner with family at our house tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm taking this opportunity to get caught up with some personal projects of mine.

Also noteworthy, I just completed reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This is probably the first novel that I've read cover to cover since junior high.


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Sat, 17 Dec 2005

New fridge



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Sat, 10 Dec 2005

400 Patch Traders can't be wrong.

Today, I just received the 400th submission for a listing on patchtrader.info. The simple little list of patch traders that I started when I was chairman of the 75th anniversary chairman for Wagion has really grown.

I do have some ideas on expanding the site a great deal. The only thing standing between me and those ideas right now is time.


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Thu, 08 Dec 2005

YAPC Conference Proceedings.

The 2005 Yet Another Perl Conference Proceedings are out now. Now you can download the bit-torrent and view my talk on DVD.


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Wed, 07 Dec 2005

What I've been doing.

Family: Christmas shopping is going on in frantic fashion. Those looking for Christmas presents for Natalie can just forget it. She already has one of every toy in existence, and she's only 4!

Scouting: I was just at the section NE-4B Council of Chiefs this weekend. It was a good time. The new section NE-4B web site is now up. I'm also working on the council web site, but it sort of took a back-burner to the section site lately. My Vice-Chief advisee for next year is already hard at work planning the lodge banquet. He is doing a very good job.

Perl: I've been devoting a good bit of time with the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers towards getting PPW up and running next summer. There's been a few snags lately. I just discovered today that Schedule::Ratelimiter, which I wrote, is a NetBSD port. That's kind of neat. Makes me wonder if people are actually using it.

Work: Stressing out big-time on a project that is taking much longer than I wanted it to. Not going to enjoy my Christmas unless I get it done.


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Mon, 05 Dec 2005

A picture left for me by a little elf.

I think that's suppose to be a picture of me holding some balloons. I'm not really sure. Natalie left this for me on my whiteboard at work a while ago, I just discovered it today when I flipped the board over to use the other side.




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Sat, 26 Nov 2005

Riding the train.



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Eating at the mall.



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Sun, 20 Nov 2005

Wagion anniversary committee meeting.



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Sat, 12 Nov 2005

Shopping at the auction barn.



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Sun, 06 Nov 2005

Gotta love this.

After watching the live episode of "The West Wing", I went to nbc.com to cast my vote on who won the debate. Naturally, for the first half hour, the site was totally un-reachable. Shows how on the ball NBC is about its site when a television show can bring it down. Sort of makes it less impressive that it was down during 9/11...

Well, anyway.. I finally managed to get a chance to vote, but after casting my vote, instead of seeing a confirmation screen, I saw this:

    Error on getting user info
    Error is:DB Error: syntax error

My guess is somebody will be fired tomorrow.


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Wed, 02 Nov 2005

New Chuck-e-cheese in Greensburg



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Sat, 29 Oct 2005

Lodge officer training



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Sun, 23 Oct 2005

Pittsburgh Zoo Boo



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Sat, 22 Oct 2005

Petting Zoo at the Delmont Apple Festival



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Mon, 10 Oct 2005

Panera Bread



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Sat, 08 Oct 2005

Natalie at Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood in the Monroeville Mall.



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Playing air hockey at Chuck-E-Cheese



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Tue, 04 Oct 2005

My future desk.



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Mon, 03 Oct 2005

Another Scouting Year Almost Done.

I just got back from the October OA Service weekend. Many pictures available. I had a great time. Now comes the sad part of the year. There will be no more OA service weekends until April of next year.

My year of advising the Administrative Vice-Chief is nearing completion. OJ has done a great job this year. He will be serving a third term as AVC next year, but I will not be advising him.

Next year, I will be advising the program division of the lodge. Allen will be the Program Vice-Chief. He and I have already started working together. Our very first task will be to plan the lodge Banquet for February.

In other scouting news, I now have my hands in three different scouting web sites. I'm still helping out with the Wagion Lodge #6 web site, though I've handed most of that off to Mike. He and Bill are doing a great job with that site. Just recently, I've been named the adviser to the Order of the Arrow, Section NE-4B web site. We don't have a chairman for that, so I'm just sort of winging it and taking my queues from the Section Secretary. And finally, I was just put in charge of the content for the Westmoreland-Fayette Council web site last weekend. I'm really looking forward to making some good changes there.


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Wed, 07 Sep 2005

Natalie playing with Mac and Rowen



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Tue, 06 Sep 2005

Natalie at Panera Bread



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Wed, 24 Aug 2005





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Mon, 22 Aug 2005

August OA Weekend.

The August OA Weekend was a lot of fun, but it went by way too fast! I had just arrived, and before I knew it, I was leaving. The scouts worked really hard to put together a "Midnight Madness" carnival theme. They did really well, and managed to make a good bit of money on Friday night. However, on Saturday evening we had a really bad storm, so they didn't have any activities for Saturday. I did manage to take quite a few pictures with my new digital camera.

You can see the pictures in my gallery.


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Thu, 18 Aug 2005

Come work at pair!

I have an opening on my software development team at pair. If you have experience coding in Perl and are interested in working in Pittsburgh, please send in a resume. Here is some information about the job description and where to send the resume.


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Thu, 11 Aug 2005

World pinball championship



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Fri, 29 Jul 2005

Blackjack!

I wrote a simple Black Jack game using Perl and HTML::Mason. Have fun playing it.

The purpose of writing the game was really to prototype some techniques that I've been working on for a project at work. It demonstrates how a complex multi-page application can be written in a way that keeps code tidy and does not allow users to bookmark the individual pages.


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Thu, 14 Jul 2005

Eagle Scout recognition dinner.



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Mon, 04 Jul 2005

Happy 4th of July!



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Fri, 01 Jul 2005

Toronto



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Cool looking ship.



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CN Tower



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Me on a Segway.



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Me in Toronto



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Mon, 27 Jun 2005

Day 1 Wrap-Up

The opening talks went very well. Larry Wall gave an interesting talk about building open-source communities. There was also a good talk about the "State of the Carrot". Though, I was disappointed to find that pair was not mentioned at all this year. This comes after last year, where we received two different thunderous applause during the Carrot speech.

I attended a few talks today but my concentration was mostly on giving my talk at the end of the day. There was a talk in the morning about tools for writing tests for your code. It was good, but also mostly review. There was also a talk about mod_perl 2.0, which seemed interesting, but dealt with a lot of things that I didn't have much experience with.

My talk went very well. The place wasn't exactly packed. But the people that did attend seemed to enjoy the talk. I was generally pleased with the way things went.

Immediately after my talk, Meng Wong of pobox.com got a group of people together for a tour of the city on Segways. I have some pictures stored on my phone, which I will post when I get home. We found a place that rented out Segways and took people on tours. Afterwards, we had a really nice dinner in an old building that was used 130 years ago to store Whiskey at a refinery. I enjoyed this day a lot.

Now with the fretting about my talk out of the way, I can enjoy the rest of the conference.


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Slides for my talk.

Slides for my talk today are now available here both in PDF and HTML versions.


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Sun, 26 Jun 2005

Arrival Day

Managed to get checked out of the Hilton and into the dorm rooms pretty easily. Cab fare for a 15 minute car ride was about $45. The dorm room is just about everything I expected. The AC is barely working in my room. The layout of the room isn't that nice either. I'd say this was obviously designed with college kids in mind, but it doesn't seem laid out well for that purpose either.

The registration happened a little bit late. Now, I'm waiting a little bit before its time to head to the arrival dinner. Looks like it will be about a 20 minute walk for that.

Itinerary for the rest of the night is to come back and get my slides polished up for tomorrow. Then, hopefully practice it a few times.

Also, looks like the cell phone network up here doesn't support sending pictures. So, it will be text journal entries for me only until I return to the United States.


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Sat, 25 Jun 2005

Arrival at Toronto

I made it to Toronto a little after 3:00 today. My very first commercial air plane flight went well. The hotel accommodations are very nice, but they are only for one night, then I will be staying in the conference facility for the rest of the week. It has dorm-room like conditions, which I do not expect to be as nice.

Unfortunately, from my hotel, the only thing in walking distance is more hotels, so I don't think I'll be doing any sight seeing tonight. The taxi ride, which was less than 5 minutes long cost $18 (Canadian), so I don't think I'll be taking a cab anywhere either.
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My flight: Air Canada 7947



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At Pittsburgh airport



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Sun, 19 Jun 2005

Leanne caught a bass at twin lakes park.



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Sat, 18 Jun 2005

Another day at Idlewild



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Wed, 15 Jun 2005

Picnic at the park.



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Tue, 14 Jun 2005

Rainbow over the south side for my birthday



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Sun, 05 Jun 2005

Congratulations to OJ and Kenny for getting elected to section office!



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Sat, 04 Jun 2005

Wagion volleyball team



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Say goodbye to that beard, Jack!



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Fri, 03 Jun 2005

Vote for this guy for section chief.



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I wish Leanne would stop throwing garbage on the back porch.

The picture did not come out so well. But if you look dead-center in the picture, you will see a possum. It was standing about two feet away from Natalie and I on the other side of the sliding door in our kitchen. It was in to some garbage that Leanne decided to just throw on the back porch rather than put in a garbage can.

I'm a little concerned that I was standing there banging on the glass, and it just looked at me and kept on going. It wasn't afraid of me at all. Natalie had just been outside playing about 15 minutes earlier. Who knows what might have happened if she saw it and ran up to it.





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Tue, 31 May 2005

Parking time expired.



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Fri, 27 May 2005

Natalie in the boat at Idlewild



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Sun, 22 May 2005

Playing in the park.



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Sun, 15 May 2005

Natalie and Evalina



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Thu, 12 May 2005

Pittsburgh Perl Mongers talk

I gave a talk last night at the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers meeting about a DBIx::SearchProfiles. Slides from my talk are available here.
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Wed, 11 May 2005

Pittsburgh Perl Mongers



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Sat, 07 May 2005

Natalie and Kayla



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Thu, 05 May 2005

Pittsburgh sunset.



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Wed, 04 May 2005

I've had it with Watson Chevy!

I took my blazer to Meineke about two weeks ago to get the brakes looked about because they were squealing a little bit. They told me my brakes were fine. They said I had about 40% life left in them.

So today, I took my blazer to Watson Chevrolet-Olds in Murrysville to get inspected. They told me that my brakes were completely worn out. They also told me that my had broken belts in them and that the ball joints were bad in my front wheels. They wanted $700 to fix everything.

So, I took the blazer over to Export Tire to have them look at the tires since that's where I got the tires. They told me that the belts were not broken in the tires. They also checked the ball joints and told me that they were a little loose, but would certainly pass inspection.

This is the last time I go to Watson to get my blazer inspected. The Cavalier is still under warranty, so I'll probably take that there until the warranty is up. I certainly will not be buying any more vehicles from them!


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Tue, 03 May 2005

Opening day for Panera Bread in Murrysville.



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Mon, 02 May 2005

Tomatoes ready to plant.



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Sun, 01 May 2005

YAPC::NA 2005.

I will be speaking at YAPC::NA 2005 (A programming conference) in Toronto on June 27. The title of my talk is AnyData - A Case Study. I'm going to be talking about the AnyData Perl module and how I've used in some of the programs that I've written for pair.

I'm pretty excited. It will be my first time speaking at a conference like this. Its also going to be my first time ever on a commercial airplane. I've been to Canada twice before, but never to Toronto, so I guess that's a first also.
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Mon, 25 Apr 2005

April OA Weekend

This weekend was the April OA Service Weekend. I had a good time. I helped to get some work done for the lodge. Mostly, I was just glad to be able to sit back and watch the officer that I'm advising do his job without much involvement from me.

The weather was interesting this weekend. I arrived on Friday wearing a T-Shirt and shorts. When I went home on Sunday, there was snow on the ground. In between, we had a mix of really cold winds and freezing rain.
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Sat, 23 Apr 2005

Our wise lodge adviser.



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Rich's umbrella.



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Saturday vigil meeting.



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Fri, 22 Apr 2005

Friday night executive committee meeting.



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Sun, 10 Apr 2005

Cool.. I'm ranked by Alexa now.
Check it out. My site gets enough traffic that Alexa actually decided to rank it.
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Fri, 08 Apr 2005

Eating ice cream at DQ



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Fun with Google Maps

  • Where I grew up

  • The property that Mom left to Diana and I

  • Where I work

  • Camp Conestoga

  • The Murrysville Tree Sign I also submitted this one to a Google site-seeing blog. We'll see if they pick it up.


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    Mon, 28 Mar 2005

    The hallway is changing color again.



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    Sat, 26 Mar 2005

    Riding the horse.



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    Sun, 20 Mar 2005

    Enjoying a nice day at the park.



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    Sun, 06 Mar 2005

    One of the reasons I hate shopping at Wal-mart: they always have junk blocking the aisles.



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    Sat, 26 Feb 2005

    Wagion banquet



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    Mon, 21 Feb 2005

    Banquet is just a week away.

    The lodge banquet is just a week away now. My Vice-Chief has been doing a great job. In some ways, I think advising an officer is a lot easier than advising a chairman. If the Scout has gotten far enough in the OA that he is an officer, a lot of the skills are already present. So the adviser has to take on less of a teacher role and more of a just being there in case something goes wrong role.

    I'm happy to say that my role in the lodge web site is diminishing. I was really happy to help get that committee up off the ground. But I'm even more happy to see it being self-sufficient.

    I'm also taking up other roles in scouting now. In addition to my membership on the Council Marketing Committee, I'm now a member of the Council Camping Committee as well. My present job is to analyze the past performance of the camp trading post and make suggestions for the present year. The committee seems to be eager to make some big changes in the trading post in order to improve revenue and help keep camping fees down.

    In other news, we took Natalie to see the new Pooh's Heffalump Movie tonight along with Evalina and her mom and dad. They had a good time. Afterwards, we stopped at Dave and Busters for a bite to eat and to play some games. I think that was probably a bit too much for Natalie.
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    Sat, 12 Feb 2005

    Throwing pennies in the fountain at the mall.



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    Natalie at Evalina's birthday party.



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    Sat, 05 Feb 2005

    Wagion 6 lodge leadership development course.



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    Tue, 25 Jan 2005

    Leanne's birthday dinner at Red Lobster



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    Mon, 24 Jan 2005

    My office assistant.



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    Fri, 21 Jan 2005

    Merry-go-round



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    Natalie and Abigail



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    Natalie at a school mate's birthday party at Chuck-e-cheese.



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    Mon, 17 Jan 2005

    Natalie and daddy working on the computer.



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    Thu, 13 Jan 2005

    Annoying twerp.



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    Flowers from Rob and Kim.



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    Wed, 12 Jan 2005

    Pittsburgh Perl Mongers meeting.



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    Sun, 09 Jan 2005

    Our first camping trip.

    I set up a dome tent in the living room last night and we all had our first family camping trip. For Leanne, it lasted about 20 minutes before she decided she'd rather go upstairs and sleep in a bed. Natalie went upstairs with Leanne for a bit, but then decided she'd rather sleep in the tent. So she came downstairs and slept in the tent with me until about 6:00 in the morning. Then she decided she'd rather have her mom and went upstairs with her.

    This morning, we had smores and Natalie helped me take the tent down. Natalie told me she really liked camping. A few more times of doing this and maybe we'll be ready to graduate to the back yard.


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    Stopping the child from striping in the middle of Wal-Mart.



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    Sat, 01 Jan 2005

    It's a hard life.



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    Happy New Year

    Natalie spent last night with her grandparents, and Leanne and I had the house to ourselves. We decided to go out to Dave and Busters. We stayed there until closing time around 1:00. It was nice to get out and do something with just the two of us.

    After we went up to get Natalie, we came home and watched television. We all watched the ball drop for New years, then I opened up the front door to see if I could see any fireworks. I didn't see any fireworks, but I did see plenty of pretty lights. Apparently a bunch of teenagers were pulled over by the police right in front of our house.

    I'm refreshed from having a week off of work, and I'm very anxious to get back and start working on some new projects at pair.

    Scouting is going very well. My Vice-Chief is doing an excellent job, and the Camping Promotions committee has started working on their own. The next things to look at will be Unit Elections and the Banquet.


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