I returned from Russia one week earlier than Anastasia and Alexei. This sucked on a number of fronts (I missed his first birthday, she had to travel from way over there to way over here all by her lonesome, etc). At the same time, I did get some things done while living as a bachelor that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do.

My plane got back Saturday evening, so by the time Tuesday rolled around, it was high time to get some food in the house. The crowning accomplishment of my spree at Giant was undoubtedly the discounted day old bakery stuff. But that isn’t all that interesting. Oatmeal, on the other hand, is.

When Anastasia makes oatmeal, she does it “right". That is, she dumps some flakes from a huge Captain whoever jar into a bowl and prepares it. I, being myself, find this way too much work and therefore settled on the instant oatmeal route. Instead of forking over extra for the real Quaker, I settled on Giant brand instant oatmeal.

It took this long, but finally the two boxes of offbrand instant gunk is gone. Very tasty, I must say. Like the old days, the back of each packet has a question/answer. Without any further ado, here are some of my favorites (and not so favorites). The question is followed immediately by the answer, so click through and enjoy!

Oatmeal sits in your gut for a very long time

Question 2	Question 3	Question 4
Question 5	Question 6	Question 7
Question 8	Question 9	Question 10
Question 11	Question 12	Question 13
Question 14	Question 15	Question 16

Note: As of now, I haven’t made lightbox work reliably in non-WebKit browsers. This means that if nothing happens when you click on the images above, it is my fault. Trust me that some are funny, but most are a waste of time. Look on the bright side, I’ve just saved you some wasted time by having a broken website!

…and we would be living on the streets?! Probably not literally, but it is possible. I’m referring to this website and getting it up to what I consider a functional level.

Yesterday I got to work and just didn’t feel like working. So I perused a few tech blogs, hoping that catching up with the pulse of what other people like me are doing would get me in the mood for work; it didn’t.

Let me pause for a moment to say that I realize this is really a wonderful predicament to have. When you work for yourself, there really is no task master. And that is the thing that rears its ugly head to bite me on a regular basis. For example, I can be extremely productive for a few days/weeks followed by a day or two of nothingness. Which is better: the tortoise or the hare? Sometimes I wonder if I had a real job that I punched a time card for if my life would be more preferable than it is now. Certainly those type of people have fun too. By training, I am a teacher. In today’s educational climate, there certainly isn’t any room for slacking in the classroom. Maybe I’d grow up if I actually entered the real work force.

Now then, back to my wasted day. This blog runs on the b2evolution blogging platform. When I stumbled upon it last August I was blown away by how closely the stock features resembled what I wanted to do on our family’s website. Now that we are actually ‘live’, there is an endless list of tweaks I want to make. Here are a few that I made today:

• made my first widget
• cleaned up a few boundary conditions in the core of b2evo
• got the site to validate
• sped up load time
• fixed a few css inconsistencies

The widget I rolled is really a compilation of a hack that stk over at Randsco put together a few years ago. In a nutshell, it is what powers the random image to the right. The way it works is by searching through all of the posts of a current blog for any images and then choosing one at random. When you click the image, the respective post is displayed. So instead of just a random picture with no further info (like I had before), you can learn more about the picture by clicking on it. The only draw back at this moment, is that I only have one post with a picture on my blog, so it doesn’t look so random.

I was really pretty bummed about the amount of time it was taking to load my site — upwards of 20 seconds. This is totally unacceptable for a family website, if you actually want people to frequent it. So I tackled the case of getting the css and xhtml to validate. In order to do this I had to tweak some styles a little bit and clear a few unaccounted boundary conditions in the core files of b2evolution. As an aside, I’m really not looking forward to upgrading to the next b2evo release as I’ve let my fingerprint throughout a good number of core files. Things do validate now and are in general a bit more responsive. I don’t feel that I’ve surmounted the loading time issue yet, but it is no doubt better.

OK. At this point I’ve actually got to the point where I can read through php files fairly easily. I’m still not all that great with the syntax, but google is my friend for that. What’s a guy going to do if he still doesn’t want to work, but doesn’t feel like hacking up web stuff anymore? Go on a name game adventure, of course!

tselliott.name is the name of this website. I purchased the domain when .names first came out a few years back. For most of the time I’ve had it, it was only used for my emailing needs. Now that I have a family, my name is still Troy S, but it seems rather selfish of me to use that for our site’s location. In other words, I am on a quest to discover new meaning for the T and S of tselliott. The Super Elliotts was the first thing to come to mind, but that is just so blasé.

Taking a sticky note, I started scrolling through the Ts and Ss in a thesaurus. As I scrolled through, I jotted down things that either sounded cool or weird to me. Here is a little picture of my sticky note musings. (And now I have two pictures in my random picture sidebar, whoo-hoo!) If anybody has managed to stick around to this part in the post, please leave a comment or two with your suggestions of what you think the ts should stand for.

What does the ‘ts’ really mean?

There we have it: I wasted a day making structural changes to what you’re viewing, brainstorming a good name, and finished it with a post. Not to shabby; although with it not putting food on the table, I can’t guarantee it will happen all that often.

[EDIT] As of March 1, 2009, this website has a new home. It is located at: http://thelliotts.net/. Please update your bookmarks.

I don’t frequently remember what I dream about. Saturday morning was the exception. The wife and I were walking down Tanager Lane in Columbia, MD. As we passed by a house that my granddad built and lived in, a helicopter passed overhead. Nothing out of the ordinary…yet. The helicopter just flew by us, but then circled back. After taking another glance at us, it passed for a second time. Then, without warning, it veered hard in our direction and came down for a landing. We took off running. And at that crucial moment, I woke up in a cold sweat.

Heart pounding furiously, I laid in bed and tried to go back to sleep. That wasn’t working very well, so I got up to visit the toilet. Finished with my duties, I headed over to my workstation just because it was 4am and there was nothing better to do. It had been a couple weeks since I did a complete backup of my main machine. As I prepared to hook up my drobo to run the backup, I noticed that there had been an 18 second power outage a couple hours earlier. Everything seemed to be working fine still and then the power meter started blinking, indicating that it was running on battery.

Strange, the power going out again? I peered out all the windows and none of the neighbors had power either. Deciding to test things out a little bit, I fired open a web browser. It worked. My apartment is without power, but I am able to get online via my wireless network router connected to a cable modem without a problem. (If you didn’t get the idea already, a UPS is a handy thing to have.) I got the phone number for Pepco and called in to report the power outage. They were already aware of the situation and said the problem should be fixed by 5am.

At this point I should’ve shut things down and trundled off to bed. But I was curious as to how long my CyberPower UPS would last. So I did some housecleaning on my laptop. Now, I could have made it last a lot longer if I had turned off my external monitor and shut down one of my computers earlier, but even with them I had power for over half an hour. Not too shabby, eh?

Moral of the story: When an Apache is after you, make sure to have your UPS fully charged and ready for action.

The poll results are in. Now for the next several months, I presume that we won’t be hearing as much from President-elect Obama and possibly a bit more from President Incumbent.

Last night I was in bed and asleep at 8:30 in the evening — something that is not all that common for me. As a result I didn’t watch the votes coming in and listen to all the political mumbo-jumbo on the tube. When Alexei decided it was time to get up at four this morning, for some reason the thought didn’t even cross my mind to find out who had won. Instead we just played until about six.

A few hours later when we got up, Anastasia asked if I knew who had won. My first reply was McCain. The second was Mickey Mouse. Finally, she told me. Which brings me to the point of this post: I don’t do news much.

I opened up my web browser and started typing “news” in the location bar. The first thing that auto-completed was BBC. Up for a non-American take on the situation, I clicked. Of course the main event was the American election, but scrolling down a little revealed that Windows 3.1 reached its end of life last Saturday.

Ah, the good old days. I don’t remember which birthday it was, but my parents bought me a copy of Windows 3.1 and a mouse from the Electronics Boutique store at the Columbia Mall (which at that time was called that). I’ll need to find a picture of that birthday just to see what my facial expression was. In my memory, I was the happiest kid around — I had a mouse. What more could there be to life? Remembrance is a wonderful thing; I don’t recall struggling with drivers or trying to find an additional 3k of RAM to free up, but the non-ergonomic 3-button white mouse.

Recently, the pastor at my church talked about tithing. I haven’t yet this year. What’s that say about me?

Compromise is a basic tenet of life. Yet, in some things, we refuse to compromise. These inflexibles are different for every person. Part of the interestingness of it all is discovering what they are in yourself and others.

And then, if you’re my kind of person, try to get others to seriously confront their stalwart beliefs…you know, to help them fire-test their core values.

Esotericism (yes, I’m aware this is not the correct usage of the word; I like the way it sounds) aside, I’d like to talk about an old adage today. The proof is in the pudding.

I’ve been a Seventh-day Adventist Christian since childhood. Even now, most Sabbath mornings will find me and my young family in church. Since my son is old enough that he doesn’t like sitting quietly for longer than a minute or two at a time, I find myself skipping out on the main part of the service most weeks. Today, however, was unusual in that he decided to sleep during the church service.

Pastor Steven Jencks is a nice enough guy. His strength undoubtedly lies in the sermons he gives. What makes them attractive to me is his fervor — it is evident that he actually believes what he is saying, and, while talking to his congregation, he is also preaching to himself. He knows he isn’t any more perfect than ‘normal’ folk and is unashamed to admit it.

With the economy the way it is, it is no surprise that churches are having a more difficult time paying their bills. As his sermon progressed, Pastor Jencks turned to the topic of church finances. I have yet to find a situation that doesn’t mirror the 80-20 rule, and giving patterns at the church are no exception. My parents have always been uber-involved with church doings and so I have had access to inside information about who contributes and who doesn’t at various times throughout my life. Until a few years ago, I was in the 20-80 side of the equation. Now, I am not.

It is easy enough to say that I’ve got a family and they need to eat and have shelter and all that sort of stuff. Yet the point remains that if I say I am a Christian and am not nice to people, my faith is a joke. In the same way, if I go to church and think churchy thoughts, yet do not give a faithful tithe; I might as well have stayed at home and watched a smutty movie. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force which can either motive or embitter a person. Which route will I take?

As a closing thought, consider the following. If an obese person really wants to lose weight, s/he’ll tell friends and family that s/he wants to lose weight. The positive peer pressure this creates may effect a change on said person’s weight. Tithe has always been portrayed to me like voting - both are personal business between you and your God/government. There is no need to discuss them because others may gain a glimpse into the real you.

Why did I make my thoughts part of the public domain?