When Anastasia and I decided when she would return to the workforce as our family’s breadwinner, I expected that she would really miss her son. To try and soften her adjustment, I came up with the idea to surprise her with the blow-by-blow highlights of Daddy Daycare…in real-time. To that end, I grabbed a Twitter account for my son.

For those who may not know, Twitter is a micro-blogging site. That means that you can write up to a 140 character message letting the world know what you’re doing, sharing something interesting (or most of the time not-so-interesting), or just spamming anyone who cares to listen.

Over the course of a day, Alexei and I make somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 updates. If you would like to keep abreast of our doings, feel free to follow Alexei. On the other hand, if you don’t want to sign up for yet another service on the web, you can view the five most recent ‘tweets’ in the rightmost column of Alexei’s page.

In computer programming, there is something known as a “Hello world” program. It is a way to get one’s feet wet on the road to learning a new programming language. It also boosts your self esteem and makes you feel like you can actually do something, albeit as simple as printing one line that says simply, “Hello world.” Twitter is a unique web service in that 1- at its core it is very simple: a person writes a very short message and other people can choose to read it, and 2- it has an enormous user base. For these reasons and some others that would probably bore most people that may read this, writing a program that interfaces with Twitter is being called Hello world 2.0.

Here’s the clincher: out of the 30 or so days that I’ve been tweeting for my son, his mother followed him in quasi real-time once. All the other days I’ve printed her out a hard copy of the day’s tweets for her to read in one sitting when she gets home. So much for all this high-tech wizardry…

[NOTE] On the outside chance that this is the first time you’ve heard about Twitter and are thinking about taking it for a test drive, here is an informative quick read: How to introduce yourself in the social media. Once you get all set up, don’t forget to follow Alexei. Enjoy!

I’ve been an early bloomer throughout my life. For Christmas in the fifth grade, my dad gave me an electric razor. Naturally, I didn’t know how to use it properly and wound up giving myself the razor burn of my life on the first shave. Technology hasn’t been much different. When friends or family want advice on some new gadget, they ask me. Now, with this whole social networking thing, I’m happy to report that I am the slow guy in town.

In Russian schools, people go through their entire primary schooling experience with one set of classmates, assuming their family doesn’t move. The Russian word for your section of a grade is odnoklassniki. Odnoklassniki.ru was launched in 2006 and has quickly become the de facto social site in the Russian-speaking world. Anastasia has been on it for awhile, but with her mom here visiting us, she has had a little extra time to spend chatting with her girlhood friends. The thought crossed my mind that maybe I should enter the English and Russian social networks at the same time, so I asked my wife what she thought. The answer was a big fat no on both accounts. I decided to go along with her halfway. As of yet, I’m not on odnoklassniki.

Yesterday, I finally joined the masses, according to my brother, and got a Facebook account. Technically, I’ve had one for over a year, but never visited it or anything. Part of the reason I haven’t wanted to get into the MySpace or Facebook phenomena is that it seems like it would waste a lot of time. Besides, I like owning whatever it is that I do. With this site, for example, I can make a backup of everything and be assured it is reasonably safe. With Facebook, Google, or anything else in the cloud, I don’t know for sure. Chances are that things are backed up much more regularly and better than I would, but still there is this nagging deal of ownership in the back of my mind.

My Facebook strategy: one account for work, one for personal stuff. I realize at the outset that it is impossible to segregate one’s life like that, but I’m going to try. (Generally speaking, I’m actually in the majority by having two logins.) When I want to kick back and do some facebook-stalking on my old friends, I don’t necessarily want to see my work associates’ shameless self-promotion of their wares. To (hopefully ) decrease the time investment, I’m not going to ask anybody to be my friend, but wait and see how long it takes for people to notice me.

Twitter. I like the idea, but need to get my personal prose back up to par. For that, I much prefer the blog format. However, a few weeks back I opened up an account for my son and future daughter. I figure once Mommy heads back to work, it will be nice for her to keep tabs on what we’re doing. As Alexei starts talking, it will hopefully become something he looks forward to doing…some form of early literacy, I suppose you could say.

The upper limit of friends I would ever have ten years down the road is what my brother Trevor has now. As of this writing, he has 700. I am not he, and likely have fewer real friends than that, but that’s beside the point. Realistically, I’d guess that by the beginning of summer I’ll have somewhere in the range of 100-200 ‘friends.’

At the end of Day One, I had eight friend requests. In addition to that, I asked the two brothers that hadn’t noticed me yet to grant me friend status to boost my visibility. I’m waiting to see how long it will take my father to notice me; I’ll give him to the end of the week. A few months ago he got Facebook and quickly became a junkie. My mom got a surprise from some friends when they asked her if everything was okay between my father and her. She had no idea what they were talking about…it turns out that my dad listed himself as ‘in a relationship’ because my mother isn’t on Facebook for him to say he’s married to her.

Probably nobody cares (I know I don’t…); here is my friend tally:

• Day 1: +8
• Day 2: +10
• Day 3: +8
• Day 4: +7
• Day 5: +2
• Day 6: +3
• Day 7: +2
• Week 1: 46
• Day 8: +3
• Day 9: +2
• Day 10: +1
• Day 11: +1
• Day 12: +2
• Day 13: +0
• Day 14: +0
• Week 2 = 55
• Month 1 = 60
• Month 2 = 69
• Month 3 = 77
• Month 6 = 96
• Year 1 =137

Note: I’ll be updating this post periodically over the course of the next year.

Edit: It turns out I was wrong about how long it took my dad to notice me. It was one week and one day.

Edit: And there you have it…the final tally is 137. That many people asked me to be their friend over the past year. Although if I count the number of people on my business facebook account, that number jumps to 152.

I just watched this three times in the last ten minutes. It gets funnier with each viewing. Maybe I should go do some work now…

If the three grand price tag was dropped by about two grand, the over ten pound heft was reduced, and the primary screen’s size was halved, I might be in the market. Then again, I don’t think anybody would take their boots off for that.

For the Thanksgiving week, my boss was just outside of Mobile, Alabama visiting his mother and her husband. I think I’ve met the two of them maybe twice over the past few years. I don’t know much about the husband, but he seems like a really nice guy. One of the last times I saw him he was into day trading, and doing quite well with it. However, with the turning of the financial tides, he isn’t in that line of work any more. Instead, he work in a sweat shop.

Sweat shop is definitely the wrong term. He works as a telemarketer at a Sears warranty department or something like that. I have a lot of respect for telemarketers because at my other job, the telemarketing division is what brings in a good chunk of business. And most of them are genuinely nice people.

Back to Mobile…as he was visiting with his mom, the boss guy learned how much his step-dad was making and it blew him out of the water. $12-$14 per hour, depending on bonuses. It really boggled his mind how somebody could only make that much. Here’s the clincher: if the amount of money my boss pays me were broken down into an hourly rate, it would be about the same as his mother’s telemarketing husband. I’m sure he didn’t calculate that out, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have ranted on about the slave’s wages his step-father was making.

So anyhow, why do I continue to work someplace where I don’t get paid very much and have no benefits? That is a long and involved question to answer. The short version is that I enjoy parts of what I am doing, and there is a distinct possibility that things will improve financially before too long. Then again, things were supposed to have improved by this time last year. Am I deluding myself?

A final thought for the day: using the above estimation of my hourly wage, I make one-tenth of what we bill. Of course, not all the work I do is billable at this point. Still, that is a large chunk of change that I bring into the company that I never see. They say money is the root of all evil; that is incorrect. Lack of money is the root of all evil.

…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.