My boys needed to have their hair cut. They were rather shabby. I have cut my own hair for most of my life and cut their hair too. I asked my 6yr old how short he wanted it. He told me as short as possible. I buzz cut it to about 1/16 inch. His little brother wanted the same thing so I obliged. I then realized how much cooler I would feel with my hair short. I buzzed my own head. My poor wife has three bald boys now.

Before

Me being in a hurry one day

After replacing the bricks with stones around the lampost and the mailbox

Last night we went to a restaurant. This is something we do not do very often and was a special treat.

We went to Los Potrillos in Santa Fe, the address is 1947 Cerillos Rd. For those familiar with the area it is on the northwest side of Cerillos Rd about two blocks east of St. Micheals Dr. It has excellent food, and we previously found that most Fridays there is live music. My wife had a Tamale de Cazuela which was wonderful. My whatever-it-was burrito was great. The chips are provided with three choices of sauce, one of which is avacado based. All three are excellent. The only down side to the restaurant is the size. It does not seat very many so calling ahead to make a reservation is wise. The servers and other staff are very friendly and attentive but since it is usually full they are in a hurry. They get my vote for the best restaurant in the area.

Anyway, our kids are not used to eating in front of others. They are taught to act courteous and have good manners but it is different in front of others. About half way through our meal, our youngest decided he would scream in response to something he did not like. He refused to calm down so I took him out to the car and buckled him into his seat. After nearly 8 minutes of screaming, I tried to talk to him again. He was not a happy camper and was not about to calm down. I then called my wife and let her know I would not be returning, she talked to the little guy over the phone and the change in parent calmed him down. We went back in and started eating. Not very long after my second bite an older couple sitting not to far from us finished and as they were leaving the fellow said, "You have four very well behaved children. If I had kids like that I would take them out to eat every night." I take that as a compliment and other than the little guy's meltdown they had all done very well. It was nice to have the external validation though.

Today as I was doing some things around the house I realized I needed a few things to finish the task at hand. Where we live, most things you need are 30 miles away. So, I mentioned this to my wife who said she needed a few things and wanted to make a quick trip of it. we were planning on being back to take the kids for an afternoon swim. Here it is after 10pm and we have been home for less than an hour.

We loaded everyone up (car seats too) in the truck and we were off. We were just starting up the hill into Santa Fe when I passed a truck on the side of the road going rather slow. I looked at my wife and she gave the assent to pull over. As I was slowing down, I realized that I knew the driver. It was Chris, an older brother to some of the kids in my wife's science class. He was having some trouble with his fuel pump and the fuel line heating up (being too close to the engine). I really didnt have much to do. He started þe trucked and began rolling. I waved and was off. As I merged onto the highway, I looked back and saw him stopped again with the hood up. I pulled off again.

We had four kids in the truck on a hot day. they did not have a lot of fun but my 9yr old had Harry Potter 6, my 6 yr old had Charlie and the chocolate Factory he was racing through and we had a few other picture books for the younger ones.

I helped Chris rig up a heat shield for the fuel line and said I would follow him up the hill. He went racing up the hill and then stutered to a stop after about 4 miles. I pulled up behind him again. He is a level headed kid and much smarter than me about cars (not saying much but he is a smart kid). We worked with the fuel line trying several things, none of which worked very well. We then reconnected the old fuel pump and tried that. It was a mechanical pump turn by thre crank shaft. He said it needed priming so we towed him a little waise without getting the engine to crank over. He finally figured out the issue and I helped him piece together the fuel lines and clamp them up. I towed him again and he started right up. I stopped at the top of the hill we disconnected and went our separate ways. We had spent about 2 1/2 hours with him.

Some years ago, long before I met my wife, I was with a group of friends returning home from an evening on the town in SLC. On the way home, one of the girls in the car spotted a car on the side of the road and suggested we pull over and help. Was that you Cami? There were four of us guys (suburbans are great for lots of friends) and we figured we could help with anything needed. The guy was my parents neighbor, alone with a small baby on a very cold night. He had borrowed a car and gotten a flat. It was new to him and could not find the spare. The baby was screaming and he was without solution, accept prayer. He said he had just gotten up off his knees when we stopped. The flat took less than 10 minutes and the baby was calmed. Todd was on the road again and back to his family.

A couple months ago, just as I was starting home from work, I saw a car off the road. I stopped and was greated by a woman, whom I had never met, in tears wondering how to change a flat. She had already called someone for help but they were not nearby. She was over joyed and when she heard my name, she knew it means "gift from God", she was over joyed. As I got out spare and jack three more people stopped to help, then another. I was touched to learn that there are kind people who stop.

Some years ago, I lived in Cache valley while attending Utah State Univ. The valley can be cold at times, temperature inversions being common. That is where it is warmer in the mountains than in the valley.

One January, I think it was of '03, there was an inversino for the entire month. It was hazy and cold. There were days of lows being in the -20's F and highs only getting up to something like -6 F. I often road my bike to work and classes during this time and found the ride, cutting through a wooded area to be quite relaxing. towards the end of the bitt month, I was walking early one morning and heard several birds chirping and calling to each other. It was probably some old crows but I am not sure as I did not see them. I was talking to a friend and mentioned the birds I had heard that morning. He did not believe me and even retraced my steps to hear the birds too. For me the birds were like a call to my mind that even in the darkest of times there is still hope, there is still good around us but we must seek it out and find it. 

I heard a story on the radio this morning regarding the tenuous situation in which Greece and now Italy find themselves financially. They have tried the "Socialism or bust" experiment and are now going for bust. The International Monetary Fund (aka The IMF) has told both countries that in order to stay solvent they must reduce labor costs and also cut government spending to create growth.

I wonder if anyone at the December "Job summit" in the White House suggested something similar: Cut government to create jobs. With a laser-like focus on creating jobs I wonder how many would have been naturally (organically even) created if He and his administration had simply gotten out of the way.

Today there was a kite festival in town. It really wasn't much and my wife was out of town, leaving me to play with the kids for the most of the day. I decided it would be advenerous to take the kids tot he park, make kites and see if we could get them airborne.

I took the four munchkins (my youngest is 2) to the park. It looked like a storm was brewing over the mountain but I decided not to heed the warning. A local bank sponsors the event and helps kids make some kites. While in line to make kites it started to rain and rain hard for a short time. The kids were cold especially my girls and at one point wanted to go home. They finished their kites and the storm broke. We headed for the soccer fields, kites in tow. It was a little breezy and I managed to get one kite up after another. At one point, all of my kids had a kite in the air. Then due to slack lines and a sudden calm they all came down. I managed to get them all up again just not simultaneously. What fun!

I have made a switch to using Concrete5 instead of ModX as the content management behind this website. First, I have no affiliation (nor stock) with either, so my opinion is not pulled one way or the other from pressures unseen to you.

I found that the driving philosophy bethind each is similar. Get the task done without repetition and make it easy to use for both developer and user. The difference is in the implementation of that goal.

ModX is very hands on and is, in my opinion, not for the average-joe computer user. That said neither will work well for someone unwilling to dive into cold water, you simply can not stick your toe in the water and know it will or will not work for you. I built an entire site using ModX 1.something. It was easy to use once I got the hang of it. I even put together my own css templates to use.  The problem I had with it was that the documentation was for previous versions and I could not find out how to get commands to work with my version. There are wonderful and detailed examples for 0.9.something. I am grateful to authors such as Maryscode for their trail blazing. I just could not figure it out. For example, I could not get 'Jot' to work. Jot is supposed to be simple and allows you to allow users to add comments to pages. It lets you format that and easily create a form for the input. The form alwyas worked but it did not track the comments nor notify me when someone left a comment. I beat against it for hours trying to figure that out, without succes.

Another issue I had with ModX was that I could create great chunks that could be reused on multiple pages but if I wanted subtle variations for each page I had to create multiple chunks or snippets. I did not find a way to do this and I ended up with many chunks.

I did not like the fact that the login page was not forced to ssl via https. I suppose I could have used the .htaccess file for that but I did not know about that at the time.

I liked the way I could apply changes to multiple pages all at once. That came in very handy. The rewrite to pretty urls was clean and the interface was nice. Going back and forth between the page and the dashboard was easy and facilitated easy testing of features.

The community forums were a lot of help, usually. There were lots of snippets and chunks and some templates available to use. There was not very many "polished" items though. It was more put together in a garage rather than in a factory. Don't get me wrong, I like things forged in garages but they do not easily have the same shine as production quality.

Not being able to edit the page from the front end was a bit of a downer but I am a big boy and can edit from the backend. However, I am also not sure if there was a way to manage user comments from the backend. That could get tiresome fast having to traverse a large site just to manager comments.

Concrete5 on the other hand allows users, even ones without much computer experience to edit not only the text of a site but entire blocks and move them around in a near wysiwyg interface from the front end. Again, there does not seem to be a way to manage the guestbook (their version of user comments).

Each page can be change and each block can be altered to function the same or slightly different on each page. This is nice until you need to change one thing on 90 pages and have to do it on each one. Concrete5 also uses a lot of flash for editting and such so you better like flash and not be too into Apple-non-flash products. I will have to surf my site with a non-flash enabled browser, perhaps Konqueror will do.

The Concrete5 community forum seems to have 5 or so people helping everyone. That will get old for them real fast and they will not be able to respond in time and drive folks away. At teh same time as more users get experience they will in turn help others in the forums. The marketplace seems very dominated by those trying to make a buck, which is really the point of the "market", rather than by those trying to help each other. I think in part because people could make a few bucks they have more insentive to polish the code they post. The result is a product that is "real shiny".

To explain, no there is too much. To sum up:

ModX
Pros
modular, templates, code re-use, apply changes to multiple pages simultaneously, once site is up can be operated by average computer user, community is kind and free.
Cons
documentation outdated, not easily spit and polished, getting site up is not for faint of heart, not easy to manipulate structure to suit each page's needs, no easy way for https login, no front end management except for comments.

Concrete5
Pros
Easily polished, easy to use front end content management, easily manipulated blocks, project managers highly motivated to keep project secure.
Cons,
need flash, no simple way for https login, best stuff from community is not free (relatively cheap though), no backend management of comments

I like math. I also like to use calculators; I don't mean for stuff like adding a few entries in my checkbook. I like entering in polynomials and other such fun equations into calculators. The fastest method is using reverse polish notation. Yes, that is really what it is called. While I like the reverse polish notation on many HP calculators, when I sit at a computer I prefer algebraic notation instead.

One calculator program that I like is Speedcrunch. It has a visual history, functions, a large constants library and all commands are accessible from the keyboard. The calculations are computed quickly and it takes very little system memory to run. Speedcrunch is available in many forms for varyious operating systems including Windows, GNU/Linux and MacOS.

I find two dissadvantages with speedcrunch. First, is that if you are using older versions of kde (3.5 or older) you will have to download an older version and possibly even compile it yourself. This is a very minor weakness. How many still use the older kde? I just happen to be one of those few.

The second disadvantage is that it is slow to open. This seems to be system independent as I use kde 4+, kde 3.5, windows XP and windows 7 and it is slow in all of those on at least 3 different hardware configurations.

I do not watch much TV anymore, I find it contrived. However, I was just watching some news when a commercial came on that made me think. It was an advertisement for the movie Iron Man 2. I have nothing against the movie and will probably even see it, eventually. However, I really take offense at the commercial... ok really with Hollywood. With this commercial they push the idea of what they think it takes to be a hero. 

It is easy to be a "hero" if you know you will not get hurt, thousands of people cheer you on, you have super powers or a mini nuclear reactor in your chest. You face no consequence for your choice. In fact, that is not even being a hero it is simply making the right choice. 

Being a hero is making the right choice knowing you may get hurt (physically, financially, or otherwise) and that others may never know of your choice. Soldiers, knowing they may step on a mine, get shot and be away from their families, are heros. They are also fulfilling a promise to obey orders, so if you do not agree with their actions, start blaming at the top, not the bottom. Police officers and firefighters are heros. They daily put themselves on the line to serve and protect the rest of us. 

There are everyday heros too. The person that stands so a pregnant lady can sit. That picks up a piece or pieces of garbage fromthe street. An alcoholic that, with longing, does not take that first drink. The person that works at a job they hate for years to support their family.

We can all be heros even without the palladium reactor.