This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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I am easily distractable. I like to procrastinate. I save things to the last minute to do them, sometimes later. My efficency in a task is directly related to the time pressure to get it done, and the number of people I am doing it with. Put me in a room full of people with a whiteboard figuring out a problem or discussing something or whatnot and I’m in great shape. Put me in my office alone to write a document that is due in a week (as opposed to in a couple of hours) and I am in trouble.
Even when I get started and into a groove, a few seconds of someone coming by and asking me something resets my internal clock. Before I start again I may walk around the office, get a coke, use the bathroom, walk around the office again, print out what I’m working on, walk to the printer to get it, walk back to my office, have to organize my desk, and well… umm… perhaps check a few websites. There is a list of them on the left of the front page of my site. Gotta check those. And there are a handful more I’ve started to look at which aren’t on that list yet. And then I do a little work, and then I have to check my email, both work and personla, and maybe answer one or two, and maybe listen to a podcast or two (in the background of course). And I’d mentioned that I want one of those Sling things so I can watch TV too… but mostly it is back to the websites to see if there is anything new.
Now, don’t get me wrong, when I gotta get something done, I get something done. It’s not like I’m spending whole days doing nothing. Uh, well not usually. But I have been getting very frustrating knowing how much MORE I could get done if I could just not be quite as distracted. I’ve been looking into other things too, but early last week I decided on Step #1….
I told all my web browsers to use a proxy to get to the internet except for certain sites. And I pointed them at a non-existant proxy. So except for the specific domain names I allowed, there would be no web surfing. I only put in a handful of domains directly relevant to work. No web surfing, no access to personal email, no blog posting… no nuttin.
There was an immediate drastic effect. The first few hours were painful, as by reflex I kept trying to look at things which were now blocked. But then it had the desired effect, I filled that time by actually doing stuff. Useful stuff. The amount of time per workday “wasted” dropped percipitously. I was getting some things done that I’d meant to for awhile but had never gotten to. And other things I was just getting done faster. This was awesome!
Then the cracks started coming… first, with all the proxies on, a couple of konfabulator widgets I have set up to show the local radar and stuff (lots of thunderstorms and shuch here in florida) didn’t work right, cause they used the proxy too. And I couldn’t get at the podcasts, and surely it was OK to listen to something with headphones while doing other things, right?
So, while leaving the Firefox settings the same, I changed the IE settings (which the other things were queing off of) to not use the proxy trick, but rather to use parental controls set for the most restrictive setting, and excpetions put in for the sites I needed. OK. Now I could have my widgets and my podcasts, but everything else was still blocked.
Uh, sorta. This went a couple more days. But then one day at lunch I felt temptation. In IE with parental controls, if you try to get to a site you aren’t supposed to, you are given the opportunity to override the parental control with a password. And it was lunchtime, so hey, I did… I refrained from using the “this site is OK forever” option, but rather the “just this time”. I had to put the password in every single time I clicked on anything else. It was a major pain. But I did it. And I kept doing it after the appropriate amount of time for lunch had finished. I tried to refrain, but now the temptation was there again.
Then the parental controls started interfering with some tests and demos of the product my company makes (even when I told the parental controls the URLs in question were OK), and to keep the stupid password thing from coming up all the time, I had to turn off the parental controls too. Firefox was still all locked down, but now IE was wide open again. I normally use Firefox except when I have to use IE, but…
That was yesterday that I turned off the IE protections. Today I once again feel like I have had the distraction jar wide open and calling me. I’ve resisted, I’ve done the time critical things I needed to do so far today, but… once again at the longer term things with softer deadlines the distractions have been killing me.
And here I am, I finished a late lunch a little bit ago (Wendy’s this time), but before I go back to “work” I am posting something on my blog. Tisk Tisk Tisk. Bad Sam. Go sit in the corner!
After I finish posting this, I am going to try again. Forget the weather widgets and podcasts. They are also just unneccessary distractions (although less so than actual websites). I’m going back to the fake proxy mode of blocking myself from surfing. All non-work related spots on the internet… blocked. And then I’ll start working on this information gathering project for work that I’ve been meaning to do for a little while but that isn’t explictly due any particular time, but would be very useful in a variety of things.
And I’ll once again restrict any pleasure surfing, or personal email looking or answering, or podcast listening, or blog posting, to those few hours a week at home when I get a chance to actually sit at the computer and do that sort of thing.
So, bye for the moment… the blindfold is going back on… NOW!
(We’ll see how long this lasts before I realize I can go back into the preferences and hit one check box and…)
Oh yes, Amy got home safe and sound Sunday night after a week at Grandma’s house. She had a great time and wanted to stay longer, but it was time for school to start on Monday. Apperatnly she did pretty well on the plane flights, but at least one person at baggage claim said he was glad the flight was only 2 hours, cause she didn’t stop talking the entire flight. Yup, that would be Amy. (He did say it with a smile though.)
And yes, 5th Grade for Amy started on Monday. New school, since we moved from where we were last year. All new kids too, none of them went to the same summer camp. So between all new kids, and this being the first year where they change classes during the day, and of course the work being ramped up a notch as the grade level goes up… definately a week of adjustments. It seems Amy likes 5th grade, and is starting to make some friends. Isn’t too fond of the teacher though, but it has only been a week, so we’ll see how that evolves.
Meanwhile, TODAY, one week after school starts, Brandy gets a call that says that Amy has gotten a spot at the county’s Science oriented school if we want it. WTF? Well, we put in the application at the end of the last school year. The three county schools that specialize in subjects (I think it was one science, one art and one languages or some such) are NOT the kind you get into by merit. It is a lottery amoung those who apply to be considered. (Past students get in automatically.) And it frankly isn’t entirely clear what they do different other than “concentrating” a bit more on the subject at hand. The lottery drawing was way back in May or something. We heard nothing, so assumed we didn’t win the lottery. There was a place you could mail a SASE to in order to find out what number you got, but we didn’t bother. Just made plans to go to the normal neighborhood school for our new neighborhood.
Well, appearantly, after the first week of school, some people who did win the lottery just didn’t show up or something and so they started going down the next numbers, and we came up. And they want her to start Monday if we still want to go.
Now, little problem here… OK, if we had gotten in at the beginning, or even if they had told us a few weeks ago, we could make an informed decision and then go one place or the other. As it is, we’ve never had a chance to check out the science school (excet driving by, and from the outside it doesn’t look as nice as where she is going, although there is the whole book and cover thing). Plus, we’re already putting Amy in a brand new school, that she is just starting to get acustomed to…
Should we rip her out after only a week and put her yet another new place? I want us to be able to make an informed decision, and of course Amy’s own opinion would be a huge part of that, but I just don’t feel there is enough info. So I am frustrated. Brandy is less so, but still annoyed at the timing of this. Maybe if we’d been able to get a tour of the Science school last year (we missed the scheduled one) or if we had known earlier or have longer to decide… but… right now I think all three of us are leaning against. And the two of them are leaning even harder than I am, so the decision is probably already made. But just to talk it out…
I know from personal experience having gone to 7 different schools between 5th and 9th grade that changing schools really sucks. And I’m not talking about the kind of changing schools where all of your friends are also changing schools because that they change buildings between one grade and another in your district, I’m talking about the changing schools and having all new people. 5th grade was one school in Durham, NC. 6th grade I went to two schools in Indianapolis, IN and one in Washington, DC. 7th grade was back in Durham, but a new school with new people. 8th grade was Frederick, MD. Then 9th grade was actually in the same building as 8th grade, but because of screwed up school zones, it was all new people. It sucked. I didn’t realize at the time how much it sucked, but in later years I realized that all that moving had indeed taken a toll.
Anyway, so far Amy had one school in PA through Grade 3. Then a second school in Melbourne, FL for Grade 4. Now a new school in Palm Bay, FL for Grade 5. Do we really want to make it a 4th school in 3 years? If the school Amy started in this week was really horrible and we knew the Science school was unquestionably awesome and an opportunity not to be missed, then maybe it would make sense. But I’m not sure that is the situation.
They are supposed to call us back over the weekend, and probably want a decision, since if we don’t take this spot, they will give it to someone else. I want to ask to go see the school, or at least go get more info and that kind of stuff. But that may or may not be possible.
I’m a little peeved at how this whole way of picking people for this school works. If we had gotten this choice before school actually started, it would have been a whole different decision process. The Science school is further away and would be a little less convienient dropping off and picking up, but I’m guessing we might well have gone for it. Cause Amy does like her math and science (although not quite as much as music, but the Arts school is a 45 minute drive away, so we didn’t apply). And at some level I’ve got to think that a school that specializes will be better than the “normal” school, even if they do not pick their students by merit. (By the way, Amy scored in mid 90’s percentile wise for both Math and Reading on last year’s standardized tests.) But as it is…
Bleh. Thanks Brevard county for making this difficult…
 Sunday morning we took Amy to the airport. She was flying by herself for the first time. To go visit Brandy’s mom for a week or so… along with all her old Pennsylvania friends. Brandy (and to a lesser extent me) were all nervous about the flying “unaccompanied minor” thing and all that. And sending her off by herself. (Under airline supervision of course.) And Brandy was completely getting hit by the fact that she had never in Amy’s almost 10 years been away from her for a whole week.
Of course, Amy was having none of this. As the time got closer and closer, she got more and more excited. We had to wait forever in line to get all our stuff in order. The online kiosks were not working properly. We couldn’t have used them anyway since Brandy had to fill out the unaccompanied minor form and get us our “parent passes” to get to the gate even though we were not flying anywhere. But because of whatever problems they were having it took us more than an hour to get set. Luckily security was a breeze this time.
We got to the gate just as they were starting to board. The people said they had been looking for Amy and had called for her on the speakers. (They board unaccompanied minors at the beginning of course.) As Brandy was teling Amy to be good and to behave and to do what they told her and call as soon as she got off the plane in Philly… the croud around laughed somewhat… and Amy was like “of course mom, don’t be silly, of course…” and then they said “OK Miss Amy, time to board” and Amy was off like a dart, ready to run onto the plane. (The picture is just seconds before she dashed onto the plane…) She only just barely remembered to turn and wave goodbye to us. And then she was off. Bouncing into the walkway full of energy and excitement. I pity whoever ended up sitting next to her!
Anyway, the flight was uneventful and Grandma picked her up on the other end. They are now a third of the way though the visit or so, and by all accounts having a great time.
Brandy is working on fixing up Amy’s room with new paint and a new arrangement and everything while Amy was gone. This was planned for a long time, but recently it wasn’t clear if we’d be able to. We’ve scaled down the plans a bit, but the basics are still happening. Paint and all. And a few other things. So shh… don’t tell Amy!
 Just as the tadpoles have been turning into frogs and all of that going well… Brandy found Heracles was no longer with us. Heracles is the big guy in the picture. His un-named friend had died last year. Both had been with Brandy for many years. And Heracles had made friends with Icarus (the new guy). You can see how much the liked each other in the picture. Icarus followed Heracles all the time and imitated him.
Heracles had seemed fine, so once again this was a bit sudden. He was fine… and then he wasn’t.
We had a brief ceremony and buried him in the back yard. Poor guy.
But then, a little later, we found that in the other tank… oh, background. The litte fish in Brandy’s tank (not the plecos) started having babies a couple months ago. The tank got so full of babies that we got a second tank and moved about half in there. For that tank we got two more baby plecos. One was an albino that died after just a few weeks. The second looked a lot like Icarus (the baby in the tank with Heracles).
So anyway, a few hours after we found Heracles, we noticed that the one left in the new tank was nowhere to be seen. That isn’t entirely unusual, as he had been known to hide in his castle for days at a time. But then Brandy saw… a clump of snails eating something. After a bit of looking we determined that it had to have been the pleco. He was almost gone. And we couldn’t take him out, because we would have gotten snails too.
This all happend on Saturday. It was a sad day.
 A few days ago, Kelly asked for an update on the frogs. And I was about to comply that very day, but then she said she needed more pictures, so I was delayed several days. Even then though, I didn’t get any good new pictures, so here is a picture I actually took a few weeks ago but didn’t use on the blog at the time. It is of a tad-frog that has its legs, but hasn’t lost the tail yet.
Anyway, the update. At any given moment there are two or three newly minted mini-frogs emerging from the tank. They tend to stick around the tank for a day or so. Perhaps two. But no more than that. Then they hop away.
A few don’t make it. I’ve seen a few that obviously died half way through the transition. Newly formed legs. Tail still there. Apperantly this is normal. Metamorphosis is a traumatic experience, and quite simply not all of them can make it through. But it appears most are making it. The ones that don’t… well, they are eaten by the others.
Meanwhile, in one of the tanks there are now hundreds of new tiny tadpoles. Now, I’m fairly certain tadpoles are too young to reproduce, so it isn’t that they are breeding in my tanks, but rather a full grown frog couple decided the tanks were a good place to make more. So more are on their way yet.
Brandy says once we have a screen the tadpoles have to live outside of it. :-( Oh well.
Every day though, new baby frogs working their ways out of the tank and off to the wide world.
It is a nice thing.
In other news, according to the last update we got, we are only weeks away from getting the screen behind our house replaced. Last I heard from them (a couple weeks ago) they said still on schedule for the first week in August. Of course, it was originally scheduled for March. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it still ends up not being August. And of course, we are not the only ones:
Pool screens awash in delays
(Scott Blanke, Florida Today)
There are more than 36,000 swimming pools in Brevard County, including the one in Melissa Wells’ back yard in Palm Bay. Like many of her fellow pool owners, Wells is waiting for a screen enclosure to be built around her pool.
She put up a fence in her yard so she could use her pool while she waits for a screen enclosure, but it’s not the same.
“You can’t go out and swim at night without getting attacked by mosquitoes,” Wells said.
Homeowners across Brevard County are having to wait months longer than usual and pay thousands of dollars extra for swimming-pool screen enclosures, as screen contractors have been overwhelmed with work because of last year’s hurricanes and Florida’s housing boom.
The situation has created a lot of unhappy customers.
We’re locked into “last year’s rate” by contract. They better not try to change that. Brandy has been most upset by the many month delay we’ve already had. I’ve never been too concerned about that, cause I expected it. Now the price on the other hand… this is supposed to be entirely paid for by money in escrow from the previous owners. If they try to change the price by one penny, then I’ll be quite annoyed. I think they are locked in though.
One of the things the article mentions is how some of the screen builders who signed up too many people (like ours obviously) are themselves getting screwed because they are locked in to only recieving last year’s prices while their own costs have gone up considerably.
I guess I feel for them somewhat. On the other hand, I don’t care so much that I’d want to pay more. :-) Just get our screen on, so we don’t have to worry about bugs and leaves.
Brandy got some bad news Friday that will probably disrupt our lives here for the next month or so, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. Hopefully less rather than more. I won’t say more in this forum. All will be well before too long, but there will be some short term stress for both of us.
I have never been a regular breakfast eater. In fact, I’ve always felt a bit wierd eating anything until I’ve been awake at least 2 or 3 hours, sometimes more.
But the last few days, I’ve gotten to work and I have been HUNGRY. And tired even if I had a decent number of hours of sleep the night before. And it isn’t like I haven’t had dinner the night before, or have had less than normal. That has stayed about the same.
But I’m ending up hungry and groggy in the mornings, and not fully functional until I get lunch several hours later. I mean, I’m always a bit groggy in the mornings, I am just not a morning person, I’m best in the afetrnoon and evening… but it has been a bit more so than usual lately.
I’m starting to think maybe I have to think about how to fit a coffee and a bagel or something into my morning routine.
I have not forgotten what is supposed to be my next random trip in a long series of random trips. It just isn’t to be just quite yet. Originally it was supposed to be fore 1st quarter of 2004. At this point even 1st quarter of 2006 seems unlikely, but it will happen eventually I tell you! It will!
In the mean time, above is a Google Maps overhead view of the spot. Enjoy!
As I mentioned in the last post, I unexpectedly was stuck at Dulles airport. It was getting kind of late, but I figured I’d call Rebecca and Chris anyway. I was in the general DC area, and of course my dad is also there, and my friend Al, but both are further away from Dulles, and as I mentioned, it was late. Rebecca and Chris have been known to stay up late and live relatively close to Dulles. Besides, I hadn’t met Gideon yet. So, a call was made.
Last time I was stuck at Dulles and I called them, they weren’t available. Out of town or something. This time, thery were home, and Chris came to get me. They offered a place to stay for the night, but between having to get up at like 5 AM to be back at the airport in time, and my allergies to their cat, I figured a hotel was the best bet.
But I did get to spend a couple hours with them. As Rebecca already posted yesterday, I did indeed meet Gideon during her impromptu WRCT Day. Gideon was great. Big head and all. He sat with me very nicely, played with my tie, and was generally a happy little fellow. Apperantly he threw up on Al when they first met. I did not get that honor. But I think I can live with that.
Also got to catch up a bit with both Rebecca and Chris. The last time I’d seen them in person was way back at my House Cooling Party well over a year ago, and certainly well before Gideon. So it was very good to visit, even if it was just a short chance visit.
Sorry I didn’t get to see all the other DC folks. I’ll need to actually SCHEDULE a DC trip sometime, not just get stuck at Dulles for a few extra hours.
And of course, you all COULD just come to Florida. :-)
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