Timmerov's Blog
i miss my family
they're visiting relatives in pennsylvania and chicago. i have nothing to do but work work work. and feed the cat.
flying tanks
the marine layer made the coast unflyable. so i did aerobatics over the cement plant. wee! fun! i haven't been there in a while. on the way home i buzzed my house. it was easy to find this time. it's the orange roof next to the two big white water tanks. you can't see the tanks from the ground because of the strategic flora. i didn't know they were there until i looked at the google satellite maps of my house. i tried to find my house before. but it's pretty busy in the cockpit just then. i'd bet i saw the tanks before and looked away. there's nothing like that near my house after all.
diet coke
i don't drink the stuff any more. quit cold turkey. no more. the stuff's addictive. i kept drinking more and more. i was up to about 4 cans on a typical day. i know folks who drink more. it seems the stuff was affecting my body's ability to regulate its blood pressure. like i'd stand up from the couch and grey out. this cannot be a good thing. now i leap up from a nap as fast as i can just to see if my head can take it. so far so good.
rove
the white house seems a bit confused why the democrats would be upset that rove said they're soft on terrorism. i think they missed the point. they're upset by the implication that being softer on terrorism is a bad thing. as we've demonstrated time and time again, being hard on terrorism creates more terrorists.
army recruits
the religious right has given us war in iraq. i think it's appropriate that the religious right provide the soldiers. recruiting for the army and marines is way down. it would be way up if the robertson's and falwell's of the world encouraged people to sign up for military service as vigorously as they encourage them to sign up for that ineffective 'no sex before marriage' silliness.
nation of fear
we're afraid to: ride a bike without a helmet. fly in airplanes. ride in a car without a seat belt. put a kid in a car without a car seat. play with fire crackers. copy a cd. crack the computer case. fish toast out of the toaster. run a hair dryer near the sink. eat sugar/meat/fat/carbohydrates/peanuts. turn off the tv. challenge the irs. work hard. go out after dark. hug a fag. leave the doors unlocked. exercise. leave the keys in the car. drink the water. step on a crack. feed the hungry. take a risk. face reality. pet the baby alligator. jaywalk. say sorry, we were wrong.
bowling for columbine
i don't understand the title. michael moore is an asstard. he's very good at making bigger asstards look stupid. i loved the scene where he asked charleton heston to apologize for inconsiderately holding an nra rally two days after a first grader shot and killed another first grader in the first grade classroom. the only other redeeming feature of the movie was calling us a nation of fear. made me think, hmmm... mr moore seems to have pulled out a plum.
offer refused
i recently offered a nice young kid a good paying job. he turned me down. said he wanted to build weapons to make his friends safer in iraq. wouldn't they be safest if we brought them home?
welfare babies
when i was a kid my mother pointed out that society is paying people to make babies and not work and live on welfare. i figured it would be a problem. poor people making more poor people. bad idea. unfortunately, it's even worse. those welfare babies grew up and now vote conservative.
doping the cat
the poor old cat went to the vets to have her teeth cleaned. one was rotten. it needed to come out. so now she's on antibiotics. the first day alisa and i carefully wrapped her up in a towel, gently pried her jaws open, and dripped the medicine onto her tongue. i'm home alone now. i just grab her and squirt the stuff down her throat before her claws can come out.
best father's day ever
having grown up sans dad, i don't have much experience with father's days. the boys made me pancakes, took me climbing at castle rock, and fed me sushi for dinner. as for alisa's contribution... i'm not sayin'.
hall pass
when i was kid i got hall passes to wander up and down the hallways of my school to visit the little boy's room. apparently, bennett gets hall passes too. but here in california the schools don't have hallways.
shotgun
garrett often loses his underpants and runs around shotgun under his overpants. one day he asked mom if she was shotgun. mom said, of course! i had happy thoughts the rest of the day.
casey & andy
andy of
casey & andy is moving to boston. he asked his fans to contribute strips while he's too busy moving. the boys and i made one. it's a fart joke. i bet he posts it.
free stuff!
1) call your favorite online store. 2) listen to their special. it'll be something like: order $200 worth of stuff, get $20 off. 3) order the $20 item you actually want. 4) find something on backorder. 5) order $180 worth of it. 6) they send your item and charge you for $20 plus tax title and shipping minus the $20 rebate. 7) cancel the back ordered item. 8) profit.
finches
the baby finches poked their heads out of the nest one day. the next day they were gone. we told the boys they grew up and flew away. though the parents keep searching the nest as if they expect the babies to be there. i suspect we lied to the children.
80's oop
a friend of mine pointed out that oop has been around since 1980 or so. i countered with 1980 is in the 20th century.
oop++
so in the process of converting all my flat c code to a more object oriented paradigm, i created a class that automatically converts endian-ness. it's kinda neat. but it does illustrate many of the things i don't like about oop. old way: short y = 0x1234; short x = NativeToLittleEndian(y); new way: short y = 0x1234; EndianWidget< short> x = y; the class should really only be used as fields in classes that are read from and written to files. but you can easily make all of your variables little endian and cripple your big endian machine.
oop
at work i noticed that the majority of the code that i view is object oriented. i've been coding flat c style for 20 years. but i think it's about time to leave the 20th century behind and join the 21st.
finches
we have some nice little finches that made a nest in the eaves right above my window. katz likes them too. she goes out and sits on the patio and the little finches sing to her. it's great. not like those mockingbirds a few years ago. they were mean. they'd dive bomb her head and pull her tail. she didn't like them at all.
pen bee
i was sitting in the run up area at reid-hillview airport ready to take off when i became aware of a bee flying around in the cabin. it flew to the windshield and got stuck between that and the dash. it had to go. so i opened the window and grabbed a pen. my hand wouldn't fit in the narrow crack. and bees have stingers. so i tried to shoo him towards the window. instead the bee grabbed onto the end of the pen and hung on. and hung on. i looked at this small creature that was very happy exactly where it was. i have a bee on my pen. then i stuck him out the window into the prop wash. he hung on briefly before flying away. then i flew away too.
midway
63 years ago today we got really lucky. the battle of midway was the turning point in world war two. granted we made our own luck by tricking the japanese into thinking our fleet was somewhere else. but if their spotter planes had spotted our fleet or if our dive bombers had arrived two minutes before our torpedo bombers instead of two minutes after... history would be have run a very different course. (happy birthday mom.)
meeting
grandpa and annie were here this week. we were discussing the day's activities. i chipped in that i had a meeting 12:30 to 1:30. no response. at netscape. still no response. i have to take my hockey gear. finally i get a response. hey! you're going to go play hockey. yup. it's a hockey meeting.
indecision
bennett's and garrett's little school had a party. there was stuff everywhere. there was a firetruck in the parking lot. there were cookies outside the classrooms. the boys got stuck between them running in circles. cookies, firetruck, cookies, firetruck, cookies, firetruck. can't decide! poor kids.
date night
alisa and i went to
kan zeman for a date. it was quite good. next to us were two college girls. one was obviously your typical poor starving college student and was eating, not buying. the other equally obviously had a wealthy background and was buying, not eating.
