by ·0 Comments

Guess what’s missing (yet not missed) from this list of things done tonight?
* Ran 3 miles
* Went to dinner with my husband (oooh, a date!)
* Perused the magazines in the bookstore whilst we waited for the latest torrential downpour to pass by
* Cleaned the cat boxes (bleah – I’ll never own another cat)
* Picked up the basement
* Sketched out a list of things to take and things to do before our camping trip with the girls (look sometime next week for a description of success or failure, taking a 2 year old and an 8 month old tent camping)
* Edited 1 blog entry, wrote another one (this one!)
* Went to sleep at a nearly reasonable time

Give up?? Nothing about work. Nada. Nichts. Not even writing this from my work laptop – left it in my office. Left it sitting lonely in its docking station, thinking whatever thoughts lonely laptops think when they’re deprived of company. In case you’re scanning the ‘Net, little laptop, looking for something to remind you of me, I dedicate this blog entry to you, ‘puter. But I hope you start coming up with hobbies of your own, ‘puter – I’m hoping to spend a little less time on our relationship.

by ·0 Comments

I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person. Did a little bit better than OK in school, worked hard (_really_ hard) at a couple of classes in college, but other than that, the main work there was time management to get things done. So, have been looking forward to returning to school in the fall to finally (!) get started on that MBA I’ve been thinking about since my junior or senior year in college. The timing was never right. First I wanted job experience to make the MBA that much more worthwhile (and hey, maybe easier if I already knew the stuff). Then we got married. Then we had a kid. And then we had another one. School takes time, time that’s always spread a bit thinner than one would like. But still, the MBA beckoned. I’d peruse the course catalog and wish I could take the class, just for the material covered. I’d plot out how many years it’d take to complete the degree part-time (too many!). I even went so far, last fall, as to write out my application essay for a local school. Never actually sent it in… Jason and I were looking at baby #2 coming and then some minor upheaval in the Coleman household as I returned to work and he took over primary care for the kids. Didn’t seem fair to load a night out to class on top of that.

In the meantime, my interest in the courses haven’t waned. And each time they come around at work to check where we individually fit on the GSA schedule, I’m reminded yet again that I never got that advanced degree. So, today went and took the GMAT exam. It’s required for the local biz school where I hope to earn my degree, one class at a time over the next several years. I’m quite certain evenings spent watching Law & Order will now be spent poring over economic and accounting tomes. Jon Stewart’s monologue may be the refrain behind research for papers. Signup’s coming up for the fall semester – need to get my application in order, including that application essay and a copy of my resume. Good excuse to get it up-to-date, anyway. Lots of things to add, of late, including (tada!) a paper I’m listed as a co-author on that’s going to be presented at a conference at NIH in a couple of weeks. (If it’s posted anywhere, I’ll post a link here… paper describes some cool work we’ve done at the National Library of Medicine).

It’ll take me long enough to get through the MBA program that Cora may be doing her homework while Mommy works on hers. One class at a time, baby, one class at a time.

by ·0 Comments

Bug 6619, assigned to me on my project, innocently asks, “Should prev next appear at the bottom of the list, if there is no prev or next page?” The page uses an ASP.NET DataGrid, which nicely provides me an easy way to turn on paging, which is the idea that I don’t present to you all 300 records you asked for at once, but I let you get 25 or so at a time, with buttons to traverse through the set. In this case, prev/next buttons.

Turns out, Microsoft easily grants me the capability to turn on paging and easily grants me the capability to say that the buttons should say prev or next, but doesn’t easily grant me the ability to turn off, say, the prev button if that button shouldn’t exist. It’ll happily turn off the link itself, so it “knows” there’s no previous page, but the effect of that is to just display the text ‘prev’ without a link. Attempts to update the text of those links on the fly, say to an empty string, are happily ignored by the page… Grr….

So, I start investigating other options. Turns out I can put in my own custom navigation controls, and bypass the prev/next button stuff. Great! The document that tells me how to do that says ‘One of the options on the Pager tab of the Property Builder is Show Navigation buttons’. Hmmm… option on the what tab? Not seeing that in my Properties window…. Oh, that’s because it’s only available on the Property Builder, one of those wizard things I usually avoid because they end up doing stuff for me that causes problems later. Flipping the switch there gives no obvious indication in the Properties Window, no obvious indication in the HTML code, no obvious indication in the code…. but somehow things work differently. Grrrrrrrrrr…

I’ve now spent almost an hour and a half on this bug. Microsoft, your documentation leaves much to be desired. Those of who want to do things beyond your basic behavior run into too many stumbling blocks that don’t have to be there. Don’t box me into your default behavior. Particularly don’t box me into your default behavior without giving me a big ol’ warning that this default behavior can’t be overridden in rational ways. At least spare me the time of running down those fruitless reasonable paths by pointing me in a direction: if you’d like to do X, you should consider using Y instead of our normal recommendation of Z.

Frustrated…

by ·2 Comments

Just in time for Mother’s Day, advice on food selection for your child:
“If Mommy gives us chocolate when we’re kids, that is what we grow up to like,” Yosses said. “And if Mommy gives us hissing cockroaches, then that’s what we learn to like.”
— From ‘The Scorpions Taste Kind of Fishy’ in Wired Magazine

Now I know what to serve Cora this weekend: the cicadas are coming. Save us a trip to the grocery store and broaden her food horizons. Callie’s off the hook this time around: no teeth to crunch ’em means she’s spared until the next 17 year cycle.

by ·0 Comments

I’m working on a habit. A good one, I hope. I’ve been slipping the sneakers on at the end of the day, and going for a run around work. Even picked up a running partner lately. Steve’s training to run a 5K in memory of his wife, who passed away from cancer. I’m running for a much less worthy reason, for the most part. It feels good. I feel like I’m accomplishing something everytime I can run a bit farther than I did previously, or run the same run without giving up and needing to run that last hill on the last quarter mile back to work. And I really like the idea of the jeans fitting a bit better as a result. Gives me the motivation to skip the chocolate that my project lead so sadistically keeps in his office.

It’s time I take from my family, I realize. I try to trade that off by eating my lunch at my desk for the most part, so hopefully I’m not chaining Jason to two youngsters for longer than necessary. And I try to make it up to him – (hint, hint- I’m feeling guilty, Jas – you could work this to your benefit). My habit is fast becoming an addiction, though my speed doesn’t similarly count as fast. For me, a long run is 3+ miles, though I have dreams of marathons… maybe even this year, if I can figure out how to fit in the time necessary to run the LSDs (an addiction of their own, but means Long Slow Distance) necessary to build up to 26.2.

I looked up Biblical references to running – came up with a few. Heb 12:1 seems to fit – I’m trying to earn the perseverance to run the race. Something to cogitate upon to redeem the time – it’s Bible study time, honey. Really.

by ·0 Comments

Daddy’s been gone for the weekend. One of the girls is sick and on the upswing from it, and the other may be getting it. It’s honestly been a reasonably fun weekend, even given that one girl got me up at two and then the other was not only awake, but hyper(!) at six this morning. I’m definitely looking forward to Jason getting home – a hair cut and a long run are on the list, as is mowing our lawn if the rain holds off. But I got a miraculous chunk of time this morning. The six o’clock riser (our two year old) was convinced to take a nap. Not threatened, locked away screaming, ‘you shall take a nap!’. But talked into climbing into her bed and getting tucked in for a nap, with the promise of a lunch with chocolate milk afterwards. An hour later, the infant collapsed (and it took that whole hour to get her to do it, too!). So, surprisingly, I’ve had about an hour so far with two napping children. That never happens for us anymore . The two year old never takes naps, and then the odds of synchronizing naps – well, let’s just say I’m not in church today (sick kids aren’t particularly welcome in nursery), but I’m thanking God for a miracle.

I’ve actually had a list all weekend of the set of things that I’d do if I only had one awake and the other were reasonably happy. Cora and I worked on the garden yesterday (that’s a blog entry in and of itself of the fun a two year old has with pipecleaners that Mom’s used to try to mark where she’s planted things) and got most of the herbs and vegetables planted. That was a major score – too many more weekends and the vegetable garden would have been relegated to a weed garden this year. But today’s bright spot of freedom granted me – a clean floor! A stick some CDs into the stereo, grab a wash bucket, and get on my knees to scrub the floor clean floor. No baby food spills around the high chair. No formula powder near the sink. No dog drool around the dog food bowl. Got the pancake batter Cora “liberated” as she tried to help make pancakes yesterday. I can see my floor, and it looks good, and I’m ecstatic.