My office here at home is a little on the dark side. I have one light on the ceiling but that’s it. It’s a normal light and provides as much, uh, light as a normal, uh, light does, but since it’s overhead and a little bit behind me when I’m sitting at my desk, it creates a Chuck-shaped shadow on whatever I happen be working on. So everything is well-lit (if not clean) except what I most need to be well-lit.

Fortunately, I also have a lamp on the desk. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Hasn’t worked for more than a year, at least. I look at it frequently, there in the shadow of my biggianthead, and I think of how much more light I would have if only it had a new bulb in it. But it’s a halogen lamp, and those things are a pain in the ass.

Because, first off, I can’t just get a halogen bulb at the grocery store, no, I’d have to make a special trip another five minutes or so to go to Office Depot to find one. And the times I find myself driving past Office Depot — or maybe even inside Office Depot — I can’t remember what size halogen bulb it takes, and I’m not going to buy one on faith because then I’d have to make another trip back to exchange it if I got the wrong size and of course I’d get the wrong size and I had enough damn trouble getting here in the first damned place so I know I’d just never come back to make the exchange so screw it already. And then even if I did have all my ducks in a row and I knew I was going to be at Office Depot and knew what size bulb I needed, those damned halogen bulbs are expensive enough to offend my inner cheapskate and I’d spend half an hour comparing them and debating and hemming and hawing and then I’d probably leave without buying it anyway. So the punchline from the old joke “How many Jewish grandmothers does it take to change a lightbulb?” applies: “Never mind, I’ll just sit in the dark.”

So I frequently sit here in the dark and gaze longingly at my desk lamp and dream of what could be. And then I shake my head and get back to working by touch. Because never mind.

Well, today I was looking at the lamp in the dim of the afternoon and a thought occurred: Are you sure the bulb is burned out? Have you actually, you know, tried it lately? Ever? Do you remember trying it? Ever? And I had to answer “No” to all. So I took a chance, I flicked the switch to turn it on.

Well.

This is the part where you’re all expecting me to say that, whoa, the light worked! It wasn’t burned out at all! Right? Well, you’re wrong. I flipped that switch and nothing happened. Noth. Thing. Zip. Darkness continued. Etcetera.

Not so smart now, are you? So settle down there with your holier-than-though attitudes about how stupid you thought I was, all right? Because, no, it did not work when I turned it on.

But it did when I plugged it in.

I interviewed for a Training Coordinator job early last week and completely blew it. They had a long list of “What’s your biggest weakness?” cheeseball type interview questions — which I absolutely hate — and I was coming across like such a goober that I actually paused and took a private moment with myself at one point when I smiled and thought “Fuck it, just get through the next 15 questions and it’ll be over. You’ve already blown it, just coast through the rest of it now and quit stressing.”

Shockingly, they called later saying they wanted me to come back to do a 30 minute mock training session so they can see me in front of a class.

So I went in today to do the mock session. I stayed up late last night going over the material, then got very little sleep since I kept waking up every 15 minutes all night long, got up early, shaved, showered, put on a nice ironed shirt and pair of pants, fought freeway traffic to get there, and finally arrived at the training room to find no one there to meet me. I was a little early, so I poked around for a few minutes and worked on getting the PCs all up and running and started installing the work files needed for the session. And when I was finished, still nobody was there to meet me.

Because, as it turns out, my mock session is scheduled for next Wednesday.

Of all that wasted effort leading to that bonehead moment, I resent the shaving the most. I could have waited another day before I had to do that.

Email I just received from Beth:

On your bio page 42 @ 42, you say that we got married on 7/25/95

http://www.deadpan.net/pie/bio.html
(for your clicking convenience).

Ahem….honey, we were married 6/25/95.

Signed,
Your wife.

And we have our 10-year anniversary coming up next month, too. In June, not July.

I am so screwed…

Zoe turned up with a sore throat and fever last night, so we kept her home from school today and she got to do her favorite thing: lay up in my bed and watch TV. (She also got to sleep in my bed with Beth last night, too, while I slept in her kid-sized daybed. That was, uh, “fun”.)

So with her laid up in the bedroom and me in my office on the other end of the house and her with a sore throat, long-distance communication was an issue. Zoe asked if we had a bell she could ring when she needed me (because it’s a TV cliche and yes she watches far too much TV and of course I let her spend her sick day watching TV) but we don’t have one, so I offered her the 21st Century version of the Sick Bell: my cell phone. I had her call the house line if she needed me and I answered in my office and that way we could talk without taxing her voice.

And oh-my-God did she work the hell out of that phone. No lie, it was ringing every five to ten minutes:

• Daddy, can you take my temperature?
• Daddy, can you make me a cup of tea?
• Daddy, can you make me some tomato soup and tuna fish?
• Daddy, can you put more mayo in the tuna?
• Daddy, can you take my temperature again?
• And etc…

Now, the phone ringing annoys me on the best of days, and today she was ringing it off the hook. But because it was Zoe I couldn’t ignore it and let it go to voicemail. So not only was it annoying me by ringing, it was also annoying me by requiring me to answer it. And not only was it annoying me by requiring me to answer it, it was also annoying me by being for me. And not only was it annoying me by being for me, it was also annoying me by being a call that required me to get up and do something. I’m not the most patient of people to start with, and all this ringing and being interrupted and running to do whatever didn’t do much for my sunny disposition. So I don’t think staying home sick was quite as much fun for Zoe as she might have imagined.

She seemed to be staging a comeback by the afternoon (which time has proven to be just the Motrin kicking in), so I got her dressed and out of bed and took her to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Because I’m all about being a responsible parent. But, hey, that was two hours when we were entertained together and the phone wasn’t ringing. This part of the day probably was as fun as Zoe had imagined — she thought it was cool going to a movie midweek because “It’s not crowded because the only people here are retired people and people who don’t have jobs.”

And now we’re home again, and more importantly now Beth is home again, and I’ve tagged up and turned over responsibility of sick kid requests to her.

And I took my cell phone back.

I’m quickly developing a love/hate relationship with Access. My little scuba inventory form is coming along nicely and I think it’ll be a thing of beauty when I’m finished with it. In the meantime I’m teaching myself a lot of cool stuff about Access — but I’m also forgetting stuff as I learn newer stuff.

One thing that I loved when I learned it — and now I can’t remember how the fuck it worked — is how to make checking a checkbox in a form trigger a date in another field in the same form.

I know it can be done because I did it about five hours ago and thought I was all spiffy for figuring it out. Then I deleted the form to rebuild it with a few refinements and when it came time to make the checkbox put the date in the other field — well, I drew a complete blank. And I’ve been drawing a blank ever since. And it’s really fucking pissing me the fuck off. A fucking lot.

So if any of you fine peoples out there can tell me how to do this, I’d sure appreciate it.

Fuck.

I’ve decided Access is going to be the way to go with my scuba shop inventory project. Unfortunately, I don’t know Access all that well. So today I toddled off to my local small-store-crushing megabookstore and grabbed a Teach Yourself Microsoft Access book so I can, um, teach myself Microsoft Access. And then, because I’m a big ol’ geek, I also grabbed PHP in Easy Steps.

Noble (but not Barnes &) purchases, both of them, full of good intent and a desire for higher learning and self-betterment and all that crap. Hoo-raw, good for me. But the question is: will I actually read them?

Little-known Chuck Fact that drives Beth to distraction: I don’t read directions. I not only don’t read them, I refuse to read them. It’s a point of pride for me that I can figure out how stuff works on my own and I don’t need no damned directions to help me do it.

So when we bring home a new widget or need to assemble a whatsit on Christmas Eve for Zoe to open Christmas morning or have something or other that requires some kind of putting together, the first thing out of the box and into the trash when we open it is the directions. And then I spend the next several hours forcing parts to fit together in ways they probably weren’t meant to and muttering “fuckingpieceofshit” and occasionally throwing wrenches across the living room and generally being a pain in the ass until I’ve completed the task. Sort of.

But if she’s being fair, Beth has to admit that I do usually end up successfully assembling these things on my own. And if I’m being fair, I guess I have to admit that I often end up with a small pile of “extra” parts that I couldn’t figure out how to use. And if I’m practicing rigorous honesty, I guess I also have to admit that sometimes I just can’t figure the stuff out at all and that, yes, sometimes I do have to cheat and read the directions. But I only read the part I’m having trouble with. I also never inhaled.

Aaaaanyway, I now have an Access book to help me figure out how to do my scuba shop project, and a PHP book for fun later so I can figure out to do … something. And I might even read them. Maybe.

Reading is fundamental, it’s true. And I put the ‘fundament’ in fundamental.

I need some help from you readers. My local scuba shop wants to set up an inventory control system for their rental equipment and they’ve asked me to help. I know what I want but I can’t find it out there. Maybe you can point me in the right direction?

What we’re going to do is barcode all the equipment so we can scan it to check it in and out. I need two things to make that happen:

1. Some kind of database with tables made up of the equipment being rented and the customers renting it, and then need a front end on it where we can plug in who’s renting what and when they return it. We don’t need prices or invoices, just in/out.

I was thinking Access might be the way to go but I don’t know it well enough to set up the tables or design the interface.

2. A way to get the barcodes on the equipment. This is scuba gear, remember, so it’s going to get beat up a lot, not to mention being underwater for extended periods of time. We need something durable that won’t get in the way. I’ve seen something like a cross between a zipper pull and a zip tie that looked close to what we need but I can’t find it anywhere.

So there you go, that’s what I need your help with. If you can point me to a cheap Windows-based software solution and a durable inventory tag, I’ll sure appreciate it. Maybe I’ll take you diving with me as thanks.

Can you help? Puh-leaze?

Today’s date is 5/5/05, That’s trip fives, so I’ll celebrate by giving up one of my poker strategies.

One of my favorite hands in Texas Hold-em is pocket fives, a.k.a. “Presto.” If I look down to find those in my hand, I will absolutely, positively raise without hesitation every single time. It’s superstition that makes me do it, mostly. It’s not that strong a hand, after all, but for some reason I just love it. And this could just be me rationalizing my love for a low starting pair, but I think it’s called “Presto” for a reason: because it’s a magic hand. It seems to me that more often than not, pocket fives will hold up — I’ll either make a set (3 of a kind) with them or they’ll just turn out to be the strongest hand. They just win, baby, so I always raise them pre-flop.

And I’ll admit, I’m a little crazy with them, too. If I don’t make a set on the flop, I’ll chase with them anyway, and maybe even raise while I’m doing it. Because, again, more often than not, it seems to me that they come through — if I miss the set on the flop it’ll come on the turn or the river. Or, like I said, even without a set they frequently turn out to be the strongest hand anyway. So I chase, even when chasing with a small starting pair is stupid.

But — and here’s the tell — if I have Presto and make a set, I will absolutely, positively, without fail go all-in every single time. And because it’s “Presto,” because it’s magic, it usually wins. So if there’s a five on the board and I’m pushing my stack, now you know why.

Today is 5/5/05: Presto. I’m going all-in.

I think perhaps I wasn’t clear enough with the meme I proposed yesterday:

Go to Google. Paste whatever’s on your clipboard right now into the search box and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Report your result — IN YOUR OWN BLOG.

I think it’s cool that you’re all dutifully reporting back to me what results you got and why, but this meme will not propagate — and I will not thus become world famous and enjoy staggering amounts of traffic here and thus become even more famous and enjoy even more traffic and etc and etc — if you don’t help me get it out there by posting it in your blogs.

Thanks for understanding.

Love,
The Ingrate

I had a real “duh” moment in a Word class I was teaching the other day.

I was going over tabs: how to set them, use them, different types, etc. And then I went off on one of my patented tangents and started talking about how a quick way to indent an entire paragraph was to drag the “Left Indent” box on the ruler. Not really tab related, but sort of in the same genre — if I’m training it. Then one of the students interrupted me to ask how to indent just the first line of a paragraph.

Easy answer, right? Uh, no. Not for me, not on that day.

I was right in the middle of tangenting off into formatting paragraphs in a manner only vaguely related to tabs, so I had paragraphs, not tabs, on the brain. And my mind immediately jumped to Format/ Paragraph/ Indentation/ Special and the various options there, and seized on “hanging indent.” Which a split second later I realized does the exact opposite so it wasn’t really an answer. And then I quickly mentally inventoried the other options there and realized none did this weird “indent just the first line” thing this student was asking about. This all took place over the course of about 2 seconds. And I was, for just a moment, stumped.

Then another student offered, “Couldn’t you just hit the Tab key?”

Hey, I’m honest, I ‘fessed up: “Um. Yeah, that’ll do it. Sure. If you want the easy way.”

It was a good reminder to KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid. Knowing all the advanced features doesn’t mean you have to use them for everything. Sometimes all you need is one simple key that does exactly what it says it does — they have names on them for a reason. And it took a beginning level student to remind me of that.

That was probably my biggest training Duuuuuuh moment ever. I felt like an idiot. And of course I’m sharing it with the world (or at least the eleventeen people who read me). I must be an idiot.