My wife, Michele, discovered this copy of Senator Robert Byrd’s comments on the Senate floor on May 21, 2003.
You should go read it.
Then you should tell everyone you know to go read it.
For several days now I have been avoiding my emotions. My employment situation is tense at best, and lately it hasn’t even approached best. Last evening I had a very emotional breakdown that allowed me to express what was going on for me.
It felt good to open up about all the stuff I was feeling as a result of work. Some of the emotions I expressed were ones I was aware of having or holding back. I think once you get started in a denial mode you lose the ability to clearly see all that you are denying. On the surface my emotions were about the fears I have about what is going to happen next, while underneath they were really about affirmation and acceptance by the people here at work. And under it all, the truth was about affirmation and acceptance from myself for my actions.
Once I blocked how I was feeling about what may or may not happen next all the emotions about affirmation and acceptance from others piled up behind and created a log-jam. This completely masked the true emotions I was avoiding, the feelings of unworthiness and self loathing I was having because I was listening to, and taking personally, what others were saying rather than listening to myself. When I broke down and cried last night I was releasing the log-jam and getting past what others were saying, and worse, what I was imagining they were feeling towards me. I was able to clear all of that away and see the real truth underneath.
I could not have done this most difficult work without my incredible wife, Michele. She created a warm, safe place for me to fall. And in allowing me to fall she created a space where I could grow and learn. She set aside her feelings about what I was going through and allowed me to fully express what I was feeling, thinking, and imagining. Once I got past all the surface silliness, then she engaged me and helped me to explore the truth of the matter.
I cannot thank her enough for her courage and wisdom.
In this press release, Apple announces that they’ve sold over 2 million songs in the 16 days since the iTunes Music store went live. By my math that’s an average of 1.44 songs per second. Steve Jobs says that over half the songs downloaded from the service so far are part of an album purchase, dispelling the notion that people would buy just the songs they wanted and not entire albums.
Can you imagine what will happen with iTunes for Window debuts?
Contrary to recent indications, this space is not intentionally left blank. The code I was using to structure my new site layout breaks under some browsers, most especially Camino.
I have discovered the offending script and removed it from the main page, however, the other pages of my site are still corrupt. Hopefully by this evening I’ll have those pages cleaned up as well.
This is a list of the known viewing problems:
Windows IE 5.5 SP2
Yesterday I got my first pair of bifocals. For some time now I have been having difficulty reading text at less than arms length. The doctor agreed with me, saying the my right eye had gone from slight farsightedness to neutral, while my left eye (the dominate one) went from neutral to slightly nearsighted. Since I work with computers all day, and play with them in the evening I needed a combination lens to allow me to see the screen at arms length, and text at less than that distance.
Driving or walking is okay. When my focus is out ahead of me I barely notice the two new focal centers in my lenses. However, as soon as I move my head, especially to nod in agreement to something, all I can see are these two areas of different focus bobbing up and down in front of me. It is very distracting.
The worst part, so far, is finding a new head position for things. It seems like the line between short and far is always getting in the way. I guess we don’t realize how we move or don’t move our head in some activities. At least I didn’t until I had these two extra lenses stuck in front of everything.
I feel helpless and out of control as a result of all this change. I knew that this change was coming and I thought it would be a relief to be able to read up close comfortably again. However, getting used to all the side effects is something I was prepared for. I know that with a little patience and practice I’ll find methods that work for me. In the meantime I will have to console my self and be nice to me. I don’t need to start criticizing my decision on top of dealing with the impact of that decision.
So if you see a guy constantly moving his head up and down, and perhaps taking his glasses off a lot, relax, it isn’t a fit. It’s just me trying to adjust my picture.
I’m somebody now!
One of my favorite daily sites is Gizmodo. Yesterday I discovered a site with some wonderfully looking storage solutions, and wanting to share, I passed the site URL on to Gizmodo. This link is another few seconds off my 15 minutes of fame.
Happy Mother’s Day to Helen and Virginia.
There is no greater hero in the world than a mother. I am very fortunate to have two great moms in my life.
Be sure to thank the mom(s) in your life. Thank them early and often.
I have started the process of rebuilding my site with a new style. I am pleased with the overall structure of things so far. I still need to hammer out some of the details and clean up some of my HTML and CSS code.
Please feel free to use the comments feature to point out any glitches you may find. If you do comment I would like to know the browser and OS that you are using. Thanks.
During the past year or so I have focused a lot of time and energy into this site, which reflects events and thoughts that I have as an individual. However, there is a professional side to me and it is with pleasure that I direct your attention to the newly revamped Partition Software site.
The original Partition Software site has languished for too long with out being updated. Created at a time when I was learning DHTML, it made use of a fancy cascading menu, that unfortunately only worked when viewed thru Windows IE. And then only sometimes.
I am pleased with the lightness and simplicity of the new site layout. It satisfies my needs as a professional geek hoping to attract gainful attention. And it pleases my individual creativeness need.
Update (5.9.2003 @ 9:59 a) Currently the partitionsoftware.com site is unavailable as it seems I pulled the plug on my former hosting location too soon. The whois registry shows the new DNS information, but it hasn’t trickled out to all the local servers yet.
Update (5.9.2003 @ 8:50 p) It looks like the DNS changes have finally filtered down to the local level. I’m able to view the site again. And my POP3 accounts are working.
Like the rest of the Mac world I have upgraded to the latest release of iTunes, which includes a new pay-per-track music store. While I haven’t made any purchases yet it seems like Apple has hit the center of the target with this feature. It’s Napster only legal. In Napster’s heyday I participated and collected about 400 titles. With iTunes I can do this legally. Of course, it’d cost me $396 to duplicate my earlier collection. Hmm, this could be like the early days of AOL, when stories of massive monthly bills were common. Who’ll be the first person to rack up a 1000, 5000 or 10,000 dollar download charge in a month I wonder.
I also like the ability to collect and display the album art with iTunes 4. After doing some searching I discovered the easiest way to grab the image is drag-and-drop from Amazon. Select all the songs for an album in iTunes and then, using Safari, surf on over to Amazon and look the album up. Drag and drop the image there to the Selected Song panel. Wait while iTunes updates the tags for all selected tunes. Very slick.
Now if only the image would update to the currently playing title, rather than just showing the artwork for the selected title. Maybe there’s a preference setting somewhere that I missed.