It's been cold and foggy. The pollution has reach national records in some places in Utah. Every morning, my throat is dry and scratchy. I'm getting tired of the inversion. I don't mind the cold much, but the air is getting to me.
The week was busy again at work. There were a lot of issues with new regulations out of the states. Thursday one of the primary routers apparently went berserk, and it took out all the routers and the network for about an hour and a half. Earlier in the week the virus scanner on the e-mail server decided the Internet was a virus, and refused to get or send e-mail. The IT guys had to disable it. Even the vendor is not sure what is going on. Friday my carpool mate told me the department had turned over the source for most of the programs used to get data in and out of the system to the company in India. I had a few profane words over that. Not because they are now maintaining it, but because most of it has my name as the author. This means the liaison will be taking up my time answering the why questions.
Rachel and Patrick had basketball games Saturday. Patrick had a lot of fun, although he didn't get the ball much. One of the kids on his team has more skill than the rest, and kind of takes it over. Rachel is on a team with a girl who dominated last year. In the game Saturday she started to do the same, but then another girl started to do the same thing. The girls are older, so there is a lot more team work. Rachel did get the ball and shot at the hoop a couple of times. She is rusty and needs practice, though.
President Bush outlined his plan for the space program. It sounds good, and maybe my wish for manned exploration to resume will happen. He didn't drum up much money for it, and with all the other things going on, I wonder if it will happen.
The ship's web site has had a ton of updates, and there is more to do. As with most web sites, including this one, it's an ongoing task. I did put in links to dummy CSS pages on my site, and wrote a script to extract useful information from that. This will allow me to evaluate the changes to the site, and make it better.
I have started the Enterprise reviews again, but with the number of episodes the sliding menu does not work very well. It's a neat idea, but the flaw with it is that if there is more than five items, it is too slow. I could move the reviews to a table of links, but that just does not appeal to me. I need to look around some more for ideas.
I downloaded Eric Gunnerson's Regex Workbench. It looks like a neat tool to play with regular expressions. As I said in another entry, these are not my forte. I don't know anyone who is adept with these. They are very useful in picking elements out of a stream of data, though. I do a lot of processing on log files and data streams, so this is something that can help out a lot.
Carl Stark gave me a jar of Star Trek quotes at the BBQ. Unfortunately, I left them at Jef's house that night. I finally picked them up at the senior officers meeting Friday. The first one I picked out was from "The Bonding", where Picard tells Jeremy that as long as he is on the Enterprise, he is not alone. This is a good thought to start the year out on. They are popular with Rachel. I let her pick out a few since it is the seventeenth and I need to catch up. She didn't understand the Rules of Acquisition.
April told me that another mother got upset after Thomas went to the bathroom by himself. I guess she was not ready for him to grow older. That emphasizes to me that you need to take time and enjoy kids at the age they are now. This is important since I get caught up in what will happen in the future and forget about right now. Another mother told us a boy her son and Patrick hang out with at school is a troublemaker. He was at Patrick's party, and he seemed ok. Patrick's teacher is of the opinion that they are boys, and a little wild at times. I don't want to tell Patrick he can't play with this boy, but I do try to impress on him that if someone is doing something Patrick knows is wrong, he should not be joining in. He can't go through life avoiding everyone that seems bad.
Finally, Rachel asked me if the Ticonderoga was going to do another Fourth of July parade this year. She had fun last year, and really wants to do it again.
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