I just got an email security bulletin from Comcast (yay!) telling me how Comcast is "going to great lengths to help provide your family with a safe online experience". Gee, thanks guys.

One of their great lengths is offering McAfee virus-scanning software, which is widely known and hated in security circles as largely ineffective, intrusive, and a real performance-killer on a Windows PC. (It doesn't run on Linux-- shame.)

The best part of the Comcast email is the Global Security Threat Level indicator in the top right corner of the message:



I have no idea what that means, but apparently we're at Critical level. Yikes! Run for the hills! Hide the women and children!

Oh, and I can't unsubscribe from this junk. At the bottom in the fine print it saysIn other words, "Screw you, we're going to send you whatever bad offers and scary-sounding garbage we want and there's nothing you can do about it. Mwah ha haaaaa!"

Today we're going van shopping.

For years I swore I'd never drive a minivan. I mean, everyone knows they're just not... cool. I love my little two-door sporty car (if a Saturn can really be called "sporty") and don't really enjoy driving big vehicles. Heck, even Laralee's Eagle Vision is too big. So a minivan? Come on, it's big, clunky, gets poor gas mileage, and makes me look like a soccer mom or something.

Unfortunately my argument of "it's not cool" didn't hold much weight versus Laralee's much more logical "it's practical" counterpunch. It's true: as our kids get bigger they're squeezing a bit in the back seat. Long trips-- which we take several times a year for vacation and family visits-- get more challenging as we figure out how to pack the trunk. And any time we want to go to dinner or the pool or the store with family or friends (or kids' friends) we end up either taking two cars or packing about five kids into the back seat and hoping we don't get pulled over for something vaguely unsafe.

So yes, I finally came around to the "practical" viewpoint and I've been doing all kinds of research to find a van that'll be not only practical, but somewhat cool (as cool as these things can be, anyway) and also get good gas mileage and consumer reviews. In the end it looks like it's going to be the Honda Odyssey.



Of course everyone has an Odyssey. It seems like every other minivan is an Odyssey-- and half of those are gold. My friend Megan just bought a gold one and said it's impossible to find in the parking lot if you don't remember exactly where you parked, because there are always at least half a dozen others out there.

I figure if Laralee gets a new vehicle, it's only fair that I get one too. My choice: the Honda S2000.



A sweet, sweet little ride. But on the practicality scale it makes my Saturn look good. This thing is tiny and has only two seats (at least the Saturn pretends to have a back seat) and a trunk the size of a bread box. Still, loads of fun.

In the end, that nagging sense of practicality will probably win out and I'll end up with an Accord or something. They get about twice the gas mileage of the S2000 and actually have a back seat.

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror wrote an article about how his shiny new database server can't seem to use all of the memory that's installed on it, and after some digging he figured out the problem was in the operating system-- specifically, Windows Server 2008 Standard. I enjoyed reading his rant, which included:Yep. Awesome. Bite me, Microsoft, and all of your sixteen flavors of Vista. My operating system is free and runs circles around yours.

"Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television."

-- Paul Hawken

"I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world."

-- Adrienne Rich

I just read an interesting article entitled "Entrepreneurship Is Not Sexy" by Rob May. The article is summed up pretty well in this quote:That's spot-on. I've been an entrepreneur for ten years now, and I can say that for most of those ten years it's been a real grind. Late hours, weekends, pulling my hair out, pounding my head against a wall, worrying about where the next paycheck will come from, figuring out how to get deadbeat clients to pay up, taking on the role of the programmer, the sales guy, the marketeer, the accountant, and the manager. It's an unbelievable amount of work, and there have been many times when I was ready to throw in the towel, find a nice geeky programming job somewhere, and let someone else tell me what to do so I didn't have to figure it all out for myself.

Yet there are rewards, and it's those little things that make it all worthwhile in the end. Having a client thank me for a job well done, or praise one of my guys, or say they're surprised and immensely pleased that we were able to figure out such-and-such a problem that their other agency wouldn't touch... rising to the challenge and accomplishing something like that is a darn good feeling.

We don't win all the battles, and these days things are pretty tough. Rob May is right: entrepreneurship is definitely not sexy. But I'm glad I did it, and I hope I can continue walking this road.

A few weeks ago I found an old dusty box in the basement. It was labeled mysteriously as "Unorganized Pix". As it turns out, it was full of random snapshots from my whole life. Every Sunday afternoon for the past weeks I've been scanning them, and today I finished the lot.

The scans aren't the greatest quality, but then again, the photos themselves aren't the greatest quality. So I have some darkish fuzzy pictures-- nothing like what you get from a nice digital camera these days-- but they're still pretty funny.

Take, for example, the fact that in the early 80's everyone in my family wore absolutely hideous pants.

Tom and me:


Again:


Me and Kari:


I'm sure as I wade through these scans I'll find some more gems. Stay tuned.

Ahh, the joys of youth!