Blogging @ csb7.com

OK - So, I've been a stay at home dad now for over a half-year and I should have plenty of time to post, yar? Nar! Honestly, the only reason why I have any free time right now is because Mom has the kids for a few minutes so I can finally finish up this post that I've been working on for literally months. So what have I been up to?

1. Fatherhood
2. See #1

Honestly, that's about it. My plan to aggressively code for freelance projects in the off hours took a sever hit within the first few days of this role change circa January '08. Office work left me mentally drained. Full-time fatherhood leaves me physically drained.

So how has it been so far? No doubt it's been fun. As I tell anyone who will listen, whether you're a stay at home dad, a normal working-man, or even a divorcee with visitation writes, fatherhood is an excuse to act like the 13-y-o dork that still lives inside you. Cracking fart jokes, wrestling on the floor, wearing a clown wig - fatherhood, to me any ways, is about showing your kids the fun side of life and being a kid again, recapturing that sense of wonder from discovery and that lackadaisical, hakuna matata sense of time. Well, that and screaming your head off because the kids seem to have lost their ears/brains over breakfast. That is fatherhood.

I guess I can't say that's all that's been happening around here. Since the Summer months have come (at least according to the calendar if not the actual weather...) things have ramped up. People talk about having Seasonal Mood Disorder, but honestly I think it should be called "You Live In New England". Summer makes me want to stay here forever. The other 11 months remind me why I probably/hopefully won't...

Any ways, Summer has ramped up our social lives. We went to an awesome wedding at a summer camp (marshmallows and weird-smelling cabins included!), went to Maelin's first dance recital, celebrated our 6th anniversary, saved a bird from certain death-by-cat (not once but twice!), have been to the lake a few times, had the family over, etc., etc.

Freelance work has actually been pouring in as well despite my time for completing said work. That has resulted in all too many 20-hour coding binges during which I still managed to neglect some of my favorite clients (Sorry Steve!). My Mom's off for the summer though and taking the girls a few days a week for the next few months so hopefully I can catch up. Oh, and Firefox 3 launched last week but while I managed to get an updated Clean & Close patched to work with it, it's currently still waiting for someone from Mozilla to review it so it's not available for auto-update yet. (But you can download it directly here)

OK, I got code's to write. Until next year...

I've submitted an update for Clean and Close to make it compatible with FF3, but it's been in the Mozilla review queue for near a week now. I hear they are pretty backed up so it could take a little while longer before it's available for auto-update. Until then, you can download it directly right... here.

I'm also thinking of updating it with a couple of extended features. If you have any requests leave a comment below.

I'm still working on the update of Clean & Close for Firefox 3, which was released today. I've hit a small problem that I can't seem to get around, the details of which I posted in the Mozillazine forums for help. So far no responses. If anyone knows someone with development experience who could lend a few minutes to troubleshoot please have them get in touch using the contact form on this site.

A few months back I came away from TicketMaster.com with a really bad taste in my mouth, and 2 really expensive tickets in my pocket.

Unlike a traditional e-commerce site where you have time to evaluate your purchase before checking out, TicketMaster.com has unrealistic time limits on each step of the checkout. After searching for tickets, here's what they give you:

Confirm seating selection: 2 minutes
Log in or sign up for a new account: 1 minute

Complete purchase: 2 minutes

In the first step, it took nearly 2 minutes just to pull up the web site of the venue, find their seating chart, load their ridiculously slow Seating Chart Java applet, enter the section and row of the seats that TicketMaster was holding for me, and wait another 20 seconds for the 360-degree panorama to load. So by the time I did that and saw that they were really good seats I had just enough time to go back and click Continue. I had already been burned once by the time limit, so it felt like a pretty high-presure sale situation the second time around.

Next screen: sign up for an account in 1 minute. 7 fields (one of which is hidden until the end), 1 minute total, 8.5 seconds per field. That's crazy.

Last step: Checkout, 2 minutes, including billing and shipping info. Have you ever been rushed trying to enter a credit card #? You are guaranteed to make a mistake.

The girls have both been sick for a couple of days: feverish, head colds, congestion. You know, the really oozy kind of sick. Hopefully we've just hit the zenith in the cycle with the barf, splat! that just happened on the couch and in the bathroom. The smell of vomit is now competing with the smell of Febreeze.

We were going to go into Boston tomorrow for the NE Boat Show and to the aquarium or children's museum, but I think that's going to have to be post poned. I have to go wash the vomit off of my socks now...