Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

I got a haircut yesterday and apparently the person cutting my hair had never encountered anyone with a beard before. As she was finishing up she asked “What do you want me to do with your sideburns? They seem to be connected.” ^_^

I made an addition to The Magic World of Names website I did for Dr. Lawson last October. The new section is titled ‘Quiz on Words from Names’ and includes a new quiz to take.

As I often realize I have too much random pop-culture info stuffed into my brain, it didn’t come to a surprise to me to see this: Pop Culture’s look at Grimace (found via Anil Dash).

This answered the burning (not really) question of what happened to the McDonaldland crew. I actually do remember the various characters and commercials and such. What I don’t remember seeing is the horrifying 4-armed Grimace. I think I would have remembered that, or perhaps it was just too much and my brain has locked that memory out to preserve my sanity. However all this reading about Grimace has made me focus on getting a yummy (not really) McDonald’s shake. So I guess as a commercial characterization of a food-like product Grimace still does his job.

Isabella turned 5 this past week. It’s hard to believe. I really can’t explain where the time went or how my little baby is now a full-fledged kid. Not a baby, not a toddler, but a kid. Her own little person. Her little sister is now about the same age that Bella was when Gilli was born. Wow. That’s all I can say. It’s truly a blessing, amazing, and breath-taking.

View the entire photo set.

So while I was taking a break just now I was reading through Lifehacker and came across this comment by RHazlett:

“Really engage yourself in what you are doing. Be aware and mindful of the current task at hand.

An old Zen story relates to this very well. It states that if you are going to wash the dishes, then wash the dishes. Don’t hurry and wash the dishes to get to your tea, because you’ll always be thinking of the next thing in line and not enjoying your life.”

This seemed really applicable. It is too easy to forget to enjoy the moment and live in the future. But when the future comes it turns into the moment only to be replaced by a different future. Constantly looking forward (or backwards) makes it impossible to ever enjoy anything.

I have tried to breathe some life into my oldest tech-related side project the Chautauqua County Information Technology Professional Association. I find myself going full circle, since i started it as a tech blog, then moved to a bulletin board forum, then added a blog to it, hacked together a CMS, moved to a full CMS, and now am back to a blog and forum format. I am now using WordPress and bbPress for the blog and forum software respectively. I almost didn’t renew the domain a few months ago since the community had gone stagnant and I didn’t really dedicate the time to keep it alive. Dave convinced me not to let it go, so now I am trying to get it going again. I guess I’ll see how it goes.

I don’t backup my data regularly. I imagine I am in the majority here. However, I just had a major/minor incident at work today that made me reach for the DVD-R’s. A utility supposedly designed to remove a specific application instead deleted most of my files and settings. Luckily I have been anticipating reformatting that computer since I am running the Vista beta on it. However I did lose some documents and a lot of email I had saved to the hard drive but hadn’t backed up recently. That is the minor incident, since I could have lost a lot more. The major part of this incident is just the inconvenience of not having my Vista machine up and running and having to reinstall everything again.

Today’s lesson: Back up frequently. If you haven’t in a while, do it today. I know I will.

I uploaded more pictures from Christmas to my Flickr site.

And of course, they loved all their presents, but true to the cliche, the next morning they played with the big box ^_^