The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 259): Appliance Shopping

Made breakfast for #1GF! and watched Heroes on Netflix on Demand. Went back to Kam to get zeroed in on our appliances and then sat in a Dunkin Donuts and drank coffee while trying to figure out what we really wanted. Prices were reaching outrageous levels, and we were trying to figure out if it was worth the extra money just to change the temperature of food. We drove home, made our final decisions on what we wanted and watched more Heroes while we ate takeout.

Monday (Day 260): President’s Day Appliance Shopping

Got up and waded through the torrential rain (and 60 degree heat) to compare prices at Hancock Appliance. The prices got better, so we took them over to another store who soundly beat our best deal. We had the salesman write it all up and even got a free cherry pie because it was President’s Day.

On the way home, we were hungry from watching all the pork commercials on the Food Network while shopping for appliances, so we went to dinner at a restaurant that we refer to as “the old people place”. #1GF! wanted pork but changed her order to something else at the last minute because she thought that I wanted to order the pork. I changed her order back to pork and had the ribs. I also ordered her drink. The waitress must’ve thought that I was some beard-wearing control freak.

We went home and watched Heroes and then You Can Count on Me which was pretty much crap. The drifter brother comes home to the stable sister and messes things up. It was a trite plot coated in a slow pace without anything interesting to spice it up. The one thing that I never expected, nor wanted to see in my lifetime was Matthew Broderick in a sex scene. Thanks, but no thanks. D

Tuesday (Day 261): Buddy Love Plugin For WordPress

I spent the first part of the day working on Buddy Love, which is my latest plugin for Wordpress. I spent the rest of the day and night learning how Subversion works and setting it up so that my plugins can be hosted on WordPress’s site. When you don’t know the basic commands or concepts, even simple command line programs can be painful. Thankfully, I had it all figured out by 8PM and didn’t have to go to bed with an unsolved puzzle floating around in my head.

Wednesday (Day 262): Talking With Yale Appliance’s CEO

I swore that I would eat cherry pie for breakfast just because I thought it was a strange thing to do. Instead, I ate Cheerios and watched the Family Guy. I called the contractor, took a new route over to the appliance place to drop off a check, did the food shopping, and then worked on getting Better Blogroll into subversion. I ate 2 pieces of cherry pie for lunch because I thought it was strange and bad for me, but not too strange and bad for me. I smiled as I did it, feeling like it was something I shouldn’t be doing.

In the afternoon, I got an e-mail from the CEO of Yale Appliance about our bad experience there last week. I told him not to worry about it and traded a few e-mails. He seemed like a pretty normal guy, which isn’t normal for a CEO. For the rest of the afternoon, I worked on learning Inkscape and making buttons. I’m starting to see the world as a series of gradients, which makes me watch commercials for the graphics instead of skipping them for their content. #1GF! went out to dinner, so I forgot to eat until 9PM. I had a couple of hot dogs before she got home so that she wouldn’t think that I was retarded and incapable of fending for myself.

Thursday (Day 263): Buddy Love Gets A Cache

#1GF! caught me watching a craft show on TV that was so bad that I swore that I’d be able to have my own craft show one day. I don’t have a crafty bone in my body, but Jon’s Crappy Crafts would be a better show than that popsicle stick train wreck. Once #1GF! was off to work, I spent the morning fixing some redirect issues that had suddenly sprung up after my host took down my site while upgrading my server.

Once the config issues were done, I spent the majority of the day updating the Buddy Love plugin so that it caches its links instead of pulling them from sites on every refresh. This was something I thought about, but N0ia gave me the push I needed to explore it. What’s a geek if his peers think he’s inefficient? It took me all day, but once I figured out that I could access some built in features in WordPress to handle the caching, I released version 1.13. I have to say that it’s lightning fast compared to version 1.0, and, as you can see, it’s .13 times better.

I ate cherry pie for lunch for the second day in a row because I’m such a wild and crazy guy. I also had hot dogs for dinner for the second day in a row, indicating that I’m less wild and more unimaginative when eating alone. After dinner, I started reading through my hundreds of feeds only to find two interesting posts. Sifting information is not a particularly effective way to spend time unless someone is paying you to do it.

When #1GF! came home, she walked into the office just as I took a massive swig of Coke. While she was talking I knew that I had taken too much, and I knew that if I looked at her it was going everywhere. Because I’m a crazy pie-for-lunch wild man, I looked anyway. Almost immediately, clapped my hand over my mouth and started the process of calming down. Within minutes, the Coke was gone, and not a drop had hit the monitor or desk. I was so proud that I yelled out “YESSSS!” as if I had won something. #1GF! just looked at me and smiled, oddly pleased with her retarded choice of mate.

While laying in bed, I thought about taking down all the ads on my site because they bring in so little money that they’re almost a waste of space.

Friday (Day 264): Open Source Flash With Openlaszlo

I started the day by changing the graphic on my about page to look more like a Polaroid. I then spent the rest of the day looking into OpenLaszlo, a free, open source application for Flash development. I spent the whole day on it and don’t even have a lousy flaming logo to show for it.

By 5:30, my brain was out of virtual memory, so I called it a day just as a former co-worker IM’d me. He was trying to fix a website for his son’s baseball team, and I helped him out by converting his logo to vector graphics so that he could resize it without distortion. He then added his own touches and put it up on the site. It only took five minutes, and it was no bother, but I was glad to help.

Soon after #1GF! got home with pizza, so we continued watching Heroes on Netflix on demand while the snow swirled outside.

Saturday (Day 265): Mister Badass

Even though I typically cook on Sunday mornings, I decided to make #1GF! breakfast while she dusted and vacuumed. I mashed some blueberries into a bit of vanilla yogurt to tide her over until I could figure out what I was going to make. I eventually decided on a Greek omelet, which turned out perfect, if I do say so myself. Even though it uses up more bowls, a multi-course breakfast seems more fun than a one plate breakfast. #1GF! was worried that because I was cooking for her on Saturday, her traditional Sunday morning breakfast would consist of cereal. That level of worry comes only from a woman who loves her breakfast.

After a quick episode of Heroes, we went out to run some relatively unnecessary errands. It was in the mid-40’s, and the sun was shining off the melting snow, so I think the errands were merely an excuse to get out of the house. Before we got into the car, I saw my reflection in the car window and told #1GF! that I thought that my beard and cheap sunglasses warranted me being called “Mister Badass” for the rest of the day. She disagreed and asked when the beard was coming off. I replied with something to the effect of “Mister Badass isn’t taking questions right now” followed by a Cool Aid Man style “OH YEAAAAA!” She chooses this life every day. It’s remarkable.

#1GF! wanted to get a jump on house stuff, so we decided to go look at hardware for cabinets at Restoration Hardware because I thought it was supposed to be a great place for that sort of thing. We drove a half hour to get to the small mall that it was in, and avoided the free valet to park in their underground garage. We took the brass-finished, glass elevator to the third floor (why I didn’t pick the first floor seemed strange to #1GF!) and when the doors opened, we were immediately hit in the face by the smell of an overly cologned former co-worker. It was almost as if someone had spilled a bottle of the stuff or the mall was misting it from the ceiling. Here’s a rule for cologne and perfume: If I can smell it from more than three feet away, you’re wearing too much. If I can smell you before I see you, it’s shower time.

We made our way through the cologne fog to Restoration Hardware, and were disappointed that it seemed like a bad version of Pottery Barn. I then realized that memories I had of Restoration Hardware were actually memories of Expo, a higher end form of Home Depot which closed a number of years ago. We went through the store in about five minutes, which had a large number of male and female employees standing around its checkout like a pack of cats, their tails flicking at their lack of something to paw at. We headed back out into the nearly empty mall and down the escalator to the lower level. I turned around to talk to #1GF! and as I got to the bottom, we were met with a security guard.

“I normally have to yell at kids for doing that.”

“Huh?”

[mistaking my confusion for deafness] “I normally have to yell at kids for doing that.”

“Uh, Doing what?”

“Riding the escalator backwards like that.”

Let me just say that if you feel the need to chastise adults for riding the escalator the wrong way, I really don’t have time for you. If this was 1896, and the escalator was a new technology, I would expect the guardsman to instruct me in various methods of safety forsooth and forthwith. Because most urban Americans have been riding escalators their whole lives, I just gave the guy a laugh as nicely as I could and walked on. Once we were out of earshot, I asked #1GF!, “Didn’t he know that he was dealing with Mister Badass?” Because I tend to mumble, #1GF! heard, “dibbly humbly mumbly ass?” By the third repetition, Mr. Badass had grown weary of repeating himself and suggested we leave the mall.

On the way home, #1GF! asked Mr. Badass if he wanted to go to the Abington Ale House for lunch. He didn’t answer. She asked again. He didn’t answer. When they were almost on top of the exit, Mr. Badass said “Sure,” and #1GF! abruptly turned off the exit.
“Why did you make me do that?!”
Mister Badass just laughed. “You act like I’m in control of your actions. Ohhh Yeaaa.” #1GF! was not amused with Mister Badass.

When we got to the restaurant, they were playing a 70’s channel and #1GF! and Mr. Badass had an argument over whether a particular band was called “Wings” or “Paul McCartney and The Wings”. I’m not going to tell you who said what, but it should be noted for the person in the conversation who didn’t write this, that the band is called “Wings”. When our order came, I looked over at an old sign for Abington, Massachusetts hanging on the wall. It said, “Leaving Abington. Home of Many Beavers”. I asked #1GF! if it was real. Because I have the maturity level of a twelve year old, she spent the next five minutes convincing me while I laughed. I guess the town motto was taken from the Native American name for the area, Manamooskeagin, which means “Land of many beavers”. Had I known this as a teenager, I may have visited way more often.

When we got home, #1GF! wanted to relax, so I broke out the Playstation for the first time in long, long time. I never play anymore because video games are a bad habit for the unemployed, but I decided to throw in Need For Speed Underground. It had been so long, that I had forgotten how to play, but I was soon back in full swing, destroying property and breaking through police barricades with my black, tinted Evo VIII. At the cutoff time of 8PM, I put it away so that we could watch Heroes and Big Love together before bed.

What I Learned

• I’m no guru, but I’ve learned quite a bit of design / CSS / Graphic stuff that I take for granted.
• I learned that you have to install Subversion to use it (it was a big duh).
• I learned how to host plugins at Wordpress with Subversion.
• I learned about WordPress’s internal caching and RSS fetching code: Fetch_RSS
• That Abington, Mass is not only nicknamed “Bingtown”, but it’s motto is “Manamooskeagin” or “the land of many beavers.”
• I learned that Moonymosqueegan is actually pronounced “Manamooskeagin”
• I learned that the CEO of Yale Electric is on top of PR and damage control.
• There is a lot of life left in the PS2.
• That eating pie for lunch, wearing a bushy beard, and calling yourself “Mister Badass” doesn’t really make you a badass.
• That my ads are pretty useless due to my low traffic. Like a supermarket, making money on the web requires high volume traffic to make up for the low profit margins.
• I re-learned how to play video games.

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