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 266): Fog Light Failure

I started the day by throwing on a hat and sneaking out to change some lights on #1GF!’s car when she went into the shower. I was trying to surprise her, but it didn’t go well. One of the screws was so rusted that it crumbled as I tried to loosen it, so I decided to leave that light alone until I had more time to spend on it. I was supposed to change one of her fog lights, but both of them were out, making me think that there was some trick to turning them on. After fiddling with every control I could find, I gave up and returned to the house to #1GF! about the magic secret to turning on her fog lights. There was no secret. I had done everything right, but both the lights were out. I decided to hide my shame by making #1GF! breakfast.

It was in the 40’s, so we went to the house to spend fifteen minutes shoveling out from Friday’s snowstorm before heading to the auto parts store to pick up another fog light. When we walked in the door, a lady asked us if we needed any help. Because I have a beard and testicles, I wouldn’t ask for help in an auto parts store unless the project involved something that I really shouldn’t be doing. #1GF! went for the help before I could protest, and the clerk found the bulb for us while I followed along like a big lug.

When we got the bulb home, we figured out that she had given us the wrong bulb, so I had failed a second time. To emasculate me even more, I made two quiches for dinner. If there was a site called thisguydoesntdeservehisbeard.com, I would’ve been front page news, most likely in a photoshopped tutu.

Monday (Day 267): Cabinets

I wrote my Life of Riley post for half of the day and then went to see the cabinet folks at night. We are way over budget on our cabinets, and I think that we wear the poor cabinet people out.

Tuesday (Day 268): Re-writing The WordPress Link Importer

I woke up with a headache, so I decided that I’d sit down and rewrite some core WordPress code that I didn’t like. That’s sort of a haughty endeavor, don’t you think? The problem was that I didn’t like the way that WordPress import function only imported blogrolls into a single category. I have hundreds of links in my feed reader that are all categorized nicely. When I import into WordPress, I have to manually recategorize each link. It makes updating my blogroll a major pain in the ass. I wanted the importer to read the categories that were in my .opml file and categorize them for me automatically.

After a couple of hours of trying to figure out exactly how the importer worked, I asked myself why I was pouring so much effort into something that I wasn’t getting paid for. The only answers that I could come up with were that someone else was probably having the same problem, and I really didn’t have anything better to do. I took a break for a coder’s lunch of Pringles and Coke, and decided that I should continue on.

Figuring how the importer worked took me half the day, figuring out how to implement my ideas took another quarter, and testing it took another quarter. When I was nearly done, I noticed a copyright on the file from the original author, so I shot an e-mail over to Mike Little who wrote the original WordPress code. He assured me that the copyright was only there because the code hadn’t been updated since the beginning of time, which made me wonder if anyone actually used the WordPress Link Manager and had the same complaints.

By the time 8PM rolled around, I had the thing working nicely and was proud as hell. Unfortunately, without knowing what it’s like to interpret and revise other people’s code is, it was nearly impossible for #1GF! to share in my accomplishment. Meh.

Wednesday (Day 269): Persistence

I spent the first half of the day on the writeup on my Wordpress hack, and the second half playing around in forums. The second half was a waste of time, and I probably would’ve been better off if I just walked away from the PC to do something else. Instead, I started thinking about my FineTune Friday playlist and staring at things around the office as if they held any interesting qualities.

I think sometimes, giving up is better than plugging away aimlessly, but I stuck with it and decided to work on a hack to give Blogger users a random blogroll that Sarah had been looking for. I haven’t used Blogger in years, so I had to figure out how Blogger served up its blogrolls before I could get the hack working. It ended up taking a few hours to figure out.

Thursday (Day 270): FineTune Friday: Psi Fi

I spent the morning working on my FineTune playlist, and then realized that the theme was “science fiction” and not “outer space”. I thought of the friggin’ theme, so you’d think I’d be able to stick to it. The realization made me give up at about noon, not knowing whether to delete all the non sci-fi, yet space related tracks, or to have a looser definition of the theme. That thought was enough to make me realize that I’m wasting too much time on things that don’t matter.

Friday (Day 271): Fog Light Redemption

I started the day by making a second attempt at fixing #1GF!’s fog lights before she went to get her car inspected. I knew she wouldn’t stop worrying about it until it was done, but I was almost positive that a fog light wouldn’t be a reason to fail an inspection. I thought about letting her go to the inspection and fixing it later, but then I thought, “Why not prove you’re useful and get out there to the parking lot and fix the bulb. It’s seven degrees, but it’s only five minutes in the cold, and you’ll look like a hero instead of a worthless slouch who is too lazy to help out his woman with simple things that you can do for her.” On that thought, I went out and replaced the bulb. It was no big deal, but I don’t want to give my woman any reason to think I’m any more useless than I really am.

After #1GF! got off to work, I answered my e-mails and got sucked into Inkscape for a bit. I went out and did the food shopping (while listening to Amon Amarth) and spent the rest of the day reading some of my RSS feeds. I cleaned out about ten of them because they haven’t provided a speck of useful information in a long, long time. Most of the deletions came from the blogging category, and I’m staring to think that there are more people writing about how to make money blogging than there are people who really make money blogging.

Saturday (Day 272): Bring Out The GIMP

We woke up in the middle of a small snow storm, but it wasn’t nearly bad enough to keep us from visiting a granite warehouse to look at slabs that were auditioning to play the part of our kitchen counter for the next few years. Most granite warehouses have short hours during the week and close up by noon on Saturday, so we only hit a couple of places before we ran out of time for the day. I had no idea how many different kinds of granite there are, but we had at least ten types make the first cut, most of which were expensive, and none of which thrilled us.

On the way home, I asked #1GF! to stop off at the library so that I could pick up a book on GIMP that I had seen. GIMP is a free graphics program that is similar to Photoshop in it’s power and flexibility. I promised that I knew what I wanted, so it was agreed that I would run in by myself, leaving #1GF! in the car. It may be funny to have to promise things like that, but I have a tendency to wander from subject to subject, dragged along by a curious mind and a terrible sense of time.

When I returned within ten minutes as promised, I held up my choice, “GIMP: From Novice to Professional, and said, “See? That wasn’t so bad.” #1GF! just stared at me with a WTF? look.

“What?”

“You’re going to do gimp?”

[realizing that #1GF! thought that I was going to be weaving bracelets like a kid at summer camp] “It’s the latest craze. The kids these days love it.”

#1GF is still staring and possibly wondering about her choice of mate.

“You know, I figure that I’ll sell them on E-bay for like a buck, and maybe weave some beads in there so that the kids will, you know, maybe give me like two bucks.”

#1GF! moves from processing to accepting and sighing.

“I’m telling you. It’s a good business. Look right here. [pointing to the book cover] I can go from Novice to Professional and rake it in. I just need to go to the craft store to pick up some of those plastic strips and maybe some beads.”

“Oh you are so weird.”

“I’m telling you, it’s a good business. I’ll be a pro-gimper in no time.”

I was dying on the inside, but I let the joke simmer. From about 4PM until 8PM, I played video games while #1GF! napped. Whenever she regained consciousness, I offered her the book to give her an opportunity to reveal the joke. She refused it at every turn, no matter how many times I offered or how awesome I told her GIMP was.

We ended the day with me making Mexican food for dinner, with my ruse still in play. The joke wasn’t revealed until the next morning when I said, “What the hell is a digital imaging chapter doing in my gimp book? How is this going to help my weaving?” and held up the book for her to see. I hate forcing punchlines, but I was starting to feel like a liar.

What I Learned:

• Spending a small amount of effort to fix things for someone is much better than feeling like a lazy sloth.
• WordPress core files are not above hacking.
• Blogger is uniquely not fun to hack.
• Non-geeks don’t necessarily think of graphics when they hear “gimp”.
• There are way too many choices in granite.
• Sometimes plugging away without direction is a waste of time, but sometimes, it’s the lack of direction that leads you to places that you wouldn’t normally have gone.
• My ads are a waste of time and they’re probably coming down until I can generate a lot more traffic.
• When it’s most confusing and frustrating, sometimes it’s only raw persistence that will lead to a solution. Giving up, although a time-saver, never leads to a solution.
• I waste a lot of time on things that don’t matter to anyone else.
• If you’re not doing things that you enjoy when you’re unemployed, you’re doing it wrong.
• If scripting is what you do for fun in your spare time, you haven’t lost track of your inner geek.

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