If I Were King, March 2010 Edition

It wasn't too long ago that I heard about an 80 year old woman who went in to a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles office, renewed her drivers license, and promptly slammed her enormous Cadillac into a large tree at the edge of the parking lot. Inspectors on the scene said that she had to be going at least 50 mph to inflict that much damage to the car and to the tree. I repeat AT LEAST 50 MPH IN A SMALL PARKING LOT!I've often maintained that driving, though ingrained into the American psyche, is a privilege and not a right. Part of that privilege is maintaining your skills and not being a … [Read more...]

A Painful Month Without My Blog

Bloggers beware! Just in case you didn't know it, Goggle/Blogger.com has a policy against spam blogs. Spam blogs, as you might guess, are designed to direct its readers to some kind of commercial and/or scam site. I got snagged by this for the last month because Blogger has an automated method of detecting spam blogs. That is, they look for any blog post with lots and lots of web links. Two posts ago, I put a post with a lot of web links to cool websites. Unfortunately, the automated spam blog blocker isn't too smart and it marked me as spam simply due to the large number of web links in the … [Read more...]

The Passing of a Good Friend

I've been in a real funk lately since my good friend, Ken Henderson, passed away unexpectedly two Sundays ago. It's taken me this long to get into a place where I feel like I can blog again.Ken was 40, a father with young kids, and a happy marriage. I don't know the exact cause of his death, but it was very much a surprise. Ken was a SQL Server expert and author like me and we often shared a beer at the various conferences every year, as well as emailed and talked often.If you read my blog with any regularity, you might've noticed a link on the lower left entitled The Antichristian … [Read more...]

Vasovagal Syncope

Ok, it happened again.Twice now in the past two Februaries, I've had a situation where I had a terrible fainting problem that caused my heart to stop beating. It's known as vasovagal syncope (that's pronounced "sin-cope-ee") and it's actually rather common. About 1 in 200 people have it, but for 90% of them, it simply causes dizziness when they stand up quickly. For a few of them, it will cause outright fainting. And for a very few, it causes our hearts to stop.On the previous two occurrences, I was very sick with stomach flu and quite dehydrated. This is one of the triggers of vasovagal … [Read more...]

Those Dirty Rats Aren’t so Dirty After All

I've always been a big proponent of thinking expansively and in broader, more disconnected ways. A lot of people would call this thinking outside the box. But I tend to think of it as simply allowing more options into your set of alternatives. My biggest intellectual assets have been breadth of understanding, not depth. My biggest intellectual inspirations are books like "Connections", "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and "The Ghost Map". These books all very clearly show that the greatest innovations come from individuals with keen minds and wide, interdisciplinary skills. In other words, the … [Read more...]

Proof that the world DOES care about color-blindness

I've always accepted that color-blindness is one of those handicaps that no one ever thinks about. After all, it's not very common. And it's not usually very dangerous, despite the fact that red-traffic lights are very hard to see for someone with "daltonic vision". But it looks like someone out there really has given us color-blind people a second thought. Look at this:http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/flexscan/flexscan-lcd-monitor-for-the-color+blind-is-24-inches-326224.php Very cool!-Kev … [Read more...]

I survived (again)…

Ok, so my last post was about how I survived a terrible ordeal. So guess what happens one week after the posting on 3/4/07? You guessed it - it happened again.My daughter Katie (the youngest) came down with a nasty stomach flu on Friday night. I spent most of the night sitting up with her. She was so bad off that even Kelly felt compelled to come over and spend a few hours comforting her. She couldn't keep anything down and was throwing up everything we put in her. Despite constant hand washing, I somehow managed to get the virus. I had a headache by Saturday night and on Sunday morning … [Read more...]

Spam?!?

What is the deal with all of the spam lately? Usually, my spam blocker will catch a couple dozen in a single week with zero spam getting through to my regular work email account. But lately, I've been getting 3-6 spams per week into my regular email account and scores (as in 60-100) spam to my spam filter. It's enough to drive a sane person outta their mind!-Kev … [Read more...]