Photo: Taiyo FUJII

Well. Tomorrow afternoon, Laurin arrives at the MSP airport and moves in. In theory, we're ready for him to move in. Or, at least we're as prepared as a couple of people in our situation can be.

However, the last week has been a test for just how many things we can try to cram into 7 days. Shelly started a new job on Monday and much of the rest of the week has been filled with paperwork, errands, cleaning and pretty much running around.

To manage that running around, we've created a sea of "to do" lists and have been crossing items off of them like mad. Performing the tasks themselves hasn't been much different than normal. However, the actual making of and striking through items on those lists has been made slightly more enjoyable because I've been doing it with my new Safari Lamy pen filled with brown Noodler's ink.
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Photo: flattop341

The power outage earlier in the week managed to coincide with an email server problem. I worked through the original problem, but brought attention to the email server and made me think about the things that I had on my fix-this-when-you-can list.

Attention is often like that. I've said repeatedly about marketing that if you get the attention of your customers, you'd better be prepared for it. If they've been irritated with your service and you send them a flyer or a bill, you've just given them a reminder to call and complain.

Anyway, since moving to the Linux mail server, I haven't had POPFile doing my spam filtering, and I've really missed it. I used to run it on my Windows mail server, but just never got around to setting it up on the Linux one.

So, last night, I decided to set it up. There were a couple of tricks to it that I thought were worth sharing.
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We're only about a week away from our exchange student, Laurin arriving. I wanted to write about that whole experience, and invite him to join me in talking about the experience. However, I don't want that to take over this site, or to radically shift the focus and rhythm here (which I like).

So, this is just a quick note to point to a separate Wordpress install I set up to talk about the cultural exchange we're going to be experiencing.

If you're interested in what the year hosting an exchange student is like, head on over. Otherwise, it'll probably only show up here when it makes sense.

Photo: Brian

Ever since my appendectomy, when I started watching Craig Ferguson when I couldn't sleep, I've had his show on Tivo subscription. I no longer watch it when it's actually on, but catch it in the morning or after work, before dinner.

A week or 2 ago, Craig had a guest on and their conversations turned to a strange concept, that of having low self esteem and a big ego. He summed that idea up in one of my new favorite phrases:

I am the piece of crap at the center of the universe.

He then commented on how it wasn't something he really thought was out there. They quickly moved on and I just filed the amusing phrase for the exceptionally rare possibility that I'd ever get to use the phrase appropriately.

Then, I read this article about kids who are constantly told they are smart, wonderful people and, as a result, underestimate their own abilities and underachieve in fear of failure.

In other words, these kids feel like they're the piece of crap at the center of the universe.

Who knew that that phrase would prove relevant within a few weeks of hearing it?

I've long felt that the people who faced adversity and overcame it are nearly universally more interesting and more capable of tackling the problems that life throws at you.

And, I'm reminded of the fact that Mensa is full of people who are off-the-chart smart, but have done nothing extraordinary with that intellectual capability, while many "average" folks do amazing things.

Just a quick note during lunch. Last night, about 11:30pm, the general hum and whir of our house: air conditioning, white noise machines, fans, computers, aquarium pumps, etc. all gave a simultaneous whine easing into silence as the thunderstorm crossing the state waged war with Xcel Energy's electrical infrastructure.

The storm dropped some much needed rain, so I'm OK with the inconvenience. However, that doesn't change the fact that we didn't really get much sleep last night. It was overly hot and way too quiet except for the sound of the dogs. Last night was a great reminder of why we use a white noise machine. It's amazing how much scratching, shaking, chewing and, ugh, licking those 2 manage to do in the course of one night and how loud it is in the dead silence.

This morning, the power still wasn't on, making a major change to the morning routine, including candles and trying in vain, due to habit, to turn the lights on about 425 times.

All morning from my client site, I've been pinging my home network to see if the power came back on. The firewall and router (and most of the rest) are set to come back on if they lose power and, a few minutes ago, they appear to have done that.

So, if you were expecting something from me this morning, I'm sorry. I didn't get my normal early morning work session in before heading out to work on site, so I'm going to have to get to that backlog when I get home.

I'm just glad it is back on and we won't have to go through the week-long ordeal from a couple of years ago.