1. Buy broccoli when you know there is already more than enough in the fridge.
2. Go for a run.  Cool off.  Take off clean pillow case and replace with T-shirt.  Cover with clean pillow case.
3. When driving, ask if we should go the wrong way down a one-way street.
4. For 15 years, every Sunday that you wife suggests going to a museum, express surprise that museums are open on Sunday’s.
5. For 15 years, occasionally suggest going to the local book store on Sunday.  Express surprise that they are not open on Sunday’s (thanks a lot Blue Laws!).
6. Use 20 points to do a 3 point turn. 
7. On a cool early Fall afternoon, walk into the room and turn on the A/C.  Complain that it’s cold.  When wife says, "then why did you turn that on, silly" and gets up to turn it off, grab the warm spot she had on the couch.  Bonus points if she does not realize you did it until much later.
8. Open up a can of delicious white albacore tuna and eat it straight from the can, in bed, at night.
9. Go into the kitchen while wife is eating dinner, open up the cutlery drawer and push utensils around until wife screams, "what are you looking for!"
10. On receipt of new business cards, secretly place them all around the house: Under the bed, in pillow cases, inside coffee cups, in her purse, in coat pockets, car glove compartments, the pantry — anywhere you can think of. 
11. Write blog entries about your wife.
12. Wake up.
13. When walking the streets of New York City, be on the alert for "crusty" objects on the ground.  Keeping in mind your wife’s special fears, reach down as if to pick one up up and ask, "hmm, I wonder what that is?" (Be prepared for wife to body slam you as if she’s a secret service agent protecting the President  from a sniper or you’ll find yourself laying on your back on the sidewalk).
14. Drive twice around a parking lot looking for space.  You know you’ve really hit pay dirt when your son in the back seat yells, "Oh no! He’s doing it again!"
15. Write "top 10" lists that don’t have 10 items.

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Bonus wife joke:

Two male co-workers go out to lunch.  One of them tells the other, "I let loose an embarrassing Freudian slip the other night."

"A Freudian slip?  What’s that?"

"Well, when we finished eating, the waitress came by and asked how we liked our meals. I meant say, ‘I loved the chicken breast’ but instead I said ‘I loved your breasts’.  I was so embarrassed."

"Ah," his co-worker replied.  "I had the same thing happen to me this weekend with my wife.  We were eating breakfast I meant to ask her to pass the butter, but instead I screamed at her, ‘You ruined my life!’"

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About six years ago, my four-year-old son and I were upstairs watching a Discovery channel "shark attacks" special (possibly this one).  He was very young at the point and I was always worried what he might see on a show like this and how he might take it.  I didn’t want him to develop, for example, any special fears of the water or blab something inappropriate to his friends and possibly cause his baby friend network to come crashing down.

Discovery handles these kinds of subjects very well.  It’s not about creating a fear of something, but rather to show how unusual it is for sharks to attack humans. 

So, we’re watching it and there is this one particularly scary attack involving a small girl.  As Discovery is building the drama of the attack, my son (who has always been extremely jumpy anyway), is getting very excited.  I make some noises about how unusual it is for sharks to attack people, and how bad the poor girl must feel.  I’m trying to explain that people recover from these events and become stronger for it.  However, I had misinterpreted his excitement.  He was not worried about the girl at all.  Instead, while clapping his hands, he tells me, "The sharks love it!  It’s terrific.  It’s wonderful.  Its a DREAM COME TRUE!"

I thought this was hilarious, but also very disturbing.  On the one hand, I was glad — even a little proud — that he could have strong empathic feelings, cross-species though they may be.  As humans, we need to develop our "empathic muscles" so speak or you’ll end up like this guy 🙂  On the other hand, he was feeling cross-species empathy toward a species who was exhibiting behavior inimical to his own.  I was really struggling with this when the narrator used the word "paradigm".  My son picked up on that and asked me what that meant.

That’s not such an easy word to describe to a four year old, but I gave it a try.  When I think of the word "paradigm", Thomas Kuhn is never far from my thoughts.  I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions back at Lafayette and for better or for worse, the word "paradigm" is pregnant with extra meaning for me.  (Sort of like the word "contact" after hearing a Movie Phone voice tell me where I could see that movie [I thought the book was better]; I always say to myself, "CONTACT!" whenever I see or hear someone say "contact").

Anyway, I’m trying to explain to him a Kuhnian definition, that it’s "a historical movement of thought" and that it’s a "way of thinking with a number of built-in assumptions that are hard to escape for people living at that time."  Of course, you can’t talk like to a four-year old, so I’m trying to successively define it to smaller pieces and feeling rather proud of myself as I do so.  (I just knew that someone outside of college would care that I had read Kuhn!).

I’m just warming to the task when he interrupts me.  Waving his hand in my general direction and never taking his eyes off another brutal shark attack, he just says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blah, blah, blah.".

So much for that 🙂

At that point, I decided to run away, rhetorically speaking, sit back, and enjoy watching sharks attack humans with my son.

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Back near 1999, I was spending a lot of weeks out in Santa Barbara, CA, working for a client, leaving my poor wife back here in New Jersey alone.  I dearly love my wife.  I love her just as much today as I did when she foolishly married me 1,000 years or so ago.  Somewhere along the line, I coined a phrase, "special fear", as in "Samantha has special fears."  She as a special fear of "bugs", which to her are not flies or ladybugs, but rather microbes.  She’s afraid of this or that virus or unusual bacteria afflicting our son, or me, but never really herself.  (She is also specially afraid of vampires, miniature evil dolls (especially clowns) and submarine accidents; she has out-grown her special fear of people dressed in Santa Claus outfits).

One day, my co-worker and I decided to drive up into the nearby mountains near Ohai.  At one point, we got out of the car to take in the scene.  When we got back into the car, I noticed that a tick was on my shoulder.  I flicked out the window and that was it.

That night, I told her about our drive and mentioned the tick.  The conversation went something like this:

S: "Oooo!  Those are bad.  They carry diseases."

P: "Well, I flicked it out the window."

S: "They are really bad though. They can get under your skin and suck blood and transfer bugs.  You better check your hair and make sure there aren’t any in your head!"

P: In a loud voice: "My God!  CAN THEY TAKE OVER YOUR MIND???"

S: Literally reassuring me: "No, they’re not THAT bad."

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We bought our first (and only) "luxury" car back when hurricane Floyd nailed the east coast of the U.S.  We got a LOT of rain here in New Jersey and several days passed before life returned to normal.  Just before Floyd struck, we made an offer for a used Volvo 850 GL and after Floyd struck, drove it home.

It was our first car with a CD player.  Like most new car owners, we went a little CD crazy, revived our dormant CD collection and went on long drives just to listen to CD’s in the car.  Like all fads, this passed for us and we ended listening to the same CD over and over again.  In our case, it was Jesus Christ Superstar. 

One of the (many) brilliant pieces in that rock opera is sung by the establishment religious types, led by Caiaphas, the "High Priest".  They sing their way into deciding how to handle the "Jesus problem" and Caiaphas directs them to the conclusion that "Jesus must die".  The refrain on the song is "Just must die, must die, must die, this Jesus must die".  You hear that refrain a lot in that piece.

At the time, my son was about three years old.  You can probably see where this is going. 

I came home from work one day and my son is in the living room playing with toys and humming to himself.  I’m taking off my jacket, looking through the mail and all my usual walk-in-the-door stuff and I suddenly realize that he’s just saying, not really singing: "Jesus must die, must die, must die."  I was mortified.  I could just see him doing that while on one of his baby play dates at a friend’s house — probably the last play date with that baby friend.

We pulled that CD out of the Volvo after that 🙂

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So, this morning, my son is determined to see an age-thirteen restricted Halo 3 video at Gamespot.  I’m outside shoveling snow, so I’m not there to help or hinder.  Necessity is the mother of invention and all that … he  has a eureka! moment.  He realizes that even though Gamespot wants him to enter his real birth date, he can actually enter any birth date he wants.  Once he realized that, he made himself old enough to see the video.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this 🙂

At my first job out of college in 1991, I was lucky to to work for a manufacturing company with 13 locations, not including its corporate HQ in New Jersey.  I joined just when the company was rolling out a new ERP system.  We were a small IT department of about ten people altogether, two of whom Did Not Travel.  Part of the project involved replacing IBM System 36 boxes with HP hardware and HPUX.  Everyone used green tubes to access the system.

The project rolls along and I’m sent down to Baltimore with a new co-worker, Jeff.  Our job was to power up the Unix box, make sure the O/S was running, install the ERP system, configure the ERP, train people on the ERP and do custom work for folks on the spot.  (This was a dream job, especially coming straight out of college).  Before we could really get off the ground, we needed to unpack all the green tubes, put them on desks and wire them.  And the best part was that we had to put the RJ11 connectors on ourselves.

For some reason that I never understood and actually never thought to ask about at the time, we had had some contracting company come along and run cable throughout the plant, but we didn’t have them put on the connectors.  So, there was a "patch box" with dozens of of unlabeled cables in the "computer room" and these snaked around the building to various places in the building.

We worked our way through it over the course of a weekend, testing each wire, putting on a connector (making sure it was straight vs. crossed), ensuring the bit settings on the green tubes and printers were correct,  labeling wires, making sure that "getty" was running correctly for each port and probably a thousand other things that I’ve suppressed since then.  It all came together quite nicely.

But, there was one important cable that we couldn’t figure out.  The plant in Baltimore had a relationship with a warehousing location in New Jersey.  Some orders placed in Baltimore shipped out of that location.  There were two wires that we had to connect to the HPUX box: a green tube and a printer.  The green tube was easy, but the printer turned into a three-week nightmare.

If you don’t know it, or have suppressed it, dealing with green tubes and printers this way, there are various options that you deal with by setting various pins.  8-bit, 7-bit, parity (even/odd/none), probably others.  If you get one of those settings wrong, the tube or printer still shows stuff, but it will be total gibberish, or it will be gibberish with a lot of recognizable stuff in between.  Of course, these pins are hard to see and have to be set by using a small flat-edge screw driver.  And they are never standard.

We set up the first of many quick calls with the NJ guy (a grizzled computer hater who probably curses us to this day).  We got the green tube working pretty quickly, but we couldn’t get the printer to work.  It kept "printing garbage".  We would create a new RJ11 connector, switching between crossed and straight.  We would delete the port and re-created in Unix.  We went through the arduous task of having him explain to us the pin configuration on the printer, never really sure if he was doing it correctly.

It’s about time to go live, everything in Baltimore is humming, but we can’t get the cursed printer up in NJ to work!  We’ve exhausted all possibilities except for driving back up to NJ to work on the printer in person.  To avoid all that driving, we finally ask him to fax us what he’s getting when it’s "garbage", hoping that maybe there will be some clue in that garbage that will tell us what we’re doing wrong.

When we got the fax, we immediately knew what was wrong.  See, our method of testing whether we had configured a printer correctly was to issue an "lp" command like this:

lp /etc/passwd

Basically, we printed out the unix password file.  It’s always present and out of the box, always just one page.  You standard Unix password file looks something like this:

smith:*:100:100:8A-74(office):/home/smith:/usr/bin/sh
guest:*:200:0::/home/guest:/usr/bin/sh  

We had been printing out the password file over and over again for several weeks and it was printing correctly.  However, to the end user, it was "printing garbage".

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