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And The Happiest Place On Earth Is…, Morley Safer On Why The Danes Are Considered The Happiest People On Earth - CBS News

60 minutes did a piece about why the Danes consistently rate as the happiest people on earth.  Its not fluke - its not just one half-hearted cosmo-style quiz.  They really do rank the highest on several “happiness quotient” quizzes.

Why?

Their weather isn’t great.  The swedes are healthier and the norwegians have more money.  So why are they #1 in happiness and the USA is a meager #23?

They have very low expectations of life, so when things don’t go as miserably as they thought - well then there’s something to be happy about.  Apparently their glum and grouchy outlook allows them to be pleased when not ALL of their plans crap out.

Oy.  Good for them?   :roll: 

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NPR: A Dogs Unlikely Habit? Sucking on Toads.

This is really funny.   A girl’s cockerspaniel develops an ugly addiction to sucking on toads.

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The weekend was good.  It was mostly very quiet.  I watched some movies with the kids that I wouldn’t normally include them in.  We saw The Perfect Storm and Hunt for Red October.  They liked them both.  Personally, I still prefer Hunt For Red October.

Today I am back at work.  The kids are all better and although Liz was better on Saturday I think she got some other bug on Sunday and she’s stuffed up and achy again.

Work is busy.  I have finally decided that I need to learn a lot more about Java and how SAP uses it, so I will be spending a lot of my spare time in the coming weeks focusing on this issue.  Right now it makes my head hurt.

Monday stunk.  It rained cats and dogs.  It looks like there’s a small leak in the roof over the playroom.  There’s a roofer coming out today to give me a … *gulp* … estimate.

Ben is going to spend the next three days on Cape Cod with his buddy, Spencer.  I think I mentioned this last week. He took my precious, but underused video camera with him.  On the one hand, I am very hesitant to let someone of his youth take it.  On the other hand it doesn’t do anyone any good sitting on my shelf.  He and his buddy have been having fun making videos over at his buddy’s house so I finally decided that under threat of pain I would lend out the camera.  I’m very nervous about how it will come back.

The laser printer is all set up and happy.  The Brother HL-2170W laser printer was a royal pain in the ass to get recognized on my network.  I spent several evenings trying to get it to connect wirelessly.  It did just fine over USB and wired-ethernet, but when I tried to get it to connect to my wireless network it would never do it.  Eventually I got an email from customer service telling me to make sure the firmware on the printer was at version 1.09 (I think) and my printer had shipped with 1.06.  I downloaded the most recent drivers from their website, installed it and the printer connected even easier and faster than I expected.

I am very happy with it now.  I got it installed just in time to print out the reams of paper necessary for my taxes.  It would have cost me a bundle to print out 30 pages on my Epson Stylus Photo printer.

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1. People are still falling down sick at my house.  Liz is still sick.  Chloe came home from school yesterday throwing up.  She is still home but hasn’t had much trouble today.  I am hoping this weekend signals a return to normalcy.  Don’t worry: I’m still fine. 
2. The Brother laser printer showed up a couple of days ago.  It prints great.  It prints fast.  I’m very happy with those two parts of it.  It also prints via USB cable just fine.  Likewise, it has no trouble printing over a wired ethernet cable.  But its having trouble connecting to my network wirelessly.  I think I must be doing something wrong with the WEP encryption or something.
3. I stopped off at REI on my way home from work last night to pick up some new shades.   I got them cheap from rei-outlet.com - they were on closeout.  They get shipped to my local REI for free.  So anyway, every time I go in that store I get interested in getting outdoors again.  I don’t even care what it is - just walking would be fine.  Hiking, camping, fishing.  Great.  But by the time I get home, all that enthusiasm has drained out of me and I wind up sitting on my ass for four hours watching TV.  What a waste.  So I need to get out and start doing stuff again.  I’ll let you know how it goes.
4. No plans for the weekend.  I guess that means that I will have no excuses to keep me from spending some time outside, eh?

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Grace was home sick on Monday and Tuesday because she was throwing up.  She said she felt well enough to go to school today - its her Sharing Day where she gets to share something with the class.  The kids have always loved Sharing Day.  Sadly, she came home due to nausea.  I guess she wasn’t quite done yet.

Now Liz is sick too.  She has a fever, chills, etc.

Hmm… I don’t like my chances of staying healthy.

At work one guy from my team is working from home because of the bad weather.  The other guy had a doctor’s appointment at 11am and decided to work from home.  That leaves just me and I was supposed to be in more of those gawdawful meetings.  I guess maybe everyone else being home is a blessing in disguise.

There was more snow today - we only got a few inches, but by the time I got up at 6am the rain had already been falling for a while.  The snow soaked it up like sponge.  I spent 30 minutes clearing the sidewalk before a tiny plow came by.  Sure, that little guy is handy for the people who put off cleaning up, but I already had a nice pristine sidewalk and that SOB dropped his load on my walk and wrecked all the nice neat walls I had.  It even created two little berms in the driveway.  I guess it couldn’t have been THAT bad - it only took me another 15 minutes to dig the remainder out.

Chloe is in the school play - she’s a baker in The Emperor’s New Clothes.  She has play practice until 4:30pm today, then she has to rush home and change for dance class, which starts at 5:15pm.  With Liz being sick I guess I’ll take her to dance class.  I’m always uncomfortable in the waiting room with the mom’s - I never really know what to say.

Ben got a funny invitation yesterday.  A friend of his is an only-child and over Feb. vacation they want to take three days to go to The Cape.  Cape Cod has a great reputation as a favorite vacation spot in the summer because of the beaches.  But lets face it, folks: this is still New England and its STILL going to be thirty degrees out there.  Its usually a little more moderate than inland, but there’s going to be lots of wind and I think it sounds just awful.  All of the regular touristy things to do will be closed.  Restaurants will be closed.  At that time of year a person really has to appreciate the quiet serenity of the place, you know?  In any case, they don’t know what their son will do during this time.  So they asked if they could borrow Ben. 

I laughed out loud.

I think its great they want him to come along and he was delighted at the invitation and eagerly agreed.  But I can hardly think of anything worse.  Clearly, it is not my cup of tea and I don’t think its Ben’s either, but he doesn’t know that yet.  All I can do is pack his toothbrush for him and wish him luck!  Better him than me!

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I am at work right now at a meeting where management has brought in some consultants to help us figure out how to get more value out of our IT investments.  We’ve spent all this money on huge pieces of software to make us more efficient and able to support the business better.  Now we need to figure it all out?!

I am looking at three days SOLID of meetings.  eight hours a day of meetings to line up enterprise resource planning software with our business requirements.

holy crap, I’m going to stick some knitting needles in my eyes to alleviate the pain of this stuff.  I’m never going to make it.

I think I need a flask.

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I got fed up with my Epson inkjet photo printer having trouble with the simple part of printing: feeding paper in to the slot.  It jammed all the time.  Also it frequently needs to have its printheads cleaned, which isn’t difficult but it is time consuming and frustrating to know that virtually every time I want to use it I first have to issue the “clean print heads” command.  As my uses for it have evolved I also find that I don’t use it for printing photos much any more.  I rely on different Internet services to do that.  Inkjet ink is also really expensive.

So I threw in the towel and bought a new printer.  I wanted a laser printer so the ink would last longer and the pages would come out faster.  I’ve had it with sitting around waiting for a page to come out.  I always suspected that as time went on I would use a printer less and less.  But that isn’t the case.  I print fewer and fewer photos, but I find myself printing out all kinds of things at home.  The kids all seem to want to print things out.  At first I was fine with saying “no” - it was really too expensive to allow them to print out any old crap they felt like.

Now, they’re all connected to the home network and they all seem to have uses for a printer.  I find that I have not just my own needs, but the needs of a whole (miniature) user community to contend with!

This Brother printer got good reviews, it has built-in wireless networking and besides it was priced to move.  It has a generously sized paper tray and I think it will really pump out the pages at 22ppm.  It gets high marks for clarity (2400 x 600 dpi). I also can’t believe the way prices on laser printers have dropped.  This gem has 32MB of memory in it!

I confess that I don’t have any experience with Brother as a printer brand, but I’ve used their label printers for years.  The two things I would have preferred is

• color
• duplex printing

But these both add tremendous expense to the cost of the unit.  All in all, I am fine with printing on only one side and I still expect printers to issue output in only black so I think that’s fine.  I may still keep the Epson around in case I need color, but I’ll have to find somewhere out-of-the-way to keep it.

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‘Jaws’ actor Roy Scheider dies - CNN.com

They give a quick run down of Roy’s most famous movies including, “The French Connection“, “All that Jazz” and of course “Jaws“. But they COMPLETELY left out his most groundbreaking work! There was not a single mention of “Blue Thunder” (precursor of the 80’s Air Wolf series).

I know.  Its a travesty and an oversight of the grossest scale.

Nonetheless, Roy will be missed.

Rest In Peace, Roy.

Over and out.

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Using Microsoft Published, Ben has managed to publish a website!  You can see it here:

http://www.solomonville.net/

Ben did a nice job of setting it up and formatting it and everything.  He has also been learning something called “Scratch“.  Its sort of a fourth generation programming language designed to teach children how to program.  That is, it introduces basic ideas of looping and procedures and whatnot.  It allows them to easily and quickly slap together animations or games.  There’s an after school class about it at his middle school and he’s been having a good time with it.

Here is a link to the projects he’s done so far.

He did one for a presentation on Viet Nam and another about the American Revolution.

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I went to the Hannah Montana concert movie last night prepared to endure 75 minutes of pop cute torture.  I love my daughter and she loves Hannah Montana / Mylie Cyrus, so I thought I would cover my ears and take a nap.

That wasn’t necessary.  Chloe and her friend were REALLY well behaved and had a great time.  The movie itself … well, it was fairly dull, but underscored what parents like about Mylie Cyrus.  In this era of Britney Spears’ insanity and the sensuality of singers like Shakira and Christina Aguilara it was nice to see a young girl (15yo) who appears to be well grounded and singing songs about positive things with a positive attitude.  Its hard not to like her.  And her music… well, its fine pop.  Its not my cup of tea but that doesn’t mean I have to disparage it.  I can’t exactly appreciate it, but it seems harmless so who am I to be hatin’ the music?

All in all it was a good evening and it seemed like the kind of event Chloe will remember forever.

Oh and while we were waiting to get in to the movie the Boston Celtics management had some kind of event at the theater.  While they were coming in there were a bunch of cheerleaders there bracketing the red carpet.  Holy Toledo.  They had the tiniest little dresses that came down to almost cover their tushes in the back and … well their hoohoo’s in the front.  wow.

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