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- The One that Got Away
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This week the Boyink Headquarters have shifted 55 miles north here in Michigan where we’re staying at a lake-front cottage for a few days. While the plan was to use the internet connection at the cottage to continue working, the whims of technology were not in our favor. My laptop wouldn’t connect to the network, and the PC at the cottage has a habit of spontaneously rebooting. This isn’t the first time the so-called “working vacation” approach has failed. Thank goodness for the local coffee shops with free wireless connections.
At any rate, since I couldn’t work I decided to try fishing. I have to tell you—I know very little about fishing. All I’ve ever really done is the hook, bobber and worm approach and I’m happy to keep the experience on that simplistic level. There were some poles at the cottage, one was setup with the necessary tackle so my son and I went and dug up some worms. We spent an hour or so out on the dock, and managed to find a small “hot-spot” where we got nibbles and caught a couple of small sunfish (sunfish being 50% of the species I can identify on sight).
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- A New Gun in Town
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I’ll tell ya - you spend 30 minutes with a kid, showing him how CSS works both inline and as a seperate stylesheet, and two days later he’s hanging out a shingle and giving the old man a run for his money…
I went upstairs earlier today to find this on my 10 year old son’s door (click to enlarge):
So…now I guess it’s time to start charging rent..
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- Finally, There is Revenge!
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As you might imagine, growing up with a last name of Boyink had it’s moments. While school kids can usually find a way to make fun of *any* name, Boyink is an obvious target. I learned early on to diffuse the joke potential by being the first one to have fun with it. Usually on the first day of class the teacher would be taking roll, and there would be a pause as they came to my name. I would quickly pipe up and pronounce it for them, then say it was “like a sound effect” or something, get a few laughs and that would be the end of it.
Now fast forward 30 years and I really appreciate the name. It’s short, punchy, memorable, and Googles well (as long as you overlook some of the odd referrers that come in that are obviously expecting something totally not web development related…I’ll let you stew on that one…).
I was listening to NPR today, and they had a segment on people with unusual names. I felt inclined to call into a radio show for the first time in my life - just to point out the internet-age advantages of an unusual name. Turns out I’m not alone in that thinking as NPR linked to this Wall Street Journal article about new parents evaluating the search engine placement of potential names for their children. Ah well - no great surprise there I guess.
So anyway - “pfooey” to all the teasers growing up - viva la “Boyink”! And “Strawberry”. And “Chantilly” And “Burgess”..
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- The Boyink Office
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In response to Luke’s Where Do You EE post over on Jambor-ee here are some pics of my home office, which resides in the basement corner of our house:
Features of note include a hydraulically height-adjustable desk supporting my Windows system with dual screens, the all-important Aeron chair, and the Jeep calendar on the wall..)
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- Ice Cream Trucks
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‘Tis the season, and again today - even though it was only in the mid 60’s the ice cream trucks came down our street again today.
As we watched the neighbor kids run out to buy something, and turned down (yet again) similar requests from our own kids, my wife and I had an interesting conversation around ice cream trucks.