Happy birthday, Nick.
Wish we could all be there, but Sam and Jake will be there this weekend with Aunt Nat.

Back in Septemeber, I posted how I was getting rid of MySpace and LiveJournal. Getting rid of MySpace was more a defensive move. MySpace just does not feel like the kind of site that I really want to spend my precious time associated with. I even went as far as to load the AmIOnMySpace plugin for Firefox 2. There is not yet a version for Firefox 3, but I am sure that will come. Of course, there are other ways of preventing MySpace from coming up in the browser.
LiveJournal just didn't match up with me anymore. I host my own blog. I didn't need them. And I like what Six Apart has done. I didn't mind LiveJournal. It just didn't fit anymore. I didn't want to keep accounts with services I was no longer using.
I hope all this indicates that I am at least thinking about the quality of the services I use. It really doesn't matter if it's an Web 2.0 social network or just a 'regular' site that doesn't try to be anything more than what it is. There is a point where the site is causing me more issues than I think it should.
Today Friendster crossed that limit.
For the last several months, the only contact I have had with the Friendster site have been fairly obvious SPAM for adult sites. You know what I'm talking about. You get a message from Friendster saying someone's left you a note. You don't recognize the name, but you go into the inbox and there it is, an innocent message, asking you to follow a link to see what is presumably some hottie's webcam or special photo gallery. Please. All I ever do is flag the messages as spam, delete, and move on.
Now, I could maintain the Friendster account, and just ask it to not e-mail me when someone messages me. But then I would never go to the account. If I never go to the account, then I don't need it. If I don't need the account, I don't want it. If I don't want it, why have it?
There were not a lot of people I knew that were using Friendster. And all of them I talk to in other ways.
So, thankfully, all Friendster had me do was fill out a quick form as an exit interview and that was it. The account, I was told, was gone.
I'm sure they will have my data somewhere in their backup media, but when I tried to access the profile, it was unavailable.
So, one less social network site in my portfolio.
Good bye, Friendster.

Here we are at the last half hour of Father's Day 2008.
Strangely, here I am alone. The vagrancies of scheduling things after the school year is over.
Natalie and the boys are visiting with Nat's mother. They are only in Williamsburg, at a resort where Nat's mom is staying. But still, they are not here.

This year, Father's day started for me somewhat early in the morning where I was doing something for work. That went well.
From there, it was a quick sprint through breakfast, which was very nice. And then it was helping everyone get ready to go.

I did get to talk to my Dad today. And that made me happy. I would have been happier if I could have been there. But such is the problem with living 300 miles away.

In a very real way, I really not that into having a big fuss made about me for holidays or birthdays. It is more important to me that other people have something nice done for them. Natalie thinks that this means I am depressed. I don't think that is the cause. I think it is more that I would rather feel that the people that are important to me always feel that way. And it is hard to do that being 300 miles away from everyone else.
And yet, I keep getting caught up in doing things late because it is somewhat hard to keep that part of my personal schedule together. I plan in terms of what I need to get done at work. I sometimes even plan so that it's hard for people to do things for me.
I also lie about when my birthday is so that I don't have to deal with the ritual humiliation that tends to occur in the cube farm. Before it happens, I tell them it's "the start of June." After it happens, I tell them it was towards the end of May.
That really doesn't bother me.

Now dates for when I'm planning to do things at work, that's important.
And I try to at least pay lip service to other people.

And right now, I have nothing better to do than to sit here alone and think about this.

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Birthday, Macey.
Sam and Jake wish they could be there with you.

Love you.
Uncle Butch.

I jokingly added 16 hours to an estimate under the line heading of coffee and recovery referencing how long it would take for us to actually deal with the project being estimated after it was done.

I was asked to justify coffee in the estimate.

This is what I came up with.

Completely
Organized
Funded
Functional
Endorsed
Executed

Think that's too much of a stretch?