I was up at 6AM and I *still* didn’t get an iPhone 3G today. I’ll be up early tomorrow morning and in line at an AT&T store, trying to get one of the few arriving tomorrow. Tammy’s cell phone contract with Sprint has been up for two weeks and tomorrow is the last day of the billing cycle. If I can port her number to AT&T on Saturday, then we’ll be “even” with Sprint.

Wish me luck!

So I guess my weblog needs are changing and I’m considering ditching WordPress.  What do you think?  I want to go back to the time when I generated the HTML on my own and just uploaded static pages.  Site comments aren’t important and I don’t use the database functions so really, I have a dynamic website for no good reason.

I’d rather spend time writing my wife’s site in Rails if I’m going to hack at something, so maybe something like Typo?

Comments?

Here’s the short list of what’s going on in my brain.

>I want a new website framework and I miss [Frontier](http://frontier.userland.com). WordPress is overkill for writing a basic weblog and the maintenance is a little much for me. If I’m using plain text files that can be rendered locally and uploaded with a cron job, then TimeMachine can back it up without a hassle.

>I had to order more RAM and a larger hard drive for my work computer. 80GB doesn’t cut it any more and I’ve tried everything to make it happen. I used Monolingual to cut out all of the non-English app resources. I reduced the amount of music and video on the drive. I deleted extra apps that I didn’t need. I even moved my VMware files to an external portable drive. That move made the biggest difference but the risk of carrying so much important data on the external drive made me nervous. I moved everything back to the internal drive and ordered a 160GB drive (plus a 1GB RAM chip) from Other World Computing. The drive is a used/pulled drive and the RAM is the same. The benefit was the price: $15 for the RAM and $60 for the drive. Considering the machine is two years old and for work, I’ve got to make do with what I have and get upgrades as cheaply as possible.

>I’ve switched cars with Tammy for a couple of weeks. The Accord is getting awful gas mileage in town (16MPG) and I need to spend time with it to see if it’s driving habits or something else. I travel for work enough that I get a solid mix of highway and city miles so I should see a difference. Also, the Fit is getting too many miles on the odometer in a short time. This should help.

I made [Tammy](http://tammykirks.com) this cake for her birthday, a labor of lemon love, using a recipe from America’s Test Kitchen.  The frosting is seven minute meringue with a bit of lemon juice to give it some zing.  The yellow filling is a gorgeous lemon curd.

Yes, it was amazing.

I’m trying. Trying to be positive. Trying to motivate myself without hate. Trying to find an activity that I’m passionate about while maintaining my emotional center.

It’s hard.

The switch to the Joyent Accelerator went off without a hitch.  The instructions were clear and well-written, so following them was a snap.  This domain is moved, next is Tammy’s weblog then Red Bee Designs.  The Red Bee Designs site is in Ruby, so that requires a bit more intervention, like getting a lighttpd port assignment.

Onward!

I’m moving the sites we have with Joyent to a new Shared Accelerator over the next few days. Please be patient as you may have intermittent outages.

Life is full of ups and downs. It’s a cliché to be sure, but true. I’ve tried to spend some time this week figuring out what makes up a “Steve Kirks”. It’s an identity crisis I’ve never had to face. I’ve change my appearance by growing my hair long, adding a beard and mustache and even wearing different clothes and shoes. Yet, when I look in the mirror, I struggle with an internal conflict–is the person staring back at me really “me”?

I don’t really know any more.

We missed out on a house. We should have signed the contract but didn’t. I wish we would have thrown a bit of caution to the wind and made the decision.

We’re trying to move along.

Hi Weblog!  How are you?  Have you missed me?  I’ve missed you…

I’m home, getting ready to cook turkey brats on the grill.  I’m missing my friend Matt Kerner and his wife Sarah.  They are super nice people with 25 hours worth of things to do and only 24 hours in a day.  I wish we could see them more often, but I have to follow their weblogs to really know what’s going on.  Matt’s been at a conference and if I read [Sarah’s weblog](http://beautyschooldropout.net) correctly then she’s been chasing yarn in Austin, TX.

My mother-in-law recently [snagged an iPhone](http://keckeley.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/igotta-iphone) and now she’s learning to use it. Her husband Burl just finished an upgrade from cable to Dish Network and is loving the DIY Channel. The two of them are in Des Moines for the long weekend, visiting Anne’s daughter Mary (Tammy’s sister) and our nieces. We got a phone call from the older niece Julia to let us know that Grammy was there safe and sound, that she missed us and most of all that she “loves Aunt Tammy”.

I always spend time thinking of my family during the month of May. I’ve been estranged from most of my family for several years and May is the worst month–my father’s birthday is the eighth, my brother’s was yesterday and Mother’s Day is thrown in for good measure. My birthday is traditional Memorial Day (look it up) and that means by the end of the month, I’m battling the blues. Celebrating holidays and birthdays without your family is hard because when you’re a history person like me, you look back to give you perspective as you move forward. When I look back, there are two lives I lived: my birth until I turned thirteen, then from thirteen until I married Tammy (25).

My early life is easily remembered and enjoyed. The rest is almost best forgotten. Buy me a Scotch and I’ll tell you some of the funnier stories.

Tammy’s family has had their share of problems, but somehow they have all come out better because of it. My family became bitter, divided, obsessed with everyone’s wealth and status and worse, indignant and passive aggressive. It’s best that I left that behind, but May is the month that it hurts the worst, I guess next to Christmas.

Here’s to all the wars we’ve fought (both real and imagined) to preserve the liberties we all sometimes take for granted. This weekend, raise a toast to Americans everywhere who’s lives were given in the name of this country.