Stuffleufagus

If you wish to date my daughter there are some things you need to know.  About me, and mostly about her.

She is extremely intelligent.  Don’t let the fact that she is cute confuse you.  She is smarter than you are. And I am smarter than she is.  Between the two of us you cannot fool us. Treat her poorly once, and feel the wrath.  You won’t have a second chance to treat her poorly.

Do not pull up in my driveway and honk your horn.  You will not like the results you get.  Really.  I am not running a drive thru.

Don’t try and call me “Mr La Gesse” unless you REALLY know how to pronounce our last name.  If you screw it up you make a bad impression.  You don’t get any bonus points for trying - and failing.  Just call me “Sir” until I introduce myself (usually as “Rob”).  And once I introduce myself as Rob, don’t call me anything else.  I don’t really like “Sir” or “Mr.”  Rob suits me.  Once I give you that permission.

Of course, I expect you to respect me.  I *demand* that you respect my daughter.  And if you are not yet 18 and you hurt her in any way - no problem.  I can wait until you are 18.  At 18 I can kick your ass without worrying about child abuse charges.  I am a patient man.  But really - can you enjoy your 18th birthday knowing I am just about to pounce?  Better to be safe.

Realize I was in the Military, and I have a health care background.  The health care background may come in handy, since knowing how to relieve pain also taught me a great deal about how to inflict it.

Feeling lucky?

Don’t - not with MY daughter.

I have few fears.  Death is not one of them and you certainly are not one of them.

Treat her VERY well and you may even find that I appear to be friendly.  But never turn your back - I am constantly evaluating and re-evaluating you.  You have a very small margin of error.  You aren’t allowed a single mistake.  I know this may seem unfair.  Deal with it.

Make her cry and I make you cry.  Harm her physically in any way and I will mail you a package at Christmas.  Hopefully the Doctors will be able to reattach what I had previously removed from your anatomy.  I doubt it though - they will probably be shrivelled by then.

Think I’m joking?  Think again.

I am a Protector.  I protect my employees to a fault, so imagine how I deal with family, much less my daughter.

You want to date my daughter?  I admire your courage.  The fact you know this and still ask tells me a lot about you.  You are either brave and decent, or totally stupid.  I’ll deal with the stupid ones quickly.  The brave and decent ones, over the course of a few decades, might just prove to me that they are worthy.

Maybe.

written by rob

written by rob

I am not claiming they were never in debt - they were.  And they had their own hard times.  But they never entered into any contracts that they knew would cause them to spend more honoring the contract and paying for “life” then they earned in a single year.

They “borrowed” what they knew they could pay.  And they paid back everything they borrowed.

I can’t say that I have never owed more than I could repay - once, I did.  For a brief time.  But it’s been >2  years since I owed anything more than a house payment (ZERO down, 15 year note, fixed interest loan, thank you very much) and several years since I had a credit card.  I am seven years into the first home I ever bought and I own more of it than the bank does.  A few hundred extra dollars on the mortgage a months makes a difference.

If I still had a wallet full of credit cards I would never have been able to buy a home.  Credit cards make it easy to spend today’s dollars at tomorrow’s prices.  If you don;t understand the future value of money, you really should.  The goal is to save today’s dollar and cash in at tomorrow’s prices - instead, we do the opposite - and as a country we are failing.

And as some have said on Twitter and elsewhere, “Don’t blame us - it isn’t our fault.  They are showing a bright and shiny lure, and we cannot help but strike at it”.

The lack of personal responsibility in this nation now scares me.  Almost as much as the lack of personal privacy/rights.

But our Government spends more than they take in, as do many American’s.  And MANY businesses.  There are too few of us not living on credit to sustain the rest of you.

Be it Governement bailouts, or insurance subsidies to live on the coastal region or in a fault zone - too many of us are paying for the ways of others.  How is that fair?

To any of us?

written by rob

The company you are transfering it from makes it as much of a pain in the ass as possible - and then, even when it works, they send you an email saying it failed.  *sigh*

written by rob

I helped build WiFi, and WAY BACK THEN (~6 years ago) my kids were young. I could walk with them through any electronics store - Best Buy, CompUSA, Radio Shack etc - and point at what I did. “Our chips are in that, and that, and that”. It was very cool, and I was a hero to my kids and their friends. Wireless was (and still is) some VERY cool stuff! If you love your WiFi, throw me, and a very talented group of engineers some love!

Now I do Cloud Computing - it is very hard to point at something and have my kids understand exactly what I build. I could not even bring them into our data center and point at a machine that one of my domains runs at. There is no “machine”. There are thousands of machines. (And even as the Director of Software Development I don;t have the credentials to get into our datacenters - I don’t need to be there).

What I build is hard to point at - much more difficult than a Wireless enabled laptop, or a WiFi Router.

But I am building something even larger than WiFi. Imagine that - larger than WiFi! Think of it - where were you last in a decent sized city and you couldn’t find free WiFi somewhere?

It is everywhere, And I am helping to build something even bigger, but different.

And struggling with how I explain it to people. Even my kids.

We went through this with Wireless - where people just didn’t get it - until they used it. Cloud computing is kinda like that. You don’t know that you want it (yet). In a year you will be pissed when you can’t get it.

written by rob