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As a lifetime cold cereal eater, I thought it time to share some wisdom on the subject.

1. So you’re approaching middle age and a nice bowl of cereal is sometimes “dinner”?  Don’t apologize.  There are far worse things you could eat, and hey, there is milk in there!
   

   an abundance of health

2. Having a pantry full of boxes is a good goal.  Nothing is worse than getting the urge only to find the dregs of a shredded wheat box or the like that you bought ages ago for a “healthy” breakfast.
   

   not likely going to get eaten at my house

3. Also a good goal is to have a pantry full of variety.  Nearly as bad as only shredded wheat is a pantry full of only chocolate-based, or only marshmallow-containing or only * Chex.  Also, you won’t likely regret having at least Cocoa / Fruity Pebbles variety.
4. Let the kids pick out a box or two.  It could be that the latest action figure, cartoon or commercial has insight into what tastes good and your kid is your best chance for passing on that info.
   

   a recent discovery

5. You open up the silverware drawer and find it wanting.  Rather than pilfering from the dishwasher, or washing a normal cereal spoon, grab one of the clean, big, non-slotted spoons.  You might think you’ll regret it, but I don’t remember ever having mid- or post-bowl spoon size-remorse.  Kids spoons larger than infant size are also acceptable.
   
   

   might work in a crunch

   

   just fine

    

6. Just like on other items, cereal sales are your friend.  When you see 2/$4, load up.  Like they’re going to “spoil”?  I hardly ever pay full price for cereal.
7. Some sub-wisdom,  always go family/giant-size.
   

   yum

8. For whatever reason, Costco cereal just doesn’t do it for me.  I think I am a one box, one bag kind of guy.  And the one box is generally a little lame for “can I look at the box” viewing.
   

   who knows how long these box-orphans have been kicking around

9. When the post-ten pm urge hits, just go with it.  The urge will likely be flavor specific, so hopefully your urges are congruent with your inventory.  It might even help you sleep, especially if you remember that . . .
10. Not drinking the milk at the end is like flying to Anaheim and not going into Disneyland!
    

    eaten with large spoon for dramatic effect

Last May I started tweeting with this gem

spackest

(Earl Cahill)

You think creative writing teachers are ever like "Your writing is weak. Literally!" On 21-5-2011 05:23:30 from web

Seems like I still ask questions like this

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(Earl Cahill)

"Are you supposed to say no to dad?" Most paradoxical parenting question ever? On 24-5-2011 04:20:04 from web

Not surprisingly, London has appeared several times

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(Earl Cahill)

It hit me the other day that the world will teach London much when she already knew what a spork was. On 13-7-2011 06:02:18 from web

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(Earl Cahill)

My conversation with London ended something like "so if you're a superhero, can I be your sidekick? Do you know what a sidekick is?" On 13-7-2011 05:59:35 from web

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(Earl Cahill)

Four year old London today, "You know what's funny? Dogcat!" On 10-6-2011 06:27:46 from web

Guess I’m biased, but Dogcat! still cracks me up.  Every so often London will just say it and I start to laugh.  Think that kind of nails my sense of humor pretty well.

And I was told these were clever by at least a person or two that wasn’t me

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(Earl Cahill)

I think a friend of mine just got some ers. You know, renters without the rent. On 22-9-2011 04:55:00 from web

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(Earl Cahill)

I would like to help coin a new phrase for a distinterested girl, something like "That girl is SO Best Buy: no interest for 6 or 12 months" On 15-8-2011 05:05:07 from web

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(Earl Cahill)

Actually, I checked, this is your first rodeo. On 14-1-2012 00:02:19 from web

And probably my favorite, which got retweeted a couple times.  It actually got mentioned favorably after an interview.

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(Earl Cahill)

What if they say "whatever you say can and WILL be used against you in a court of law" and you say "I really like those Cadbury mini eggs"? On 31-12-2011 19:28:06 from web

I will say that before I started tweeting I didn’t really get twitter.  A few months later I think I get it.  There really is an art or beauty to saying something in 140 characters.  Often I have typed in something that is more like 160 characters and then I pare it down.  And though it often doesn’t happen, it is exciting to have a new follower appear, or get favorited or retweeted.  Someone told me that the half-life of a blog post is like six hours.  Thinking the half-life of a tweet is like thirty minutes?  That said, this got favorited just a few hours ago, some twenty days after I tweeted it.

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(Earl Cahill)

Twitter:comedians::digital cameras:photographers On 3-1-2012 15:59:39 from web

Here is an another animated crosswalk guy, this time from Cartagena, Colombia.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ-J_eiMvQI

Enjoy!

Earl

Let’s say you get a new camcorder and want to upload your first video, you know, fancy full high def video to youtube – what video would you choose?  How about an animated crosswalk guy from down in lovely Lima, Peru?  Awhile ago my friend Ken Jennings wrote about an animated crosswalk guy he saw in Cambodia.  Well, the past week and a half I have been in Latin America and recorded a similar (though perhaps not as cool) crosswalk guy and uploaded it to youtube.

There is a similar guy here in Guatemala and I am hoping to get some video on the way to the airport in the morning.

Enjoy!

Earl

I went to church in guatemala today and noticed a few differences between there and church in say pleasant grove, utah.

Some few differences

• much more razor wire
• a gated wall
• nice tile, but no carpet inside that I could see
• the benches in the chapel could move, like they weren’t bolted down
• a ramp going up to the stand
• no organ
• hymnals were pretty scarce
• the sacrament on the sacrament table was left / right, not front / back.  like the bread was on the left, the water on the right or vice versa
• much more spanish spoken
• only one ward uses the pretty good sized chapel
• lots of handshaking, like I might have shaken hands with thirty people?  and I don’t think it was just because we were visiting.  folks were very friendly to us and I think generally
• I think there was a brown out or something, so the lights and microphone weren’t working when church started
• started a bit late, maybe ten minutes?  at nine the place was pretty empty.  folks were setting up chairs and someone in our group mentioned they thought that was faith.  part way through sacrament the chairs were pretty well full.  I should point out that a ward at byu was pretty well empty when the meetings would start (like four people or something crazy like that) and my current ward is sometimes a little sparse at 9
• breast feeding without the good old apron (just one lady)
• had basketball courts both inside and out
• part of the parking lot was a basketball court
• part of the basketball court was a couple soccer goals
• there was grass in the parking spaces
• a woman who was baptized yesterday got confirmed during sacrament meeting.  seems like that’s how it used to go, but now it happens at the baptism (at least the last several I have attended)?
• recent converts went to the first week of a two week family history class where hopefully next week they’d have enough info to take a name to the temple.  sounds pretty inspired actually

Some few similarities

• started and ended with prayer
• had songs
• as has been wont to happen in the past, I played the piano.  kind of fun to play something where you don’t know what you’re about to play.  nothing like trusting the rhythms for a bit 🙂  used to happen when I would sightread new song in primary
• folks nicely dressed.  pretty well white shirts and ties for the men and dresses for the ladies
• folks gave good talks (a guy in our group translated for another gringo and me)
• folks made jokes about hoping there wasn’t enough time to speak
• folks bore their testimonies
• teacher had insights and we had a good lesson as mentioned above
• felt the spirit

For the record, I manage a couple teams of programmers that write software to help record custodians capture, publish, etc. their records.  We work with records custodians that have genealogically significant records involving births, marriages, deaths, etc.  A group of four of us came down to see how things were going, sense needs and help with some relationships.

Enjoy!

Earl

Kind of three parts here.

1. A while ago, I talked about CrumbTracker and I think it’s pretty cool.  Then my wife, like much of the world, got an iPhone and I thought, man, would sure be nice to write apps in a way such that they worked on android phones, iPhones, iPads, in a browser, on a desktop, etc.  Enter Flex for mobile.  As I understand it, that’s the vision.
2. I am a sudoku enthusiast, as evidenced by my apichallenge.  I’m not a nut or anything, I just like sudoku.  That said, I think it just takes too darn long to play a game.  And I find myself spending most of the time applying the rather inelegant, elementary strategies of checking rows, columns and 3×3 regions for some winner spots.
3. The past year or so, a few of us have been playing Dominion at work.  Since we’re all kind of nerdy, we started vdom, as an open source project.  Along the way, some guy named moohtank joined the fun, as seen here.  vdom serves as a backend for dominion and moohtank came along, fixed some bugs and made an android app to play domion.  You can actually play against my bot if you like 🙂  Anyway, it kind of made me catch the vision of small open source projects.  I have been doing such things for years, but generally I would have done vdom as a closed source thing.  I can’t really think of a good justification for doing such a thing.  I can’t really come up with a business model where anyone gets rich from something like vdom, or actually, aidedsudoku.

So yeah, I started to write an aided sudoku mobile app using adobe flex and tonight I posted it on google code.  Pretty raw, but I hope to build on it.  If you have some moohtank leanings, come join in the fun 🙂

Enjoy!

Earl

Maybe I should wait to write three of them, but if I worked for the onion, I think I would submit the following for consideration

• Study finds global warming caused by computers studying global warming.
• Two NFL athletes move into training camp facility to fight for “first one to practice, last one to leave” title.

What do you think?  Should I send them my resume?  Maybe I’ll wait till I get a third one.

Enjoy!

Earl

So, I have a couple famous friends and one of them asked if I could write a little app that could help him send emails to folks on his totally legit email list.  Well, since it is a totally legit email list, folks that really do want to hear from him, I felt pretty comfortable writing the app on google appengine.  About a day after he asked for a little help, google released an offline taskqueue that could be used nicely for sending emails.  Rather serendipitous, I thought.

Lesson in non-engineer customers: sometimes they want you to do things that you think you can’t do, but with a little effort you can.  My friend said he would like to just maintain spreadsheets in google docs for who to send to, then have my program look at the spreadsheets and send accordingly.  I was like, “yeah, I don’t think we can do that.”  We started to discuss how to maintain the email list just with my app, how to keep things in sync, how to query for users in a certain country or state, etc.  Messy.  Well, turns out using the gdata api, I can authenticate a user, talk to google docs, allow the user to pick a spreadsheet / worksheet, then pull stuff like email addresses.  Awesome!

Took a few nights, but I have something up and running.  My friend says he will give me some nice powered by links when he sends and I am hoping for a blog post here or there.

If you happen to have a totally legit email list (very serious about that part) and would like to trade some sending help for some publicity / marketing, please drop a line to cahille AT yahoo DOT com.

Enjoy!

Earl