Why do I put up with you?
It's a question she asks me at least once a week. I've been thinking a lot about Fae today, so let me try to answer.
Dear Fae,
Why do I? You can be a pain, demanding, irrational, stubborn, annoying, and even drive me to want to go screaming into the night. So why on earth would I stay? Why would I 'put up with all of your shit and baggage and bullshit' as you so often put it?
And no, it's not anything as corny as 'you complete me'.
It all comes down to, You UNDERSTAND me. I may have given you a base or a platform for you to crawl out of that raging sea that has been your life for the first 25 years to stand steadily on and get your bearings, but you have been the rock that I can cling to while I dip my feet into the sea of growth and change discover who I am and who I want to be. You make me into a better man, a better husband, a better father and a better friend. You've allowed me to see inside myself, to show me things I haven't know about myself, and at times, smashed me over the head with a reality mirror to clear the way for me to see who I am, and what I am capable of.
Why do I stay with you? I stay with you because you are my best friend. I stay with you because you need me and I need you as we find ways to become more interdependent and less dependent. You amaze me with your capability for growth and change, and inspire me to try and do the same for myself. You are my greatest critic and my greatest champion at the same time.
I stay with you because you are everything I need right now, and will be for me tomorrow, next week, next year, next life.
I love you my Fae, and I always will.
Your,
Matthew
Excel help – separating name into two columns
I had a need to take one column with a persons name and separate it out into a first name and a last name column. Rather than cut and paste everything, I googled for a formula and after about 15 min, found it:
http://www.bluemoosetech.com/microsoft-excel-functions.php?jid=32&title=Separating%20First%20and%20Last%20Names%20in%20Microsoft%20Excel
hope it helps anyone who is looking for it.
music luck
ever have a day where you put your music player on shuffle and every single song is exactly what you wanted to hear? I'm having a day like that. It's not just that I really love all of my music, it's almost as if I am about to finish a song and I'm enjoying the anticipating what cool song is coming up next.
Hopefully I'm not jinxing it by writing this 
Listening to Bruce Springsteen's "Badlands". I'm not a huge Bruce fan and there are some songs of his that I do have that I'm not crazy about. Anyway, enjoying my day
#update(2 min later) - yep, screwed up my luck. Just had to FF to the next song, which was Firewoman by the Cult, so maybe my luck is back 
Pssst…Do something
they're working on making people aware of all of the racism and prejudice that Fox is interjecting into their news casts. Is it biased? Of course, but I figured I'd spread the word because I can't stand closeminded a-holes
Hello World
Okay, so I got started with Ruby tonight. I went out on saturday and bought a book on it, and decided to dig in. As a developer, you can't really say you've attempted a language until you've built your first Hello World application.
It's official, I am a Ruby on Rails (ROR) Newbie. I built it on the new mac machine I got my from work and after a problem with a file inconsistency:
MissingSourceFile in SayController#hello
no such file to load—sqlite3
I googled around a bit and found the answer (http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/msg/366ae75593ed8b46). It's amazing what you can find
Okay, so what does this all prove? That I'm almost 40, I can learn new things, and it's past my bedtime.
Goodnight Mr. & Mrs. Internet.
Few new things
First and foremost, I'm writing this post on a Mac Mini. I've been a fan since my roommate in college got a computer from his dad and it had this thing in it that he paid an extra 150$ for. "Dude, it's too expensive and no one's going to produce stuff for it"
Well, it was a CD-rom, and he's never let me live it down. This was 93. It's 15 years later and I've had a few Macs here and there, but this one's probably the slickest. Granted, it's a much better OS and the graphics and hardware have come a long way, but after downloading a VPN client to connect to my work network and installing a few programs, I'm running perfectly.
Leads me to my next new thing - Ruby on Rails. Yeah, it's a buzzword language, and I'm jumping on the bandwagon, but I've been looking for a lightweight alternative to the C# generator I've been using. Truthfully, the way RoR is structured, it'll really force me to learn more about the language in order to do things, but from what I've seen so far, there's a lot more I can do with RoR, and I won't code myself into as many corners thank god.
Is it going to solve all my problems and do everything for me? No. But I'd like to become a little uncoupled from Microsoft, and this is a decent step in that direction. If anyone wants to see stuff built in RoR, check out Basecamp. The guy who wrote the Rails stuff, wrote Basecamp in Ruby and decided that a lot of the code could be reused, so he created Ruby on Rails.
Keep an eye out, I'm going to start creating small apps because my hosting company will host them for me, so I'll be able to show you what I've learned. "Hello world" should be coming soon