The Chicago Sun-Times had a wonderful article today about Darren Erman, one of my Zeta Beta Tau brothers from Emory.

Darren chose to give up his career as an attorney a prestigious Chicago law firm to chase his dream of becomming a basketball coach. His journey took him to St. Anthony's High School in New Jersey, where he coaches under Bob Hurley and teaches environmental science for 1/6 of his former salary. Despite sleeping on an air mattress on a friend's floor and living out of his car, he loves his new life.

Many of us dream of chasing a dream like this. Few of us have the guts to do so. There are times I'd love to move to Mexico, or go to culinary school. So far, those are only dreams... To those like Darren who take the leap, I wish you good luck!

I guess I would have thought it'd look more impressive than it does:

Looks like I need to do a bit of a road trip out west:

Create your own map at World66

The faucet in my shower had been dripping for months. I'd been meaning to fix it, but it just never seemed to get done. Well since I'd gotten back from Mexico, the drip has turned into virtually a constant small stream of water. I needed to get the damn thing fixed. No problem, I thought, just an hour or so --including the trip to Home Depot for parts. Wasn't quite so easy.

Day 1: Pry the little "C" cap off the knob and unscrew the knob. Ony took about 2 minutes. This is easy! But then I hit the first hurdle. Neither my wrench nor pliers can open large enough to get around the packing nut.

So I head off to Home Depot for a wrench. To the North Ave. Home Depot. The busiest Home Depot in the country. On a Saturday afternoon, when the Lincoln Park and Gold Coast yuppies are all there buying things to spruce up their condos and townhouses. I didn't want to make a second trip, so I swing by the plumbing dept. hoping that there's some sort of standard to the replacement parts for faucets and if I can describe it a bit he'll say that it's this or that. No luck. Could be any of hundreds of parts, I'm told... Go Home and put faucet back together again.

Day 2: Having successfully removed the packing nut with my new wrench, I fight to get the stem out. I'm turning and turning waiting for the thing to unscrew. After 15 minutes, I begin to wonder whether it actually screws out. I hold the outer part of the stem with my pliers and try fully unscrewing the part that the knob moves when turning on and off. It doesn't come out. So in frustration, I simply yank at the stem. It comes out! Silly me.

OK, now that I've got the part out I take it to Home Depot. The same full of yuppies North Ave. store as the day before. I take it to the plumbing dept. and show it to a couple of the salespeople. One doesn't think anything's wrong with it. I tell him it's leaking so SOMETHING'S WRONG with it. He tells me to talk to another salesperson. That guy looks at it and says it's too old. So I try the nearby Ace Hardware. I get a similar story. The faucet's old and they can't carry parts for every faucet made. He's at least helpful and tells me to try a specialty plumbing store, and gives me the names of a couple. Unfortunately, none of these places are open on Sunday. Return home and put faucet back together again.

Day 3: I get up a few minutes early so I can swing by one of those specialty plumbing stores on the way to work. They're both kind of on the way, so I figure I'll try one and if no luck there I'll go to the other. But finally a break! I walk into Community Home Supply and show the guy behind the counter the part, and he instantly recognizes it. And he's got the part right there below the counter. And it was only $5.15 -- 1/3 the price of faucet stems I'd seen at Home Depot and Ace. So I buy two of them --might as well replace the hot faucet as well. When I get home from work, I disassemble the faucet, pop in the new part and reassemble the faucet in about 1 minute (I've gotten enough practice!). No more leak!

So it took a little longer to complete the job then I'd assumed, but I successfully completed the job. When tackling these home repair jobs, I need to keep in mind that they are never as easy as they first appear. I'm starting to learn my lesson, especially living in an older building. It's not that old -- built in 1968 -- but I guess that's one of the problems with Home Depot being headquartered in Atlanta, where nothing's over 10 years old.

In about 18 hours, I will be boarding a plane bound for Puerto Vallarta for a much needed 2 week vacation. 14 days of reading on the beach, drinking Coronas and Pacificos, eating some fabulous meals... This will be my 8th year in a row down there and yet it never gets old. As the winter cold sets in and the corporate ratrace continues, I always wonder if I should just be selling t-shirts on the beach or open a bar or something down in PV.

I'll be posting some pics upon my return. Unless I decide to take a job selling t-shirts...

I've finally got access to MovableType again after nearly a week with no weblog access. Seems my web host had to rebuild a couple of its web servers off of backups, and didn't bother to reinstall all the PERL modules. I had this same problem with them when they migrated my site to it present server a few months back. What really pisses me off is that they don't bother to send out any sort of email explaining that they will be doing work on the servers, that things may not be all working, etc. and give an ETA for having things fixed. I may have to do some research about new hosts, because while the price is good for the features I get, there have to be other options.

Anyone know of a good host offering a package comparable to 250MB disk space; 5GB bandwidth; PHP, CGI, etc. and capable of running MovableType for less than $100/year? Let me know.

...where there's the palm tree with the Christmas lights and the guy whistling Christmas carols? That'll be me for the next two weeks. Well, kind of. Hanukkah ended a couple weeks ago already, but I will be chilling on the beach in Puetro Vallarta! Man do I need this time off, too. Rough couple weeks at work. But that'll all be forgotten in 14 days of sunny beaches and incredible Mexican food!

According to a team of British scientists, alcohol makes others better-looking. Uh, thanks for the tip.

And in order to study British pub culture, the Social Issues Research Center "embarked on yet another six-month anthropological pub-crawl".

Exactly who's handing out the grant money in England and where can I get some?

Over the course of the past week, I have seen two people who clearly just do not get it. You know those stickers with Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes peeing on something, ususally a Chevy or Ford logo? Well the other day I saw one in which Calvin was peeing on a Honda logo, but it was ON A HONDA CIVIC! And then a couple days later I saw Calvin relieving himself on a Ford logo, the sticker attached to a FORD AEROSTAR van! One guy who did get it right, however, was the Suburban driver who had a sticker of Calvin peeing on the work "Terrorists."

Well, after years of reading others Blogs, I have decided to embark on my writing my own. I don't have any set topic for this. It'll probably be all over the place. Web design, sports, Chicago, politics, business, who knows what else. We'll just have to wait and see how this thing unfolds.