Dumb Stuff

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Programming and age have ravaged my eyesight, but I have an astonishingly strong sense of smell. It's a blessing and a curse.
As a little boy, I was in love with the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci. I was pretty sure she was in love with me, too. Whenever I heard Nadia's Theme by Henry Mancini, I felt something I now recognize as melancholy. She's out there, she needs me, she misses me...sigh. All that from a seven year-old.

To this day, the Rankin Bass logo inspires profound sadness in me. When I was child watching Halloween or Christmas specials on TV, it meant the show was absolutely, positively over. Six seconds of sad, right here:

Ohio's official natural fruit is the pawpaw. I had never eaten one until I went to the Ohio Pawpaw Festival in 2015. Now we have pawpaw trees in our yard, and I eat them whenever I can (which is about three weeks out of the year).
Every year, Gina and I buy a live Christmas tree with the ball of dirt still on it. Then we replant the tree somewhere in the yard. We have blue spruces, green spruces, a blue hoopsii, a canaan fir, a scotch pine, and a concolor fir.
Cake or pie? Pie.

Trying pawpaw soda. It was not good. Sep 2015

Pawpaw trees in the middleground and to the right. Jul 2018

Favorite season: Autumn, no question.
If I ever start to think I'm smart, I imagine opening the hood of our car. I don't have to actually open the car hood, I just have to think about doing it. I have no idea what's going on under there.
I could eat these cuisines every day: Italian, Mexican. For everything else, I would need a break once in a while.
I prefer television, where you can get into character arcs and a multiple storylines. For now, 90% of what I watch is TV, 10% is movies. Having said that, my two favorite movies are: Network. It's simply a masterpiece. Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. This movie is fun and funny and awesome. There's something about it I love with a deep and unshakeable passion, and I can't quite identify it. It's not because the Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog plays when Eddie loses the poker game, but that sure as shit helps.

Our 2015 Christmas tree, a concolor fir

The 2015 tree's ball of dirt. So heavy I injured myself bringing it into the house

The men in my family are masters at killing bugs. Flies, mosquitoes, wasps, spiders, etc. My wife didn't know how much she would appreciate this talent until she began reaping the benefits.
There are a few items the kitchen must always be stocked with at the Tann household. One of them is Crystal Hot Sauce. Another is Bonne Maman Mango-Peach Preserves.
I don't write much about software or programming here because 1) it quickly gets confusing and boring, and 2) that's not what this blog is about. Having said that, here are a few things in the world of technology which I love. If any of these look as if they might interest you, check them out:
- SASS The stylesheet preprocessor CSS has always needed (ok, this is a little technological, but it's cool)
- UserFrosting Easy user management, sophisticated software under the hood
- Grav Simple, clean, fast content management; flat file only (some plugins use SQLite)
- Redmine Project management for programmers, simple and robust
Somewhere there is a photograph of me as a twelve-year-old with a South American boa constrictor named Sizzlean around my neck.