Rejection is hard to take, isn’t it? I was reminded while watching a few random clips of “American Idol” auditions that it is really hard to hear someone criticize you. It always makes me uncomfortable to watch bad auditions because people are putting themselves on the line when very few even have the chance of making it. I think there is a reason that Paula Abdul is so slow to say something mean to nice people–because she’s felt the sting of criticism and it just hurts sometimes.
The interesting thing is that people who are willing to be rejected and keep their chin up can move forward–making improvements, or even changing direction in life to something that better suits them. I think it’s pretty easy for rejection to go the other way, though–sending you into a spiral of self-doubt and depression.
I remember when I got laid off–both times!–and it felt like that. It’s almost worse in the small-time stuff because that can make you think that you’re not even the best among a small group–let alone the whole community of whatever you’re talking about.
I’ve dealt with rejection of various kinds in my life. The rejection of being a geek. The rejection of not having a good-enough band. The rejection of losing. The rejection of being laid-off.  I still have a consistently lingering feeling that I’m really not worth much to an employer.  All I can say is that now I have more compassion on people who are trying their hardest–and I’ve learned not to place my self-worth in something as fleeting as a job or a hobby, even a talent.
It makes me realize how important family is–they love you no matter what.
After updating a bunch of software on my Mac (including a Leopard install), I really didn’t use it all at once. After a week or two not working on Rails, I noticed that when I started my mongrel server it gave me a message:
I thought it would be a pretty simple fix. Just change the version number in your config/environment.rb file and you’re golden, right? Wrong.
After I did that, I still had some issues–no idea why–giving me an error about “OPTIONS already defined” –what was going on here? So, I mistakenly ran
sudo gem update
Bad idea. Now I have Rails 2.0.2 installed as the default. I chalk this up to the programming karma gods and say it’s time for me to go ahead and make the upgrade. (Before you know it, I’ll be on Ruby 1.9 too–in production!). But I’m still getting the same issue. So I created a new rails project and started up the server… and it worked! So I know my installation isn’t hosed, it’s just something with my environment.
I start copying plugins and environment files over one by one and starting the server to see if it comes up. Eventually I copy in my environment.rb file and BINGO we have a winner. There’s several things going on in my environment.rb file so I start taking things out one by one until I get it working. Cached_model / memcache is blowing everything up. Good to know.
sudo gem install cached_model
That pretty much fixed everything. Went back to my old codebase and started the server right up. I actually have no idea how cached_model got uninstalled, but I’m guessing that the version I had was incompatible with my latest gem updates and everything got hosed.
I remember the feeling I had the first time I beat Zelda when I was 10 or 11. It was an awesome feeling. The credits scrolled by anticlimactically as I reveled in my warrior awesomeness. Good defeated evil and all was right in my little world.
It’s probably been 15 years or more since I’ve beaten a game like that… until tonight. And what a game it was. Super Mario Galaxy was an awesome Christmas present–and it was a SUPER fun game to play. The controls (except for the swimming levels) were very intuitive and fun and the variety of levels and challenges were awesome.
And on top of all that, when you’re done beating Bowser again (AGAIN!), you get to revisit 15 of the levels that you’d beaten before and solve coin puzzles.
I’m glad to be done with the main part of the game because it was consuming a lot of thoughts–the last 15 levels or so can be taken at a much more leisurely pace.
Today, Andrea and I reversed roles. Andrea was gone all day and I hung out with the kids. It was quite fun, actually–and a welcome change from the awful day we had yesterday.
Andrea was gone to church for quite a long time due to some planning and prep-style commitments before and after. Timothy stayed good all day and didn’t take a nap. He made it to 7:45 without really fussing. It was really nice.
But in the afternoon, Andrea went to the gym with a friend to try to get in the workout habit. While she was gone, I took the kids on a Daddy-venture. On the way out Timothy was talking about all the awesome things that we’ll do as a family, like go to the park. And apparently while we’re at the park, Daddy will be invincible because…
“You’re the strongest, so bugs don’t eat you!”
Had to laugh for multiple reasons on that one
After we got home and mommy came back we watched Ratatouille on an iTunes rental (as an aside, I love the idea of iTunes renting movies. I just wish they had a 48 hour timer rather than a 24 hour one and that they were about $1 less per movie ($1.99 for old titles, $2.99 for new ones) — that would mean they were almost always the right way to rent–as it is now, it’s good if you you rent periodically.) and I cooked dinner (wings!). After that put the kids down and life returned to normal.
Andrea passed out around 9 and I’m up writing this understanding her side of things a little better now. I think she understands how I feel when I get home from work a little better too!
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