Skip navigation

Category Archives: Family

Anything that is a product of my husbandry, fatherhood, sonship, and brotherhood.

Before I get going, I just want to state this is intended for my sons.  All, obviously, are welcome to read it.

To my dear sons Will and Jake,

A man is the sum of his actions, not his words.  Words are powerful, but if there is nothing to sustain their value, they are pointless dribble.  Likewise, your words should be of value and reliable.  If you say you will do something, then do it.  Use your words to lift up others rather than tear them down; and to show others you care for them.

A man does not gripe, grumble, or complain. He accepts what is given him, and seeks to make it better with dignity and respect; not by the worthless prattling of his tongue.  Understanding of course that at times you will need to confide in others your worries and your concerns, but don’t make yourself a constant source of negative discourse.

A man is gentle and protective of those who are less fortunate, or less capable than they are.  They do not lord over others or treat them in a condescending fashion.  He leads, and by leading he serves; and presents himself as an example.  He asks nothing of others he is not willing to do himself should it be required.  Not of course to speak of things he is not capable of doing, but in such a situation shows due respect for those more capable.  He does not act petulant towards his superiors, but instead seeks to grow to be as capable.  If his superiors aren’t as capable, he still shows the due respect required for that title and relies on his actions to show his worth rather than demeaning speech.

A man does not raise his hand in violence, lest it is to protect the helpless, and will gladly lay down his life for others if it is required.  Simply put, it takes far more strength to stay your hand, than it does to let it fly.

A man never strikes a woman. A man never forces himself onto a woman. A man never pressures a woman to do anything she is not willing to do on her own.  A woman is not a trophy, but a precious person.  A daughter, a sister, a mother. Generally under appreciated in our society today, but the brace that holds most things together.  You are of no greater worth, and you will not act otherwise.  A man respects a woman, and when he finds the right one, loves that woman more than he loves himself.

A man does not fear commitment, and when he finds the right woman, he will marry her.  A man does not leave his wife.  A man will do anything in his power to make his wife feel safe, secure, and loved.  I know that a person is responsible for their own feelings, one can not force security, happiness, and love into another; but that is not an excuse to stop trying, EVER! If you are failing to do this, you are a selfish boy; only interested in your own contentment.  Admittedly that may sound harsh, as what is required may not be possible or even practical.  At those times discernment is required about what should or should not be done, but the final decision should never be reached for the sake of personal gain; but for the gain of both.  If a concession needs to be made, it is not weak to concede to your wife; and it will not go unappreciated if it’s from the heart.

Know that making a child doesn’t make you a man, raising one does; and a man raises his children in integrity, and shows them all the love and attention they deserve (They do not however take precedence over his wife.).  He is patient with them, he plays with them, but he doesn’t hesitate to rebuke them.  He is the firmest, and gentlest hand that his children will know.  A sons first hero, and a daughters first love.  His heart beats for them, and he lets them know that they are his pride.  The words of a father to his children can be the difference in how high they fly, or how low they sink.  Do not be an anchor, but wings for your children.

Finally, a Christian man loves Jesus, and seeks to emulate him in his every day life.  Loving others, always forgiving, and obedient to God; even to the point death (literal, or metaphorical).  Life is not perfect, it’s a series of heart aches and joys.  You will not be strong enough to do it alone; I certainly don’t.  But for as long as you have me, I will do what I can to help you; and I pray that you find peace and strength in Christ and the faith that these teachings are a part of, but I will love you any way my sons.

– Your Dad

The Belcher’s have officially moved into our new home, bought our new home, and have the interwebs back in our possession.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with CM12 now for work, and hopefully once my personal life dies down a bit, and I start getting back into a normal flow I’ll get some interesting CM12 content posted.

Until then!

 

So my free time has been spent lately helping with 2 children with walking pneumonia, 1 infant (perfectly healthy) working a full time job with more than a full time workload; and a lot of the cool, fun stuff I’m doing at work (in my opinion anyway)…. I can’t talk about here

.:: sadface ::.

(I still think my wife has been working harder than I have)

Trick or treating was fun, both Will and Maggie had a blast at their last Trunk or Treat @ HSBC, and run around their neighborhood.  Will was all go, all night; and Maggie was super fired up about her candy!  I was exhausted afterwards of course, but I was overjoyed to see their excitement!  Glad I got to TC this week.

As far as my gaming; I’ve been able to play a little bit of Borderlands 2 (not even 20 yet), and Torchlight 2 (wiped out my save so had to start over) which I have enjoyed.  AC3 was released, and Halo 4 is coming next Tuesday.  Alas, my consoles are packed for the move so I won’t be getting/playing them right away which pains me a bit.  I’d get AC3 for PC, but I have already played all the others on my PS3, so I wish to maintain that trend.

And for coding; I’ve been doing a fair amount of (windows) scripting lately, but nothing really ground breaking.  I did write a SQL to email script in both vbscript then re-wrote in PowerShell (since I was informed CDO will be depreciated in future releases of exchange) which I plan on sharing here in another post once I’ve scrubbed them.  They are actually jokingly easy to do, but very useful for anyone that hasn’t got a paid tool for this kind of thing.

In the short term I’m going to share a simple script to quickly gather OS service pack information from AD from a list of machines and dump it to a csv I wrote for a buddy of mine (seriously, in PowerShell this is crazy simple).

Expect to see that post around Monday or Tuesday; until then, have a good one and pray for us (or keep us in your thoughts).  There’s a lot going on, and we all feel a bit overwhelmed.

So we had another kid, that was already discussed previously.

However what has been going on now is home buying and selling, fortunately that has gone swimmingly (so far). We listed on a Friday, and got an offer on a Wendesday. We also found a home in Nashville on the same day, so it’s been a whirlwind.

Meanwhile I’m under heavy project loads right now and haven’t had time to post anything new.

Ok, brief introduction on this.  We are moving, and in the process of selling a home among other things.  So in the process of staging our home we’ve packed up our desktops and servers here.  Not a problem, we have 3 laptops, 1 is my personal, 1 is for my work, and the other is a shared one for the family.  Recently while testing some stuff with hyper-v installed on the shared laptop I had imaged the machine then saved it to a portable drive. Well what does that have to do with anything? My wife wanted to use the shared laptop as a stand in until her desktop could come back out, and I’d since deleted the image and packed all my windows 7 discs etc. Ruh roh.

So being the FOSS guy that I am (outside of work), I decided I’d use this opportunity to throw a very user friendly Linux distribution onto the laptop and see what my wife thought of it.

The distribution:

Linux Mint 13 with KDE

amanda-desk1

Now this was a fairly easy setup to make for my wife.  She is what I would consider an average user with some advanced usage areas.  Primarily with video editing and photo editing (some graphic design stuff).  However for her day to day she needed web, office suite, and email.  Since I’m going to be on the road a lot, I needed her to have Skype as well as other chat programs.

I installed from a USB key using the live iso image.  From windows this is easy to achieve, download Windows 32 Disk Imager and the desired ISO file, rename it to a .img then apply it to your flash device and viola.

After a very light crash course on navigating the system and the passwords I setup for her she was off and rocking.  Our first hurdle however was the native mail client with KDE, Kmail.  It’s functional, but she was having some issues with the large volume of emails she has on one of her accounts so I opted to install one of my favorite FOSS mail clients on their instead, Thunderbird

We both are avid Chrome users, and have our accounts and profiles linked for easy setup across platforms, so that was a breeze for her.  I imported her windows profile data to her home directory which got her back up and running with the data she needed as well.

For her Office needs we went with (and she’s adjusted quite easily to) using LibreOffice which has usurped OpenOffice as the FOSS Office Suite of choice with most Linux distros these days.

For her photo editing there is of course Gimp which has been an amazing free image manipulation application for over a decade.  For her video editing needs there is Avidemux and OpenShot, neither of which she has made use of yet.  Her video editing needs are slim at this time anyway.

Now, here is the mind blowing part for some of you Linux timids or FOSS nay sayers.  Up until this point, I’d done everything from install of the OS to now without once going into the terminal.  I had made it a point not to.  If I was going to give this to my wife to use, regardless of my feelings about the console, she shouldn’t have to use it.  All the application installs were performed from default package stores as well using only the Linux Mint Software Manager.  Being a long time Linux user (since 97~98) I was personally blown away by this.  I normally run to the console out of habit, but found that it was at a point where I genuinely didn’t have to.  However there was a problem for usability for my wife that I felt needed to be addressed, and it would require me to script something for her.

In Windows, I have a PowerShell script my wife uses to pull file system object information for her pictures and looks to the creation date then renames the files for her.  So this was something she of course wanted, and even though Dolphin and Konqueror have a really cool built in rename feature, this date method wasn’t possible for her out of the box.  I’m not going to lie, I was personally elated with this task, but finding the best method was tricky so I went with a simple iteration script she could drop in the folder and double click to run.  If she chooses to use Linux longer I’ll work on a possibly building her something a bit more robust, but here’s the existing code:

#!/bin/bash
#Script to rename jpg by create date and number
x=1
for i in *.jpg *.JPG
do
y=$(stat -c %y "$i" | sed 's/^\([0-9\-]*\).*/\1/')
  file=$y"("$x").jpg"
        mv "$i" $file
                x=$[$x+1]
done

 

So there is a bit of regex usage here, but the end result is each jpg file in the existing folder has it’s date information pulled from the file using stat, then piped through sed to chop it down to a preferable string.  That string is then concatenated into a file name with an incremental integer and extension then the existing file has it’s name changed to that newly created string.

So what did my wife gain from this interim transition?  A new appreciation for another operating system and the flexibility and eye candy that comes with Linux environments?  I don’t know, but it’s allowed us to retrofit some old hardware with her level of desired functionality at 0 additional cost.  All in all, I’d say that’s pretty cool, and I’m still stoked my wife is rocking out with Tux.

So August 10th I finalized interviews with, and had a verbal offer extended to me from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Services, which I’ll refer to as Deloitte for simplicity sake from here on out.  I’ve since accepted the offer and will be relocating (back) to Nashville.  This chapter in our lives comes to a close here in Alabama as we move back home.  Thanks to all our friends we’ve made while we were here, we’ll miss you.

I will continue to be an SCCM Engineer but for a global data center (well larger globally than what I’ve done in the past).  Everything is a step forward, with minimal lateral movement thanks to Kinder Morgan stripping every perk away from my job once buying out El Paso.  I’m extremely excited about this new opportunity and will begin employment on Sept 10th.  We are gladly accepting any help moving if anyone is interested in providing it once everything here sells.

That’s about all I feel comfortable posting on my blog, if you are a close friend or relation and have any more questions, you have my phone number.

who-is-awesome

image

Little feet, marked for measurements, and a smiley face. Round one of my little girls corrective equipment collection begins.

Spun up another blog dedicated to her crafting:

and from my understanding is willing to craft things for other people as well if they are interested…

I’m not sure how the female readership is to my blog, but men if you have wives or kids, it might be worth showing them so they can follow it. Thanks.

Here’s the link to her announcement post.

Moved me to tears with her 19 month post for Maggie. I know she doesn’t like a lot of attention drawn to herself or her blog, but I just had to share this post.

Poem from her post:

Special Child
by Sharon Harris

You weren’t like other children,
And God was well aware,
You’d need a caring family,
With love enough to share.
And so He sent you to us,
And much to our surprise,
You haven’t been a challenge,
But a blessing in disguise.

Your winning smiles and laughter,
The pleasures you impart,
Far outweigh your special needs,
And melt the coldest heart.

We’re proud that we’ve been chosen,
To help you learn and grow,
The joy that you have brought us,
Is more than you can know.

A precious gift from Heaven,
A treasure from above,
A child who’s taught us many things,
But most of all – “Real Love”

So for those who know, and for those who don’t.

My mother in law was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and after a bit of testing had her first surgery this past Tuesday.  I won’t go into vast amounts of detail, but the tumor was succesfully removed, and 2 of the 3 lymph nodes came back negative upon the initial inspection, and the tumor came out nice and round (generally meaning it was well encapsulated).  I’m thankful that initial crisis is behind us, and we can look forward to (hopefully/prayerfully) continued healing of her body.

I’ve been loaded down with work, and personal issues lately that have prevented me from posting anything on here in quite a while.  Hopefully I can get some solid script/code/technical content posted here soon.  I really want to get my logon framework posted up here, but I’m not really sure the best method for achieving that right now.

Until then, take care.