Narcissistic Vanity

SysMango.com is the personal website of Butch Lebo.

The picture to the left here is a picture of me, taken almost daily, for my own amusement and as decoration of this exercise in being uninteresting.

Please feel free to contact me via this form, or by commenting on any of the posts.

This text is really a placeholder while I think of something better. Because I'm not really sure what I want to put here. Do you have a suggestion?

My Twitter TimelineMy LinkedIn ResumeMy Facebook ProfileMy Brazen Careerist Social Resume

The gears in my mind . . .

Happy Birthday, Natalie!

Submitted by Butch on Sun, 2010-08-29 23:53
in

I know today is your first day back to work for the school year, and that you're not feeling well. I hope you enjoyed the presents and cards and the day we spent in Portsmouth.

Sorry the Bier Garden was a bit of a disappointment, but like you said, running out of standard dishes at one in the afternoon . . . that's just wrong. And yea, maybe it didn't match up with what you would have called home cooking.


All that being said, I hope today, your actual birthday, is a good day. I know it's going to be the 3rd busy week in a row, for both of us.


Moving away from Facebook

Submitted by Butch on Mon, 2010-08-16 00:20
in

I just spent a little bit of time doing what I was starting to feel like was the only reason why I even went back to the Facbook website: blocking applications that people I was connected with were using because I just don't have an interest in what Facebook game, Facebook quiz or Facebook 3rd-party-app feature most people use beyond the small set I use myself, for my own purposes.
After blocking the eighth facebook app, I started to get a little angry. At least two of these apps I thought I had blocked before. Either there is yet another app on facebook with this or that name, or an app I already blocked has spawned another app to get around the fact that people block it. I really don't care. I'm tired of it. I really only want to see status updates from people that are actually put onto facebook by a person deciding there is something they want to add to facebook, not an automatically generated posting made by a game teasing me with information that I can't get to, because I don't use the app.
I'm sorry; I'm not going to add an app just to see 1 more line of text, and let yet another group mine my information without any value to me.

Read more »

The State of this Human

Submitted by Butch on Sat, 2010-07-17 22:18
in

Part the First: What the hell is going on here

The original idea for this post came kind of early in the year. Of course the problem is at that time of the year, everyone is doing these kind of posts. Programs of all sorts look back on their pasts, talk about current projects and dream about their futures. Toking at some of the title these kind of things get, plays on the US State of the Union, I realized that I am able to do is speak for myself.

And thus the title, “State of this Human.”

The next time the idea of this post came up was around the time of my birthday. And that just seemed rather boring. But the idea kept.

This week (or two) I'm here alone. Seemed like a reasonably good time to be a little bit introspective.

Part the Second: Life in general

Would statistics work here for starting things off? 37. Overweight. Underpaid. How about some categorical assignments? Husband, Father of 2 boys, Technology Consultant. Insomniac.

The phrase that has seemed to sum up everything for me for the last couple of years has been “I'm not really all that interesting.”

Read more »

Good-bye to a good dog

Submitted by Butch on Sat, 2010-07-10 14:03
in

I just got off the phone with my mother. This morning they had to put our dog, Gabby, to sleep. This is the second time that I've been unable to be there to say good-bye to a pet I helped raise right before Natalie and the boys were going to be making a trip to my parents, without me.
Gabby was not a young dog. While we never really knew what breeds she mixed, at 13-14 years old, she must have been old for any of them. She had a good long life, and I believe that she was happy for most of it. The only times it might not have been good were when Max was put to sleep, having to adjust to being the only dog in the house, and the last couple of years of discomfort from medical issues.
Today is even sadder, because it is not just not being there to say good-bye to a pet, but also the viewing of the mother of friends that we spent a lot of time with during high school, which was also this morning. I'm still a little stunned that the mother of of close friends is gone. She was someone I knew, and someone that cared for the whole group of us, treated all of us good enough to be family.

Read more »

Third week of Summer

Submitted by Butch on Wed, 2010-07-07 21:13
in

About three weeks of Nat's and the boys' summer have passed. And everyone else is getting ready to leave for 3 weeks.
At the start of the summer, Natalie and I put together some activities that we wanted the boys to try do to keep their minds working through the summer. We worked hard through the school year to get the boys writing and to get them to learn how to keep themselves from putting all their work off till the last minute. This is something that we had problems with even getting into the end of the school year. One of the stated goals I had was to give them work to do, and to have them figure out how to meet the objectives for every week.

Read more »

Follow up on JB

Submitted by Butch on Thu, 2010-06-24 22:27
in

A quick follow up on JB and the great epic trek into parental hell that started Monday.
He's doing much better. Much, much better.
Jacob's color is back. And he is now starting to tell me that he's bored. Which says to me that he wants something to do.
I expect that we'll start slowly returning to whatever passes for normal around here. The big problem is that we were not able to establish the new (read: summer) normal before a somewhat tiny vestigial flap of tissue decided it wanted everyone to pay it some attention. So, now we start trying to return things to normal, whatever that means.

JB at the hospital: long day

Submitted by Butch on Tue, 2010-06-22 00:13
in

Forgive me if the typing is weird. I'm doing this on my phone.
Friday night JB was a little congested, but we live in Virginia Beach and school just got finished, so allergies and colds happen.
Saturday we went to the beach, and Saturday night JB was complaining he was dizzy. We figured he was dehydrated from being at the beach and in the sun for a couple hours.
Yesterday (Saturday) he ran a fever, but nothing else seemed wrong. At this point we were figuring it was a cold.
This morning, Nat and I slept in from the school year 5:30am start. It was 6:30 when we started to get up, and JB comes into the room telling us that his stomach hurt. There wasn't anything really wrong with this, until he curled up on the floor of the bathroom when we asked him if he was going to throw up.
Seems this the "my belly hurts" means "I am doubled over in pain and there is nothing anyone can do about it"
JB might be a bit overdramatic at times, but this was way different from normal.
We did get him back in bed for a bit. He started to act like he felt better. He even started to eat breakfast. And then he started with the discomfort again. At this point it is all way too familiar.

Read more »

Happy Birthday, Macey!

Submitted by Butch on Mon, 2010-06-14 12:19
in
Happy Birthday, to you! Happy Birthday, to you! Happy Birthday, dear Macey! Happy Birthday, to you!

We all wish we could be there with you, sorry you're not feeling well.

On My 37th Birthday

Submitted by Butch on Mon, 2010-05-31 14:09
in

2009Oct252008May312009May312010May31
Today is my 37th birthday.
Yesterday, the neighbors used my birthday as an excuse to throw a patio party (not that we really needed much more of a reason than it was warm). And it was a surprise. Would you believe the first surprise party anyone has ever done.
Honestly, it's just another day (that just happens to be a national holiday).
So, we had some drinks, some coffee, some cake, a noticeable Marti Gras theme in honor of the beaded necklace that I found on my car a week or so ago, and there were some funny gifts.

On another front, today is Quit Facebook Day. And I'm tempted to quit facebook. But I'll leave that for another day. QuitFacebookDay.com

And on the final front, today is Memorial Day.

Recovered from my own mistakes

Submitted by Butch on Fri, 2010-05-21 08:06
in

Yesterday I noticed a problem while upgrading some of the modules that run the site. It should have been an easy issue. The version numbers for one or two of the modules did not reflect the versions that had been installed, and this was making another module complain, because at least one of the versions not being reported had a security problem.
I did some poking around and realized that I must have put an earlier version of at least one module in the wrong place, and the system was still seeing the old version in the wrong place, not the new version I just tried to install.
So, I went about and fixed this. I deleted what I thought were the wrong versions and made sure the new versions were where they should have been.
And that's when I made my mistake. I worked without a backup.
Some of the modules I use rely on other modules. The layout of some of the pages, including, it seems, the admin pages that only I see, fall into this category. And all of the relationships between modules, and where files are stored and how things go together are all stored in the database.

Read more »
Syndicate content

Navigation