A couple of nights ago, I was leaving my father-in-law’s house with my three-year-old son, Hayden. I picked him up on the sidewalk, planning to carry him to his car seat in my truck.

Normally, Hayden would walk to the truck and climb in, but I was parked on a fairly busy street in our town, Gibson Road. Although it is technically a residential street, someone had the terrific idea to allow four lanes of traffic on it.

Sure, this eased the gridlock, but it also turned Gibson Road into something of a highway.

As I was preparing to step out and around my truck to put Hayden in, I saw a car swerve a bit out of the lane into the shoulder/bike lane/street parking area, the same area where I was about to be.

The car corrected itself quickly, and as it approached, I prepared my sharpest glare, looking like I was suffering both constipation and diarrhea at the same exact moment.

Once the car was close enough, I could see that the driver was either dialing a phone number or texting a message. My guess is that she was texting, based on her young age and the rapid movement of her fingers.

I stepped back onto the sidewalk as she passed. If she plowed into my truck, I didn’t want Hayden and I to be in the line of fire.

She didn’t crash, but I did see her swerve again after she past me. I felt such rage inside at her recklessness that I considered whether or not I could get a shot off, had I a gun and any knowledge of how a gun might work.

This idea remained after I calmed down and strapped Hayden into his car seat. Perhaps it would be fair for me to take a shot at a driver engaged in dialing/texting. It’s not like I would be perched on the roof of my father-in-laws house with a sniper rifle, taking shots at the first site of a cell phone.

I would have to retrieve my gun from the holster in which it resided, unlock the safety, aim and shoot. The car would be moving away from me, making a successful hit much less likely, and if I had Hayden in my arms, I’d have to adjust my stance to support his weight, maybe even try to fire from the hip.

Seems fair to me. Of course, I wouldn’t want to hit any innocent drivers, but then I thought that this should be part of my equation. If you don’t want pedestrians taking shots into traffic, you, as the innocent driver, need to preemptively take out the cell phone user.

Rather than just shaking your head at a texting/dialing fool, you would feel compelled to run them off of the road immediately to deter any gun happy people from firing off.

It’s a win-win solution, I think. Cell phone users will think twice before dialing or texting, if they know they might be driven off of the road or shot at.

Of course, the obvious solution to this problem is to make driving while dialing/texting a felony. After all, how many of you would drive home even more drunk if there were no DUI laws?

I’ve been coding sites for a while, so I know good and well how troublesome Microsoft’s browser can be. I know about the style problems and the rendering problems and the speed problems and the hygiene problems.

Today, another problem came right out of nowhere and punched me square in the cooch.

A user of a CMS I manage (and co-wrote) complained that .eps file extensions on her site were being truncated to .ps on download. I verified the existence of the problem and considered how it could be happening.

Thinking that our file upload routine was blocking .exe files incorrectly, I dove into the code trying to find the bad bits.

After reading several hundred lines of code, I tried to download the file in Firefox. (I do all my normal browsing at work in IE because 98% of the people who call me use IE, and I want to see what they see.)

As you can imagine, the .eps file downloaded just fine in Firefox. Moments later I had a support page open on Microsoft’s site acknowledging the issue.

The resolution involves creating a new associated extension for the Postscript file type in your folder options. Easy, right?

WRONG, motherbumpers!  You think a casual user is going to know that they are supposed to do this? It’s absolutely absurd to think that this is a viable resolution. Just when I was getting riled, I noticed the workaround at the bottom of the page.

To work around this problem, rename the encapsulated PostScript file so that it has an .eps extension instead of a .ps extension.

So, after you download the file, change the extension back? Brilliant. Of course, you’ll have to confirm the warning alert that pops up when you change a file extension in Windows.

Here’s a thought, Microsoft, if you’re still listening. How about not doing ANYTHING with the file extensions of downloaded files?

If I want to download donkeypunch.ass, shouldn’t I be able to? I can and did, by the way, but once it was downloaded, Windows Vista didn’t know how to open ass.

I’m sure that abandoning a blog for a month is not good for its health, but I have my reasons. I’ve been swamped at work, my favorite place to blog!

I also blog on a work-related site. When do I do that? At home, of course.

The past two months or so, I’ve been busier than ever before at work. I finished one project only to jump right into another one, and then hop out of it early only to dive right into another.

Now that I’ve come out of the other end of this frenzy of work, I’m feeling pretty strong in my ability to do just about anything in ColdFusion. I been a CF programmer now for almost two years, and I can honestly say that it has taken two years for me to gain this level of confidence.

My initial plan was to revisit my work goals after two years and make a decision on what my next steps should be. I haven’t made any decisions. I like my job and can see potential growth in my position. I also like the idea of returning to school for an advanced degree.

One thing is for certain. It feels very, very good to have a career I enjoy, work with people I like, and see a bright future in the work that I am doing.