So much for trying to keep a current blog and fresh content…right? 
I’m not about to make excuses for an almost 2 month absence. A lot of things in my life haven’t been going the way I want them to and instead of pissing and moaning about it I generally just clam up and contemplate doing harmful things to the “powers that be” that have this effect on my life…..So, if you are either, someone that contributes to my unhappiness or someone that thinks I should keep an updated blog…Kiss my ass! All others, welcome.
So what have I been up to?
Pretty much the same things I’m usually doing….Working, visiting Jacob, and sleeping.
There was a very cool break to that monotony from Jan. 25th to Feb. 3rd, which was my vacation spent as full time daddy and primary care giver to my awesome little boy. We didn’t do a helluva lot other than hang out and do the father/son bonding thing, but to me it felt like the best vacation I could’ve had. It also did wonders to squash my self-doubt about my abilities as a dad…Why?…’cause I fuckin rock and my little boy loves me! It was amazing to see the difference in relationship dynamics between him and I and him and his mother, it was pretty much night and day. I can honestly say that I don’t think I heard him cry once while he was here…whine a little, maybe…but we started working on curbing that with great success before vacation was over. How he behaves when in Mom’s presence though, pretty much the opposite since he knows it works.
So, enough gloating about the perfect baby since Mom has been known to snoop this blog from time to time….Besides, I already did my gloating in her face at the time. 
Hmmm, what else…
Oh yeah, I just got over I nice little intestinal virus…..That was a fun week 
I’ll spare the details but given a choice, the virus or a high caliber bullet to the back of my head - the bullet sounds like a more pleasant option, in hindsight.
Ok, I was debating on writing about work for a couple reasons but, what the fuck….
Work sucks!!! I believe I’m coming up on a year since I expressed my desire to get off of 3rd shift and become a normal person and be a better dad and also the direction I’d like to take in my career. Since the last time I mentioned it in this blog, I was told about an opportunity available to me, this wonderful opportunity would not take me in the desired direction in my career, it would add about 1.5 hours travel time daily, would not give me the schedule I need to make things work with my son and last but not least would put me right under an asshole I’ve worked for before and had nearly gotten into a physical confrontation with…thanks but no thanks, fuckers!…I do my job well and they fuckin know it…. This is the kind of treatment/neglect that creates disgruntled armed assailants in the workplace!…Ok, end rant….See? that’s why I was debating about talking about work.
Anyway, enough for now. I think I’ll go break stuff.
Post Category: Life
February 23rd, 2007 at 08:39amTom
I know I’m a few days late but tough shit…
Once again, I find myself trying to recap the year and seem to be measuring things by my son’s accomplishments…I guess a baby can do that to ya’.
My year had its ups and downs and I came to the conclusion sometime during 2006 that I’m pretty much done with working 3rd shift…My family life and social life have suffered far longer than they should have. I made my intentions known to management and they seemed (at the time) to be willing to get me into a daytime position which would mean a promotion and the monetary increase that goes with it….I was told “lets make it through the holidays and prepare my subordinates to be promotable and we’ll make it happen”…Did we make it through the holidays?…YES…Are my subordinates promotable?…Some yes, some No but there’s nothing saying that they need to be promoted for me to get what I want. So, as it stands, I wait…I do think I should be shopping for my daytime attire sometime in the coming weeks though..If you’re wondering what the daytime attire would be, it’s white shirts, ties and slacks that make my ass look great…lol
Anyway, I hope y’all had a happy and safe new year and best wishes for a great 2007.
Post Category: Life
January 3rd, 2007 at 07:59amTom
I just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone that may stop by a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa….or whatever holiday you happen to celebrate.
I’ve never been too big on the whole Christmas season thing but since Jacob was born in 2005, I’ve been a bit happier than I used to be, this time of year…I hope you have someone in your life that makes the holidays better for you as my son has for me.
Post Category: Life
December 21st, 2006 at 01:46pmTom
As you may or may not have noticed, which kinda depends on if you even come to this site, is that upon opening My Music Page, it automatically starts playing a song with a neat little flash plugin for Wordpress (Wordpress being what this site is built on). I had originally thought about making one from scratch and was googling my fingers off trying to find out how. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to look for a plugin to serve my purpose but it came up in the searches that I was doing (several pages deep, I might add), and voila! …embedded music in a visitor controlled stand alone flash player…too f’ing cool!
Post Category: General
December 16th, 2006 at 08:58amTom
Due to a recent “happening” in my life, I thought I’d write a little about it.
On the night of 10/28/06, I had more than a passing thought about my first love. I’ve thought about her off and on since the last time we spoke but never like this.
I was “with” Robin Lynn More, off and on (mostly on) for nearly 6 and a half years of my adolescence and in March of 1989 things ended very badly for us and I ended up moving from Liverpool, NY to Chicopee, MA. I spoke with her maybe twice from ‘89 to ‘91 and hadn’t heard from or tried to contact her since then. So, after having her pop into my head (and stay there) on the 28th, being somewhat of a geek that I am, I decided to look her up…It turned out that she wasn’t all that prevalent in my web searches but had some info to go on. But I started to feel a little creepy about looking her up. After all, things did end badly and she might have a happy life now and never want to hear from me again….OK, data dismissed, maybe I’ll wait another 15+ years. 
Here comes the “holy shit”
On the night of 11/7/06, I woke up for work as usual, got ready and grabbed my keys and headed for the door. I noticed that my answering machine had a message and stopped to listen to it. “Hi Tom, this is Robin More, maybe I’ll try back sometime”. Well, of course in that week from the time I looked her up ’til then, I had tried to put her out of my head…Which I seemed to fail at but her calling me had undone any progress I had made in that endeavor. So, at that point I was patiently waiting for the “sometime” that she was going to try again…OK, maybe not so patiently.
I *69′d the number and googled to see what I’d come up with…Bingo, got addresses and a means to reach her…But since she didn’t leave the number or request that I return her call, I sat on the info. That is, until I got tired of waiting. So, I type up a quick letter letting her know that I would be very happy to hear from her and giving her plenty of contact information to reach me at any given time, send it and I wait.
At this point I feel the need to digress and share a little about my mindset at that point…
Being where I am at this point in my life, single with not much of a social life and having more than several failed relationships, including a marriage, I’ve become rather jaded and skeptical that there is a special “someone” out there for me. Maybe I’ve also watched too many Maury Povich reunion shows that have some romantic happy ending but I guess there’s always a part of my heart reserved for my first love and as hardened as I have become throughout my life, I might harbor some hope that I could meet her again and fall head over heals all over again…*makes me squirm just saying that*
So, back to the story.
The morning of 11/26, my birthday incidentally, I received the phone call I was waiting for…I know I was very nervous and a little tongue tied but managed to keep up the small talk while being somewhat playful and even a little flirty at times. Even through finding out she’s now on marriage #2, she has 2 children with twins on the way, I managed to not seem like the neurotic mess that I was feeling like on the inside…. Maybe my birthday was not the best time to get this call since I have been feeling a little down about growing older and the feelings of inadequacy about my life seemed to surface a bit during the call but we managed to talk about sending pictures and said the obligatory “lets stay in touch” to close out the 20 minute call….How do you talk about 15+ years of your life in 20 minutes?…what the fuck did I just talk about? ….Gee, can I have a mulligan on that one?
Have I received the pictures? No… Have we talked again? No…. Has she even visited this site? No. (and yes, I can tell where people are from and when they visit 
)
So, in closing, all I really achieved from that phone call is, feeling a little older, a little lonelier, and wanting some kind of “real” romantic involvement in my life….Apparently, not all of us can have that next “special someone” present themselves as soon as the current relationship ends…Must be fucking nice!!!!
Post Category: Life
December 11th, 2006 at 08:27amTom
So, as you may have noticed, VirtuallyTom.com just got a facelift….Hell, it’s more like reconstructive surgery and transplants.
On the morning of 12/8, I got tired of wondering how to fix the site with learning CSS and recoding everything manually and said “fuck it, I’ll install wordpress”. Since this blog and Jacob’s World are both WP blogs, I was pretty familiar with the installation and figured it was a good idea for content management of the site and a much easier way out of having to become some web design guru….There are still some things that need to be fixed but between installing Coppermine Photo Gallery and WP to handle the pages of the site, this is probably the closest thing to a consistent site structure it has been since its inception in 12/04…YEAAAAA!!!!
Post Category: Technology
December 9th, 2006 at 07:26amTom
As you may or may not have noticed, I actually have been doing some work on the site…a lot of it is in the coding which you won’t see but it was work none the less.
The new additions to the site which you may have guessed from the post title is music…Lately I’ve had more desire to get in touch with my roots and start playing guitar, singing and recording than anything web design related….and it shows by 8 new songs on My Music Page. Some of the songs I’ve been playing for years, some I just learned recently….I’d like to think that the quality of my recording is getting better with each song and some listeners seem to agree….but there’s always room for improvement.
Anyway, the new editions are:
Far Away - Originally recorded by Nickelback
Rockstar - Originally recorded by Nickelback
Someday - Originally recorded by Nickelback
When You Say Nothing At All - Originally recorded by Alison Krauss/ Randy Travis/et al
When There’s No One Around - Originally recorded by Garth Brooks
3AM - Originally recorded by Matchbox20
Question Everything - Originally recorded by 8Stops7
Anymore - Originally recorded by Travis Tritt
The songs that were there previously have been cleaned up a bit too since someone pointed out that the quality of my earlier recordings sucked ass….I was totally surprised at the improvement made with “Audio Cleaning Lab 10 Deluxe”…Definitely recommended if you’re ripping cassette or vinyl to mp3.
You might notice too, the music has a bit more low end punch to it….That would be because I bought a bass guitar, finally! I can’t believe I waited this long….So far I’m pretty happy with the purchase….Peavey Millennium BXP 5 String
I plan to continue covering songs until I get bored with it or hopefully come up with some original material….I’ve had the desire to start writing again lately but not instrumentals….Lyrics have always been tough for me so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to come up with anything worth listening to.
Post Category: Music
December 4th, 2006 at 06:15pmTom
Well, maybe….
I’ve had the urge to work on my site again lately and possibly start blogging again….don’t know how long it will last or if anyone visits anymore….The website stats say “yes” but what they’re visiting, how they’re finding me, how long they stay, how many pages they check out, I don’t know….So, I guess I feel the need to make the site worthwhile again.
Which leads me to talking about the “makeover”….Firstly, I’ve acquired the new domain name VirtuallyTom.com as I felt that the site was lacking a personal touch due to being created under my pseudonym. tictoc5150 is/was a screen name that I used on various instant messengers and forums…. I may or may not still use it but when it comes to this site, I am the real me.
“Who’s that?”, you might ask… Thomas C. Taylor
I won’t get into my life story here, I’ll probably be setting up a bio page in the very near future to take care of all of that.
I’m really not sure where or how to start working on the site….I want to do things right and not just throw a bunch of pages to the server…..That kinda means actually planning it and the even harder part of learning how to do it. It seems that knowing some HTML is not enough to create a decent website. To do things right nowadays you need HTML, CSS, XHTML, FLASH…blah blah blah. I’ve been trying to learn CSS over the past couple days and while I’ve picked up a few things here and there, a lot of the information I find is not structured very well, making it even harder to understand….I’ll keep at it though.
Post Category: Life, Technology
November 13th, 2006 at 08:33amTom
Oh, my!!! I’m surprised to find myself posting here twice in the same month but since I just updated Jacob’s World for good reason, I figured I might as well throw a quick one up here too.
I’m definitely having a proud daddy moment…It’s so cool to see your kid do something that they previously couldn’t do…Crawling or even dragging himself a matter of a few feet was something pretty cool to see….Most things that he’s done so far have been a gradual process, so, it doesn’t sneak up on ya’ that much. Not that those moments are any less important but a dad likes to be surprised from time to time.
Take the talking thing for instance…He makes plenty of noises and some of them even sound alot like words but unless he repeats himself and confirms that he is actually calling the cat “kitty“, there’s no real way of knowing that it’s his first word….And yes, that was a real example of his speech….He was looking at the cat when he said “kitty”!!! Since he already makes “da da da da” noises, I’m pretty sure he’ll be calling me by name pretty soon…That’ll be pretty cool too, at least until he wears it out. :lol:
Also, the “sitting up on his own” thing, a pretty gradual process but from seeing that he couldn’t do it as of 1/1/06 and now he can, things do happen reasonably quick.
So, anyway, it was a nice way to wind up a vacation…I spent considerably more time with him this past week and he closed it out with a milestone event…very cool, little man!
Well, guess I’ll close this out and try to catch a nap before work tonight….going back to the grind after vacation totally blows! :mad:
Post Category: Life
January 21st, 2006 at 04:05pmTom
So, another year goes by…I’m not gonna say, “down the tubes” like I have in the past, thanks to my son being born…
Alot of the holiday blahs that I’ve felt in the past have, more or less, been absent this year due to my mind being on other things, mainly my awesome little boy. The people that know me, know that Jacob is a perfect example of quintessential serendipity and no matter how he came to being, I wouldn’t go back and change it now….He totally rocked my 2005 and I imagine he’ll continue to do so for many many years.
I’m not sure why, but just before I sat down to write this entry, I was thinking about how long I’ve been living in this general area and realized that I’ve been here almost half my life…It was a rather shocking revelation. I didn’t pay much attention to turning 37 this year but now that I think of the fact that I moved to this area when I was 20, made me think “wow, I’m gettin’ fuckin old!!!”…lol
But on the bright side, I’ve managed to become a reasonably responsible adult (or can at least appear that way to the untrained eye :lol: )…In the past 17 years, I’ve served my country (so what if it was the reserves, and I looked damn good in uniform!), I’ve been in love a couple times (yeah, all good things end…lol). I’ve held a couple jobs for a significant amount of years that definitely improved my resume. My current employment has probably made the most changes in my life, providing me with the means to be the over-self-indulgent flake I tend to be and also the means to be secure enough to afford my son…Schools aren’t cheap and I have to get this kid good and educated so he can get rich and buy me lots of cool toys for my golden years. 
In trying to think about what was good about 2005, I found myself measuring the year by Jacob’s milestones. I guess that is probably pretty common and most certainly provides more interesting reading than the ups and downs of “shop-talk” or that of my drab personal/love life.
So, here we go again….
The little man grew 5 to 6 inches and almost tripled his weight from 7/8/05 to 1/1/06…They biggie sized him at no extra charge!!!
He rolls over on his own, can stand up with an assist for balance, can sit also with an assist, makes lots of new noises, ranging from laughter to raspberrys and every day seems to be brought to us by the letter B…Wouldn’t shock me if his first word ends up being “bullshit”. :lol:
By the Jacob scale, I can tell 2006 is gonna be huge. In the next year he’ll start walking and talking and getting into all kinds of mischief…Oh joy, let the baby-proofing begin
Anyway, I hope you all had a great 2005 and best of luck for an even better 2006.
Peace y’all.
t0c
Post Category: Life
January 1st, 2006 at 05:30amTom
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