I had lunch with Mark today. We discussed parenthood, marriage, life goals, and politics. Mark has decided to go back to school and get a Masters and possibly a Doctorate in political science. He regrets that he treated college as a means to be employable upon graduation instead of an opportunity to explore what he really wanted to do in life. Not that he had a bad major -- his degree is in Computer Science -- it's just that 20 years later, he realizes that he doesn't really enjoy coding. Especially since the late nineties when the "bar kept moving". I feel somewhat the same way. I've been in IT for about 10 years now, and everywhere I go it is all the same. The innovations in RDBMS technology does not really matter, companies never use them. I know alot of interesting stuff but it does not get used. All companies care about is getting it up fast and cheap, and having someone to blame when things go wrong. Usually, that blame is placed on the poorly designed database that they will not allow me to normalize. I sometimes wonder if this is what I want to do ten years from now. I'm good at what I do. I would like the chance to model and implement a database "by the book" once. There is only one time I came close to doing that.

There was a tornado warning this evening. Michael's mom called to see how we were doing. Michael stayed at work until the warning expired at 7PM. There were a couple of tornadoes that touched down not too far from us. All I saw was some heavy rain, other than that nothing.

Michael and I cleared some shows off of TiVo. We still have a lot to watch. Most of the stuff on TiVo is marked to be deleted right after it is recorded.