Category: Family

Follow Up to News Reports About Michael Gullickson

Posted on by Todd Osborne

On February 20, 2008 my step-daughter’s father was killed in a head-on snowmobile accident near Mount Horeb, WI. He was a great guy, everyone that ever met him loved him, including me. I won’t rehash old news, his sister Heidi has an excellent blog and is much better with words and emotions that I am.

The only thing that I want to add is a refutiation of some of the information that has been circulating in the news, and with friends of Mike’s. Alchohol or drugs was not a factor in the accident. The coroner has finished his report, and the police are wrapping up their investigation. Neither rider was drunk or stoned, so despite the original news media reports, alcohol was NOT a factor in this accident.

Despite the good intentions of Mike’s friends, NOBODY saw the accident happen. Other riders were in the area, and one of Mike’s friends came upon the scene very soon after the accident, but nobody actually saw the accident happen.

Speed does not appear to be a factor either. Original stories that we heard was that the other rider was driving in excess of 70-80 MPH. This is wrong. The police reconstruction team estimates his speed between 40-43 MPH, well under the night snowmobile speed limit set by the Wisconsin DNR. Mike was either completely stopped, or very close to stopped when the accident happened.

Mike died within “seconds” according the coroner report, due to severe head and chest injuries. Both riders were wearing helmets.

We are still awaiting the final police report. At this time, it does not appear the district attorney is preparing a case against the other rider, which indicates even further that this was an accident. A horrible, possibly avoidable, accident, but an accident nonetheless.

Halle and Josh's Birthday

Posted on by Todd Osborne

Today was a very good day. Halle turned 9 and Josh (Missy’s brother) turned 32, and we had a little family party for both of them. It was a very full house, be we all had a great time. Halle cleaned up pretty nicely, she got her ears double-pierced, a new Guitar Hero guitar for the Wii so we can play doubles, a digital camera and journal for the PC, and the game of Life, along with a Claire’s gift certificate from Josh. She is officially richer than Missy and me now. Josh didn’t do too bad either, despite having to open a box with multiple (WAY too many) layers of wrapping paper while having his hands in oven mits (compliments of Missy), he did manage to score a couple new shirts.

We thought this might be a real tough day for Halle, since her dad was just killed 2 1/2 weeks ago in a horrible snowmobile accident. They had had big plans for today, including a trip to Appleton, Wisconsin to visit the American Doll store, something she had been looking forward to for a real long time. Fortunately, she still had a wonderful day, one that she does not want to end. I am very happy for her, and happy she was able to accept that life is sometimes tragic, sometimes magic, and there is always time for fun and celebration. Today was a day for celebration, Mike would have wanted it that way.

Here are some more pictures of today’s fun!

(Re)Building the American Dream

Posted on by Todd Osborne

When Missy and I got married in July 2007, we formed very specific goals and milestones for achieving those goals. They are not far-fetched, pie in the sky type daydreaming, just a simple plan for achieving the American Dream.

1) We needed a better family car. When we got married, Missy had 1 daughter and I had 2. She drove a Toyota RAV-4 that we called the “Go Cart” because of its size, and I had a Pontiac Grand Turd, err Am. These cars were fine for us at the time, but our new family of 5 could not go anywhere together. Within 2 weeks of getting married, my Grand Am was gone, replaced with a shiny new Ford Explorer. Problem solved, we no longer needed to borrow my ex-wife’s minivan to take the family on trips, we just have to add gas every time the damn thing passes a gas station.

2) We needed a truck. I had a great Dodge Dakota truck that was destroyed in the Stoughton tornado way back in August 2005. I had to buy the Pontiac Grand Turd, err Am quickly because of that, I need a car quickly, and the Pontiac was available for the right price. My needs for a vehicle are not that high, I sort of prefer crappy old trucks, but did not want a POS. We traded the RAV-4 for a 2001 Ford F150 at Suburban Wheels of Madison. Problem solved. Actually 2 problems solved, I will never own a non-American made vehicle, but that is for another post.

3) We have to pay off our credit cards! Ok, they were my credit cards, but still they had to be paid off. The balance was over $11k and they were maxed out following the wedding and honeymoon in Mexico. I set up a plan and we did this in less than 5 months.

4) We pulled our credit reports from the 3 major companies, Experian, TransUnion and EquiFax. There was some old stuff we didn’t even know about, things we had to take care of to get our credit scores up. Nothing too major, but combined was several thousand dollars we had to pay. We paid it.

5) We need a house. Before I was married, or even seriously dating Missy, I rented a 2 bedroom duplex. It’s a real nice place, for a single guy or small family, but 5 of us is really pushing it. All 3 girls have to share a bedroom which means the kids room has a bunk bed and a regular bed in it, sort of cramped when you add the other stuff in there too. The single car garage is great for Missy, but I have to scrape snow and ice off my truck whenever I want to drive somewhere. The basement is unusable because it is filled with the leftover stuff from merging two households, my kitplane cannot even be reached, so that project sits dormant. The house is cluttered because we have too many people and too much stuff in too small an area. My home office is in our bedroom, and I work about 80 hours a week, about half of that while Missy is trying to sleep. The 1987 IBM M keyboard I refuse to give up does not help any. Like I said, we need a house.

It Only Took 13 Years…

Posted on by Todd Osborne

Hard to believe that an accomplished computer programmer with a flare for writing and speaking his mind managed to somehow take 13+ years to create a blog. Well I was busy, yes, since 1995.

I have always thought I preferred to maintain my own web site (www.toddtown.com) and that whatever I wanted to say I would say there. Why not? Doing that means I have complete control over the look and feel, content, programming language, servers, etc. True, I have all of those things, but it’s a real pain in the ass. Oh let me count the ways…

Hosting your own web site means you have to have and maintain the hardware (server) required to do it. I have plenty of machines around that are capable of hosting a simple site like ToddTown, so that is not really a problem. In fact, ToddTown.com runs in a virtual machine (VMWare Server) on the same computer that hosts my Windows Media Center, as well as a bunch of other stuff. It is a very powerful Intel Quad Core computer that I built myself and is more than up for the task. Other than doing 300MB downloaded updates from Microsoft every Tuesday for Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Server 2003 (in the virtual machine), this is pretty easy. Yeah, I know this is odd, combining a Media Center with an Internet Server, but it works well and I get the most bang for my buck doing it this way.

Charter Communications; Other than Experian, TransUnion and EquiFax, I doubt there is any other company out there that I hate as much as Charter. To host your own web site (and email server), they make you pony up for their ‘business class’ Internet. This is basically a way of getting a static IP address that allows inbound connections, which allows you to easily host web and email servers. You get a little bandwidth, much less than residential customers get, for $120 per month with basic cable TV service, and are committed to 3-year contracts. The ‘business class’ service is no more reliable than residential, with at least 2-3 hours a month of downtime. This is okay for a lightweight personal web site, but I sure could not see hosting a real business site using Charter. Charter has no clue about reliable Internet connections. Hell, they only provide a single DNS server, no backup, so when they are doing maintenance on it, I cannot even get out to the Internet. Of course our phone (AT&T) is also done through this connection, so when Charter is down, so is our phone. The small amount of bandwidth I get easily gets bogged down, which can make phone call quality sporadic as well.

We are planning to move this summer into a real house, one that we own. I am not planning to take Charter with me. I will either go DSL, or if that is not a option, I will have to keep Charter, but will only pay for residential Internet service. I plan to get DirecTV for television, which I have not had for years, but miss. Look, I don’t give a rats ass about the fight between the NFL Network and Charter, they are both greedy assholes in my book, but I am tired of missing Green Bay Packers games because those two cannot work out their differences.

Damn, I knew that would happen. I start talking about one thing and end in a rant about something totally different. Well, that’s what you can expect on my blog. The next battleground here is going to be about credit scores and credit reporting agencies, and the education I have (involuntarily) received in the last several weeks.