Getting the Most from your IT Department

My Sister send me the following list. I nearly fell over laughing. I personally have had 30 of the 35 experiences listed. Enjoy!

 

1. When you call us to have your computer moved or fixed, be sure to
leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed
animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and children's art. We don't
have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of
yours.

2. Don't write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages
from here.

3. When an IT person says he's coming right over, go for coffee. That
way you won't be there when we need your password. It's nothing for us
to remember 300 user passwords.

4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what's keeping
you from getting it. We don't need to know that you can't get into your
mail because your computer won't power on at all.

6. When IT support sends you an e-mail with high importance, delete it
at once. We're just testing.

7. When an IT person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and
spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

8. Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and
flags it as a rush delivery.

9. When the photocopier doesn't work, call computer support. There's
electronics in it. Ditto for the microwave, timeclock, and coffee maker.
Hell, if it plugs in, we're probably in charge of it anyway.

10. When you're getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer
support. We can fix your telephone line from here.

11. When you have a dozen old computer screens to get rid of, call
computer support. We're collectors.

12. When something's wrong with your home PC, dump it on an IT person's
chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem.
We love a puzzle.

13. When an IT person tells you that computer screens don't have
cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.

14. When an IT person tells you that he'll be there shortly, reply in a
scathing tone of voice: "And just how many weeks do you mean by
shortly?". That motivates us.

15. When the printer won't print, re-send the job at least 20 times.
Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.

16. When the printer still won't print after 20 tries, send the job to
all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.

17. Don't learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly
what you mean by "my thingy blew up".

18. Don't use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.

19. If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your
dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were
designed to have 40lb of computer sitting on top of them.

20. If the space bar on your keyboard doesn't work, blame it on the mail
upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin
crumbs and nail clippings in them.

21. When you get a message saying "Are you sure?" click on that Yes
button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren't sure, you wouldn't be
doing it, would you?

22. When you find an IT person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited
on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don't
have any money to speak of anyway.

23. Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about
that computer crap". We don't mind at all hearing our area of
professional expertise referred to as crap.

24. When you need to change the toner cartridge in a printer, call IT
support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and
Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional
engineer with a master's degree in nuclear physics.

25. When you can't find someone in the government directory, call IT
Support.

26. When you have a lock to pick on an old file cabinet, call IT
Support. We love to hack.

27. When something's the matter with your computer, ask your secretary
to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a
third party who doesn't know anything about the problem.

28. When you receive a 50MB movie file, send it to everyone as a mail
attachment. We've got lots of disk space on that mail server.

29. Don't even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller
chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the
queue.

30. When an IT person gets on the elevator pushing $100,000 worth of
computer equipment on a cart, ask in a very loud voice: "Good grief, you
take the elevator to go DOWN one floor?!?" That's another one that
cracks us up no end.

31. When you lose your car keys or go to lunch, send an email to the
entire company. People down in Las Vegas like to keep abreast of what's
going on.

32. When you bump into an IT person at the grocery store on a Saturday,
ask a computer question. We do weekends.

33. Don't bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own.
Computer names are just a cosmetic feature.

34. When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office,
leave the documentation at home. We'll find all the settings and drivers
somewhere.

35. In no way do we believe that end-users are ungrateful. It hurts our
feelings that one could even think such a thing on the basis of the
above statements. In truth we wish to express our deepest gratitude to
the hundreds of wonderful end-users portrayed herein, without whom none
of this would have been remotely possible.

Fun filled Week Part I

I know that It's been more than a week since my last post, by boy what a week it has been. I guess it started last saturday, when we got a call from my Beautiful Wife's niece, saying, "hey, we are on the way". The way to where? we asked, "Well, your house". So hey cool, we are going to have some company! It's going to be my Wife's Niece, Her Daughter, and her Daughters friend. So My Beautiful Wife and I got to work immediately in making the house presentable. I tackled the dishes, she took on the laundry. All in all we got like 8 hours worth of cleaning done in like 3 hours. Yeah, were rockin. So now the house is clean, where are we going to put everyone. Hummmm, we may need some help on that one. So I let my Folks know what's going on, and they come up with the brilliant idea of bringing their motor home over to our house, and our company can stay in their. Now this was a plan that really came together. My Dad and Brother brought it over showed our guest how to use everything and we charming as usual!

Sunday, or should I say sunday lobster sunday. Being that our family guest from Airzona, first place we have to hit is going to be the beach. After getting the necesarry things (Dr. Pepper, Umbrella, boogie boards, Dr. Pepper, sandwiches, chips, Dr. Pepper, towels and sun screen.) we packed the car and where off. We went down to Santa Monica beach, and to our surprise so did everyone else in LA. We finally get down PCH enough to find some parking. We ended up at part of the beach that my Dad and I use to go surf fishing at all then time when I was younger. We set up our spot, and the girls going boogie boarding and My Wife and her Niece went for a walk. I kicked back and watched the girls like a hawk. You see my Beautiful Wife's Nieces, Daughter and her friend are both 11 years old. So of course the Oldest Brother thing kicks in. After we have some lunch I go in the water, now I don't think I have actually been in the ocean for 3 or 4 years. I've been the the beach but having gotten in. When I was a kid you couldn't keep me out of the water. It was nice to do a little body surfing with the girls. Of course being the manly man that I am, I didn't put any sun screen on, and I did get some sun, fortunately It just turned to tan, but it was sore for a day or two.

 

A Childhood on Ebay

Is it just me, or does it seem that everything ends up on ebay? I was reading some rss feeds and ran across a post on K.I.T.T. (Knight Industries Two Thousand) from Knight Rider being on eBay. I remember as a kid, that this was one of my brothers and my favorite shows. It was on Friday nights at 9pm, on NBC. I remember this so well, because our bedtime growing up was 9pm. With Friday nights being the exception, we were allowed to stay up till 10pm to see the end of Knight Rider (What can I say we were rebels through and through).

It seems like there isn't any toy or electronic from my childhood that I can't find on ebay. The CEDs we use to watch instead of having a VCR. All the game systems that my brother K has had over the years are there. (Yes, folks he is a gamer. Don't play grand turismo 3 with him unless you feel like losing by a lot. We are talking he will lap you in a less powerful car then you are driving) I am sure that with enough eBay searches,  I can find the "Incredible Hulk" bike I had as a kid, that was stolen out of our yard. Now, I don't mean one like it, I mean the one I had.

So it gets me to thinking, should we really buy the toys, and object of our childhood? Does the nostalgia bring back the same feelings or does having those things as an adult change you prospective on them. I think somethings are nice to have. Your baseball glove that you had when you were a kid, you know things that remind you more of spending time with your family. The electronics have come so far, that you will be sorely dissappointed. And as for your favorite TV show from when you were a kid, I would suggest skipping the reruns. Awhile back I got to see an episode of Knight Rider, and as an adult, I have no clue how that show stayed on the air for as many seasons as it did. But I still have a soft spot in my heart for the car from the show. I wonder how you ask a loan officer for a 50-60 thousand dollar loan to buy K.I.T.T. off eBay?

Staying up late...Paying for it in the morning

Last night, was a bit of a long night. I was here till 1am with two of my co-workers trying to migrate to a new Database server.  Fortunately or unfortunately we ran in to some serious issues. I personally think it was a good thing. I rather have the problems with the machine before it is put in production that way we can have it fixed and reliable, instead of trying to make it limp along.

One of my co-workers from our impromtu night shift had taken the train in to work. Of course at 1am the trains in Los Angeles just don't run. So I took him to his car in Irvine. I just didn't see any reason for him to stay at work overnight. It turned out to be one of those great car ride conversations that you learn alot about the other person and they learn a lot about you. It was really quite nice, and I came away feeling good about people in general.

The ride home was nice and uneventful. So at 2:30am, very drowsily I get home, change into PJs, but the little boy in his bed (he is asleep on my side of the bed), set the alarm, and then fell asleep within about 20 seconds after my head hit the pillow. So then what feels like about 45 seconds later the alarm goes off. It's already 7am. So I get up, turn the alarm off, take my shower, shave, brush my teeth, and I suddenly realize that I have done the whole  "getting ready for work" ritual with my eyes closed the entire time. I figured this out when I actually had to open my eyes to pick out my clothes.

I drove today, so that hopefully I could get home early. I get here about 8:30am, not so bad. So I am working away a little bit, trying to get my eyes to focus on the screen, and the phone rings. Its the other web developer. He's got some things going on at the house with the paint contractor he has doing work and lets me know that he will be rolling in to work around 11 to 12 today. I just had to laugh. Since 6am on thursday morning I have been home a grand total of 5 1/2 hours, while in the same time period he has only been at work a grand total of 5 1/2 hours. So I realize what I have to do, I need to paint the house.

Users Fixing Website Design Flaws

 This morning I ran acrossed a very interesting article on wired.com. (actually in is from the rss feed) Apparently a math student named Matt who found the web site of his favorite movie theather chain hard to use, so he made a version that was more usable and hosted on his site.

 So I took a look at the orignial site, and the truth it, the site is amazingly hard to use, even for me. The site takes a long time to load and has a lot of competing elements.  And of course the page doesn't even render properly in Mozilla (the javascript menus don't even show), I didn't even bother to try viewing the site on my Mac.

 So in my opinion Matt did a good thing. He created something that should of made the theather chain reconsider the design of their site and redesign it with usability being the first consideration and design being the second right? Nope, they sent Matt a cease and desist order. Okay so why did the lawyers get involved and not the web developers/designers? There is a disheartening trend among corporate websites. The flash intro/Ad, and navigation that is almost hidden. These sites take an extremely long time to load and even more time to find the information you desire. The other trend I have noticed is that many site are virtually "IE Only Sites", meaning that if you are on a browser other than Internet Explorer that you either can't view the site at all or have limited functionality with the site.

 These trends can't continue and I don't believe they will be allowed to continue for several reasons. First, the statement that the Department of Homeland Security made about Internet Explorer. "There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME-type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different Web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites" The recommendation was to using another browser like Mozilla. The second reason would be Section 508 accessibility. It is going to become necessary for financial institution to make sure their sites are Section 508 compliant.

 The question that pops into my mind is, why is it that websites in 1997 were easier to use then sites in 2004. I can come up with a couple of reasons. First, there were some elements that all sites had. Everyone had a links on the top and bottom of their pages. Another element was site maps. Site maps helped you cut through the paths that the design team/marketing department wanted you to go through and get right to the information you needed. Also Flash wasn't as prevelent. While Flash is a great web technology, it doesn't always have designers that create the most usable web interfaces.

 Something that I have found interesting is that usability and easy of publishing are coming back around again. Blogs have been at the for front of this movement. People are using pre-build, simple yet effective designs, and the easy to use publish tools that are offered. This is reminds me of what made the Web great to begin with. That just anyone with a text editor and a couple of hours could learn to write their own web page and express themselves in this "new media".  I hope that the trend of usability and easy of use, so that everyone can publish to the web continues.

You can find anything on the Internet

Some how I stumbled across this site and had to share. It seems that it really is true that you can find anything on the internet. My favorite thing about it is the  image of the operator waiting to take your call on the bottom right hand side of the page. The reason I got to the page was a link to a Jet Engine plans. This is a great page that features images that look like they are a mixture of a young boys imagination and a Road Runner cartoon. However I couldn't find a ACME Rocket Bicycle logo anywhere on the images.

Will Ferrell - Afternoon Delight

I can't stop watching this, it is so funny. Will Ferrell and the cast of "Anchorman The Lengend of Ron Burgundy" doing their rendition of "Afternoon Delight"

The Switch from IE to Mozilla

So I have made the Switch from IE to Mozilla Firefox. For the most part, it is a good change. I love the fact that I can download a theme and make Firefox look like Apple's Safari browser. The search bar next to the address bar is saving me loads of time. Instead of going to google, and then searching, I just search google from there. Now that is a nice feature. The other nice thing about Firefox is that there are Extensions. Extensions for Mouse Gestures, for development, and all sorts of other stuff.

So does this mean that I never use IE anymore. I wish I could say I don't , but there are some applications I still have to use it. Some of our intranet and web applications are IE only. However I think that I will start working to change that. Well, excuse me won't you, I have to run some new security updates for IE.

45 miles and counting

Well so far since I started riding again in June I have racked up 45 miles as of tonight. Yesterday night I got a new schwinn bicycle computer to help me keep track and measure my progress. Believe it or not I got it at walmart for $10. Of course I have no idea where the bicycle computer I bought 10 years ago for $75 is, not that it did any thing more than the new one does. (In fact it didn't do as much as the new one does.) Now I know how fast I am going, how far I have traveled and how long I have been riding. It's really rather like having all the stuff from your car dashboard, as far as speedometer, odmeter and clock right on your handlebars. I have been keeping a log, making educated guess as to distance using mapquest and lenght of the ride and coming up with my average mph. (Actually Bikelog will do the calcuation for you.)

I think I have mentioned it before but there is a great application called Bikelog. It comes in Windows, PDA and Web Flavors with the most expensive (the Windows version) being only $12.95. It really is a bargin and it really makes it easy to keep track of your progress. Some of the other things it does are give you ways to schedule and keep track of up coming rides and bike maintenance as well as some really cool charts of your data.

The one on the left is my Calories burned versus watts produced. I thought this was a great view, because it helps you to see what a great workout you are getting and how much energy you are producing on each ride.

Also if you are kind of competative you can upload your data to the http://www.netcyclist.com website and see where you place. I am currently 32nd. Not that I'm counting.

Intenet Explorer vs. Homeland Security

Apparently The Department of Homeland Security thinks that Internet Explorer is a security risk.
Here is the whole story

Monday of a Tuesday

So after a very bad week last week, my Beautiful Wife did here best to make me feel better and to forget about it. We had a great weekend. Went for a lovely drive up the coast and spend time just holding each others hand. I felt rested and better about things in general. Then I made the mistake of coming into work. And things were just as bad as last week and getting worse by the minute. So here at work they have successfully transformed me from Sr. Web Developer to a Text Monkey

3 things I learned on my Ride today

So I went for a bike ride tonight. I made 7.6 miles. Which is showing improvement. It's funny the difference between starting over at 30 over ride everyday when you are in your late teens. 8 miles use to be my short rides and I use to pull bigger gears, and had a higher cadence. Well at least I am riding again. So I learned three things on my ride tonight.

• Someone is always mowing their lawn. So if you are an asthmatic allergic to grass, have your inhaler in your seat bag.
• Always carry a second water bottle with you.
• Fellow cyclist well always wave back, unless its a guy riding a Colnago C50, that he mortgaged his house to get and his wife is still mad at him.

Everybody's working for the weekend

Well, I haven't posted much lately. Work has kept me too busy. But I am happy to announce that for the most part the CMS is launched and in production. There are still some bugs to workout and that is expected. No project is ever perfect right out the gate, there are always some tweaks to be made. Now that it is live and people are required to use it, they are asking how to do their work. So we will do some more training. A little (very) frustrating but what can you do. Well now we have a three day weekend ahead of us and I can really use it. I am on the fringes of burnout, so I really need a good rest and to get way from the stresses of work. The other thing that I need to work on is saying "no". People have their job for a reason, it's so that they can do their work. Not for me to do their work. The problem is that is faster for me to do the task then to explain how they should do it.

Issue with Netscape

So we are a day from launching our CMS, and I think, hey I need to check it in Netscape 4.7. I hadn't yet, and thought it would be a good idea. What happens, the whole site in Netscape is all blown out. Now I had been checking it in Netscape 7.1 and Mozilla. So two days of searching day and night for the problem and 2 minutes to fix once it was found. My Beautiful Wife figured it out. It was an issue with the CSS. Basically a TAG element for TD had line-height:17px. Well IE and Netscape 7.1 ignored this and rendered the pages correctly. Now, would you like to be even more impressed? My Beautiful Wife didn't look at the code, she just looked at the Netscape 4.7 page blown up and said, have you checked the CSS. I thought I did, but it wasn't tell I was going over the html code line by line that I saw the CSS and switched from the new CSS to the old one. I switched it and the page work perfect!

Thank you Sweetness, You are my coding Hero!

Early Saturday morning ride.

Well, I got up this morning (despite not really wanting to) and got myself ready and went for a ride. I rode just about 7 miles today. The route had some small hills, but being as out of shape as I am they felt like the alps. I am sure to USPS team they would of felt like pedaling up the drive way. But I did make it, and only stop to rest at stop lights (which feel way to short). I did learn something very important this morning. I need to get up earlier! Why, because apparently by 6:50am Saturday mornings, people (lots of them) are already out mowing their yards. So trying to ride back into shape, and being a asthmatic, allergic to grass, this combination didn't quite work out well for me. I think that is why I kind of bonked at mile 5. But I wouldn't get off the bike, I know that if I did my asthma would get the best of me and I wouldn't finish the ride. And after the flat tire the weekend before last, I wanted to finish a ride.

Logo for the blog

The other day I was goofing around in Adobe Illustrator, so I thought that I would take ten minutes (8 minutes 27 seconds, but whos counting) and come up with a logo for Adventures in Real life. Of course I was stuck on a coding issue, so that was at the forefront of my thoughts when I started the design. The other influence was the cool little lego guy icon that Channel 9 is using. Let me know what you think.

Deadlines and Approvals

We just made our deadline. It took way to many nights working in to the wee hours of the morning. So tomorrow we will have a soft launch and next week we will have the full blown launch. It's been mentally and physically exhausting. So you would think that I would be proud, right? Not so much. I am glad it is over. It is one of those projects that change how things are done for the better. However those are the projects that take the most energy to get done. Not only do you have to get the work done, (Which was huge effort) but you also have to change the way that people think about how they do their job. That is really the difficult part. People think you are taking some freedom away from them. Which in part is true, but you are giving them time back. This project in essense took the technical part out of the equation, leaving just the creative part. So anyhow it is done. I am glad! Now I just want to get my my pajamas and watch some movies.

The other thing that happened today is we got approval on a project that we have been wanting to do for two years. After so much work just to get an approval, it feels like a victory. And in truth it is just the begining. Going to have to take a vacation soon.

The Browser Wars

Well it seems that the War of the Internet Browsers has started again. I know that some people would say that it never ended. While I admit that is true, the fighting wasn't as fast and furious as it is starting to get now. So what has changed to make this happen? A couple things, Mozilla/Netscape have had a couple of big leaps forward in their browser. Netscape 7.2/Mozilla Firefox 0.9 has been released and has been warmly received. It's a great browser, I love some of the features it has, such as tabbed windows. Which lets you have one window up with different web pages in each tab. This is such a desktop space saver that it has been adopted very quickly, by everyone but Microsoft. Of course those that Love Microsoft Internet Explorer, and want tabs can use MyIE2. It's a nice IE based browser that uses tabs. If your use to using keyboard shortcuts when you are browsing, you are going to have to relearn them for this browser.

So what is the fighting about? It's about standards of course. Mozilla has worked harded to be very standard compliant with the latest HTML, XHTML, CSS specifications from the W3C. And of course Microsoft's still in development version of IE has, supposedly taken some liberties with the specifications. This is a lot of talk on Channel 9 about this. Web Developers are asking the Microsoft team if they even care about them and their needs.

Walmart the Retail version of a Casino

Yesterday Morning I was up way to early. So I figured since I was up that I would go run some errands. One of them was to pick up a couple things at Wal-Mart. Like I said it was pretty early, in fact it was still dark outside. The Wal-Mart we go to is open 24 hrs. So when I walked it, you could smell the in store McDonalds getting ready for the breakfast crowd. You could see the stockers filling up the shelves and it hit me. Wal-Mart is the Retail version of a Casino. I looked around and didn't see any clocks on the walls. I walked a little farther into the store and noticed that from the lighting you couldn't tell if it was day or night. The more I thought about it, the more similarities I saw. It got me to thinking, now I know that casinos will play music that has subliminal messages in it that says "lose, lose, lose". I wonder if the music they play in Wal-Mart has subliminal messages saying "spend, spend, spend".

First Ride to the Park

Yesterday the Little Boy and I had our first bike ride to the park. We had a couple of things to do before we could ride. I needed a tube for my bike, and we both needed a helmet. So we headed off to Wally-World (walmart) and picked ourselves out a couple of nice helmets. When I was a kid, we never wore helmets. We just didn't even think of it. However in California there is a law that was passed a couple years ago that says, 'if your under 18 years of age, you are wearing a helmet'. Of course, I have to have one too, I need to be a good example to the Little Boy. So now with helmets in hand we head to the bike shop to get my tubes.

So we get to the bike shop, locate the tubes, now business is taken care, of and the Little Boy and I can peruse the shop. Instantly we are magnetically attracted to some very nice bikes in our sizes. The one the little boy likes is a very nice aluminum trike, and I pick a very nice aluminum bike. After ten minutes of looking and wanting, and the Little Boy trying to take a test ride on the one he had picked out we decided that it would be financially responsible of us to pay for our parts and go. On the way out we see the new Trek Medone, which is the bike Lance Armstrong will be riding in the Tour de France. So I am looking up at it in awe, and the Little Boy reaches out and spins the rear wheel (Gasp) and he says "Cool!". That rear wheel cost more then both of our bikes combined. It made me laugh, I would of never reached out and spin the wheel, I knew how much it cost. He doesn't know dollar signs. So one wheel is just as good as another. And he was right, it was cool! On the way to the front a salesman asked us if we needed any help. I said, "I need to get my stuff and go before I buy something big and my wife divorces me", to which he said, "hey, stay awhile". Anyhow we got our stuff and headed for home.

Once we are home we get to work on changing out my tube and getting our new helmets fitted and adjusted. Everything it working good, everyone is safe, so we are off. The goal is to make it to the park and back. The park is about five blocks from the house on very residental streets. So here is how it played out. My plan was to keep The Little Boy between me and the curb. I would act as the buffer between him and any traffic that we may happen upon. He would start to pedal, so I would get in the pedals (my bike has toe-clips, I am so glad I didn't go with clipless, it would of killed me on this ride), then he would pedal about 20 feet, and the stop and make the "errrt" stopping noise when he was stopping. We did this no less then 15 times. This is when we (me) came up with our riding matra, "Pedal, Pedal, Pedaallll". Now this isn't to be said loud in an unkind fashion. It must be chanted in a comical tone to receive the desired results. Which is the Little Boy pedaling further than 20 feet before stopping. So about 10 to 15 minutes after we started we got to the park. Granted when I walk to the park it takes 5 minutes, but it was a victory none the less.

Now that we made it to the park we would ride around a little. Our park has a very nice paved path that is just perfect for kids to ride their bikes around. We made about 4 loops. After each loop we would stop at a picnic table and have a drink from my water bottle. I showed the Little Boy how it works, and it just tickled him. I am going to have to get him one for his very own. (especially if Cheetos are involved in the snacking process). After our 4th victory lap around the park My Beautiful Wife pulls up and tells us about a yard sale just a couple of house down. So she parks in front of the house, and gets out, and Calls to the Little Boy, and I right there next to him chatting our matra got him to ride not stop to her. Which was almost 200 feet away from the park. Sure I only had to pedal four times, but it was four good ones and I was proud. We looked at the yard sale for a little bit, and then decided (it was lunch time, our tummies decided) it was time to go home and get something to eat.

The Little Boy was really pumped up for the ride home. He looked and me and said, "Let's ride fast". With the pace that we had going to the park, I took this to mean lets go 40 feet before we hit the brakes and make the "errrrt" sound. However to my surprise he pedaled a good two blocks before needing a little rest. Once rested he said, "Let's ride fast", to which I replied "I will ride as fast as you can go". And he would pedal (I would let off the brakes and coast) for a good little bit, and then need little rest. Lets face it, it is tough when you are little to pedal or walk any distance with out a little rest.  Anyhow we turned on to our street, and the Little Boy was just about done. With a lot of coaxing we got to the house. The poor Little guy didn't have the strength to pedal up the driveway. So I go off and helped push him up and in. He got off, sweating, and panting, ready for some rest. I got off, mentally more tired than any ride I had ever been on, but didn't even get winded. All and All one of the best rides I've ever been on.