Rhonabwy

It's getting late, but I'm

It's getting late, but I'm not really tired. Last night I had insomnia too - stayed awake and staring at the dark ceiling until 1am or later. The time changes, strange environments, and the little additional stress from the wake of the reunion has all added to my general inclination in that area I think.

I'm thinking about starting another Blog type of thing as a creative writing project. I've read back over some of my entries both recent and a ways past, and I've read a bunch of other folks' blogs - so this idea just sort of welled up from there somewhere. The idea would be a blog of a completely fictional person. Maybe just using modern day situations, news, etc. to focus writing in another perspective. Kind of a forced put yourself in their shoes sort of thing. It's always somewhat compelling to me, for whatever reason, to change reality a bit for it as well - maybe an alternate variation of common themes, or just go right out there and make it sci-fi, or urban fantasy-ish, or whatever. I guess I'll really just do it like I've always done my creative writing (when I'm doing it) - just invent up some characters and try to let them write themselves. I'm currently wondering if I want to attempt this in real time at all - I suspect not, but I haven't really made up my mind yet either.

Had the reunion today, and

Had the reunion today, and man - o - man, can my brother cook. I can't even spell some of the items he prepared, but it absolutely kicked ass. Two beef tenderloins, one pork tenderloin, and a variety of goodies to enhance, supplement, and just plain follow along. The only piece that was really terrific that he didn't do was the strawberry rhubarb pie that "the twins" made. Wonderful pies, and they still make crusts the way god intended. I.e. not healthy and you definitely can't buy that anymore.

It was a pretty interesting day really. I helped Ben (that's my brother for those who don't know) in the kitchen most of the morning, and then Karen and I played shepard to the six kids who showed up as a part of the gang and kept them busy. My grandmother has a pool, so it was mostly keeping the place safe, playing the arbiter in whatever interesting rule was just being made up, and insuring the law of the parent was followed. Mostly, it was watching three thirteen year old girls.

They're my second or third cousins - hard to say really. I'm sometimes just not really sure what to make of it all. I guess I'd say that their parental care was really not up to what I'd hope for them, and it's clearly not up to the older generation's standards by what I've heard the folks saying when they're not around. One of them (the youngest actually), has a pretty solid head on her shoulders and seems to be making out OK. The other two are a bundle of nightmare emotions and problems utteryly ascerbated by teenage harmones and plain ole rebellion. It's really frustrating to me in some respects - because the grandparents are all speaking their mind, but nobody is really interceding to give these kids half the chance they all seem to think they should be getting. They're just sort of complaining, shaking their heads, and saying "Damn, it's a shame really. She never had a chance you know... It's all about their upbrining..." - stuff like that. I feel compelled to help them - but at the same time I know deep down I really don't want to get wrapped in the movie of the week sort of lives that seem compelled to follow them around. Well, shit. And I live over 2000 miles away - although that's just as good as a two (or more) hour drive for all the time I'd probably take to make a difference if I'm being honest with myself.

Karen and I talked about it for a while today, quietly in the corner. The conclusion we came to was that small things can make a huge difference, so let's take a stab at some of the small things. We're going to send a book or two back for two of the girls, and I'm going to see if any of the three of them are interested in corresponding - either paper/snail mail or email (although it didn't sound like they had email addresses earlier).

Of course the question had to come up - When are you going to have kids.... Well, if you haven't figured out they aren't coming soon, you haven't been paying attention. Don't know if we'll ever have kids. Maybe we'll have some of our own in a year or three. Maybe we'll adopt a couple. Maybe we'll just sit on the sidelines and screw with everyone else's kids. Hard to say really.

So tomorrow it's some visiting, and then we'll take off in the afternoon and head south for Columbia to visit more family down there. My brother has to be back at work on Monday, so he won't be coming down to Missouri for the 4th, which is kind of a shame. He's an executive chef at a catering company though - and July 4th isn't exactly a slow time - so it's kind of to be expected. I must admit I had hoped for a little more of his cooking.

It's strange how things come

It's strange how things come and go on the Internet, ain't it. Revisionist history, things we publish and then take down - not really wanting to be caught saying. I do it too - and there's things I don't publish in my Blog that I think, see, do. It's a strange effect of knowing someone is reading. It's no longer a private journal, but something subtlely different. You don't censor your private journal - but you probably censor you public words. Like these - self censorship.

The Internet has made public words all the more public. Never know when an email will come back to haunt you, or maybe a Blog entry will get someone pissed off and have you fired. Especially when they're handing out pink slips anyway.

I thought maybe having a completely anonymous log to journal in would make a difference, but as I thought about it, I don't think it would. You could change the names, but the content of what you write will still be available - and while you can't easily search it today, I don't think we're that far off from being able to search based on semantic content. Patterns and relationships will become recognizable, any public words available in content and meaning as well as spelling. What a wild idea.

Gus reported that Glenn Kulhman died today. I guess Dave gave him a call this morning and let him know - a car accident. I didn't know him all that well, but I recall working with him. Did nice work on the MU web pages while I was lurking about there.

My brother just arrived from Denver - he's sacked out since he drove through the night and has been up pretty much for 26 hours straight. He's brought with him a plethora of amazing food - we're going to be eating very well tomorrow - pork tenderloins, beef tenderloins, salad's and soups. The man is an amazing cook - it's probably best I don't eat his stuff very often, or I'd never loose any wieght.

It's sort of strange writing this blog entry from my Grandmother's den. There's pictures up around the walls - of Burlington's Snake Alley, of Misquito Park looking over the mississippi. And then there's pictures I gave her - one of Stonehenge from my first visit to Great Brittian, now 12 years back. A picture of Karen, and another of me with Paul Harston in the background taken while we were visiting the coast of Wales (near Harlech) a measley 11 years ago. I don't normally think of my face looking older, but I look at those pictures and think "Geez, I look so young in them". Another picture out in the hallway of my clambering alongside the ruined wall of a keep in mid wales - I don't even recall which one anymore.

I should go back. Walk around Wales some more - maybe follow some old paths that I never really got to the first time. I wonder how much time I could take off and go lurk about the back country of Wales.

I guess this'll be making

I guess this'll be making the rounds. I think I'll keep my eyes open for them: warchalking

Oh - so I have

Oh - so I have to mention how interesting it is to drive from Seattle to Iowa. The countryside was a fantastic view, changing sometimes abrubtly and sometimes very slowly as we moved from the coast... through the mountains... into desert... back into mountains... onto high plains... and then a slow gradual shift from open prarie to the partially wooded riverlands right around the Mississippi. I wish I had pictures that could do it all justice, but I just really don't. I think a neat artistic experiment might be to take a picture every 5 minutes from the car as I drove. It's something like 24 hours of driving, but if you took all those and made it into a movie - dissolving from one scene into another, it'd be a really cool movie. Sort of a fast-forward road-trip across half the United States.

Quite a few years ago, I had a friend from Wales come over and want to see the "US". I wish I could impress the changing scenery and massive scope that I've somehow encompassed for him. I think he'd enjoy it.

/. is running a link

/. is running a link and story on Project Oxygen at MIT. It's all about the ubiquitous computing thing, and making it real. Neat research - I'm glad someone's doing it.

Down to the last few

Down to the last few pages of The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. It's a really good book, but I admit it takes some getting used to Stephenson's style of writing. He introduces some really radically new concepts with aplomb, and if you're not reading intently, you'll just swipe by them and miss a little bit of the feeling of the whole milieu.

The story is good, and worthy of a any story regardless of technology, but it's clear that he put some really deep thought into what Nanotechnology could mean. In the tradition of many Science Fictions writers before him, it's an impressive cautionary tell as much as it is anything else. If you haven't read it, I'd recommend giving it a shot, although admittedly it's not everyone's cup of tea.

How fascinating - a little sidenote. As I went to the Amazon page to create a link for the book, I noticed a new little marketing/sales thing that Amazon is going - something called a "Gold Box". Cute little icon in the upper right hand corner, personalized just slightly for me. Click on it and it starts a 60 minute timer, in which you have 60 minutes to take advantage of the offers they make. You can use it once a day, and when it's expired, they go on to new things. The discounts are good too - at least at first blush. Neat technique, not horrifically intrusive. I'd run through that periodically to see what they had offered - kind of like hitting the discount rack of computer software in a game store...

Last fall, I saw an

Last fall, I saw an article in Queen Anne News about a restaurant down on Westlake Ave called Pasta Freska. I'd read that they didn't have a menu - that you just go in, sit down, and the chef comes out to talk with you about what you like and don't like. I suppose they have a menu in there somewhere, but I'm here to tell you that you'd be missin' out if you tried to order from a menu there.

The food was fantastic. And there was a wide variety, and we were thoroughly stuffed by the time we were done. After all was said and done (dinner, desert, bottle of wine, coffee, etc) it was roughly $25 a plate. I've eaten at a lot more expensive restaurants and not gotten as good a meal as I did there. Wow.

You going to be in Seattle and looking for a good meal? Go here.

Apple's just grabbed up another

Apple's just grabbed up another video production technology house - apparently it's the right time of year to get into that game. Yesterday, the announced the purchase of Prismo Graphics.

Well that was exciting. Everything

Well that was exciting. Everything slowed down and then started crashing in that way that only Unix can do when something really freaky happens. First we stopped seeing progress in our workflow environment. Then you couldn't log in as "oracle" to the database box, then you couldn't log in as root, then it stopped responding to pings. Yeah. Great. When I got to the COLO facility, I found there wasn't any direct console access (shit!) to the database box, and the tape drives were horked. Great - some mechanical failure caused the whole fuckin' thing to grind to a stop. Turns out we were doing a routine backup, and the plunger which moves the tapes got "stuck". Since the backup was running as root, it tried to recover, slowly claiming more and more resources from the box until everything was completely blocked with handles to a non-working IO device. You'd think it would just fail nicely, wouldn't you? Naw. This is really expensive hardware - that's not allowed to fail nicely.

So after using the Big Hammer (call me Ambossfaust) - once on the database machine and three times on the tape drive - things finally unstuck. I figured out how to get console access, but by then one of the crew here was already in there and helping me. The databases came back up, not too much worse for the wear (no emergency restore needed thank god!), and now - 3 hours later, workflow is running again.

Byron's back. So... Dourty, gunna

Byron's back. So... Dourty, gunna start bloggin'?

MacNN had a link to

MacNN had a link to an Interview with Jordan Hubbard that was interesting. Talking about the Darwin layer of MacOS X and himself.

Here's an interesting new form

Here's an interesting new form of pledge drives for public media - Kuro5hin has decided to make the run of an non-profit setup instead of a for-profit. I wish them the best. If I read them, I'd probably donate.

A couple of interesting news

A couple of interesting news articles from the home-town paper. They'd generally soft-shoe around the Microsoft stuff, but apparently not too much at the moment.

Microsoft Baffles Legal experts
Microsoft's Lawyers Defy Judge

I was reminded tonight of

I was reminded tonight of a number of things. Customer service, community, and why living on Queen Anne kicks ass.

I took Karen up to Northwest Sewing for an errand this evening. She wanted to get some special cotton thread with a specific texture for some projects she's working on. Northwest Sewing is a sewing store focused on selling the Bernina brand sewing machine - it's the machine to have within the sewing circles - high quality, high precision, and you generally pay for it. Northwest Sewing is also ranked as a Bernina Gold store - meaning they sell a bunch of these babies. We're generally talking a couple of grand a piece, sometimes more. So this particular store, in my opinion, focuses way to much on the hard sell. In fact, Karen walked out of there the first time we went in, simply because she was (at the time) looking at Bernina's and trying to decide if that's what she needed, and if so which model and so forth - you know, the usual shopping around stuff. They pissed her off with the hard sell thing pretty badly, so we hadn't been back in quite a while. (Actually, since she bought her machine in Puyallup, she's been back for meetings there and periodically gets some specific supply stuff there - like threads).

Anyway, while we were picking up the thread and checking out, the lady behind the counter asked Karen for her name. They've got this point-of-sale system thats based on the customer's name and Karen said "It's Karen D" - she'd been in this position before where her name is not exactly unique. The lady said "Some customers just tell me their customer number" and went on the explain how much easier that actually made things, and how neat it was that their customers all knew their numbers. Well, I'm not much for numbers, so I couldn't keep my trap shut and said "I generally prefer not to be known by my number". I wasn't honestly even sure the lady got the little bomb I'd sent her way, but after attempting to explain why her foot was in her mouth for a while, she said "Nobody is a number to us", so I guess she got it.

Karen and I then came back to Queen Anne and decided to head to the mighty Calzone King restaraunt: Pete's Pizza. As we found ourselves a booth and settled in, the waitress came by and said "Hey, I haven't seen you guys in here for a while. Where ya been?". Man, they've fucking got my business. There's no fucking numerical ID for me there. I had a wonderful Calzone (they are really good there) and Karen had a salad and pizza. As we left, they said "See ya guys - not so long, huh?".

The funny thing? Karen's been to Northwest Sewing more than Pete's Pizza. And we're considered regular's at Pete's Pizza. Maybe it's Pete's. Maybe it's Queen Anne. I've generally had more of that experience on the Ave - folks just kind of get used to seeing you. You're part of the neighborhood - the community at large. That's what really kicks ass about living here.

Two good things done today.

Two good things done today. I've got all the places lined up for the project that's coming up, and I got things "ready to go" for my team before I'm out of the office for two weeks. Of course, in the process of doing this I've completely screwed productivity of just about everyone in the company - but that's OK. I don't think there was really a way to avoid it, and our CEO said it had to be done... If we going to do it, might as well not let it be a terrible cluster fuck.

The past two nights I

The past two nights I spent re-reading The Forge of God (amazon link), by Greg Bear. It's good science fiction, with a horrific notion and ending. A good read, and it kept me uncomfortably gripped by the story - such that I really didn't go to bed very early both those nights. One of the tidbits that I'd forgotten (it's been a couple of years since I read it), was that Seattle featured in the book - even Queen Anne Hill was called out. It's rather unfortunate, as in the book it doesn't bode well for the character who's on Queen Anne in Seattle at the time. I won't give it away, but let's just say it put living here into a slightly different perspective for a few hours.

So now I've moved back to the book I was originally planning on rereading: The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. Fortunately, it's not caught me up so completely - so I'm able to stop reading the book before my eyes wear out at 2am like the past several nights.

Today is an interesting day.

Today is an interesting day.

I actually feel really good about today, although it's in a sort of bizarre way. I'm philosophically completely opposed to a particular course of action we're taking, and I could have let the whole thing slid, and it would have been a very nice little panic disaster while I was gone. Instead, I grabbed it by the reigns and sheparded it through. I'm even loosing in this exchange (well, everyone is I think), but the end result will be more coordinating and hopefully not a complete cluster fuck when I'm done.

It feels good - I dunno - because I think I'm doing the "right thing". Sort of that high moral ground feeling, carrying out orders to an objective that's just fucked (in my opinion). I've also lost a huge amount of respect for the person who had been setting this course. The planning skills are just not there - in fact, I'm surprised there was ever really a decision made. Fickleness rules the day on this one, and it's going to impact everyone in the company. The key word is decisiveness. This isn't. Sometimes I think I just let let it fail. I debated that course of action - actually pretty hard. In fixing this and making it work, I'm essentially masking a problem. I think I'm masking the problem to good effect, but there's definitely a counter argument there too. I suspect it's a problem everyone runs into: Do you intercede to help make something happen when you don't have to and you disagree with the known result.

I'll probably choose to let other things fail instead.

Oh. And my hands are

Oh. And my hands are sore.

It was cold and wet,

It was cold and wet, raining half the time. My hands were soaked in leather gloves, my cap plastered to my head. The winds were shifting around 45 degrees and variable from 3 knots to 20 knots throughout the night.

It was awesome. We finished the race dead fucking last - maybe a half hour or more behind the last of the other boats. We were way slow, made lots of little mistakes, a few big ones (we really fucked up getting the spinnaker down after rounding the leward mark - almost drifted into the big steel buoy - twice - but we didn't). We finished the race. Of the seven person crew, only one person really knows their position (Anne - the lady who keeps the pit running fabulously).

The tacks were rough going upwind - the rain on the lines and higher winds made things really difficult. The white line, which I normally love, was tending to bind and knot in the blocks, or overwrap on the winches. The rain was making everything on the boat slick - especially the cockpit flooring where we could otherwise normally get a good bracing with our feet. We probably choose some bad course directions early on, and there were a bunch of other little things that ate away at our speed, course, etc. But really? We did pretty damn well. The crew all works well together, we're all pretty light-hearted and having a beer at the Sloop Tavern after it was all said and done was perfect. This is a great boat to crew on.

So I just wore my foul weather gear right on into the shower to rinse it all off, and it's now dominating the bathroom for drying space. My gloves have been soaked in clean, fresh water - so hopefully not too much of the saltwater from the Sound has little plankton bits growing in them. While I was out tonight, Karen did all the freakin housework. Trash out, kitchen spotless. I came home to a beautiful house, chatted with Karen for a while until she couldn't stay up any longer, and then jumped in the shower to get rid of some of the smoke smell from the tavern.

It was a really great night,

Last week I was bitching

Last week I was bitching about how frustrating the sailing was because everything was so calm out on Puget Sound. Well, while we were being frustrated at being stuck out there at dusk, Sean was taking pictures from the boat and getting some really damn good ones. These are some of our fellow "stuckees" out on the Monday night sloop race from last week.

Quiet evening tonight. Karen's home,

Quiet evening tonight. Karen's home, even got back earlier than expected today. That was kinda cool. I got a call at 6:30am saying "I'm catching an earlier flight! I'll be there at 11am!", so I slept in a little more, got up and headed down to the airport to pick her up. The afternoon's been pretty quiet since then. Playing Xbox, like I mentioned earlier, and grabbing a little bite to eat.

I haven't been doing any coding lately (outside of some one-off trash stuff for the office). Not feeling a particular desire to do anything with that right now - more thinking about how I want to arrange my finances. I've been reading more on Quicken, and have been trying to figure out how to adjust my financial info and day-to-day stuff into that world. It's really odd - I'm the kind of guy who doesn't balance his checkbook and just keeps and eye on his account. I try to work strictly with cash, other than paying the periodic large bill with a check. So going to a everything is accounted for system is sort of stretching me. No really, in a good way.

Although I've not really been coding, I've seen some neat things happening. Gus has recently rev'd a simple "query the database tool" of his in Cocoa, basically showing off how simple it was to use the Mac's Interface Builder stuff merged with JDBC to get some really impressive work done.

Another particular interesting bit of code to me is HenWen, a graphical interface wrapped around Snort on MacOS X by Nick Zitzmann. The thing I find so interesting about it is that it contains the whole Snort binary embedded within the package setup of the Application. That kind of concept provides a lot of neat "prepackaged" setup ideas - like including a MySQL database inside an app - with the code and files for the database all contained locally instead of relying upon a standard (and external!) installation.

Saw a link to the ShareMe blog on Doc's page. Went ahead and did the usual thing - followed it. So Fred is apparently having a lovely time with some guy named Bruce Cullen, who appears to be insisting on spamming Fred. On the lighter side, he links to a strange little site called Typorganism. In addition, Doc had a link to a fun little bit of Flash that I'd seen previously, but lost track of.

Been having a good time

Been having a good time playing with the Xbox lately. I've been shooting up starships with Jedi Starfighter, and more recently been playing this RPG game called Morrowind. The RPG really reminds me of another RPG I played last year: Summoner. The graphics are decent, the design and detail are good (but there's some really weird effects that I've almost just gotten used to where things clip into existance in the distance). It's a pretty wideopen game (Morrowind), and the biggest problem I'm having most recently is keeping myself from getting brutally killed.

The starfighter games are an addiction from way back. Xwing vs. Tie Fighter. The controllers when you use an Xbox are a little funny - but then I don't think they could have even begun to map all the keyboard controls that the originals had onto a single controller. I'm just not used to having the index-finger triggers control the speed with "thrust harder" and "brake". There's a sort of default speed, and while it's not a good idea, sometimes I just want to stop completely and shoot the crap out of something while standing completely still. Even with those faults, it's a pretty good game. The controller is really designed to encourage you to use the speed controls significantly, and they made it really hard to both fire weapons and roll the ship at the same time. Sometimes I wish they'd just break down and go for a different control setup for these sorts of games - a joystick sort of thing feels more natural for flight and space sims to me than the dual-thumb joystick controllers.

Here's an interesting use for

Here's an interesting use for Apple's CHUD hardware tools...

Gus has finally realized how

Gus has finally realized how powerful Cocoa really is, but hasn't said a damn thing about if he got the house or not.

Meanwhile, Sean has disappeared into the ether, Ryan isn't posting anything other than the periodic odd link, Byron is still moving to Chicago, and Paul is tearing up the miles in California.

I've got my eye out for some code generating tools - specifically something that spews both C++ and Java. One of the guys at work has a boatload of simple "container" objects that are tedious as hell to code, and it sure would be nice if something cheap did all the work. I actually would have thought something like that existed, but while it's there for C, and C++, it would appear to be mostly missing in a cross-language setup.

Some pseudo geeks at work have recently gotten themselves all wrapped up in some mile-high conversation recently, and now the zeitgeist for software quality is roaming back to haunt things around. I'm waiting for the recommendations to start hitting about how we've all got to do this differently, or that differently, so that everything will magically be better. I'm really, absolutely, astoundingly positive that if you improve the process, everything else just has to get better. Yep, yessiree! ISO9000 is my friend. In the meantime, I think Joel has a good test to see how you're doing in terms of keeping to some measure of ideas that will help enhance software quality.

Today was the big race

Today was the big race day. Yesterday was reporting winds of 10 to 20 knots and1-2 foot waves for today. They were off. The waves were 1-2 inches (except for a big friggin' wake off a 70' yacht) and the wind was 1-2 knots. Yes, another fucking float fest. There was a really thing about the race though - as we were floating out there, we saw a couple of dahl porpoises checking out the new floating landmarks that weren't going anywhere. I'm sure they would have been much more interested if we'd been under any sort of power (creating a bow wake, which they apparently like to play in), but we were just floating.

Here's a picture of them I found on the web: - or feel free to hit Google's image search for them.

So today's race was really in support of Leukemia - it was the Volvo Leukemia Cup Regatta. But I don't think the sponsors really have a clue of how to make this raise money by their actions. It was a $75 entrance fee for the race, and they completely abandoned the race at 2pm. $75 is a large amount for a 1 day regatta, and the wind did fill in this afternoon (admittedly not 10-20 knots, but enough to race in). The seattle race has apparently been getting smaller and smaller each year - as the entrance fees go up, the amount of racing goes down, and relative "fun" level sinks quickly. Guys? Time to get a clue - just ask the folks actually out there on the boats, they'll tell you.

Guess that Microsoft focus on

Guess that Microsoft focus on security

On the US Government front, it looks like we're seeing another Federal vs. State battle brewing - this time over weapons grade plutonium. I find it interesting that my cultural background is so pro-federalist. I read the story and immediately thought "Can he even do that?". I'm sure lots of others had the same reaction, but I wonder if they understand what that reaction means?

W3C is offering an XML Test Suite. They've got all the goodies in CVS if you're curious.

Good luck on the house

Good luck on the house Gus.

Kind of a quiet day

Kind of a quiet day so far. Bunch of folks from the office are out at an "off-site" meeting - a little morale building gig. Looks like a great day for it too - although I bet a fair number come back sunburned based on the weather. A few technical problems at the office cropped up since yesterday, so I dug around in code and figured out what needed to be done to correct them. I ended up getting a DBA to set some default values in a table, which seems to have resolved the problems.

Macworld reports that Gartner Group

Macworld reports that Gartner Group did a recent TCO study that dropped a bomb on ole winders... According to the article, there's a cost of $1,114/year to support Macintosh and $1,438/year to support Windows. That's a big ouch to the TCO arguments that Microsoft has been shoveling for a while.

Then again, I'm not really surprised. While Microsoft has done a good job at bringing some technology to the masses, they've done an absolutely shitty job of making complex things simple. I've always thought of that as being one of Apple's key strengths.

Jeez, it's friggin HOT around

Jeez, it's friggin HOT around here. Yesterday we got up to 85, and it looks like we're going to do the same thing again today. It's not as bad a the midwest, but it's sort of surprising - we're way above the average temperatures for the year. In fact, I think yesterday was a record setting day for a couple of places around the area!

Looks like punchcards and papertape

Looks like punchcards and papertape could be back in 2005... admittedly in a slightly smaller scale.

Today did not suck. I

Today did not suck. I wandered home, and then Karen and I took off out for the evening. We headed to the Library, about 8 blocks away, got some books for her trip, and then wandered back home, stopping at Pasta Bella for a truly fantastic italian meal. We don't eat there very often, but the food is very uniformly good. I ended up devouring two heads of roasted garlic to boot - nobody is going to want to be around me tomorrow as I sweat that out!

I've got a whole lot of Bloggin' thoughts backed up in my head that I haven't spewed out here, so I'll just dive in.

On of the guys at work has started a Blog sort of thing - an online diary as he works through testing some software to see if it'll do some cool stuff we'd like to pull off. It's interesting because I wouldn't think of it as the kind of Blog I maintain, but it definitely is a weblog. He's not using an helpful software - just slamming it out in whatever editor is his favorite (v, emacs - I don't know what he uses). One of our management staff even suggested that we focus some of our product on blogs - but he never really went anywhere with it. I don't think he really knew how that would or wouldn't make us any cash, and what the details of doing it would be. I'm still not sure how he went from Streaming Media to Weblogs - but somewhere he managed it.

The I can do anything feeling persisted throughout the day, very nicely giving me a little emotional high. I see others that portray that constant face of self assurance and indomitable will, but I don't understand how anyone can really keep that up unless they're cosmicly stupid. I'm constantly questioning myself - probably to good effect on occasion, and bad on others. But I sort of look at the whole process and think Jeez, how can you not question yourself if you're paying attention. I'm presuming that these folks that show the iron wills and strong spirits probably have the same doubts, fatigues, and concerns as everyone else. Or they're dumber than a bag of hammers - I think I know one of two of those too.

Thank god!

Thank god!

Back from the Dentist -

Back from the Dentist - a pretty good guy. I think I lucked out in stopping by his office this morning, I was really impressed. I miss Dr. Durkovich from Missouri - he was freakin' awesome - but this guy seems like he's got things straight. He made a pretty unpleasant situation bearable, was straight up with me, and very professional. I've got myself a new dentist. And a temporary crown. That was kinda pricey, but it could have been a whole lot worse.

Found a dentist this morning

Found a dentist this morning - that wasn't too bad. The end result will hopefully be OK as well, but I imagine the intermediate bits will probably suck. They squished and squeezed and I have an appointment at Noon today. I'll probably be getting the damn thing crowned.

Found it sort of hard to get to sleep last night, and even harder to wake up. Last night was pretty on the water, but sort of frustrating too. Pretty because we get the effects of the partial eclipse about 6pm, and got to watch a beautiful sunset across the sound on almost still water. The downside of it all (the frustrating part) was that we were watching the sunset on beautifully still water - and only halfway through the race. The race ended up getting called as the sun disappeared - only two boats finished of something like 30. Jen and JR call these "Seattle Float Fests".

what a weird fucking day

what a weird fucking day

I found out everyone at my office is loosing their offices as we all do some weird ass cube-shift to sublet half our floor. I broke a tooth. We didn't finish our first race because everyone lost wind. It was a beautiful sunset. People at work were assholes. People at work were cool. Racing was fun. Racing was frustrating.

i wonder what happens tomorrow...

Did laundry, cleaned house -

Did laundry, cleaned house - all those good sunday things that you do but don't really want to deal with. Finally gave up on attempting to stay off the knee, so I wrapped it in a knee brace. It's feeling a hell of a lot better at the moment, although I'm a little concerned about tomorrow's sloop race.

Mostly, I've spent the afternoon hanging out at the house. The weather's been beautiful, and I've just been enjoying the sunshine. Our neighbor's house is for sale, and today was the open house. So I checked it out... bout like you'd expect. Claude and Maryann have really cleaned the place out - I swear they must have moved half their stuff already. Last time I was over it was a hell of a lot more packed than that. It looked really good - although I don't care for the Realtor much. She wrote a really crappy description of their house - making it sound much smaller than it is or feels. People have to be walking in there thinking "well, it's going to be small..." The funny part was she asked if I lived in Queen Anne. I lied - told her "No, not yet" and then found myself promptly dismissed as someone who clearly couldn't have the money to get a house in Queen Anne. I hope Claude and Maryann get a decent offer. I don't have much hope for them with her doing the selling.

I stayed up late last

I stayed up late last night playing video games on the Xbox - that was pretty fun, I almost never do that when Karen's around. I don't know why - some guilt complex I suppose. I woke up late this morning to stiff shoulders and middle back, and a couple of very sore knees. No specific damage to them that I can tell, but my right knee is having this rather unfortunately tendency to hyperextend and twist a little. Not good. I think this means I'm going to need to start thinking about a strengthening program at the gym to work on the muscles supporting my knees.

I think I do the worst damage to them (bruises, etc) when I'm grinding in the jib or spinnaker pole lines. The boat is usually heeling over at a pretty decent pitch (on the days when it's hard - like yesterday), so I'm grinding while trying to figure out where to brace myself on a 45 degree downhill slope. It's freakin' akward is what it is. JR suggested bracing one foot on the cockpit floor and one foot on railing that supports the lifeline (if that foot slipped, I'd be very unhappy - trust me - in pain and probably floating in the sound). I couldn't figure out how to do that and look forward (sort of critical to know how well you're sheeting in the jib). The other part was the required flexibility... heh. In the meantime, I'm finding myself bracing myself on the cockpit's bench with my knees jammed in for support. That way I can look forward and grind in the winch at the same time. I'm also still working on how to deal with not having too many turns around the winch for the early part of the tack (when I'm pulling the sail over furiously) and still getting the extra turns on needed for really grinding it down tight.

I've cleaned up the house, am doing a touch of laundry, and now I'm getting towards being at loose ends again. Maybe back to those video games!

Done with racing. Didn't quite

Done with racing. Didn't quite work like we expected - we got out there and the wind just completely died (this was about 10am). We motor'd up to a buoy a way's north - the buoy we had originally intended to round on our "test race". About that time (getting on to 11am), the convergence finally passed and the wind started filling in from the north. In the next three hours, we went from nothing to up to 18 knots of wind, with it gusting and shifting directions by as much as 45 degress (doesn't sound a lot, but let me tell you it makes a hell of a difference on a sailboat!) - and whitecaps.

The afternoon was fantastic - we bagged the whole "test race" concept we'd originally planned and just did spinnaker and jib practice. It was good, and it was needed. We mixed some folks up - and I found myself teaching Tom how to trim the jib and fly a spinnaker. That was cool - and it was way, way good for me to actually be on the spot as the knowledgeable resource. Teaching is learning - and that drove it home once again. I made mistakes, but in the end I learned even more from it and nothing got really fouled up.

We had to get back to Shilshole Marina by 3pm to get Tony off to a wedding, so the last part got a bit exciting. We'd flown a spinnaker way downwind to Westpoint until the wind was just getting too much (we dropped it when we started seeing gusts above 14 knots). We brought everything about and came up towards Shilshole, only to find ourselves on the edge of the race that was really going on that day, and getting pinched between large commercial traffic (read: Big Fucking Shipping Haulers and Tug+Barge). We did a pretty decent job, even getting in a few last tacks with Tom in back. By the end, I think we were screwing up as much because we were all tired as anything else - the last tacks were all pretty uniformly slow and clumsy. Not trusting ourselves to make the cut between all the traffic emerging from the locks, we dropped the sails and motor'd on in.

The sound was really great out there at the end of the day - whitecaps showing, a strong wind (12 to 18 knots) blowing from the North/Northeast, and a deep rich emerald green. The wakes and waves combined to send spray really flying, and at one point the waves crested over the bow with enough loft to get JR - who was driving in the rear and opposite side of the boat. Sean, working as foredeck, was absolutely soaked from head to foot - but appeared to be loving it (I would have been freezing my ass off). I'd shed the jacket earlier in the day, but like most of the others was still wearing the bib-pants.

It was a great practice day, great sailing, and I'm completely wiped out now. I ate my lunch at 3:30 and am now sucking down a Jamba Juice, debating the merits of a hot shower or a long soak in the tub. I just wish the chair I was in would stop moving so much...

It's racing tomorrow - could

It's racing tomorrow - could be quite chilly. I'm definitely planning on taking the foul weather gear: the forecast is calling for scattered showers.

The day has turned cool

The day has turned cool - almost chilly. We had some rainstorms. It's very strange not having Karen around. I came home early (since I got there early after all) and was really at loose ends. I hunted around in the fridge, didn't see anything interesting, and finally left the house for a while.

I headed up to Northgate, looked around a bit and purchased a new XBox game I'd been meaning to look into. Came back to Queen Anne, did a little grocery shopping, and returned home to ensconce myself in a chair with the new game. Been playing for about two hours now - it's pretty cool, and reminds me a little of Summoner, which I played on my PC. My fingers are quite chilled now, however, so I'm taking a break, petting the cats (who've been demanding attention), and writing a little.

I just sort of realized that IE is showing beautiful anti-aliased fonts - must have been because I installed Silk.

Wow. Awake early this morning.

Wow.

Awake early this morning. Got into work about 6:30am, cleaned the office up a bit for the bigwig that's visiting, and even checked in some new code (actually, just reformatting a parser a bit before I really screw with it). Hope this guy has a clue... I've been pretty universally disappointed with them so far.

Quiet day, busy day. Took

Quiet day, busy day.

Took Karen to the airport this morning for her flight to Omaha. She's there and well situated now, but looking forward to an incredibly busy weekend for herself. I, on the other hand, went to work, got a couple of interesting things pinned down, went to a couple of other mostly (for me) useless meetings, put out a fire or three, and then bailed to go talk sailing with the rest of the crew of the Manta Ray.

It would have been a pretty decent day all together if I hadn't developed a low-grade headache and carried it with me from about noon until 9pm. That really makes enjoying the afternoon and evening rather difficult.

I thought about messing with Quicken some more tonight, but I want to check out some info from my bank first to see how far back I can get with downloaded data. I thought about playing on the XBox, since I've got the night to myself and little else to occupy my time. It just didn't sound good tonight. I finally got Mozilla 1.0 downloaded and installed - but I haven't played with it too much yet. Debating whether or not to get the Silk carbon-font-smoothing-hack code too - Gus says yeah.

Just feeling kind of blah tonight. Tomorrow is a relatively free day - I'm heading into work early tomorrow to make things look pretty for a corporate bigshot wandering through, other than that the day is free. Saturday is sailing all afternoon - no telling what the evening will bring. Sunday is cleaning and picking up Karen at the airport later in the afternoon. Kind of quiet, and I'm not really inspired to go make shit happen for anything.

Started playing with Quicken tonight

Started playing with Quicken tonight on Karen's computer. I was surprised at how easy it was to use it, but sort of put off by the sheer amount of data input I'll need to do to set the damn thing up properly. The cool bit was it could access my bank's data via an online account and just suck all that data in. So I've got since April in data files in this Quicken thing. Not really sure what I want to do with it, but getting a better handle on our budget at home, spending habits, etc. probably wouldn't be a bad idea. I'm sort of put off on the concept of getting all the background info in - figuring out how much is left on the loans, mortgage, etc - ick. I can work numbers as well as anyone else, but the whole financial game just seems to be a little more complex and scary than I ever really want it to be.

Yeah!!! Furnance installation complete. Boy,

Yeah!!! Furnance installation complete. Boy, that's expensive - but at least now we don't have to worry about it too much.

It definitely wasn't easy waking

It definitely wasn't easy waking up this morning. I heard someone knocking on the door about 7:30am, and it turns out it was the guys to install the furnance! I had no idea they'd be showing up that early, so I through myself out of bed, pulled on some clothes, and got out into the living room, only to find Karen had showed them where they needed to go, etc. I moved the car, but little else.

They've been working since then - it's a smaller unit and now we have a kickass air cleaner - and it looks like it's running now. I'm heading to check...

Woke up at 4:30am, Left

Woke up at 4:30am, Left home this morning at 5am. Left SEATAC airport at 7am. Arrived Burbank, CA at 9:30am. Did a little diagnosing and settled some feathers for the first hour. Called in to a staff meeting and stirred things up for a giggle and to get an answer (since nobody was at their desks) about 10:30. Then I pretty much proceeded to sit on my ass and twiddle my pinky-toes for the next 5 hours, after which the networking was all connected up and I could knock out the last couple of items on the plate to get my cohorts remote access. Was done about 5:30 and caught a lift back to Burbank airport hoping to catch an earlier flight home. Found out corporate travel had booked me one way, but not the other. Got a little pissed off, called the 1-800 number and they actually straightened it out pretty quick. Didn't get an earlier flight though - left Burbank at 8pm. Arrived San Francisco 8:45. Left SF at 9:45. Arrived SEATAC 11:50pm. Got home just after midnight have been unwinding since.

So... How was your day?

Who elected you leader of

Who elected you leader of this outfit?

Well Pete, I thought it should be the one with the capacity for abstract thought.

I hate it when that

I hate it when that happens.

Two of the guys working for me have been working on a project for the past 2 months. They've been doing it in sort of a fast iterative style with little or no documentation really being generating. We called them to task 3 weeks back and said "Hey, ya really need to document and present what's going on here" - more so that it would illuminate their good solution and get buy-in from the rest of the engineering staff. But instead it illuminated a problem - they couldn't get the documentation done. So friday I threw up the flag to the other development leads and said "I've lost control, I don't know where they're going, and I don't know how to get a handle on it".

So we had a good meeting this morning, going over the problem and deciding how we wanted to get it nailed down. We didn't want to kill the project, because we all felt it was necessary (or at least that was the consensus). I had clearly reached the point where I wasn't able to do anything to help it out, so one of the other guys raised his hand and said "I'll take it". We really just need to redline the scope of the project and get it back on track. I'm sure he'll get it done, cover the bases, and get these guys back on track. I wish I could have, but I missed the mark this time. Another learning experience.

The Georgie Bush administration finally

The Georgie Bush administration finally admits there's global warming happening. They've stated that the cost of reducing emmissions would be too costly to the US. I don't know the numbers, but I wonder what his version of "too costly is" compared to the damage and death that we'll wreak with the changes as the sea rises 19"...

Ah. 10pm (or thereabouts) now.

Ah. 10pm (or thereabouts) now. Mowed the lawn this evening (it'd been needing it a bit), had a little dinner with Karen, and showered the accumulated grime off me. My hands, shoulders, and upper back are all feeling the effects of the past two days now - my hands possibly the worst. They're feeling sort of puffy and stiff - a side effect of dealing with the lines under tension for hours at a shot I guess.

The SciFi novel is still sitting here, but I'm not really moving to quickly to dive back into it. It's good, but it's dense reading and frankly I'm already kind of tired.

This week should prove to be pretty busy. I'm flying down the Burbank tuesday (and back late that night), Wednesday we get a new furnace installed, and Thursday has Karen flying out to Omaha, Nebraska for a conference (at which she's a teacher and speaker). Thursday night the crew of the MantaRay will converge over at Sand Point Sailing, where Luther (the other trimmer) works/volunteers time. We'll lurk about a conference room there, planning and going over tactics, and then on Saturday we'll spend a long day out on the water (hopefully with wind) practicing the long uphauls and downhauls - tacking and gybing around for practice. And in a week, Karen gets back from her conference and we're back to another week...

Yeah. That was more like

Yeah. That was more like it. Got back from racing today, and while we still have loads to do in learning, coordinating, etc - we did a hell of a lot better today. The morning was again in the classroom, and the afternoon racing. The classroom stuff was better for me today - perhaps partially because I'm learning the terminology better (have a long way to go though) and partially because it was a little more topical to the position I was crewing (trimmer).

The switchovers between jib and spinnaker were a LOT smoother today, and we ended up finishing second in the race. Even got a trophy (a glass that said "Second: Corinthian Yacht Club"). I'm way sore now though - shoulders, hips, elbows, deltoids. All the stuff you use while crunching around in the cockpit, hauling or holding lines under tension, and the periodic grinding on the winches. No real bruises today though - the only damage would appear to be on my knees where I kneeled down on the metal track outside the cockpit a little roughly.

Starts are still fucking outrageous, and I'm only beginning to get the gist of the tactics. Fortunately, I don't really need to know the tactics (working as a trimmer or mast person) - but I figure it's good to know all the same. We had some consistent wind in the morning (8 knots or so), which died out to 1 knot by the end of the day. A convergence swept through the sound too - causing a lot of dead air and an eventual change of direction in the wind from north to south (or vice versa- I might have it confused).

Next big race is in two weeks on Saturday - the Lukemia Cup. I think we'll be ready to give a decent showing, although I'm pretty sure we won't win.

The coach we had today was way, way, way better than yesterday. He didn't get excited, he just gave advice and watched. He reached down to lend a hand when asked, but didn't force anything to happen. The overall effect today was that everything felt a little slower today - way more controlled - than the frantic hollering and jumping we were doing yesterday. At the end of the day, we all huddled in the club house and he stuck with us giving us terrific advice - advice individually at our stations and as a team. It was really good. At the end of the day, I didn't feel like I just wanted to be away from him. Can't say that about yesterday.

Oh - a little story about yesterday. During the lift of our spinnaker, we had gotten it curled and twisted and had zero forward momentum. Then the a coach of another boat used a tactical manuever (right of way stuff) to force us to jibe while the spinnaker was twisted - pretty much fouling us up for quite a while longer. It was really uncool, because he did this too us while we were practicing *after* the race. We weren't even racing... So this guy comes up to JR this morning and says to him "So.. you know what I did to you out there yesterday?" JR wasn't sure (I think) at first who he was, but when it became clear from his descriptions, JR said "You're the guy who forced us to gybe when we had our spinnaker fouled!". This apparently pleased the so-called coach (who's name is Pat by the way) and he smiled and did that little hand signal like you're shooting someone "Yep. Just finished ya off. You know what we call that?"

JR's response was SO on. "Yeah, I've been racing competitively for three years, and we call that unsportsmanlike". The guy said "oh.. oh.. Not so!" and started on babbling. I just grinned and left the guy in digust. These kind are always around training new folks - the ones who humiliate because they can for no good reason. I went and told the rest of the crew what JR said, grinning.

Karen and I headed down

Karen and I headed down to Barnes and Noble yesterday to browse, ponder, and generally spend an evening off the hill and outside of our house. In a fit of impulse, I snagged up a science fiction novel in the "New SciFi" section: Revelation Space (amazon link to same) by alastair reynolds.

I'm not too far into it, but it's easy to tell you that it's written by a Brit author. They just use a whole different vocabularly set than I'm used to in contemporary american science fiction. Takes a little getting used to.

Well, that didn't go as

Well, that didn't go as well as it could have. Sailing that is.

The Corinthian Yacht Club at Shillshole Bay here locally hosts a "Rookie Rally" to teach us newbies to sail racing the rules, the tactics, etc. So today was the first day Jen and JR (owners of the MantaRay) mixed their more experienced crew with their less experienced crew, and threw us all into a race with 5 other boats.

You know the funny thing? On video tape is looks boring as snot. I mean really impressively "that doesn't look like anything!" boring. It's way different on the water. There's a huge game of tactics, right-of-way, and chicken being played at the start of a race. And, to be perfectly honest, it gets really fuckin' tense sometimes. It's not like you have a throttle you can quickly throw into reverse. We got our boat squished in between two others, all moving at 3-4 knots, all under full sail, and the boat on our right not giving way like it should - having cornered itself into a bad situation as well. We did what we could - we luffed the sails and tried to drop the speed. We missed the other boats as they powered on, but it was kinda wild there for a moment.

So we had some good moments, but I think today could best be described as "getting the needed practice". We all (well, Ann aside) made a plethora of mistakes. I completely froze up in working the spinnaker - which I'd done so well on the week before. I've got a admit a bit of frustration when the "coach" assigned to our boat grabbed the line from my hands instead of telling me what to do while trimming a jib.

But all is not lost. It was good practice, and we did get a lot of good teamwork resolved out and flowing by the end of the day. Tomorrow is the second half of the rookie rally, and we've resolved to all get down there at 8am (the rally starts at 10am) to go over the details, make sure we're all in sync... before we hit the water and the stress levels crank up.

In the meantime, I'm bushed from a hectic day of gybing, tacking, trimming, and easing. And my cat is making it really damn difficult to type - sacked out between me and the keyboard of my iBook.