Rhonabwy

The Boston Consulting Group made

The Boston Consulting Group made a presentation at the recent OReilly Open Source convention about research into open source projects and why people were involved. They'd done this sort of thing previously, making a general swag earlier about who 'hackers' where and how they worked. This time, they've delved deeper into the world of motivations. They've produced a large (516k) PDF file with the results that really a pretty good read. (Courtesy to a Tim OReilly blog entry for th' link)

One thing I found interesting about the results was what the programmers/hackers were looking for in a project leader. The interesting thing is it's really the same thing that the coders I work with are looking for in project leadership.

The Wall Street Journal has

The Wall Street Journal has an article on a new advertising scheme - setting up ars to publicly use geek-toys and try to get folks interested in them. Sort of jump-starting the word-of-mouth stuff that can really fan the flames. On one hand, I'm sort of shocked by this new level of deviousness from the advertising contingent. On the other hand, it sounds like it could really work - especially the bit about some cute ladies in a bar playing games with the things. You know that'll drag in a few men to purchase them in the eternal quest for impressin' the ladies.

Last day of the month.

Last day of the month. Quicken update night. Karen and I sat down, entered in all the stuff, got the updates from the banks. Looks like I did pretty good - didn't spend too outrageously this month. Managed to keep my cash expenditures to a reasonable level - in fact, lower than I have in months. I guess just paying attention was enough to make the difference.

Of course, I've just shelled out $40-odd for a book, which I'm sure Karen will be wanted to tag against my discretionary cash.

Moved the base station in

Moved the base station in my basement today - that really appears to be helping with the network connectivity to my desktop. Consistently getting a good signal level, as opposed to the mediocre (sometimes downright shitty) signal level I had been getting. Basically just moved it ten feet - but ten feet got it to the other side of a lot of pipes with water in 'em.

Signal quality it still good in the living room as well - I'll have to check and see how far out it goes now too. Medium levels in the back of the house, and I actually rather expect I'd get a reasonable (if low) level sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house. I'll keep an eye out for the cars just sitting out there eatin' my bandwidth.

Amazing what that signal level does for speed of the connection. It's so much smoother now...

Done. Finally. I don't care

Done. Finally. I don't care how cool the dentist and his crew are, it's just not fun getting fillings. Dr. Jensen is, by the way, quite cool. I really like him and his style. He and Lisa (his assistant) were great while I was getting the fillings and generally going through the whole process.

My face is numb again, and I imagine it'll be quite sore this evening and tomorrow. He definitely pincushioned the back of my mouth with that needle again. I can feel the top of my nose, but not the bottom, and the left half of my tounge. It's very, very strange.

It's sort of a melancholy

It's sort of a melancholy morning. I think it's mostly related to a lack of enthusiasm to get some fillings taken care of at the dentist' office this afternoon. Imagine that.

Updating my laptop today. It's

Updating my laptop today. It's an original iBook, so it doesn't exactly have a whole lot of disk space. The default install of Mac OS X 10.1 with the developer package included takes up 2.4Gb of the 3 available. Add much on top of that... yeah. So I'm borrowing some space on a local machine at work to move things around and do the updates. Then I'm going to turn around and use the iBook to archive out some of my mail into MBOX format. I apparently have a fucking huge amount of it stored up - most, I'm sure, is the freakish attachments that everyone seems to like to send around. 2Mb powerpoint slide presentations are the standard working document in our company... They don't even use MS Word anymore - just powerpoint for everything.

That was fun! Karen has

That was fun! Karen has been wanting to make a video tape for her mother - to show her some of the stretches she's learned in Yoga. We snapped it right out tonight. We took about 25 minutes of video with my DV camcorder and then imported it into iMovie. We then clipped out the sections she didn't like and placed it all back together again - no transitions, titles or nothing - just slap editing - and wrote it back out to DV tape. It was then that I realized that these tapes only hold an hour of video in DV mode, so after a false start, I dropped a new tape into the camcorder and wrote it back out. Then we hooked the camcorder with the edited footage to the VCR. Pressed record on the VCR and play on the Camcorder, and in 20 minutes we'd finished knocking out Karen's video.

I wanted to put in transitions, and a light background soundtrack, but she just wanted the whole thing slapped end to end and done quickly. Even at quickest, it took us a good three hours to put together and produce the 20 minutes of video onto a VHS tape. Even ran out of disk space on the hard drive while we were importing it from the camcorder at one point (DV takes a fuckin' huge amount of storage).

That's really been about it for the evening. Checked the email, the usual crap like that. Ate some leftovers for dinner, thought about some alternate video and computer projects. Not really much happenin' this evening now that the video production stuff is done.

I've my final round (for a while anyway) with the Dentist tomorrow afternoon. Appointment at 3pm. I'm hoping I'll be able to eat by 9pm... At least it'll all be over.

I found a notebook I'd

I found a notebook I'd purchased on a whim one day and scribbled in for the day. I later dropped it off at home, where it quickly became buried in the usual pile of papers and detritus that accumulates around my computer. Since I cleaned everything up, I found it again. On a lark, I brought it with me to work. Looking through it, I found some notes that I'd scribbled down from something - almost a mantra for a person writing code these days:

Disk is cheap
Processors are fast
There is never enough bandwidth

how true, how true.

Ahh! Cool! I found

Ahh! Cool!

I found a topographic map site that made it super easy to locate the area where we hiked last sunday. Have a look at the topo map of Skyline Divide, courtesy of TopoZone. Neat site!

I went ahead and ordered

I went ahead and ordered A New Kind of Science. It's raised a little controversy, and seems to be newsprint's favorite tech controversy when they can't find anything more interesting to write about. I'd meant to order it some time back, but sort of lost track and got distracted. While I was at the Dentist's office yesterday, I saw an article in Newsweek on it, so I figured Hey, I should check that out.
It'll be arriving in a 4 to 5 days, so I'll probably start crackin' on it after that.

So I'm thinking that Paul

So I'm thinking that Paul Festa and this analyst at Jupiter - Michael Gartenberg - have shown themselves to either not have a clue, be the terrible victims of an editor dumber than a bag of hammers, or just be plain fuckin' stupid. CNET has an article on Real and OpenSource that really seems to be missing a point on this whole open-source & streaming media deal that's been happening.

Neither of them have opened the Codecs. That's the dream of all the OpenSource geeks - getting the detailed tidbits that make the codecs work. What they have opened is the transport mechanisms. In Apple's case, they've got Darwin Streaming Server completely open, based on the Apache project. Contrary to Michael Gartenberg's (possibly out of context) comments, Apple's been very successful in actually opening up key pieces of their system. Their focus wasn't ever on opening up the codecs, nor the fancy GUI stuff they do. Instead they opened the very base level of the OS and the transport mechansims. Darwin.

Now Michael, go read exactly what Real's opened up with this Helix stuff. Let me tell you - it ain't the codecs... Real has released their codecs into the world of Linux by releasing Object Code, not the source. What they've released is a cleanroom implementation of the transport mechanism identical to that used by Microsoft's servers. Look at what they're doing. Now go read Joel's article on Open Source and making a commodity of software. That's what they've been trying to do you Dorks. Even Real's VP of Media Systems seems to be missing the point (although my suspicious nature would have me consider the possibility that he's intentionally missing the point for this Article - trying to make the Open Source efforts at Apple look pale in comparison to theirs - since they've just released a competing open source project).

Apple, and now Real, are trying to commoditize the streaming media transport world. They're trying to make it so cheap, and so ubiquitous, that any consumer can get their hands on it, without restriction for platform. They're retaining all the proprietary stuff that they've sunk years of development time into - the crown jewels of streaming media - the Codecs.

Fuckin' numbskull.

Gus, there's a first thing

Gus, there's a first thing you should do when you get into a new home: Have a rauckous party. It really introduces you in a positive light to all the neighbors.

Fourth today. Don't really know

Fourth today. Don't really know how many boats, but we did decently. Had a great start, made smooth sail changes, tacks, and gybes. I think the only real mistake we made we heading out into the channel instead of cruising along the shore. The winds just weren't great enough to make up for the current in the center of the channel. The difference was probably a boat in the race - we might have made third - but that's really about it.

Got some cavities filled at the dentist's office today, just before the race. The left half of my face was numb for the majority of the race. It's no longer numb, so the rear part is feeling like the pincushion it was made when he injected the novacaine.

Wow. Awake early - sort

Wow. Awake early - sort of stunning. Got up and moving at 7am this morning - thats like the earliest I've crawled out of bed in weeks! Got to work and the Monday's meeting was canceled. I expected it, but it would have been nice to get a "it's canceled" note, especially since the decision to cancel was made last friday.

We finished drying the cherries

We finished drying the cherries last night. Karen put them in a ziplock bag and asked me to plop the whole kit in the freezer when I went to bed. Tonight, she was taking out the jerky we'd made while we were out. "Can you put this one in the freezer before you come to bed?"

Shit.

Turns out we took 55

Turns out we took 55 pics on the trip up and down to Skyline Divide. So here's a precious few for your amusement. Wish I'd gotten better snaps of Karen...

Skyline Divide. That was today's

Skyline Divide. That was today's destination, regardless of the fact that the weather just wasn't cooperating. Karen and I drove up to Mt. Baker area, talked to the rangers there, and decided we'd go for the hike up in hopes of seeing wildflowers in the Alpine Meadows.

We saw a few, but before we got there we got our asses kicked by a 2 mile, 1400' climb. I guess the four mile hike took about 3 1/2 hours round trip. While we were walking up, I told Karen "Yeah, this is one of those hikes you talk about and make it sound like it wasn't a problem". Thought about doing that. Nope, it kicked our asses. That was a steep, long climb. Guess what? At 5300', there's still snow. Yup - last weekend in July and spring is only just starting at Skyline Divide - the wildflowers weren't even out.

The whole area was pretty socked in, so it was a foggy/cloudy walk most of the way. I really, really hadn't expected the snow - I would have worn something other than sandals. My feet and pants were soaked and covered in thick black mud by the time we made it all the way back down to the car. We've decided that we'll just have to try this one later - the view should have been spectacular from the meadows - but it just wasn't to be today. Definitely made for a good day out and gettin' away though!

We had Buffalo burgers for dinner too! Stopped at this little place called Seven Loaves that caters to the weekend northern cascade tourist crowd. We were the only customers in the place - it was a neat little place, sort of felt like a modern hippy commune thing. We were both ravenous, and frankly didn't want anything to do with the cold gezpatcho I'd brought to nosh on. We wanted something warm. The temperature outside was about 60 degrees most of the time, but the ever present clouds/fog cooled things down pretty effectively. It was nice while climbing - the excertion really kept you warm - but coming back down things got a tad chilly.

Got to try out the hiking poles Karen had given me for Christmas too - man, are they nice on a climb like that. I took one and Karen took one. I tried using them both for a while, just to see what it was like. They really add a lot of stability, especially when you're using both of them. They were invaluable when we came back down - a lot of the path was slick with loose mud and it kept both of us from butt-planting in the snowmelt mud.

The only real downside was having to drive back. We finished with dinner and then had a 90 minute drive back to the house. It wouldn't have been so bad, except that I had a full stomach and had been really working hard at that climb... it was a long drive back accompanied by a lot of caffeine.

We've been getting cherries in

We've been getting cherries in the CSA Market Basket of late. Lots of cherries. So many, in fact, that they were starting to go bad (all fuzzy) before we'd eaten them. I mean, really - if they're going to get all fuzzy, at least let it be after we eat them. So we pulled out the dehydrator. While we watched movies last night, I pitted a bowl full of cherries, and they've been drying since. They're about done, so now we'll have dried cherries for later in the year! Since the dehrydator was almost done with this job, we got inspired to dry more stuff - so now we have 3 pounds of beef marinating in the fridge in prep for being turned into jerky.

Gezpacho. Yum! Made that and

Gezpacho. Yum! Made that and a hefty salad for dinner. That was pretty much the sum of useful things I got done today. I fiddled about with my internal computer network, and ended up deciding that the pain of setting up a linux box as a firewall/server just wasn't worth it. I'd thought about putting up a Quicktime Streaming Server for my own use, but I think I'll try and find an alternate method of getting the same thing accomplished.

databases... We use a lot

databases...

We use a lot of database stuff at work because it's easier to change than the code. The funny thing is we keep making the database stuff more and more complex - to the point where the code is often easier to change than the database stuff. It's relatively easy to scan for class names and function calls in a large set of code, but it's a lot harder to make sure that any given column or table is or isn't being used. Add on top of that we have 5 times as many coders as DBA types... It's kinda odd. I wonder if this happens to other folks.

It's nice having Gus back

It's nice having Gus back from vacation. Not because he's working with me anymore, but because he gives me something to read pretty regularly with his Blog. He's decided to bag the .Mac account thing - while I think I'll try it. I'm waiting - of course. They giving the first year for $50, so I'm waiting until the last minute (I've got 66 more days) until I sign up. I figure why burn 2 months when I don't have to?

Don't know if I'll keep it, but I'll at least try it out. 100Mb ain't shit, and the "benefits" you get don't really tally up like Apple has provided, but it's worth a shot to me. I'll still spend $50 sort of impulsively. I'm using the associated email account pretty heavily so I don't have personal stuff thrown in with the work account. I get an email address through my DSL provider, but it's shitty service there so I just don't use it.

Still haven't gotten my home network re-wired to use the linux box as a firewall/server. For some reason I was having terrible difficulty with my Airport card in the G4 loosing connectivity and hanging up the machine. I need to enable remote login (via SSH naturally) because the machine looked like it was only partially hung - the mouse was moving, but all desktop related stuff was frozen. I thought I might have been able to get in via SSH and reboot it nicely rather than the hardware reset switch, which I hate using. Only seemed to happen on heavy and fast downloads though - otherwise it stayed pretty solid. Sooner or later I'd like to hardwire that corner with CAT5, but in the meantime, the airport is a nice solution.

It's about accountability. I'm working

It's about accountability. I'm working around to figuring it out, but I'm not there yet. There's a special class of folks who are getting a new level of hell developed for them. They're the folks who claim accountability is important, and then turn around and set up processes, meetings, email lists - whatever - so that no one individual is, in the end, accountable. I view accountability as a personal thing. I take it personally and I generally take it as a positive goal. "I'm the guy that gets shit done" was a line I'd use when explaining to people what I do. Then there's the other side - the side that's generating things to do, making up processes that involve groups and no clear method of determining something. Or maybe it's a perfectly clear method, but at it's heart involves an accumulation of 'votes' from 6 or 7 people. Then that choice is wrong, and folks are ducking out left and right. Whoops they say, while some no-brain executive is screaming for blood "Who's accountable!!!". "Well... So an so did the work..."

I guess that hasn't happened to me exactly. I've not been blamed for any terrible choices, but I'm one of many reaping the drawbacks.

I'm feeling particularly down today. There was a meeting this morning that was only 90 minutes long - and it felt like three hours. It's a meeting where I don't feel that I can honestly speak my mind or I'll have others taking pot shots at me. The worst part is it's really only one individual who's taking those shots. And he's not been shut down - even after repeated episodes. It's disconcerting. It's annoying. It's unfortunately, expected at this point.

I finally got a chance

I finally got a chance to read the Chapter 8 at Blogroots: Using Blogs in Business. It was reasonably well written, but I guess I've run into some problems with it. The article sort of espouses how Blogs could be used in an ideal sense. My cynacism, however, tells me how they'd end up getting used: just like email and mailing lists at the office. They're another avenue of sharing information, and would appear to suffer from all the dystopic problems that current venues have. The article was really sort of offering Blog technology up as a saviour pill to better organization and communication, but I think it misses the point. Organizations are all about people. People, in any group, make up a culture - and that culture is what's going to drive anything else. A culture that *likes* to blog out details of their projects has the potention that Blogroots is advertising. A culture that's focused on "top down objective setting" is a hell of lot less likely to be encouraged to share information and ideas in that manner.

Then again, mabye I'm just an organizational anarchist.

Blogroots has a lengthy article

Blogroots has a lengthy article about using Blogs in business. It appears to be a pretty decent article, although truth be told I just scanned it briefly and figured that I'd look at it more tomorrow since I stuck the link in my blog tonight. We've actually used the concept once in our office, but our more normal medium is email, with all it's strange etiquette and escelation issues involving who gets copied and what segment of the company is reading it. We actually have a supplemented system which can get some really great slams and/or arguments brewing - we have our bug tracking system post email as well, so in addition to the various email complications, you've also got a very firmly tracked record of what was said in the conversation. Put in a bit of a slam myself this morning. A gentleman of some fame earlier in my rantings indicated in a pissy sort of way that he thought we were fucking something up and wanted to have a meeting. I responded by thanking him for being concerned, stating we had it under control (we actually do, surprisingly enough), and indicated that he should be specific about his concerns before requesting that we have some huge and inevitably painful meeting because he doesn't feel all comfy and cosy.

Ah... but I meant to write about tonights race. 9 of 13. Not as good as Monday's race, and I know Jen and JR were a little down about it after we were all said and done. Tom and Sean were working mast and foredeck respectively. Tom really hadn't worked the mast position much, so there was complications and confusion there. Myself and Dave worked as trimmers, and Dave was relatively new to the game himself, so we both had our moments of confusion and chaos. Add to that the usual problems with everyone wanting to help everyone else, and we lost quite a number of seconds to screw-ups and just being slow in tacks and gybes. The cool thing was that we got better - constantly - through the race. Dave and I switched off flying the spinnaker, and the tacks got a little smoother. Tom got more used to moving that mucking long aluminum spinnaker pole about during gybes, and in general things just kept getting smoother and better through the race. We did great on the upwind and downwind runs - we probably could have done better, but we were making up speed that we lost and it certainly helped. I didn't see the times exactly, but I'm better that without that assistance, we'd be farther back in the pack than 9.

Oh, and we beat Xcentric. That's the speedy race boat owned and crewed by Microsoft coders. Gotta beat them - it's sort of a moral imperative. (grin)

Wednesday night races, by the way, are a hell of a lot more active. Instead of two points, there were four - so we had three upwind legs and two downwind legs (Monday nights are 2 upwind, 1 downwind). Makes everything a LOT more active, and I'm pretty fuckin' bushed right about now. We left the boat about 9:15pm or so, and I got home at 9:30. Karen had an awesome salad left over for me, and we chatted a little while I ate. She's passed out now, and I don't think I'm too long behind here. Felt good tonight though - very active, but I felt like my feet were more solid on the deck, and climbing around when the boat was heeling way over was - not quite more comfortable - maybe just more stable for me.

Oh - and if you haven't heard yet, there appears to be a very large asteroid heading our way. Current estimation of impact is February 2019.

And for the illuminati/conspiracy fans out there, there's a conspiracy piece about DARPA, the occult, and this new office of "information awareness".

damn. Kiln People, by David

damn.

Kiln People, by David Brin, is only available in hardback. I'm just not quite ready to plunk down $27 for it, but I'd be happy to throw down $7 or $9 for it. I called Elliott Bay Book Co, and they reported that paperbacks are often 12 months delayed from hardcover releases, which would seem to indicate I'll need to wait until January to get it.

grumble.

work work work. I've spent

work work work.

I've spent most of the morning trying to pin down an effective means of snagging files via webDAV. I'm getting close, but there's no nice command-line setup programs like wget or curl to really make the process easy. I think I'll end up using the Perl libraries and whipping something out using that. I looked for straightforward Java libraries, but didn't really see one that did what I was hoping. Apache has the SLIDE project, which includes a webDAV client in it's code, but I haven't dug into it to see if that's a viable option. I have to have support for https, username, and password. There's a really nice unix commandline client called cadaver that's available. Acts identically to smbclient. Which means it's a bitch to script out. I almost thought about using expect...

I still have a testing plan to nail down. The test matrix looks like it's a grid of 32 x 7 possible states, with a specific choice made on each, and then between 1 and 5 possible outcome states for each item on that grid. This oughta be fun to test.... There's a particularly complex segment where one item being tested can effect a list of other items in a number of interesting and possible ways. Ahh, the joys. Testing is just not my forte.

The easy thing I knocked out today was installing Tomcat version 4.04 in our test environment and whipping out the docs on how to start and stop it. Everyone had been testing it just on their local boxes, but I got asked to put one in place, so there it is. Ain't real hard to do, thank god. I've got plenty of other "hard" things to tackle.

Had a great evening, which

Had a great evening, which is what really made the day. John came over after work and we lifted the anvil up onto it's anvil base. In return, I fired up the forge and showed him what a propane forge looked and sounded like when it was live and moving. Made a little hook thing for that basically sucked, but was a decent example of how easily steel moves when it's cherry red. Tried to fire up to a higher heat, but only got to lemon at the peak. I expect I would need to up the propane pressure to really make that happen, so maybe some other time. Running at 12 PSI is perfect for the light practice work I need to work on.

Somewhere in the mess, I've misplaced a bucket of tools. My favorite smithing ballpeen is hiding (a nice, slightly larger and heavier one that's great for working with 1/2" stock) as well as a couple of my usual suspect pliers. They're somewhere here, just don't know where.

Karen whipped up a nice dinner too - the potatoes weren't something I'd repeat, but they were edible. The pork tenderloin, however, was fantastic. No, I'm not a vegetarian. At all. Gimme my meat. Especially when it's that juicy and tasty. My hands were stained a deep purple (looked like they were bruised) from slicing and pitting two cups of bing cherries by hand for desert, which was also fantastic.

Afterwards, I dropped John off at home and we headed over to Bellevue for an end-of-evening swim. We lurked about in the pool, floating and goofing off with Nathan and Leah, watching the sky go from bright blue, through dusk, and we finally bailed when we were solidly seeing stars. It was glorious just floating there, watching the sky up above you.

Today... Today was a great

Today...

Today was a great day. By the way, I'd talked about the Guayas that was in port - it left today, and Karen got some great pictures. Here's one of my favorites, with it under partial sail out in the Sound. Click on it for a larger version...

Thanks to BoingBoing for the

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link - Doonesbury has a bit on the wireless world today, pretty good.

2nd place tonight!! WOOOO!!!! The

2nd place tonight!! WOOOO!!!!

The boat in front of us still kicked our ass - it was 13 minutes ahead of us. It was a small race though, so it was hard to tell where we really fit in during the race. Out of all 30 boats, I think we ended up ranking 9th. Pretty good... I'm way, way out of practice. It was so, so clear that everyone else had been doing the whole kaboodle for the past week solid. Luther didn't even give me a chance to fly the spinnaker, just because I wasn't super clear on what I needed to do and it was just easier for him to do it himself. I was sort of hoping for more there, but I figure I've probably shucked him out of a couple of long drives with the spinnaker in the past myself. I called him on it later, so next time...

May go out wednesday evening - just depends on if Jen and JR find themselves another trimmer (they've got someone lined up, but he hasn't responded yet) or not. I'd like to get a run on that "new" spinnaker (new to me, for everyone else it's a month old).

Looks like Gus has the hammer laid down on him for folks not cluing in to an obvious joke. Maybe yer right... maybe blog's and work just don't mix. But I think I'll just keep on truckin' with mine. I try not to name names of the folks who're being utterly incompetant or pissing me off. And I try to be careful not to disclose anything that I really ought not to. Well, in my opinion anyway. I'm sure if other's were reading, they might have a different theory on that. But hey, it's a voice. It's distinctly my voice, my opinions. Deal if ya don't like it.

Back to work. Ugh. I

Back to work. Ugh. I guess ya gotta.

Managed to spill coffee down my shirt pretty much first thing. Always a good start. At least it's supposed to be sunny, warm, and windy this afternoon. We've got a race this evening that I'm looking forward to. Well, I'm just looking forward to it so I can be back out on a sailboat - it's been 4 weeks since I was last out.

Somehow the morning has mostly slipped by as well - catching up with Jen and JR, chatting with Tony about an upcoming change to how we store language information and it's reprocussions for our manual processes, and helping diagnose a database unhappiness that's apparently had a section of our environment down since last friday at 3pm. Okay, so maybe I actually did do some work in there, just doesn't really feel like it. One of my big to-do's has been placed on hold awaiting further code refinements elsewhere, so I'm back to working on a test plan and vaguely attempting to script accessing a file via the WebDAV protocol. Onward and upwards I 'spect. At least it's something concrete to attack.

No terrible Monday meeting today - it's apparently been put off until Friday. Oh yeah, a shitty long unfocused meeting on a Friday instead of wasting Monday's morning - where at least you don't normally get anything done. Then again, maybe I don't get anything done on Friday mornings either. Hard to tell anymore.

I'm about halfway through American Gods, and resisted the temptation to bring it to work. I know I'd be ducked under the desk and reading it instead of doing anything potentially useful here. It's a good story. Neil Gaiman's writing reminds me of Tim Powers, and I'm honestly not sure which I prefer. I've read a lot more of Tim Power's stuff, but I've been thoroughly impressed with the humor and irrevrence of Neil Gaiman in this latest novel.

There's a particularly funny scene (funny to me) where the main character is talking with one of Odin's ravens: Thought or Memory (they never really say which one). He says to the bird: "Hey... say 'Nevermore'". The raven replies "Fuck you".

Had a great morning downtown...

Had a great morning downtown... went and checked out the Tall Ship that was docked at pier 56 - the Guayas, from Ecuador. Nice ship, free to the public to visit until it leaves Tuesday morning. Karen's thinking of going down to the market to see if she can watch it go under full sail out in the channel. That's be pretty cool. Afterwards, we walked on down to the submarine that's docked down by the ferries, but decided not to plunk out the $10 for the tour. I spect I'll go some morning or afternoon on my own.

The return trip included a stop at the Elliott Bay Book Company, which I'd never been to. Really neat bookstore - quite the plethora of interesting titles, and not stacks and stacks of the only the most popular ones like you see at Barnes & Noble. Spotted a book that I'd been waiting to see in paperback, and nabbed it: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Karen's fighting a nasty headache now, so I figured I'd curl up with this book for another hour or two and then start attacking dinner - a spicy amaranth stir fry with scallops. (I love it that you can get good, fresh seafood so easily in this town)

So the Bite of Seattle

So the Bite of Seattle was a bit too much for me. We went down there for lunch today, but the crowds were really wigging me out. Crowds aren't polite, they don't really pay any attention to personal space, and they're godawful clumsy. I almost had a drink poured down my shirt three times during the whole 30 minutes we were there. Yuck.

Spent the rest of the day doing some research and playing games. I checked out the Linux router/NAT setup info, but after screwing around in the basement for a couple of hours, I realized I needed some cabling that I don't have at home. Time for a quick trip to by a cat5 patch... The forge stuff is all sitting there, but I decided not to set it up this afternoon. I think I'm going to review some of my older notes on the baseline stuff again, so I have a plan on what to accomplish when I get it all fired up.

So that left me with playing Black & White for most of the evening. Well, all of it to be honest, aside from eating dinner. Nice evening. I just wish my head would stop spinning with code ideas for other projects.

Ahhh. It's drawing closer. The

Ahhh. It's drawing closer. The actinic glare is about to be unleashed again!

I was successful in my morning hunt. 6 cinder blocks, 9 gallons of propane, and 40' of mild steel bar stock (3/8" and 1/2" pretty evenly mixed). Found a place down in the SODO called "Pacific Iron and Steel". Appears they don't do anything more than mild steel, but that's fine for me right now. I expected that if I wanted to get into fancy steels, I'd probably need to order them from some wholesaler anyway. So I'm pretty much ready to put it all together and make it happen again. Boy, I'm going to be way, way, way out of practice.

Karen's spent the morning working in the yard, planting Dahlia's and generally tidying the area in front of our porch.

Thought last night that I needed to stop screwing around and rearrange my in-house network, so I'm hoping to get that knocked out this week as well. Got a linux box down the basement ready to become a router/firewall/NAT point/server - so it's just a matter of hooking it all up and making it go. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night. Hard to tell really.

Drinking a grande latte at

Drinking a grande latte at quarter to ten in the evening is probably not the wisest thing to do. But at that moment, it just sort of felt right. I knew that with my nap earlier in the day, this would be sealing my fate to stay up late tonight. At the time, there were a few sparkling clouds out over the western horizon, visible in that swath of olympic mountains that you can see when you're up on Queen Anne hill. They were reflecting the last of the daylight, down to those strange red-blue-purple colors. The sun had disappeared at least 45 minutes prior, and we were down to the final bits of dusk really. The eastern sky had already moved into that darkness showing stars, and a gibbous moon hung off to the left of the sky from where I'd been facing. A beautiful day was turning into a pretty damn good night.

So I spent the evening finishing the SciFi book of late: Earth, by David Brin. Nice finish. I'd forgotten that he had researched Minsky in making the book - it was kind of neat to re-read it after I'd done the same research myself. (if you're interested in a little philosophical/AI research, I'd recommend Minsky's The Society of Mind)

I enjoyed the ending of Earth, even as it was warning against a thousand small deaths we might die between here & now and the conceived future 50 years down the road. It's sort of interesting to note that most SciFi writers are shortening their scope - no longer does the reading public expect a millenium to see dramatic changes in science and society. Fifity years is more than sufficient. I know some out there have been calling it a signal of doomsday - that we're changing so fast we can't comprehend it. I'm not so sure - I think it's just an indicating that we are changing our world that fast, and that astute writers have realized that people have come to almost expect those grand sort of changes in far less time. Now if we could just get people to start planning for a generation or two in advance.

So I did a little time scanning OReillyNet. Saw a weblog/article by Tim OReilly throwing an offhanded pot shot at the beast.

Wait, I've got somethin' else to say:
PUTTING IN LINKS TO A BLOG MANUALLY IS A PAIN IN THE ASS!!!

Okay, maybe I have some incentive to do a named entities parser to automatically link up text to it's associated common link. So I could always link OReillyNet to http://www.oreillynet.com/ without typing a whole lot of < a href > stuff.

/. is carrying a couple

/. is carrying a couple of Apple related articles today - one on Stuart Chesire - the ZeroConf guy at Apple and one on a Sorensen/Apple countersuit. The one on Stuart includes a link to an interview with him. Smart fellow. I actually spent one afternoon at WWDC eating lunch with Stuart's "boss", although I got the impression that Stuart was pretty much perfectly capable of self direction.

OReillyNet has an article entitled The Aisle Less Travelled - a quickie report from MacWorld NY. One of the products I thought was interesting was one I'd actually conceived of before it showed up (gasp!) - Creo's Six Degrees - software that tracks what you're doing in the background to make links between email, documents, projects, etc. I'm not really sure if it's all that useful, but I was always kind of interested in mining email metadata to establish patterns of working relationships. Use? What use? Just one of those "that'd be kinda cool" things.

Sucatash, yum! Karen's made up

Sucatash, yum! Karen's made up some for dinner tonight, along with a light salad, while I completely passed out after a wonderful day on the water. So we're still noshing away at pieces of the CSA Market Basket.

Spent the day boating out on Lake Washington on the Stugots - John's boat. We got out of the dock just after 9am, and returned about 4pm. The early part of the day was actually pretty chilly, and I'm really glad I remembered to grab our sweatshirts before we went out. It was strange moving that fast on the water after I'd gotten used to sort of a maximum speed of 8 knots out on the water with Jen and JR's sailboat. I found myself automatically looking at the water for wind, and once almost told Sue to come around to starboard because we were heading into a large dead zone. Duh, like it makes a difference in a power boat. The afternoon was a lot warmer, although I left my sweatshirt on. I crawled up on the foredeck of the boat and relaxed on the pad in the sun. I didn't sleep, but man it could have been sooooo easy.

So the rest of the evening is being pretty quiet for us, with both Karen and I yawning and sort of stumbling about. We'd talked about going down to Bite of Seattle, but decided to save that for some tomorrow. I finally gave in and took a nap, and Karen valiantly made dinner. Valiantly because I think she's as tired as I am.

So tomorrow holds some Dahlia planting for Karen, while I head out into the wilds of Seattle to get a 100# propane tank filled (and home safely) and do some digging around in the SODO for merchants of mild steel and light bar stock. I also need to find (somewhere along the way tomorrow) a 75' hose (karen's requisitioned all the hoses for gardening and I need to wash the care) and several cinder blocks (to raise my forge up to where I can really use it).

Funny this. /. has an

Funny this. /. has an article on the 1yr birthday of Code Red. It's funny because one of the ops guys showed me his home web server log and asked "Hey, what's this default.ida thing that someone's trying to buffer overrun?". He'd never seen a code-red attack against his server before. Not much of an attack really, just a little "ping".

/. has a link to an animated gif showing it's spread. Appears to be pretty heavily slashdotted at the moment though.

Oh - and on the dark side, it looks like Transmeta is about to lay off a huge force.

Hey, it's just after 6pm!

Hey, it's just after 6pm! That means the bus fares have dropped off "peak", and I can catch a lift home for about a $1.25. No walkin' up that bloody great big hill for me this afternoon!

I had a great lunch

I had a great lunch today. The day around was sort of shitty - well, one part was rather spectacularly shitty - but the lunch was really cool. After a very rough meeting, Austin grabbed me and said "I think we need to get way away from the office for lunch. You could use some fun". That was cool. So Austin snagged me, and we grabbed a few other folks from the office that were willing, and headed down to Pike's Place Market for a bite to eat. Great place for a lunch, if chaotic and scrambled. The rest of the crew had been there several times, but I usually don't walk that far afield for lunch. The general idea is to wander into the heart, get lost, and find something that looks tasty. Let me tell you - it's not that hard down there.

I sort of wish the office was closer to the Market, but I'm also glad it's not. I can imagine getting sucked into it every day, exploring for hours, and not really getting anything done because you were still hunting for "that perfect thing" for lunch. I ended up having spanokapita and some dolmathes from this little greek place, with a monstrous snikerdoodle cookie for desert.

The afternoon was better really. A demo from an R&D facility elsewhere in the mothership and I got some details knocked out on a couple of outstanding tasks that are lurking about the office. Im supposed to be generating a test plan, but the scope of it has really been sort of elusive. I think I've got a decent handle on it now though, so I'm going to start hacking it out on paper sometime on Monday.

Holy shit, this logo couldn't

Holy shit, this logo couldn't be any scarier... Caught the link off BoingBoing. I can't believe they just made that. It's like, I dunno - just coming right out an calling this whole thing "fatherland security" and changing the uniforms of the boy scouts...

Bruce Schneier's latest cryptogram is

Bruce Schneier's latest cryptogram is out. Strangely enough, I was listening to an article on NPR this evening that talked about one of the topics in there: cyberterrorism. I don't think much of the concept in terms of real danger, I take more of a line that it's easier to use dynamite than a computer, and with more destructive effects.

The other relevant bit on NPR talked about how the government just made another step towards making computers more secure. They gasp installed patches!!!

Wow. I wish I'd thought of doing that. God, then I wouldn't have half the problems I do today with the cyberslime.

Got the teeth cleaned this

Got the teeth cleaned this afternoon. Cavities, yech. I hate to say it, but I expected them. I just did a shitty job of caring for my teeth over the past year, so it was bound to happen. More office visits coming up...

On other news, it looks like asynchronous clocked chips are getting a little more media attention. /. has an article on it, linking to a scientific american article. I recall studying it a bit when I was learning and doing CMOS design, but at the time the concept was way out of vogue and terribly unstylish. We're closing in on some serious limits of keeping an entire system synch'd with a single clock when we don't even really have to - so I expect we'll start seeing some changes. Of course, it makes a chip designer's life a lot harder...

MEETING FROM HELL. Good news

MEETING FROM HELL.

Good news on the side though - just talked with customer support at Apple. Looks like I'm gettin' the 20Gb iPod. Weeeoo! With that much space I've practically got a backup of my whole damn system right there! Or 4000 songs, whichever I prefer... :) Although my whole music collection at home only comes out to 5.8Gb. Yeah, I know. A wimp.

I'M IN THE MEETING FROM HELL!!!

Whoa. Big day in New

Whoa. Big day in New York for Macintosh. I'm watching a re-transmission of the keynote even now, but it's clear most of the details are already available on the standard macintosh news sites (MacCentral, MacNN). It's interesting that the newest iTunes is doing some smart categorization - kinda neat. A nifty idea on personalization built into the app. And it looks like the iPod got one hell of a boost. The 20Gb version is apparently available at the same price as the 10Gb version just a touch ago. I've wondered what was holding up my iPod order - I guess I'll have to call Apple Order today and find out what they're a doin.

Also on MacCentral, I noticed that RealNetworks has finally gotten off their butts and swung a RealOne player for MacOS out the door. Even if it is in beta - which appears to be standard policy for large shrinkwrapped software these days.

So there's this "iCal" thing too - don't quite have a sense of that one. Seems to fly pretty brutally in the face of one of Microsoft's strengths: Outlook Calendaring (contrary to MS's bullshit about all the goodness of Outlook, what I've seen is that most folks want it only to enable calendar coordination). So if Apple is offering a open calendaring sync setup, and using something akin to standards, they may be able to pull this off. Otherwise - well, it would look to me like they're covering their collective asses for when MS stops doing Office software.

Apple's finally gotten the clue that you can't serve anything for free and make it last. iTools was very cool, but I'm not surprised they've moved to a subscription model. They appear to offering quite a value too. Having just gone through my own personal coniptions with spending, I'm not sure we'll do much there, but that's all yet to be seen really.

iSync huh? I don't do the mobile thing much...

This whole Quicken thing has

This whole Quicken thing has been causing some mental distress. I know it'll be best in the long run, but I have some terrible aversion to the concept of accounting and the way the default software (Quicken) works - categorizing your life into little impersonal chunks and such. It's probably because I'm an impulsive buyer...

There's another aspect of the whole finance thing that's been sort of wild. Both karen and I can get really freaked out with each other as we're attempting to make something akin to rationalizations about how to spend money. So I knew we'd be both jumping around about making a budget and figuring where we should be spending our money (as opposed to where we have been). I took advantage of the upcoming confusion and declared at dinner that today was my day to freak out about money, and therefore Karen had to be the perfectly calm and rational individual. It mostly worked too - the one time Karen started getting wigged out about some of the items I was mentioning, I stopped and started jumping up and down in the kitchen, throwing a tantrum about how it was "my turn" and she was supposed to be the rational one. It worked. heh.

After a lovely chef salad for dinner, we talked for a while about the money stuff, and finally decided that ice cream was clearly in order. We headed down to the Cow's Meow - a little hand-made ice cream shop on Queen Anne Ave. They have a wonderful flavor currently: huckleberry. I'd highly recommend it.

So the rest of the evening is watching a little "Harry Potter". I watched it just the other night, so I'll probably read a little bit of David Brin's Earth. Haven't read it in a while, and Karen just finished a re-read of it, so I think it's time to jump in again.

It's all there. Everything's now

It's all there. Everything's now into Quicken. Even the furnance purchase. We've got all the sordid spending details from the 15th of January 2002 right on up to today. It's making me face some spending habits that I'd really prefer not to acknowledge, but I guess I'm just gunna have to. Over the past half of a year, we've spent more than we made. It's damn close though - not having gone to WWDC would make up the difference. Karen likes to blame eating out - and she's got a decent point, but that alone isn't enough to make the difference. We've got a game plan now though - to move the cashflow into a positive state (by reducing our spending). Definitely time to work out what we owe where and figure out how to make it all as inexpensive as possible.

Got home and immediately started

Got home and immediately started downloading Quicktime 6 and Quicktime Broadcaster to play with it on my G4. Looks pretty damn cool, let me tell you. Between my iBook (or the ole linux box downstairs) and that G4 with a DV camcorder attached, I instantly have my own home studio for live broadcasts. The "Joe and Pooka Show" may be coming live to a screen near you! I'll need to do a little reconfiguring of my home network before I can make that happen. Currently the DSL modem is doing NAT, which sort of screws up the works - but I can set it to just bridge everything and put the Linux box in place as a firewall/personal server, complete with Quicktime Streaming Server, and be ready to go...

Aside from the strangeness of my own home networking setup, this all integrates very, very nicely. I'm really tempted to see if I can't wrangle a Macintosh at the office to do just this, but I haven't a clue how I'd justify it. Even an old iMac would do the trick for the broadcaster. Ah well, I guess I'll just play with it at home.

Did the cat thing for Jen and JR tonight too. Actually, Karen and I got brutally sidetracked playing with Quicken (yes, we finally have about everything in there) and learning how to download info from my VISA card into the quicken account. Then we realized it was almost 7pm, and Karen wanted to get something from Northwest Sewing (she said something about a single item 37% discount, so I didn't argue too much). While we were up there we also grabbed from Teriyaki from the little joint next to Northwest Sewing (very friendly folks, good food, and quite inexpensive!). Then we did the cat thing.

So now I'm back to lurking on the couch, drinking a little diet coke, and writing in my Blog.

Holy shit, this is big

Holy shit, this is big news: Apparently there's a gene that blocks HIV - caught that from Wired. hum. I wonder if it's true.

Just installed Quicktime 6 -

Just installed Quicktime 6 - wanted to make sure to have the latest version installed before the next Apple webcast (they tend to take advantage of the latest goodies). The installer was pretty painless, although it really wanted a restart of the OS (Win2K) before it was completely happy - it loads into the system tray area in the base of the menubar. The features are pretty cool, and the "quickstart" update to the format is really apparent on some streams from ATOM films. In particular, I'd like to recommend Darth Vader's Psychic Hotline

A day at the movies.

A day at the movies. I spent my entire day in theatre's downtown, catching up on the action flicks I've been meaning to see. So... today I've knocked out: Minority Report, Sum of All Fears, Road to Perdition, and Windtalkers. I'm not linking to rottentomatoes for the movies because their advertising pissed me off.

Of the lot, Minority Report and Road to Perdition were my top favorites. Some fuckhead pulled the fire alarm about 20 minutes from the end of Road to Perdition, so I'm having trouble reconciling my being pissed off with the quality of the movie. Windtalkers was good, but I think went overboard on the war scenes that really didn't add anything to the storyline for me. And I liked Sum of All Fears, although I'm struggling with Ben Affleck in the "Jack Ryan" role. They did a very credible job of nuking the stadium in Baltimore - FX on the blast and it's effects were really well done. Minority Report was my favorite though - both for the Science Fiction - close future look and for the interesting philosophical questions it raises about predestination and self determination.

Got home about 9:45pm, seriously jones'n for some Thai. I think I'm out of look, since it's Sunday night, but tomorrow... lunch... yeah (assuming the "Monday's" meeting doesn't run from 9am until sunset)

Watched the last of the

Watched the last of the movies we'd rented: The Education of Little Tree. It's a good flick about an 8 year boy half-cherokee, over the course of a few months during the Great Depression. Left both Karen and I kind of sad and reflective. The cinematography was amazing - I recall the tennessee mountains looking just about like they showed them in the movie, minus the people, power lines, and all that crap.

So now it's close on 9pm. I'm thinking about wandering out into the evening, since it's just getting dusk about now, and finding a coffee down at El Diablo.

Jeanette (Ursula for those in

Jeanette (Ursula for those in the SCA) had her baby last night - Elizabeth Madeline. 7 pounds or there abouts. I hope she's doing well.

Playtesting at Microsoft was fun - neat experience. And I was pleased to note I wasn't the oldest guy in the crowd. They sure made quite a deal about the NDA form we signed though.

Finished cleaning up the kitchen from last night's dinner. Still had wine glasses to clean and crap like that. Unfortunately left the wooden salad serving things in the salad bowl, so the tips are a little discolored from soaking in oil & vinegar all night. Whoops.

On the geek side of the world, Apple's released a security update to MacOS X software updater. Pretty damn impressive really, how fast they whipped it out after the vulnerability announcement. Details on the update are on their knowledge article. Slashot is also covering the news it appears...

Dinner tonight went really well.

Dinner tonight went really well. Had a nice merlot to complement a "chicken-waldorf" salad over fresh greens, some "oh shit I've been sleeping for three hours and I need to make them" cabbage rolls (which came out really good actually), some of that local-bakery yum-good bread, and cherries to just pluck and eat as you felt like it. Five fit around our table nicely, although we still sort of have this generic seating problem (the problem is lack thereof). We sort of expanded in the dining room to include lounging on the daybed by the windows (yeah, same one I sacked out in earlier this afternoon). The living room has a couch, a chair, and a little rocker that really only Karen (or someone equally petite like Karen) can sit in. Not quite sure what we're going to do about it, but having another couple (or more) over really makes for some akward seating. Hurm. Unless you like lounging around a dining room table that is.

Ran across a series of

Ran across a series of collected articles on programming in Cocoa (MacOS Objective-C) by Andrew Stone. Andrew is one of those guys I keep an eye out for in the "cocoa-programming" mailing lists - you know, the ones where you throw away everyone's spewage except the responses from a few folks... I sometimes read everything and try to help, but everyone else is always faster at it anymore, so I've just stopped and read the in-depth technical good that flows from a few really good coders.

It sort of reminds me that I was starting to delve into the twisted parentheses world of scheme. Still got that nifty little book on my desk at work - I need to make some time in between the corporate bullshit and real work to read, try, and learn.

heh. Just found that Byron

heh. Just found that Byron has a webcam for his dog - Murphy. Freakish, yes. But kinda cool. Hi Murphy!

Worked from home this afternoon.

Worked from home this afternoon. That translated roughly into thinking about a document I should write up regarding our development process, cutting the grass, and passing out on the daybed in front of the sunny windows with the breeze blowing across me. The good news was I woke up at 6pm. This is good news because we're having Nate, Leah, and Liz over for dinner tonight (theoretically at 7:30, but they ain't here yet) and I was supposed to make the cabbage rolls. Managed to hack that out sort of brutally and get a shower to boot. How's that for movin!

John Rucker will be getting back from Jordan next week. He's been out there managing an archeological dig for Brown University - which means I didn't get to visit him at all when I was out in Missouri. That sucked, but hopefully his dig went well. I'll have to troll him for stories about it later.

Got a late birthday present - an iPod. Well, I'm getting it - as it's not here yet (but SOON!!!). Got the 10Gb one too - that'll be awesome. I'll have my entire home music collection on it, plus have room for files if'n I feel like it.

hmmm... wonder when the terror trio will arrive...

Erch! Got a bill in

Erch! Got a bill in the mail yesterday for the furnance we just bought from Olsen. I'd set up this 6-months-same-as-cash deal to help defray the costs, except that it doesn't appear to have happened that way. The bill I got was from the financing company, but they were already starting to acrue finance charges! Youch! So I called Olsen, talked to Kelly there, and she got them all straightened out el pronto - it was really cool. They apparently just made a mistake and starting me on a credit line right off, when they were supposed to wait 180 days. So Kelly said all the charges would be undone and everything made happy there again.

Now if I could just get her to forgive the cost of the furnance itself...

Definition of obsessive

Definition of obsessive

Jello in spanish is "jello".

Jello in spanish is "jello". Surprise surprise, huh? Just for you Johnny... (gotta use that castillian accent though)

Weird. I'm getting asked to

Weird. I'm getting asked to explain variances in a budget I didn't set and can't control. Hummm.... what's wrong with this picture?

I'm gunna play games on

I'm gunna play games on Saturday! And get free software for the service! Pretty cool, huh?

It turns out that you can sign up for Microsoft playtesting if you live in the Seattle area, so I did. They called yesterday and asked about what games I played and such, and I've been asked to join them to play games for two hours on Saturday morning. Lord knows what I'll be playing, and I'm probably not supposed say even after I've played them. :) But it'll be cool!

MacNN had a link to

MacNN had a link to The Nando Times talking about the Liberty Alliance's proposed ID system (to combat the MS hailstorm initiative). It's sort of one of those not-really-saying-much articles, but it's kind of interesting in the fact that there's news about it and something is moving there. Doc periodically has a story on Identity, privacy and such, most recently sort of mentioning PingID as an option for an identity system.

I spent a portion of last night laying on the daybed and staring out the window, wondering about micropayments and why they all sort of flopped and died. The idea was sort of struck up again the other night by the conversation with Evan and Meg about music, booking, and so forth. There's been this crowd who's argued back and forth that artists and consumers would both benefit if we yanked out the middle men. Unfortunately, there's precious little in the way of digital cash (Paypal being about the closest really) and the transaction costs are always the bite in the ass at the end. Ultimately, there needs to be some way to convert whatever transaction actions into real money for people, and that real money thing is kind of tightly watched by our lovely federal government here in the US. I dunno - the whole nickel and dime for each view or listen is a real pisser, but reducing the cost of "a song" or "an album" would induce me to purchase a lot more of it. If I wasn't paying $15 per CD (which I've seen asserted $1.50 goes to the artist), that'd be really cool. But to move the cost of a CD down to $2 or $3 means that the transactions have to be really inexpensive, which they ain't.

I should pitch an email or two at Evan and see what his views are - they'd be sort of interesting since he's in the studio/producer position in the chain.

I saw a post on

I saw a post on /. earlier this evening about software engineering at Microsoft. I took some time to scan through the slides and spent a lot of time thinking "yeah, I've seen that..." and such. A good presentation - wish I could have seen that one live, even if it is two years old or so.

Having done a lot of developer support, and refined the process for checking in code, dealing with the developer miscommunications, or just plain mistakes, takes a lot of work. We have a process in place right now that is actually working pretty darn well. Even still, I sometimes think it'd be cool to have a chance to rebuild that process and try some changes. Some aspects, I think, are still pretty broken - but most of those have roots in an essential management dysfunction - determining what's important to do now, and what should be done later (I suspect it's an ongoing problem for a HUGE amount of software development shops).

Had dinner with Nathan and Leah tonight. They also had Evan Brubaker and Meg Peters over, so it turned into an interesting musical evening. Had some great conversations, and picked Evan and Meg's brain about how to get into being a booking agent for my sister-in-law back in Missouri. I think she'd be really fantastic at it.

Oh, and it appears that Karen's helping me take on the Quicken project with a vengence! I got home to find she'd back entried a huge amount of info, and it about to start attacking some of the more outlying accounts we have and get the mortgage set up into the gig. Wow, and I thought it'd take me weeks to make this all happen. At the rate she's attacking it, we'll have a good view in just a few more days.

Then I guess we'll have to start making some real decisions about where we want to get to and how we're going to get there.

What a pleasant morning. I

What a pleasant morning. I walked to work, bout the same as usual. Took a slightly longer route and rescheduled my dentist appointment (that I stupidly missed on Monday) and returned The Shipping News to Blockbuster. Got my latte and scone before I came into the office, so I'm now all settled for... what? ... Writing documentation I guess. I still have details to fill out in a word doc that need to get hammered out, and then start working on some test plans for a large change to our server software.

There's been a recent "idea" at the corporate level (from the gaggle of 's that we appear to have lurking about the overall corporation) that has the look of becoming yet another unfunded central mandate regarding software quality. I haven't got all the details, but I've been delegated to represent our little corner of the corporate world to this organization. There's a lot of whoo-hawing and hot-dangin' going around these software quality management levels, between ISO9001, CMM, ETM, and whatever else they're calling them. I don't really know all the details, but I get the general gist.

It's sort of interesting from a philosophical point of view, because we developed a software quality plan and process here based on our staffing and the individuals playing in the pool. I suspect that's really the way they all need to be developed, and a general "cross corporation" plan is folly of the highest order, simply because nobody can really understand all the personality issues, coordination details, and plain ole' needs of the software. We also appear to do the most rapid development cycles around (at least in our Corp), using continuous integration and weekly releases to our server code. I guess I'm going to need to dig in a little and understand what these metrics are they're asking for before I figure out what we're going to do about it.

It's late, and I should

It's late, and I should just go to bed. I guess it's a role or something I let myself fall into - not really wanting to go to sleep, so i just sit here and write in this blog, surf the web, or do other mindless things. I really need to find something more concrete to do instead of this mind-numbing crap. Tomorrow night we'll be having dinner over at Nate and Leah's place in Bellevue - never did head over there yet (planned to earlier tonight too, but Karen convinced me I should just drive over there once this week). I want to return the car-top cargo carrier I borrowed - just one of those "to do" list items I want to get nailed down and done with.

I guess thursday night I'll start attacking the great Quicken data entry quest with a vengence. Only way it's gunna get done after all. I need to get a handle on our spending and start making some intelligent choices about it, instead of just happening along day by day like I do now.

Karen and I stopped by

Karen and I stopped by Blockbuster on our way home - it's not really a common experience for us, and we didn't leave unscathed. Three rented movies later, and the purchase of a "previously viewed" DVD had us set to watch at least one movie tonight.

So we watched The Shipping News. I really, really liked it. The tale was solid, and the characters were more realistic than most of the movies shipping out these days. Kevin Spacey did a hell of a job (I really liked him in KPax too), and the whole crew really seemed to work well together. One I'd suggest watching if you have a chance. I want to go see Newfoundland now too... Guess that's just how it works.

First day back has been

First day back has been successfully completed. I'm beginning to suspect that it's sort of like levels in a giant video game - you keep sort of playing them over until you get it right, and some times you get a really spectacular day, and others you just sort of curse as you keep getting nailed by the same stupid shit that got you last time.

Actually, today wasn't too bad. Spent some time socializing - our sailing crew took 4th in the race last night, so we're doing really well (although I can't claim to have helped there since I missed the past 3 weeks and next week they'll all be out sailing at Whidby for a week long set of races). Knocked out a few problems that had been haunting folks operationally, and am preparing my weapons for a long drawn out session or three with the corporate infrastructure folks. I always try to come at those problems like they're not complete idiots and thinking on the small sides of their brains, but I'm always fighting an inborn prejudice that they're institutionally stupid and short sighted in a nearly criminal fashion. I've just been proved correct too often on that point.

I need to stop screwing around with Quicken and get the shit up to date. I have everything I need - expenses, reports on the mortgage, etc. I want to get it all laid out and understand really where we're standing financially - maybe convert some things around and work towards some significant savings so I can choose to pick up and go elsewhere to get something done. Most everyone at my office has some form of financial golden handcuffs around them helping to keep them there, but really - the locks are starting to open, and I think most will be complete and done by next february or march at the latest. I'm secretly hoping a bunch of our good engineers will say bail and get other jobs, if nothing else than to point out that the past year hasn't been good for retention of staff, and the only reason they've stayed is nothing better is out there (at least with the handcuffs and relatively shitty job market)...

Driving back from Missouri, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do and be. It was a refresher visiting my friends and family back in Missouri, because it revived a bunch of ideas about artwork, craftsmanship, and such that I've really put on backburner while I've been out here in Seattle. The SCA had been the big artistic outlet for me while I was in Missouri - that and gaming with my friends, be it Science Fiction, Horror, or a fantasy genre. I haven't really worked the creative juices in a while, and it's really about time I did.

A friend asked me recently if I'd ever thought of writing a game. Heh - like only a couple dozen times. Storylines are a hell of an outlet for creative juices though.

Well, I need to run some stuff back over to Bellevue this evening (borrowed goodies from friends), so I probably ought to stop screwing around with this Blog until later this evening or tomorrow.

There's an interesting aspect to

There's an interesting aspect to having grown up in Missouri and spent 30 summers there. After returning to the pacific northwest, I look outside and see a brilliant sunny day. My gut reaction is "Don't go out there!!! It's hot! It's muggy!". Good news PNW fans! It's only 70 degrees and 51% humidity here. Fuckin' awesome!

I made it to work

I made it to work about 9am. So now, for the first time, I've finished with all the mail for today and am starting to work on the backlog. Wooo boy, this is gunna take a while.

Hey, but the cool thing is I came back to my office. Why's that cool you ask? Because I expected I'd have been moved out into a cube (the plan two weeks ago when I left on vacation), but the move hasn't happened yet. Another week, then it begins - the moves. Everyone ('cept the Controller) moves into a cube. It'll be good for communications and efficiency - you know, all the standard stuff. It'll be especially good that we'll all be packed in - solid cube filling - right next to the other half of the office space without anyone there and no walls to separate us. Yep - we'll be able to see all that nice quiet open space until such time as someone really gets excited about subleasing it. It'll be a vista view - better than Mt. Ranier from your living room window. Ok, enough sarcasm for this post.

Hey - it's getting /.'d right now, but there's an interesting article on the realities of affording 5 9's of uptime and how it's just plain financially stupid in most of today's environment. Oh - and Janis Ian has a pretty salt'o'the earth view of this whole piracy/copy protection bullshit that RIAA + + is pushing. Definitely worth a read.

Karen made us a nice

Karen made us a nice picnic style dinner of crackers, bread, cheeses, hummus, and other yummy like items. It was really nice - the aroma of the various foods was actually more interesting that eating any of it, and I found I just wasn't that hungry (as well as being fairly listless). I don't think I'll get the bits I borrowed from Nathan returned tonight - even though it's 8:45pm and still nicely sunny, I'm just not up for running around out there.

Work tomorrow. I expect I'll walk, which should be a nice change from everything I've done lately. Maybe I'll hit the sack early and get moving tomorrow morning at some ungodly hour - since I'm theoretically switched to Central Standard time instead of Pacific.

Wow. I'm obnoxiously tired. I

Wow. I'm obnoxiously tired. I stopped moving, and now I can't really get any enthusiasm for moving at all. Karen's just tried to get me to go out to eat with her (I'm usually a way easy touch), but I just don't even want to leave the house. I got us home, driving both us for four days. Dealing with thunderstorms, heat, and my sweetie who's as tired and grumpy as I was - I'm just done. Even missed my dental appointment (had a cleaning scheduled for this afternoon) - I just couldn't get moving.

So Karen's got herself moving with one of those wicked smiles - she's headed off to the grocery to find us something to nosh on. Two weeks, and yep - the fridge and kitchen are exceptionally bare.

Lordy. Looking back, it's been

Lordy. Looking back, it's been a week since I posted. We arrived in Columbia on the 30th, and left July 5th late morning. I think if we'd really hauled ass out of there, we could have made it back to Seattle last night, but I just wasn't up to the long late night drives. We took a nice route which included southern Idaho... I guess I should work backwards from now and catch things up.

Last night we stayed in Dalles, Oregon - which is about the middle of the Oregon along it's northern edge and right smack dab in the middle of the Columbia River Gorge. The whole drive is fantastic, although when there's thunderstorms ranging down the gorge, let me tell you it gets pretty fuckin' windy. Today's drive finished up from Dalles to Seattle, and we'd stopped along the way to see a few sites, including a really cool waterfall and a couple of viewpoints along the Gorge to just snap photo's.

Yesterday we drove from Idaho Falls, Idaho (southeastern Idaho) to Dalles, Oregon. We went and visited the Craters of the Moon national park - volcano flows out in the arid, high plains of Idaho. They were very cool, but didn't look like moon craters to me. We even hiked it up to the top of an old cinder cone, which reminded me again - in the lungs-on-fire painful way, that there's a lot less oxygen at 7000' than at Sea level, which is what I'm used to. Sucking wind at the top, we snapped the obligatory photos and headed back down to the car to rest, drink water, and try to recover a little. I think it took 30 or 40 minutes. We also stopped at the EBI-1 - our nation's first nuclear rear - and toured the facilities. That was sort of cool, in that 50's cold-war scary shit sort of way. I didn't find anywhere to purchase a geiger counter though, which disappointed me a little.

Saturday saw us from eastern Wyoming (don't remember which little town, but it was on I-80) to Idaho, and Friday was hauling from Columbia, Missouri on up through all of Nebraska along I-80. Long drives, of which the first parts where hot and mind numbingly dull.

I think by the 4th, I'd worn out all semblance of extrovert batteries and was going into hiding at my inlaws basement. I read a couple of books, played some Xbox with Dan, and otherwise lurked away from folks. I sort of wish I'd had more time to visit with Dan and Sarah - they don't really take any energy to visit and they're cool to boot. Sam, my nephew, is almost 1 year old now - toddling around like a mad fiend and oozing fluids even still. I hope that stops soon. I expect he'll be walking pretty well by Thanksgiving.

Jeanette hasn't popped yet, to my knowledge. She's looking really good, but is having "relationship issues". She didn't ask if it was going to be a boy or a girl, so I'm just having to wait things out to find out. On other baby news, my cousin's Eric and Leah (in Denver, CO) had a baby boy on July 4th morning - named Leif. Very cool - I expect Thanksgiving will have pics and stuff so I can see if he resembles Eric or Leah more.

Dan and I spent several evenings playing Co-op mode Halo. We didn't finish the game, but I expect that with another evening or two we would have. I'll just have to drag it back with my on Thanksgiving to whack out the last of it with Dan.

Spent an afternoon visiting folks at MU the day after we go there. That was pretty good - and Igor even hit me up, looking for a job since he was laid off. I'm astounded that Janet Deneke, who's pretty much completely incompetant, didn't go when Igor did - but then I guess some of those decisions where being made by the usual morons. Found out John Hay has a blog... I supposed I shouldn't have been surprised. It's pretty funny - his writing is focused on his fiance as an audience.

I've returned to the beautiful

I've returned to the beautiful northwest. Yeah! I enjoyed the visit, but the heat was just wearing me out. The worst part about the whole trip was that driving back from Missouri meant the driver's seat was typically on the south side of the car for the trip - which meant that every day from noon to about 8 or 9pm was a "let's cook the driver" sort of day for those of us travelling west. The temperatures stayed in the 90's from Missouri until the middle of Oregon (we drove down the Columbia river gorge) - 3 1/2 days of the 4 driving.

But it's over. Car's unpacked. The new shit is littering the living room floor, begging for a clue on where to be stored. The general housework that's always sort of needed after a long vacation has been done - even the cat litter all cleaned up again and taken out for the trash tomorrow morning. Bills payed that were outstanding - all the usual stuff.

It's sort of darkly humorous that my 89 year old grandmother has a better computer and better access than my inlaws. I was unwired throughout the visit in Columbia simply because I didn't have any easy access while I was there. Heh. I'll write more later.