Rhonabwy

Haven't done much of anything

Haven't done much of anything useful today. Well, maybe some minor things, but mostly it's been a screw-around-in-the-basement organizing kind of day. Spent the evening up in Greenwood, looking for the 99cent taco place Tony had indicated was around there. We found a few mexican joints, but Karen thought they looked kinda "scary", so we ended up having sandwiches at Ernie B's, a little sandwhich shop right in that same area. Very nice little place - they had a great Philly Cheese and Steak.

Found a bunch of my blacksmithing books, as well as more of my tools, but I'm still missing that great 2 pound ballpein hammer that I recall having. I'm still not sure what happened to it... I do have a plethora of other hammers, but nothing exactly like what I'm craving for my initial foray into blacksmithing again. I suspect the ones I really liked were John Rucker's, and I'm simply out of luck. Guess I'll just have to make my own - I need a little cross pein forging hammer with a flat beveled face on the opposite side. In the meantime, I'll make do with a smaller ball pein and a hand sledge.

We've rented a couple of movies for the night - Dave and Amelie. Karen wanted to see Dave, and we've never seen Amelie, so I took the opportunity and snagged it. Yeah, I know - should have seen it ages ago. I'm correcting that tonight.

Well into the evening, and

Well into the evening, and really moving into the 3-day weekend. We had a nice dinner of fresh pasta with a light (and fresh) pesto, and then had John and Sue over for dessert - a peach and blueberry crumble. I guess we chatted and told stories until 9:30 or so, after which neither Karen nor I really did anything of particular use.

I'm glad I've got this blog to scribble down thoughts in. Dinner was after the last blog entry, so I had a chance to sort of use it to clarify my own thoughts and ideas. The whole concept of "being used by a corporation" is, I think, really sort of the key for me. It gives me a handle on how to react, as well as mentally defend myself, to these otherwise ill-fitting concepts that occur at work. I'm not sure anyone will consider me to have a "good attitude" because of it, but if it makes the time until I find a more interesting job go easier - well, then it's a win.

I've been thinking about this whole move to Seattle as I sit here. There's a cool breeze blowing in the windows, and I remember laying in bed last night feeling the same thing - almost to the point of being chilly. I absolutely love Seattle's climate. If my current job did nothing else, it gave me the excuse to haul both of us out here to a new place and new opportunities. Really, it did quite a bit more than that - I like living here. I wasn't sure I'd ever like living in a city, but living up in Queen Anne, near the heart of Seattle - for me it's really the place to be. And with any luck, a 600' tsunami won't wipe us all off the map.

Sometimes I wish for more space in our house - it's a small house really. But then I look around, and I think "well, darn it - just build it!" Karen and I have already identified a couple of places to put in built-in bookcases (and we need it, given our love and craving of books). It fits with the craftsman style (built-in's rule), and a number of additional shelves - well, let's just say it wouldn't suck.

This weekend, however, won't be dedicated to woodworking. At least, that's my current plan. Instead, I'm going to tear through my tool sets again and get everything together for some metalworking. I'm actually thinking now that it would be kinda neat to still have access to a wire welder (we had one in our basement in Missouri that a friend stored and used at our house). For the meantime, just goofing off with the tools and forge will be good, and getting some practice with the heats, maybe a little welding (if I can find more Borax), and the usual set of tasks in basic forming.

Heh. Gus had a link

Heh. Gus had a link on his blog referencing an OReillyNet article on why EJB's are a pain in the ass. I've always thought they were a bit overrated myself, but others in the office around here would tend to argue for the "proper CS" way of doing things, which led to a fair bit of work.

Okay. So.. a strange note

Okay. So.. a strange note about dinner. Jen and JR sent me home with food from the Manta Ray - basically the leftovers. Of course, today is Thursday, which means we received our Market Basket today too. So our fridge was way, way fully when I got home. We took advantage of some "bulk" purchases, and have a sack stuffed with fresh basil (harder to find in the Seattle climate than Missouri's) and a monstrous flat of blueberries (to be frozen for later yummy eating). Anyway, one of the items I brought home was Baba Ghanouj. Well, it turns out that Karen was making exactly that when I arrived home. Only we didn't have Tehina paste, so we had to walk to the store to get some. It was about the middle of that walk that I realized I really hadn't eaten enough for the amount of work I did on the boat today. So I'm sort of wobbly, and still feeling it from that too.

For the record, Karen's Baba Ghanouj was, in my opinion, better than the store bought stuff. But she had more lemon juice in hers as well, and that stung the crap out of the roof of my mouth, where I'd burned off the skin with the morning's latte.

So, where were we? Oh yeah - just arrived a the Blake Island mooring bouys. So we spent a couple tries and hollerings to get the mooring buoy snagged and tied on to the bow of the boat. Eventually got there, but not without dropping the boat hook into the water, missing the snag two other times, and holding up the Stugots from tieing up with us because we'd been messing around with the Buoy. As we'd come up to the area, we'd pulled out all our bumpers, and while Tony was lashing them to the lifelines (in prep for tying up with Stugots), one of them dropped right off the end of the line - the knot had given way. John and Sue kindly snagged it for us out of the water, as we'd had to immediately get started with attempting-to-snag-the-buoy manuevers. In another 15 minutes, we'd gotten moored there, and had the Stugots come up alongside and raft up with us. John and Sue had brought Austin, Ken, and Clif. Out came the goodies, conversations started up, and Tony and I started moving between the boats like monkeys - definitely a little more comfortable with climbing around on rigging and parts of boats than most of the others. JR shimmied up the mast a bit, taking pictures, and mostly we settled down into a relaxing mix of conversations about just about anything other than work.

At some point, Eric showed up in his kayak, which he'd rowed from Bainbridge Island (where he lives) to join us. Jen and I had grabbed the water cannons and purported to shoot at him (well, we did shoot at him, but intentionally missed him) keeping him off the boats by a good 10 to 15 yards until he dug out his bilge pump (which looked like it could shoot a little) and we relented. In no time, we had him tied up to the back of Stugots and slapped a beer into his hand, letting him settle down into the relative comfy of John's boat.

(As a side note, I'm actually rather surprised he didn't come aboard the Manta Ray and look around. He professed some interest in sailboats, and I thought he'd be clambering all over. Not to be though - he must have just gotten caught up in conversation)

So we decided to pull off about 3:30pm or so, after we'd all had our fill of munchies. I think pretty much everyone was reluctant to admit it was time to go, but John had to navigate back through the locks, and that was going to take him a fair bit of time. Austin decided he wanted to see a sailboat in action, so we added him to our complement and got moving back to the northeast. After we cast off, John circled us in the Stugots, snapping pictures of us under sail. Since we were going downwind, we quickly raised the spinnaker and Tony got some fun in flying the kite. We handed him the active sheet and away we went. He did a really good job, which was rough because the course we took put us in high winds (17 to 20 knots) on a broad reach (meaning the active sheet - or rope to the free end of the spinnaker - was under a fair bit of pressure). Once we'd passed beyond Blakely Rock, we switched over to give his hands a break, and I flew the spinnaker for Manta Ray back through the shipping channel and over towards West Point.

While we were crossing the channel, a container ship moved past us. I'd say lumbered, but they were going about 30 knots through the water, so it really only looked lumbering from a distance. The bow wake that sucker was throwing up was a good 6 feet above the normal water line. The initial wake we passed through was so long in periodicity, that it was just sort of sailing up and down short hills, maybe 6 feet high. The secondary wake (the reflection off land a few minutes later) was quite something else - that really moved us, and while Brad was sitting up on the bow of the boat, the front end dipped enough to send water cascading over the foredeck. Brad got a little damp, but seemed to enjoy it all the same.

Once we got back over towards Shilshole Bay, we took an extra few minutes to spin around. We dropped the spinnaker and went back to the jib - flying their old #1 (which is a huge amount of sail, especially for 17 knots of wind). The goal appeared to be to see how far we could heel the boat, and we even managed to get an inch or three of water over the starboard gunwhale a couple of times. By this point, I'd moved way up front and placed myself on the bowsprit. Austin appeared to really enjoy that aspect, and even went to the leward side while we were heeled way over, hanging on and just enjoying the water racing about.

During races, I'm never on the bow (moving my mass onto the bow causes it to dip pretty well into the water, which really slows us down with we're going upwind), so this was really a treat. Of course, heeling the boat way over, and me on the bowsprit, brought the bow back down and quite a number of waves made it over the foredeck and washed my feet . I just held on to the forestay (the line holding the mast forward and to which the forward sail attaches) and enjoyed. We finally called it all in, dropped the sails, and headed into the dock about 5:10pm. Not much of note in docking, and we'd had everyone back on the dock by 5:30 without issue. We stuck around for another 30 minutes, Tony, Jen, JR and I - cleaning up the boat, scrubbing the decks, and getting everything put away nicely.

It was clear Jen and JR were really happy to have had Tony and I on board for the "off-site". We could take care of the forward part of the boat, and I think it really alleviated a lot of stress for them. When we'd tack, I'd move people about, and I spent most of the day barefoot, so I'd just scramble over them if needed. It really worked out pretty well. And it was a fantastic relief for me, after what I considered to be sort of a hellish week at the office. I think, actually, that today pretty much made up for all the ick from yesterday, and I'm feeling charged up and ready to go. I'm a little sad, thinking that this can't even begin to be a common occurance, but I'm hoping that sometime over the next month or three, I'll be able to convince Jen, JR, and Tony to take the occasional day off for a sail around the Puget Sound.

Today was, in just about

Today was, in just about every account, a glorious day. As you might imagine, I didn't spend any of it in the office. Instead, we had an Engineering and Operations day out - ostensibly for a going-away thing for John (our ex-VP of engineering). On boats. On the Manta Ray and Stugots, to be specific. I'm looking forward to the pics - I expect we got some good ones (I know I did). I didn't take my camera though - so I'll have to wait until John, Jen, JR, and Ken all get their stuff online somewhere.

Even as I write this, I'm still somewhat wobbly - that feeling you get after you've been on a boat a while and everything seems to be moving around underneath you. Amazing what constant motion will do to ya...

We left this morning about 9am out of Shilshole Bay Marina (where Jen and JR moor their boat - the Manta Ray). The standard crew from work was aboard - that being Tony, Jen, JR, and myself. We added a few passengers - Melissa, Brad, Chris, and Diane. The initial wind was sort of cool and cloudy, but just getting out on the water was nice. The wind was so light that we motored down to West Point, where the wind picked up a fair bit. It was great sailing down from there to Blakely Rock, where we took the sailboat inside the little island and around. We arrived at our mooring point off Blake Island at 10:45am (or thereabouts). Just before we go there, JR wanted to go below, so Jen handed me the tiller and I drove the boat for a while. It was neat doing the new position, and man - I've got to tell you, that tiller is sensitive. The slightly movement - maybe an inch at the elbow - will send the bow turning upwind or down. It was really cool, and a great chance to learn some. I figured out a little more about what JR was doing driving, which I think will probably help as we go forward with racing.

Oops - dinner time. I'll write more later. The trip is really just getting started at this point, since we didn't get back to our cars until 6pm...

Some dude was banging on

Some dude was banging on Brent's windows tonight calling out for "Jennifer". (Brent's my neighbor). I went out and told him he had the wrong house, and then redirected him down a house or two. He seemed like he'd had a few too many - older fellow, maybe 50. Grey hair and a stout build. Friendly enough, but it sort of weirded me out to have him banging on windows, so I called the local gendarme's to have a looksee about him. I haven't seen them roll up here yet, but I haven't heard much from him either - the window pounding appears to have ceased.

Read through the summer copy

Read through the summer copy of The Anvil's Ring (ABANA's quarterly publication) and saw a gate that I just fell in love with. Takayoshi Komine, from Saitama, Japan was featured in the Showcase of the magazine, having created a set of gates for a house with different members of the family living on each of three floors. It's absolutely beautiful, with a mixture of simplicity in it's design and essential function, while each is unique and following the same theme. Very round in design - I only have a small snap of a pic to share:

In other neat-to-have news, I just received my DVD's that have all the sessions from Apple's WWDC 2002. There's 6 DVD's, and while I've watched a few of the sessions via the streams they're offering, it'll be nice to have all these sessions available for me to peruse through at liesure. It's always nice to fast forward through boring bits - you can't do that when they're in front of you talking, remote or not.

Heh. I'm back online. The

Heh. I'm back online. The weekend (extended) down at Long Beach was fantastic. I wrote in a notebook in lieu of blogging here, the downside being you don't get to read it. So highlights, since I don't want to write it all back down again, or even just transcribe it all into here.

So Saturday was probably the best day of the weekend. A liesurely morning getting down to the beach, followed by some really great Rokkaku battles. There were seven teams with these great big kites, all running around in a 400' x 400' field trying to knock or cut each other's kites out of the air. It was a great show, and having learned a little more about it really made it interesting. There was single-person fighter kite rounds earlier in the week, and watching that was really something as well. We were lucky enough to have some of the local explain the game to us - they don't actually cut kites anymore, and none of the battles allow the traditional kite strings that cut - basically to keep from littering glass-lined strings which can float quite a ways.

We also got some flying of our own kite in on Saturday, but I found the other kites a little more interesting. While I was spotting for Karen (who made some real progress in flying the dual line kite), I saw a giant delta variant (not unlike my legacy) flying overhead. By giant, I mean like a 12' to 16' wingspan. It was slow and ponderous in the sky, and you could tell it really had some pull, as the guy flying it was leaning back at 45 degrees to keep it under control. Watching that go overhead, maybe 10' up, was astounding.

That evening we just snacked and munched on a spread that Leah laid out back at the house we were renting. After we'd downed a bottle and a half of wine, we were treated to an impromptu concert of Leah's work, including some work on a song she hasn't even finished (a very rare treat). It was a great concert, and Mom got to hear her stuff live, which was exceptionally cool.

So today we pretty much just hoofed it back to Seattle, and spent the afternoon doing a little sightseeing. We finished it out with dinner at Ivar's Salmon House.

So the only downside, although I rolled laughing at the note, was that John about exploded from fright when he was downstairs and spotted the manaquin we store down there. His note was absolutely hilarious, and I was rolling for hours while reading it. I've just got to include the relevant tidbit:

My suggestion would be, don't put a LIFESIZE DUMMY with a featureless BLACK HEAD and BLACK HANDS SHAPED LIKE A MONSTER'S CLAWS that might remind your friend OF SOMETHING THAT IS ABOUT TO RIP HIS THROAT OUT in the shadows behind the litter boxes OR ELSE YOU MIGHT COME HOME TO A FORMER FRIEND WHO DROPPED DEAD OF FRIGHT.

I aged two years in about two seconds.

Yeah, I'm staying up late

Yeah, I'm staying up late tonight. Because I can with impunity. (not that I'm really very diligent about making sure I'm at the office at 8am)

I've been reading the Lessig/Winer blog-debate thing. Larry's recently responded to Winer about political action and all the stupid (I mean really fucking insanely bad) choices that have been made, influences, and effectively won in DC re: Technology of late. I'm not quite sure what I can do myself. I know that I can't afford to fund a lobbyist myself, but I'd be happy to contribute a couple of hundred bucks to politically fucking some of these incredible dumbshits in Congress. I looked at GeekPAC and AOTC. Neither seem to really have gelled enough for me - I just don't get a sense that there's any potential for real movement there. (Ok - so seriously I'm nervous about seeing Eric Raymond's name placed so prominently and very few others. The one time I met him, he came off as such an incredible arrogant fuckwad that I really don't want to be actively associated with him, and I certainly don't want to give him money.) So I'll prolly join the EFF, if nothing else for the TShirt to wear at a company meeting with the BigWigs and a new Seattle Umbrella (read ball-cap). Actually, because they seem to be focusing some efforts and resources on attacking this bullshit, even if they're spread really damn thin and not actively funding any lobbyists (well, that I'm aware of).

It's strange for me to want to be actively involved in Politics. I mean, I've had a history of ranting letters to my congressman and senators in the past (like it did much good in Missouri). I think McDermott has received more letters from my than my grandmother this year, and he's even been reasonably aligned with my own sense of stepping on those assholes. I can't really complain about the local crew - they've actually been reasonably active in a positive way. I would, however, like to see Berman politically bitch-slapped.

VACATION TIME! Worked through the

VACATION TIME!

Worked through the day, mostly following up on the usual stuff. Watching workflow, making sure it started up (and stopped earlier) without a hitch. Really, the focus of the day was on touching base with the other devleads (there's four of us) to make sure we're all on the same page. Looks like we'll be coordinating the engineering group together for the next three or so months. John's last day is Friday - so I'm sort of sad I'll be missing it, but I think it might be easier this way too. The transition from employee that's been shoved into the corner to free man will take some getting used to, and now he has the time to follow up on his boating (for the rest of the summer), house work, and hopefully that general recovery/fucking around/staring at the ceiling doing nothing sort of stuff. (hi john, I expect you're reading this).

I think our little oligarchy will work reasonably well for the time it needs to, and then my guess is that D will be named "head of engineering" near the end. I know it won't be me because 1) I've already said I wasn't interested and 2) I don't want the job to be nearer the heat. I thought A would be a good choice, but he reminded us this afternoon that he's about to take 3 of the next 6 months out with a leave of absence, so I think that immediately rules him out. EA is the last man in the picture, but he pisses off El Presidenta enough and has been "tuned out" of the gettin' things done channel at the office for the better part of a year. Together I think we've got a good diverse group, and if El Presidenta would listen to our input, I 'spect we'd be OK for quite some time. Although the statement has been made about "trust" in us and our input, I rather expect it doesn't really exist there. Only time will tell.

So enough about work - I'm on vacation now. Tomorrow we grab the Market Basket from Pike's Place Market, sort it through, and head on down to Long Beach in the afternoon. Mom's in town for the week, and although she's been here before several times (albiet many years back), there's still a lot of the little things she hasn't seen - the troll under the bridge, the statue of Lenin in front of the Taco place in Fremont, Elliott Bay Book store, etc. Tomorrow will be mostly focused on getting down and settled at Long Beach, so we'll save the general touristy stuff for next week. We've got everything really pretty together, so it won't be hard to really time consuming. The only outstanding thing I'm really thinking about it getting some parts for the kite that we're missing (and need in order to fly it).

Last monday night sloop race.

Last monday night sloop race. We came in third tonight in variable winds (started light, built to about 20 knots at the very end) and did a really excellent job technically. We came in 4th overall for the sloop series, which is pretty freakin' awesome considering half the crew was brand new (me included). That's it for the Monday night races this year - so it's just practice on Monday's from here on out, with the big deals being weekend races. The next big one for me isn't until Sept 28th, but I expect I'll get out there and get some practice in.

Gus has a nice snippet

Gus has a nice snippet from an article at Slashdot. It's a sort of refreshing take on problem solving - no intuitive leaps, just common sense searching until you learn more and go from there.

Gus appears to be able to beta test something as well... I've got my email into him to find out. :)

Today has been, in pretty much any way counted, a fantastic day. We woke up early and met some friends at Queen Anne Cafe for breakfast. They wanted to wish Karen a Happy Birthday, so I got a free breakfast in the mix. Afterwards, we collected our visiting friends (Nada and Tal) from their hotel and headed to the Tall Ship Festival to get on a few more boats. Ran into Jen and JR doing about the same, clambering all over them and enjoying the boats. We stayed around there until just after noon, and then worked our way back over to the Seattle Center were we snagged some lunch at Bamboo Garden, a vegetarian chinese place (very tasty). We dropped off Nada and Tal for a while, and came home to nap and relax a bit before making another site-seeing assault around Seattle. I sacked out in what I've now determined is the most luxurious place to nap in the house - the day bed in front of the west facing windows. You get a nice breeze and a lot of sun.

Evening had us watching some of the boat battles between the Lady Washington and Hawiian Chieftain, grabbing some dinner at Ivar's and eating on Lake Union (with the customary throwing of cold fries to the seagulls, geese, and ducks), stopping over at Golden Gardens Park for a view of the Olympics at sunset, and then winding up with coffee and ice cream on Queen Anne Ave up top here in Queen Anne.

Somewhere in the midst of everything, I also managed to reinstall MacOS X 10.2 on one of my G4's partitions. Had to reset all my permissions, and it's still sort of in progress doing all that crap. I've also, a complete aside, starting writing my own set of notes about managing, supporting, and working with a crew of developers. There's insight I've gained while working at my current job, and I thought I really should try and get it nailed down. All these people have spawned archetypes in my head about personalities that programmer's have - but in trying to write them down, I'm finding it hard to tease apart to pieces that are the "true across multiple people" bits from the just plain freakin' wierd personality pieces of folks with which I work. That'll keep my busy a while, but my goal is to write some essay or extended piece on working with software developers. I suspect there are parts of it that you just have to experience for yourself to truly understand. Like the strange and insatiable desire to re-invent the god-damn wheel, just because they didn't like a variable name (or at least that's the excuse they provide). I didn't really get that until I worked up here in Seattle.

Little tidbit: BoingBoing has a link to CDFax, a sort of interesting rip-burn over the Internet setup that looks really appealing. 650Mb at a shot...

End of the day report:

End of the day report: Mission Accomplished.

Karen sacked out an hour ago, but before heading to bed she commented "I had a really good birthday". It's not the "really great" that I'd hoped to get with the sailing on the tall ships (yeah, I fucked that up - tickets went way, way faster than I thought), but I'm pleased with a "really good". We had a nice dinner with Nada and Tal, and Nathan and Leah joined us for Ice Cream and Birthday cake later in the evening. We sat around the dining room table chatting and joking until Nada almost fell asleep in her chair (she's used to Central Time Zone, and going to bed at 10:30pm... so 10pm here was a little late for her).

A good evening.

Ah, the usual change of

Ah, the usual change of plans.

The morning was relaxed as I'd hoped it would be. Karen took off for the Quilt show down at the Seattle Center around 11am, and I got the house all cleaned. Even attacked the kitchen (it wasn't too bad) and spiffed everything up. After I'd finished, I noticed the answering machine had a message: Nada had called at some point in the early AM (like 5:30am I think) to tell us she and Tal were taking a later flight out to Seattle, and that they'd call us when they got in. Karen got back from the show and we stopped over at Chuck and Laurie's (neighbors) to wish Chuck a happy birthday (he was 80 a couple days back - I guess his birthday is actually on the 11th or something). We didn't stay too long, so now the afternoon is in that quiet wait time. Haven't heard from Nada or Tal yet, and we don't have any particular plans until the evening really.

I played a little Halo, got my butt quickly kicked, and realized that I wasn't really into game playing this afternoon. I thought about reinstalling MacOS X (10.2) on the partition that I'm using (the upgrade/install I did previously seems incapable of saving my preferences, which is really annoying me). While I was cleaning, I snagged a bunch of MP3 streams from Dr. Dobbs Technetcast. I'd sort of got excited by the list of files from the presentations at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference that was recently held (some nice stuff in there for general perusal). The piece I really enjoyed was Lessig's talk on Free Culture (warning: that link is to the MP3 - 20.2Mb of it). Another talk I'm planning on listening to is The Changing Relationship Between Business and Developers by Paul Pangaro, Ph.D. and Elaine B. Coleman, Ph.D., Sun Microsystems, Inc. (22.3Mb of MP3)

Oh - and just so

Oh - and just so you know I haven't been slacking off in my reading, I've tackled through Chapter 3 of A New Kind of Science and am thoroughly confused in the midst of Chapter 4.

Chapter 3 really finished the rough and ready introduction to the world of cellular automata and all it's glorious variation in mind numbing detail. I really didn't get most of Chapter 3 until I got to the section near the end entitled Some Conclusions. I'm still not sure I buy the basic premise he's selling though. The whole thesis so far is that modelling natural phenomenom with mathematics does a reasonable job, but when you start seeing complex shit happening, then your mathematics gets equally complex and generally icky. Cellular Automata (or more precisely, simple rules and emergent behavior) also shows complex behavior (he hasn't linked it to any specific natural effects yet, but that's coming in later chapters - I looked ahead a little), and it's simple. Therefore, this simple rule thing is a much better model because it's simpler and it described complex behaviour. He asserts (without much backup at Chapter 3 anyway) that understanding something that controls the general behavior, even though you don't know all the icky inner details, is more important than knowing all the icky inner details and not being able to get an idea what the system will do in real life.

Chapter 4 goes off the deep end into number theory and how it's really this simple rule thing, or they related, or something. I'm not really grokin' it too well. I've looked at all the pretty pictures, and read the text (which is dry, but very readable). He appears to be asserting that common mathematics even sucks for mathematics, especially in realm of things like PI, e, and representing the decimal value of 1/7th. I'm in there with "Uh, ok. Yeah, I always kind of knew that sucked. I hated those repeating series integer things anyway for describing a fraction in some reasonable method." Like I said, I'm still not really grokin' the Chapter 4 stuff. Chapter 5 looks equally mind boggling - it's entitled Two Dimensions and Beyond.

We headed out to Gasworks

We headed out to Gasworks Park to watch the evening ship to ship contest between the Lady Washington and Hawiian Chieftain. We sat out there from maybe 6pm to 8pm, watching them manuever, fire blanks from their cannons, and continue manuevering. The thing that stunned Karen and I so much was that these guys were getting complete mobbed by other boats. Everything from small two masted schooners to yachts to kayaks were following them around. I don't know how in the hell they manuevered in some cases, but it all seemed to work.

I'm really glad I asked that fellow how they tacked the Lady Washington earlier this afternoon. I got to watch them come about a couple of times (we had our binoculars, which made all the details infinitely clearer), and it really was quite the work of art to mix and match those big square sails this way and that to catch the wind and turn the ship. The Hawiian Chieftain was significantly more manueverable, with a more moden rigging (that trapezoidal style of sails instead of the wide square rigged stuff). It was interesting to see them both work it, because it became so very clear how much more control the Chieftain really had out there in the water. I don't think it was just one crew better than the other sort of thing - both were synchronized in their actions exceptionally well, and the wind was medium (I'm guessing 5 to 10 knots) and quite steady out there.

We took pictures of both of the ships under sail and working around each other, but you'll have to wait a day or two until we get them all downloaded and put together.

Tomorrow is Karen's birthday. We'd originally planned to go to the Tall Ship's thing early in the morning, but it's just not looking like that is really going to be a feasible option. We're expected Nada and Tal, two of Karen's friends from college, to be showing up sometime tomorrow (around noon time), have received an invitation from Laurie (our neighbor) to come over about noon for Chuck's (her husband) 80th birthday, and I have to clean the house before our guests arrive! I'm having Karen wake me up early tomorrow so I can walk down and get a coffee and have a liesurely start to the day. If I woke up at 10am, I'd be in a flustered mad rush all damn day, and I don't want that. Tomorrow evening we'll have Nada and Tal over for a little cake and ice cream (which reminds me, I need to pick up the cake from Larry's tomorrow afternoon).

Nada and Tal will be around Seattle all week, siteseeing. They're staying at a hotel down in lower Queen Anne. My mother is showing up for a visit on Wednesday, and we're planning on dragging her out to the Washington State International Kite Festival on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday down in Long Beach (on the southern coast of Washington) - and she'll be here until the following wednesday. It's going to be a crazy 10 days... (Oh yeah, I also gotta drag up the futon from the basement and clear out space to set it up). I took about 300 pictures from the last kite festival, we'll see how crazy I get this time around.

Oh - and it's now been one year since we moved into our house in Queen Anne. It's kind of hard to believe it's already been a year. Well, at least I got that screen fixed. Next I have to tackle the terrible laurel hedge out on the west side of the house (anyone have a chainsaw?) and somewhere in all there, I need to find some time to whip up a little metalwork.

I went down to the

I went down to the Tall Ships Seattle event today with Karen. We walked down there, which was sort of interesting. It's really fucking difficult to get across Aurora, although it wouldn't appear to. We ended up walking all the way down to Broad Street to get over to the Wooden Boat Center to see the thing. We left reasonably earlier, but didn't really get there until 11am because of the extended walk.

We did get to get on the Lady Washington, Hawian Chieftain, Nina, and the Zodiac to tour them. The lines were getting unbearably long about 3pm, so we finally bailed and determined we'd hit things again early tomorrow morning to catch the remaining ships. It was incredibly cool getting to go on the Nina, a beautiful reproduction 15th Century Caravel. I was really sort of shocked by how small it was. For whatever reason, I'd just assumed the Nina and similiar boats were much, much larger than that. Karen couldn't envision sailing across the North Atlantic in it. I could see it, but man - it'd take a lot of chutzpah.

The Nina

I was really impressed with the grace, beauty, and the feel of speed on the Zodiac. It a 127' schooner, and while it was larger than many of the other boats around there, it felt very similiar to Jen and JR's Manta Ray. I think the key was the size of the lines and the relative simplicity of the rigging. I could envision sailing that one. The others seem almost too complex to really fathom.

While I think Karen and I agreed that the Hawiian Chieftain was a neater looking boat, the Lady Washington really caught my attention. I talked with a fellow in the stern about how they maneuver the ship - just something simple like a tack. I learned that they couldn't point much closer than 60 degrees (the Manta Ray points up at 10 to 12 degrees, and for those that don't know - pointing is how close you can sail directly into the wind). Karen started another conversation with a young lady up on the foredeck, and it turns out you can volunteer to crew this boat. They ask for $250 for two weeks, but volunteering is "free" thereafter - I expect it's a training and 'make sure you're really interested' fee. It's the sort of "vacation" that you'd need a vacation from after, but it sounds incredibly cool. From reading their website, it also sounds like I'd be a LOT older than most of the crew. heh.

You know, I guess it

You know, I guess it just bugs me. So folks are working on some nifty code. I want to play too, but they've gone an included features from the super-latest version of java (1.4) in some of that code, which I don't have access to. So since I'm not on Windows and running Java 1.4, I feel sort of locked out of this game. I know, I know - I should just make my own "version" of that file that doesn't use a LinkedHashMap. I'm just bitching cause I'm annoyed. I guess a reasonable substitute for those of us currently stuck with Java 1.3 is a TreeMap.

Oh. I do sorta like the new java.sun.com website.

heh. Now I can say

heh.

Now I can say I did something useful on Friday too. I stayed up late tonight (obviously, just look at the timestamp) working on an expect script to automate pulling a file from a WebDAV file server using the unix command line client cadaver. I won't win any great awards for cool Expect coding, but it works and even checks for the obvious errors. It's not what I'd describe as "good computer science code". It is, however, and excellent hack to get the job done.

I've always secretly (or not so secretly) been a fan of WebDAV. I just wish Apple had included support for https:// WebDAV servers in their OS. Cadaver has it - with openSSL libraries anyway. And it's the only way Microsoft allows their business partners to access files from them (guess how I've learned that tidbit). Humm. Ok, so I just submitted the feature request for this at http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/.

Gus forwarded me a link

Gus forwarded me a link today that's pretty good:

http://magicpubs.com/mac/macosx.html - a page entitled "A Guide to 'Things UNIX' on the Net... (MacOS X and general UNIX)" Neat site with lots of links and goodies for the MacOS X crowd out there.

I've done one really useful

I've done one really useful and productive thing today - all day really. I replaced the screen in our bedroom that had a hole the size of a child's fist. I think that qualifies for having done something productive... The screen had been busted since we moved in. I've even had all the screen material, the little rolly-thingy-that-pushes-in-the-rubber-tubing, and obviously the broken screen. So tonight, in the midst of a spasm of laying about, I decided I'd get that damn thing fixed.

Ok, so it was purely sel too - it's the only way I'll feel comfortable flinging that window open at night without worrying about the cats deciding that they can enlarge said hole and use that window as an escape ramp into the great outside. (I hate to tell them they're get their asses kicked by the local cats).

Work today was pretty par on course for this week - an impressively frustrating day, mostly revolving around one individuals complete inattention to schedules and how they effect others.

The evening resolved out to trashing the dining room table with dead screen bits and then promptly deciding we should go across the water and visit Crossroad's Mall, get a bite there, and wander through the book places. That worked out pretty well, all in all, and when we returned home Karen sacked out on the daybed in front of those windows (that place with the glorious cool evening breeze in the house) and fell asleep, while I finished the screening and replaced the new screen into the bedroom. I'm just leaving her sleep for now though - she looks so comfortable, and I've moved over to writing in my blog, catching up with the evening geek & friend news, and probably goofing from there into the night.

While we're on the /.

While we're on the /. topic, it looks like ActiveBuddy has been granted a pretty rediculous patent on IM Bots. Excuse me? Prior art? Come on, ask a geek will ya? The things they're claiming to patent have prior art all over the fuckin' place. There's an article on InternetNews that talks about the prior art, to at least some level.

Awww man!!! /. is reporting

Awww man!!!

/. is reporting the release of GCC 3.2. We just got 3.1 into MacOS X...

grumble

Bizarre and stupid (but amusing)

Bizarre and stupid (but amusing) things to do:

1. Use the translation capabilities in the new version of Sherlock that comes with MacOS X 10.2 (Jaguar) to translate a phrase from English -> French -> German -> English and see what it comes out ...
2. Repeat this process three or more times.
3. Try and figure out what the hell I typed in that generated the phrase "foutre will be directed toward you"

Slashdot is carrying a story

Slashdot is carrying a story about Alcatel suing one of it's employee's for an idea. It's that whole inventions thing - a number of companies have contractual agreements set up that they bulldog you into signing that hand over any ideas you have or generate while you work for them. My company, for instance, is one...

Holy Shit! Ryan's back!. I

Holy Shit!

Ryan's back!. I admit, I didn't believe it would happen.

Well, apparently my late night

Well, apparently my late night sermon caught some attention - all of the good kind. Hangin' with the home boys on IRC produced an interesting response or two - the best from a guy I'll label as PolloLoco, to keep him from getting in any trouble. Gus seemed to enjoy it, and Byron's comment was "Man, glad I wasn't that keyboard". Even Johnny snagged a looksee - wasn't sure he even read my stuff.

PolloLoco suggested that viewing the whole project/resources issue wasn't about deadlines really at all - it was a about playing multiple tables at once in Vegas. All about gaming theory. You land out chips (resources, wether they're people, machinery, or whathaveyou) on multiple tables, and basically you have until the deal is done to move those chips around. He's supposition is that a game theory approach to managing resources in product development, even though it's missing some aspects, will lead to better behaviors than the simple microeconomic model I suggested.

He's get a good point, except that the issue I was perceiving was someone who wanted to 100% control schedules while remaining flexible. As if controlling the schedules was the critical aspect of suceeding.

It's pretty damn warm in

It's pretty damn warm in the house tonight - 82 degrees at 11:30pm. Blech! So I've got myself on the couch near the windows, feeling a light but almost non-existant breeze work it's way across me. The concept of sleeping is quite distant, regardless of how tired I was yesterday, and the idea of sleeping next to something warm is almost repellent. I wish it would cool off more.

So, in lieu of sleeping, I'll provide tonight's sermon on flexibility versus predictability.

So, the core thesis here is that these two items tend to be inversely proportional in an organization or group. Here's the baseline - you can have an organization that creates schedules and meets them nearly all the time (I won't say 100% because something always comes up to screw that number). You can also have an organization that doesn't maintain any schedules but it constantly available to adapt to whatever problem is at hand (typically support staff work in the mode - one deemed 'interupt driven'). I would assert that a good organization is one that balances these two items, and that the very act of being flexible dooms you to more unpredictability. Am I talking basics here? Yeah, I thought so. But clearly there are people who don't get this concept.

Here's how it works. You've got a team of 3 guys hacking away at project BuildABetterMouseTrap. One of these guys had previously helped create a prototype in a project called OhThisIsNeatMaybeWeCanSellIt. Unfortunately, that project never really showed much sales lift, and was shelved. Being a competant manager, you don't leave that hacker lurking about with idle hands (devil's play and all that), so you assign him to another project, continue with life, develop your schedules, etc. Now all of a sudden that shelved project has been reinvigorated as WhatAFuckingLongshot. But there's nobody to work on it - all the staff are assigned to other projects. At this juncture, you have several choices:

1. Tell the project manager to fuck right off, because there just ain't any resources to pull this one off (inflexible, but you can maintain your projected schedule)


2. Yank off HackerDude and assign him to add that tasty cajun spice to the original OhNeat.. project, getting a chance at the WhatAFuckingLongshot project and possibly scoring a serious jambalaya goal. (flexible, but certainly increases the risk of blowing your schedule for BuildABetterMouseTrap)


3. Drop the BuildABetterMouseTrap project all together and move all staff to the new project immediately. (100% guaranteed supreme fuckage of the schedule for the BuildABetterMouseTrap project, and ultimately flexible. Your project manager for this new project should be having orgasms about now, while the project manager for BuildABetterMouseTrap has locked herself in a closet with a 5th of Jack and lost the key).

There's a business decision here, really, at the heart. Someone's going to make the call on wether or not the WhatAFuckingLongshot project will be a success. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. The very process of reallocating resources (I'll cheerfully assume that all resources are 100% allocated 100% of the time) will cause you to remove resources from another project. Unless someone was really fucked up in scheduling a project (or sandbagging in the finest ScottyChiefOfEngineering fashion), the project(s) effected will not come in on schedule. They'll be late, hopefully not too much, and that's an accepted cost of being able to tackle FuckingLongShot style projects.

That's cool - and in fact, I would assert that this ability is beyond cool and simply critical to being able to run a business in today's world. Oh, okay - some businesses can afford to take sucking losses for years and years and years, but sooner or later it'll catch up. The half-life may be in the 3 generations of humans timeframe, but it's there.

So, if you're in management out there, here's the deal: You can't have predictability and flexibility and get them both. Oh yeah, you can expect it - but you're fucked in the head and just ain't gunna get it. Remember that old adage:

Fast, Good, Cheap: Pick 2

Yeah. EgssssZactly. So don't come bitching to me about how we need to pull in our project timelines when you're demanding flexibility and rearranging staffing underneath me. Got it?

Oh - and something else, while I'm stirring up my bitchy pot:

Microeconomics has this interesting little theory called Supply and Demand. I like it, I always thought it was cool, and it makes a pretty decent 1st level approximation of a market. So - there's a collolary to process - easy to do vs willingness to do it. If you make something really easy to do, people will be more inclined to do it. If you make something harder to do, they'll be less inclined. (By the way, that's why there's 3 and a half bazillion web pages out there - it's really easy to do, so a lot of people did it.)

If you make something harder to do - big intellectual leap here - then people will be less willing to do it. Like microeconomics, I'm talking pure abstracts here, reducing this equation to the ideal forms. In reality, some fools will still be completely willing to do this paperwork, or process, or whatever, but in general and with no incentives, there'll be less willingness.

Now here's a definition of making something harder:

Moving from:

maintaining a single page document listing generic goals and evaluating the success of those goals every six months

maintaining a single page document listing specific goals and evaluating the success of those goals every six months, plus keeping track of all other additional goals added in after the initial revision of the goals and evaluating them in a prorated fashion against time spent active pursuing each of those goals

Oh - and when it comes down to details, I haven't yet heard a rational argument made that supports the concept that you can manage the ever-changing job of the so-called Knowledge Worker in a fashion that is both 100% objective and still get what you want out of them.

Man, have I ranted enough tonight? Not sure it's 100% out of my system (okay, I'm sure it's not 100% out of my system), but at least I've provided a place for those confused executives to look at to understand the key concepts of:

business: flexibility vs. predictability
process: easy of use vs. willingness to use

The latest Wired magazine hit

The latest Wired magazine hit the office today. It's cover shows a guy with a cable running into the side of his head. At first I thought this was a CGI effect for the cover of wired, but reading it shows that this is the real McCoy. Scary-life-altering real.

The article is about this fellow named Jens, who's been a guinea pig for artifical vision research. His own eyes were OK until accidents took them both out. Now he can see again - at least at some level - based on this researcher's stuff. I think the thing that really wigged me out was an alternate researcher who had a similiar idea, but wanted to do it as a sort roofing-nail sized electrode bundle that would be driving into the neocortex. Holy shit batman! I can't even stand to have my eyes touched, let alone the concept of someone driving a nail of electrodes into my brain. I mean, I always sort of knew it was coming - the research was an obvious direction and the failures haven't been spectacular. The risks are high (siezures, in case you were wondering, caused from overstimulation) but the payoff is radically huge. Technology has the DSP chips down the size that what once took a room and staff a geek cognoscenti is now hardcoded into silicon and can be run on household batteries. I dunno - to me this represents the beginning of the fusion of computers and the human body - sort of ala Ray Kurzweil. The story is written to slant me in that direction. It worked.

Dan Gillmor has an interesting

Dan Gillmor has an interesting set of Blog discussion thingies going on in his journal today (couldn't find a permalink for him). He's been discussing, in that sort of oblique Blog way, how Blogs are effecting communications with Ray Ozzie. Ray's got a tidbit on the "Oh shit, look at this!" aspect of Blogs, and then another link sort of responding to Dan about Groove, Blogs, and control.

It's sort of ironic that I'm reading this, thinking it's cool, all that stuff, when I'm buried in a strict hierarchy environment at my office. Ok - not immediately at my office, but it's the overall way the mothership works.

Oh - and the concept of "change agent" within an organization? Business bullshit bingo should have that one.

Cool - here's a quicktime

Cool - here's a quicktime movie of the Sony Robot. I guess I'm just permanently fascinated with this kind of stuff. Grat's to BoingBoing for the link.

Yeah, I'm just surfing the net while I wait for data to come back to me. I'm filling out some knowledge management form, and they want to know how many files we have, of what kinds, and such. Course, we've got it all on a 350Gb NetApp Filer, so it's taking a while for the "find" command to return data.

Interesting - The Guardian has

Interesting -

The Guardian has an article about Windows Media and ripping music. The gist is that if you've ripped your CD collection, then all that goodness is encoded with your machines unique ID. If you restore, or move that media to another machine - you can't play it back. That's why you should rip to MP3. BladeEnc!

Last night finished out well,

Last night finished out well, but man was I tired when I got home. Probably too tired to really be driving.

The race had started with 20 knots of wind, but quickly died back to 5 to 12, variable and quirky between the west and north. Made for some twitchy sails and even more confusion and chaos in driving than normal. We didn't do terrifically well, but we didn't completely suck either. We fell behind the crew we normally race with, but really kicked the ass on most of the fleet that sails around us. We were doing particularly well against Heirloom for a good part of the race - it's a longer boat with larger sails (i.e. faster), but we kept up and even passed it for a while. They kicked out butts later, but we had a great upwind tack. The whole course was a single upwind mark and then a race back - total length 5 miles. Took quite some time, but it was great to be out on the water. Got to see an incredible sunset in the process as well - the Olympics were beautifully silhouetted in that shades of gray sort of effect you see in paintings and stuff. And man, when the sun finally dropped beneath the edge, you could feel the air cool off immediately. Jen, JR, and other scrambled for warmer clothes. I was fine with it (I'm a little thicker around than those skinny folks - so I retain heat beautifully, especially when I'm active).

After the race, Karen and I headed up to Snoqualmie Pass (elevation 3000 ft) to watch the Perseids slash across the sky. We got to the pass about 11:00pm, watched for 45 minutes, and then packed it up and came home. Didn't really make it into the house until 12:45 or so, and the drive was really long for me, simply because I was so damned tired. Karen was a little freaked out by the native wildlife (a dog barked, cats prowled - nothing big), and I got freaked out in turn, so it wasn't as comfortable as we'd hoped. Next year we'll go camp somewhere outside the light polution of Seattle and do the stargazing. The stars were, by the way, incredible even at 3000 feet, and we saw some beautiful shooting stars cross the field while we were there. Sometimes makes me think I'd like to live out in the quieter areas, way the fuck away from everyone - but I know I like the city, the connectivity, the people. I need to work in the periodic retreat, but I'm good otherwise.

The 9am meeting was cancelled

The 9am meeting was cancelled - so much for missing out on the perseid's last night. I think, perhaps, that I'll stay up late tonight, lying in some field outside of the lights of Seattle, watching them all come crashing into earth.

Karen said she read an analogy to bugs hitting the windsheild. That at 8pm or so, it was like looking out the rear window of a moving car - you just didn't see that much. That by about 11pm, you were looking out the side windows, seeing the periodic long streaks of bug-goo smearing across the sky. And by about 2am, you're looking out the front window and they're pelting in at top speed - squishing themselves against the window.

The IMAX movie from last night included some outrageously cool views of the earth from Orbit. It reminded me of how thin the earth's atmosphere really is compared to the overall size of the earth. It's just this really thin layer of gaseous goo, sort of circling the earth in these swirls and stuff. Then this sand (meteor's) come pelting down at it. Really amazing. One of the books of my formative youth was The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I recall clearly the idea of "dropping rocks", and the idea has been used in a ton or three of SciFi novels since. Watching from beneath the meteors, I always think of that - "What if...?" What if one of them is big enough to make it through the burn of the atmosphere. What if one of them impacts near me? How big will the crater be?

That reminds me, I need to get down to see that blast crater in Arizona.

Went and saw the IMAX

Went and saw the IMAX SpaceStation 3D movie tonight. That was fantastic. A great cap to the day.

I spent the morning taking a liesurely walk over towards GasWorks park, only to find the parts department of the GasWorks Park Kite Shop isn't open on sundays (grumble). It was a nice walk though, even if the day was kinda warm. Spent the rest taking it easy, doing laundry, reading a book - that kind of stuff. Karen whipped up some tempura for dinner, so we had tempura beans and carrots. It could have used some slices of sweet potatoe and maybe some shrimp, and it would have been perfect.

We thought about heading out to see the Persied Meteor shower this evening - it's a great evening for it - but decided to hold off until tomorrow evening. I'm theoretically supposed to be at work at 9am for various meetings and the general visiting dignitary bullshit, and I don't want to be completely dragged out and falling asleep over my latte for all that. So tomorrow night is the plan - I'll get back from sailing about 10:30 and we can head out from there...

That was a great performance.

That was a great performance. If you like acrobatics and such like circus style acts, this is the place to see it. Top notch performers, set to lively and diverse music, and fun costumes. It was good.

Coming home sucked a bit - there was something letting out of the Seattle Center just as we got into the area - but after a bit of gridlock we scooted through and were home free making our way up the hill to our quiet little house. The cats greeted us at the door, reminding us thoroughly that we hadn't fed them yet (oops! Shit!) So they're happily munching away, Karen's sacked out, and I'm writting a little into my blog for the evening.

I suspect tomorrow morning may have a little coffee house action, and that's really about it. After a very active day outside doing things, I'm ready for some quiet downtime.

So we headed down to

So we headed down to the Seattle Center to just sort of goof around and see the "bubblefest". That was sort of fun - kids running everywhere, and big bubble wands available to just pick up and fling around, sending bubbles spewing all over. The highlight of the morning was seeing this fellow named Fan Yang do his bubble show - a performance of just making different shapes and sizes of bubbles. I wasn't uber-wowed, but it was fun. The guy definitely knows how to make and control soap-bubbles, although I hardly think we were seeing bubbles made with Dawn dish detergent. Whatever he was using, it was very elastic - he easily pulled 3' wide bubbles a good 20 feet across the stage.

Walked down and back up to see all this, so now I'm sort of tired and warm. We snagged lunch while we were down there, so we've lurched the time forward to 3:30. Nathan and Leah are going to be showing up around 4:30 or 5pm - then we're heading down to this Italian place named La Medusa. Dinner there with a few of Nate and Leah's friends, and then on to see Dralion, a production of Cirque du Soleil.

No astounding meals tonight. Just

No astounding meals tonight. Just a quick trip out to Olympia Pizza for some ravioli's because neither of us wanted to attack a meal in the kitchen tonight. The light is fading off just now in the west, with a muted but pretty sunset. I'm really liking the beta of Jaguar - running it on the iBook with a pretty decent amount of success. The largest problem I'm having is my pack-rat-itis, which means I'm constantly low on disk space and completely unwilling to delete anything to make more space. I think a larger drive would fit right in this ole guy, but I'm not 100% sure - and it's not exactly in the ole' budget right now either.

I've got MS Word (yeah, I actually bought office for MacOS X) up in the background for some general thought-dropping that I've been doing.

I'm up to page 120 in the Wolfram book. I've now received an ultrafast grounding in a wide variety of automota, their variations, and the results playing them out to their natural conclusions. Still haven't quite figured out how this relates to anything other than pretty pictures, but I'm guessing it's in there somewhere. While its definitely approachable, it's also dry. So it's now my very own insomnia cure as well.

Oh yeah, and if anyone

Oh yeah, and if anyone was curious. The iPod is a beautiful thing. The solid state ring they're using in the new version is a dream to work with. I've got it plugged in to a couple of external speakers right now, driving a little Peter Gabriel for my afternoon good-attitude experience. Boy he's got some rhythm.

Halo2. Oh yeah. Thanks for

Halo2. Oh yeah. Thanks for the link Gus.

Got some good code knocked

Got some good code knocked out - one of those items that's been lurking on the bottom of my to-do list for the past three months. It scans the copious log files we generate and spews it's happy goodness into an HTML page on our intranet. Makes a quick look at the "Oh Shit" far of our workflow. The usual sort of crap appears - errors that aren't errors, and things that are important not labelled as errors... Makes for some dirty Perl hackin'. Wasn't pretty, mind you - just expedient.

I still have the book on Expect yet to attack in a serious way. My eyes are fried from too much CRT though, so it'll wait until tomorrow at least. Need to finish whipping up a little scripting WebDAV goodness to automate a data feed process. Shouldn't be too hard, but it does sorta need to get done.

The iPod, by the way, fuckin rocks. I've been listening to music most of the day and just enjoying the hell out of it.

YES! It's here! I've got

YES! It's here! I've got an iPod! YEAH!!!!

And, as it turns out, I've received my book Wolfram's a New Kind of Science. Not exactly light reading, but I must admit I'm curious as to what all this hullabaloo is about. It's a big damn book too - you could hurt someone with it. :)

Racing tonigh made a fantastic end to an otherwise shitty day at work. In the boats in our class, we came in 2 of 4. Overall, we ranked out at 8:13 - mostly because we "owed" other boats time (they have all these ratings and stuff). We crossed the finish line fourth. We had one major foul-up: we didn't get the jib raised quickly on the upwind mark, which lost us maybe 4 or 5 boat lengths. We did very well otherwise, and it just felt good to be out there racing.

FUCKING JACKBOOTED ASSLICKING MONGRELS! That's

FUCKING JACKBOOTED ASSLICKING MONGRELS!

That's my statement for today. Don't ask, it wasn't pretty.

As I rode into work

As I rode into work on the bus today (needed to get in early to catch some muckity-mucks and I was carrying a pile o' sailing gear), I heard this woman in front of me talking to her friend. Turns out, she's in the billing/operations department of whatever large corporation, and her computer was recently nuked by some virus. Klez, something else, who knows. Well, apparently she's spent the past two days at work reading a book, because their corporate policy is to ship all PC's to texas to be 'repaired' if something major goes wrong with them. I guess Virii are considered major... Her friend asked when that PC would be back, and she said "Oh, I don't really know. They never give a date on things like that. Maybe sometime next week?"

Can you imagine shutting down part of your operation for 5 days just to get a machine reformatted and windows installed? Fuckin' amazing. Corporate intelligence, my ass. At least have a backup PC or something sitting around, jeezus! Like it's really expensive these days. Say you get some el cheapo crapo PC that costs $2K. Look at the costs guys...

Photo by JDR

Photo by JDR

Just got home from the

Just got home from the night I didn't expect. Listening to A Certain Distance by Dave Nachmanoff. Neat folksy tunes, very catchy. Neat guy too - a friend of Nate and Leah's.

Which is a great lead in to the evening. We didn't end up going on the duck-dodge after all, instead we bailed at the last minute when Nate and Leah called up asking for help looking at houses. They wanted someone to bounce ideas off of, play devil's advocate, and generally keep them a little more grounded. It appears to have worked, and they're putting in a bid on a place up in Capitol Hill tonight. Neat craftsman style place, which I think they'll generally really like. It's a house that has something for both of them, and it's big enough that they'll be comfy in it (they have a kinda spacious place out in Bellevue now, and it's harder to find that kind of space closer in to town).

So no racing and partying on the 44', dual masted ketch rigged boat. That's a shame, but I think helping out Nate and Leah was the right call tonight.

From monday night's race: ..

From monday night's race:

.. hey gang..

great job to all who were there :)
Jen & JR

Ok, this is a good

Ok, this is a good read - it's the talk that Bruce Sterling gave at the OReilly Open Source conference. It's funny, it's witty, and it's accurate. Take a gander, blow a few minutes.

It's made it from Tiawan

It's made it from Tiawan to Indianapolis, via Anchorage, Alaska... soon...

Spent the day writing. Generating

Spent the day writing. Generating what I'd generally classify as bullshit, the kind of bulletpoint stuff that I pretty much ignore when it's presented. I was originally asked to do it in Powerpoint, but I don't have Powerpoint, so it's just plain ole HTML. The only good side is we can now definitely say we have our development process written down. Yeah. Ooh.. ooh. I'm so excited. Yeah.

I thought, when I left

I thought, when I left work, that today would be a float fest. wrong

20 knot winds was the norm tonight, pretty steady out of the north. We were way overpowered, but the heavy wind really played to the boat's strength, and I think we came in third tonight. Had a little fun out there with a boat named "Avatar" that was pretty exciting. We decided to duck it, and as we started to do so, they decided to try and duck us. We ended up avoiding a collision by 2 feet while moving at full sail (7 or so knots of speed). Good night of sailing all in all. I'm just dead tired now.

Oh - and Steve Zeller

Oh - and Steve Zeller has written some interesting USB code. He's got some tidbits on talking to the Delcom USB chips from MacOS X.

Spent the morning on

Spent the morning on Mercer Island watching the Blue Angel's perform over lake Washington. I tried to take some pictures, but spent so much timing fucking with the camera that I missed some of the performance. I gave up on that shit pretty quick, but I still got some pics... John had a similiar camera (a Nikon digital) and suggested that I just stick it in autoshot mode and track them while they were flying - a trick he'd been using to catch the really good shots. I probably should have done it, but was too frustrated to really fuck with it at the time.

I've never really been hooked

I've never really been hooked in Python. Neat language - learned to hack it up a bit, but every time I started really thinking about doing Object Oriented work, I'd mentally shift into Java (or more recently, Objective-C, although Java is winning out because I've been coding in it at work). I looked at it a lot - one of the folks that I originally replaced at my current job was a python advocate, so I had some of his scripts to hack up and out.

Now, it's available onboard MacOS X by default (Jaguar, anyway). Python 2.2. Haven't really dug into the modules yet, but I've got to say I've seen some pretty damn impressive stuff done in Python. And if you're looking for a language with a boatload of libraries to get you through dealing with problem X, Y, or Z - Python has about the best library API setup that I've seen outside of the Perl world. Stuff that I keep thinking should have been done already in Java is complete, robust, and moved onto version 3 in python. It's wild.

So now O'Reilly is publishing The Python Cookbook. The reason I paid attention was there was an article on OReillyNet that's an interview with the creators of this book. I've always been a fan of recipe books like this - code snippet sequences is something I collect for the inevitable question of How did he get that to work exactly.... I've got O'Reilly's Java Cookbook and Perl Cookbook, and they're both a nice "oh yeah" sort of thing for reminding me how to tackle this or that problem.

While I'm reading online articles and burning CD's of the latest seed stuff from Apple, Karen's caught up in the series Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars - by Kim Stanley Robinson. They're an addicting set of books.

Ahhh. It's finally shipped. Hopefully

Ahhh. It's finally shipped. Hopefully it will be here soon.

Karen and I went out

Karen and I went out to Chinese tonight. I walked home, chatted with Karen while I cooled off, and then we quickly decided that Chinese was definitely the way to go. Uptown China is the place - down in lower Queen Anne (or are they calling it "Uptown" now - hard to say). Great little place - good service, good food. Brought a little home with us for later this weekend.

The real story from the dinner was my fortune cookie. Karen got one saying "be more careful in the future", but I got the truly ominous one:

You will dance to a different beat next summer.

How's that for freaky?

I left work having gotten

I left work having gotten some things done. You know, those itching little tidbits that come out of nowhere, and that you attack with the ferocity of I don't have anything else I really need to accomplish today and I certainly don't want this lurking over my head. I snagged a book from the communal bookshelf (The Chronoliths) and spent the evening reading it.

At first I'd just planned on starting it and then spending the evening quietly with Karen. But as I got home, I sort of felt disconnected, sort of out of phase with the rest of the world. Walking didn't seem to help, and I didn't have any particular desire to go anywhere. We had a nice dinner, but I just remained uncomfortable, so I dived back in and read the book. Just finished it in fact - it was a fairly quick read compared to most of what I've been involved with recently. It was engaging, and had just that right style to sort of suck you in to see what was going to happen. Not the greatest, but definitely an enjoyable read. And it came to a nice solid conclusion, which is more than I can vouch for in several of my recent reads.

Tomorrow I've got a few more problems to diagnose - some screwed up script that automates interaction with CVS is causing fits (if things get out of sync, it doesn't deal with it well - and it certainly doesn't provide useful error messages). I've "instrumented" it - it'll throw gobs of messages now (probably annoy everyone too - but that's ok. If they don't like it then they can change it themselves).

Neat! Apple's posted an article

Neat! Apple's posted an article on Working with Javascript - Mozilla SOAP API... All about using Mozilla's native SOAP engine with Javascript.

The Wall Street Journal has

The Wall Street Journal has an article entitled Record Number of Office Workers Used Web Broadcasts Last Month. It has an interesting quote:

When you don't have access to radio or TV, the Internet is the best news source, said Jarvis Mak, a senior Internet analyst for NetRatings.

Well, Jarvis, you've not quite glommed on to what many folks already have: that the Internet is a superior news source to radio and TV. As mentioned later in the article, you can get news media from around the world. Meaning you can see the BBC broadcast about some world event as well as the ABC, CNN, and MSNBC news casts. More sources, better convergence of truth. Everyone knows that a written source is biased. If they don't, they didn't fuckin' pay attention in grade school and history courses. The more sources you have, the better. A radio gives you one source, or maybe two - because the broadcast range is relatively short. Relatively short compared to the scope of the Internet, which can give you a broadcast from the other side of the globe if you feel like lookin.

Kind of an interesting story

Kind of an interesting story at SecurityFocus: When Dreamcasts Attack. It's basically slapping Linux on a boxen, writing some scripts to scan for security holes and ways out, and then dropping the thing under someone's desk.

Although the article is about a DreamCast game console, they also say they've done the same with an iPaq (much easier to slip into a corner). They're apparently going to post the software (should be interesting reading) at their web site in a few weeks.