Rhonabwy

crazed morning

Jen leaves for LA today, although with a beta copy of the project we've been working on. We've got builds going of the server and client, and while there's still bugs - things are looking like she'll have working code when she leaves.

I got a little web-based update code put in, just thinking it was mostly likely that while it wasn't a required feature for this deadline, it might be the most useful feature of this deadline. Ended up spending most of the morning given a tutorial on how to flatten disk images and prep them for internet distribution.

On thing to come out of all this - I'm amazed how easy it is to mix Objective-C and java in a single project. It just works seamlessly for where we're using it. Most of the backend is java (because it's familiar), but I did some of the front end pieces in Objective-C. Beaut.

Bug reporting website?!

Oh man, you mean I can't just send you terribly long emails anymore, complaining and whining about tidbits and typos?!? Damn, I guess I'll just have the use the web form.

Maybe I'll write some code in python to automagically fill it out for me...

regatta today

Spent most of the day today working on the Manta Ray, sailing in the last of the "snowbird" series races. Not a bad race today, but not really great either. Jen was driving (and hence being skipper), which proved to be rather contentious - simply because I think JR was very used to that position. He was giving lots of hints, help, and advice - all of which became rather overbearing from even a spectator's (or trimmer's - in my case) point of view. We also had a new crew member working with us today - Doug. Doug was okay, but sloppy.

That may be shocking, if you know me. I'm not noted for my incredible neatness. But there's some things that I'm a real freak about. One of those things is when we're under sail, I like to have the sheets, lines, winches, and winch handles all in good order and ready to go. Winch handles, for example, are not (in my highly biased opinion) to be left anywhere other than locked into a winch or in one of the two winch holders.

The race itself was fine - quiet actually. It was a very warm, light-wind day. Somewhere between 2 and 8 knots most of the day. It's had to believe that last weekend had gale force winds! We even flew the dreaded krinkle sail (it's a sail of just mylar - which is incredibly loud to do anything with). When we're folding it, you can't even hear over it - it's that loud.

Afterwards, we grabbed some spicy noodles at this schezuan place up in Greenwood, and then wandered home again afterwards. After a much needed shower, a walk about the neighborhood filled out the evening.

Since then, it's been picking up and cleaning the house and looking over some code in between bouts of cleanliness (like I said, not noted for my incredible neatness).

what's so hard?

About not checking in a file IF IT DOESN'T EVEN COMPILE!?!?

Today, I am reminded...

Of why, two years ago, I shouted and kicked and cajoled and wheedled people into a new development methodology (with Jon's help): continuous integration.

I spent 3 hours this morning learning and debugging someone else's code to get the minimal build to just work so that I could continue from where I was yesterday. He checked in a broken build, and since he was up until 2am here last night working, he didn't show up until almost noon today. No note, no explanation. I just came in, did and update, and everything was fuckin' broken.

So, to get to where I could continue working, I had to figure out what was broken. In the end, it was just commenting out a currently-unused method call. But I think that makes it even worse - if it's not even being used, why leave the project broken?

So I am reminded of why a good build and development process is essential. It keeps me from wanting to shoot the son of a bitch in the knee for hobbling me all morning.

Moleskine and fountain pen

So I received this really nice pocket sized moleskine notebook as a gift a week or two back. I wrote my name in it, but haven't really been able to bring myself to start using it yet - much to the mockery of one of my so-called friends.

Well, today I picked up what I think is the other reasonable half of that equation - a fountain pen. I really enjoy that style of pen (even if you can't write cheques with 'em), and had one for quite a number of years. Unfortunately, it got very, very lost in the move to Seattle two years ago and I haven't had one since. Until now that is...

No, I didn't get a Waterman or a Cartier or something like that. Just a cross. It wasn't nearly as expensive, and still got me a gold nib, which makes the writing a hell of a lot smoother. I was going to get just a steel nib pen, but when I found the Cross with a gold nib for under $100 - I went for it.

Cocoa/Java coding

I've been working on some Cocoa Java stuff at work, which has been a real change. I never expected that I'd actually get to work on anything related to MacOS X at my current position. So most of today and yesterday was spent in a learning curve over three items: NSOutlineView, how the java methods vary from the Objective-C calls, and how to not set up a MacOS X project if a group of people are going to work on it.

So here's the thing - MacOS X coding has this really cool concept of "Nibs", which are honest-to-goodness freeze dried objects that get dynamically loaded at runtime and make developing a UI just an absolutely gem. Interface Builder does all this cool magic for you, as well as generating stub code for controller objects if you'd like it to (or reads in your code and generates the objects...)

Now a nib in MacOS X is a bundle - a special kind of direry that the OS recognizes - with three binary files in it. So that means saving this stuff into CVS means you're generally saving nib files with that "-kb" flag. So merges... well, they just aren't. It's all or nothin' there.

So at work, it was becoming clear that I wasn't going to be able to spend as much time wildly coding up MacOS X stuff as I'd wanted, so a contrar was hired (a past employee) and given the integration task. I happily took the "tell me what you want" role with everything else sort of rolling around on my plate, and ended up developing UI pieces and delivering nibs. Well, this fellow has taken all those separate nibs and combined them all into a single nib. And now my request has been things like "See if you can get the NSOutlineView working - it's not showing anything". Which has meant fiddling with nibs in the process. But since there's a single binary of them now, this fellow and I have been in resource contention to get stuff done. Since he's doing the most of the work, I've taken these opportunities to do things like actually eat lunch and stuff.

So - if you're working on a MacOS X programming project in a group - be aware and plan for only one person working on a nib at once. Which, among many other very good reasons, is why it is a good idea to break your UI functionality up across nibs where it makes sense (like completely new windows and stuff).

I just hope we stop dicking around with the damn UI so we can finish the integration work. At this point, the "functional beta" is to be completed by next monday evening, and it's become abundantly clear that the only way that's going to happen with by some truly heroic effort on the part of the developers. Frankly, I'm helping - but not at the heroic levels. I've just got too many things I need to get done in the evenings to be able to afford that for the office right now.

Well, anyway, I've become much more conversant with the NSOutlineView UI widget and it's datasource. Neat thingy. And yeah, I got it showing it's data.

oh yeah, I gots this blog...

Yeah, I know. Like the one week that Lynn actually posts something is the week I find myself too damn busy to even think properly.

Well - Congrat's to Gus are first in order - for his 1.0 release of VoodooPad. He got some really nice commentary from Jim Roepke on his code that I gandered at after a quick little Googling to see how his code was faring on the might internet mindshare machine. (looks like most of the commentary is actually over in Germany...)

This week's been incredibly busy, mostly with my head down in a computer. I haven't even walked to work once this week - mostly cause I'm draggin' my ass out of bed and directly onto the bus after having stayed awake far later than was reasonable or sensable.

I attended a meeting today that I really wish I could bring myself to report on. I have never seen a company with it's internal communications as screwed up as I did today. Whoa.

3 day weekends

Man, I need another day in this weekend. I guess almost everyone sort of feels that way from one time to another, but it's been pretty frequent of late.

I spent most of this morning sort of stumbling around trying to recover from the amazing full body workout (tm) known as sailing in 30kt plus winds. (I had no idea I was going to be this sore) I finally got my gear all cleaned up (rinsed off the salt, soaked the gloves in freshwater, etc) and mostly put away. Karen is being a real gem about letting me abuse the shower with my foul weather gear hanging to dry.

So this afternoon and evening has been incredibly productive for me. I've got some MacOS UI stuff done for a project at work, and made significant progress on my own project today. Karen was out most of the day, which left me to my reading (I've almost finished another technical book) and programming. It's been so productive that I wish I could continue this right on into tomorrow.

Karen echoed pretty much the same sentiment today, saying "Are you sure today isn't Saturday?". Too bad it isn't.

fingertips

After yesterday, mine are unusually sensitive - especially to heat. I must have abraded several layers of skin off - that is really my only guess. The pads look okay - if somewhat brighter pink than usual. But most of my hands are brighter pink than usual. Trying to eat warm to hot foods has been tricky. Last night, the panina was troublesome, and this morning a toasted bagel was just as bad.

Well, a few days and I figure they'll desensitize again...

sailing... in a gale?

Ok, so the wind was bursting up to 36 knots today, mostly running in the 25 to 30 range. I tried to look up what was considered a "gale", but was unable to quickly google it, so I stopped trying.

Got to the boat at 8am (well, 7:30am actually, but I wanted to eat first) and we were underway by about 9am. It was clearly going to be a windy day - we were seeing 19 knots inside the marina, which is very sheltered. After getting a start and heading down south (we were sailing some 15 miles south along the sound), it all started off rather spectacularly as Jen threw her coffee overboard.

Let me explain that, while a tomboy growing up, Jen had clearly never learned the lesson of not peeing into the wind. The waves were 4-6 feet, and several had already come over the side while we were heeled over and moving, so I wasn't suprised to get wet again - only this looked strange.

What the fuck is this stuff?, I shouted trying to figure out if it was some weird plankton bloom or something (I couldn't see the color on my red jacket very easily - I thought it was greenish at first). Only a couple seconds later, Jen starts laughing, and as I step back I see Anne wiping some dark brown liquid off her face and tasting it. That's coffee! she exclaims, which sends Jen into apologies as she's finally realized that the coffee she threw out came back and splashed down all over Anne and I.

I guess that really set the tone, but the sailing was still good - if rough in the high winds. We had the small jib up (the #3), and were hugging the shore quite closely. We were making good time in there, the winds being very strong regardless of the nearness to shore and the current was light. Unfortunately, we made a number of poor tactical decisions, and after three or four hours we'd made at least twice the number of tacks as everyone else, and had slowly slipped away to being the last in our "fleet" of the regatta.

The "mark" that we were rounding was "Pulley Point" - which is sound of downtown Seattle by quite a bit. It was all upwind to that point, and most of the time we were on a starboard tack, which was also (for some reason we still have figured out) about a knot slower in speed to our port tack. I have no idea what time it was when we finally got down there.

As we were coming up to the point, a discussion ensued in back about what exactly was the point, and where we had to round. We were in shallow water, getting ready to tack out again, when Luther (the other trimmer) stood in front of the instruments for exactly the wrong time. JR shouted "What's the depth?", to which Luther responded "5 feet", and then "thud".

Yep, run aground. A sandy bottom - so it was a more of scraping than a crashing - thank god. Looking over the side, well - it was clear we'd managed to sail the boat with a 6' keel into really, really shallow water - like about 4-5' of water. You could easily see the bottom (and that it was sandy) as well as sand dollars, star, and crabs all happily wandering along down there. We screwed around for 30 minutes trying to free ourselves, mostly to no avail. I even watched a crab crawl past us as we were stuck there. We'd even tried kicking in the motor, but to no effect. Finally (I think) the saving grace was the tide coming back in. In our bouncing about, we'd turned the boat to face away from shore (as opposed to alongside it) and just as a very, very kind man in a large sailboat was about to back up towards us to help pull us out, we lifted free and moved out enough that we were pretty sure we were good to go. You see, we'd been "bouncing" quite a number of times already, moving 6", 9", or even a foot or two before being wedged into the sand again. So it wasn't clear we were free until we'd waiting a few minutes of moving into deeper water with no more scrapes.

How do you manage to run a boat with a 6' keel into water that's only 4' deep? Simple, keep it heeled way the hell over in 30 knots of wind. The deck of the boat, normally horizontal when floating nicely in calm water, was pretty much at a constant 20 deg slant, with definite periods of moving up through 30 and once well into the 45 degree range.

Anyway, we disqualified ourselves from the race when we used the motor to try and free ourselves, so we took a much liesurely run back. We were still doing hull speed (7.5 knots) while surfing the waves back north. By the time we'd freed ourselves and moved north, you could see the fleet's sails on the horizon, but we were way, way, way behind.

All of us were soaked by waves splashing and the foredeck slicing down into some particularly large waves. More than once, it rained down so hard that it was like someone pitched a bucket of cold saltwater over your heads, even coursing down into the jackets a bit.

Luther, however, definitely got it the worst. Sometimes, you need to put weight on the low side of a boat to maintain the heel (slanting) - the boats move faster when heeled, and when the wind lightened those few times below 18 knots, we didn't have enough heel with the small jib up. I'd been laying down on the down side several times already, so Luther took a turn.

For the record, when you lay down on the "down" side, you do expect the wind to come back up, and you're probably going to have to climb a steeply slanting deck to get back up... from a prone position... with water coursing at 7 knots or so about an inch from your side. Maybe less. Especially if the boat catches a LOT of wind, and the boat heels over so far that water comes over the gunwale. So to this effect, you almost always lay down with your feet to the fore. That way you can sit up if you start getting really doused in water and just your lower half - well protected in foul weather gear - gets wet.

Well, Luther laid down with his head towards the foredeck. And the wind gusted. We heard a terrible shout and he levitated back up, and standing in the cockpit, you could easily see the water draining out the bottom of his pants from where it had poured in down his back.

So it's dead last for us - in the racing overall, and disqualified for this last one. Oh well, win some, lose others. I figure if you don't screw up and run aground like that every now and then in racing, you're probably not trying hard enough. I'm glad to be back home (got home about 7pm) and mostly warm. I'm sore all over from the work (it's been 4 weeks since I was last out) and my hands are in terrible shape from being soaked in salt-water soaked leather for 8+ hours, but it was good to get out there. We learned a few things, and now I can say I've been sailing in 35 knot winds.

Change Management and Blogs

Ryan posted a fairly obvious idea today that had not occured to me - using the Blog medium for maintaining a log of system changes.

I think he's on to a good track, although I worry about the unintended consequences of your MBA types seeing this and attempting to wrap heavy process around it. As a form of communications and record, the blog could be a really interesting utility. A variation on the theme would even allow you to semantically mine it, although that seems a bit beyond the "standard" capability that Blog's are doing these days.

Regardless, I could see a really interesting effect of a blog for each machine with an aggregated RSS feed and a standard web-based search engine crawling it for a search mechanism. If you wanted to get fancy and embed your local variation of a taxonomy on top of it, you could mine it perhaps more effectively. An all-out machine readable version would, in my guess, be taking things just a little too far - because some of the best updates in logs like that aren't structured data. Although I guess I'm accomodating that to some extent by saying "a machine per blog", which instantly adds some structure simply by it's organization.

Movable Type with a few variations would be a delightfully easy system to set up (I found it easy anyway), and if you got all excited, it's very amenable to hacking. I'd probably disable the comment system on that though...

Cool MacOS X hint

Having watched a lot of apple events flow recently, I wish I'd known about this one earlier:

How to tell the finder to log all AppleEvents to the console.

That jerk

Remember I talked about that jerk I saw on CNN the other evening, well I saw an article on CNN showing his face - it's Walter Rodgers. Here's the CNN article about the "wave of steel". Oh, and the men were the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the US Army 3rd Infantry Division.

Thanks BBum!

Now this is funny!

Bill Bumgarner posted a blog entry reporting that Apple's Hot News site is linking to that wonderful parody site : Crazy Apple Rumors and a story there about Bush demanding a recount in the Apple Board of Dirers meeting where they elected Al Gore to join the board.

That's really, really rich. And it's a good parody too - well timed.

TV and War

Watched TV tonight.

For those of you who know me, you know how very, very rare that is. We went over to Nate's, had a little dinner, and then spent the evening flipping channels between CNN (any more bombs?) and various other shows.

The only thing they really covered was the earlier "attack of opportunity", which occured just before dawn in Iraq. The most common thing I thought was "Jeez, CNN's gone to hell!". I remember seeing a lot better coverage of the Gulf War, and even with their improved technology, the talking head this evening on CNN was truly abysmal. They trotted out live Iraqi TV while Saddam Hussein came on, more of less (in my opinion) to prove he was alive.

There was one "embedded reporter" with the 7th Cavalry (I think it was the 7th) that was just over the top bad. He was trying to get that "excited"/"rah rah" angle on the troops, but mostly these guys were just sort of "ready". Nobody wanted to be called "excited", but this guy was just pushing. So the second interview "live" with this butthead reporter had him talking to a bunch of tankers. He fixated near the end on some poor lieutenant who paused before saying "we're ready". So then he jumped all over that "hestitation", live on CNN. Buddy - you're LIVING with these guys, and your life is WAY in their hands. While I have every faith they wouldn't kill him for something like that, I'd expect that he better check his boots each morning really, really carefully if you know what I mean. I felt bad for that Lieutenant, but I liked hearing from them. All were quiet - but what the hell do you expect them to say when they're poised to hop in a bunch of armored vehicles and drive to Baghdad at any moment.

Interesting, just before we left, I caught a little bit of Kevin Sites (war correspondant up in northern Iraq with the kurds, and blogging the war on his site). It was neat seeing him live on TV, when mostly I've just read his work.

We both decided that Shrub was probably waiting until early tomorrow - another 6 or so hours - until the US could watch the advancing troops live on CNN.

Dear lord, how war has changed. It was exceptionally odd, and cool too, seeing low-bitrate digital imaging being broadcast. They were showing live pics of F18's taking off aircraft carriers.

OReilly's Safari update

Finished reading my first book entirely online last night from OReilly's Safari service. I'm still in the 14 day free trial period, but I've got to admit it's working reasonably well.

I do wish I could get a more minimal screen - disabling all the crap on the left hand side of the window (contains search, table of contents, category shortcuts, and browse by category). They do a good job in enabling me to minimize that stuff, which helps - I find it distracting on the reading because I'm always scanning way left, realizing that's not part of the page, and then skipping right a bit again.

I'm into my next book, which will be the real test - it's one of the "learning" books, so I'll want to be working through the examples on a computer while I'm reading it. I'm hoping it'll be as good as the "plain ole' reading" was.

Virtual PC

I used Virtual PC several years ago on the PC platform, but never really took advantage of it on the Macs I used. Since Connetix (er, now Microsoft) released version 6 for the Mac, it seemed like the time was gettin' right to pick up a copy.

So last night I went out and bought Virtual PC 6 with Windows XP Home edition. So far, it's worked pretty well. Of course, most of the now 5 hours I've worked on it have been spent updating Windows XP. 15 critical updates, and 10 general updates - the general updates are installing now. Once I finally get all the updates installed, I'm snagging out a copy of that disk image to make sure I've got it stuck away in a safe place.

That's the one thing I really remembered - that being able to restore that image when you've completely pooched it was a lifesaver. At the time, I had been running Windows 2000 under VirtualPC from Linux. It worked beaut.

It is sort of startling to see WindowsXP in fullscreen mode on the iBook though. It's just not what you expect to see.

(Update: take that count of updates back - I've now been through two additional reboots, which then ventured forth that there were additional critical updates to be installed. So now we're up to 17 critical updates: 14 updates in round 1, 1 update in round 2, 2 updates in round 3, now on to round 4...)

awake...

I finally went to bed about 2am, after having read several more chapters in my technical manuals. Got up about 9am, and crawled on in to work, where I picked up the reading again.

We've got a project going on at work that's using a Cocoa front end on a Macintosh application, and it's very odd having someone hand me a "web based" front end and ask for specific things in the UI to work like a web page. They seem to be pretty cool with me suggesting alternatives that make a little more sense from a UI perspective instead of trying to slam the whole UI into a web-page metaphor - thank god. My current bugaboo is grok'ing the NSOutlineView and DataSource mechanisms such that I can add new items up to a specific depth within the tree structure.

On other news, I've added a new granule of knowledge to my "debugging" understanding. When nothing has changed in the code, and nothing has changed on the database configuration, and yet it all still breaks - you're likely looking at some threshold issue. The most recent case was wildly overrunning the maximum value for the Int type. Unfortunately, the bug wasn't in our code (we were using Doubles, knowing this would happen fairly quickly with Ints), but in a library module where it's going to be a bit hard to resolve. You see - it's one of the few library modules we purchased, and we don't have the source... This kind of error has really become the most prevelant in recent months - but I guess that's pretty common with a steady-state system that's not undergoing radical growing pains anymore.

midnight

it's almost midnight, and I'm having a hard time with sleep again. I'm not tired yet, and I'm unwilling to go attempt to sleep until I'm actually tired. Not a great sign. I know I'll just roll around a lot and bother Karen, so... for now... I'm writing here.

We had a lovely St. Patrick's day dinner, where we mostly even avoided political talk. Corned beef and cabbage, the traditional fare, that was really tasty. The corned beef was a little on the tough side, but very flavorful. Karen wasn't 100% pleased, so she's convinced us that she'll just have to try it again. Not a problem here! There's some leftovers even, which look like they'll make an amazing sandwhich with a little fresh horseradish.

Nate took off about 10, when Karen was getting sleepy. I've been reading technical manuals since then, trying to focus on issues other than the impending war. John (a friend in Columbia) seems to think it'll be a short war - that the Iraqi's will flee en masse. I hope he's right, but I fear he's not.

Obviously, the spectre of war is covering my thoughts and muffling me pretty heavily from any other reasonable thought. It's a terrible thing, and I don't want to think about it, but if I don't actively work on some other topic, my mind wanders right back. Which is why I don't want to go lie in bed, somewhat sleepless.

What a day, what a night.

We are officially about to become the "Bad People"

Dear President Bush,

You are one dumb motherfucker. What the fuck are you thinking? Oh right, you weren't. This isn't going to reduce the chance of terrorism against the US, this is going to increase it. Dramatically. And embolden the fears of all the little nations who used to think we'd hold back. Now they're clear - we won't. Our pre-emptive military action into Iraq, on the fear that they'll do something is almost identical to the rationale proposed by a certain german leader some 50 years or so ago. The Germans aren't stupid - they see what we're doing. So does France. I don't even LIKE most of France, but I respect them in this opinion.

For a long time I was hopefull that you were just playing the bulldog, to be reigned back by the "good cop" of the consensus of the United Nations. Now it's clear you're the bad cop - the very, very bad cop, completely beyond any rational control and outside the system. I wish we could remove you. I wish we had a vote of no confidence in you. Because I want to vote there - I want to represent to you that you're making such a large mistake that I want you out of that office. In my opinion, you're not fit to be president.

To all the representatives in Congress and the Senate,

You dumb motherfuckers, you complete spineless bunch of idiots - what the fuck were you thinking when you wrote that stupid texan schmuck a blank check for violence in the world? Al Queada did exactly what they wanted to when they flew those planes in to the twin towers in New York - they helped us to destroy our own civil liberties and put a childish, brutish despot in the complete and unfettered control of our military. You are just as responsible for this war as President Bush is. You've written him the blank cheque that he is now cashing.

Senator Cantwell: Your vote in the Senate regarding the Patriot act has convinced me to work to find a replacement for you. I favor many of your political actions, but this one is just too much. You are partially responsible for the death that is about to occur, and I will work to actively replace you with someone with more sense. It is no longer enough to be the lesser of two evils.

Senator Murray: Thank you for your sanity. You listened, and you didn't panic. Overwhelming, the population of Washington has spoken out against the Patriot act and it's unconstitutional power.

To all the troops of the United States of America,

Come home safe. I fear for your lives, and respect you for your willingness to die for my country. I'm proud of you.

I'm not ashamed to be an American. I'm ashamed that our president is causing America is acting criminally in the world courts (United Nations), and I'm ashamed that our representational government willing destroyed the checks and balances system in a fit of panic and fear. And I'm ashamed and fearful that we'll be bringing home body bags from our troops dieing in the streets of Bagdad, engaged in an illegal war against a foreign power.

This is a tragedy. We're spending into a deficit financially, and we're spending into a deficit of goodwill. Bush is spending so deeply that it will be generations before we can recover.

#1237 : Meetings are the scourge of the day

Hard to believe I've got one thousand, two hundred and thirty seven entries in this blog (including this one). So - today's topic:

Meetings are the scourge of the day!

I was sort of reluctant to want to come to work this morning. It was comfy in bed, sunny outside, and I had a really relaxing weekend to encourage me that I wanted to continue in that vein. I didn't expect today to be all that relaxing.

It wasn't too bad, all in all, but I felt like I spent the whole thing in meetings. Meetings, meetings, meetings. One after another. First an update on topics and questions after the "monday morning meeting" broke out. Then a discussion about UI development and outlining what needed to be developed for this project (a useful one, granted). Lunch was followed by a meeting with the head of America's Sourcing, which involved the review of a bunch of legal documents and discussions about how to leverage the power of a large corporation to get better pricing. We don't buy much. I'm wary to proclaim that value. That was followed by two ad-hoc (and useful) meetings where I answered and asked questions about the status of yet another project I'm involved with, but which isn't making tremendous headway. Finally, another meeting discussing the next steps about that same project, assigning out work and labelling it down to get done by individuals. I have a work item, but it looks pretty minimal. It's unfortunately bottlenecked on someone else getting a piece done though.

That takes us up to 4:20pm, just about effectively done for the day. I didn't even arrive late this morning - it just all got sucked up in meetings. I did some software updates in between there, and wrote a few personal emails, but really the whole day was meetings.

I once tortured Randy Wiemer (one of my many bosses back at MU) saying "Meeting is the work of managers!", quoting from one of those "rah rah" management publications that we'd been forced to read. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, but somewhere in there I wonder how I got to end up on the tortured side.

Moooovie

Went and saw a matinee of Gangs of New York today. Kept hearing all this stuff about it, and I've liked Daniel Day Lewis in other flicks, so it seemed a good bet.

Wow - that is one fucking intense movie. It didn't really rile up any tremendous sympathy or antipathy in me, but it was very shocking to the senses, well directed, and well acted. Even Leonardo did a decent job. I didn't even recognize Cameron Diaz in that role... And they didn't spare a lick in the bloodshed or violence, that was for damn sure. Plenty of the scenes were making me wince.

The only downside is afterwards I left the theatre with a headache that never quite went away again. I went over to Nate's to help him set up some shelving units in his garage, but had to call the evening quits a bit early because I was just having a hard time getting anything rational around the headache.

Practical Cryptography

New book to add to the wish list... Caught mention of it in this month's Counterpane.

Beware the Ides of March

et tu brutus?

My favorite March day - the 15th. It started out a little rough though. I was working on Karen's machine yesterday, and installed a few updates that the OS said was "critical". Well, those updates appear to have caused the scanner to no longer be recognized this morning at 6:30am, when Karen was attempting to scan in some images for a handout. A handout that she was making for a class that she is currently teaching (started at 9am).

At 7am, she rolled me out of bed to help figure out what was going on. In the end, we unplugged and replugged everything and relied on Windows XP's built in "roll back to a previous day" ability of the filesystem/OS to revert all the system back two days, when she knew it was still working. We backed up files and all the usual crap. Even still, it made for an eventful and somewhat stressful morning, as Karen was getting a tad excited about getting the handouts done for the class and then getting there on time (we were 8 minutes late).

Since then, things have calmed down. I've finally got breakfast sitting in front of me (yeah, I know - it's a little late), the house is cleaned, and I've made my morning pilgrimage to Queen Anne Ave to pick up goodies and stuff for some friends coming over this afternoon.

As a side note, I'd like to point out that it's Eric Albert's and Matt Shaw's birthday. They don't know each other (I think - I'd be surprised if they did) - but Happy Birthday anyway!

(Matt doesn't have a web page to my knowledge, so I've included his email address as a link - write him and wish him happy birthday!)

how the fuck did we get here?

Musicians are being censored for unfavorable political stances (which I actually thought was pretty progressive for them), World news is saying "when", not "if" we'll invade Iraq, our so-called president has about completely fucked Tony Blair out of his political station in the UK, and instead of paying for education, we're bribing Turkey to let us use their country as a bounce pad.

I have no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a vile, twisted fucking sociopath. But why do we have to stoop to his level?

Macrina Bakery

There's this little bakery up on Queen Anne, called the Macrina Bakery - and it's devestatingly good. I picked up a loaf of their Irish soda bread yesterday, and the damn thing's all gone. Of course, I had far too much a hand in it (I'm a sucker for good breads). It was wonderfully deserty - a sweet soda bread with oats and a touch of orange.

If you're up around the area, stop in and try it out.

Struts, Linux Magazine

Took a stroll this morning to get away from my Windows machine and the nasty Windows Media player. Walked on downtown (it's wet and windy today, by the way) to Barnes and Noble, and picked up the March issue of Linux Magazine. I've definitely become a fan of these guys over TooManyFuckingAdsLinuxJournal. This issue of Linux Mag is titled "The Java Issue", and has a really nice (and lengthy) article on Jakarta Struts by Chuck Cavaness. Some folks here at work have been starting to use it to quickly whip out web apps, so I'm hearing good things about this particular apache project from multiple sources.

18 cents a megabyte

Nope, not hard drives - compact flash.

Amazon has a 1Gb compact flash card available for $190. Whoa.

Too bad it's not read only and filled with DRM technology - that would make me buy it for sure! (NOT!)

excited

now here's a guy who's really excited about some code - oh yes, and true to form, it's got a PDA reference in it.

Actually, the lua is interesting. I recall seeing it somewhere, but it didn't really stick as anything outrageously cool. I'll have to go check it out again sometime soon.

$!^#$%!n Windows Media Player

I swear that damn thing has some terrible software leak.

I was using it extensively (on Windows 2000) this morning, and after I played about 60 streams, it just started locking up randomly and claiming that perfectly good streams were invalid, or that it couldn't recognize them. I ended up restarting my machine twice to support going through a total of 110 streams. I guess it's the week for Windows frustration.

Office 2003

Caught a link from /. to this article about Office 2003's XML format. Can't say I'm surprised at what they're reporting - I don't think anyone rationally thought Microsoft would move towards interoperability, no matter what pleasant verbage they put around using an XML format.

XML doesn't mean interop, just the potential for it.

Certifications

Caught an article on CNet about MySQL offering certifications. On one hand, that sounds like a generally good thing. On the other, I've held to a general belief that certifications are vastly over-rated, and that far, far too many employers who don't understand technology use them as a crutch when attempting to employ people for work they really don't understand.

Personally, I don't have any significant certifications to my name. No MCSE, no Oracle, no Sun, no AIX. But back in 1993 I participated in a work group with IBM (as an MU staff member) in a certification building process for their web server (a variation of Apache, which they later dropped and just used Apache instead). It was an interesting process, and it was pretty darn clear that I knew as much as the folks that were coding it at the time - which gave me "level 6 knowledge" in the IBM parlance of the day. I think what we developed would have been a pretty reasonable test of someone's basic "web server admin competance" too.

At the same time, I've met lots of MCSE's, CNE's, etc. that just didn't know a damn thing about computing, IT, or how to solve real problems. It was very frustrating to me too - I expected that with these plaques on their well, they'd be able to answer my questions and help build something really cool. Often, too often, they were just completely unable to help in any significant way - unfamiliar with the underlying concepts and all - and learning the topics myself was just simpler.

So the egomaniac in me says "well, I'm just better...", but the realist part of me is shouting a little louder: the systems aren't foolproof and the certification doesn't necessarily mean a damn thing.

I hope the MySQL certification turns out to be good. I really like the database myself (I use it on any small project really, and a number of larger ones too) and hope to see them continue to suceed.

Llamas

No, not the dali kind. The animal kind. I've always liked Llama's, and Yahoo had some pics of them from a guy in Ohio that has a farm with a bunch of em.

Maybe one day we'll have a place with some llama's. I understand they're great to go hiking with.

Thai Kitchen

Karen had some dental work done today (a crown fitted for one of her molars), so Thai was the plan for dinner tonight. Phad See Iw specifically - big, flat, easy to eat noodles. We thought about a bunch of places (my default restaurant knowledge seems to revolve around Belltown for some unknown reason), and then finally remembered Thai Kitchen, right up here on the hill.

Really good thai food, and not all that expensive. We had Phad See Iw and a yellow curry with rice (no drinks, just water) for $20, plus some leftovers. (Would have been more leftovers, but the curry was really, really good and I noshed it all down).

I snagged a take-out menu on our way out - there's lots and lots of things to try out there that I haven't had before. Definitely a do again.

teeth clean, clothes soaked

Well, it's real rain out there today.

Had a dentist's appointment this afternoon for the 6mo teeth cleaning routing. Came out with a clean bill of health, which is awfully darn pleasant after the whole abscessed tooth and root canal event of February.

In the meantime, I'm soaked to the bone from walking home. It was all of seven blocks to the dentist's office from my house, and my pants, jacket, and ballcap were are all dripping wet from the walk. It's still not quite a Missouri Downpour (tm), but it's a lot closer than the normal misting/rain that Seattle gets a lot.

Stumbling around

I don't go out of my way to crack into people's wireless networks, but I do like the software that scans for it. Up until now, I've been using MacStumbler, which appears to have gone somewhat dormant in terms of development. But today, I saw Kismac on Freshmeat, and tried it out.

Wow - that's a nice setup! It's even got the linkages to hook up to a GPS and retain geospacial data while you wander around. It immediately found our local private network (which MacStumbler didn't).

The only downside is I haven't figured out how to hand a closed network a 40bit HEX key to get my laptop on. So, for now, I just have a spare CAT5 ethernet cable drapped across my desk so I can use my iBook at work.

While I'm at it - the Seattle Wireless guys are really awesome (they have an available node about a block from my house) and this jerk is (in my opinion) a complete prick - and I've never even met him.

MacOS X Innovator's Contest

Saw it first yesterday, and today Eric's commenting on it as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see Brent Simmons take first place either - his little piece of software became ubiquitous before it was even finished.

I think Gus has a good shot with his personal Wiki software: VooDooPad. I immediately went home and starting thinking "is there anything...?", but no - I've not got anything nicely developed in the corner just waiting for this sort of thing. And I'm sure that REtry and SignalStrength aren't in the ball park - they're neat little apps, but not really there.

Camino, Seattle Traffic WebCams

Wow. I've been playing with the latest release of Camino (used to be called Chimera - the Gecko HTML rendering engine wrapped in Objective-C) and it's really damn fast! The guys at Mozilla are really doing some impressive things in there. At this point, well - I think it's even faster than Safari's rendering.

Scanned through the little desktop widgets that have been posted up at Konfabulator, and there's a new one up that swaps through the traffic webcams posted all around Seattle. Works pretty well...

McWifi?

How very odd. McDonalds will soon be sporting WiFi when you buy a Combo meal (Yahoodlin' news). So.. Arby's next? Taco Bell?

Mitch Kapor, Chandler, Groove, Ray Ozzie

In the news this morning, Mitch Chandler is leaving the board of < a href="http://www.groove.net/">Groove. Mitch has dug himself deeper and deeper into his Chandler project. The New York Times put a little spin on it, indicating that he left Groove after he found out that the spooks were using it to spy on Americans (er, perform counter-terrorist monitoring and activities). Ray Ozzie, chief geek and bottlewasher, remains active, and in fact Groove recently announced a recent infusion of cashola from big buddy Microsoft and others.

Halo on the Xbox and the BBC

I guess it's really saying something when news about a video game makes front lines on the BBC. In this case, a story about Halo2 not making it out before Christmas.

java 1.4.1

everyone else it talking about it, so I might as well too...

Apple's released Java 1.4.1 for MacOS X 10.2. Phew! Finally! I'd been seeing the betas and liked what I saw, but have been biting my tongue waiting for the final release. Lots of nifty new pieces in this one, most of which has already been covered at OReillyNet by Daniel Steinberg. I think the most interesting thing to note about all this is the GUI Scripting capabilities, which now makes Java app's fully scriptable. A very nice touch, and one that's sure to make some workflow processes a hell of a lot easier to deal with.

So what are people wanting to get done anyway?

Spent some time today reading Clay Shirky's latest on Group software and politics. It was an interesting piece, and although I don't always buy what he's selling (rhetorically, of course), this one sort of resonated.

It was, to me, really a piece asking a lot of good questions. The biggest one that I walked away from it wondering was "So what are people wanting to get done?" from these group software implementations. I mean, some of them are relatively obvious (to me). I participate in a MU* just to be social with some friends of mine. (Never got into the IRC stuff too much) I'm a semi-active lurker on a couple of mailing lists (Cocoa-dev & MacOS-X-dev). And I troll a bunch of weblogs for various tidbits of news and interesting things. Mostly, they serve up what I want very well - the only one that breaks down a little bit from an awesome implementation is the mailing lists. Mamasam does a fantastic job of providing a search to the archive (the history of the list is more than half the value in my opinion).

Even still, sometimes I think that search isn't quite enough. Maybe it's because people don't know how to use it, or aren't aware of it's existance, or they just can't get the results they're wanting from it. I've found that I just read the list, absorb what I can and store the stuff that "looks good" for later searching on my desktop. What could make it better?

My assertion, I guess, is that folks are heading there with a problem and needing an answer or a direction to an answer. How do you make that easier? And then how do you let people know about it?

Gus, the monkey

This is Gus.

Gus the monkey.

Windows is a damned pain in the ass

I use it at work. You know, the usual reasons - because it's there, because everyone else in the office is using MS Word and Excel, because that's what our infrastructure is set up around.

And it still pisses me off. It doesn't work. At least not reliably. This morning, I came in and unlocked my screen. Mail was working fine, and I coursed through the 20 messages and notices that automatically get sent to me over the night. Then I activated the little batch file that updates my local CVS repository. Somewhere in the weekend, the machine decided it wasn't logged into the local network, so it just failed. I tried going to the fileserver and it says "Can't log in". Oh great. Thanks. So the solution is simple, and annoying - restart the machine.

That's TERRIBLE! Why should I have to restart the machine just to log in to the damn fileserver! grumble.

Of course I restarted it. Went and got coffee, and it was all done by the time I got back. But I'm still annoyed at it.

wired

Yeah, I'm still reading it. Although I'm getting more and more frustrated with each issue I get. This one had what appeared to be some really interesting reading - an overview of hydrogen as a replacement for petrol.

Unfortunately, it was mostly an opinion piece with only a few bits of interesting technical detail. On top of that, the issue is filled with all this weird shit about "ads from the future" and crap that's just confusing and (to me) comes off as some sort of strange literary masturbation.

Hey Wired! Knock it the fuck off and get back to having decent content, OK? Your design already hurts the eyes, can you just give up on this future-vision shit and get back to reporting on the geek of today's world? I mean, really - you could just scan Slashdot or BoingBoing for story ideas if you're feeling particularly clueless.

congestion

I'm still working to rid myself of this nasty damn chest congestion. It's been two weeks since I caught the flu, and I still have some wheezing and a cough. Damnit. Annoying too.

Yesterday, Karen and I went out for a long walk around the neighborhood - and I think we chose the wrong day to do it. Yesterday it was 38 and raining, and today it's 52 and partly cloudy. Yeah, call me dumb. I was being antsy and at a loss though, so it was a good time to get me out of the house anyway.

We strolled to the north end of the neighborhood - where Queen Anne starts to dip down and (on a clear day anyway) you can see the Olympics beautifully. There's some lovely walls over there - various houses on the peak of the hill have some nice ornamental ironwork (well, and some have some crappy stuff too). There's also some sort of historical wall which circles around over there too - a nice flat with views out over the puget sound and the south end of Magnolia.

All in all, I think we were out walking for two to two and half hours. We stopped by the library to warm up a bit, which was needed by that point. In the end, we were out a bit long, and the congestion in my chest has been a touch worse for it since last evening. Hopefully it'll let up soon.

Northgate

Took Karen clothes shopping today. Woo. Exciting (NOT!). Well, it was a chance to see exactly what was inside Northgate Mall. And... well, it's a mall. Not unlike Columbia Mall in COMO (for you Columbian's readin') - about the same scale. JCPenny, Nordstroms, and Bon Marche make up the big boys footing the mall. A very different food court from what I've been used to in the past (more asian foods than the midwest), where we grabbed a bite to eat before we fled the crowds.

A mall is a mall when it comes right down to it, and this one isn't very different from any of the others I've been to. Kitschy crap in those little center stands, being worked by bored teenagers. Way too many cellular phones in practically every corner. Grump people, happy people, teenagers out trying to impress each other. Yeah, pretty much your standard mall.

Now Karen's sacked out for a bit, worn out from all the noise and human contact I think.

what?

Oh.

Nothing really. It's a day. Spent it working on some private projects and preparing to pull my hair out. I was randomly perusing python stuff a bit, and ran across the folks who've integrated it into the windows COM environment. About 2 hours later, I ran across a bunch of commentary about how COM was a screwed up system that caused no end of performance issues. Good lord - how does anyone code anything on Windows with all this? And I think LISP and Scheme were arcane and somewhat complex...

cant... focus...

I'm sure it didn't have anything to do with having that margarita during lunch...

I've been working on learning how to play successfully with Apache's XMLRPC, and at the moment I can't seem to keep my concentration focused long enough to really get into doing anything with it. It's a neat project, and looks like it's very straightforward to use.

On a related note, Brent at Ranchero released an open source XML-RPC library for Cocoa. Apple's WebServices framework has a nasty little bug in it, which has apparently caused Brent no end of pain with his NetNewsWire code.

Bug reports at OReillyNet/Safari

Well, I gotta say I'm impressed.

I was scootin' around and checking out OReilly's Safari Bookshelf yesterday - I've been thinking of subscribing to keep an online reference of OReilly books handy whereever I am. Well, of course I had to check out the "Cocoa" books. They have these nice category shortcuts in a sort of book taxonomy, and one of them is "Programming:Cocoa". So I clicked on it, and "Programming Coldfusion" at the bottom of the list of 4 books (the other's were all about Cocoa).

"Well, this is weird. Looks like someone screwed up some data or a SQL query to me...", I thought. So I used their link "Submit a problem" at the bottom of the page and told them about it.

Well, today I get mail in response reading:

Hi--

I just fixed this and the fix should go live this evening.

Thanks,
Madeleine
...

Madeleine Newell
Associate Production Manager
O'Reilly & Associates

Wow - I don't get bugs fixed that fast in my OWN organization! I'm impressed!

freakish city things

So it's like 8:45am, and I'm wandering back from the local cafeine injection station (Uptown Espresso), and at the corner there's this metal plate, banging away.

You see, normally it's lying flat, covering up some small maintenance hole - it's one of those tread-plate aluminum things, maybe 3/8" thick and a foot by 18". Normally, it's just quiet. Lying there. But not today - as I walked by, this thing was chattering away and lifting off, but not quite being thrown out of it's little niche, by what appeared to be some significant air pressure underneath it. Add to that image water sort of bubbling and spurting up around the sides.

What the hell is going on? I sure didn't look, I just hurried past... figured it was one of those weird and freakish city things.

Camino 0.7 is out!

For those of you with MacOS X, Camino 0.7 is now available (used to be known as Chimera). Caught the news from Dave Hyatt.

pigfucker

I'm glad to see Rob Flickenger post about that snot-head running SeattleWireless.com. I'm not active (just a lurker) within the group, but I've got a lot of interest in what they're doing. And this guy - jeeze - is just ripping people off.

vino

Joined Nathan for a wine tasting this evening at Seattle Cellars. There's a winery that Nathan is very fond of - Woodward Canyon - in Walla Walla, WA that was the primary event this evening. Nice reds, although all the fresh ones were a bit sharp yet for my liking. None the less, I snagged up a bottle to be shoved into a corner for a year or three to see how comes out.

Afterwards, dinner was down at the Flying , maybe 2 blocks down the street, where we indulged ourselves in oyster's on the half shell - 25cents a piece. Makes for a very inexpensive dinner!

Now back at home, and Karen's making a blueberry crumble for desert. Couldn't seem to entice anyone over to join us this evening, so it's just the two of us.

The whole thing makes for a nice end to the day that started out with a very shitty morning.

U.S. Diplomat John Brady Kiesling Letter of Resignation

I'm sure this is floating around, but I was reminded of it this morning when a friend of mine in Kansas forwarded a copy to me. I guess this puts me in the "dove" category in the dove/hawk continuum.

The story is available at the NYT. I believe it's worth a read. I wish it would make a difference - I'm not sure what can make a difference now. We've expelled the Iraqi diplomats, we're coming up on the dark of the moon... So much life wasted.

I wish we could throw the fucker out of office. The damage will be terrible across the board - iragi lives, US lives, world economy, everything.

Weblogs @ OReilly

I caught from Eric's blog today that OReilly has updated all their weblog'n stuff. I like reading through them periodically, so I've got the feed in NetNewsWire to keep abreast of what's goin' on.

Best news story I've read in a long time

MetroWest Daily News from a few days ago. You've just got to read this - some kids crashed a party and offered to sell some drugs. The party was being hosted by one police officer for his buddies... Link courtesy of Paul at Ukazu

that new trophy...

Byron pointed me to a washington post article about a dude who blew away his laptop. Literally. My favorite quote from the article:

In police reports, Doughty said that he realized afterward that he shouldn't have shot his computer but at the time it seemed like the right thing to do.

Lawyer arrested for peace

What a sign of the times, huh? First the homeland security office is resurrecting variations on the theme "duck and cover" - my favorite in institutionalized paranoia, and now a lawyer has been arrested in New York for wearing a peace tshirt. I caught the link originally on BoingBoing, and then Gus reminded me of it this morning as well.

walkin' on the beach

Karen and I took the evening off tonight and went out. Dinner at Ray's Cafe after a wonderful quiet walk on the beach down at Golden Gardens. It made a really nice end to the day for me. Work was dragging on sort of intolerably, and I just felt like I wasn't making any consistent progress on anything, even though I was getting things done and knocked off my plate.

It was a lovely evening on the beach - really light winds (maybe up to 3 knots?) had the sound with just a hint of wave, but really very glassy. It reflected the light from the sunset beautifully, and the Olympic peaks were all shrouded in clouds and mist on the far side, with their bases clear. It was partly cloudy, the the sunset was doing this interesting back illumination on the low clouds that were hanging around, causing them to sort of glow with various reds and oranges.

For dinner, we both just wanted some cornbread and chowder, so we took at shot and headed towards Ray's Cafe. Well, they don't have cornbread (that's Ivar's), but they did have a really nice chowder and sourdough rolls.

We got back home, and Karen had a nasty headache, so I turned around and walked down to Safeway to get some more ibuprofen - we'd burned through the last of our supply last week with the flu. It was another fine walk - cool outside, but not wet or really windy. I really like walking around my neighborhood, but I didn't dawdle too much since Karen was waiting on me.

And now? Well, there's some software I need to install on Karen's home PC, but I'm dreading it so much that I'm putting it off for another night. That leaves a relatively quiet evening, but I've got some more writing/editing I want to do, so I'll probably start attacking that.

CELL

I caught this article in the Mercury News about Sony and some new chop technology on Hack the Planet (good little general info blog by the way).

The article talks about how Sony's whippin' out this hot new chip that's basically multiple PowerPC processors in one chip, and some patent that it secured back in September regarding what it calls "cell microprocessors". There's a (I think?) related news story on Infoworld from last april on Sony, IBM, and Toshiba working on a "cell" processor. Heh. Google drove me right to Matthew Alsleben's home page, where he talks about working on the Cell processor at IBM.

Hmm. Well, it certainly sounds like an interesting chip.

newton, palm, ???

CNet has an article on one of the newton kids returning back to Apple - ok, so he's not a kid, but it sounds like excellent news to me when he class talent is moving back to do something.

You were wondering why Google bought Pyra?

then you should read the Wired story on Google delivering Ads on other sites...

more, more more...

MU.ORG has received it's happy upgrade. Gus commented on it yesterday to some extent - means a little more space for everything. It's where Rhonabwy.com is hosted - as well as a pile of other things.

kicking off a new project

I'm kicking off a new personal project called "Feedback Loop". Ought to be an entertaining bit, anyway. I've gone out an contacted a few people to get some information for it, and when I get it back, I'll start putting the project together.

I'm not sure I'll post a whole lot about it while I'm developing it, but I'll make sure to let everyone know what it's about when it's time!!

back2work

first day back in a week. It's taking quite a bit of catching up. I had 10 voicemails and let me tell you - our phone system is a pain in the ass to iterate quickly over 10 voicemails. Someone flubbed the usability test there...

Still have a lot of congestion in my chest, although I'm not hacking all that badly. Feeling worn down and low energy, but that's not all that surprising given how sick I've been. I'll probably slip out a little early and see if I can get some more sleep to help kick this thing off entirely.

more local news

here's something you don't see everyday - an apology from a public official. In this case it was from Washington Supreme Court Justice Bobbe Bridge, who was arrested for DUI & hit-and-run.

local news

A little local news - apparently there's some discussion going on about wiring up all of Bainbridge Island. That's an island due west of Seattle (out in our Puget Sound) where a lot of folks commute to downtown.

I hope something interesting and good will come of it for them - I know that Columbia had dark fiber owned by the city strung all through the place, but nobody ever really took advantage of it for years because of the political hassles and technical capital it took to get things up and happening.

warmth

I really got outside for the first time in a week. Wow - what a change. The weather warmed up nicely this morning (it's about 50F now), so I stayed outside for a bit and enjoyed the sunshine and flowers. Spring is definitely here, and marauding about with a vengence. All the fruit trees are going, as well as a huge host of daffodils and crocus.

I talked with Karen's folks last night - it was her father's birthday - and they're still socked in with snow. Couple of inches as I understand it. Sometimes it's a tad strange that we so much farther north and enjoying the spring so early. I'm used to Missouri getting the spring about 3 weeks before Iowa, and being able to travel the entire length of early to late spring in an afternoon driving north or south about this time of year.

So I've got the windows open, airing out the house for what's been a couped-up week in here. Karen taught a class this morning up at Northgate, so it's the first real outing for both of us today. Now we're back, tired, but feeling pretty good all things considered.

Jen, JR, Tony, and Ann are out sailing in a race today, although the winds are so light I expect it'll be more of a floatfest than anything else. Four people may even be a reasonable crew for such light weather. I just wasn't up to the exertion, so I had to beg off for this week. We've got another race next weekend - I'm just hoping I've recovered enough by then!