Rhonabwy

light wind, short on crew

pretty much summarizes the race conditions. But it was really good. It reinvigorated me (much needed today), the attitudes were all very positive on the boat, and we worked well together. Not that we didn't have our screwups, but we did very well in our class and showed ourselves well against the folks we were racing.

can't focus my eyes

You know it's just one of those days when you can't focus your eyes on the screen for more than 30 minutes. I'm beat - dead tired - and my eyes are right there with me. I've been trying to do some simple perl CGI scripting today, but I just haven't been getting anywhere.

Multiple walks around the office, outside, etc. But nothin' doing. I'm just dragging today.

We sail tonight - a race out on the Sound. I don't know how I'll do given how darn tired I am, but hopefully well enough to pass muster. At the moment it looks like light wind out of the south (5 to 6 knots) and almost no exchange in the tides, so it should be a pretty straightforward race. Temps are (at the moment) 55 to 60 - depending on how close to shore you get (warmer air on the shore). The winds are getting lighter as the day goes on (they were in the 10 to 15 range this morning) and there's a chance of light showers - but the air pressure is still rising slowly so it shouldn't be all that bad out there.

I've pretty much given up on coding for the day, just cause I can't keep my eyes working. Workflow needs to start up this afternoon after maintenance, but I'm not sure if that'll be before I leave to go racing. If not, it'll get fired up this evening from home. I do love that SSH and VNC combo for being able to work from home.

Apple fans or Slashdot readers?

You've got to wonder which group can create a larger, nastier, spikier load than the other. Of course, today, they're BOTH hitting the Apple music store website, and it's definitely buckling under the load. Even now - 3 hours after the announcement, the site is just not responding to some searches or general "genre" queries.

Personally, I'm looking for some harder to find tunes within there, but I think I'll just wait a bit. I already have a large CD collection at home, so I've ripped them all into my iPod (yeah, and G4). In fact, while Karen was away I just fired up iTunes and let it randomly progress through the tunes. I've got 5.4 days of solid music, so it worked out pretty well. I didn't hear all of it, but I think the cats enjoyed something other than just a plain quiet house.

The new iPods look slick (well, you'd sorta expect them to really), but I've already got mine (a fine 20Gb model) and I'm certainly not ready to shell out for another quite yet.

bug reports and Apple

Oh, one other thing came in today that I thought was particularly cool. I got a response from Apple's bug staff to a bug I submitted. Like, a real response and everything! (Typically it's just a request for more information, or notification that the bug was a duplicate.)

So I've taken to submitting bugs on all that picky little shit that annoys me where Apple is breaking their own UI rules.

I've worked in large companies, and I know the game - keeping every coder in line is a damn difficult task. So I figured, this way a "customer" was bitchin' and there was a specific bug to track to get it resolved - well, it might help put a little pressure where other methods perhaps had failed. I'm not saying that's what happened, but it's a potential within my own realm of possibility that I thought might exist.

So, today, I got a response along with the closing of the bug saying "It'll be out in the next release!"

Since I'm under NDA for the bug stuff, I won't go any further- but I'm really, really glad it worked! Of course, this has just emboldened me with success, so I'm off to submit a batch of other bugs on crazy UI stuff that's happened in Apple's iLife apps and other places to encourage them to "follow their own rules".

Heh. You can ask Gus, I find the wierdest little bugs...

slow, but persistent

So this isn't something I expected, which is why I thought I'd write about it. I have a copy of Windows XP running on my iBook under Virtual PC. It's been working great, except that there's this one critical update that's being a complete and utter bitch to install (Q187287 for the curious). Since I had a problem installing it, and the error messages were less than useless, I took advantage of Microsoft's email support and starting requesting help.

Well, a fellow by the name of Manish has been slowly working me through the process, and although it hasn't gotten resolved hyper-swiftly, he's doing a hell of a job helping me out. Very polite, and answers "by the book" (I would actually rather expect they're scripted) - but they keep coming every time I respond.

I've got to say, that's a hell of a lot better than some of the commercial support contracts I've used in the past (IBM and Oracle to name names) where you have to call them and remind them there's a problem for which you're awaiting a response. Then it was often busy-work bullshit while they desperately tried to figure out who you were, what the problem was, and prioritize it accordingly.

Apple Store

Cool!

Just got back from Oak Harbor and saw that the Apple store would be opening in Bellevue Square on May 10. And that another would be opening later in the year in U Village.

Stunning New Development!

Performance-based salaries don't always pay off.

I'm not surprised.

Blogs as a development tool

Well, not suprisingly it appears that Google is using Blogger internally to support it's own development.

For an interactive tool in the software development process, I'm not sure blogs (Blogger, Movable Type, etc) are really there. They're really fairly minimal on the interactivity, so things like questions, decision making, polling, etc are sort of hard to do through that medium. They do, however, really excel at providing a public face for "development notes" and details about a project. Oh yeah, I mean someone still has to write into the blog, but it allows for a nice level of multiple person input into what I think of a more living design/implementation document for any given project.

What would you do?

What would you do when you see your own doppleganger?

I grabbed a bite to eat tonight at a little mexican place I like, and when I walked in the door a couple sitting at one of the tables stopped me dead in my tracks. Yeah - to the point that the person behind me coughed politely to remind me that I was blocking the doorway.

Don't know who the woman was, the but the guy looked so much like me that it stunned me completely. He didn't look up, was just reading a book and periodically eating a bit of food. Hair, face, build - it was really frightening. Looking at him closer, I could see his face was a touch flatter and with cheekbones a bit more pronounced, but man - that was a scary likeness.

I didn't talk to him, but I wonder to myself if I should have. He probably would have just thought I was a freak or something. So what would you do if you saw someone who looked just like you in a restaurant?

wind...

Well, according to the ferry readings, the wind today is 10 to 20 knots out of the south. A good day for racing. Which is where Jen, JR, Tony, Doug, etc (and not me) are. Racing, apparently a distance race all the way up to Edmonds area and back to Shillshole Bay.

Tony was worried the winds would be light today. I expect that's not the case. Since it was north and then back, I figure they've finished the downwind mark - long ago - and are working their way south again. At the moment, I expect they're out in the center of the sound, since the tides are working in their favor, although if they're not close to being back, they'll start heading towards the shore to hug it for the rest of the trip, as it's starting to ebb about now (3pm) and it looks like a pretty decent exchange.

Air pressure is high and rising slightly, so I expect they'll have lovely weather out there for the rest of the day as well.

There's my armchair view of the regatta, not knowing squat about what's actually there.

Not a nice a morning, but it doesn't suck either...

Today is more Seattle-ish than yesterday by far. At least to me. The cloudcover is thorough today (although it is fairly bright for all that), it's cool, and there's a light bit of wind out. Sweatshirt weather, not really up to full bore jacket weather. After the cats harranged me into feeding them, I took a liesurely walk down to Queen Anne Ave and got myself a latte and generally enjoyed the wandering about before settling down to being actually useful and creative this morning.

Somewhere in all that midst I also snagged out the mower and gave the yard a once over. It was just getting to the time when it needed it again, and since the grass wasn't horrifically wet or anything, the timing seemed pretty good. The back yard still looks like a butcher went at it (well, I did) and hasn't recovered from it's neglect of not being mown in far, far too long.

Edging the yard is sort of looming on the "need to do" list as well - just going to have to take the time and make that happen at some point. We bought one of those half-moon-on-a-stick thingies to make it easier than a straight-shooter tuff digging shovel.

Well, enough blathering from me for the morning. I'm off to get something useful done.

Good morning

A very nice morning, in fact. It's a strange mixture of light this AM, with the sun streaming down through sucker holes into low clouds, causing these sheens of reflected and refracted light to cascade sort of sideways over everything. The shadows are all over the place, or non existant, and the colors are astoundingly rich.

Promised myself a treat for breakfast one morning this week, so today was the day. Headed down to The Crumpet Shop in Pike Place Market for a bowl of groats, steamed milk (whole, not that white-looking watery stuff) and brown sugar. They're always very friendly there, nice folks. While I was in a fellow walked in with a what I thought was a Starbucks Tshirt. Not terribly surprising, given the city, but I did a doubletake when it read "Get Fucked" where the starbucks logo usually is. Shortly thereafter the story ensued of the local corporations nastiness towards small coffee shops (offers landlords double the lease for the spot kind of thing...) and I offered up my own story of Tom and Karen's little coffee shop demise by exactly that tactic. Turns out the owners live right up there (near 85th and 32nd W - just above (vertically, not north) Golden Garden's park) and knew exactly where I was talking about. Didn't please them all that much - they'd liked Karen and Tom's little place - but it at least answered what happened and why they were closed.

So now I'm at the office and ready to attack the systems and see what I screwed up back on Wednesday, cause somethin' ain't running right.

that helped...

Took a nice walk this evening, regardless of the light rain. That helped clear my head significantly. Took some papers and got some more technical reading done over a coffee at Tully's. I'll probably regret that caffeine later tonight, but for now I'm doing better.

Just after I got home I got a call from Karen. She's having a blast up in Oak Harbor, although she's exhausted. Today was, apparently, dye work - and she didn't get back to her hotel room until 10pm. For Karen, that's very late. I expect she'll get back home when she's all done on Sunday and just collapse for a few days. She was running hard to prep all the last tidbits for this workshop, and it sounds like she's running equally hard up there. I just hope she doesn't catch a cold when she comes down from the run.

I'm still reading OReilly's Safari and am continually surprised and impressed. They're constantly adding new books to the list, and the corporate account I have gets me access to the whole lot of them. It's really incredible. The only problem is I just don't have the time to read as much as I'd like to! Fortunately, their search is reasonable. Could be better - but it's pretty good.

nothin' doin.

I'd like to say I was doing something really impressive tonight, but I'm not. I had all sorts of great ideas earlier this afternoon, but now I can't seem to keep my head wrapped around anything for more than five minutes. Had a great afternoon, but this evening is just not working for me. The cats are happy, as I sit in front the computer staring at the pixels and wondering which way is up. (yes, Pooka is lying across my arms even as I type this).

I think maybe a walk is in order - just get out of the house, clear the head. I'm sure everyone has nights like these, but they're damn frustrating regardless.

Never assume...

Never assume that three year olds are harmless.

no race

Well, tonight was the first night that I've been on the boat and a race was actually cancelled before it started. There was no wind out there - the sound was glassy and smooth. It was going to be a very, very long race if we did it - but it never even happened. We waited an hour for something, anything, to pick up and blow. To no avail.

So after floating on the water for an hour, toodling about and watching the sealife wander by, we called it quits and headed back into the marina. Thereafter, a dinner of spicy noodles up in Greenwood actually finished off the evening quite nicely. Jen and JR were freezing by the time we were done - I must just be more warm blooded, because I thought it was nice. A little wet (a periodic shower gently swept over the sound), but otherwise pleasant. On a clear day, it would have been a beaut for pictures.

how incredibly frustrating...

Why is it that when you're trying to get Windows Updates, the idea of "keep trying, and it will work eventually" is even conceivable?!?! Yet, in fact, that's what I'm doing with my morning. I just keeping attempting to install the bloody critical updates and sooner or later I think they'll take.

Normally, I'd say this is completely irrational behavior. Except that it appears to be working. Clearly my opinion of Microsoft's update infrastructure behavior is not really positive right now.

So quiet...

The house is always so quiet when I come back home from dropping her off in Oak Harbor for her workshop. It just sort of weirds me out sometimes - dropping her off at a hotel in a small town 2 hours away and leaving. I know she does fine up there, and the workshops are fantastic for her, but I still come away feeling sort of hollow for the first few days while she's gone.

Took a while to do the round trip this afternoon, so I just got back into the house. Next plan - take a shower, check the email, and maybe do a little coding to keep my mind off how quiet the house is...

user centered computing

Eweek's got an article on Panther (next rev of MacOS X - releasing this summer) that reports to be focused on "user centered computing". On one hand, I think Apple's got the best show on the road for a unified, easy to learn user interface. At the same time, I just want to slap them around for breaking their own rules in their own apps (just look for preferences in some of the iApps... it's all over the damn place). And it's not like it hard to update that - really. At least if they're written in Cocoa. At all reasonably well. Nevermind, maybe they're not.

Anyway, the article is flimsy and light, but worth a gander if you're interested in MacOS X Panther.

Another good MacTech

Got the April issue of MacTech, and it is, like all of the others I've received, really good. Oh particular coolness is another article by the folks at Panic (Cabel this time, on design and Transmit!) and a really interesting tidbit by Tim Monroe (Quicktime Engineer at Apple) on a preview release of Microsoft's Stinger and it's capabilities with Quicktime.

(if the link for Cable is atrocious, it's all my fault - I found it by trial and error, and god knows if that is what he wants to represent him)

But I think the coolest bit is that they now have Scott Knaster writing a column for them. I missed his early days (wasn't doing anything much with coding back then) on the Macintosh, but heard a great deal of his work... so I'm really looking forward to seeing what he comes out with.

So the bottom line - if you're into Mac coding, MacTech is the gotta-have subscription.

Chandler 0.1

let the gnashing begin!

Chandler 0.1 has been released.

HCI 2?

Damnit. How dark is that? I just wrote this big old three paragraph thing babbling about human computer interaction, and the post to my blog failed and I lost the work. Apparently that's also happened to Steve Frank, who was up a bit later than me last night and was reviewing the current state of affairs in HCI in Knowledge Navigator concept video from Apple years ago.

I believe the key issue is really with having some semantic understanding of what the individual wants to do. A general computing device (i.e. a PC) could do any number of a gazillion things. With a phone - you're calling someone. With a microwave, you're intending to subject some thing to microwave radiation - or maybe just set a timer.

As for the actual interaction, well - that's all about metaphors. Which means it's pretty intimately tied to a cultural reference. A desktop, folders and documents (thank you Apple) is one a lot of folks in classic western european cultures will understand without all that much pain, but don't even try to explain it to someone who has lived all their life in a rainforest doing hunting and gathering. For folks who have never used a computer before, there's the tactile issues (typing, mousing, trackpading, etc) and the metaphor issues both to overcome. (Incidentally, that's what sucked about IBM's OS/2 - it had an incredibly hard to understand metaphor and then wasn't consistent with it's implementation)

Update: What the? All of a sudden, it looks like that data wasn't lost at all...

HCI

Well, it looks like Steven Frank was up later than I was last night, posting an extended rant/discussion on human/computer interactions.

He starts off with a link to a video I keep on my machines, just to get a juicy bit of scifi-ish style inspiration into my head when I want it.

No doubt about it though, computers are difficult to use, especially for folks with no prior experience with them. Nature of the beast in some respects - we're working in metaphors painted into pictures. The flow of information is limited, and the expectations had to manage. When someone sits down at a device that can do so very, very many things - how do you know what they want to do? The semantics of the problem are what kicks your ass as a coder.

Not that some large companies have made it all that much easier. The whole field of adding more and more features to outstrip your competition has the immediate downside of that many more things you can potentially want to do with the program. When you bring up a calculator, well - it's pretty easy to see what's coming. When you bring up a word processor these days - give up all hope.

And while Apple did implement some really cool semantic technologies with Newton (technology which may be on a shelf, but I hope isn't lost), Microsoft has been wildly active doing research on this areas in the past few years. They've even published some really interesting papers (I personally like reading what Eric Horvitz has been up to - he seems to have his nose in some interesting areas).

Happy Birthday Byron

29?, well - another year and you'll be thirty.

Not that it really makes a difference.

Oh - and I can stuff you on Sushi for $20 here...

interesting quote

An interview with Andy Grove at CNET caught my attention with this interesting quote:

Christensen: If you look back in history at companies that have successfully launched new disruptive-growth businesses, with only a couple of exceptions they were run by the founder. Is there something about being a founder that gives you the self-confidence to make an irrational or intuitive decision that goes against the logic of the organization?

Intuitively, I've believed that must have been the case, but I never heard anyone state is as a fact. The standard USA corporate structure is so amazingly risk averse (I've got a lot of other very negative opinions on them too), that it's a rare individual that can turn up something innovative.

Med Kitchen

I think Paul would like this place - french and lebanese cuisine. Karen ordered two dinners, I ordered one. We now have six or so meals in the fridge. (To be fair, Karen only ordered the second one after she realized the first one had mushrooms). Man, was it good too!

I tried a seafood couscous, and it was absolutely delightful. Karen ordered a lamb shishkabob for her second meal, and it was equally wonderful. She swears she's not just stocking the house with "good me for" food while she's out of town next week.

The best part of the whole thing was eating out with John and Sue. We hadn't done anything together with them for a while, so that made it extra nice.

SciFi day

Obviously, this is the Science Fiction day. First Ryan tags me about Traveller (a longstanding an old addiction to a space genre role playing game), and then Slashdot posts up a story on Burt Rutan's new X-prize space plane thingy. Of course, it's immediately anihilated by online viewers eager for that stuff, so a friend at the office pointed me to Space.com (warning Pop-up ad central!) that had some good pics and a decent article.

So my biggest question is what kind of Isp are they getting out of nitrous oxide and tire rubber? (yeah, it's that traveller rocket science curiosity from way, way back).

I do miss a good RPG session, but I haven't gone looking for anyone to play with around the Seattle area since moving here two years ago. Funny thing about Traveller too - although it's the game I loved the best, it's also the one I played the least.

Java Extreme Programming Cookbook

I've been reading Java Extreme Programming Cookbook (online, yeah) today. Man - I wish this (and all it's associated tools) had been so well put together two years ago.

It's kind of funny though - this is almost exactly the development models and tools we've evolved to over the past two years. Ant, JUnit, Continuous Integration, etc. And this book lays out all the details that otherwise took googling, trial and error, and wild Ant task java coding to accomplish. It's quite a distance from where we were when I started - a nightly build process was in place, running partially with python, java, make, and shell scripts. Man, was it tricky to add stuff as well. We moved to Ant and the builds speeded up by a huge far (didn't have to set up and tear down the JVM for each compile set). We moved to continuous integration, JUnit, and serialized checkins shortly thereafter. Since then it's been minor tweaks to fit the project or just damnable necessity of the world.

If you're setting up a build process, release process, or any of that, I'd recommend getting a copy of the book to keep handy (or a Safari subscription).

OReilly's Safari

We've been trying out the corporate edition of OReilly's Safari at work, and it's been pretty good. End of the first week of a 30 day trial, and it's seen fairly light usage outside of me. Ok, so I'm a monster of random quick flipping through web pages, so it looks like I spent the entirety of last week going through it from their logs. A couple of other folks have talked about how cool it is, but I'd guess that haven't really delved all that deep into it from the usage stats I've seen. In some respects, the volume of the data is so high that making any concerted use of the system without search or a taxonomy of categories to work down through is almost impossible (1377 books when I last looked!)

The search mechanism (don't ask my why I'm picky about them) is pretty good (Google style interface), but could be better. One thing that's surprising is they have two different "web sites" to this product - which don't reference each other. http://search.safaribooksonline.com/ and http://safari.oreilly.com. The later website is more "integrated" (if you call some graphics and links integrated) with their other public websites such as OReillyNet and OReilly.com. The former is purely Safari.

Their taxonomy is good, but not without errors. In email conversations with their technical support, it seems that the category of a book is determined by the publisher - and they're not always noted for their accuracy in these sorts of things. The errors are the kinds that would lead you to miss a book you might otherwise find - so probably not critical.

I don't think we've really hit jackpot wit the utilization in house, but I suspect most of the engineering staff hasn't really clued in to what's out there either. We're a primarily java shop - and well, we've got LOTS of OReilly's java books around the place. 153 books under their java category when I just hit it. But it's not like it's just technical programming manuals either - just this past week a couple of books hit the list including "Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond", and "Privacy Defended: Protecting Yourself Online".

I'm with Byron

I'm with Byron. Oh yeah, Novell was a rockin' company in 85, but it's been in the shitter ever since. Stability? Damn. We used the linux plugin to their NDS system and the damn thing was the most fragile piece of code I've ever worked with, bar none! (IBM's internal SP2 system for managing images was a close second).

Novell, go somewhere quietly and die. Or really transform yourself - clearly Eric Schmidt wasn't able to pull it off.

what a night!

Just got home, maybe 30 minutes ago. We're back to racing on Wednesday evenings, and pretty much done with weekends. So, out we went racing tonight. That was, well, exciting.

We did terrible. In fact, we didn't even finish the race. By the time we were done, we crossed on the wrong side of the committee boat and just wanted to head in. During the race we went from a little wind (3-7 knots) to no wind - unfortunately in just the right time to completely screw us for rounding the mark. When we finally made it through that, the wind really picked up (along with quite a downpour) and within a few minutes we were running around in 15 to 20 knot winds with pretty limited visibility. I completely lost track of where we were going and what marks we were rounding after that, and just went into the zone of trimming jib and spinaker as they were needed.

I had been pretty convinced that it wasn't going to rain, and so when the downpour came I was engaged with the active sheet of the spinnaker and all my rain gear was down below. Never did get it on. So I got pretty darn soaked, but I was active enough that I stayed warm regardless. When they brought the sail across and dumped a bucket's worth of water over my shoulders - that was chilly, but that was really the worst of it.

The crew (Doug, Tony, Luther, and myself) all pulled together in this mess, including dealing really well with tangled and knotted lines, sails twisted and wrapped in each other while trying to change them, and a variety of other sundry things. Unfortunately, we also had a pretty big blowup where Luther got fed up with JR and vice versa. Quite the blowup. Jen was captaining tonight, and well - JR was giving more advice than was warranted. What a mess. That probably would have been OK except that a couple of times JR left his post (he was working the main) and ran forward to help Tony on foredeck - leaving the main unmanned. So other folks stepped in, which just aggravated the situation for him even more. So the fight was probably actually a really good thing. Tensions had been building for quite some time when JR moved away from being captain to just a crewmember, and it was bound to blow sooner or later. You just can't work that close without some pressure releases happening. JR's pissed off and Luther's pissed off, but I think in the end it was good just because it made the point and got things out into the open. A rough way to deal, but there it is.

The worst part of the whole race, however, was the fact that I ripped out my pants at the very beginning of the race. Like from knee to crotch... the fabric had just gotten weak, and one lunge to bring in a sheet and it was all over. Given how large the rent in my pants was, I was surprised that Jen didn't notice until the very end of the race. Got plenty of "ooh baby"s after that though. Made things a tad breezier than I would have generally wanted. More than anything else, I was terribly embarrased.

a day

I guess today was a good break from reality for me. I worked from home and spent most of the morning and afternoon on the computer, doing remote builds, verifying code, and stuff like that. Operations is short staffed this week (and for the next three), so I'm covering more than the usual number of bases. Doing it from home makes it a little easier to not also get pulled in three different directions by random requests for help. Oh, they still come in, but now there's a higher barrier to "entry", so I know they're something more than someone couldn't remember the CVS update command and didn't want to look it up.

This evening's been a complete waste though - couldn't keep my mind on a damn thing. I tried sketching, programming a bit, and reading - but nothing it really suiting. I didn't even down all that much caffeine today, but it sure feels like it - that scattershot brain effect.

Code Snippets

Neat!

In an email today, Dan Wood announced a web page full of code snippets. Well, actually, a weblog of them. (yep, even has an RSS feed...)

That will be a wonderful resource to have available. Glancing through, I've already spotted items that I know I'll go back to look for again in the future.

slipping away

The day feels like it's just slipping away. I'm caught up in my thoughts, wondering a gazillion different things and not really getting anywhere. Folks at work seem to be moving into a pretty conservative mode - lots of chatter in the lunch room, at the dartboard, that sort of thing. It's sort of weird state we're in.

I actually got stuff done this morning, but really it doesn't feel like I'm getting much traction anywhere. Chasing down ephemeral things that either resolve out to a legitimate bug (only once), disappear before I can get grasp on them (most), or remain stubbornly uninformative about why they're intermittently occuring.

I dunno. Mostly it just feels like the day is randomly scattering about, and I'm not really able to grasp on to anything concrete right now.

A little music

Leah and Nate said we "had to see" this fellow who was playing a concert tonight. Well, obviously we're a hard sell, especially when Leah is recommending the gigs. The musician was a really incredibly talented fellow named John McCutcheon. I guess I just wasn't in the right circles, because this guy has been doing music for years and years, quite the name in folk music circles.

What's really interesting is a couple of web pages he keeps up on his site. One in particular struck me as highly amusing: The McCutcheon Index. A worthwhile read.

I bought his latest album (well, the latest one that is available in record stores - he's got one that's web and concert only) and plan on enjoying it while walking to work tomorrow.

sailing

Long day of sailing, and I got my ass kicked. Well, I mean we lost the races too, but personally I'm wiped out and a little broken. Well, not as bad as Ron. He wrapped his arm around the lifelines when he slipped and fell from the foredeck to keep from going overboard. Unfortunately, it ripped his shoulder 4" out of the socket. We gave up on that race to get him back to the dock and to see a dor...

We started about 9am, practiced a bit, and then began racing in earnest about 11am. It was windy, chilly (40's I think) and there was a little rain. Wind was in the 15 knot range, although it made it up to 20 a couple of times. 2-3' wind waves made for a rough ride. After Ron screwed up his shoulder, Luther screwed up his ankle - turned it. I've screwed up my lower back a bit, and pulled a groin muscle (not badly, but we'll see what tomorrow brings).

All in all, it was fun racing, but pretty hard on the body today.

Cart driving the horse

It's amazing to me how easily the cart gets to be driving the horse in today's work environment. A strange cascade of vortex occured today: I got a request to change our log rotation setups for the web servers. Well, there's a report that's due on Friday that uses the analysis of the web server data. Like most other places, we cull and collate the logs each sunday in the early AM. So, we can change it - now we'll cull and collate each friday morning so that analysis is done for the previous week and ready to go for whatever critical meeting it's for.

The only downside is I immediately got a complaint that the logs don't reflect the sunday to sunday data anymore. Now it's friday to friday and doesn't include that last friday's data - often our busiest time. Uh, yeah? Whad'ya expect? All this so that the data can be ready for a meeting on Monday morning.

Then again, maybe I'm just being whiny.

Spring cookout

Cool! I didn't even know that had continued. It's nice to hear. I remember several of the ones I've sprung on campus computing (and later IATS) over the various years. Invariably it would be a completely un-supported and un-announced thing that I spread across the entire building and utterly destroyed all productivity for a good few hours, if not an entire half day. We'd invite just about anyone who walked by, and few more than a few campus police some freshly cooked BBQ burgers as they drove up to check out the activities.

We have a company lunch pretty regularly where I work now, but it's not really the same to me. For one thing, doing a cookout style thingy downtown is, well, akward. Austin tried to arrange it a couple of months back, but it really fizzled down quite a bit. Better bets have been the going away lunches (we had one today for Chris and Cassy), which have tended to be a great deal of fun.

The best "outing" all together, though, has to have been the boat tie-up we had last summer just after/while John DeRosa resigned. We'd planned it for a good two months prior and had a fantastic time out there. I also recall our CEO being exceptionally pissed off afterwards. Apparently nobody had notified her that we were taking engineering and going out to play.

what the hell were they doing?

Earlier this evening (like 6:30pm) a couple of military jets screamed overhead on a track southeast over downtown Seattle. I couldn't figure out what they were doing... were they tracking a plane as escort? It's just very rare to have the jets actually cross over Seattle downtown airspace unless it's like SeaFair or something.

Other than that tidbit of excitement, I spent most of the day on errands or tied up to the computer.

Oh - MacOS X 10.2.5 update is out. Wild.

Warwalking

Steven Frank went 'warwalking' with his PDA today, and talked about the results a bit. At the end, he wonders: But free wireless networks everywhere at other people's expense, however wonderful, can't last forever... can it?

Well, I dunno. But I can make a guess. Some folks are doing it out of negligence/ignorance. But some folks are doing it very much on purpose... And you can see there's some really disruptive technology innovations that are being slowly coupled on top of 802.11b that are going to really shake things up - making it easier and easier for those folks setting up no-cost wireless access.

What's going to happen to the economics? Man, hard to say. The "last mile" is something all the telco's have been whining about for ages, but frankly I don't think they really care all that much if it gets solved. Will I still want DSL in my house if I can get wireless at the street corner? Well, as a matter of fact yes. There is, as it happens, a public wireless node less than 200 yards from my house. I want the DSL for the same reason everyone else has become addicted to it - instant on/always on.

I've considered offering wireless access to my neighbors in return for a share of the cost of the DSL. The folks on either side of my don't currently have any access other than dialup, but then they're not really itchin' for more than that either.

So - wether or not it will continue (I think) will largely be a question of legal manuevering and economics. Would I like it to continue? Damn straight. I've got zero problem with TMobile selling service at Hotspots - but frankly I think they're overcharging people brutally and I'd like to see a little competition push them down. What do you get with them over a free service? Well, one would hope some additional reliability. Maybe even (gasp!) good customer service. So push'em a little.. or a lot.

Unable to think

I sat staring at the monitor this afternoon and evening - the good old CRT - completely unable to think. I don't know what's wrong with me this evening, but nothing's flowing. Not a darn thing.

Don't really know what all to do about it. Karen's suggested I just read a book and write off the evening. Maybe that's the best bet. Pooka is certainly willing to take up some time - he's making it difficult to even type this entry. Laid out across both of my arms on my table.

A book and a couch then.

Lynn complained...

Lynn complained today that I don't put up enough pics, so here's some video from our trip to the San Juan Islands of some Dall's porpoises

A still shot of one of the pod breaching

Lime Kiln Lighthouse

Joe out Whale Watching...

Karen on the south beach of San Juan Island

Olympic Lights Bed and Breakfast

The coastline of San Juan Island (near the America's Camp)

More of the south beach of San Juan Island

sailing

I've resolved that I need to balance things up a little more - intellectual work has been my obsession to the point of disregarding some of my health. So - back to getting excercise and trying to be mindful about it. I've even got a new goal, I think. Although I'm trying to convince myself that I should do this and haven't quite yet. I'd like to volunteer and sail on the Lady Washington. There's a two week training course/does it work for both of us. I'm scared about all the usual crap, but mostly that I wouldn't work out. Gus would have a great laugh at this - one of things that would be critical is going aloft into the rigging to set things and sail the ship. Yep, gotta break through that fear of heights thing. I figure I also need to be in a hell of a lot better shape for doing that stuff. Crewing the 30' sailboat that Jen and JR run in races is one thing - I'm not often hauling myself up a mast there.

Karen's convinced that I should do it. I'm interested, but scared. Actually, I'm excited as hell about the experience. She's all behind my applying, and in fact told me to get in my application immediately, as they'd probably be swamped when the movie came out. It would be something that not many can claim to have done, and an experience - even if the two weeks didn't work out positively - that I would remember the rest of my life. After all, how many people actually get to sail on a 18th C. Brig?

We had a blast at the Tall Ships Festival last year, and I've been enthralled with these guys ever since. But then I happened to go back to the Lady Washington's page after I saw the preview for Pirates of Carribean. It turns out that Lady Washington served in that movie - as the Interceptor. In fact, it's currently en route back from the Carribean, where it finished the filming earlier this year.

I've just printed out the application form, so I'm going to try for it.

Back into the swing...

Getting back into the swing of things has been a little tough. Our relaxing mini-vacation has really worn us out, and both Karen and I had a hell of a time getting up this morning. I finally did, and walked into work.

Work was interesting today, surprisingly so.

San Juan

Last night Karen and I stayed at the Olympic Lights Bed and Breakfast on San Juan Island. It's a wonderful B&B, and if you're looking for a quiet getaway, I heartily recommend it. The hosts were fantastic - helpful and friendly, but not overbearing in any way. They provided all sorts of great information for Karen and I (that being our first visit to the Island).

For a day and half sort of trip, we did a hell of a lot while relaxing. We took off early Saturday morning, and caught the mid-morning (~9:30am) ferry from Anacortes over to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. That ferry trip takes about an hour, and wriggles it's way right through the heart of the archipelego that is the San Juan islands. There's several (four+), but we only stayed and visited on one of them - the "main island". The other large island to visit is "Orcas", which we'll have to go wander around some other time.

Once in Friday Harbor, we grabbed a bite to eat and wandered around looking through all the art galleries there. Without a doubt, my favorite gallery there was WaterWorks. Well laid out, a wide variety of art, and very professionally displayed. The other galleries were OK, but this one was really the best.

After the art gallery walk and tour, we headed down south and started looking for beaches. I'd brung a tide chart, and low tide was at 1:00pm or so that afternoon, so we tried to go tidepooling. Well, that wasn't very successful, but we had some really great walks along the beaches (they're the rocky kinds - little balls of granite and basalt that have been water smoothed and vary in size from a marble to a bit larger than your fist). We also took a little hike through a park called "The America's Camp", which wandered over a few hills until it dropped us through a very nice forest onto a beach on the sheltered side of the island.

Today, after learning that the time change took place, we hauled our butts up to Snug Harbor (hard to find, but a neat little harbor/marina) where we caught up with Captain Jim for Maya's Whale Watching Tours. Never did see any Orca (although they'd been spotted in the area a few days before), but we had a wonderful time watching some dall porpoises and checking out a variety of bird species that inhabit the corners and coves of the area. It was a great ride, if a bit chilly at times, and Karen and I got some great pictures. You'll have to wait to see a few of them, because my Mac is being difficult and not recognizing the digital camera at the moment. I suspect because we drained the battery so far down... But. With luck, I'll also have some decent video to possibly post up here as well. I think I got some good video of the porpoises racing around the boat as we floated with the engines off in the middle of their pod.

So that's it for the San Juan Islands report. It's a great place to sneak away to.

friday

hey, what's there to say - it's a friday. That's nice in and of itself.

Karen and I are planning a little day-getaway up in the San Juan islands this weekend. Haven't been up there before, but everyone says it's beautiful. Spend a day walking around the beaches, and try to take in a whale-watching cruise as well. Obviously, time to go charge up the digital camera batteries and grab the extra flash card...

looking for some open source solutions?

Might I recommend Chris Abajian and Espresso Software. I've worked with Chris for two years now, and he's a bright, bright guy. So... if you're looking to get a little work done, he's your man.

Hydra

What a cool idea! Hydra is a text editor using the Rendezvous functionality to allow two (or more?) people to work on editing a file together. Specifically, it's focused on the white-board sort of concept where it pertains to pair programming. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the mighty BBEdit, but it's pretty darn lean, slick, and low cost!

(Oh, and I really like their logo...)

Africa, Safari, Ken... (Bereksin)

Holy shit, I'm falling out of my seat! Ken Bereskin has posted to his weblog!.

More seriously, he's apparently returned from a trip on a safari to Africa, and has an amazing collection of photo's available. I'm thinking there's some amazingly kick-ass desktops in that collection...

going away party quote

No name, but you can get the gist... Normally I'd censor this from the writing, but it was just too good. I didn't even say it!

1: "And now, I'd like to have a touching and elegant moment... which" [interupted]

2: "Bend over Ken"

(silence as everyone took that in)

1: "Here's to 2!"

Movable Type plugins

After finishing way too large a glass of exceptionally potent sangria, I saw this article on OReillyNet: Developing Movable Type Plug-ins, which looked pretty good. Not that I'm making one, but I've enjoyed using the movable type system for my own stuff. Like this blog.

MacOS X Hacks

MacOS X Hacks became available on OReilly's Safari today, so I snagged it onto my bookshelf. Some nifty things in there, although to be honest I only took a quick peek because I was trying to be immersed in a completely different project - to varying degrees of success.

My two week trial of Safari was up today - so I've moved into a full subscription membership. Not sure I'll keep it forever, but for now it's coming in damn handy. Keeping me from spending a fortune at Barnes and Noble for some books that I'll probably only need for a short bit of time.

worn out

i'm worn out today. really dragging.

the afternoon has been a sequence of query, wait for response, query again... with a periodic burst of scripting to automate some data updates within our database. Not pretty, fast, elegant or anything like that - just nessecary. And something I've been kicking onto the back burner for about 10 days now.

energy level is crap, and there's lots more to do - both at work and at home. I'm not tired exactly, just of mentally exhausted.

quieter...

spent part of the morning working through a build process for that Mac project we've been doing. I saw that there'd be several requests for builds at weird hours, so it seemed pretty rational to have a quick update, build, and deployment process ready.

Turns out that it's a bit tricky to do all the disk imaging stuff, but BBum and Mike Trent wrote up a beautiful script that illustrates how to do all the work.

So once I figured it out, I realized that what's up there now is really only a temporary release process, and that the time it would take to revise the scripting and set up and test the process is probably more than it will take to just do the builds and deployment manually. So that's on the back burner again, and I've turned my attention to fixing a couple people's CVS enlistments and getting back to the backlog of work items I have on my plate.

I know there's going to be an implicit expectation that I continue to put as much time as I can on this Mac project, but I just don't see that as likely if I'm going to continue to make progress elsewhere. On top of all that, we're moving into a short-staff mode for the next month while folks are heading out on vacation, which is definitely going to increase my workload (I cover a fair bit of that work while they're gone).

Ugh

I'm with Gus. If there's ever a day to stay away from reading anything on the Internet, today is the day. Shit, it even started a few hours early from my point of view... Email rolling in late last night. Course, I'm on the west coast, and the damn east coaster's are 4 hours ahead...