Rhonabwy

Simplicity is power

Michael Toy posted some fears(?) and thoughts about simplicity and UI with Chandler. I posted some comments in there, and so did Hamish.

I went back to read them this afternoon (to see what else got posted there) and thought it was an interesting enough thread to want to link up to it here.

I particularly like Hamish's comment:

"Simplicity is power"

nephew

This is my nephew, Sam:

Don't be fooled by his pleasant and cute demeanor - it's a ploy. He only appears harmless in this photograph to lull you into a state of unawares...

reading, writing, thinking

Slurping on a latte this late morning, pawing through the Fall 2003 O'Reilly Catalog which just showed up in my mailbox. Some interesting tidbits in there, but what really caught my eye was Tim OReilly "inside-the-front-flap" soapbox, where he has this essay thing that's a repeat of his baseline talk over the past few months. I don't mean that in a bad way - it's worthy goals that bear repeating, and if repeating them makes it more likely to happen - good for all of us.

The title was "All software should be network aware", which followed a sort of set of hypothesis down into the realm of buddy lists should be some address book commonality between all apps. Make take away is that this is so that we can manage identity ourselves to some degree, enabling (hopefully) software to do more on our behalf when we give it such permission.

In lines with my own programming projects, I'm thinking about now just how my code will work inside itself, but how it should work with everything/anything else. It's not a terribly far stretch to see the power of enabling a data import/export mechanism based on XML so that it's immenently readable and process-able. But I think the base concept goes a lot farther.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, I'm a huge proponent of the philosophy of "lots of small pieces working together" that is Unix and one of it's baseline tenets. The OReilly piece also quickly reminded me of Weinberger's Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, which espouses a number of the same ideas, taken further down the logical expansion path. (By the way, there's a fun Kids Version available on the website as well).

I don't yet know how I want to make this connection into my own small projects, but I think there's something there - powerful - yet to be enabled. I look at Java and the things that have been done, and see a lot of blind alleys and overly complex systems that have been developed. It seems a natural tendency to make things more complex (which I perceive has happened libraries and frameworks with Java), but I want to see things become more simple.

I'm leading myself somewhere, but I don't know where yet.

don't see this very often

You don't see this very often:

I guess I just take a perverse pleasure in seeing the big guys fall down every now and then.

Nice.

Since I'm geeking out tonight, it's worth mentioning that OReillyNet is hosting some really sweet content on setting up a mail host with QMail and friends - these are the kinds of instructions that are just wonderful to have. Enough detail to get you moving super-quick, but references to all the relevant pieces so you can get in detail as much as you need. Joe Stump (and his editor) did a really nice job with it!

NSTableView debugging

So a tidbit on debugging a particular Cocoa problem...

I had this NSTableView and all the code set up to where I expected all the columns would be editable, with the data being nicely stored away in an NSMutableArray of a little custom data object I created. Really simple.

Only when I was working with it, I found that one column wouldn't edit and one would. I double checked my nibs - I had the identifier set up the way I wanted and the appropriate methods on my data object. In this case, it was "shortDescription" and the data object had
- (NSString)shortDescription
and
- (void)setShortDescription(NSString *)aDesc

I thought maybe that I'd screwed up by not including some delegate mechanism - but that wasn't the issue (I made one, and it was called all proper like and everything). No matter what I fiddled with, it seemed that – editColumn:row:withEvent:select: just wasn't getting invoked (breakpoint was never getting tripped and the NSLog message didn't fire).

The Solution:

So, in the end, I changed the names of the identified and methods. I must have screwed up the typing, but I never was able to figure out how to debug into asking it what it was doing in there. My methods became:
- (NSString)desc
and
- (void)setDesc(NSString *)aDesc

My identified in the nib got switched to "desc" as well - and it all worked like a champ. I'm convinced I had some typo in there that was just invisibly failing, but I never did find it.

Lesson learned (yes, again) - keep it simple, stupid.

update:
Oh - and I should add this. I found a really nice demo on NSTableView linked from the CocoaDev wiki site that Steven Frank runs. If you're digging around in there, the code is neat and tidy - easy to read. I recommend it for a lesson on how to make some of the components work together.

trails and books

After the morning's talk, I headed out with Karen on a long-promised "do something outside" trip. In this case, it was grab some food at University Village and then walk east from there on the Burke Gilman trail for a while. (On this map, we walked from U Village to where it crosses NE 65th St). Our feet are a tad sore now - but it was a nice walk.

After the walk, we rested our feet in the U. Village Barnes and Noble (probably one of the best ones in the city - an amazing selection because (I suppose) it's focused on catering to the University that is right next door), where I picked up
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. It's part of a new series he's working on - The Baroque Cycle. I'd seen some reviews that were favorable, and I've loved his writing in the past, so when it was there with a 20% off discount sticker - well, it came home with me.

We also picked up a new Charles De Lint book while we were there: Spirits in the Wires. Haven't even taken a peek yet, but he's one of those authors that I'll spash down cash for just based on his name. I've found a few of his things I didn't like as well as others, but in general I haven't been disappointed by any of his work.

craftsman

John invited me to an interesting talk this morning on Craftsman Bungalows - one of which we happen to own. It's funny actually, because the house we owned in Missouri was really a much better example of a craftsman style house (although it wasn't one of the small bungalows...) with it's exterior decor.

The house we own now - well, the outside doesn't really look like a craftsman in any particular way at all, other than it's a small house. It's the interior that really shows it off - a tight, compressed floorplan with bump-outs and areas for builtins that I suspect were simply never built.

Karen and I have talked about improvements to the home - and one of the many ideas is simply filling in some of those built-ins to bring the interior into the style that so many folks (including me) appreciate and enjoy. We've also talked about how we might expand the house in other ways (like adding a second story) - all of this is way beyond our current scale of projects - but hey, you gotta dream...

can't... focus...

That's the problem with playing a video game on the computer. It wears on your eyes as much as reading or coding or email - so after a few hours of it, you can't just take an easy break and move to one of those other tasks... grumble

On the flip side, I've made nice progress on a little app that I brainstormed about the other evening. Haven't written anything about it here yet - I think I'll probably wait until it's a little further along. It's not massive or anything, but it's been months since I dug into Objective-C and the frameworks that Apple provides, so I'm a bit behind the curve with the multi-document architecture that's been provided. It's really powerful - in that I'm getting a lot of functionality knocked out very quickly, but I'm missing a lot of the little pieces that I need to know to make it all really work together tightly.

2 Apple stores in Seattle

As of today, there's now 2 Apple stores in Seattle. The University Village store opened up today, and I went by to check it out. Nice store, nice layout, nice location. The only downside from my point of view is that it had lousy public transit service (all of U Village does) to the rest of Seattle.

Made for a bit of extended walking to get home afterwards - I wandered up and through most of the UW Campus to get to a bus to take me back to downtown Seattle where I could transfer to heading home.

Looking at the world a little differently

I was pondering through the Wired News this morning when I came across this article about retina-like silicon designed to see like an Opus. The story talks about how the system was designed to optimize for edge detection - which made me think about what it would be to watch a scene in motion through edge detection alone.

I know I could simulate it by making some kind of display filter that overlaid quicktime or something - or if I could even capture the video and run it through some convolutions prior to encoding and storage. Who knows, maybe it wouldn't even be useful. But it'd be interesting.

WASTE

Interesting tidbit. WASTE is back online, this time on SourceForge. You may recall this particular bit of coding legerdemain was the stuff that AOL pulled from NullSoft's website mere hours after it's posting.

Note that this isn't available on NullSoft's site...

not surprising

Not surprising, given that AtStake is consulting for Microsoft...

Redmond

The area around redmond - well, it's a fucking twisty maze of little streets, all alike.

I took Karen over to a Microsoft Playtest this evening, and after I dropped her off (about 6:45pm), I thought I'd go grab a bite to eat at some local food joint. Well, there's plenty of those and that part didn't take long.

Now finding my way back around after dinner was a pain in the butt. Maybe I'm just mentally deficient (although I doubt it), but I always seem to end up pulling U-turns on the small roads leading out of Redmond that I manage to get myself onto, thinking they'll link up with where I want to go in short order. Forget about the idea that the place has a grid layout, or even that the streets remain somewhat parallel. Or that the street numbers will incremement or decrement in any sort of logical order.

After twenty minutes of random driving, I did eventually find my way onto the road that I had been hoping for. I'm sure I could have back-tracked earlier and figured it all out - but I'm hoping (or maybe just being persistently stubborn) that repetition of driving those bloody streets will drive some cognative map of them into my head.

If you decide to visit Redmond, take a freakin' map.

But can they make it actually work?

CNET is reporting that IBM has inked some large Grid Computing deals. I have no doubt that IBM can make it happen, but I'd be really, really surprised if they can make it happen either now or efficiently...

I recall initial concepts moving into this space - and in terms of ideas, IBM's been ahead of the curve since the beginning. Virtualization and dynamic allocation of resources was the heart of their mainframe computing platforms. I administered a couple of SP2 frames in the early 90's - which included some in depth software that's about imaging machines and remote control of clusters (like a really rickety beowulf cluster with badly written shell and expect scripts controlling the whole mess).

IBM's got great ideas, and even some really great products - but I've seen an unfortunately large hole between what they say they can deliver and what actually comes into the customer premises.

I really hope they pull this off - it'll push the envelope of computing infrastructure into some areas that I think have been needed for several years. I don't have the confidence that Sun would manage it either though.

Monitors...

Oh - and Gus pointed these out yesterday:

Grand Canyon Monitors

Darwin

In a little more concrete news, Apple's released the latest updates to Darwin (6.7 & 6.8) - pretty much the core OS goodies that underlie MacOS X. I haven't used it directly as such, but I could see dropping it right onto a PC and keeping a BSD box running with it.

AntiSearch Engine?

PC Magazine has an article on IBM's AntiSearch Engine, that really says impressively little about it.

A little Googling finds some more info at IBM's Research Web Site - but in the end of what I've found (admittedly not looking to hard), WebFountain is simply the latest hype mechanism using the well known searching buzz words in a marketing attempt to see if anyone's really interested.

As of friday

make that two Apple Stores in Seattle. The most recent to open this Friday at 6pm down in the University Village area.

Interesting tidbit in their add - they're apparently going to be giving away an iPod on Saturday (post college football game) for every point that the Huskies score against Stanford. heh.

updates, updates... and movies

On the geek side of things - have the new seed of Panther installed, and at the same time upgraded my desktop home system to MacOS 10.2.8 when I noticed that the code had rolled out from Apple last night.

On the non-geek side, I spent the evening (while I was doing all this installing) watching El Mariachi and Desperado - what I sort of viewed as the requisite backstory to Once Upon A Time In Mexico, which is currently showing at the Cinerama.

I felt compelled to see this latest flick, simply because Johnny Depp was in it. But having viewed the previous films, I'm pretty impressed. I liked the first film best - simply because it had more of a fairy-tale quality to it. I liked the dream sequences and the idea that this legend was not getting really born, but a person transformed into it by circumstance.

The second was OK, but I'm not a super big fan of Antonio Banderas (I don't dislike him either, just not a very interesting ar to me). Seeing Selma Hayek nude was a definite plus - but her breasts, while quite nice, really didn't advance the story much to me. And the second one was really more of a pure action flick as opposed to what I liked in the first movie - transformation of the character.

another reinstall

pulled down the latest seed from Apple, so it's another reinstall on the laptop. I've got to admit, I'm getting darn tempted to go live with this stuff... but fortunately some sanity is keeping me from installing prerelease software on both my machines...

lists in css

Dan Gillmor talks about why he loves the web - in this case a wonderful example tutorial of how to make various kinds of lists all with cascading style sheets. Really nicely done!

Farewell Galileo

Farewell Galileo

Generalists

Jeremy Zwadony has an entry up with a couple of quotes - one of which really caught my eye:

From Jon Udell (Infoworld):

In software development as in science, breakthroughs often occur when insights flow across disciplinary boundaries. The condurs of these flows are typically generalists who belong to several (or many) communities and who form bridges among them.

Of course I see myself as a generalist, so this is sort of one of those squishy quotes that makes me feel good about myself.

Citing your sources...

Okay,

Admittedly, it didn't take long to find the publication referenced in this NewsFar article, but it was annoying to have that research be online and no link to it, ya know?

There's a lot of really good detail online - it'd be nice if folks would start actually USING the web to cite their sources sometimes...

BTW: It only took one search on that broken search engine to find the publication...

Concert

Karen and I went to a concert tonight, a benefit hosted for Viry Music, which supports acoustical music in the region. Some really great folks took the stage tonight, including the amazing Leah Kaufman, Uncle Bonzai Band, Scott Katz, Matt Price, Joe Crookstone, and a few folks I hadn't heard before that I only recall as Reggie and Richard - but make up the Snake Oil Peddlers. Good music, good price, good cause. Can't really beat that.

Cruise Pictures...

No editing, no culling - all the good, bad, blurry, and so forth pictures from our cruise.

I've got another set of pictures to put together from our stay in the parks...

Update: Pictures from those Disney parks we visited are now up as well.

Karen and Sue

Drummin'

Metadata and Search

Joi Ito has some interesting "out of the blue" commentary about Microsoft, Metadata, Search, and Google, and Scoble commented back about it.

What I find so very telling is the phrase:

I've been involved in a bunch of secret conversations about blogging and syndication inside Microsoft and so far I am happy to say we've been taking the high road. (emphasis mine)

So... would you be so willing to tell us if Microsoft wasn't taking the high road? Duh, of course not.

Then William Grasso is complaining about how it's all gone bad, in a strangely times realm of questions about meta-data, search, and making is useful.

Writing

Sounds like JDD had one of those writing moments... bang, there goes a topic from a book (he called it a chapter, but I'm betting it's the same thing).

I've got a friend in Missouri who writes as a side-line - fiction mostly. I wonder if he relishes killing off characters sometimes. I kinda bet he does - at least sometimes. grin Other times I'd expect it's kind of hard to see a favorite reach an "untimely" end.

I can't do that...

I started out my computing career in tech support, and still have quite a number of friends that do that for a living. So it always has, and continues to, amaze me when I hear someone say "I can't do that..."

Today I had a few hours to burn between 1 and 3pm (Karen was teaching up at Northgate), so I thought I'd stop by and check out the local Mac user's group new digs up on Stone Ave N. near Northgate. I ended up helping a couple of folks there - one person had a question about Virtual PC, and the other was having trouble installing a printer.

The one that amazed me was the lady with the troublesome printer. (In fact, I think her machine has some trouble - as the Finder crashed multiple times on me, which is just freakish from my point of view about MacOS X). Anyway, it sort of boiled down to "We should do a clean reinstall of the OS" and see if that rules out any nasties - after that we're down to potential hardware issues. So while we were talking about it, so continually said "I can't do that..."

The thing that really tweaked me about this is that she's a teacher. I thought (smack me here) that teachers were sort of trained to recognize and discourage THAT VERY BEHAVIOR in kids! I recall tutoring math and later physics in high school and college, and having one of the biggest stumbling blocks for people be "But I'm BAD at whatever subject" of "I can't do that...".

What is it? Come on folks, like wake the *%*!$! up! If you think you can't do it, you'll never be able to! Join the world of trying things out - experiment a little. PLAY for christ's sake!

ugh.

The new digs are nice - looks like it MUCH more easily seats a crowd of 30 instead of that tiny little room over on Eastlake that maybe sat a presentation of 10 folks comfortably.

sleep

Took today off as I figured yesterday, which worked out well. Spent most of the morning sleeping and napping, with little bouts of unpacking and moving things about. This afternoon I went out and took in a matinee flick with Nathan: Bubba Ho-Tep, which I actually have to say I'd recommend. It was a corny flick, but well done and with pretty good dialog. One of the better "B grade" flicks. Wasn't even sure that it was Bruce Campbell there as "Evlis".

Had a quiet evening, and then met some friends down at the local coffee shop for a latte and chatting on our return to Seattle. The down side to the day is that Karen's been pretty wiped out all afternoon - having caught what I had about a day and a half behind me. I know she doesn't want to admit it, but I think she'll be effectively wiped out for the next day or two wether she likes it or not. She stayed up pretty late tonight (also getting her converted back to the Seattle time zone has been rough) which is good. She woke up at 4:30am this morning, ready and rar'in to go. Fortunately, she didn't wake ME up at that hour.

I think I'll actually be pretty happy to have monday roll around here in a few days and knock me back onto a schedule. Although the relaxing has been wonderful, I'm feeling probably more than a tad disconnected from every-day reality right now. I should probably just shut up and enjoy that, but I'm wanting to get a little more grounded again.

compelled to write

something i've found is that after writing almost daily for two years, taking two weeks off from that habit is really, really hard to do.

Fortunately, I took a paper notebook with me, so I had something to scribble into for my random thoughts and notes. Things I wished were better with the cruise, with Disney parks, or just thoughts and inspirations as they came to me while we were out having fun and taking it easy.

I could tell it was time to get back home though, as I began to start getting some anxiety dreams about work a day before we returned.

The Report

Just now pulled out the laptop to start a little writing - I've been spending most of my day bumbling around the house in my sweats, drinking tea and generally enjoying the cool and light rain that's eveloped Seattle. But I've been wanting to write about the trip, so here tis:

We've been planning this trip for the better part of the last 9 months. We wanted to do something good for our 10th anniversary, and since Shrub was inciting the US to war, we decided that touring about Europe for a bit was probably not the best idea.

Instead, we opted for the 7-day eastern carribean Disney Cruise. The cruise included stops at St. Maarten, St. Thomas, and Disney's private Island in the Bahamas - Castaway Cay.

We had four days at sea, and three days on shore. The cruise was wonderful and relaxing, and although I'd feared I might get sick during it, I didn't (that was later). St. Maarten was OK - not a place I'd really race to get back to, but it was fun. We wandered around it's beach a bit, went snorkelling (the snorkeling wasn't so hot, but the guys doing the excusion were fun), and generally enjoying hanging out on a island in the caribbean.

St. Thomas was a blast - we did a little shoping and the really cool thing - an Atlantis Submarine Tour. The snorkelling would have been MUCH better here, but frankly I think we saw a hell of a lot more with a passenger sub that took us down 90' around the reefs of St. John (next door island).

Castaway Key had, by far, the best snorkeling with their shore excursion Seahorse Snorkel Adventure. A motored catamaran took us half way to another nearby island (this wasn't operated by Disney, but by some folks living on the nearby Island) and we snorkeled around in the reef. It was some incredible scenery, all close to the surface (sometimes within 9" - as in you couldn't snorkel over it). I also hadn't realized how shallow some of that area is - the entire area directly between the two islands didn't get below 30' deep.

The days at sea included me wearing a tux, not once but twice, in support of doing the "formal" thing up right. We attended a wine tasting, had a high tea, an absolutely wonderful dinner at the formal restaraunt on board, and generally ate ourselves silly in between bouts of other interesting things to do on the ship. Never once, in the seven days, was I bored or at a loss for things to do. If anything, I sometimes felt pressured to "do as much as I could" since we were on the vacation.

We had a lovely stateroom that was handed to us on a silver platter - we received a "complementary upgrade" to a "category 4" room. Which means it was a bigger than usual stateroom with a verandah overlooking the port side of the ship. Sooner or later, I'll get up some pics - we have to download them all first. We filled up 2 128Mb compact flash cards and a 64Mb compact flash card with pictures from all over.

After the criuse, which ended Saturday, we went to Orlando, FL and enjoyed a few days at the Disney World parks, staying at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. We'd been planning on staying at the Port Orleans French Quarter resort, which I really like - but Disney offered us a really minor cost upgrade to Animal Kingdom since they were closing the Port Orlean French Quarter down while were going to be there for rennovations. And man, am I glad we did (take the upgrade).

It's themed as a lodge in Kenya, and had three seperate "savanahs" with African animals in them - right outside your balcony. In the one we overlooked, there were Giraffe, Anku Cattle, and one of the many variations of antelope. It's pretty cool to wake up in the morning, head over to the balcony, and see a giraffe hanging out, eating his breakfast. Although this is one of the expensive resorts at Disney, they've definitely done it right - with all sorts of really nice amenities. One evening we ate at their dinner buffet place - Boma - and tried all sorts of different african dishes (another example of us eating to far excess). We attended a presentation on Botswana by a fellow who was a guide there for Safari's (and I learned a hell of a lot about Botswana!). We learned a fair bit of Swahili (very unexpected), when we ran into an artisan at Epcot who was carving wooden animals - at the time a "mose kobe" - an Old Turtle.

We did the expected Magic Kingdom thing, spent some time running about Disney MGM studios, but I really enjoyed our time at the resort itself, at the Animal Kingdom park, and at Epcot the best. Oh - and the show La Nouba - the Cirque du Soleil show that's currently running down at the Disney performance area they call "West Side". I'd highly recommend the show to anyone who can get to see it.

It wasn't until three days ago (about tuesday) that I started coming down with this cold, so really the vacation wasn't terribly impacted by it. It sucks now, of course, but it was nice that I didn't catch it while out snorkelling or something.

I'm sure there's a thousand other things I could tell you - but those are the highlights that I can think of while I'm sitting here. Some folks may think a Disney Cruise is really wonky or something, but it's really incredible. There's the disney stuff all over, but the cruise line is one place where that corporation really shines in "doing it right". There's kids on it, but if you don't want to be around them, it's very easy to not be bothered by them. There's huge amounts of programs, shows, and excursions - and the boat itself is lovely, large, and very comfortable. If you're thinking about a cruise ever, well - check it out.

back online

Well, I'm back online, and back home. Karen and I spent the last 10 or so days anywhere between St. Maarten and Orlando, Florida - enjoying a 7 day cruise through the caribbean with dear Isabelle basically chasing us back up to Florida. We completely lucked out with beautiful weather every single day, although I am seriously not used to the heat and humidity. Great details, and bazillions of pictures, all yet to be unpacked and gone through.

Right now I'm sporting the joyous addition of a fine head cold (just in time for the flights back home), but I'm in good spirits regardless.

More later...

Incommunicado

Well, I'll write y'all again in a few weeks. I'm going incommunicado for a while to disconnect and celebrate my 10th wedding anniversary (this September 11th). We've got some really cool plans for the "great disconnect", and the best of them is going to be a complete break from the normal media outlets.

Greg Johnson

If you were involved with computing at any time in the past three decades at the University of Missouri, you probably at least knew of Greg Johnson. Well, I found out yesterday that Sept 2nd was his last day at MU, and that he's heading off into the wilds of the public school system to become a teacher.

Although I loved to rant about how mean Greg was upon occasion (usually when he was forcing me to look up an answer as opposed to just giving it to me), he was one of the single best resources that I ever had at MU to learning most of the trade. He was, in fact, most of the security background that I started with - as for the past decade or more he had acted as the local "bit cop", trying to encourage experiementation and interest in computing while keeping things in line legally. Not exactly a job without some risk.

I wrote Greg, and he sounds excited about moving forward with teaching and learning about learning. I hope this move is completely his own volition, and equally expect that I'll never know if it wasn't - he's a pretty circumspect kind of guy.

So for all my scattered geek friends from MU out there, drop him a note and wish him well - his MU email is still operational for a bit as he's student teaching. (I've got to admit, the thought of Greg "student teaching" makes me start to snicker and giggle, given how many things he's taught over the years)

wierd night

Sort of anxious tonight, don't really want to sleep although I'm getting somewhat tired. I skipped the potential caffeine this evening, but even still I'm sort of wired up. The night's pretty quiet around the house - the sound of a computer fan and the cat's ever-cycling-water fountain being the loudest things in the house at the moment.

chopped the hair

Chopped the hair - it is way shorter now. First time I've had a hair cut that didn't involve a trimmer and razor in five years. I supposed it's fair to note that it's the first cut I've had in 3 years as well.

(image courtesy of the iSight - and it shows up a tad dark under Windows)

My sister in law suggested I donate it, so I have - to a program called Locks of Love. 16" of hair - it's going to be really weird sleeping without all that tonight, or taking the next shower and washing it.

rafting

Spent the weekend down in Merlin, Oregon with Karen's aunt Pat and Uncle Bill. They have a place outside of the tiny burg of Merlin right on the Rogue River. So naturally, we spent the 95 degree day out rafting through some level 1 and 2 rapids and riffles on a two hour trip that was a blast, but has left me sore and with a fair share of blisters on my hands.

It was a long drive down there (8 hours or so), but well worth it. We still have yet to get out and see Crater Lake or some of the other incredible attractions, but it's all on the list.

Got back home to some less than pleasant news - aside from some friends of mine near "gettin' it" on the Kansas Turnpike, one of our central database machines has decided that it's just not going to work anymore. Have yet to see a console on it, but it's been effectively kaput for a day now and our support agreement doesn't kick in until 8am today because we got the cheapy version to save some cashola. Ah well, it goes. Everyone's anxious to hear what is wrong with it (as am I), so I'm heading off to see what I can make from some core's myself until we hear back from the support group.

Floods

I found out this evening that several good friends back in the midwest were almost caught in this recent flood, which has left 4 dead and 1 missing as the Kansas Turnpike took a hell of a hit. Three of them escaped their vehicles to rising floodwaters, with two of them being brave (possibly stupid) and forcing other folks out of their cars to higher ground as well. Apparently they watched several (then empty) vehicles get washed into the creek and away while they stood behind a police barricade, unable to really do anything about it.

Karen and I saw the weather news and the string of thunderstorms wiping across the midwest, but had no idea that flash floods had struck the highways until we got home this evening.