Rhonabwy

snow

The snow from this morning is all but gone. A few revenant snowmen lurk in the yards around here (and some in Capitol Hill as well) - but most traces of the several inches we had are now gone.

Even as I say that, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there was snow falling around the fireworks at the Seattle Center. It's 37 outside and dropping, the sky is spitting in what will clearly become sleet in the next hour or so. I wouldn't be surprised if at 1am, we were seeing the same sight of snow falling and coating and layering on the sidewalks, trees, railings, and bushes.

I guess we'll see in the morning.

trains, planes, and automobiles

End of the day, end of the year.

Well, it turns out that we get to keep my grandmother here a few more days! When we got to the station, they had cancelled the 11 train which runs from Seattle down to Los Angeles. Of course, their website didn't have the info - which would have saved us a good two hours of standing around in lines... I'd even checked it! Sometimes the updated data there is OK, sometimes it just sucks.

So I actually spent most of the day at work after I got my grandmother settled back home again. We've got another attempt set for the 4th of Jan, but this time I'm calling before we head down to the station.

Nathan and Leah invited us over for a truly magical meal with Phillip and Cindy, Ari, and Ayla (I think I'm spelling their names correctly) - Leah's brother and his family. They're really neat folks, and I wish I could have spent more time there this evening, but I could tell my grandmother was getting pretty tired - and Karen was even starting to droop a bit. If it had just been Karen, I would have let her sack out on the couch and spent the wee hours chatting with Nate and Phillip, but I guess I'm into responsibility tonight.

I got to try a new kind of wine this evening, the spelling of which will have to wait for another blog entry. It's a desert wine - intense, rich, thick, and not a little alcoholic. It reminded me of a fuller flavored ice wine, but with a very different texture to it. (Ice wine was also on the menu, but we didn't get to it tonight - Karen was being looped by the wonderful wines we'd had already and was getting tense about me having any more)

Tomorrow I'm heading back there, though - thought I'd sit the kids and amuse them (and myself) with various antics. Don't know if my grandmother will come along for the ride, or if she'll stick around the house and continue to be caught up in that book we just gave her. They're really neat kids, and they might as well be my own niece and nephew for as close as we are to Nathan and Leah. I even asked for any instructions regarding them - ways to (or not to) discipline if it was needed, etc. The only word I got was not to feed Ari peanuts, as he's rather alergic to them. Sounds like a plan.

snow

Got up from attempting to sleep tonight and gazed outside for a while. It's beautiful out there, with at least an inch of the powdery white stuff covering the world. Christmas lights on nearby houses are showing up beautifully as well, reflecting and coloring the twillight bright outside.

I heard a few folks shouting and hollering a few minutes ago - I guess a few more people have figured out we've got a layer of snow down.

Haven't the slightest idea if this is reserved for the top of Queen Anne and similiar elevations (all of 400'), or if the snow extends downtown. If it does, traffic tomorrow will be incredibly nasty. Seattle just doesn't know how to drive in inclement weather - including any snow on the ground. This wouldn't even phase a midwesterner, let alone someone in the northeast where they get it by the foot, not by the inch.

last evening visiting

Today was the last day of my grandmother's visit. We had a great evening including dinner at Ray's Boat House followed by an evening around the table playing card games and visiting. She's been here for two weeks, and it's just been wonderful. If she hadn't come out here, there would be pretty much no way we could have arranged a visit of that duration for quite a while. Well, and have me keep my job that is.

Tomorrow morning, we head to the train station, and she's on her way south to Los Angeles to visit some more family down there. She'll be somewhere in transit on New Years Eve, but she thought that was about perfect: "I'd just sleep through it anyway..."

It's going to be a bummer seeing her go though.

er, whoops...

A new version of points is out... Not exactly as planned I expect.

conversation

MacOS X irc client Conversation has a new version out. Not too shabby a client - I've been using it fairly frequently lately.

Return of the King

Today was the day. Finally saw it, and I liked it. I can see where some scenes might appear in an "extended DVD release", and others that were cut from the movie - but it didn't do too much damage to the story overall.

fire on Capitol Hill?

Anyone know anything about the fire in Capitol Hill this morning? I was coming back from there at 7am this morning, and as I was driving up the side of Queen Anne, you could clearly see a large plume of smoke and fire (at least one lot, maybe more) from the west side of the hill, maybe 2-4 blocks south of St. Mark's Cathedral...

Update: KOMO TV News had the story a few minutes ago. It was at the 900 block of 13th Ave East. Apparently everyone got out okay, although the house and a nearby van are a complete loss. I'm not suprised given that I could see it from Queen Anne, and I'm really impressed that the fire department managed to keep that one to a single dwelling. It was so large that I thought they might not be able to, regardless of best efforts.

python

I think I need to stop screwing around with Python and just jump into it more. I've started a little more with that just this evening, messing around more with some CGI work in Python.

The thing that I just love is the exploratory nature that you can get with interactive python, messing around with functions and commands - especially when you have readline support and rlcompleter enabled. (frustratingly, MacOS X doesn't come with readline enabled by default, so you have to go get pieces and add it in to make it work)

Once you've got that working, though.. man, it's a breeze to fiddle around and try things out. I'm a big "build up the software" kinda guy - so this fast turnaround sketching code concept really works well for me. When it's CGI, it's usually two terminal windows and a browser - one to try things interactive, one editing the CGI, and the browser to run it each time and try out where I am now.

I have a huge amount yet to learn about the ins and outs of decent python coding, but it's at least getting somewhere.

I wonder if the facts bear this out...

/. has s story about Microsoft and a tipping point that points to an article at the Inquirer.

The comments in the Slashdot article were better than usual (I typically expect rather raving style commentary there), but the real meat is that Inquirer article - and I wonder if the facts will really bear it out. I saw another article or commentary somewhere (I can't remember where now) that talked about value cycles and how IT spending is picking up, but becoming much more cyclical because there's little additional value to be had with the short-term upgrades. (The article was talking about Mainframes, Sun, and that cycle of buying)

Unfortunately, the Inquirer article is more speculation and opinion than actual backing of numbers, only really starting with the basic concept of Microsoft's last quarter had flat sales - after that, well - it's not an outstanding article.

Wow, they did it again

I was talking with Gus over iChat this evening and ran into "Wow, what the hell is THAT!" again.

I'd made a PDF of a website that wasn't anonymously accessible (a bug report on SubEthaEdit, which has annoying stopped working altogether, only emitting a single message in the console: can't cache image).

Anyway, turns out this PDF is shown as a scrollable thumbnail IN iChat. And Gus could drag it to his desktop too. Man, that's cool.

white stuff

I guess Chuq noticed the cooler weather today. Granted, we a bit south of Vancouver, but not really by much. We spent most of the day hiding indoors - didn't seen any snow at 400' here on Queen Anne, but it was around. Or more specifically, sleet was around.

Nate was out golfing today in north seattle, and he reported his last nine holes were completely in sleet. What a lovely game that must have been!

We stopped by his place this evening before heading to dinner. Decided that we ought to expose my grandmother to Thai food. She thought she'd had it previously in Denver, but wasn't sure... Given that this is the realm of riches when it comes to finding asian food - well, we weren't going to pass up the chance. She didn't care for my panang curry, but liked the sweet and sour "princesses delight" dish and phad kee mao. All ordered very mild (not mild enough in the case of the curry, but we didn't expect she'd like curry anyway).

So dinner was wonderfully successful, spicey curry or no. We brought home leftovers (we almost always bring home leftovers from Thai - we get excited and order way too much food). She's only going to be with us for a few more days, so now we're pondering where to go next...

bummer

Well, they're not saying it - but I will. Looks like we lost the Beagle to Mars.

As of today, there's still no signal from the probe that I'd hoped landed smoothly. Wired is carrying a news story on it that doesn't really say a whole lot other than "yep, it's gone".

The beagle2 site has a neat weblog, but it's the news section that I've been waiting to hear from.

(You do sort of wish that they had an feed for their weblog, though, ya know?)

points was finally released!

Deallus Software finally released points - a little application that I've been using to keep track of status items and to do lists.

It's not everything that I wanted and dreamed about, but they did a nice job with it.

And if you don't know who "they" are, ask me.

PS: It's only available on the Mac - MacOS X 10.2 or later.

Tully's, REI, and Fry's..

Ah yes, a lovely day of the-day-after-christmas shopping. :)

My grandmother and I had a relaxing morning checking out the paper and drinking some goodies at Tully's in Ballard, waiting while Karen dived into the fray of the JoAnn's Fabric Store sales. She took a while, and then came out with a couple of huge plastic bags - the contents of which I still don't fully understand.

Afterwards, we headed to REI to get the ever critical "flower socks". For the rest of you, those are "wool socks". Karen and I have called them flower socks because one weekend a few years ago I thought about sending Karen some flowers, but sent her a pair of wool socks instead (from REI, as it turns out). Her feet are sort of perpetually cold, and she loved them - so we've nicknamed all such spontaneous gifts of wool socks as "flower socks" because it's like getting flowers, only they're socks. Yeah, so we're a tad weird.

Anyway, my grandmother has about stollen two pair of my wool socks now, so we took her to REI to either get her some of her own, or replacements for mine - depending on how you look at it. Found a really nice green wool sweater with a fleece lining around the collar that I picked up 25% off too - that was nice. Wore it the rest of the day.

Last on the shopping trip, and without a doubt definitely the busiest, was Fry's. My grandmother was marvelling over our digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix 880) and really being enthralled with how with how quickly you could do things with the images (such a mail them to family, or print them at Walgreens like Gus.

We ended up getting her a Canon Powershot A60. Somewhat based, to be honest, on the good tidings from Eric. It's a nice camera, lightweight, and gives some clearly terrific results. My grandmother thought it was pretty comfortable to hold too - so we've been teaching her the ins and outs of using the camera this evening.

Well, mostly this evening - we also spent it watching The Two Towers. I really like what they added into the movie, although I'm still sort of pissed off that they made Faramir look weak and petulant. The movie gave a much nicer screening on Boromir - cast him quite into a different light for me. Also felt positively sorry for Gollum when Faramir's rangers were giving him the once over. More than anything else, I was glad to see the "trees" get their part back in the battle for Helm's deep. To me, they're still the ones that saved the day - even though the film portrayed it differently.

After two days of the Lord of the Rings, I think we've got my grandmother hooked. We'll have to see - but we may be taking her down to the Cinerama on tomorrow or Sunday to "just see how it all ends".

Fellowship of the Ring

Yeah, I know - everyone else is talking about Return of the King, but we spent the evening watching the first one - Fellowship of the Ring. I received the Two Towers (that cool extended edition) for Christmas, and my grandmother was sort of curious about it. Hadn't heard anything really about the books, hadn't seen the movies, only heard a lot about the press of recent.

Well, we were going to watch The Two Towers, but Karen and I thought it might be best to introduce her to the story with the first movie first - otherwise we were afraid the second movie would be difficult to understand and basically just lots of strange fighting.

I think we've got her hooked. We're going to watch the second movie tomorrow (I still haven't seen that extended edition) and see how it goes. If she's still curious how the whole thing ends, maybe we'll all head down to the Cinerama and take in Return of the King on the big screen.

I guess like many others, I was hoping...

I was hoping to hear some news of Beagle 2 landing and sending out some signal. It looks like the latest news is that as of this evening, nothing has yet been heard from Beagle 2, even by the big boy: Jodrell Bank's Lovell Telescope.

No news isn't definately the end, but it sure isn't a good sign. I guess we've got a couple more probes about to head into that area, but I'm not seeing much on the news about them.

In other space geek news, SpaceShipOne (the Rutan XPrize development effort) broke through Mach-1 on a climb that tested out a number of features on their orbital insertion and retrieval craft. I expect that'll make Paul Allen pretty happy, seeing as he's recently admitted to being an investor. The only downside is that the landing gear experienced some failure on landing, causing the then-gliding space/air craft to skew and dip it's left wing into the landing runway.

Helicopter!

I got an Air Hog Sky Patrol RC Helicopter for Christmas. And boy is that neat!

I just took it out for it's maiden flight, and didn't even do too bad. The controls are not terribly complex (faster or slower on a trigger) - so high speed is it really moving forward, and slowing down to hover causes it to rotate slowly (or not so slowly). Dropping speed more is how you land it.

My landing and directional control aren't fantastic, but I was pretty gentle on the controls. A light breeze (2-3 knots) was enough to drag is sideways in the air as I was flying, though - so I'm going to wait for a relatively windless day (or a large open room with no breeze) to take it up again.

When I'd first seen this, I thought it was tethered, but it has a Nickel-metal-hydride rechargable battery in the fuselage to power the flight. Flights only last 2-3 minutes, but that's just fine with me! I was impressed that someone managed to get the power-to-weight ration down far enough that battery operated flight (in a helicopter form) was even feasible!

I also got some nice clothes, a couple of movies, and a nice set of tins for holding loose-leaf (or bagged) tea. I think the helicopter is the real prize of the Christmas season though. Karen's refused to let me fly it inside the house. but I can imagine some relatively open spaces that might be perfect...

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas world.

Peace. please.

Knots

I opened a single gift tonight - and it's really cool. I got this great book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Knots and Ropework, by Geoffrey Budworth.

It's a great book for knots, including my favorite: the monkey fist. I've been enjoying knotwork and lines since I started sailing again two years back. I'm looking forward to getting some line and putting some of these into practice...

Nephew

Hey!

I got a Christmas picture of my nephew Devin and his "uncle sherman". Had to share it with the world, so here they are:

(I can't believe my mother got her dog to wear that hat!)

reading what the cool kids write

I read a lot of what the "cool kids" write.

The honest reason is that I'm an obsessive information junkie, and I think or at least feel like keeping up with all these diverse opinions and technologies will some day give me an edge on something for some reason. My grandfather hoarded small bits of tools and metal - I hoard tidbits of knowledge pretty much the same way - all stuffed in various shelves, vaguely accessible but not really clearly organized.

Anyway, one of the places I read is Joi Ito's blog, cause he's sort of an interesting guy. Found out from there that John Perry Barlow has a blog, and so I've started reading that. Thank god for NetNewsWire, btw.

So tonight there was an interesting post on Barlow's blog - which was mirrored at joi Ito's place. They fired up iChat AV and created an ad-hoc "virtual presence space". Kind of a conference-call. But because the quality was reasonable, and the cost neglible to them, they left it runnin'.

It's a neat idea - another one of those "social software" things I guess - but I can't imagine that I'd really like to work that way all that often. I mean, with a few friends, yeah. But I already sit in a cube environment at my office, and let me tell you the "communications" are definitely enhanced. So going out of my way to add more to that environment would not be a first choice of mine.

Now if I worked in a quiet room in Wyoming, or rural Japan - yeah, I can see where another voice would be really nice to hear periodically. Giving and getting mutual support. When I ran a sys-admin group in Missouri, we all worked clustered together in what's typically called a "bull pen" in cube-land speak. Worked pretty good - but then we were all pretty reactive and interupt driven in our jobs.

Working more with coders over the past few years, I've become more and more convinced that quiet time is as essential as mass communicatin'. (At the moment, I'm leaning towards having structure around one side or the other of that boundary so that they don't bleed over, but that may be me just being reactive to what feels like constant interuption at work too)

Eh - anyway. The fact that the technology got used in that fashion was pretty cool - as well as someone being interested and excited enough to write about it.

what an interesting trend...

I've noticed that quite a number of publications have started focusing in on "articles to help the independent software vendor succeed". Eric Sink has his latest article on MSDN entitled "Make More Mistakes".

MacTech has been running a series of articles in the 'Zine on the same basic ideas, and I seem to recall seeing something at OReillyNet over the past six months, although I'm not at the moment able to find it. Maybe I dreamed it?

I wonder what's encouraging this sudden burst of helpfulness from the publishing powers that be? I mean, there's long been some really good articles out there on this topic (I'd point to the Dexterity Software Articles as a good general place for this kind of thing.)

I'll have to keep my eyes open to see if this continues.

Dinner and a show, minus the show

We had a truly amazing dinner tonight over at John and Sue's place - lasagna and meatballs, and it was just incredibly stunning. They had invited us over (Karen, my grandmother, and yes - even me) for a holiday dinner, and it was truly par excellence.

We'd hoped to go see the Christmas boats/lights parade out on Lake Union this evening afterwards. Karen was really itching to go after seeing a wet and rainy variation of it last year (or was it the year before?) Anyway, while my grandmother is from Iowa, where it is a LOT colder than here, the chill of the air here is a bit more than she can easily take. We wore her out wandering her around Pike Place Market, and the wind off the water is just more than she wants to deal with. Actually, I think she would have marched right into the water if I'd really wanted to do it - but I felt responsible to not abuse that willingness to go.

So tonight was dinner and a show, minus the show.

(Yeah, got the Christmas lights on, and pretty much nothing else except the glow of the screen while I'm writing this. It's lovely.)

The Market

Today we took my grandmother to see the world famous Pike Place Market. It wasn't too crowded today, which was nice because I'd been hoping that would be the case. We decided not to try either last Saturday or tomorrow for the plain idea that we figured the place would be packed.

Took a while to park down there - normally I take a bus. To make things easier for my grandmother, though, I drove down. After I finally found an ATM to get some cash, I parked in one of the garages sort of behind the market. But it took me like 20 minutes to get everything settled and then hoof it up all those steps to meet up with them at the Crumpet Shop on 1st Ave.

I think she liked the market, although she thought it was crowded. (I mean, it is a crowded place, but it wasn't horrifically packed). I lurked about to make sure she didn't get jostled, and otherwise just enjoyed watching people and seeing what was about in the stalls. Found some blood oranges (very tasty!) at one of the corner veggie markets, and otherwise we just wandered and looked. I guess we spent about two hours there total.

Now we're back at the house, and everyone is sacked out taking a nap. I think I may follow suit here pretty shortly. I'm taking the day off, so I should stay away from email or I'll just get caught up in the day's events - and I could stand to decompress and take the time off. I find it hard to do so.

Unlike Tara, this won't be my last day working in 2003. I'll be working some between Christmas and New Years - but I'm actually really looking forward to that short week. Everything quiet at the office, so I can get some of those long-deferred items done that have been waiting for nearly two months now.

lights

I'm enjoying one of my favorite things about this time of year- Christmas Tree lights.

I never much cared for them in random decorations on cube walls or houses, but I really like them on a Christmas Tree. I don't care about most of the other stuff on the tree - I'd be happy with just lights to be honest. Little pinpoints of color that glow from the tree.

So I'm sitting here, writing and petting my cat, enjoying the lights. Without my glasses, the points sort of blur and glare just slightly, making them look like litttle stars in there, the colors reflecting from the windows, walls, and presents under the tree.

Actually, I've enjoyed the display of lights at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens - but that's more about sculpture with lights than just enjoying a few of the lights themselves.

blech

I hate it when I leave a link all mangled on my blog for hours and hours. I didn't notice until late this evening when I logged into a chat and noticed that Gus had posted a shout to me. Blech.

Understatement

Allow me to share an understatement I saw today: "but it contains some useful information". It contains a HUGE amount of really useful information. I'm sure lots of people could have figured it out, but we didn't... Steve did and posted the details.

MacTech

Dan Wood is complimenting the latest edition of MacTech, and I've got to agree. My favorite article from this edition is how to use NSExceptionHandler to get auto-generated stack traces from your own code to assist in debugging. A really terrific article by Steve Gehrman.

mmmmm... code. drink.

Ok, so after I was done being annoyed for the evening at s[c/p]am, I decided to sit back and doodle a little bit in code. Got myself all set up, and it's been fun - and too long from it.

Spent the evening doodling around with NSAlert and fiddling with dynamic sheets in place of modal dialog boxes. I like the sheets, but I'm not 100% up to speed on them.

In the meantime, my head is all warm and fuzzy from Egg Nog spiked with Ameretto. Yeah, I'm abusing my diet all to hell at the moment. None the less, it's tasty and I'm all chilled out while fiddling with code.

yet another scam

I've gotten two S[C/P]AM emails this evening, both suggesting that I invest in New Millennium Media Intl Inc (OTC BB) - also known as ticker NMMG.

Maybe these guys really are a company, but it's still damned annoying getting spammed with some yahoo telling me that this thing is going to take off.

ramifications

It's getting more and more prevelant that pay-for-play games have bits that people are treating like real property. Nate forwarded me an article from CNN where a Chinese company was told to redress the "loss" of "stolen property" because they allowed a hacker to easily steal his stuff.

The individual case isn't so interesting to me, but the ramifications of the case are rather profound. It's putting the responsibility for centrally stored goods (even if they're just "bits") on the company hosting the servers, making them a virtual bank - but with real financial obligations.

I haven't tracked the possibilities in the US so much, but it's clear there's plenty of trading of virtual commodities, and articles that talk about Ultima Online having a gross national value higher than some 3rd world countries.

It's sort of a bizarre state of affairs when compared with the visceral and real, which I'm feeling rather buried in lately with the holidays. I'm not quite sure what to think of all this, to be honest - it's just sort of pinging around in my skull, saying that there's something profoundly significant here, if I could just recognize it.

cribbage

The sad and sorry truth - I suck at counting to 15. You wouldn't think it would be that hard, but those 7's, 8's, 9's, 4's, Jack's... they all just start blending. Turns out I could have won the game tonight if I'd only counted a little better. Missed it by, yep - one point. Eh, so it goes...

At least I relearned how to play. It's been years since I last played (with Tom Schimonitz, who taught me - and was very, very good at counting to 15 and 31).

voices

I've liked the idea that the Internet enables "voices" to be heard. Voices that you wouldn't normally hear, because they wouldn't stand out or didn't have a way to get to you. Tonight I got a little touch of that, and it really made me smile.

I got a message that had been waiting for me for a few days - feedback on my little side project. I haven't had a lot of time to devote to it lately, so I hadn't been checking everything super frequently either. I did tonight, catching back up on things - and was glad I did.

Don't know if you read this blog, Linda, but thank you. The feedback you gave me was truly wonderful. One of those "voices" moments where I hear someone speaking to me and really providing some wonderful feedback on something I created. I can't tell you how cool and wonderful that is.

friday night

yep, first the obvious. It's friday night.

I'm glad we've finally made it here, because holiday's or no, I've been running around each day like a chicken with my head cut off. Ok, well - maybe a tad more controlled like that, but certainly with that level of unrestrained energy. When I've come home each day this week, I've been exhausted. I've passed out each night at 10:30pm (way early for me), and wanted to sleep way later than the grudging 8am wake up I forced myself to follow. So tonight I've actually caught up a little on sleep, so I'm not as wiped out, but I realized that today was the second day this week I'd completely forgotten to eat lunch in the crush of everything to do at work.

Yep, time to delegate more. I have a natural tendency to not do that - and although I can get several people's worth of a work done in a day, I'm not the equivilant of more than about 3 people. And I usually work that whole scam by not being terribly expert in any one area, which means that if I need to suddenly "be expert", I've got to expend more energy towards doing so. There's been a lot of "expert need" lately. Ah well, the joys of working in tech.

Turns out Karen pretty much exhausted my grandmother today - as the two of them went out all over Seattle doing some shopping and other miscellaneous errands. Asked my grandmother what she thought of Seattle over dinner tonight. "It's a neat town - lots to see here. I like to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here - too many folks, too crowded". She's from Burlington, Iowa - a much smaller town than this - lived there all of her 90 years with the periodic foray outside for traveling to visit. So small town is pretty ingrained with her anymore.

So now is all quiet around the house. The christmas tree is lit up, but other than the glow from my monitor and desk lamp, that's all the lights in the house. I've been meaning to get some "light reading" done for some time, so this evening looks to be it.

(Oh, speaking of good reading - the latest issue of MacTech landed in my mailbox a day or three ago and I've finally gotten a chance to really scan through and do that 'first read' routine on it. It's a good issue. If you're into coding on the Mac, I recommend it. I know some folks haven't found much use for it, but I like what they're doing with it, and it seems to have a new vigor to it)

updates

Wow...

Today seems to be the day for updates galore! iTunes, XCode (which I missed the inadvertant release and should be available tomorrow), Quicktime, and MacOS X itself. Quite the collection.

tree trimming without shears

So tonight we had a "tree trimming party". Karen of course yelled at me when I brought up the heavy shears from the basement, but I was quickly mollified with a huge amount of food (mostly cookies!) including some really nice marinated cold shrimp (i said mostly cookies, not all...)

So we had over several friends, including some I hadn't met prior to this evening. Karen had met Claire some time back in her sewing groups, and finally convinced them to come over for a "party". Claire is originally from Glasgow, Scotland, and her husband is from South Africa. Neat folks - I hope to get to see more of them.

As all parties go, I have little skill in keeping conversations running without resorting to geek talk or such. Gotta work on that somehow... But Sue was an absolutely gem at it. I wish I knew how she just so effortlessly pulled that off.

In the end, I think the night was a lovely success. The tree is all decorated, the cats are pretty happy with the additional attention and the new toys (the ones hanging on the tree of course), and we didn't completely wear out my grandmother.

Visitin'

A long day at work was pretty effectively erased by coming home to visit with my grandmother, who arrived late last night. We had a lovely dinner (which Karen made - I just did the dishes afterwards) and then sat around the table and talked for hours.

We broke it up only a half-hour ago, so I've been checking my mail for any last minute catastrophes. I was the point man for pushing troubleshooting issues today - felt like it was just one of those days when every error message was intentionally built to be less than helpful - and some of the problems extended well past when I threw in the towel and said "See ya! I'm heading home for the night".

Well anyway, so now I'm getting a half-second or three to write in the blog. I missed the monthly meetup, which Jake wrote briefly about. Looks like most of the usual crew were there, including some folks I haven't had a chance to meet yet. Matt, Beth (who I think lives somewhere close by because she's got a ICBM url that points towards Capitol Hill - I remember reading some of her blog a few months back before I started going to the weblog meetup just to see what other folks in Seattle were writing about.

So it's been a good evening, and as I'm writing this I'm actually thinking it is about time for me to sack out too. I have some biscotti that I'm supposed to pull off the cooling rack in a few minutes. Karen was making it pell nell tonight, so I'm finishing off the process for her. She's already gone from this world.

One last geek thing for the night - congrats go to Garrett Murray for his recently released Cocoa program xPad. I haven't tried it out, but I gotta respect the guy's work on his website and going to the trouble to finish the code out properly. I'll have to download it tomorrow or something and see what it's all about.

JRR & Billy S...

I was reading Andy's blog today, where he made a good point about focusing on talent to get excellent work done. He has a quote in the top of that item from JRR Tolkein:

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost,
...

And I was instantly reminded of William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. I suppose that wasn't intentional, although until today I'd never noticed the almost direct quote link there.

And just because I love the sentiment of the immortal bard in this:

All that glitters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscroll'd:
Fare you well; your suit is cold.
Cold, indeed; and labour lost:
Then, farewell, heat, and welcome, frost!
Portia, adieu. I have too grieved a heart
To take a tedious leave: thus losers part.
-- William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

snail mucus

Rode the bus to work this morning - didn't quite feel like walking through the rain (light, more like mist really). Anyway, I noticed that several women were wearing a lip gloss that - I can't help it - reminded me of the mucus trail that a snail leaves behind. It was all shiny and somewhat glossy. I know it's supposed to be some "wet look", but it just didn't work for me at all.

quiet night

As soon as I got home tonight, I just crashed. Karen was on the phone with her family, so I curled up on the futon and in a few seconds I passed right out. Woke up about an hour and a half later, but I think that was enough. I'm now pretty awake, although it's a little early to proclaim insomnia.

I tried to go to bed about 9 pm - figured I sort of needed it after that come-home-crash. A whole bunch of stuff going on at the moment in my life, which is all leaving me somewhat frazzled and sometimes outright exhausted.

My grandmother arrives tomorrow. Looking at the train status, it's already scheduled to be 30 minutes late arriving. Hopefully it won't be too much worse than that. The train is leaving the Sacremento station tonight somewhere around 1:30am (it was supposed to leave at midnight).

So for the moment, it's a quiet night. I hope to have a good double handful more of these yet to come this Christmas and New Years. To me, it's what the season is for - quiet nights reflecting. Oh, and there's also that bit about having a drink with some friends as well. Egg Nog and good amereto are already pre-emptively stashed away for the season.

services

nope, not xml-rpc or soap - church.

Got a call from Nate and Leah last night: "Hey, ya wanna go to church with us?"

"Uh, ok? Sure! How nice do we need to dress?"

Well, it turns out they weren't talking about going to synogouge (which had us confused because it was a sunday evening), but to the services at St. Marks Cathedral. I'd read about their services in the paper a couple months back - the 9:30pm compline services consist of chant. Primarily in english, although they had a lovely Ave Maria in there as well.

The services were beautiful - the Cathedral is a massive room with some really interesting acoustical effects that support chant very nicely. Most of the chant was also in english - which I actually found strange, but very accessible.

Probably the thing that surprised me the most was how many young people were there for services. Way, way more than I've seen in a church (well, other than Mormon) in ages. I'm not exactly a regular church-goer, but these services were pretty nice.

That's cool...

a recent note from Greg Titus to the Cocoa-dev group brought to light something I hadn't realized about Omnigraffle Pro - that it can diagram NIB files and their outlets! It makes sense for a good plug in when you think about it - the NIB files are well known, and the visual layout thing is what Omnigraffle really does a kick ass job at... The sample they provide is pretty cool. Now I'm tempted to find someone with this and see what some of my nibs look like!

I'm especially curious about how it'll render out NSTableView connections, as the new key-value observing, subcription, whatever stuff is likely to make how you set up the nibs rather important. Or at least, setting them up and making sure everyone knows the conventions is important to make sure it all works smoothly and seamlessly.

The "Ultimate Toy Store" is rotten

Shopping today - yeah, one of the things on my list. I went looking for a specific board game for my brother for Christmas - it's rather a classic, but I won't mention which one in case he reads this blog (I don't think he does, but you never know)...

Anyway, I went down to FAO Schwarz in the downtown core of Seattle to look for it. They didn't have squat! I was really disappointed by their store, as in looking around I realized about the only thing they did with any particular splendour was stuffed animals (which I have a soft spot for) and Barbie (which I despise). Thanks, but no thanks.

I split from there and headed down to Pike Place Marketwhich I highly recommend for that random shopping sort of stuff that sometimes fills out a Christmas bag or something. Found what I was looking for, and sampled some good stuff besides! Turns out there's a hand-made cheese place that moved in where Molback's used to be. They were giving out samples of their curds, and they were pretty good. Didn't think it was appropriate for anyone other than me though, so I didn't buy anything. I'll definately be back there though... (Beecher's I think was the name)

So after my downtown trip, I headed up to Northgate (blech!) to go to Toys R Us. That worked MUCH better. It's been a while since I was in one, and they're a pretty good toy store actually. Lots of cool things in there that looked fun, and less than what I expected of the dreck that lurks about acting as toys. Even bought an extra thing for my brother in law that I just had to get him. We've already got him a Christmas gift or three, so it'll probably be saved for his birthday this february.

I think what impressed me the most was the Edu-games section, which is where you find the electronics kits, microscopes, etc. Man, have microscopes gotten cool! I can't find it on the amazon site, but they had one microscope that had an 8" screen!!! That would have been awesome! Plenty of others that have webcam/usb attachments for the computer - I think you could take all sorts of cool pictures with something like that... They also had some telescopes, although I think if I got one of those I'd prefer to live where there's a little less light polution and spend the bucks on a really nice one.

One of the folks back at MU (Marla) had a husband that made his own lens and telescopes - I remember seeing jupiter and it's rings with amazing clarity through his scope one time there. That was cool.

One thing I was looking for was something that would project stars out into a dark room. With constantly cloudy nights, I thought that could be a really neat way to teach someone about constellations - like maybe a nephew or something. Didn't see anything in that venue though.

End o' the week

Well, I can't really say "FINALLY!" because there's a hell of a lot yet to do. I've got some Christmas shopping to nail down for my brother and father, which I think is going to happen in the downtown shopping area as opposed to heading to a Mall tonight. Yeah, can you imagine going to a shopping mall on a Friday night a few weeks prior to Christmas? That's what I thought too.

We've been running flat out all day - both Karen and I - in parallel tracks and similiar directions. At 6pm I was finally home, and my only proclimation was that we had to eat out tonight, because I didn't want to cook and I didn't want to wait. We settled on the Outback Steakhouse, which is relatively new to our area (south Lake Union neighborhood). Pretty good meal, and I'm feeling pleasantly stuffed - although still craving sweets and breads.

Soon enough I'll be shooting my diet in the head for the holidays - but for the moment I'm sticking fast.

So the plan for this weekend, other than shopping, is sleeping in both days, doing some laundry, and mailing off the gifts that we've accumulated over the year to family.

Oh - if you're looking for little action figures for someone, I heartily recommend Stikfas. They're really posable little fellows and you can spend hours just amusing yourself with making scenes with them. Well, at least I do. Shoot, I even thought of doing some stop-motion mini-films or something with it when I saw iStopMotion in the Innovators' winners circle. I haven't quite brought myself to waste THAT much time fiddling with them yet though.

no reading, coding, or sleeping

Another one of those evenings. Reading isn't interesting me much (working through the last bit of Lord of the Rings again prior to the movie release) this evening. I can't get into coding at the moment, and I'm feeling sort of anxious which means sleep is, at the moment anyway, not really a possibility.

Not really quite sure what to do with myself, so I'm probably going to burn some time browsing through blogs, reading articles at OReillyNet that didn't catch my eye on the first run, and waiting a bit in the hopes that I'll get a little more sleepy.

HALO

yeah, that's sort of like "Hello", only different.

Picked up a copy of Halo for the PC tonight as the booty for participating in a Microsoft Playtest. I'm looking forward to seeing how it compares to the Xbox version. Gus is, I think, still waiting for the Mac version. I would be too, except that this pretty much fell into my hands tonight...

christmas tree

So an interesting little tidbit to start this evening's entry off with:

Our entry foyer is about 6" lower than our normal ceilings. As it turns out, we have 8' ceilings in the house, and we bought (I thought) a 7' christmas tree tonight. In fact, what we brought home was a 7' 5" christmas tree - which is missing the ceiling by just a little bit. Last year we had a "short" tree - only 5' tall or so, and Karen really, really wanted a larger tree this year. I'm certainly glad we didn't get an 8' tree - jeez, could you imagine that panic and chaos?

As it was there was the usual squabbling and hollerin' at each other, the tree, the door, and the cats that seems to ensue the process of bringing a christmas tree into the house, getting the lower bits trimmed to fit the stand, and then all settled in place.

ruined it!

Ah, Jeremy just ruined his cycle of cynicism with a completely PC version of "Boy, you really fucked up!" - a lesson on using blogs internally in a large (or small) corporation...

Zawodny

I know at least a few of you who read my ravings also check out Jeremy Zawodny's blog. So a question for you folks:

Has anyone else noticed that he's gotten more and more acerbic over the past 6 months? Not mean, exactly, but his writing is (to me) exhibiting significantly more bite than it did in the past. I don't know if this is an example of a natural cynic finally bleeding through in writing, or if he's just feeling pissed off at more things lately.

Eh, anyway - I actually get a chuckle from a lot of the things he has written lately - some I thought a while back myself.

ok - fixed the spelling - thanks

up tonight

I'm feeling pretty up this evening, but that's really an anomoly for me at the moment. I've been tired a lot lately, with new stresses taking a pretty heavy toll on being able to pick up new items, or even continue old ones much at all. To some extent, it's the usual holiday thing (there's more to it than that though), and I don't expect any particularl reprieve until early January.

That being said, I think I'm fixing in on the problem earlier than is usual for me, and slowing things down a bit. I'm not getting as much done, but I'm not beating myself about the head and shoulders with panic about it either. There's just so many hours in the day, so spending a few more of them sleeping or doing other things to chill out seems to me to be a pretty darn smart thing to do.

I'm finally getting back into some habits which I dropped for a while too - reading up on my blog-roll and really reading the cocoa-dev list postings. I have a habit of deleting them outright when I'm feeling pushed for time, but I enjoy it and learn a lot from them.

About outa steam...

It's been a busy darn weekend, and I'm bushed. I caught The Last Samurai early this afternoon with Nate and Leah. Nate and I loved it, Leah didn't. It was pretty bloody, and it was clear enough to see that her "gore" meter maxed out and she wasn't enjoying the flick after that. I didn't personally have high expectations, but I was really blown away. I was really impressed with the story, but also the cinematography and how they managed to really display strategy as well as tactics on the battlefield with this one. It's often enough you miss even the tactics.

Karen had us going to a Christmas Party at Northwest Sewing - which was odd because usually it's me dragging her to an office party, and this was completely the reverse. It was a pretty good time, the only real downside being that I was bushed even there and I blew my diet without thinking about it.

I'm starting to look at helping Gus a little with his vpwiki mechanism for Flying Meat. I'd thought I might have more code wandering done, but I haven't gotten to squat wtih respect to coding this weekend. More work on my own project, but not a truly significant amount.

catching my breath...

This morning was a flurry of activity, running and doing all manner of errands. My grandmother is coming to visit us over Christmas, should be here on the evening of the 16th, arriving on Amtrak. She turned 90 last year and lives in Burlington, Iowa. I don't think she's been out to this part of the country in over 40 years now (my grandfather was stationed up here in WWII - aboard the USS Brooks).

So there's all the bits of getting the bedroom back together before she arrives (one of the errands today was fixing the old crappy college bookcase that fits in the room so well). There's also grocery shopping, getting christmas gifts together for mailing, taking Karen by JoAnne Fabrics for some sale or another, and then a plethora of miscellaneous other minor things.

This evening, well - after writing this anyway, is dedicated to getting some more work done on my personal project and finishing it up sometime before Christmas. Not a whole lot more to do at this point, but I'm ready to wrap it up and put it down for a while. Lots of other things are screaming for my attention this month, but I don't want to let it linger half-done forever - that's a bad habit in coding that I don't intend to make anymore. Well, it probably won't stop me, but I intend to minimize it anyway.

Had coffee with John and caught up with him a bit. It was a really great visit that refreshed my state of mind quite a bit. Reminds me that I'm in a good place, doing well, and have a lot of opportunities coming up.

One of the most exciting things I'm looking forward to should be hitting the streets this January. I'd been writing on article on using the Apple SearchKit technology, and submitted it for publication to OReilly. Well, it looks like there was more interest than I'd imagined, and last I heard it was due to be published this January in Mac Developer Journal! It was way more than I expected, and I haven't been published by a press in years!

For the terminally curious, quite a ways back I wrote Using Netscape 2 for Mac - now available at Amazon for a whopping $3.48, and did part work for Special Edition, Using HTML (2nd Edition) - now out of print and I'm unable to find it even on Amazon. I wrote about how to create CGI scripts back when the state of the art technology was "cgi-lib.pl" and debates were raging about whether Perl was even suitable for the purpose...

There's always my usual self-publication mechanism (this blog), but I wanted to get back into writing a little for fun and profit... and articles for magazines seemed like a good way to do it. Not to mention it gets it out into a wider readership and (hopefully) to folks who'll be interested. And hey, if I can use it to fund a trip to WWDC next year, all the better!

Congrats Byron!

Monstrous congratulations go to Byron since he completed his Master's thesis and defended it.

poker

Spent the evening over at Nathan's chatting and goofing us. He was a lovely host, especially considering I invited myself to have dinner at his place. Somewhere over the course of the evening I decided to get a lesson or two on Poker, so James and he gave me a run down that honestly mostly slipped right out again. I did OK, but ultimately dwindled out slowly and died. I certainly don't have much sense of the probabilities, and I'm nothing in the bluffing game to Nate and James. Whoa.

no, I'm not dead

Gus told me today that Ryan thought I was dead or something, since I hadn't updated my blog in a week's time.

I dunno - just feels weird writing to my blog that I'll be gone for any amount of time, and part of time gone was work related, which I'm just cutting out from my blogging altogether now.

Well, I'm back now - and catching up. Catching up with home stuff (WAMU's online banking has been down all day and is pissing me off) as well as work stuff. Lots of places to pick things apart and see what's happening. Dinner has yet to be dealt with as well - gotta get that all sorted yet this evening too.

home again

Nearly a week later, I'm home again.

Thanksgiving was a wonderful break, with the only real downside being illness. Not me, this time, for which I'm exceptionally grateful, but Karen and my mother both came down with various ickiness. Karen's was a nasty cold, but Mom picked up a really impressive bout of the flu. I ended up spending friday driving my brother, mother, and nephew back to St. Louis from Columbia and returning later that day (to Columbia).

The weekend was fun, mostly family, affair as well - hanging out at Karen's folks' house and visiting a few friends in Columbia, but not nearly the number of folks I'd hoped to see.

Monday had me in St. Louis, and flying to Virginia for work. It was a good meeting out there, although I got stuck in a smoking room at the hotel, which really sucked. I flew home tonight, and boy is it good to be back.

I do need to get in and see a dentist though - think I picked up a cavity that started making itself known here just recently, and I learned last year (the hard way) not to ignore that.