Rhonabwy

Old feature, new twist for VoodooPad

Gus' VoodooPad has had the ability to run code inside it for quite a while. It was one of the coolest features for me, providing me a massive snippet library of python tidbits as I was working out a problem.

Now someone else is really getting into that same style - and Garret is taking it a new direction with Ruby

What to talk about?

With the Mind Camp coming up next weekend, I've started to work on "What to talk about". Ted is recommending that you go place your ideas on the mindcamp wiki.

Oh - and I need to increase the number of people that I'll know there again. Collin Greene and Scott Koon will apparently both be wandering around in there somewhere.

Next weekend

Only a few days ago I was thinking I wasn't sure about this whole Mind Camp thing. Amazingly, I'm now feeling really interested in attending and seeing what boils in this pot. Amazing the difference a few days can make.

I think I'll know only a few people there right off the bat - Gus, Ted (although I haven't even really talked to him in months, he wrote me and suggested the gig) and Peter Zdebski. Well, I guess I actually know more than that - but the others I don't think would recognize me in a lineup...

Heh, maybe that's a good thing.

Halloween...

I checked the weather tonight, and watching the little widget I thought: Yeah, that's definitely halloween in Seattle...

tool flashback

Theres an interesting rant about using IDE's and their negative effects and some follow-up commentary. If you're interested in programming and the technology trends that are going on with that career, it's worth a read.

Late night shopping...

It was an evening that I got home late - and I promised Karen I'd do some shopping. I completely filled a shopping cart, and that was even ignoring the whole "restock the soups" bit on the shopping list. Weren't cheap either - but it was clearly overdue.

So after the shopping was done, I made it back home and dodged all the raindrops while getting the groceries in and put (somewhat) away. I had also picked up a sandwich and started munching and catching up on my reading. Somewhere in the depths of my RSS feeds, I spotted a link to some stuff that George Dyson wrote about visiting Google and his reflections on a "world brain". I am probably mischaracterizing it tremendously, but it was interesting reading.

I have been fascinated by Turing and Von Neumann for ages, although translating their concepts has been tricky for me since so many of the words they used to describe things have become incredibly overloaded with current computer technology terms. I think being a "geek" actually makes it harder to understand what they were driving at.

I think I'm going to need to re-read this one when my brain is running at full capacity. 1am on a Friday night... - well, it is not quite there right now.

(By the way, if you ever get a chance to hear George speak, do so. He's a very engaging and humorous speaker!)

What a day!

That's all that can really be said about it.

Tonight was a good chill-down, we headed to El Diablo and I picked up a book at the semi-attached Queen Anne Ave Books and read a bit over a cocoa (mexican chocolate is wonderful!)

Sort of amazing that it was wednesday today. My time sense is even more screwed up than normal.

But why can't I ?!?!

You know what's really bugging me right now - why can't I paste an image (like a screenshot or something) into a web browser and submit it. It's a simple thing, really - but THERE IS NO EASY WAY TO DO THIS!

(someone please correct me)

I've become incoherently annoyed at this restriction. Screen shots and images are useful for all sorts of things, but your input controls on web browsers just don't include the concept. About the best you get is making a file and then using file upload to inject it into something.

Talk about annoying!

Hey Firefox guys - make my day and add this in, will ya? (I don't know how you'd go about adding this actually, and just looking at the scope of a project like Mozilla Firefox makes my head spin. How on earth does anyone ever get started into something like that?)

now mind camp?

I've been watching and lurking on the lists where folks have been talking about doing this Seattle Mind Camp for a few months now. I wasn't sure if it was something I wanted to check out, or if it had that smell of excessive mutual back patting. So I guess I'm going to find out, as I've signed up...

So from saturday, Nov 5th through Sunday, November 6th, I'll be lurking about this big ole building and talkin' to folks. I know a few of the attendees already, but there's a whole LOT of names on there I don't know. Seattle isn't that big a town, really - not in the technical community. So it'll be interesting to see what comes up and out from this.

El Diablo, Corn Mazes, and seattle sundays

It's been ages since we spent the evening at a coffee shop. Yet on a cool, wet Seattle sunday evening it was just the thing. Karen and I hoofed it down to Pete's Pizza for a little dinner (they have wonderful salads) and then to El Diablo. I chatted with Gus a little online, posted some earlier blog entries, and worked on getting my laptop up to date with the latest tools and goodies. (I'm upgrading XCode to the 2.2beta as I scrawl this post)

I didn't go to the second day of Code Camp, even though there were a number of sessions that I thought would be worth attending. The one that really stood out is I'd like to have seen Scott Koon's Cross-Browser Javascript Development. I suspect he gets to do this quite a bit at his job (Fred Hutch) based on comments he made earlier, and I'm interested in picking up a bit more about how folks are doing that sort of thing.

We did, however, go and check out a corn maze... The first one we went to was a complete piece of shit, and I'm really aggravated that I paid any money for it. They did some sort of weekend/evening scream thing, and the maze itself was trashed, muddy and useless.

We bailed in under five minutes, and ended up at a much more interesting one - The Farm. The maze there is in the shape of washington state (go to the site and look around - it's impressive), and it was fun to go wandering around in. Unfortunately, my shoes were woefully inadequate for the trip, so for me it was like skating on ice most of the time. Still, it was fun, and they have a neat farm. In a past year, we'd gone to Remlinger Farms, which is a little more "commercial", but there isn't a corn maze there (although eats are superior). It was a fun morning. We got back to the house about 2:30 in the afternoon, and I zonked for a good few hours on the couch, covered with a blanket and two cats.

White light, no heat

Very cool - a grad student stumbled through to making damn-near awesome white light with an LED. If production costs get worked out, this could be a major milestone for lighting technologies.

This Is Gus

Hey, a pretty good pic of Gus, from Evening At The Adler.

Lucene continues to port

Latest on the moving Lucene to every possible language - it has been ported to Ruby. I was all hot on PyLucene myself, but then dropped away as the job took me in different directions. It will be interesting to see how the folks have managed and will manage the Ruby port/fork of the code.

After Seattle Code Camp

Yeah, another geek oriented kinda post.

Today I attended Seattle Code Camp 1.0. And I've got to say, it was really worth it. I thought about attending tomorrow, but I think I'd prefer to not spend the entirety of the daylight hours of this weekend in windowless rooms.

I went to a number of sessions. Scott Koon gave a talk on Forensic Development that was really quite good. Brad Wilson did a talk on Ruby that was a nice hands-on experience sort of thing - crackin' away at code (bravely!) in front of us all. It was nice to see it getting used, and its focus went pretty quickly into Ruby on Rails, which is obviously pretty powerful and quite the attention getter these days. Steve Borg and Richard Hundhausen gave a really incredible overview of Visual Studio Team System, and I've got to say that this was the single most useful session I found at the conference. More on that in a bit. Finally, Richard Crandall gave a little talk about the ACG, which is a bit of Apple outposted just south in the Portland area. He didn't give out any secrets (when does an Apple employee EVER do that), but it was really neat to see and hear about what his group did on a day-to-day kind of basis.

Visual Studio Team System...

I've got all sorts of immediate opinions about the product (which is really a cluster of products). I'm actually really impressed with the whole set, except for one thing - the combo set of all those goodies just seems to typify what I perceive as being rather rucked up with Microsoft's internal development. I'm speaking as a complete outside - but live in this town and you hear from and make friends with folks working for the "evil empire". Just the nature of the beast. (heh - good pun!) And their version of collaboration as developed in Team Studio seems to be more about assigning work and blame than actually getting people talking to each other.

With that rather negative start, let me say that each individual piece is really well crafted and appears to be very well designed to do what it does. It's also got the usual attrocious "where the (@*#^(* do I choose that" problem standard with really complex UI's. They have finally seemed to make a source control system that doesn't completely suck, and the integration of unit testing and code analysis into the visual studio projects is truly incredible - frankly, the best thing about the whole set. But that complex UI is the killer. When you buy into a project/product like Team Studio, you're buying into methodologies as well. And frankly, I don't care for some of those methodologies. And I really don't care for tools that are heavy and force you down a direction that don't fit. That is why I love (and use) Trac. It's lightweight. It works. It's primary focus is to help establish communication and get the hell out of the way.

Not surprisingly, the Team Studio stuff also really encourages you to use and implement a sort of MS world lock-in as well. Which I don't personally agree with either. For a mixed environment, well - it doesn't look like it would be easy to deal with. Maybe that's a crap statement - but it's my guess from the overview.

So while I appreciated the overview, and the interconnection of all the pieces, I think the recipe they used was off. I mean, I love Trac for it's integration of bug tracking, subversion, and a wiki. Visual Studio compares to that like some over-bolted on contraption, which I'm going to hope works well - but I'm not counting on it. Really, this is a 1.0 product when it comes right down to it.

All that said, I'm looking forward to seeing what additional goodies DO work with Visual Studio 2005 (testing, automated builds, etc) and taking advantage of as much of it as I can.

Memory Management in Objective-C

Scott, hopefully you'll notice this link to your blog...

You'd asked today about "getting Memory management" in Objective-C. There's some really good references out there, but the first two places I'd point you are:

Very simple rules for Memory Management in Cocoa and Hold Me, Use Me, Free Me

Both articles at StepWise - a now mostly dormant but still useful repository of knowledge. The Apple documentation on the same subject is a bit more sprawled, but still good.

Architecture Astronauts

It's worth a read: Joel Spolsky: Architecture Astronauts are Back. (Thanks for the delicious link Buzz)

Update:

I can not agree more!:

The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.

Friday already

Its hard to believe it is already Friday - well, in another 30 minutes or so anyway. This week has just been ripping by.

This weekend is the Seattle Code Camp, which I'll be attending. If you're going to be in Seattle, this looks to have a lot of potential to meet folks and just hear from other technical folks. The sessions they have posted run a large gamut of topics. It is pretty heavily microsoft technologies, but there's more than just that there. Ought to be interesting anyway.

I would have liked to see Gus and the other crazies in Chicago at the Adler, but tickets and zooming there and back weren't as well set up for me.

Performance and capacity

I've been fiddling around the edges of performance and capacity measurement for several jobs, and I decided that it was time to nail down some of the mathematical models for estimating capacity. I'd always previously done it with relatively simple linear models and rough estimation. That's worked out pretty well, but I always knew there was this hole there that I hadn't really learned.

Now I'm working on closing that hole. I received Performance by Design via UPS today, and I've already started into it. A lot of it is queuing theory and practical application of that theory - something I just never had in school. The math isn't too bad, and I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with it - extending the simple estimations and trying out estimations against real data.

Whoa - Gus! Awesome!

Gus gets major kudo's from his public! As a business, that's the kind of talk you want to hear!

Knoppix

Knoppix is one of those "mmmm, interesting" technologies that I've been keeping my left eye peeled on. Haven't done anything with it, but the concept that everything you basically need is loaded onto a bootable CD is, well, pretty cool and intriging. So when I was at Barnes and Noble snagging a book for Karen's PHP class, I spotted Knoppix Hacks and picked up a copy from their 30% off bin.

I mostly use Linux at work. Recently Debian has been the choice just because it's so damn easy to install the packages (and I happened to have become steeped in effeciency with apt-get). But replicating machines is still potentially troublesome. My favorite tool for service machine replication and rebuilding - SystemImager is still out there and doing well, but Knoppix seemed similiar and a different beast all at the same time. Making a custom systemimager CD isn't really an option with them. You can do the Kickstart "futz with it forever until it's just right" thing. Knoppix seems to have some of that a little more nailed down. The concept of just saying "well, screw nailing it down to specific drivers" and "who cares about the bloody file system" remove a few of the key pieces that are just plain difficult to get around. That's the light-bulb moment for me with it.

Anyway, the Knoppix Hacks book is nicely laid out, and it's really a recipe book on how to use the whole LIVE CD concept to do any number of useful things. I think the cover of the book is pretty bang on - it's the equivilant of the handy penknife concept that you always carry with you.

I've got to try this!

Spotted this off OReilly Net Radar EULAlyzer- screenshots of EULAlyzer - what a nifty idea! I'm definitely going to plug some of those suckers in and see what comes out...

Just say no: reproducible pies

Two pies out, two pies in, and two pies pending. Each one is a bit different - some with a touch of brown sugar, some with molasses, some which a splash of irish whiskey, some with a few more or less eggs, milk, or pumpkin than the others. As I was making them, Karen whipped out this stack of post-it notes and said "here, write it down as you go"...

I don't know about you, but I keep very careful track of what I do (especially when it's related to operational setup) at work. So the idea of tracking a recipe, which I'm mostly not following anyway, carefully at home was... anathema. No freakin' way. These guys are one-off, one-of-a-kind, never again the same way pies. That has turned out to be an exceptionally good thing in the past :-) Hopefully it'll just be something that Karen regrets this round.

The other interesting thing I learned is that the green bowl I sometimes mix in is just way too small for a pumpkin pie filling to be mixed with an electric mixer. So my t-shirt has a bit of pile filling on it now too. That's the game though.

First couple of pies will be ready for cuttin' in about 20 minutes. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

(pics of pie construction and general kitchen mess making later)

Pumpkin Guts

My hands are dirty with pumpkin guts. Nope, not carving - although we've had a good pumpkin or two carved here. This year, I decided it was time to make some real (not that canned squash shit) pumpkin pies. Yep, from scratch. I'm skimping on the crust (bought those frozen), but the core is all me.

Last night I brought home 5 sugar pumpkins - each a smaller than soccer ball, but larger than a softball. Two of them have been gutted and are now roasting in the over. Two more are awaiting roasting, and one is still whole. Ingredients are all laid out, and the only real question is how many am I going to make tonight...

Oh yeah, and will I use irish whisky in one of them or not. I'm leaning towards it for at least one. My first experiment with that as an ingredient made a pie only a lush would love (and I forced Nathan to eat some with me). The second time was much better - the amount you try to inject into a pie is, well, significant.

The cats are doing all they can to help - but I've been fortunate enough to keep them out of the way for now. Oh yeah - and roasted pumpkin seeds - those are coming up too!

CoRadiant TrueSight, part deux

Now that I've had a little bit of time with our TrueSight, I gotta tell you - it's the shizz. Yeah, and I mean that in the best possible way. Freakin' expensive (compared to a PC, not to an enterprise class managed switch from Cisco), and very effective.

You do, however, have to be a geek to get something out of it. The sequences and data take reading, understanding, a little jiggling, and at the lowest level a basic understanding of the TCP/IP handshake that happens. With all of that, it's the details. The wide swags are that it was useful in the first day. I found two problems in the first day of really collecting data, and they're resolved. Wow. Admittedly, both of them could have been found with log file analysis - but this really made it stand out.

It's super quick to enable a watchpoint (one of the key components - sort of "flag this interesting combination of things"), and they are powerful. You can watch aggregate data by web application, page, incoming IP addresses, what's fast, what's slow, who has the least bandwidth - a huge amount of options. I built a stack of about 12 immediate watchpoints that I thought would be useful, and I've quickly realized that I'll want to both go back and build more, and edit the ones I've already built so that they're all organized. (CoRadiant has a "best practices" buried in their support site that I found, read, and thought "Oh yeah, that'd be a good idea...")

Having trouble with pages that take too long? This will identify it for you, and quickly. Maybe the page is too heavy (too many GIFs, etc) - maybe the dynamic page is processing too slow - or something else entirely. It is way quick to get details and drill down to issues. Oh - and they deal with that whole "average" problem. They show you data points with the options of "average, median, 80th percentile, 85th percentile, 90th percentile, 95th percentile, and 99th percentile". That's sweet.

Actually, the biggest problem I forsee with the tool will be determining what to watch and report on, and then keeping an eye on it without getting sucked into the pernicious desire to go "wading in data". The data mining, reporting, and monitoring tools are all there (its SNMP enabled for any watchpoint data too!), but you still have to make some choices. I can foresee reconfiguring the whole damn thing once the initial investigation is done and then dumping all the stored data and letting it run again. Lord knows I'm causing havoc with the stored data right now since I don't have sessions and groupings configured properly for our web site and services.

The only downsides that I've found so far is that it's quirky under IE, the java applets aren't playing on my version of Firefox. Now, I don't mind at all that they've got a Firefox centric web app. As far as I'm concerned, I prefer it. I do need to figure out that applet thing though - damned annoying having to get the graph generated and floated in a window instead of just seeing it right off.

ACM queue

I joined the ACM a while back, decided that it was generally time, and that I shouldn't keep stealing the magazines from my friends... I'm certainly not a "fanatic member" (no email address @acm.org), and the thoughts to rejoining the IEEE have long since faded. But they have some decent benefits, most of which revolves around publications. And the publication that comes to my house most frequently is the ACM Queue.

Most of the time, frankly, the magazine is really fundamentally boring - good for resolving insomnia (when I'm not hyped up on late-afternoon caffeine). This last one (focused on semi-structured data) has a pretty good article in it. The article, entitled Learning from the Web, is by Adam Bosworth. Adam gets written about quite a bit, but I'm general suspicious of him because so many people avow his words with supernatural power. So I read his blog a while (linked above), but didn't really see much amazement and interest for myself there. This latest article, however, is surprisingly lucid (if quite a bit opinionated) about how we have historically dealt with data, and how we ought to be dealing with data - from a coding standpoint. The basic gist was the databases really haven't caught up with a lot of the lessons learned from the Web, and they ought to. He makes some concrete suggestions (adopting XML based Atom format for an internal database structure) and including in all data the key concepts of time to live and last updated to enable more effective caching. But really, I think the gem in his thoughts was that the data we think about, write, read, and deal with on a day to day business is not structured for tables, or for trees, but is really more of some crazy graph layout - if there's a layout at all. The whole concept is really a pretty big shift in thinking (especially after you've gotten used to writing SQL statements to answer a question), and the tools to deal with data in this form - they frankly don't exist.

Well, unless you think of Google search engine (or something similiar) as being the way to get to it. But fundamentally, you can't answser questions with Google, even though it's darned close - so I don't think that's an issue.

It's also reasonably close to some issues I've been dealing with lately in translating schema and concepts from one "structured environment" into another. Major pain in the ass, and there's generally NO good way to do it. Well, that's not true - code is how you do it. And a monkey (i.e. me) writes the code to do it - but it's not at all like whippin' out your favorite bizarre mixture of inner and outer left joins to snag the data you need, or write some bizarrely complex XSLT document to transform your XML tree structure into another tree structure. (by the way, they should have bagged XSLT and just written the freakin' code - it's just as fast to learn as XSLT, and it works much more effectively for me)

So anyway, good article. Learning from the Web. Hopefully ACM will have a PDF or HTML version of it accessible before too long.

XCoders and Seattle Code Camp

Not really sure what all to expect, but I'll be at the Seattle Code Camp next weekend. I may be presenting, or I may be just attending and seeing what all is happening... hard to say.

We had our XCoder meeting tonight, and had a nice turnout of 15 folks, which seems to be rolling into our normal sized crowd. That devolves post meeting to about 8 who go find somewhere for beer, another part of the whole thing that I really appreciate. Originally, I wanted to see a group rolling that focused on Mac development, but now it seems to be swinging more to a combination of that and a general social group of technology enthusiasts outside of the bounds of the office.

lessons in patience

Today has been a lesson about patience for me. At least, that is how I'm taking it. I think all told today, I got something close to 15 minutes of useful work actually accomplished.

The first part of the day was blown waiting for a meeting that kept getting scheduled back in time. And of course I should have ignored that crap and gone ahead and gotten my hands dirty in some work that needed to be done, but I tried to wait it out so I wouldn't get interupted. That didn't work.

Then after lunch, I found that updating Windows XP with the latest patches is a really, really bad idea while you're connected with a Cisco VPN client. The end result was something like 3 1/2 hours of screwing around with Windows, backing out updates, uninstalling and reinstalling the VPN client to get things working again. The end recipe was to uninstall the XP security patches, uninstall the VPN client, reinstall the patches, and then reinstall the VPN client.

All in all, a frustrating day. Tonight I needed to feed a couple of friendly kitties over on Eastlake, and after wading through traffic for 25 minutes, I realized I forgot the keys at home. 45 minutes after that, I'd waded back through traffic again and finally fed them. Like I said, a lesson in patience.

I even brought home the work 'puter to get some work done tonight, but I think the better part of valor is to just leave the darn thing in it's case and plan on going in early tomorrow and getting some good stuff done while everyone else is sleeping. Because it's darn sure that I'm not doing to get much useful done tonight - at least at the rate the day has been rolling so far.

Well, they finally did it.

Apple's out with a heavy bid into the "living room", only they're expecting that the living room isn't in the same place anymore. With the latest iPod playing video and having TV out, you've got a PVR in your pocket. Only recording? That's the trick. And I think the answer is, to some extent, the new iMac. What a sweet setup. Now it's getting really tempting.

Of course the real answer is the new iTunes 6.0 where you can download videos from ABC. Personally, I couldn't give a fig about ABC's sitcom crap. Give me HBO Original content. Specifically - give me ROME! Make it available, and I'll happily buy episodes.

sleep

Yesterday I didn't make it past 9pm - not surprising with the insomnia I had the night before. Tonight I'm staying up a bit later, but I'm not much longer for the evening. Unfortunately, not too much to report otherwise. Today was one of those days where everything seemed to come at me sideways, and I was kept busy just trying to keep up - not really making any progress of note on any front.

Coradiant TrueSight

oh crap.

I fell off the wagon today - I had some caffeine. I had been "cold turkey" for 3 weeks, and it had clearly finished out of my system. Because this afternoon I had some, and now I am clearly paying for it.

I'm somewhat tired, but mostly awake. My brain won't stop spinning and thinking, cranking through ideas and thoughts with no stopping in sight. And yeah, it's 2:30am. I tried to go to bed two hours ago - that just did not work. I may be really screwed for tomorrow.

I hope it won't be too bad though, because I have a lot to get done tomorrow and I was really looking forward to a new 'project' kicking into gear. Specifically a new tool that I've been really eager to get my hands on - a CoRadiant TrueSight.

Coradiant is another startup, and I hadn't even heard of these guys or their product until maybe 6 week ago. The product they sell is an appliance focused specifically down into the web world - session monitoring and recording. The only thing we ever found close to it in open-source was the project PasTMon (passive traffic monitor). Which really is pretty close, but the CoRadiant has SO MUCH more built in, it's pretty clear where the value is. We couldn't replicate it for the same costs using the open source project, so the choice was really pretty clear. Imagine a sniffer that is tracking and logging specifically http TCP packets, decoding them, analyzing the session data, and shoving it all into a big database. You've got part of it now. Now add on some intuitive data mining and trigger tools for live session data. Yeah, you're getting closer. Now tack on some API's... Yeah, I haven't even looked at this thing in depth, but we should get ours installed tomorrow. And then... heh, well. I'm really looking forward to seeing what this thing can do.

Prince of Persia

I rented a couple of games for the weekend, and have been spending quite a bit of time with the XBox. The better of the two is Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time, which is a remake and update of the classic 'Prince of Persia' title that I spent quite a number of hours with on old Mac's. This one is no slouch either, and right now I'm stopping because I'm all pissed off at where this thing has me nailed down. Ick...

Anyway, the other game is Star Wars: Republic Commando, which is an interesting squad-based FPS. It's not nearly as intricate as Prince of Persia, relying on the splash of Star Wars and an admittedly interesting squad command interface to keep things moving.

Django unit tests - and a nice design

I spotted the reference to a method of doing django unit tests from the Django consolidator feed and went to check it out. It is indeed a great way to do the unit tests, taking advantage of SQLite's in memory databases so that you can do everything you need and then pitch it out without impacting any "production" data. (Of course, nobody develops on their production system, right?...)

But when I went to the site, I was also impressed with Ian's web page design - the slightly translucent side-bar components just meshed very nicely with the colors and layout.

Books!

Ah, these marvelous books! The british library has opened some of them up to access on the internet. You can now see excerpts from the Luttrel Psalter, the Lindisfarne Gospels, or sketches by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Ten years ago when I was staff at the University of Missouri, I had wished for something very much like this. Getting access to even reproductions of rare books was quite the expedition, and you couldn't photograph or otherwise take away anything other than your own rough sketches of what you saw.

You'll want a broadband connection for this - it would be murder with a dialup line, but it is finally right there, at your fingertips!

In a fit of exhuberance

Nope, not me - not this time. In a fit of exhuberance, Karen has decided to take a class on PHP. Sounds great to me, except in that one fell swoop she's magically become a full time student again with 14 credit hours of load this quarter. Crazy girl...

Even for her enthusiasm which I suspect will be quite the load this fall, I went out of my way to pick up her textbook tonight. I think it's amazingly cool that she's digging back into web development, even if neither of us really knows where this is leading. Maybe she'll finish out the courses and get a certificate, maybe she'll just use it herself, or maybe she'll start being a geek "workin' for the man" like me. Hard to tell really. But I think her design sense combined with web development bodes nothing but goodness for the projects she decides to undertake...

walking

Its still early, but the treadmill is working out nicely at home. A little odd, as it really dominates the space around it, but it works well. I've been walking while watching movies on the laptop, and that has worked out really well. Last night I walked just under 8 miles (2 1/2 hours) and I seem to be getting into a groove with it reasonably well. Still some aches and pains as I work up to walking faster and/or longer, but I really want to do something about the weight I've gained, and walking while working on the computer is how I'm trying to do it.

One thing to note - it's very difficult to really type while walking at a reasonable clip. But if you have a lot of email to read (or movies to watch), it works out great. Who knows, I may even try and put the Xbox over there or something.

Xbox 360

Several years back when the XBox was released and Halo debuted, I was one of the many pushing and shoving to get my hands on an Xbox. Coolest thing since sliced bread, and (oddly enough) the first game console I've ever owned. I do not regret, for an instant, getting the original XBox. We've used it to watch videos, play Halo (and it's sequel), and a lot of other games. I've taken it to the office to have after-work lan parties just for kicks - it's been great.

And now Xbox 360 is due to be released in another 7 weeks or so. And I hate to say it, but I just couldn't give a shit. I'm not much interested in any other game system (i.e. PS3) in replacing it - its just that none of them are really that compelling for me. Maybe when Halo 3 comes out, I'll consider it. Or if it had some more features that I could use standalone. I mean, really - it's built to be an incredible PVR, why the hell do I need to have a Media Center PC to work with it. I'm sure not buying TWO machines there.

I'm going...

When you hear about a movie made based on a video game, well - my first reaction is to see if the special effects are worth it. But in this case, I'm just going to plan on going now.

Dogajolo

As a side note, I've decided that Dogajolo is an incredible $10 bottle of wine. Tuscan grapes, yummy! Going to have to go buy a case of this one...

shitty low-bandwidth connection

Catching up with friend's blogs this evening, I spotted the sidebar on Duncan's post entitled The Virtualization of Mass Distraction. Heh, shitty low-bandwidth connections indeed. It has been a constant point of dark amusement and down-right pissed-off-ness with a few friends just how incredible terrible a cell phone connection is. Great city, Seattle. Home to McCaw Wireless and ATT Wireless back in the day. Not that you'd know it with the quality of connections here. Especially on Queen Anne. Hello - to use my cell phone, I MUST stand in the only large window in my house that faces north.

Drop my land line? No freakin' way!

Dave Nachmanoff, Geoffrey Castle

Karen, Nathan, Leah and I all went to a Dave Nachmanoff house concert tonight, incredible as always. The extra treat from this one was getting to hear and meet Geoffrey Castle, a local SUPERB violinist who happened to be one of Dave's buds back in the day (i.e. 20 years back) when they were both playing the streets together. He played with Dave tonight, and I was enthralled with his speed and control on the violin, so I picked up a solo album and am enjoying the heck out of it. I guess Geoffrey is part of the well known local band The Children of the Revolution, which being a local music afficianoda (NOT), I hadn't a clue. Sounds neat though!

herbs and hail

Well, we just had a rare occurance - hail! A rather huge thunderslap scarred the crap out the cats (no more food begging for them!) and then rain and hail started pouring from the sky. This was a classic midwest thunderstorm kind of hail - about the size of peas. It's covered the lawn and street, although now (20 minutes later), the hail on the street has faded away.

Walking onto the front porch was a delight though. All the herbs there had been pummeled by the hail, and the smell was incredible! I think the cilantro was the strongest, followed by rosemary, sage, and mint. I don't really want the plants to take a beating like that again, but boy did it smell good afterwards!

Going to have to do that again...

Karen and I have been talking about Serenity on and off today, and I think I'm going to have to go see it again. There's just a whole bunch of things I want to watch for again - and strangely none of them are really special effects. Karen and I agree that anyone really attempting to categorize the movie is going to be in for some hurt. It's a great story, set in space, with a definitively western theme over the top. A lot of the critics have been, I think, hedging their bets on this movie, but the people watching the movie have been giving pretty rave reviews. Shoot - Brent's thinking he should go see it again too!