dac's blog

Baby's first... junk mail?

2009-07-25T13:48:00.000-07:00

She's just over a month old, but Mikaela already received her first piece of junk mail today. It's from these folks at the Washington State Department of Health, and technically it's addressed to "The Parent(s) or Guardian(s) of Mikaela Stephanie Cuthbert," but it's nonetheless official: her name has been indelibly entered into mass marketing databases.

First days and photos!

2009-06-28T17:14:00.000-07:00

First and foremost, have some pictures. We have more, limited only by how speedily I can get them transferred and uploaded.

The first nights back from the hospital have been pleasant. Yes, you read that correctly. The main reason for this: now we're only being woken up by Mikaela, whereas before we also had caretakers coming in every 30-60 minutes to take vital signs and perform other tests. Don't get me wrong -- our care was second to none -- but it's nice to be able to get sleep which is a bit less interrupted.

Breastfeeding has been an adventure. I was starting to worry about whether Mikaela was getting dehydrated on Friday and was trying to figure out how to supplement the minuscule bits colostrum with glucose water, trying to make feeding sessions a bit more productive and less fussy by calming her, etc. And I was feeling guilty, because I couldn't actually feed her and take some of the burden off of Tamara. However, she politely but firmly assured me that this was all normal. Sure enough, she's getting a fair bit of milk now and feeding lasts a decent amount of time.

My role -- and one I'm happy with -- is to be Tamara's arms and legs when she's feeding.

Aside from when she's hungry, I'm actually somewhat good at getting Mikaela's fussiness under control. I've been using the techniques from The Happiest Baby on the Block. I'll quickly swaddle her, pick her up and turn her on her side, shush loudly into her ear, and sway her a bit, and Mikaela will quickly fall into that quiet-alert state. It's been remarkably effective for us.

Note that I don't recommend the book itself. While the techniques in it may work, it's more of an exercise in self-promotion by the pediatrician-author. I find some of the ancillary claims dubious.

Anyway, things are going remarkably well. Well enough, at least, that I have time to write this up here. :-)

And baby makes three...

2009-06-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

Our daughter, Mikaela Stephanie Cuthbert, was born today (6/24/09) at 10:27 am PDT. A healthy 6 lbs 5 oz, 19 inches long. Mother and daughter are both doing great (and napping as I take a few moments away to write this :-).

Triathlon distances

2009-05-24T20:57:00.000-07:00

What I don't get about most triathlons: the swims are usually short, often not even half-marathons. My casual swim workout is longer than most tri swims. These are followed by ridiculously long bike rides and marathon or longer runs.

IronMan Canada, I'm looking at you. Which of these things is not like the other?

A 180 km bike ride
A 42.2 km run
A 3800 m swim

Seawalls and chains

2009-05-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as I was bicycling from the ferry terminal, there were 15 or so fire, police, and medical units by the Washington Street Public Boat Landing, an old landing built on top of the seawall by Alaskan Way. This entire area is reclaimed land -- mostly rubble from the Great Seattle Fire that was pushed into Elliot Bay -- and highly unstable.

Well, as it turns out, some poor fellow fell into a hole when the sidewalk collapsed underneath him. According to comments on the Seattle Times version of the story, he was singing "Down In A Hole" (Alice In Chains) while being rescued.

Speaking of chains... I managed to snap my bicycle chain on my ride home yesterday. Apparently, I don't know my own strength. Anyway, the guys at the bike shop said I'm supposed to brag about this, hence this mention in my blog.

If you come across a broken chain lying along New Brooklyn Road on Bainbridge, now you'll know why.

Jellyfish

2009-05-20T21:17:00.001-07:00

Have I mentioned that jellyfish annoy me?

I've been swimming in Port Orchard fairly regularly since mid-April. The water surface temperature has been averaging 50°F or so -- chilly, but tolerable.

Last week, though, the surface temperature rose to the mid-50's. Apparently, the jellyfish polyps take this as a sign to bud off and produce juveniles. Fortunately, the jellies in Puget Sound are incapable of stinging humans. However, that doesn't mean the swimming through schools of them won't irritate your skin, as I can now personally attest.

In other news... um, well, there isn't much other news. Work exists, but nothing blog worthy. Bean arrives in a little more than a month, and we're insanely excited.

Another black eye for CFLs

2009-04-08T13:11:00.001-07:00

Lifetimes shorter than advertised.
Slow (minutes-long) start up times.
Environment-contaminating mercury.

Now add power consumption to the list of reasons why compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) aren't all they cracked up to be.

This EDN article points out that CFLs have a terrible power factor, between 0.4 and 0.6. In layman's terms, this means the lamps are using 66 to 150% more energy than advertised: a 13 watt lamp may require the power company to actually pump the energy equivalent of 32.5 watts down the line to light it up.

The good news -- for you, at least -- is that you're not actually billed this larger amount. Electric meters measure "real power" -- the 13 watts put off by the bulb. The bad news -- for the utilities and the environment -- is that the electric company has to provide the "apparent power", or the equivalent of 32.5 watts.

This is still less than the 60 watts needed for an incandescent bulb, but it does eat away at the magic of CFLs.

(Apparent power is usually given in volt-amperes; this is dimensionally equivalent to a watt, but this helps us electrical geeks to distinguish when we're talking about "real" vs. "apparent" power.)

Does not compute

2009-04-06T15:36:00.001-07:00

An article in today's AP news feed claims that 1 in 5 four year-olds are obese. Sure, obesity is a problem in our populace and it's no surprise that this is reflect in our children.

However, the definition they're using is suspect:

Children were considered obese if their body-mass index, a height-weight ratio, was in the 95th percentile or higher based on government BMI growth charts.

If they're using the 95th percentile, then only 1 in 20 (5%) of children are obese by definition.

What they really meant: "95th percentile or higher based on historical government BMI growth charts." In other words, a category which used to constitute 5% of four year-olds now represents 20% of them. Or, heck, quit with the political correctness and just set a number: obesity in four year-olds is defined as a BMI or 18 kg/m² or higher. Save the percentiles for justifying how you decided upon using 18 as the magic number.

Weekend chores and pranks

2009-04-05T20:19:00.000-07:00

It was dark and snowy on Wednesday. Today, it was sunny and in the upper 60s. Such a dramatic change injects a lot of energy into people, and we were no exception.

The kid's room is now ready -- wallpapered, all electrical sockets have been childproofed, drapes are up, and all other adornments are adorned. The attachments needed to mount the used bike rack we got for my car have been obtained and the rack is successfully attached. We even cleaned up the yard a bit -- mowed the grass, ripped out a lot of blackberries, and mulched it all. I also got some mounting hardware for my traffic signal and painted it all (Ace Hardware appliance paint -- spray paint mixed with epoxy -- is excellent stuff).

I also got a small bike ride in and did a bit of swimming in Port Orchard. No distance; this was more of an acclimatization exercise -- the air may have been 68°F, but the water is still around 47°F. I can definitely feel the difference since last November. Back in November, it would take me about 3 minutes to acclimate myself to the cold; now, it's up to 8-10 minutes and the cold is still noticeable.

Anyway, while riding back from Port Orchard on my bike, I thought of an interesting prank. North Korea claims that it successfully launched the Kwangmyongsong-2 satellite, though everyone knows that it was really a failed missile test. They claim that it's orbiting every 104 minutes and broadcasting patriotic songs on 470 MHz (that's UHF TV channel 14, should you want to try picking it up on your rabbit ears). Alas, nobody has actually heard anything on this frequency.

Which got me thinking...

What would people do if I set up a transmitter on this frequency and blasted "Song of General Kim Il Sung" and "Song of General Kim Jong Il" on it, fading it in and out every 104 minutes? What kind of rationalizations would folks make? How quickly would the hoax be discovered?

On that last question: my guess is fairly quickly, but that wouldn't stop a new group of conspiracy theorists from forming their own cute new clique.

The solution to the energy crisis

2009-03-22T01:30:00.000-07:00

It's donuts. Who would've thunk it?

Carnival commute

2009-03-20T20:51:00.000-07:00

How many of you can claim you had a carnival in the vehicle you commute in?

Well, that's what happened today on the 6:20 Seattle-Bainbridge ferry. Jugglers, musicians (including two accordions), face painters, and clowns. I wish my cell phone had a camera. I'll have to keep an eye out on Flickr and other sites to see if someone posts their pictures.

Freud's field day

2009-02-18T11:41:00.000-08:00

First, for those who haven't heard: I'm going to be the proud father of a bouncy baby girl this July!

This process, though, has resulted in some very bizarre dreams for me. The first notable one was your typical adequacy anxiety dream: I was at work, looked at a clock, and realized I had forgotten to go to the hospital for the delivery. Nobody could drive me there, either. Apparently buses and taxis didn't exist, so I was panicking.

A few weeks later, a dream finds me and Tamara at the hospital for a checkup. Upon leaving, a nurse comes out with a three year-old girl and two year-old boy and happily pronounces, "Congratulations! Here are your kids!" I try to explain that my wife is still pregnant, that these could not possibly be my kids given that they're nowhere close to being newborns, that we'd be willing to go through tests to prove this, but to no avail. She condescendingly tries to reassure me: "A lot of new fathers have problems at first and are in denial, but these are most definitely your kids. Off you go!"

Last night, my girl was just born and the doctors tell me, "She's unusually advanced, mentally, for a newborn." This turns out to be a bad thing. Mentally advanced means she's already acting like a teenager. A day later, she's wearing eye shadow, has a nose ring, and is trying to get into all kinds of things that teenagers do, but in an infant's body. She finds this incredibly frustrating, as do I, but for different reasons.

Freud could retire early and comfortably if he had me as a patient.

Femtocells

2009-01-29T13:04:00.000-08:00

I don't understand the economics behind femtocells. A femtocell is a device you plug in at home, expanding a cell phone company's coverage by using your internet connection. This allows you to have a better signal and takes a load off the cell phone company's towers and networks.

Great, I say. How much of a discount will they give me from my bill for doing this?

Answer: None, and they may actually charge you for this "service". Sprint wants $10-$20/month. Verizon will let you have it for free, but still deducts your minutes even though you're not using their network!

What a wonderful business model -- if you're a cell phone company. Charging customers to subsidize your business. And you don't even have to break any kneecaps or hire mafia thugs.

IBM's glaring omission

2009-01-11T13:32:00.000-08:00

I just saw IBM's "What is a Petaflop?" commercial. In it, they state that this computer can be used to "redesign our energy grid; cure diseases in our vascular system; simulate the big bang; we can build smarter cities; cut down on crime, disease, gridlock, global warming; it can help us make the world work better."

Alas, they omit the most widely used application for supercomputers: designing nuclear weapons. The TOP500 list has a number of IBM installations at Department of Energy sites; you can probably guess what they mean when they list the application area as not specified.

On the positive side, at least this means they're not testing actual weapons on people.

Wintry island pictures

2008-12-21T18:01:00.000-08:00

Yep, it's still coming down! Have some photos:

Let it snow?

2008-12-20T23:58:00.000-08:00

We're supposed to get up to 10 inches of snow tonight, which would give even Pittsburgh a bit of a run for its money. Bainbridge Island? I pretty much expect it to be shut down tomorrow.

I did go for a walk to the road end where I swim from just now. I've never seen snow extend all the way to the edge of seawater and even a bit beyond.

We're not getting the 50-90 mph winds they were predicting; in fact, there's not even a light breeze. They've also changed tomorrow's forecast from freezing rain to more snow. This gives me hope that I'll still have power tomorrow.

Winter update

2008-12-14T13:22:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated in awhile, but that's mainly because I've been busy with activities which I can't blog about. Heck, half of the work-related stuff couldn't even be written up in my company-internal blog (which I never use; I don't understand the point).

Instead, I give you a picture of my front yard. I still find it weird to live on an island where it snows.

Pravda

2008-11-05T01:45:00.000-08:00

I've been browsing international papers online to see the international response. I was surprised to see that Pravda, that good ol' Soviet-era paper, still exists.

Needless to say, they still don't bother with trite details like journalistic integrity when they write their stories. :-)

McCain's concession speech

2008-11-04T20:50:00.000-08:00

McCain's concession speech was gracious, honest, and from the heart. That was the McCain I supported back in 2000. Had he run his campaign in that tone, I suspect the outcome could have been different. Reminded me a fair bit of another Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater.

Added later: This blog entry by Joe Gandelman sums up my feelings rather accurately (especially since I was a McCain supporter -- and contributor -- in 2000 who voted for Obama):

But, most strikingly, the speech was vintage 2000 John McCain — and it was perhaps a bit bittersweet to some of McCain's 2000 supporters who voted against him this year as they most likely wondered: "Why didn't he talk like this during the campaign? Why didn’t he run using this same tone and persona?" McCain's speech made it seem as if a long lost twin brother had suddenly reappeared. It was one of the finest moments of his long, troubled campaign. This time he wasn’t worrying about the reaction of his party’s base — only what he felt needed to be said. Just like in 2000.

Something's afoot in Utah...

2008-11-04T19:46:00.000-08:00

Check out the CNN results. Apparently they use a different definition of "majority" there. :-)

(Not that I expect the final result to differ, mind you... just thought the current tally was funny.)

Sandwich Nazi

2008-10-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

I had lunch at Seattle's sandwich Nazi today, aka Bakeman's Restaurant. As recommended, I had the turkey. Yes, it was good, but not worth the abuse.

I got berated for telling him I had cranberry on my sandwich (which costs an extra 25¢).

If you enjoy abuse, it's a great place. Otherwise... meh. I get abuse all day long at work.

If the polls are skewed...

2008-10-28T01:35:00.000-07:00

There's been some concern about the accuracy of polls -- are people telling the truth? Is there a skew towards Obama because people are afraid of appearing racist? Is there a skew towards McCain because polls exclude non-land-line owners (who tend to be older and more Republican)?

Well, I can't answer the "accuracy" question with any certainty. However, being the database geek that I am, I can crunch numbers.

I took the poll data from RealClearPolitics and tossed them into an SQLite database; you can download the database itself here. Taking the latest poll data, here's what the election results look like if the percentage points are skewed in one direction or another.

Skew	Obama	McCain	Undecided	Result
McCain +6	263	276	0	McCain
McCain +5	263	215	61	No winner
McCain +4	324	182	33	Obama
McCain +3	357	182	0	Obama
McCain +2	357	182	0	Obama
McCain +1	357	182	0	Obama
No Skew	357	168	14	Obama
Obama +1	371	168	0	Obama
Obama +2	371	168	0	Obama
Obama +3	371	168	0	Obama
Obama +4	371	168	0	Obama
Obama +5	371	158	10	Obama
Obama +6	381	132	26	Obama

In case you want to play with the database:
ELECTORAL_VOTES contains a mapping from state to number of electoral votes for that state (state, votes).
POLLS contains a listing of each poll; the rows contain: state, poll_date, poll_name, obama, mccain.
LATEST_POLLS is a view containing the latest polls from POLLS.
SKEW is a table containing the integers from -6 to 6.

The query to produce the above table is:

select skew, sum(obama_votes), sum(mccain_votes), ifnull(sum(undecided_votes), 0)
  from (select skew, (mccain - obama > skew) * votes mccain_votes,
                     (mccain - obama < skew) * votes obama_votes,
                     (mccain - obama = skew) * votes undecided_votes
         from latest_polls
         cross join skew order by skew) group by skew;

Powell's lament

2008-10-20T00:14:00.001-07:00

Buddy, I know how you feel. From today's New York Times:

"I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years," Mr. Powell told Tom Brokaw on "Meet the Press" on NBC as he made his endorsement of Mr. Obama. "It has moved more to the right than I would like to see it."

I've also been reading a new biography of Barry Goldwater written by John Dean and Barry Goldwater, Jr., Pure Goldwater. My father -- a Goldwater supporter in the 60s -- gave me an autographed copy. I'm only about halfway through it; so far, though, I'm quite enjoying it and am finding him to be a man whose wisdom we desperately need today. At any rate, I think Goldwater would've been fairly disappointed in the Republican party of today, too.

McCain continues to disappoint me. I had hopes that his shift from his 2000/2004 persona was a ploy to clinch the nomination and appease the powers in the party. Alas, as the NYT article points out with his choice of advisers, he's just going deeper and deeper into neocon territory.

I am dead to the Internet

2008-10-12T23:22:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the Internet thinks I should be dead, given my current exercise regimen:

Few people can swim a mile in fifty degree water. Apparently, I'm one of the elusive few who can do two miles.
An average adult person has a 50/50 chance of surviving a 50 yard swim in 50°F water. Well, given the number of times and total distance I've swum in 50° water, it's a statistical certainty that I should have died.
This site puts expected time before unconsciousness at 1 hour for 50° water. Dang... if only I could get those two miles in under an hour...
The chart at the bottom of this page concurs: a "clo" value of 0.06 (nude) means death at just over an hour. Dang, those Speedos I have must be great.

Anyway, this is my new standard workout. I've been swimming in Port Orchard Narrows (which, despite the name, is actually a channel/strait, not a port) from Fletcher Landing (short bike ride from my house) down to the tip of Crystal Springs. Google Earth puts it at 1.18 miles. My thermometer puts it at 50°-56°, depending on the day.

Apples

2008-10-09T19:56:00.000-07:00

I didn't get a chance to follow the news today. Why were there so many folks selling apples on the street corners on my ride home?

Actually, right now I'm feeling somewhat lucky; back in July, I sold all the stock I had and took out a loan against my 401(k) when we bought the house. I wish I could say that it was some keen insight, but it was just pure luck. Not so lucky: working in an industry where much of my compensation comes in the form of stock. I suspect a lot of folks, myself included, will max out on the capital loss deduction come next April.

Scary times.

Flight Simulator

2008-10-04T20:33:00.001-07:00

There's an Airbus flight simulator on sale over at DoveBid. It won't install on your PC, though; you'll need a warehouse.

Oh, man... this could be a lot of fun...

Hacked

2008-09-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

Dammit, someone managed to hack into a couple of my accounts. On the plus side, I was watching them as they did it, so I was able to stem the problem very quickly (within a few minutes), but dang... they're fast. They managed to create ~$400 in fraudulent PayPal charges in the span of 5 minutes. (I was on the phone with PayPal as they did were still fumbling about, in fact.)

I'm still at a loss as to how they accomplished this. I do know that I received an e-mail which caused GMail to spaz out -- text was flowing outside of the places it was supposed to be (so they probably found yet another XSS vulnerability in GMail) and attempting to view this e-mail caused the page to spend a long time loading (i.e., it was phoning home, probably with my GMail login cookie).

However, this doesn't explain how they were able to get into my PayPal account. The only thing I can think of is a keystroke logger, but it's not like I typed any passwords in those 5 minutes. That, or they managed to get into my saved passwords in Firefox (though I don't think I saved my PayPal password in there for this very reason). I guess I'll find out on Monday when I bring my laptop in forensic analysis.

In the meantime, I had my work account locked down (which I highly doubt was accessed, but this is still the prudent measure to take) and managed to change all of my other passwords within 30 minutes, all without incident; this means they probably didn't get at anything else.

The attack itself was quite sophisticated. Not only was it generating PayPal charges as fast as possible, it would intercept and delete the PayPal confirmation e-mails which showed up. I got glimpses of the subject lines and actually managed to click on one (and confirm, to my horror, that it was draining money from my real bank account), but they were being deleted not long thereafter.

Google, incidentally, is of no help here (even though I'm paying $50/year for their "premier" edition of GMail). I called their emergency number only to be told that their offices are closed until Monday morning.

Anyway. PISSED OFF IS ME.

The ultimate in high maintenance

2008-09-19T16:55:00.000-07:00

Ah, the laughs. I've found the dating profile of someone who is the ultimate in high maintenance. And it's a 53 year old guy.

He even has a section entitled, "Do NOT Fall in Love with Me until I say so!"

Need to take a week off.

2008-09-15T19:53:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a three day kayak trip around the San Juans (mainly Cypress Island) with Tamara and Julie (a friend from Sacramento who came up with the crazy plan in the first place). It was quite fun and nicely relaxing. However, the kayaking, plus swimming and hiking each night, has left my body exhausted and my muscles sore. As I'm flying down to San Diego tomorrow and spending the rest of the week there, I think I'm going to take a bit of a break from swimming.

Work has been exceedingly stressful as of late. Too many last-minute critical projects being juggled and thrown my way. I seem to spend 80% of my time in front of Outlook delegating and explaining what needs to happen instead of doing it myself. I suppose this would be acceptable if I were a manager, but I'm not. I think I'd be happier if I didn't know that spending time on this would be held against me come performance review time. Ah, like Dilbert, I guess I have the curse of competence.

Anyway, time to pack.

Setting priorities; more Chrome nits

2008-09-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

Due to various events circulating around and entrapping me, I'm thinking of requiring folks to prioritize the requests they send me. They can select from the following options:

Priority 1.15. My request is important, but not so important that anyone will actually notice before we or they change teams/companies. I'm mainly filing this to cover my ass and I can point to a document and say, "I told you so," should this blow up.
Priority 1.1. My request is important enough to require you to do this now, but not so important that I'm willing to devote any of my team's resources into understanding the problem.
Priority 1. My request is important enough that I'll make vague promises to understand the problem at some unspecified point in the future, but will hope that you don't follow up on this. Also, I'll hound you with meeting invites until you submit to my will.

On the Chrome front, I'm still generally happy with it, though I did experience slowdowns with some Flash stuff. My experience here mirrors someone's review (which I can't seem to find at the moment): better than Firefox on CPU usage, but worse than IE8.

However they don't support SPNEGO/Kerberos/NTLM authentication, at least not yet. This is the magic which lets me get away with typing my work password only once a day rather than once for each internal website I visit. I'll have to keep Firefox open in the meantime.

Quick update on Chrome

2008-09-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

Sure enough, a site I browsed to caused Chrome to crash -- not unexpected, given this is the first release of an alpha product (yeah, I know that Google calls it beta; I'm doing my own take here). However, true to expectations, it only caused that tab to close and vanish; the rest of my browser was unaffected.

This pleases me.

Separate processes are the way things should have been done a long time ago. (Why won't anyone listen to me on this?) Threads are fine if you have short, asymmetric work loads (e.g., spinning up a separate thread to monitor a file handle); they're generally not the right solution if you have symmetric work to perform. The Java fanboys at work yell and scream that threads are perfect, processes don't scale on multicore systems (huh?), you can't share memory (uh, that's kind of the point), and going multiprocess is an admission that your code has bugs (well, duh).

Of course, Java has plenty of objects to handle threads but no fork() call. Going multiprocess is much harder in this kind of environment. Not impossible, as the Cygwin guys have demonstrated through their fork() emulation on Windows, but definitely harder.

Chrome...

2008-09-02T15:56:00.000-07:00

I'm trying out the new browser that Google has tossed together. But my first impression: what the heck? It insists on installing itself for each and every user of a given computer? WTF?

That said, browsing my usual websites shows that it is quite zippy. It also imported all of my bookmarks, saved passwords, and browsing history from Firefox without a hitch (though I did have to shut down Firefox first -- I'm guessing Firefox doesn't leave files in a consistent state while it runs and doesn't provide APIs for other apps to access this information).

It does spawn a bunch of processes, as expected. Even show, with three tabs loaded, it's using less than 100 MB of memory; Firefox 3, by comparison, eats up around 300 MB just to start up.

Firefox: I'm not giving up on you just yet, but you're on notice.

Good god...

2008-08-11T00:49:00.000-07:00

I have to wonder if Russia is trying to start WWIII in Georgia. This is the biggest finger they could possibly give to the U.S. and Europe.

Of course, the second part of that statement might be, "And we know you're not going to do anything about it because your people are too tired of Iraq." On that count, so far they're right. Oh, and toss in a, "Hey look, Olympics!" for good measure.

Don't get sick in Oregon

2008-08-05T14:02:00.001-07:00

Can anyone confirm this story? I can only find it on Fox News and a few other right-wing blogs; I'm guessing there's more to it, but dang if I can find any additional information on it.

Oregon Offers Terminal Patients Doctor-Assisted Suicide Instead of Medical Care

Since the spread of his prostate cancer, 53-year-old Randy Stroup of Dexter, Ore., has been in a fight for his life. Uninsured and unable to pay for expensive chemotherapy, he applied to Oregon's state-run health plan for help.
Lane Individual Practice Association (LIPA), which administers the Oregon Health Plan in Lane County, responded to Stroup's request with a letter saying the state would not cover Stroup's pricey treatment, but would pay for the cost of physician-assisted suicide.

If true, this is obviously more than a bit chilling.

Fat Salmon

2008-07-19T15:53:00.000-07:00

I swam in the Fat Salmon open water race today. This was 3.2 miles in Lake Washington, from the I-90 bridge to the WA-520 bridge.

Oh, and I decided to do it without a wetsuit. The temperature was nice (~72°F), but oof -- the double whammy of no neoprene and fresh water meant my buoyancy went out the window. And, boy, did I pay the price -- I clocked in at an even 2 hours (my official time was something like 2:00:14). The last time I did a straight 3 mile swim in the pool I finished in 1:38 -- still not zippy, but not sluggishly slow.

I never even saw the first set of three buoys I was supposed to swim between. I might have gone between them, but then I should have caught a glimpse of them. Apparently, neither did a few others, nor were people being disqualified for this. (Not that they're overly strict at Fat Salmon.) Trying to sight them was a pain -- buoys aren't the easiest thing to spot when your eyes are at water level, and my lack of buoyancy only made things worse -- so I suspect I lost a lot of time craning my neck up every 12 counts.

But I finished.

The course:

The Rock

2008-06-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting my open water workouts -- too many to list this year, and I just haven't had the time -- but this morning's workout was notable: I finally make it to Blakely Rock today!

This is about a mile off-island; since we start in Blakely Harbor this makes the trip just under 2 miles one-way). You feel like you're in the middle of Puget Sound standing on the rock. I hope to get some pictures soon. In the meantime, here's an overview map to give you an idea where this is in relation to Seattle:

It's the year 2008...

2008-06-15T23:22:00.001-07:00

Forget my flying cars. Why the heck can I still not print from Linux (more specifically, Ubuntu 8.04)?

I threw together a little applet to stitch together a Puget Sound navigation chart from NOAA (check out chart number 18449). This isn't acceptable for navigation, they say, but hey: I just want something to look at. I don't own a yacht, boat, or even a kayak; the extent of my water vessel ownership is owning a swimsuit and goggles...

It was a success; you can download it here, if you're so inclined. Anyway, now to print it.

Oh, god, the agony.

I tried Eye of Gnome first. I tweaked my printer settings a bit (I'm printing this to 13"x19" glossy paper instead of the normal letter paper) and hit print. The system starts puzzling over this for a bit (at least if the CPU usage bar is any indication) and then... nothing.

I open up the printer jobs viewer. It says the job is stopped with no indication at to why. That's strange. I cancel it and try again. Same result.

Ok, maybe EOG is flaky. I cancel the second job and start up Gimp (which, incidentally, is an exceedingly dumb and potentially offensive name for an image editing program, but I digress...). I change the settings again, hit print... and, again, minutes of thinking followed by nothing. I do the cancel/reprint/cancel/print a test page/reprint shuffle a few times, but all to no avail.

Hrm. Something is amiss. I check out the CUPS logs:

E [15/Jun/2008:23:11:10 -0700] PID 28099 (/usr/lib/cups/filter/pstoraster) stopped with status 1!
E [15/Jun/2008:23:11:11 -0700] [Job 226] Job stopped due to filter errors.

Well, that's interesting. But why is this pstoraster program failing? Any logs?

Nope, can't find them. But it turns out that pstoraster is a shell script which does attempt to print some logs out -- they're probably just going to /dev/null. I write a wrapper to send its output to /var/log/cups/pstoraster.log, try printing again, and see what I get.

Oh, joy. It's failing somewhere deep in the bowels of Gutenprint and Ghostscript:

DEBUG: Running /usr/bin/gs -dQUIET -dDEBUG -dPARANOIDSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dNOMEDIAATTRS -sDEVICE=cups -sstdout=%stderr -sOUTPUTFILE=%stdout -c -
... many lines of garbage deleted ...
Error: /rangecheck in --image--
Operand stack:

Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--
   --nostringval--   2 %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--
   --nostringval--   false   1  %stopped_push   1905   1   3   %oparray_pop
   1904   1   3   %oparray_pop   1888   1   3   %oparray_pop   1771   1
   3   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   %errorexec_pop    .runexec2
   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push
    --nostringval--   1809   1   3   %oparray_pop
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:1149/1684(ro)(G)--   --dict:0/20(G)--   --dict:126/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
GPL Ghostscript 8.61: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
DEBUG2: cups_close(0x685378)

Catch all that? This will be on tomorrow's quiz.

How did I end up printing this? I fired up Windows XP in VMware Player, opened the image using an old copy of Paint Shop Pro 5 (which works well for 99% of my image editing needs), and hit print. Pretty map came out a few minutes later.

Seriously, folks: this is an embarrassment. You're making Vista look like a dream.

Fly Derrie-Air

2008-06-06T15:17:00.000-07:00

Skinny? Flying to Philadelphia? Check out Derrie-Air:

The magic comes from our one of a kind "Sliding Scale"—the more you weigh, the more you'll pay. After all, it takes more fuel—more energy—to get more weight from point A to point B. So we will charge passengers based on how much mass they add to the plane.

Yes, it is a joke. Nonetheless, the media company behind this spoof actually did buy full-page adverts in Philly papers this morning.

Seals, coming unglued...

2008-06-06T14:07:00.000-07:00

First, the coming unglued part: this was not my fault. (Actually, it wasn't anyone's fault, though working around the issue took a lot longer than it should have.)

But the more interesting part: I apparently have a new pet. There's a seal in Manzanita Bay, where we often swim, who has decided that I'm fun to play with. It was pouring on Tuesday, so we didn't have a support craft; instead, I had one of those lifeguard rescue tubes dragging behind me on a strap. The seal thought it would be hilarious to play with it and tug on the straps. Spooked me out the first time the came around. Eventually, it just got annoying.

Wednesday was another swim day, this time with a support craft. To my surprise, the seal still wanted to play even though I didn't have the tube with me. This time, it was mostly in the form of bumping against my feet and swimming below me (face up, just to show that he was a better swimmer or somesuch).

I am a bit worried that he's getting too comfortable with humans. That's usually not a good thing for wildlife. Ah well... all of our attempts to scare him off have proven unsuccessful. I guess we'll just have to live with him.

I've been busy.

2008-05-26T13:45:00.000-07:00

It amazes me that using the Internet, which used to be a fun, diversionary pastime, is now a lot like work. When I do get a free moment -- which is sadly becoming a rare occurrence these days -- jacking in to the matrix (errr, surfing the web, that is) is down at the bottom of the list of things I want to do.

As a result, updating my journal falls by the wayside, too.

So... let's see. Last update was 18 April. Since then, I've:

Gone to Maker Faire with Tamara and our friend Julie. It was a lot of fun. A few pictures I took of the gizmos are online.

Started open water swimming in Puget Sound again. We've mostly been swimming in Manzanita Bay (here's an overview of a typical workout there), and there's a seal which loves to swim with us. Actually, it's the ladies he seems to like. Don't ask me how he can tell the difference (or even if it's a male -- apparently, his/her ability to determine interspecial gender is better than mine), but he definitely goes up next to them instead of the guys.

Gone to Hobuck Beach a couple times. No pictures, sorry; I felt more like wandering than thinking about taking photos. I did get a nasty tire puncture hitting a sharp rock on highway 112 when returning from my first trip. That also prompted me to get my tires replaced; when putting the spare on, I noticed that the treads were much more pronounced. Oops.

Built a BlackBerry application to make oncall life easier at work, called Sur Appels Sans Frontières (i.e. "On Calls Without Borders" -- yes, I know the French is atrocious, but it translated forward and back properly in Google Translator, so I'm sticking with it). This was part of a competition to build tools for others in the company to make their lives easier. The upside: I won the "Best Tool For Builders" category. The downside: They want me to roll this baby out (in my copious spare time, of course :-). I did get a nifty hard hat helmet/trophy (in keeping with our internal system builder website's Bob the Builder theme). I'll have to take a picture of that.

Gotten completely inundated with operational issues at work. Ironically, while I was giving the demo of Sur Appels, my team was in the middle of dealing with a Sev-1. It also seems that the new database hardware we're getting has a bad issue with the storage controllers which causes the database to completely hang from time to time. In usual Amazon tradition, the engineers are being told to just deal with it, it's your problem, not provisioning's. That is, we'll spend a few million to work around the problem rather than a few thousand to deal with it directly. <sigh>

Been househunting off and on. More off than on in the last few weeks. I hate the whole process. That's all I'll say for now lest this become an angsty rant.

And there you have it, in executive summary PowerPoint bullet form. Next slide please.

It is snowing.

2008-04-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

Which wouldn't be unusual in and of itself except (a) it's mid-April, and (b) this is Seattle.

We're supposed to have our first open water swim in a couple weeks. I'm beginning to wonder about this.

Maker Faire

2008-04-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

Anyone reading this going to Maker Faire at the San Mateo Fairgrounds next month?

After two years of wanting to go but doing nothing about it, I'm finally plunking down the money to fly down and go. I'm usually reluctant to spend money on trips like this for myself without some other attached event (e.g., someone else is going, is getting married, etc.). I don't really know why I'm that way; I just am.

I'll be there on Saturday, May 3rd. If you'll be there, get my contact info and come say hi!

I spent my weekend mostly naked.

2008-04-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

Probably more information than you wanted to know. But I was at the PNA/NW Zone swim meet, so I had an excuse this time. This was my first ever swim meet that I've actually swum in (I've spent others timing and running the computer).

The King County Aquatic Center is nice. The competition pool is an LCM (long course (50) meter), dividable into various arrangements; for this meet, it was divided into two SCY (short course (25) yard) pools. It's 9 feet deep throughout -- no worrying about hitting your head turning in the shallow end -- and has waveless gutters. You could warm up during the meet in the dive tank -- 25 yards square and 17.5 feet deep. When you jump into it, you feel like you're just going to float forever downward.

Anyway, I did the 1000 and 1650 ("swimmer's mile") freestyle events, and a relay event where I swam another 50 freestyle. I learned that I'm faster than I think I am, but still nowhere near as fast as I'd like to be. I managed a 15:13 in the 1000 (vs. expected 18:00), and 25:08 for 1650 (expected 29:00). However, I know that I was faster here than I am in my normal pool -- all those niceties plus the adrenaline rush add up.

A decent web framework?

2008-04-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with a combination of CherryPy, Genshi, and Dojo to put together a website for a friend. So far, I've been quite pleased.

CherryPy is the request router -- it's responsible for cracking open the HTTP message and deciding how to process it. I have a few nits about it -- mainly documentation related -- but getting a webserver set up which did something along the lines of, "Route everything through Genshi except this path, which you should serve from the filesystem," was very straightforward.

Genshi is the first page framework which evoked a response from me of, "Hm, this could work," instead of, "God, I feel like I'm going to throw up." It uses an interesting approach: you write everything in XML and embed the programmatic constructs in the attributes. The rendering phase takes care of the transformation to HTML (or text, or ). For example, here's how you might render a table full of sliders for every integer or floating-point parameter:

<tr py:for="param in parameters">
  <td py:if="param.valueType in ('int', 'float')">
    <div dojoType="dijit.form.HorizontalSlider"
         id="${param.name}Slider"
         py:attrs="param.sliderAttributes"
         intermediateChanges="true"
         onChange="onNumericSliderChange('${name}')" />
  </td>
</tr>

I'm used to the frameworks which require you to escape any code. Genshi lets you do that, if you absolutely insist upon it:

<?python
for param in parameters:
?><tr><?python
    if param.valuetype in ('int', 'float'):
?><div dojoType="dijit.form.HorizontalSlider"
         id="${param.name}Slider"
         py:attrs="param.sliderAttributes"
         intermediateChanges="true"
         onChange="onNumericSliderChange('${name}')" />
  </td>
</tr>

Dojo is a set of widgets. Not quite Google Web Toolkit, but it's simple and gets the job done.

SpamAssassin's multiple personality disorder

2008-04-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

SpamAssassin has become a bit overly aggressive in its filtering as of late. A few of my friends' e-mails are getting sucked up in there, so I've had to monitor it a bit more closely.

Today, however, I found this gem in there. Clearly, it was conflicted as to whether the e-mail was spam or not, though ultimately it decided it was (and was correct in this determination). What amazes me is that, even with 12.3 positive points subtracted, this e-mail still scores as spam.

Content analysis details:   (8.6 points, 5.0 required)

 pts rule name              description
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
 1.0 NO_REAL_NAME           From: does not include a real name
 0.1 FORGED_RCVD_HELO       Received: contains a forged HELO
 0.1 HTML_90_100            BODY: Message is 90% to 100% HTML
 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE           BODY: HTML included in message
 0.5 BAYES_99               BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%
                            [score: 1.0000]
 0.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY         BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
-4.3 RCVD_IN_BSP_TRUSTED    RBL: Sender is in Bonded Sender Program (trusted
                            relay)
                            [Return Path SenderScore Certified (formerly]
                      [Bonded Sender) - ]
 1.6 URIBL_SBL              Contains an URL listed in the SBL blocklist
                            [URIs: selleis.com]
 3.8 URIBL_AB_SURBL         Contains an URL listed in the AB SURBL blocklist
                            [URIs: selleis.com]
 4.1 URIBL_JP_SURBL         Contains an URL listed in the JP SURBL blocklist
                            [URIs: selleis.com]
 2.1 URIBL_WS_SURBL         Contains an URL listed in the WS SURBL blocklist
                            [URIs: selleis.com]
 3.0 URIBL_OB_SURBL         Contains an URL listed in the OB SURBL blocklist
                            [URIs: selleis.com]
 4.5 URIBL_SC_SURBL         Contains an URL listed in the SC SURBL blocklist
                            [URIs: selleis.com]
 0.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI   Multipart message only has text/html MIME parts
-8.0 AWL                    AWL: From: address is in the auto white-list

Office/cubicle location

2008-04-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

I've decided that it's not the size of the office which matters; it's the location. While I wouldn't pass up a posh corner window office on the penthouse floor, that's not what I'm thinking of. I need an office deep within a maze of twisty passages, all alike. The effort required to find me would place a high premium on interrupting me, and hopefully I could get more done.

Then again, maybe this will ensure that I only get determined idiots bugging me. Hm.

Tamara and I went down to Sacramento to visit a friend for an extended weekend. It was fabulous -- we spent a few days at her family's cabin in the Sierras, got together with a bunch of college buddies in the Bay Area, and otherwise just hung out.

Remember that fitness challenge I was doing in February? Well, the results have been posted; I came in second in my age group again. The guy who beat me won't beat me next year, though -- if only because I'll move up to the next age group. :-)

Value of a dollar?

2008-03-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

If you are paid in or have bank accounts valued in U.S. dollars, the news that Bear Stearns was sold for $2 per share -- in a deal backed with $30 billion [edit: I originally mistyped "million" here] of your tax dollars -- should be extremely worrying.

This means that Bear Stearns is valued at $236 million. Last Monday, when it was trading at $70/share, it was valued at $8.26 billion. In the span of a week, $8 billion dollars effectively vanished into thin air -- in other words, investors overvalued BSC by 3500%.

If we were talking about Moe's Junkyard and Hot Dog Stand and other places with shoddy or non-existent accounting, nobody would care. But we're talking about a bank, whose finances were tracked by other banks.

This is like going to the ATM, withdrawing $20, and then trying to buy lunch -- only to find you can't afford it because there's only 57¢ in your wallet. Or going to the gas station and finding that the price of gas has risen from $3.50/gallon to $122.50/gallon. All stuff which is supposed to be unthinkable.

Yet it's here. And I'm worried.

Mirroring blog entries from Blogger to LiveJournal

2008-03-15T02:13:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a few questions on how I'm using Blogger while having posts mirrored to LiveJournal. The magic is a little Python script I wrote, which I've sanitized (that is, I got rid of my hard-coded and tossed up here.

It's not for the faint of heart in its current form. You'll need:

A Unix-ish computer. MacOS X is probably sufficient, but I don't have a Mac to test it on. Sorry, porting this to Windows is just too much effort.
Python 2.5.
The GData API for Python.

You'll probably want to install it as a cron job. My crontab runs this every 15 minutes:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/15 * * * * /home/dacut/bin/blogger2lj.py

Why would you want to do this? In my case, I'm getting weary of the goings-on with the suits over in LJ land, but still have a bunch of folks who read the version over there. I guess we got settled in before LJ became the platform for emo tweens. Heh, live and learn.

Anyway, I'm not saying that others should move to a new blogging platform. This just gives you the option to move without having to cut ties with your existing social circle. Could you imagine what real life would be like if decisions like this dictated your social circle? "Bob, Linda, Jake: It's been great hanging out with you guys, and I'm going to miss you. But I'm changing mobile phone companies, and the new one doesn't take phone calls from you. Sorry."

Oracle Poetry

2008-03-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

It's interesting what you can stumble across when you turn stones over while walking along a path. Or, in my case, when you snoop on network traffic. Worry not; I was doing this for a good cause: to track down a problem with the Oracle database driver.

@"Oracle
Everybody follows
Speedy bits exchange
Stars await to gl@ow"
The preceding key is copyrighted by Oracle Corporation.
Dupl@ication of this key is not allowed without permission
from Oracl1e Corporation. Copyright 2003 Oracle Corporation.

It looks like this is a creative way of making sure nobody else writes their own software for talking to Oracle databases -- to do that, you would have to copy the poem, which is a violation of Oracle's copyrights.

Either I'm losing my edge....

2008-03-08T19:28:00.001-08:00

... or the jargon beast has eaten the Eclipse folks and changed their website.

Granted, I'm only develop in Java because it's the langue du jour in software circles today and am not overly enamored of it (or its fanboys), but I do have a reasonably deep understanding of the lingo. But I can't make heads or tails of the Eclipse Equinox mission statement:

From a code point of view, Equinox is an implementation of the OSGi R4 core framework specification, a set of bundles that implement various optional OSGi services and other infrastructure for running OSGi-based systems.
More generally, the goal of the Equinox project is to be a first class OSGi community and foster the vision of Eclipse as a landscape of bundles. As part of this, it is responsible for developing and delivering the OSGi framework implementation used for all of Eclipse. In addition. the project is open to:
Implementation of all aspects of the OSGi specification (including the MEG and VEG work)
Investigation and research related to future versions of OSGi specifications and related runtime issues
Development of non-standard infrastructure deemed to be essential to the running and management of OSGi-based systems
Implementation of key framework services and extensions needed for running Eclipse (e.g., the Eclipse Adaptor, Extension registry) and deemed generally useful to people using OSGi
As a peer of the Platform, JDT and PDE projects, the Equinox OSGi code is managed by the Eclipse PMC and ships with the Eclipse project major releases. The various other bundles developed here may ship independently and on different schedules.

On the other hand, I think I'd be more worried if I did understand this...

February is over...

2008-03-01T11:43:00.000-08:00

And that means the February Fitness Challenge is done. Which is good, because my body desperately needs a day off.

I'm rather pleased with how I did. I swam 121,000 yards (68¾ miles/110 kilometers), beating my goal of 100,000 yards.

In pictorial form:

Am I radiant?

2008-02-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

If you're going to steal something from an abandoned building, I recommend choosing something other than the old, radioactive X-ray source. It's also probably not a great idea to sell it on eBay.

Vista -- sorry, it's my bad...

2008-02-22T01:04:00.000-08:00

At least according to Slashdot, Amazon caused Vista to ship before it was ready by stealing a key Microsoft SVP, Brian Valentine. He's the SVP of my org at Amazon now.

They also point out that we're paying him something like $33M over four years; for once, though, I'll say it's money well spent. He's probably saved the company that much already by cutting out crap. Very effective leader in my book.

I wax statistical...

2008-02-11T22:50:00.000-08:00

I'm watching "Deal or No Deal" -- they have a new gimmick where they're putting up multiple cases with $1 million (12 of 26 for the current contestant), replacing the other high dollar amounts on the board. However, I'm not sure it actually changes the gameplay at all.

Computing the expected value at any point is straightforward. The bank's offers, however, are not solely dependent on the expected value; the number of turns appears to be a factor. A comment on this blog post suggests offer = <value> * turn / 10 (where <value> is the expectation value). The offers the bank is making in the early rounds of the 12 $1 million case version, however, seem low -- almost as if the values on the board were not $1 million but the previous values. The episode ended before the contestant finished, so I'm left wondering at this point.

One thing which strikes me, however, is that the endgame is probably the same. If he/she makes it to the final round, in all likelihood (though I have yet to confirm this statistically) the choice will be between a low dollar amount and a $1 million suitcase. Maybe it's somehow easier to get to this endgame? Hm. You know, I'm going to have to do the math on this one.

Oof...

2008-02-09T22:17:00.000-08:00

Silly me. Silly fitness challenge. I swam just over 6 miles today (10,600 yards). That's the most I've done in a single day and my arms are complaining like crazy.

I'm currently at 23.8 miles for the month; my goal is 56.8 miles (100,000 yards), so I'm a good part of the way there. Let's hope my muscles don't fall apart.

Early results from Washington

2008-02-09T15:26:00.000-08:00

At least if the precincts in my caucus were anything to go by, it looks like Obama will have a solid lead in Washington. The breakdown in my precinct was 188 (12 delegates) for Obama, 55 (3 delegates) for Clinton, and 19 (1 delegate) undecided. Other precincts split similarly. Turnout was heavy, as one might expect.

This is the first time I've ever participated in a caucus -- my previous experiences were voting in lame duck primaries in California and Pennsylvania. I quite like Washington's system; you don't register for a particular party, so you can go to either of the caucuses. Since McCain has the Republican nomination pretty much locked up, it made far more sense to attend a Democratic caucus. Listening to people campaign makes for a far more lively atmosphere; participating in the political process is more fun this way.

When work intrudes on your personal life...

2008-02-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

I just saw the Super Bowl ad for Pepsi Stuff. Unremarkable, except they flashed the Amazon.com logo for a fraction of a second. It's so weird seeing that. I forget just how big Amazon is sometimes. It's unusual, because the work I do often has a direct impact on the website.

At every other big company I've worked (IBM, Seagate, Cadence), my work usually ends up being a footnote for some minor offshoot project which never made it into a real product. Until now, it's only been the startups (AstroTerra, Neolinear) where my contributions actually have had a measurable impact for a customer.

The Fed's big 75 point mistake

2008-01-28T16:39:00.000-08:00

This article in the Motley Fool is, IMNSHO, spot-on. The Fed's recent 75 point cut in interest rates is a crazy mistake.

Remember that the Fed's job is to tame inflation, not try to correct the economy. The economy simply cannot be corrected by central planning like this -- time has shown again and again that this produces results counter to the effect desired.

What does reducing the interest rate do? It makes the dollar a less attractive investment for foreigners -- who wants to buy dollars when the return is lower? Then basic supply and demand kicks in: a decrease in demand means the price (or exchange rate) goes down. Since a lot of our goods are imported -- including and especially oil -- their prices will go up.

The net result? Stagflation.

OOXML bad? Try iTunes.

2008-01-24T17:47:00.000-08:00

Technical folks like to wail about how defective OOXML (Microsoft's "open" format for Office) is. I agree -- with instructions like "render this table in the quirky way Word 95 did it", it's an impossible standard to implement.

However, that is nothing compared to the travesty that is iTunes. I've been having problems with my iPod; whenever I plug it in, iTunes spits up a DOS-like dialog box: "There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive E:. Abort/Try Again/Continue." Googling suggests a possible fix: delete your iTunes preferences and reinstall.

Ugh. I'd rather not delete my license key and preferences, thankyouverymuch. So I decided to see what was in this file and if I could fix it myself.

I open up iTunesPrefs.xml in XEmacs and am presented with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>EQ Preferences</key>
    <dict>
        <key>EQPresets:129</key>
        <data>
        AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
        AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
        AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
        AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
        AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
        ....
    </data>
    </dict>
    <key>HTTP</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Cookies</key>
        <data>
        PD94bWwgdmVyc2lvbj0iMS4wIiBlbmNvZGluZz0iVVRGLTgiPz4KPCFET0NU
        WVBFIHBsaXN0IFBVQkxJQyAiLS8vQXBwbGUgQ29tcHV0ZXIvL0RURCBQTElT
        ...
        </data>
    </dict>
    <key>Keychain</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Keychain</key>
        <data>
        WqtWpl9/8NLX0QgFWU4ogEh/7aKP4SbSBd7LRQZ6G8NBJ8dt+AjSv4fs6UOK
        qZQ1PkuO6SqRct7r67XozEPbT8LIyXCZsHZe3w5qcvBQyWOzOTUVOJXT74ZC
        ...
        </data>
        <key>iTunes Library XML Location:1</key>
        <data>
        QwA6AFwARABvAGMAdQBtAGUAbgB0AHMAIABhAG4AZAAgAFMAZQB0AHQAaQBu
        AGcAcwBcAGMAdQB0AGgAYgBlAHIAdABcAE0AeQAgAEQAbwBjAHUAbQBlAG4A
        ...
        </data>
    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

And so forth.

Ok, so I can understand wanting to obfuscate things like my DRM keys (presumably what's behind the Keychain bit). But equalizer settings? Application paths? Huh?

If you're going to store things in a locked down, proprietary format, why go through the lengths to format and parse it in an interchange format like XML?

Ah, PL/SQL

2008-01-17T14:52:00.000-08:00

Ah, the idiocies of Oracle's database language, PL/SQL.

Let's say you're trying to fix things for a few thousand customers who have managed to create duplicate accounts. You want to delete the duplicate accounts, which are listed in a driver table called DUPLICATE_ACCOUNTS. Knowing that committing a few rows at a time is a good thing on a running database, you might try something like the following:

DECLARE
    CUSTOMER_ID NUMBER;
    CURSOR CDEL_CUR IS SELECT CUSTOMER_ID
        FROM ADMIN.DUPLICATE_CUSTOMERS;
BEGIN
    OPEN CDEL_CUR;
    LOOP
        FETCH CDEL_CUR INTO CUSTOMER_ID;
        EXIT WHEN CDEL_CUR%NOTFOUND;
        DELETE FROM CUSTOMERS
         WHERE CUSTOMERS.CUSTOMER_ID = CUSTOMER_ID;
        COMMIT;
    END LOOP;
    CLOSE CDEL_CUR;
END;

Note the boldfaced delete clause. One might expect this to find the row where the CUSTOMER_ID is the same as the CUSTOMER_ID we just fetched from the driver table. But no! Oracle interprets this the same as:
    DELETE FROM CUSTOMERS
     WHERE CUSTOMERS.CUSTOMER_ID = CUSTOMERS.CUSTOMER_ID;

In other words, those rows whose CUSTOMER_ID is equal to itself -- which (since there are no null CUSTOMER_IDs) is every single freaking row in the database!

Yes, I did this (well, something similarly disasterous) at work today. Yes, it was a production database. No, thankfully nothing crashed -- our databases are so busy that this immediately got hung up waiting for locks that we were able to kill it once we realized what was happening.

I'm not a DBA. I just play one on TV.

I don't want to drool...

2008-01-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

First off, I don't like Apple, the company. Steve Jobs is rather arrogant and his company reflects this character flaw.

But their products? Oooh. A laptop that's 0.16 inches (40 mm) thick? Yes, please.

I also acquired an iPod Shuffle over Christmas. It usually lives in a waterproof housing and goes swimming with me, though I'm still tweaking the headphones -- you need to prevent water from getting between the headphones and your eardrums to keep the music going. Apparently, the shape and size of my ears is at the tail end of some bell curve; I end up having to stuff massive amounts of silicone putty over my ears just to make it last more than a few laps.

Alas, I doubt that I'll own a Mac in the foreseeable future. I rarely have a need to upgrade my computer(s) wholesale -- they're like George Washington's axe, wherein each component has been replaced at various times so that none of the original parts still exist. If I remember correctly, my current machine started out life as a Cybermax (a company which went bankrupt years ago) AMD K6-2 with 512 MB of memory and a 8 GB hard drive, running Windows. It's now an Athlon 64 with 2 GB of memory, 250 GB RAID-1 array, in an understated Lian Li case, running Ubuntu 7.10.

Work is going well, though I can't post much in the way of specifics of what I've been working on. It's nothing exciting (well, to non-dev-types) or anything you'll hear about in the news, though; I only work on the backend systems, after all.

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-24T22:09:00.001-08:00

Visiting Tamara's family over in D.C. (the other Washington). Lots of merriment is being had.

This came from my sister-in-law: what really happens to the glassware in hotels, with a follow-on edition for five-star hotels.

I guess I can understand why I was able to eat at the roach coaches parked in front of CMU and not get sick during my grad school years and not get sick: it's not that different from real life.

Replacing the artist with a computer?

2007-12-22T15:32:00.000-08:00

No, not really. At least, this falls far short in my mind.

I came across a CNet review of Photofiddle, a service which will turn your digital pictures into paintings and the like.

Alas, looking at the samples they have online, it looks more like they're just printing stuff onto canvas. You can have various effects applied (e.g. oil painting, watercolor), but I don't think they're actually applying oils with a brush (human or computerized). Brush strokes (and the globs of paint they can produce) affect the painting, and -- unless I'm mistaken -- these are simply absent in Photofiddle.

I'm also quite disappointed in what they claim are sketches. Sorry, but a crappy edge detection filter does not make it a sketch.

Amazon is moving to South Lake Union

2007-12-21T15:19:00.000-08:00

It's official -- Amazon is moving to new digs in 2010 in the South Lake Union neighborhood.

I guess this means I'll be riding the S.L.U.T. to work every day.

I'm not so sure if swimming in Lake Union is an option. The south end is where a number of boat docks and Kenmore Air are located; the north end at Gas Works Park is apparently somewhat toxic.

Also, this is the first post I'm making through Blogger. I'll have to see if I can get my replication system over to LiveJournal working.

2007-12-02T19:10:00.000-08:00

Hm, so I haven't been reading many LJ entries as of late -- though not for lack of trying. I had to clear my browser's cookies (as I often do -- lots of work-related testing), forgot to log back in, and have been missing anything protected as a result. Whoops.

So I'll embed a video to make amends. (No, I'm not sure how that works, either.) It's an Aussie TV comedy/talk show host flirting with a church group. And not just any church group -- it's the Westboro Baptist Church.

2007-11-27T10:47:00.000-08:00

They say that multi-drive failures are infrequent enough that you generally don't need to worry about them. RAID-5 is good enough.

Well, buy me a lottery ticket. I had to deal with a multi-drive failure on one of our login databases on Sunday night -- first drive failed at 9:30 pm, then the second at 10:08 pm. It took us about six hours to recover the database. Fortunately, our applications are resilient to a single-database failure, so there wasn't any impact -- but those were a tense six hours nonetheless.

Friday was another interesting day. A few web devs thought it would be neat to implement an AJAX script which updated a progress bar showing the progress of a sale (what percentage of items have been sold). Alas, they didn't think through the impact their little script would have as a few million users hit the site with a refresh request every half second. The script was badly written enough that it grabbed data from multiple services and then ignored 90% of the information retrieved. The net result? A few services and networking devices melted down. And guess who got to help clean up the mess?

2007-11-22T00:38:00.000-08:00

My people? Crazy.

2007-11-20T01:17:00.000-08:00

I haven't checked work e-mail since late Friday night. I've been tempted, especially since today's Newsweek had the Kindle on the front cover and I'm sure there's a bunch of buzz in the office, but I need the unplug time.

Incidentally, I've known about this for a year or so, though I only knew it by its internal name, Fiona. I hadn't heard anything about it for a long time; I was wondering if it had died. Obviously not. My first impressions: Ugly? Yes (and it was just as ugly a year ago), though part of me says that if you focus on these sorts of things, you're not the target audience. Expensive? Ayup, too much so for my tastes (though the price will surely come down). Will I give up books for it? Doubtful; books don't have restrictive DRM and you can dogear pages much more easily. They are heavier and (in the instances where it matters) less searchable.

Vacation has been quiet and nice so far. Spent much of today working on my console (an electronics workbench). Lots of sawdust everywhere. Trying to use a 1/8" Dremel router bit to mill out a largeish area (about 10" x 6" x 1/4") is very, very tedious. Tomorrow will involve swimming, maybe some wandering over on the Olympic Peninsula, and more milling. Notably absent: work. :-)

2007-11-16T22:20:00.000-08:00

One of the better things about Amazon: our senior managers are not out-of-touch with the engineers. Nor are they afraid to speak their mind; what they say is not couched in managerspeak.

Brian Valentine, my division's SVP, gave a talk today entitled "Lessons Learned" -- basically a rundown of what he worked on in his career (most of it -- 19 years -- at Microsoft), described the mistakes made, talked about what he wanted to do at Amazon, and related a lot of war stories. It was hilarious and inspiring -- and this is from someone who is usually a bit pessimistic.

Alas, I don't know how much I can relate here, so I won't go off quoting bits and pieces of it.

2007-11-13T10:56:00.000-08:00

Heh... so my son will be Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--. I guess my daughter will be Elaine:

2007-11-12T00:40:00.000-08:00

I was starting to wonder just how much energy a compact fluorescent bulb saves in terms of carbon footprint. It's widely known that you can use a lower wattage CFL bulb to replace a given incandescent bulb; e.g., the light given off by a 23 W CFL bulb is the same as that of a 100 W incandescent bulb.

However, CFLs also contain mercury (on the order of 5 mg per bulb). Disposal regulations vary widely; in my area of the woods, there's some confusion as to how households are supposed to dispose of them. We'll play responsible citizen here and take them to a recycling center.

In my county, there are three sites which accept CFLs. The nearest one is in Poulsbo, a 25.2 mile round trip.

Let's assume it's time to take that bulb to the recycling center. (Ok, normally I would bundle them up and take a bunch at a time.) In my 2000 Honda CR-V, this trip would consume a gallon of gas. According to a random environmental site on the Intertubes, this is 10.9 kg (24 lbs) of CO₂.

Yikes. That sounds like a lot. Does this offset the benefits of a CFL?

The average lifetime of a CFL is 15,000 hours. Assuming our earlier 23/100 W bulb comparison, that's a difference of 1155 kWh over the lifetime of the CFL. According to this carbon calculator, 1 kWhr of electricity results in 0.43 kg of carbon emissions.

That's a 496 kg; discounting our (silly) trip, I will have released 486 kg less CO₂ into the atmosphere -- that's half a ton.

Ok, I can rest easier now. :-)

Watching a train wreck...

2007-11-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

A Canadian dollar is now worth 1.08 US dollars. Next stop: Australian dollar parity. And I don't see a bottom to this:

China has announced that they're moving away from dollars
GM, still a DJIA component, reported a $39 billion loss
Oil looks like it will easily clear $100/barrel by the end of the year
And I don't think the banks are telling us the full truth about the extent of the mortgage crisis.

My investments have been flat. As expected, losing money on domestic stocks; gaining it on foreign stocks.

2007-11-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

Who will play Barack Obama on SNL? Well, how about Barack Obama?

2007-11-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

What the heck is this? I see it popping up on various sites -- it's one of the most annoying Web 2.0 inventions I've ever seen.

I'm guessing it's supposed to show a thumbnail of the linked page. I've never seen anything but the "Loading Preview" text, though.

As another blogger aptly put it, "I was beginning to think it was the 90’s all over again, with the blinky text and the annoying midi files."

Even better:

Snap’s preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and un-useful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it’s useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

What's next? Are these folks going to go around and start modifying cars so they honk every time you hit the brake? Have my office phone ring anytime someone on my floor gets up to use the restroom?

Edit: Thanks to for providing this tip on how to disable it:

If you click on the gear, there should be an option to "disable", and the little preview-page that results will let you chooose "all sites" and then "save". It'll set a cookie somewhere and never bother you again, as far as I can tell.

2007-10-31T00:27:00.000-07:00

This is what I've been spending a fair amount of time on over the last six months. Not that web page specifically, but all of the backend logic to make it work as well as migrating about 100k customers from the old set of bank accounts to the new.

U.S. occupies Canada

2007-10-29T21:11:00.000-07:00

Our solution to the currency issue? Take over Canada, one piece at a time.

Yes, I am disappointed in the Rockies' implosion in the series. Excellent showing by the Sox. Careful, though; keep it up, and people will start lumping you with another team in the northeast.

2007-10-27T00:33:00.000-07:00

Apple has apparently perfected their Windows emulation:

Dreaded Blue Screen of Death mars some Leopard installs
Apple support drones are getting an earful from Mac users who are getting the dreaded Blue Screen of Death while trying to update to the latest and greatest version of OS X. This thread on an official Apple support forum has more than 200 posts left in 25 hours at time of writing. A large percentage of the writers report getting a persistent blue screen that forces them to abort their installation of Leopard.

I cannot help but be amused. I kinda like Apple, but Steve Jobs' arrogance gets to me. This will take him down a peg or two -- hopefully.

On fire...

2007-10-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

I-15 is never this empty, especially at rush hour:

I-15 at Felicita Road [map]

I-15 at Centre City Parkway [map]

I-15 at Mira Mesa Boulevard [map]

My parents were evacuated around 1 pm; their house is (was?) on the northwestern edge of the Witch fire. Haven't been able to reach them, but I'm figuring they're safe and probably stuck in traffic on a surface street somewhere.

2007-10-22T00:47:00.000-07:00

Anyone else remember Master Ninja's Q&A section? For some reason, I was trying to remember the characters, and then I realized I didn't even recall which site it was. (Google was of no help; it's been gone for a few years now.) No idea why I was trying to remember this; it wasn't terribly amusing back then, either.

At the risk of offending , , and , I feel a bit sorry for the Red Sox. Now, I like the Sox -- how can you not like a team whose archrival is the Yankees? -- but they're going up against the Rockies. The Rockies who have been kicking everyone's ass -- including my Padres -- since the start of September. The Rockies who have won the last 22 of 23.

Oh, and this time it's not the Red Sox who are the underdogs.

The Sox' best hope is that the boys in Denver have cooled off while waiting for the ALCS to finish up.

BBC News

2007-10-18T16:20:00.000-07:00

Argh. They're screwing up everything I like about BBC news; -- basically, dumbing it down to become a British version of CNN or Fox News.

2007-10-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

This is what's in the water...

(from the Nikon Small World photomicrography competition)

2007-10-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

Tamara, I know what to name our kids now...

2007-10-05T20:56:00.000-07:00

I've been dared to explain seven of my interests...

Anachronism: Because, doggoneit, quill pens shouldn't just gather dust in museums! Seriously, though, there are a number of interesting solutions to problems in past times which required a lot of thought. Modern conveniences ("just take the car," "get a portable electric generator," "throw a microprocessor at it") have made us intellectually lazy and wasteful.
Carver Mead: One of my professors at Caltech; I took analog VLSI from him. He invented many of the techniques used to design modern chips. In the 90s, the startups he founded created the touchpad and CMOS digital cameras. More recently, he's been working on something called "collective electrodynamics," which is an attempt to revamp the way we're taught electricity and magnetism (E&M) from a quantum perspective.
Finesse: No, not the shampoo. See my response for anachronism. I love elegant solutions. If a solution is not elegant, then it probably isn't correct.
Jenolan Caves: An absolutely beautiful formation of caves in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.
Scones: Sweet but not kick-you-in-the-teeth sweet, and they go well with tea. Comfort food. I don't know that I've ever passed one up for breakfast.
Scraphead Challenge: The original title of Junkyard Wars, as set in Britain. Developed by the inimitable Cathy Rogers, contestants had to cobble together working machines or vehicles from items found in an actual scrapyard. The ultimate in finesse.
Throwing Rocks: Because the damn kids won't keep off my lawn.

2007-09-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

Swam about a mile yesterday in Dewatto Bay. It was absolutely beautiful.

To put the location into context, it's on the eastern shore of the Hood Canal, on the Kitsap Peninsula. All of this is west of Puget Sound. We live on Bainbridge Island.

2007-09-25T00:51:00.000-07:00

I just got ripped off.

I spent the last 90 minutes watching Open Water 2: Adrift. It was a free cable "On Demand" feature. That was about $30 too much. Which, if you're doing the math, means they should have paid me $30 to watch that turd.

2007-09-20T21:39:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten this quote. An excerpt from Greenspan's new book, The Age of Turbulence: "I am reminded of Churchill's perception of Americans, who 'can always be counted on to do the right thing -- after they have exhausted all other possibilities.'"

Also, in the excerpt printed in Newsweek, Greenspan lambasts the U.S. educational system, blaming its pitiful state for the growing income disparity. I have to agree; as long as schools are churning out people ill equipped to work in a high tech labor force and we persist in restricting the inflow of skilled immigrants, the wages of the few skilled workers remaining (which includes everyone who reads my journal, at least that I know of) will keep rising out of proportion. Simple supply and demand.

Alas, I'm not going to go out and buy the book just yet. I'm in the middle of Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. Quite a good book so far; both entertaining and informative.

No more "Monopoly Money" jokes...

2007-09-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

Start holding on to those Canadian coins. Each is now worth the same as the equivalent US coin. You still can't use them in vending machines, though.

Anyone know if the retailers up north who previously accepted US dollars have stopped doing so? And can I expect to see US retailers in areas like Bellingham to start accepting Canadian money?

Washington State Ferries may want to reconsider their relatively recent refusal to accept the loonie.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

2007-09-16T20:47:00.000-07:00

In case you can't find your usual stash of mind-altering drugs...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU1fixMAObI

This is how cult religions get started...

2007-09-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

Never mind that mentioned multiple times that she would be in Seattle on the 11th. Never mind that I have multiple gadgets telling me that today is the 5th. It's in my Outlook calendar: so it must be true.

This is the reality of my life these days. My schedule is completely interrupt driven. Without Outlook, I wouldn't know when and where to be or, conversely, what I can get away with putting off for now. Flipside: if I enter an appointment incorrectly, forget any possibility of me making it. It might as well not exist.

Ok, so I do know my wife's birthday (April 8th) and our anniversary (October 26th) off the top of my head. And, no, I don't need to look in the address book to remember that her name is Tamara :-P.

Anyway, , this means that I can still make a 11:30/noon lunch next week when is here.

2007-09-02T20:51:00.000-07:00

I managed to drive 73 miles yesterday without leaving the island.

How or why? I was one of the ground crew coordinators for the Arms Around Bainbridge swim.

Tiring, but lots of fun. I also took pictures, but I'll spare your friends page from them.

2007-08-31T00:43:00.000-07:00

Those who enjoy cooking appreciate a good set of knives.

This guy, however, has taken one-upmanship to a new level; he uses a laser to cut his steak.

2007-08-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

Most people's commutes are delayed by mundane things: traffic congestion, accidents, vehicles breaking down, etc.

In my case, I have bomb scares thrown into the mix.

I'm guessing this was intentional; who in their right mind would accidentally leave a bag of sparklers (which will set off the bomb-sniffing dogs they have here) stuffed behind a toilet just a day after the FBI released photos of a couple guys who have been asking for details about ferry operations?

Of course, this is all trivial stuff. I recently heard from a friend from high school who spent the last year in the hellhole of Darfur. I recommend reading her blog -- it's an eye opener. And nobody else could sum up the Darfur conflict as eloquently and flippantly as she does:

And that’s Darfur in a nutshell. The Red Sox, the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Padres, and the entire rest of the American League all armed and jealous of one another.

Anyway, off to a block of meetings.

2007-08-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

Wow. Video footage (from a security camera) of the I-35W bridge collapse.

2007-07-22T23:47:00.000-07:00

Harry entered the nearly deserted dining hall. A few other Hogwarts students were in the far corner carrying on a game of Wizard's Chess; one of them -- a Slytherin Harry didn't recognize -- looked up for a moment, but then returned his attention to the game.

Minutes passed. Where were Ron, Hermione, and Ginny? Harry hummed a tune; something catchy he heard played in a muggle shop. He didn't know most of the lyrics; something about a boy in Detroit catching a train at midnight to anywhere. The thought of a train reminded him of King's Cross station and made him chuckle. How constraining it must be -- was, he reminded himself -- to be tied to train and bus schedules, having to fill up automobiles.

Ginny enters and asks him how his meeting with Snape went. "Oh, as you might expect," Harry says. "Draco won't going to testify against his father to the new ministry."

At this news, Ginny sighs. "Well, we can't expect it all to happen at once. Hey! You're sitting on my wand!" she says to Ron as he enters and plops himself down next to her.

"Sorry. I've spent the last five hours tending to Professor Sprout's mandrakes, and I'm wiped. But as dad used to say, 'Try to remember the times that were good.'" A few of the chess players look over in their direction at the break in the silence. Harry feels the gaze of the Slytherin student, putting him on a bit of edge.

Ron shakes some dirt off the sleeve of his robe; something ruffles in his pocket. "Oh, right. Mum sent me a box of Bertie Botts." Ron pulls the box out and starts to open it. "Want some? Hey, where's Hermione anyway?"

A brief interruption in the sunlight streaming in an upper window catches their attention. Another shadow -- this time, they can see it's Hermione flying backwards, attempting to park her broom. "Ah, still trying to park," Ron sighs. The Slytherin student walks slowly towards them, still gazing at Harry. He pulls his wand out, and Harry feels a chill on the back of his neck. Just as Harry moves to pull his wand out, the Slytherin brushes past them to go to the restroom.

Ron finishes opening the box of jelly beans, and they each pop one into their mouths. Hermione, having finally parked her broom, runs up to the dining hall entrance.

[FADE TO BLACK]

For my roadgeek friends...

2007-07-21T21:17:00.000-07:00

I used driving directions from Google Maps today which included the following:

South on US 101 for 3.3 miles.
West on WA 108, WA 8, and US 12 for 38 miles total.
South (again!) on US 101 for 0.5 miles.

Yes, the directions are correct.
Yes, US 101 runs reasonably north/south in both locations.
Yes, WA 8/108 and US 12 run reasonably east/west.

The answer lies in the strange routing of US 101 between Astoria, Oregon and Olympia, Washington:

From Astoria, it runs north to Forks via Aberdeen (directionals read north/south).
From Forks, it runs east through Port Angeles to Port Townsend (directionals read east/west).
From Port Townsend, it runs south to Olympia via Shelton (directionals read south/north and the mile markers increase going south).

In case you're curious, we were going here.

2007-07-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

Being so far behind in the series, I decided to read the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows plot summary on Wikipedia. The only thing I don't quite understand: Why, exactly, did Harry kill John F. Kennedy?

2007-07-14T20:07:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you firsthand: stingray stings are painful. Much more painful than a bee sting.

I was swimming just north of the San Onofre nuclear power plant on the Camp Pendleton side. Reaching the end of the swimming area, I stood up to turn back and promptly felt an intense pain in my right foot. After a sharp yelp followed by a few expletives, I hobbled back to the lifeguard tower where they had me soak my foot in near-scalding water. Trying to burn my foot never felt so good; apparently, the toxin breaks down when exposed to heat.

I discovered a combination toilet paper dispenser and iPod dock at Fry's yesterday. Seriously, folks -- if you're blowing money on this kind of crap, you have way too much disposable income.

Here are a couple pictures of the concrete roller coaster they're installing on I-15:

2007-07-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

In San Diego briefly; heading up to Mt. Whitney tomorrow with my dad.

First, though: WTF, San Diego? Have you decided that you wanted to pick up the worst features of Los Angeles and pave over the entire place? I swear, it looks like you're building a concrete roller coaster in the middle of I-15. Every town along the corridor looks like a game of Sim City gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Wow... I never thought I'd be glad to leave SoCal. The place is soooo married to the automobile, it's frightening. It's impossible to be a pedestrian here, really -- watching people try to navigate their way across eight-lane surface streets is sad.

2007-07-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

I've been remiss in posting these.

Today's workout was a killer -- just myself and the coach, and we had initially planned on a 1:20 workout. Instead, it ended up being 2:15 (!). We were 35 minutes in; she mentioned that I had been swimming with the current so it'll take longer to get back. Ok, "but let's go for five more minutes." Five minutes later: "Oh, hey, look, there's a neat beach neither of us have explored." Ten more minutes, we're at the beach.

Remember how I was going with the current? So, 50 minutes there... 1:15 back. About 3.4 miles total.

My arms were killing me when I got out. And this was all after an on-call shift from hell (35 pages in 48 hours... WTF?).

2007-06-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

From today's low tide:

Trying to identify these critters...