Road Journal

A chess set, won

2011-12-08T20:46:00.001-05:00

John and I have been playing chess since he was four. I've made it a point over the years never to take it easy on him. Ever. In the early games, he really took losing to heart and Rebecca would shake her head disapprovingly at the heartless... er, competitive... way I played, so I made a deal that the day he wins, he gets my chess set.

Tonight, at seven years of age, he has caused me to be in the market for a new chess set. He beat me, and I didn't even see it coming.

I always knew the day would come but, for some reason, I assumed it'd be gradual, perceptible, and, frankly, years away. I was focused on bringing my Queen to cover the eighth rank while he was seemingly goofing around with some pawns, then, in a swift Qg7->Qa1 it was done, "got you Daddy." He says that a lot though, so it took a while for it to slowly sink in. Sadness, pride, happiness, deflation, humility... he won. Fair and square, he won and got himself a pretty decent chess set tonight.

I'm so happy for him and look forward to many more games on his "new" chess set...

Our last first tooth loss...

2011-10-31T20:15:00.000-04:00

When John lost his first tooth, it was pure excitement. With Grace, there's excitement too, but accompanied by a tinge of sadness that this will be our last first tooth loss in our family. I suppose it's the same with all the "firsts" but with this coming on the heels of our last first day of kindergarten, I suppose it's sinking in more. I'm so happy to watch her grow, but I do wish she'd slow down just a bit...

Enlightened corporate leadership

2011-10-23T17:10:00.000-04:00

In a world where corporate leadership is dominated by a pursuit of growth and profit, it's encouraging to see some examples of enlightened leadership. I initially came across this post from Tim O'Reilly saying,

"It was at this time that I formulated an image that I've used many times since: profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don't want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations."

He references a Huffington Post article in which Steve Jobs has this gem:

"My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products," Jobs told Isaacson. "[T]he products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything."

And back to Tim O'Reilly,

"What's so great about the Apple story is that Steve ended up making enormous amounts of money without making it a primary goal of the company. (Ditto Larry and Sergey at Google.) ... Making money through true value creation driven by the desire to make great things that last, and make the world a better place - that's the heart of what is best in capitalism. "

This sort of thinking is also represented clearly in the book Firms of Endearment. The world would be a better place if more business leaders would focus their corporate energy into something they are deeply passionate about and allow profit and growth to be a nice side effect. Who knows, maybe Jobs' legacy will be to inspire a generation of leadership that has the courage and confidence to passionately believe in what their doing and stop with the "growth/profit as a primal focus" meme.

Boots

2011-08-05T19:20:00.000-04:00

If you've been fortunate enough to take a SERE course there's an excellent chance you've had Rudyard Kipling's poem Boots branded on your mind. It's a special poem to SERE graduates. But simply reading it's words isn't particularly satisfying, you've likely yearned to hear it in a particular audio form. I don't know if this is the exact audio but with it's emotion and poor audio quality, it's close enough.

This reading makes the Library of Congress' National Jukebox project worth every penny to me! (actual poem starts at ~34 seconds)

PicasaUploader to Facebook Problems

2010-11-01T18:16:00.001-04:00

So, this is semi-tested theory that hasn't let me down so far. I use the PicasaUploader App in Facebook to get my pictures from Picasa to Facebook's Photos with frustrating intermittent success. Sometimes it would go through the process perfectly and others it would never open the browser to do the last step that confirms the upload. After playing around a while, it seems that <= 9 pictures is the key. Try uploading 10 or more and it fails, but 9 or below is fine. I dunno, it sounds arbitrary and strange, but this has worked so far for me. I post this here in case someone else is having similar problems maybe they'll find this and confirm it. YMMV.

First class link relations

2010-10-29T06:47:00.002-04:00

The original proposal had link types:

"it is useful for the system to be aware of the generic types of the links between items (dependences, for example)... without imposing any limitations." ... "Note that each link has a type ("includes" for example)..." (1989)

and later, it was made clear that link relations should be first-class - peers to the target itself - or, first-class link selection criteria:

"In this way, link relationships in HTML, and in future XML hypertext languages, should migrate to becoming first class objects." (1999)

I suppose that migration is finally upon us? RFC 5988 - Web Linking

Two wheels at last!

2010-10-08T17:21:00.004-04:00

Me: "It's your decision, but you just road with the training wheels barely touching. I think you're ready."
Grace: "K. Let's do this. Daddy, go get your tools and take 'em off!"
Me: "Yes ma'am"

She then walked the bike mid-way down the street and boldly road all the way up on two wheels her first time.

REST and self-descriptiveness

2010-09-22T22:43:00.001-04:00

The REST Architectural Style has this constraint called the Uniform Interface. The Uniform Interface Constraint itself decomposes into four constraints and one of those, the self-descriptive messages constraint, decomposes into at *least* three other constraints. The analysis of what system properties are evoked was done at the highest level - the Uniform Interface Constraint. So, what happens when you modify one of the sub-sub constraints? Who knows, as with all the constraints, you should probably *think* about it with "your eyes wide open"*....

if you don't see a movie below, open outside your reader:)

* an unfindable Roy quote

RESTFest 2010

2010-09-19T16:26:00.000-04:00

I just returned from RESTFest 2010 in Greenville, S.C (on a side note, I wasn't thrilled about the location at first, but I should say, the people in Greenville, S.C. are great and the downtown area rocks - I never imagined I'd say such a thing about Greenville, but... there it is... it rocks - if you have a chance to work or visit, take it!) - it was great to see the Raleigh crew again and meet some new folks. Starting with Mike's thorough Hypermedia Workshop the first day and some great extended and lightening talks Saturday.

There was Apache CouchDB well-represented with some cool presentations and hacking, some really bizarre stuff (I'm thinking Events:), and everything in between. I don't do .Net development but if I did, I'd be pretty excited to get my hands on the coolness that Glenn presented on that platform. Anyway, many thanks to Ben and Mike for all their hard work to pull this thing together... Here's everyone that made it all the way to the end:

And a HUGE thanks to all the great sponsors. They were:

Our first toothfairy visit...

2010-09-05T16:17:00.000-04:00

... will be tonight! John's been wiggling that tooth for weeks now and just came excitedly up the stairs to proclaim his loss. He's real happy and immediately wanted to eat foods of different textures to see how they feel:)

Health through good-for-you food

2010-08-11T20:45:00.000-04:00

Science and the medical community are finally catching up to our elders and "raw foodies" who have, for years, claimed that eating your [natural non-GMO] vegetables will keep you healthy. I can't remember it now, but I watched a convincing movie several years ago where a collection of last-resort cancer patients went into seclusion on a raw food diet and most (if not all) returned cancer free.

I have to say, that the secondary benefit of healthy eating might be reducing obesity, gave me a "duh!" reaction. Anyway, ridiculously interesting, you really should watch it.

Happy SysAdminDay Infra

2010-07-30T07:29:00.000-04:00

Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day to the Apache Infra team! Thanks so much for all you do to keep us safely and securely computing. We enjoy the fruits of your ridiculous talent and tireless labor, you guys rock!

Architecture of Governance Structures

2010-05-26T22:29:00.004-04:00

When working on complex problems it's easy to get bogged down by stuff that just doesn't matter. In software, we address this through architecture. We define, up front, properties we'd like to see in the end system. Then, we carefully begin adding constraints that will evoke those system properties. Over time, we learn that we can snapshot certain coordinated constraints and refer to them by a simple name - as an "architectural style."

For example, we might endeavor to have a system that evokes the properties of re-usability, simplicity, and evolvability and this might lead us to a design based on the Pipe-and-Filters Architectural Style which is a set of contraints (e.g. Uniform Interface) known to positively effect those properties. But you can learn more about that reading Roy's dissertation.

Like software architecture, within organizational governance it's easy to get bogged down by stuff that just doesn't matter. This typically leads to more bureaucracy. I'm interested in thinking about applying the same architectural techniques to defining an organizational governance structure.

For starters, we'd need to think about the properties that are important to the organization. For this experiment, I'll use an organization with wide familiarity - the Apache Software Foundation. So let's define some [subset of] organizational properties that are important to the ASF:

Participatory (Pa) - the characteristic of affording the opportunity for broad participation.
Stability (S) - the characteristic of the organization and it's product to be viable over a long period of time.
Protectiveness (Pr) - the characteristic of being protective of volunteers and end-users from liability.
Frictionless (F) - the characteristic of achieving goals while minimizing friction.
Modifiability (M) - the ease with which a change can be made to the organization and/or its products.
...

This is enough to get the experiment going. Now, we can begin adding constraints and reason about their effect on the organizations governance goals.

1. Open mailing lists. Open mailing lists shall be used to facilitate communication and decisions. By channeling communications over asynchronous medium we maximize participation (Pa). We further maximize participation by being volunteer friendly - they can get to it when they get to it. It enhances stability (S) by being both openly archived and self-documenting. It moderately evokes modifiability (M) allowing anyone to participate in decisions and direction of the project.

2. CLA/CCLA/Grants. All contributors must agree to grant copyright/license to the ASF. This has a positive effect on long-term project stability (S) and modifiability (M). The great positive effective also negatively impacts wide participation (Pa).

3. Release Process. All projects must have formal releases following a process that ensures license compatibility, export controls, etc. This has a positive effect on protectiveness (Pr) by ensuring that software release to the public is done under the Corporate entity (ie. the Foundation).

4. Decision making. When coordination is required, projects use simple, pre-defined voting procedures. These are simple votes (+1, 0, -1) for pre-defined approval types (e.g. lazy consensus, consensus, etc.) for pre-defined actions (e.g. releases, major code shift, new committer, etc.). Having a transparent decision making process limits friction (F). It also has a positive impact on long-term stability (S), participation (Pa), and modifiability (M).

5...

Hopefully that's enough to convey the idea. Once the properties are fully enumerated and the constraints fleshed out, we might dub this coordinated constraints the "Apache Organizational Style." I'm sure the analogy and, therefore, the framework breaks down somewhere, but it seems a better fit than the typical adhoc adaptiveness that many organizations currently suffer. I think the key value that this brings is focus. Every proposed governance change would need to be reasoned about through the lens of desired organizational properties. It also forces the organization to think about what properties it really thinks are important.

Textual Weather

2010-05-05T19:09:00.000-04:00

I've been annoyed for years at the increasing trend towards graphics-only weather forecasts. With 24 hours in a day, how can a single picture with two numbers be particularly helpful? Anyway, I finally realized how to get a nice text forecast in the Mac Dashboard - I know, I'm a little slow.

In Safari, navigate to weather.gov.

Enter your zip code in the left side.

Now, scroll down and look at the bottom right, and click on "Text Only Forecast".

No go to File->Open in Dashboard...

Highlight the middle text section, and click "Add..."

That's it, that's my not-so-new tip of the day. Now, if I could only get it in a fixed-width font:)

Article:Using DNS for REST Web Service Discovery

2010-05-04T07:32:00.001-04:00

I'm not sure if it's a "Good Thing To Do" or not, but it is interesting. Personally, I haven't seen the "service discovery" problem first-hand - I've long thought it a problem manufactured by vendors to sell their ESB-ish wares... I'll definitely be watching to see how the comments on this one play out:)

Article:Using DNS for REST Web Service Discovery: "Service Discovery is an essential aspect of service orientated architecture because it avoids early binding of clients to particular service instances. In this article, Jan Algermissen explains the need for discovery of RESTful services, and explains how the existing Domain Name Service (DNS) standard can be used as a widely-deployed and scalable solution. By Jan Algermissen"

Green escalators...

2010-04-28T12:20:00.003-04:00

I'm at a conference watching empty escalators roll constantly and I'm thinking what an incredible energy waste. Ironically, the first speaker of the morning touted the "green-ness" of the Raleigh Convention Center.

My first inclination was that escalators should come with sensors that would detect an approaching person and start it rolling and continue rolling until they are detected to have left the disembarking area.

After further consideration, given that we have an obesity epidemic accompanying our energy challenges, the best thing for our energy and our health would be to just turn them off entirely...

WWW2010 WS-REST Workshop

2010-04-26T21:53:00.005-04:00

Day 1 of WWW2010 is complete. I spent the day in the WS-REST Workshop. The day, for me, started out a bit sketchy. Sam's talk was ridiculously interesting, but only tangentially related to REST. Most of the others were solid, predictable and safe. The couple presentations that did approach the edge of our current understanding of REST were, well, bizarre and, arguably, an impedance mismatch for the style itself.

Federico's talk (no slides) was pretty interesting. He suggested the need to describe and communicate new styles that were based on REST but not exactly REST. More generally, a practical model for visualizing and understanding architecture design rationale. He had a modeling tool (i forget the name) that manages a graph of constraint, rationale, and properties (or somesuch). This is somewhat analogous to the styles->properties mapping in the dissertation itself but instead of talking about styles, talking about the constraints directly. For other reasons, I've come to talk directly about constraints instead of REST too lately. It turns out that frameworks facilitate getting REST wrong just as much as they do getting it right, so instead of talking about a squishy style, I've found it more useful to enumerate the constraints explicitly. Having a modeling approach to reason about all this would be pretty useful.

Being hosted at a conference dominated by academia, potential "research areas" seemed a key focus. Some thoughts that I had during the day...

1) It seems that we need more research on getting from style to architecture. Practically, we end up with an unreasonable delta between where the style leaves off and additional constraints of the architecture. We need a framework for defining, sharing, and reasoning about those extended constraints. This doesn't get highlighted very often primarily because the folks that talk about REST do so from the perspective of a single service rather than an
architecture group constraining a set of services across an enterprise? For example, suppose a particular architectural style gives us 6 constraints and a specific architecture has 3 additional constraints. Those 3 constraints are, typically, hidden as implementation details but they should be highlighted and reasoned about in the same way that the style itself was.

2) Someone mentioned the need for the sales pitch for REST style. In other words, if a simple RPC-style solution could be hacked together in half the time, why spend time designing media types, changing the paradigm, etc. ? Intuitively, it seems that the answer is the system properties evoked by the REST style, but maybe that doesn't resonate with managers, etc.?

3) Media type design. Someone mentioned this too, but it's clearly a theme in the RESTful world. It seems that we have collectively grokked what Roy has given us in his dissertation so far and are all collectively struggling with the variety of media type issues. When to pick one over another; when to create your own; how to create your own; json:link types missing; when to use specific vs. generic representation control data (e.g. /xml or /myformat+xml); etc.

4) Link qualifications. Link relations are clearly the way to assert the semantics of the relationship between the "current" resource and some "target" resource. I think we need some clear way to qualify the "target" resource independent of it's relation to the current. Perhaps there isn't a particularly important link relation but you want to assert some link selection criteria anyway.

5) Transactions, of course, got token mention. Mike(i think) mentioned them as the "third rail" of REST:) I dunno, I don't do services on the wild internet so maybe it's a concern, but I got a gut feeling that we've got some problem-solution force-fit going on here. I see the same thing with messaging too - I haven't seen a lot of valid needs for a composite REST/Publish-Subscribe Style. I like REST. A lot. But there are plenty of other valid architectural styles appropriate to other problem domains.

6) Similar to #1 above where there needs to be a macro discussion of REST for the enterprise, I wonder if there's a place for REST style in the micro. It seems like the same REST principles could be applied to micro application architecture. Something like the Actor model of immutable message passing.

Anyway, my rough notes of Day 1 as I understood it...

Hypermedia constraint check

2010-04-21T08:17:00.001-04:00

The Hypermedia Constraint seems to be the toughest one for developers to "get" in a RESTful system. Most of my architecture documentation/communication effort has been focused on those things that one needs to get it right. Things like: links in representations, link relations, etc. Still, all too often, folks get it wrong. Terribly wrong even. So, I've thought about a simple check that I could provide as the hint that you're "doing it wrong":

Imagine the URLs to all resources except the static bookmark had a variable number of random numbers somewhere in the path and changed on each request. Would your client still work? Would your service's documentation still be correct?

Is it possible to answer yes to both questions and still break the hypermedia constraint?

RFC 5785: Defining Well-Known URIs

2010-04-07T07:25:00.000-04:00

This feels like a terrible idea. "Fixed URIs"... it just sounds wrong in a hypertext driven ecosystem. Must be a better way. Why couldn't this be addressed by defining good site-* link relations?

RFC 5785: Defining Well-Known URIs: "
This first piece of the discovery stack was published today as an RFC. RFC 5785 defines a registry for new well-known URIs which will provide a standard location for the host-meta document. This work started a year and a half ago as a well-known document called /site-meta, and slowly evolved into a simple registry. While this isn’t a breakthrough idea, it does codify existing behavior and hopefully encourages people to share ideas, discuss proposals, and reusing existing well-known URIs.

ASF Membership += Me

2010-04-01T06:51:00.001-04:00

I've been proud to participate in the Apache community in a variety of roles over the past five years. I'm surprised and honored to learn that I've been voted in as an ASF member. Thanks for nominating and voting for me...

It's time to trust the kids...

2010-03-31T19:48:00.001-04:00

... 'cause these Apple Parental Controls are seriously slowing me down. Flash on Mac has nothing on these parental controls!

Insecticide Corn

2010-01-12T20:16:00.000-05:00

Bt Corn is registered with the Environmental Protection Agency as an insecticide. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said corn accounts for approximately 60% of the acres of corn grown in the U.S. According to the EPA,

The new plant-incorporated protectant product, MIR162 maize, produces its own insecticidal protein within the corn plant.

So, we're producing corn that is, essentially, a factory for insecticides. One has to wonder if that's the reason studies are showing negative effects of GMO corn on our kidney's, liver, and other organs.

Monsanto's new idea may make detasseling of corn obsolete - DesMoinesRegister.com

2010-01-10T12:30:00.000-05:00

This is sickening science - how can we get Monsanto to quick applying sick science to our food system? It's nearly impossible when the nature of the ingredients are opaque to the end consumer. Normally, we (the consumer) have an incredible influence in the growth and direction of markets. In order for us to apply our influence, we need transparency. This is the case, for example, with organics. In the case of genetically modified food, we have no good way of knowing when it's in our foods. We need proper labeling, so that the people who don't, for example, want to eat dangerous food that has been genetically modified to resist poison, have a way of making that decision.

From the Demoines Register...
What is left of a longstanding Corn Belt rite - detasseling - may end for good when Monsanto brings to market what it calls its "Roundup Hybridization System" for corn.
Cornfields also will lose much of their masculinity, too.
Detasseling, for the city folks, is the removal of the golden sprigs at the top of the plant that secrete the pollen that reproduces corn. Seed producers want selective reproduction of corn rather than self-pollination, so they remove the tassels from some plants so they reproduce with pollen from other plants that have the requisite traits.
The Monsanto system, the company said, "utilizes a transgenic corn trait created by Monsanto that exhibits high tolerance to glyphosate (herbicide) in all tissues except male productive tissues."

Effects of Genetically Modified (GM) foods

2010-01-05T20:42:00.000-05:00

A recent study providing more evidence of what nations smarter than us intuitively suspected - genetically modified food is bad for us. Of course, when we hire people to represent us that have a vested interests that conflict with our health, the outcome shouldn't surprise, right? Oh well, on to the study...

"... in the three GM maize varieties that formed the basis of this investigation, new side effects linked to the consumption of these cereals were revealed, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity." [conclusions]

What exactly is hepatorenal toxicity? I'm not sure exactly but hepatorenal refers to the kidneys and the liver and toxicity refers to poison/toxic - doesn't sound good in any case. Turns out Greenpeace knew this two years ago though.

They modify these foods, for example, by attaching the desired DNA to a virus [you know, like E. Coli] and letting it infect and change the host. They do this for various reasons, for example, to inject pesticides into corn so that it's immune to it when they spray the crops. Sound gross? Well, you're eating it. Around 75% of processed foods in the U.S. contained GMO ingredients in 2003 according to the Grocery Manufacturers of America[1].

The first commercial GMO was allowed into the food supply system in 1994, now 15 short years later, they're in well over 75% of processed food. That's a lot considering the effects are only now being uncovered. As well as the study above there are links to infertility. Anecdotally, there has been a 500% increase in hospital admissions for food allergies since 1990.

Equally frustrating is the fact that farmers (e.g. Nelson Farm) are being forced to buy it and grow it by Monsanto (the former major producer of Agent Orange and DDT fame). The Roundup that "Roundup Ready Seed" is engineered to be immune to appears to be a decendant of those poisons.

What can you do?

Watch Food, Inc.

Watch The Future of Food (free on Hulu)

Write your Senator or Congress person. It might help to know if they're taking Monsanto's money before you do.

Difficult Santa talk...

2009-11-30T19:56:00.000-05:00

We took time this evening to rearrange the living room and prepare the Christmas tree for its decorations. It's a tree of wire and plastic that needs 'adjusting' to give it a more tree-like appearance. John found this adjustment period to be rather tedious which led him to frequently inquire whether the job was complete. One of these inquiries led here...

John: "Are we done yet?"

Daddy: "Not yet, you know why it's important to spend time adjusting the tree don't you?"

John: "Yeah, so that we'll get lots of toys under it."

Daddy: "Well, not exactly. The more time we spend adjusting it, the more beautiful the tree will ultimately look."

John: "Right."

Daddy: "Besides, shouldn't we be grateful for any toys that we might find under this tree, be it one toy, or lots of toys?"

John: "Yeah, we should be grateful for whatever we get."

Daddy (who should have simply stopped): "That's right... you know... there are many kids who won't get any toys this year, so, even one is better than none, right?"

John: "Well, yeah, those are the naughty kids, right?"

Daddy (who only now is starting to realize he should have stopped talking already): "Well, some are naughty, but other's have parents who simply can't afford toys this year."

John: "But Daddy, Santa doesn't treat kids without money differently does he?"

Daddy: "Well, no.... ummm... "

John: "Daddy, this is sad news, I think we should go shopping tomorrow for those kids who aren't naughty."

FAQ on the first date?

2009-11-20T23:01:00.000-05:00

I follow Jeff Atwood because I think he's generally a bright guy and so I took notice when Adrian (another bright guy) was critical of him. Then, in following a link from google today, I notice this at the top of my browser...

This is from Stack Overflow, Jeff's brainchild. For an otherwise bright guy, what a incredible dumb thing to do, amateurish really. Here's why:

o) It seems to pop up based on whether your signed in or not; rather than whether it's really your first time. It is not my first time, so it's annoying to see it every time.

o) Let's suppose though, that it were my first time. I doubt I'd have a frequently asked question already. If I did, would it not be an indication that your site really kinda sucked?

o) Lastly, there's the presumptuous nature of the popup itself. You really think anyone would want to sit and read your FAQ on the first date? You're crazy. You get me hooked on your software and then when I have a question I may poke around your FAQ, otherwise, I'll just leave.

The bottom line... if a question is asked frequently enough to make it on your FAQ list and said question is of interest to a first time visitor, it's time to fix your software...

Geocaching woes...

2009-11-15T11:44:00.001-05:00

"Geocachers find trinkets and trouble" (WashPost)

Sounds all too familiar. At least these people are in Loudoun, Va. Paulding County, Ga., not so understanding.... I don't recall the exact conversation but it went something like this...

Ranger: "You boys been walking around in circles looking at that thing for a long time now..."
Us: "Yeah, it's a GPS unit for land nav trying to find a location"
Ranger: "What's that you got there? a G-P-S (overly drawn out)?"
Us: "Well, it's just a GPS unit, like a digital compass... you know..."
Ranger (skeptically): "I don't know, this just don't sound right"
Ranger (incredulously): "And you say you're looking for some kinda 'treasure'"
Us: "Well, kinda, see, people hide stuff and it's fun to go find it."
Ranger: "Ain't nobody supposed to be hiding stuff on my park land. Anyway, how am I supposed to know ya'll ain't some sorta terrorists or something? these are dangerous times, you know? What exactly are they hiding?"
Us: "Usually, it's just little toys, trinkets, a notebook, and whatnot."
Ranger: "And so you're using some sorta navigation computer to find toys out in the woods?"
Us: "Well, yeah, it's just sorta a game, you see, well, maybe we'll just go now."
Ranger: "Yeah, maybe you should, I don't expect I'll see you back here, right?"

It was longer and even more ridiculous of a conversation than that - would have been good sitcom material. It ruined the hunt - we felt ridiculous. But, it was a learning experience. We learned that such folks are called Muggles and are to be avoided....

Congressional Limits

2009-11-13T16:22:00.000-05:00

Sen. Demint won't be winning any popularity contests for this but thank God for his courage - it might well solve half our national challenges...

S. J. Res. 21: A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relative to... (GovTrack.us)

Architectural Styles, Constraints, Desired Properties, etc.

2009-11-01T11:44:00.000-05:00

REST gets all the attention, but I think the framework presented in the first half of the dissertation is equally, if not more, important. There are many frameworks that attempt to understand software architecture but none that I've found that are reasonable. REST itself is a derived by way of a worked example through that reasoning framework. I'd like to start using that approach myself but doing so demands a common understanding which, as with REST itself, is rather elusive. Trying to explain it, as Roy did, in technical terms is further burdened by preconceived notions of overloaded terminology. So, I crafted a story that attempts to communicate the essence (constraints, desired properties, architectural styles, etc.) without being burdened by the baggage of assumptions.

The story goes like this...

Suppose a customer comes to your "information business" and says, "I have a need for all the information on organic gardening." The customer travels a lot and needs the information available to him for reference when his customers ask gardening questions, but he's frequently in the fields and, so, isn't always technology enabled.

Your organization is quite large and information comes from a variety of departments. To make matters worse, you're in the Solutions Architecture side of the business and so you have no real authority to dictate a precise solution - these are 'information engineers' after all, who need room to flex their creativity. You are, however, allowed to define the solution architecture by way of "constraints" on their solution. These "constraints" take the form of:

1) All the information must be together.
2) There must be a Table of Content.
3) All information must have a reference back to the original source.

You have done this so often though, that you and these engineers have agreed that these constraints can be grouped together and referenced by a simple name, its architectural style name, instead of enumerating each one every time. This is beneficial because you know that certain constraints, when grouped together, evoke certain properties that are commonly desired by your customer. This allows you to quickly match up your customer's needs with some starting constraints. Now, you've previously agreed that constraints 1+2+3 above will be referred to as the Compilation Architectural Style.

It turns out that the constraints of the Compilation Style are a good starting point but they don't evoke all the properties that your customer really wants. They want something that's lightweight because they travel, they want something that's easily readable, and they also want something that doesn't require electricity/technology.

So you begin with an instance of the Compilation Architectural Style and add some concrete constraints to get you from "style" to a real architecture and evoke some properties specifically desired by your customer. Namely, you add the following:

A) Compilation Architectural Style
- evokes all properties known by the style
B) Information must be on paper
- evokes lack-of-technology property
C) Information must be printed in Times New Roman
- evokes readability property
D) Must be in a thin plastic binder
- evokes lightweight property

So, you pass along the customer order and your solution architecture to the engineers. Because you've chosen to define your solution architecture in terms of "constraints that evoke properties," you're able to objectively reason about them. So, when the engineers come back and say that they'd prefer Helvetica because, being sans-serif, it would save on toner cost, you can reason about how changing this constraint might effective your overall solution architecture. In this case, that level of font-specificity was simply you trying to flex some control where you have none, so you acquiesce. Likewise, the engineers come back and ask that you change constraint D to heavy-weight paper since it'd be a bit lighter - you, again, agree that it still evokes your desired property.

You deliver your solution, which makes your customer happy. But then you realize that you ought to capitalize on your latest back and forth with the information engineers. So, you go to the engineers and agree to call constraints B+C+D the Paperback Architectural Style. In future requests like the original, this allows you to simply refer to a hybrid (Compilation Architectural Style + Paperback Architectural
Style) solution architecture and know that the desired properties will be evoked.

The Magic Word

2009-10-09T19:41:00.000-04:00

Grace: "I want my purple blanket"
Daddy: "It's upstairs, I'll get it for you..."
Daddy: "... oh, but can I get the magic word, first though?"
Grace: "Abracadabra!"

Clearly, there is some parenting work left to do...

WashPost: Same-sex marriage

2009-09-21T19:13:00.000-04:00

Robert McCartney on why the difference between strong white support for same-sex marriage in the District vs. the rest of the nation...

Why the difference? The District's white population is more secular, liberal and better-educated than the rest of the country. Some surveys have suggested that educational level is the most reliable predictor of attitudes on same-sex marriage, with more-educated people being more likely to support it.

Perhaps this is a good indicator that our education system is broken? Then again, maybe it says more about religious America, that religious affiliation isn't a more reliable predictor? Then again, maybe someone's just stretched some numbers to have a fancy way of saying, "you're either with us or you're dumb"?

Ending badly

2009-09-16T19:37:00.000-04:00

mnot: REST-*? Well, this will end badly...

and so, after a choppy discussion...

... it is, hopefully, ending... and badly...

Quite frankly, this is the single dumbest attempt at one-sided
"standardization" of anti-REST architecture that I have ever seen.
...

Distributed transactions are an architectural component of non-REST interaction. Message queues are a common integration technique for non-REST architectures. To claim that either one
is a component of "Pragmatic REST" is the equivalent of putting a giant Red Dunce Hat on your head and then parading around as if it were the latest fashion statement.

The idea that the community would welcome such a pack of marketing morons as the standards-bearers of REST is simply ridiculous. Just close the stupid site down.

... I subscribe to the Burton Group mostly to be annoyed by nonsense, but Anne captured this one quite well:

I believe in being pragmatic, but if you don't adhere to the REST principles (everything is a resource with a uniform addressing scheme [i.e., a URL], interactions using representations, uniform methods, stateless interactions, using hypermedia as the engine of state), you won't produce RESTful systems, and you won't attain the desirable RESTful characteristics (scalability, serendipity, network effects, etc) that REST is supposed to enable.

For reference, while it still exists... REST-*

"That robot show"... you remember

2009-09-07T19:14:00.001-04:00

Talking with John about the show "Superfriends" I used to watch caused me to think about another show that I can never remember the name of. I finally googled the right words and found it. This is for me. For when I forget again... "The Space Giants" with Goldar, Silvar, and Tomoko... Superstation programming at its best:)

John's Story

2009-08-30T20:41:00.001-04:00

As many know, John has been testing his boundaries lately. Doing so, led to him being without toys and books until he earns them all back one-by-one. So far, he's selected only toys when he has earned something back - three so far. This left him in the unfortunate position of having no book to read for story time.

I've got to give him creativity credit, his solution to this dilemma was to write his own. When I first took on the task of taking dictation, I had no clue where he was going with it. About midway through the first page, my wrist was tired - an indicator of how embarrassingly little I write longhand nowadays - so I moved the exercise up to the computer. I left it in his words without edit - I kinda like it his way, "scardest" really ought to be a word, right? Link below:

Marine Battles Evil

Cutting to the chase

2009-08-29T12:00:00.000-04:00

I'm finally getting around to organizing the basement today so that we might rid ourselves of an over priced storage unit. John's helping. It took him all of ten minutes to grasp the essence of "organizing":

"So Daddy, we're really just shuffling junk around, right?"

Thankful

2009-08-18T19:29:00.002-04:00

Rebecca called work sounding teary the other day, it was late morning - I had just finished a conference call. It was a regular day. "Did you get my email?" Quickly, I opened up my inbox to see her message "ER Call me." My heart sank, a quick exchange, and I'll be there soon.

The week earlier, John had complained periodically of a headache. His disposition was normal, no other symptoms, just a headache. Rebecca ended up taking him to the doctor a few days earlier to just check it out. Given the lack of any other symptoms, the doctor suggested changing his pillow and coming back in a week if they're still happening.

Only a few days after that doctor visit - the day I got the call - he woke up late. Normally an early riser, it was Grace who noticed he wasn't yet awake, "Mommy, isn't why John's not awake yet?" she says. Rebecca found him moaning in bed unable to get up. He was lethargic, unable to get out of bed. Upon getting him up, she realized he's also vomiting and the headache has gotten much worse. She promptly made arrangements for Grace and called the doctor's office. After the nurse, both on the phone and in person, demonstrated no sense of urgency, Rebecca decided to take him directly to the E.R. There, the doctor did have a sense of urgency.

I arrived about an hour and a half into the E.R. visit and the wait had begun. John was pitiful, just laying there. As a parent, so helpless. The doctor comes in and the concerns are serious. "We'd like to first take him down for a CT of the brain and see what we've got," he says - he's trying to rule out brain trauma or tumors. After coming back from the CT room they did some blood work.

The timing of all this is rather fuzzy. About 5 hours went by in only a few seconds, making it difficult to relay things chronologically.

In any case, the blood work and CT scan results came back. The CT scan significantly provided a lack of anything significant - we're ecstatic! The blood work, however, shows his WBC significantly higher than normal. Significantly higher than normal - without an accompanying fever - can be real bad, so we need to watch that. No tumor, no trauma, that's good though. Now, the attention turns towards meningitis - there are many forms, some much worse than others, and we need to rule it out. This requires a spinal tap.

He'd explained the spinal tap procedure to Rebecca while I had stepped out so I'd asked him to explain the risks again. Asking about the risks in this situation is odd. I'm asking because I feel obligated to ask. He's answering because he's obligated to answer. All the while, we both know that he's gotta do the procedure anyway - it's the only reasonable path.

John was groggy during the procedure but still in and out. I initially stayed in the room because I wanted him to see me if he woke up. Disappointingly, I ended up stepping out of the room - I watched, standing up, as Rebecca received epidurals for both John and Grace but this was different, unbearable. Then, he woke up. Mid procedure, he woke up, screamed, and neither I nor Rebecca were in the room. We felt terrible. We ran in to re-assure him and in short order it was all over.

The doctor ordered a chest xray as an added test - don't recall exactly why - then said he wanted him transferred to Fairfax INOVA, which has a better pediatric unit.

While we waited for the ambulance to transport him, I was holding John's hand and he looks up and says, "is this real?"... "is this really happening, Daddy?" I wished it weren't. I prayed it'd wouldn't continue. But it was. The question was appropriate - things were moving so fast, so incongruent with our previous days that it was hard to believe, but it was real and it was really happening. "Yeah, peanut, it's real, but Mommy and Daddy are right here beside you the whole way and we love you so much."

Rebecca rode with John in the ambulance while I drove the van. At this point we knew he had to stay overnight at Fairfax so I went home to grab some essentials. On the way to the hospital, I also drove through Chick-Fil-A for a cookies and cream milkshake - ice cream and stress balance one another after all.

By the time I got to Fairfax Inova, John was settled in his room. Rebecca went home and John and I played Chutes and Ladders, puzzles, and transformers. We both slept well, except for the occasional nurse-round annoyance.

Waking up Friday, John looked much better. He had color back in his skin and some energy. Unfortunately, we were still waiting on his cultures to come back from his spinal fluid, blood, and urine. They took more blood that morning with a finger prick to test his WBCs too. At some point on Friday, we confirmed with the doctor that all the really scary stuff had been ruled out. We were looking at Viral Meningitis at this point, the lesser of the meningitis' and an easy recovery. They had started him on some powerful antibiotics from the initial E.R. visit so whatever it was, was likely be knocked out.

I went home Friday evening and Rebecca stayed with him over night. Waking up Saturday, he had much more energy and it seemed this storm was over. His reward for one last Lyme Disease test (read needle) was a milkshake at Silver Diner and Home.

Now, as I write this, John is largely back to normal. Still has a mild headache that we'll continue to monitor. His WBC count has mostly come back to a reasonable range.

The flood of emotions during the "height" of this scare were incredible. Not long ago, we had another similar scare emanating from his knees. During that time, as with this, I reflected on what we'd done and what I wish God would give us an opportunity to someday do. I vow to value more our time together. To appreciate it as the precious gift that it is. I need not another test for this to remain.

Problem Solving Strategies

2009-08-17T21:32:00.000-04:00

The other day we made some homemade vanilla ice cream after a day of playing outside. We put the ice cream in the freezer to harden up while we ate dinner and let the apple crisp cook.

After dinner I teased the kids with "Daddy already ate the ice cream... you didn't really want any, did you?"

John takes the news slowly and harshly... "you didn't really eat it, did you?"... "why did you eat it when you knew we wanted some?"

While I was having fun teasing John, Grace was just staring at me with a blank face, listening to evaluate the severity of the situation. After surmising it to be true, she takes action... she never said a word, just marched right upstairs to the authority figure and declares "Mommy!, daddy ate the ice cream and didn't leave us any!" I didn't get in any trouble - as the ice cream was still safely tucked in the ice box - but I enjoyed watching the different strategies for dealing with their dilemma...

I-Bond "fixed" rate

2009-07-16T16:49:00.002-04:00

All those years ago I thought it a good idea to buy bi-weekly bonds. I-Bonds seemed a good choice because it had a great return (that, I think, actually beat most of our other savings over the same period). I was comforted that the overall rate was comprised of the fixed + the inflation-adjusted rate - so even if it adjusted in a way not in my favor, it'd still beat a passbook account.

Fast forward to now, and a deflationary period and I learn, embarrassingly late, that Uncle Sam actually had a different, slightly more nuanced, definition of "fixed rate" (emphasis mine).

The fixed rate will always be greater than or equal to 0.00%. However, the fixed rate is not a guaranteed minimum rate; the composite rate could possibly be less than the fixed rate in deflationary situations.

So, it's fixed, kinda, but if the economy tanks, they let the "adjusted" component of the rate eat away the supposed "fixed" component, making it - by my lowly definition - not so fixed after all. I suspect I'm not alone in learning this nuance, as this is apparently the first deflationary period every experienced since the inception of the I-Bond.

Equally unsettling is that the rate *could* conceivable be pushed below 0.0% such that it actually eats away at any interest earned over the period too! So I should in fact be grateful that Uncle Sam has provided such a great regulation that in the words of my helpful customer service rep...

... regulations allow us to adjust the composite rate [back up] to 0% to prevent the investor from losing any interest earned.

... that's good... I guess... but with these terms, I think I'll look for other avenues and leave financing our national debt to the Chinese.

Sick Food

2009-07-14T21:01:00.000-04:00

Some incredibly enlightening testimony on the use of antibiotics in livestock. Everyone should invest in the hours to hear this testimony. Some highlights,

"...seven classes of antibiotics considered crucial by the FDA are used as normal feed additives for chicken, cattle, and pork..."

"... 70% of human-use antibiotics are given to animals..."

Alarmed? No? Let's look deeper...

"Especially troubling is their use not to cure sick animals but to promote "feed efficiency," that is, to increase the animal's weight gain per unit of feed. "... according to the Union of Concerned Scientist.

"Agricultural use, much of it for growth promotion, accounts for 40 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States. "

For related reasons, if you haven't already, you should watch King Corn which will give a good clue as to why the cattle need all those antibiotics (hint: cows don't digest corn well even though our tax dollars subsidize it as feed).

Graceanese

2009-04-10T22:28:00.000-04:00

At bedtime, I happened upon a story in John's VeggieTale Bible that provided a nice recap of a discussion on Col 3:20 we had earlier. It started out with a question, "Who is the ultimate boss?," which I posed to Grace. When she doesn't know the answer (as in this case), sometimes, she just turns to being cute - namely, talking gibberish. Hearing her response, John politely asks "now Grace, I can't understand you, is that JapaGrace or Graceanese?"

Later... we read a story from Grace's book. One part at the end required some explaining, so I went into action. The story is, roughly, some brothers are mean (jealous of) to little Joe, he leaves, predicts feast and famine. His brothers later come back hungry and, ultimately, he is good to them. I set about 'dumbing it down' a bit and explaining how it might be similar to him sharing a toy with a little boy who was previously mean to him. To clarify, he says, "so daddy, you mean it's like the Lord loving us and letting us into heaven even though we sin and don't do the right thing sometimes?" My reply, "um, yeah, that's a... that's a reasonable simile, sure." I've always hoped my kids will be smarter than I am, but I'm not sure how that's really going to feel when they've accomplished that at 5!

While writing this, I had to run upstairs to John screaming. "Daddy, those 'eyes' in the bathroom are really freaking me out... I can't sleep... they're just too scary." Being dense, it took a few seconds to register. Finally, I saw the 'eyes' and they are indeed freaky. Bathroom door closed... another crisis resolved.

From Bathroom Eyes

Earlier, I also managed to capture Grace's "poor Cinderellie" impression...

TP

2009-04-01T06:03:00.001-04:00

I've never been able to convince Becca that there is a right/wrong way
of hanging TP. When I notice improperly hung TP, I usually fix it....
Hopefully, now she'll see the light...

http://www.gunaxin.com/a-lesson-in-hanging-toilet-paper/15802

Roundabout flight...

2009-03-30T17:27:00.000-04:00

I mean really, who thought this was a good offering?

Decision-Making

2009-03-29T06:54:00.000-04:00

Circumstances have caused me to reflect upon the American High School experience - not the academic experience, the other one, the gauntlet. Bright young kids enter as freshmen armed with loads of natural talent, skill, and ability. Most, with the added benefit of some character, morals, and values. The next few years aren't, primarily, a test of the kid's academic ability, they're a test of the kid's decision-making skills. It's a battery of tests administered by their peers and it's deeply saddening to watch one with such potential, perform so poorly.

For added complexity, the difficulty of these tests isn't constant or even linear, they grow vastly more complex and challenging with each and every bad decision. In Big O notation, they'd be much closer to O(n²) than O(1). Unfortunately, the consequences of failing this test aren't disappointing letter grades, they tend to be much worse, as in...

... death... as one enters their freshman class, they should look around, more than likely one or more of the young people they see will be dead, disfigured, or disabled over the next few years from their bad decisions.

... parents... as one enters their freshman class, they should recognize that many of the people they stand with will become parents in the next few years as a result of their decisions.

... jail... some, will be in jail or will be making decisions that will ultimately lead them there. Yes, even that cool football player with everything going for him, he's cool, but he sucks at making decisions.

... drug addicts... many will decide to go down a path of being addicted to drugs. It'll start out innocently, with exploration, but they'll inevitably decide to squander away most of their God-given talent.

... consequence by association... some will make all these decisions well, but still end up dead or in jail, because they decided to associate with other people who suck at decision-making - sometimes the test is taken as a team.

... and perhaps the most frequent consequence is the failure to reach their potential. This is a much more benign consequence, but equally disheartening. They may start out with high aspirations and easily the skill to match only, eventually, to be satisfied by mediocrity.

There's a compounding effect to these consequences too. The first bad decision won't likely find them in jail, rather, it might start them on a path where being in jail is more likely to occur, for example.

It's this compounding effect that makes it so difficult for those around them. We see, as if in slow motion, the snowballing effect of bad decisions. It's sad. It's disappointing. It's maddening to watch. Like watching a middle-aged man riding through his mid-life crisis in his new sports car, the poor decision-makers are easy to spot from the outside. Perhaps a dramatic change in style. Maybe it's a more slow process of ostracizing those around them until they're left, isolated, with like-minded peers who also suck at decision-making.

We watch kids enter the gauntlet teasing ourselves into believing that there's a direct correlation with natural skill, academic prowess, values and long term success. We might even allow ourselves some excitement in pondering how successful a particularly gifted young person might be. The truth is, success most often stems not from raw talent but rather from good confident decision-making and hard work.

I love you and pray each day that God will provide you with decision-making skills equal to your natural talent.

Want a knuckle sandwich?

2009-03-16T19:36:00.000-04:00

I hear this conversation as I'm walking up the stairs...

John: "Grace, do you want a knuckle sandwich?"
Grace: "Umm... sure."
John: "Peanut butter and jelly or cream cheese and jelly?"
Grace: "Umm... peanut butter"
John: (holding his hand to her mouth) "Hows it taste?"
Grace: (fake chewing) "Mmmm... that good John"

I think I got screwed, this is not at all how I remember "eating" knuckle sandwiches from my older brother... strange.

Bizarre Spousal Conversation

2009-01-22T21:16:00.000-05:00

Me: "Hey, what's your Paypal password?"
Wife: "I don't know, I always use yours"
Me: "But... I don't have a Paypal account, I use yours."
Wife: "Sure you do, I just bought something the other day with it."
Wife [unspoken, look only]: I am watching Grey's, you're annoying, get out.
Me [unspoken, no look]: This is weird, I'm going back to the basement.

Picasa Mac

2009-01-06T06:55:00.001-05:00

Finally. Thank you google.
http://picasa.google.com/mac/

Now, if we only had financial software for the mac that didn't suck in
some way...

Dancing Grace

2008-12-16T19:00:00.000-05:00

We enjoyed Grace's first dance recital this past Sunday - she performed beautifully and made us all proud. It looks better in "high quality" but the video stutters a bit.

Random Kid Stories

2008-12-10T22:04:00.000-05:00

"Thanks my dance class, amen"
-- Grace, prayer

"Thank you for gravity, all the wonderful things on earth and baby Jesus, amen"
-- John, prayer

Mommy says, "Grace, stop eating the dough."
Grace grabs more dough to eat.
"Grace, *stop* eating the dough!" says Mommy in a stern tone.
Grace grabs more dough.
Mommy says, "Grace, look at me, didn't you hear what I said?"
Grace says, "yes" - as she grabs another glob
"Then why do you continue to eat the dough!?!" asked Mommy, nearing frustration
"'cause I like eading da dough" says Grace matter-of-factly
-- Grace & Mommy, cookie making dialog (while daddy diligently contains laughter)

Battery change

2008-12-09T21:06:00.001-05:00

It's been cold of late... really cold. There's not much worse than going through the five minute operation that is "gearing up" only to have a bike that won't start - though such an event really warms the body. So with the [near] blessing from my local mechanic, I head off to Batteries Plus to get an Odyssey battery to solve all my problems. Only, I forgot which one. The clerks weren't much more knowledgeable than I - which is sort of scary come to think of it. After some time, I concluded that the PC-535 was the right one so I paid for it. Then... realizing he had a browser open, I ask him to do a search for 'advrider 1200gs odyssey fit'... which he obligingly does, returning a picture like this one. So, second guessing myself, I think ok, well, return the 535 and I'll get that one - it's more powerful anyway, great. Only... I glanced at the picture and didn't see that tidbit about a seat modification to make it work. So anyway, I get my new PC-625 home tonight excited about riding tomorrow after much too long. During installation I found myself thankful for the recent feastful holiday because were it not for those extra pounds I may not have been able to stuff that big pig of a battery into such a small cavity.

With battery in place and wires reconnected, I decide to give her a test start. Push button... purrr... nice, I love it when things [roughly] just work. Man, I'll just put the seat back on and get to ride to work tomorrow. But... wait a minute... the seat doesn't fit anymore. A little Google-time leads me to this . Which leads me to my own little adhoc seat mod. I'm sure the angle grinder approach is perfectly sound, but I don't have one and it's late, the kids need to get to bed, and I have to work with what I've got so I take a faster alternate approach.

... and ended up with this...

and an up close view...

which, once you add the fasteners, ends up like this:

Now, I've got two fastening solutions in my toolbox and I went with duct tape this time. For a heavy-duty application like this I normally wouldn't rely on the lighter fastener but Gorilla Glue just seemed too "permanent" for this particular application. Man, I really need to find a middle ground...

Better Googling

2008-11-19T21:36:00.000-05:00

Google does most things well, but a couple things really irk me when searching. For example, when I search for something like:
http://www.google.com/search?q=hashmap
... I'm expecting javadocs for the HashMap class. It's not like it has any trouble figuring that out - it has long since found the relevant javadocs. The problem is that it finds the wrong version. I mean, how many people are looking for javadocs for a JDK that has entered the end of its service life? When I do such a query, I expect the latest javadocs to appear. I mean, with all the collective google genius, it's hard to believe they can't figure out logic to rank the more recent of two "like" resources higher - popularity isn't everything after all.

The other annoyance at the moment is not really google's fault but they're the application that I'll blame anyway. I search for something and a result looks really relevant. Clicking on it leads me to a "Sign in to see the answer..." page. A site named experts-exchange.com is typical of just this sort of rude net-unfriendly behavior. I don't want to see any results for such bad web citizens. It's annoying. I don't care if they have an expert going to personally answer my question, I don't like it one bit.

So, what to do? It was searching for a filtering mechanism for this later problem that led me to stumble on Google Custom Search where one can create and customize their own search engine. Using it, led to curing both ills. I very quickly created my own developer friendly search engine wherein recent javadocs are ranked higher and bad citizens are excluded. Problem solved.

Google creates annoyances, and google provides a toolbox to fix them... nice work.

Now, if I could get you to quit goofing off with useless stuff like this and focus on getting Picasa for the Mac ... Please....

Darth Vader Pumpkin

2008-10-28T20:45:00.000-04:00

This evening we finally carved out some time to work on John's pumpkin - carved out time, get it? The hardest part of doing his pumpkin was decided what to do. He went from Spiderman and Batman to Bumblebee (a transformer) before finally settling in on Darth Vader. Fortunately for him, Becca got me some cool new carving tools from the craft store. They're intended use is clay, but they work well on the overgrown squash too.

From Darth Vader Pumpkin

And with the lights out...

From Darth Vader Pumpkin

Carving pumpkins directly, using the depth of flesh to manage light is a whole new experience for me. In many ways, its actually easier than typical carving, in that, typically for a reasonably complex pumpkin design you have to think in the "negative" to figure out what an "outline" going to look like in the end. By carving a full design directly in the pumpkin and using flesh-depth to manage the light, you can know what it's going to look like at all times by carving with a light in it and a dimly lit room. Darth was my first experience with this style of carving, motivated mostly by a Food Network Challenge. I'm already thinking about what we can do for next year's squash.

Princess Pumpkin

2008-10-19T20:57:00.004-04:00

Today we carved one of our pumpkins. John and I mainly. Grace saw the yukiness of the inside and was inclined to stay away - even though this particular orange squash was to be hers. In any case, John and I dutifully operated on it carefully cleaning its insides...

From Princess Pumpkin

There's something really fun about squeezing that goopy mess between your fingers...

From Princess Pumpkin

And after an hour or so with knives, files, drill bits, and a drywall saw, we end up with our princess pumpkin.

From Princess Pumpkin

Pumpkin Pickin

2008-10-19T19:49:00.001-04:00

There's an orchard to our west having fresh apples and a genuine pumpkin patch so the kids and I ventured there yesterday. After a couple years searching for our pumpkin at a local farm stand where loads of gorgeous pumpkins lay piled up on hay bales, I decided this year we should have the real experience. It's not that the pumpkin selection at the farm stand aren't great - they are, in fact, near perfect. There's something about romping in the real pumpkin patch in search of the perfect plump squash though. The pumpkin patch is just down the road from the orchard run by the same farmers. Upon arriving, John selected a solid Radio Flyer to accompany us on our venture.

From Pumpkin Patch Pickin 2008

Grace served the Pumpkin Pickin team as the Chief Pumpkin Inspector, carefully inspecting each stem for the proper curvature.

From Pumpkin Patch Pickin 2008

And, of course, you never know what villains might lurk in the local pumpkin patch so John prepared for the worst by practicing his super hero stance - maintaining the tightest grip on the Flyer all the while.

From Pumpkin Patch Pickin 2008

Occasionally, you just need to get down and check out the pumpkin vines themselves.

From Pumpkin Patch Pickin 2008

So many pumpkins, which one should we choose?

From Pumpkin Patch Pickin 2008

Pumpkin selected... and tired...

From Pumpkin Patch Pickin 2008

... so we head next door to the apple orchard, where the apples were freshly picked and the caramel was warm...

From Pumpkin Patch Pickin 2008

And of course they were yummy...

From Pumpkin Patch Pickin 2008

Summer Camping

2008-07-18T14:49:00.000-04:00

John and I went camping and fishing at Burke Lake Park last Saturday/Sunday. He packed his backpack and sleeping bag and was well-prepared for the adventure.

We went to the sporting goods store and got him and I fishing poles and him a headlamp. He was pretty excited to have a headlamp just like mine (except his is brighter:).

Burke Lake is nice because it has a nice little train ride and a carousel right in the middle of the woods. I think both of us really enjoyed the train which went nearly roller-coaster fast. Next time, he'll ride the carousel solo though.

After making camp and riding the train and such, it was time for dinner. I brought the portable grill to make things easier and kept it simple with dogs and chips. John approved.

And of course, no evening camping would be complete without some s'mores.

I don't think John's quite ready for ghost stories by the campfire so we opted instead for silly faces into the camera while we're both wearing our headlamps.

I've got to say that I was reluctant to spend the extra money on the Weber Baby-Q but am now glad I did. It's proven itself with dogs, burgers, etc., but baking cinnamon rolls to perfection definitely makes it worth it.

They were *really* good too...

Unfortunately, the fishing part of the trip didn't go quite so smoothly. I went into the sporting goods store intending to get a cheap Zebco 404 because that's really all I've known. I think the guy in the fishing department must have thought it'd be funny to make me look like a complete idiot in front of my kid or something since he recommended an open real combo deal. Anyway, John and I get out there and he's happily fishing away with his new Superman fishing pole...

... while I'm in the background desperately trying to figure out how my reel works. It turns out the guy who put the line on got some wound up in the gear on the inside so I had to take it apart and clear the gear out, rewind a bunch of line, then spend another 10 minutes figuring out how to cast the silly thing. Meanwhile, John is looking back saying, "Daddy, why don't you just do it like me?".

Unfortunately, no fish were caught that day or the next morning but I caught part of someone else's fishing pole.

We both had a blast and are looking forward to taking the girls out and teaching them how to go camping like the big boys do.

Bean planting

2008-07-18T11:42:00.003-04:00

Rebecca and I rode up to our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm last Saturday to help out a little. I love that we can get great quality organic produce picked the same day at prices that are at or below the supermarket. The idea is that we share the risk and reward with the local farmer - if it's a good season, we're all happy, if it's tough season, then the farmer is guaranteed income anyway. There's also the invaluable benefit of supporting a good hardworking local farmer too.

The idea of a CSA is that the community also comes out to the farm during the season to help out with the farm work. This serves several functions: it helps build the relationship with the farmer, it helps lower labor costs, and it helps us appreciate and be mindful of all the work going into putting food on our table.

Anyway, as I was saying, Rebecca and I went out Friday to help out. The job of the day was bean planting. It's amazing to me how much more thought and science goes into organic farming. I mean, with a chemical enhanced farm, you could just throw some seeds in the ground and compensate for soil quality by spraying. With organic farming, it's critical to factor in how you might inject nutrients into all phases of the growing cycle. With our beans for example, prior to putting them in the ground, we had to coat them with a thick sticky syrup (Yucca extract, I think) that will allow them to produce their own nitrogen and ultimately lead to a more productive crop. Of course, the downside is that it makes planting slow and difficult - imagine molasses covered seeds.

Farmer Allen has a cow down right now too. During the birthing process, it pinched a nerve causing its hind legs to be temporarily paralyzed. He thinks they're no longer paralyzed and that it's just afraid to try now so in the meantime, he's having to flip the cow over a couple times a day and give it physical therapy. We walked over to the pasture to help flip it over too. First time either of us has been cow-flipping.

All and all, it was an interesting experience. Now that we know what to expect, I'm hoping we can get out there with the kids a few times this season too. Rebecca and I were also hot after working for a few hours and needed a way to cool down. The farm is enticingly close to the Shenandoah River, so we found a tube rental place and took a couple hour lazy float down the river. It was a nice compensation for our earlier farm work:)

Axis2 and Rampart troubles

2008-06-20T09:13:00.002-04:00

Trying to deploy the rampart-1.4.mar module within Axis2? You created
the axis2.war file using by changing to the webapps directory and
using the create.war ant task. It would seem that the Rampart people
didn't communicate with the Axis people the dependency on
'axis2-codegen-1.4.jar' for they explicitly exclude it in the
create.war ant task! Copy the previously mentioned jar file into the
WEB-INF\lib directory.

[ERROR] The rampart-1.4.mar module, which is not valid, caused
org/apache/axis2/wsdl/codegen/extension/ModulePolicyExtension
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
org/apache/axis2/wsdl/codegen/extension/ModulePolicyExtension
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:620)

Someone apparently thinks its been fixed since the issue[1] has been
closed. One of us is doing something wrong I reckon.

[1] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AXIS2-3213

First update

2008-06-06T12:10:00.001-04:00

So we left out around 7 this morning heading west on 50. So far the
weather has been decent but just as we stopped for lunch here in
Huntington, WV its started to really heat up. The Ohio River Byway was
nice in parts - wasn't all that I'd hoped for though. We doing good on
time and will probably make the side trip Jenny Wile Park. Current
plan has us camping tonight in Breaks Interstate Park.

Preparations for a foul economy

2008-06-01T10:31:00.005-04:00

So the state of our economy is a common topic around our house. Rebecca and I frequently talk about how bad it could get. For more than 5 years we've been saying that the irrational rise in housing prices and fascination with personal debt can only lead to one huge mess. We've been continually baffled that average people like us see this mess while economic experts are convinced it's somehow limited to the sub-prime market and worried about some artificial technical statistic that would indicate a recession.

Anyway, I reckon an argument for how ugly this might get is a topic for another entry. This entry was meant to let everyone know that we are prepared - well, John is prepared anyway. Upon finding the right sized cavity, he enjoys attempting sleep.

Seriously, we're hoping that it's more a boy's fascination with doing weird stuff than an appreciation for where poor economic conditions could lead. In any case, Rebecca and I are boosting our savings so that we can afford larger, perhaps even wax-coated, boxes for everyone...

The plan

2008-05-07T22:08:00.001-04:00

The current plan has us leaving San Francisco Saturday morning - after
one last trip through Little Italy for an espresso and pastries. We
head up to Napa Saturday and down to Yosemite Sunday. Then we'll
spend one last night in Fisherman's Wharf before flying out Sunday.

I think the kids are enjoying the experience so far. Me and John were
the only ones capable of finishing our Ghiradelli Sunday. I think
we've earned a second trip to the ice cream shop but I'm not sure if
we're going to bring the girls since they had such a pitiful ice-cream
eating performance.

Eating well...

2008-05-04T22:40:00.001-04:00

After starting the day eating an over priced hotel breakfast, we
headed to North Beach or "Little Italy". Leave it to me to drool over
tons of Italian pastries and settle on an apple fritter - not my
proudest moment. We then found a well-respected local cafe, Cafe
Trieste, where I enjoyed an excellent double espresso.

After the coffee it became clear that we needed a stroller- ok, Becca
was right we should have packed the McLearen. So Becca took the kids
to the play-park while I walked through China Town in search of a
stroller. Proudly returning with my prize, I quickly learned Becca
had a double stroller in mind. Oh well, tomorrow.

From Italia, we took the Muni downtown to get me a fleece - its quite
a bit cooler than I expected.

After picking up the fleece, we headed to Pier 39 via the old style
cable car.. We saw tons of seals hanging out and even got to see one
rather rude seal pushing the other off into the water. I suspect
Becca and I were more excited about the seals than either of the kids.
After the seals we went into Pier 39 proper, where I had the good
fortune of helping a guy mount a six foot unicycle - I know, weird
huh? We couldn't miss out on an opportunity to make the parents dizzy
so we took a spin on the carousel.

Leaving the pier, we dined at Rainforest Cafe which we were familiar
with from Virginia but ours has closed down before the kids ever
experienced it.

We now sit tired in the hotel and debating whether a Ghiradelli ice
cream sundae is doable.

By the way, we got some cupcakes last night from karascupcakes and
they were phenominal. Becca went through a cupcake kick about a year
or so ago where we tried many different bakeries and they were all
only ok. Katas was great. The staff seemed to downplay the vanilla,
but knowing the challenges of making a really good and moist vanilla
cake, I think it was my favorite.

As far as the bridge, I'll let you know when the fog lifts or we get
closer to it. We're thinking about doing a fire engine tour tomorrow
which would get us close enough to appreciate it.

Mediocre eating...

2008-05-03T18:40:00.001-04:00

Freshly arrived from a long flight,we were hungry and didn't want to
overthink the selection. So we picked pretty much the first sit down
restaurant we saw. Well, turns out we were sort of tricked into going
into the restaurant next door, Nonni Rose's, which was only alright
and that's being pretty generous. The bread was sub-par for San
francisco. The chowder was decent - everything else, not so much.

We're staying at the Holiday Inn, which we got for a ridiculously
cheap $89 - thanks Hotwire.com. The hotel is clean, decent, and
perfectly located. Highly recommended basically for being good in a
great location.

Virgin America

2008-05-03T18:26:00.001-04:00

I'm impressed. I wasn't enthusiastic when Becca booked our flight on
Virgin America but am now pleasantly surprised. The coolness:
- media players in all seats with pretty good tv stations
- comfortable seats
- reasonably sized restrooms
- reasonable legroom
- flight crew seems genuinely happy to be onboard helping out. A huge
change from the bitterness I've experienced from other airlines' crew.

The negatives:
- headphones are terrible. Sound was great from my iPod headphones
though.

Very enjoyable, good work Becca!

Sent from my iPod

Taxing Fast Food

2008-05-01T08:30:00.001-04:00

I never thought I'd actually say I'm supportive of a new tax, but here
it is, I think taxing fast-food might be a brilliant idea.

http://wcbstv.com/local/fast.food.tax.2.712510.html

NJ Gas Pumping Safey

2007-12-29T16:02:00.001-05:00

The transition to the new job was bittersweet - I'm going to miss the folks I worked with even as I look forward to the new challenges. To celebrate the past/future job situation, Rebecca surprised me on my last day with a trip to New York to see Cyrano de Bergerac. I'll try to write about that trip later, but the New Jersey gas pumping situation was so ironic that I felt compelled to write about it first.

Now, we've driven to New York across the turnpike a few times and I've always found it strange that I couldn't pump my own gas. So, this trip was no exception, we needed to fuel up on one of those service exits on the turnpike. While I was waiting in line - and Becca retrieved the Starbucks - I notice this fine fellow helping out.

Now, I'd seen him before walking around the line of cars, directing traffic etc. By his actions and the clipboard in his hand I assume he must be some sort of supervisor - presumably responsible for the smooth operation and safety of the gas pumps. Wait a minute, he's actually going to pump the gas too?

What a good supervisor - helping out when things get really busy.

Now, I should pause a minute to give my understanding of the insanity that disallows people from pumping their own petrol. I have assumed all along that it is for our own safety. To protect us from ourselves. I supposed perhaps it could be just to employ more people so I figured I'd look it up. It turns out Yahoo Ask, agrees with me:

The ban on self-service gas stations is a highly combustible issue and makes for some heated debates. New Jersey passed the law making it illegal to pump your own gas in 1949. At the time, legislators felt it was too dangerous to have untrained people dispensing such a flammable liquid.

Having said all this, let's take a closer look at the photo:

Ok, not the best photograph, but you can probably tell - it's a cigar. To be fair to the gentleman, I never actually saw him smoke it. Now each trip I live by the rules and let the clowns pump gas for me; making me feel about the same as I would in asking another man for directions. I understand that I may not be the safest person at the gas pump - heck, I don't touch metal prior to grabbing the pump to remove the static electricity - but I can do much better than this apparent supervisor. I'd really love to make a bold statement banning New Jersey from my future travel plans on principle but, unfortunately, it's the only reasonable way to get from D.C. to N.Y.

Taste tester extraordinaire

2007-12-24T21:26:00.000-05:00

So I frequently get asked about "kid stories" and never come up with anything. It's not that they aren't doing funny/cute/adorable stuff all the time; it's that I'm not sharp enough to remember any of it. Occasionally, I'll even think about writing it down but then think - hey, there's no way I'm going to forget that. So, some small tid-bits of the day:

I was baking a carrot cake for dessert tomorrow and Grace was my little helper. She stirred the dry ingredients for me as I creamed and mixed the wet. Every ingredient we'd add (cinnamon, flour, freshly ground nutmeg, etc.) she'd stop me and say, "taste." I now know to just offer a taste of all ingredients prior to adding them. When it came time to do the cream cheese frosting I was tweaking it a little because I wanted the cream cheese to be more apparent than the sweet. So each time I'd stop the mixer while I was making it she'd yell "Taste test" (I'm fairly confident where she got that from). Then after a while, as if sensing it was about to end - she would say "one more taste test".
After working hard at the carrot cake, Grace and I sat down on the sofa - each with a little bag of Dorittos (her with Cool Ranch and me with Nacho). I was tired and not paying much attention apparently. She was eating out of my bag - "tasting" them I suppose. It's been a while since I've had a Cool Ranch dorrito so after mine were gone I reach over and grabbed one of hers. It tasted funny, bland really. I tried another. Same thing. Then I sat back and watched her "eat" her doritto. Her process involved sticking the doritto in her mouth, sucking off all the flavor and sticking it back in the bag. I love Grace, but I doubt we'll be sharing a bag of chips any time soon.

iMac

2007-12-16T19:44:00.000-05:00

One of the annoying bits of leaving a job is leaving behind a laptop that has accumulated mass amounts of data. I've spent a good amount of time this weekend sifting through what's mine/what's not and transferring to the new machine.

The good news is that the new machine is a beautiful new 24" iMac. I've wanted one for years but could never really justify the purchase for myself and Becca didn't want one as her computer. I purchased it through Amazon which allowed me to skip out on some hefty sales tax and overnight it for $3.99 (I love Amazon Prime).

The only semi-challenging part so far is getting a proper development environment set up. I've long used TortoiseSVN for version control with Forrest and I'm going to miss it for sure. I immediately began the hunt for a mac replacement for it. It didn't take long to turn up SCPlugin which hooks right into Finder. I had only one last hurdle to clear in using it. I attempted to check out the Apache Forrest trunk and immediately got a PROPFIND error:

PROPFIND of '/repos/asf/forrest/trunk': Server certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted (https://svn.apache.org)

After poking around a while, it seems you need to use the command line svn client (included in Leopard) to make an initial connection to the Subversion server to let it know that you trust the certificate (e.g. "svn ls https://somelocation/path" then, when prompted, type "p" to permanently accept it). Why SCPlugin couldn't simply do that for me? I haven't a clue but whatever. It's a small nit.

Ok, as I write this I realize there were some other challenges as well:

Quicken. I was a Quicken user on Windows and it's not exactly easy to convert the data to Quicken for Mac. It's odd that Quicken's internal data format is different for different operating systems. It's even more odd that they seem unable to create a loss-less conversion from one format to the other. Fortunately, they have at least documented the quirkiness.
Picasa. This, I will miss. I've been a huge fan of all things Google but Picasa has to be one of my favorite. Folks seem to think iPhoto will fill the void but so far I have found it unsatisfying. No more simple enhancements. No more geo-tagging. Oh well.

Fortunately, the intuitiveness, responsiveness, etc. of the Mac easily make me forget these trouble spots.

Curious?

Heading toward unemployment

2007-12-15T17:12:00.000-05:00

It's true, beginning December 22d, I'll be officially unemployed. Assuming all goes according to plan, I'll remain in this state for four whole days. I've resigned from my current employer effective 21 December and will start the new one 26 December. I've had a good time over the past 6 years, worked with some great people and learned a lot. Now the time has come to move on and have a new experience. I'm heading to a small (~12 folks) company and suspect I'm going to like it.

Housing update

2007-12-15T16:57:00.001-05:00

Well... it's been a while and most know the status of things but just in case...

We were excited about the house and agreed upon price. Then we let our trusty home inspector loose on the place and, well, he inspected really well. While he spoke really well of the double masonry construction of the place, he found the dreaded termites. I think we would likely have been able to overcome the termites with some treatment but it turns out there were also issues with the drainage, basement dampness, and roof fungus.

Given the issues and the seller's unwillingness to adequately compensate us for them, we decide the best thing to do was sign a release based on our inspection contingency.

We also briefly toyed with the idea of just moving into something safe in South Riding but quickly abandoned that idea and will eventually continue pursuing something in Arlington or Alexandria.

For now, we're going to decorate the rental townhouse properly and relax and enjoy the holiday season. We'll begin the search again next year with a keen eye on the poor state of this economy - assuming we're not in an all-out recession by then, in which case, we'll hold off indefinitely:)

Determination

2007-11-12T19:07:00.000-05:00

It's been rare lately to see Rebecca as unwavering, resolute, and determined as she has of late. She's nothing short of marvelous when in that "mode." A real site to behold. I simply sit back and watch her work - like a skilled craftsman whittling fine details in some hand-crafted furniture - confident in every movement and knowing precisely what the next will be.

Least that's the way it seems from the peanut gallery - I was eaves-dropping while taking care of the kids.

It started Sunday when we decided to go take a look at a couple open houses. First on the list was a small Cape Cod in N. Arlington. This house, it turns out, was great but it was located alongside a fairly large street - making peace and quiet virtually impossible outside the walls of the house. On the way to the next stop we saw some FSBO properties where a guy named Wayne, it turns out, apparently owns or has owned the majority of houses in northern South Arlington. We've never really considered south Arlington because of the schools but these are really nice locations - unfortunately we found out after going inside that they were only two bedrooms.

After that short detour, we were at our next stop - a bit of a whim - in the City of Alexandria. We haven't really been looking in Alexandria either - again because of the schools - but decided to take a look at this one for various reasons. The house was well done on the inside and the kitchen totally renovated. It's a 1939 colonial just behind the Masonic Temple and it's gorgeous. Street's nice, house is nice, back yard is nice, basement is nice. From the house, we strolled across the deck and into the backyard where we were able to find some privacy to discuss what we'd seen so far. I told her I really liked it. Becca looked at me with a look unique to her and said, "I want this house." I looked back and smiling (half-chuckle) said "yeah, me too." She then looked back with an even more serious Becca look and said, "no, I mean I *really* want this house. I'll do what it takes, this is our house."

That kicked her into a mode I haven't witnessed in a while. Total focus. Total determination. She came home and spent the better part of the night wheeling and dealing. Going over the contract. Writing a depressingly large check. Waking up loan officers to generate a pre-approval letter to make the offer stronger. Will we end up with this house? I don't yet know, seems like the seller is a bit stubborn so far, but he may have just met his match in the captain of our team;)

** Just to be clear in case this entry leads to a different perception - we are very equal in our desire for the house.

Grace's costume...

2007-11-02T06:52:00.000-04:00

In response to Gwen's comments/questions, I figured I'd post them here. Grace had a tail and some ears to be some sort of last-minute rodent - but she had no interest in wearing them. Her napping was just off on Halloween (making her grumpy) and truth-be-told, she doesn't yet get Halloween, pumpkins, or costumes. Anyway, she stayed home with me passing out candy to various kids that came begging in funky garb. For her efforts, she learned a valuable lesson: "She who passes out the candy eats the most."

Maybe next year Gracie;)

I should have known...

2007-10-29T19:24:00.000-04:00

... that, when given a choice, John would choose the most difficult pumpkin to carve. Truthfully, I actually enjoyed the challenge and was glad about his selection. Knowing his love for pirates of late, I offered three pumpkin options - two pirates and one "smiling Jack". He quickly decided on the more difficult of the two pirates and I began carving. Fortunately, I helped steer us towards a whopper of a pumpkin earlier in the evening that served as the canvas for this adventure - a 35 pounder to be exact;)

Anyway, bad pictures, but here's a look at our final result. First with flash to appreciate the overgrown squash.

Now, without flash, to appreciate its spooky goodness.

and again... just for fun...

John will be a great (albeit incredibly expensive) pirate for Halloween this year - I'll try to get some pictures of our human and squash varieties together.

Time confusion...

2007-10-29T10:28:00.000-04:00

In case your clocks were as confused as ours, here's what happened.

Well... I did it

2007-10-25T20:47:00.000-04:00

After months of John and I drooling over the big flat panel TV's when we walk into Costco, I finally took the High Definition (HD) plunge. After surprisingly little research (because of being overwhelmed by confusion), I decided to just look for something that accepted HDMI and supported all popular formats (1080p/i, 720p/i). I was originally looking at a Philips but after reading this article I decided to go with a Vizio. This 47"er was exactly what I was hoping for.

I got the beast home and was immediately dissappointed. It's huge. It's beautiful. No doubt. But it turns out that my Cox Digital Cable box actually converts an incoming analog signal into digital only so that it can infuse the guide/info/feature s and send an analog signal out to the TV. The TV, in this case, is too good in that it highlights all the defects of the inferior picture and looks like surprisingly poor quality. Fortunately, a dood at work led me on to over-the-air HD. I promptly went to Radio Shack and purchased a cheap antenna fully expecting it to pick up nothing in my basement rec room. I, and Becca, was pleasantly suprised to see all the major stations displayed in High Definition - a beautiful thing. Over-the-air HD is looking so good, I find myself watching junk I don't even like;)

Now, I find myself in a bind. The over the air HD is sweet, but I'm paying for a bunch of channels that look like junk on my TV. I've got to figure out whether to make a convincing argument to pay Cox yet another $5 a month to get the true digital/HD signal or make a convincing argument to drop it all together. Already, we've had some weather come in that has shown the weakness of the air broadcast, but its cheapness is appealing. When we do move to our final destination, we won't be fortunate enough to have a rec room at all (and we'll be <5miles from the broadcasts) so I don't expect the air broadcast to have the same weaknesses. Still, for now, I'm leaning toward paying Cox for the upgrade.

All and all, the move to HD is incredible. Most people I've talked to say that once you routinely watch shows in HD you'll never go back. So far, I'm inclined to agree.

Which direction?

2007-10-16T08:44:00.001-04:00

Clock-wise or Counter? We've just had a heated debate at work with no real conclusion. Let me know how you see it...

Which way?

More Sweet Music...

2007-10-12T06:50:00.000-04:00

As Gwen eluded to in her comments, John received another harmonica yesterday in the mail. We told him that we could look at exchanging it for something else if he wanted. He was having none of it though - "take it out". We took it out of the package and he bounced around the room blowing and sucking into his new harmonica as if it were his first one. We played harmonica's most of the evening yesterday. I was flipping through a book and trying to read how to play Jingle Bells and John just looked at me, shook his head, and began to play - sounded much closer to Jingle Bells than my version that had benefited from the reading. He has enjoyed both of his new instruments and seems to give them equal playing time;)

Sweet Music...

2007-10-10T07:12:00.000-04:00

John got a harmonica from his last doctor's visit - after hitting his head in Little Ninja's;) He's had a blast playing it, but the sounds it produced were, ehem, rough. Worse than that, he gets absolutely worn out playing it. He'll play for a few seconds and be out of breath - because of the force of air required to make a sound from it.

Fortunately for him [and Becca and I], he's just received a really nice harmonica in for his birthday. He's so used to the effort required by the other one that he can play this one for extended periods. The music it produces is sweet. It just came yesterday, but I love watching him play the "real" one - his head bounces around and his fingers flutter likes he's playing a horn. Becca and I just sit back and enjoy his sweet music...

Sunday C&O Canal Ride

2007-10-01T21:35:00.000-04:00

Pablo and I took the bicycles for a trip down the tow path. We rode it from Georgetown, D.C. to Great Falls, Md - a total of around 28 miles round trip. It was a gorgeous day, a little cool in the morning but warming to a perfect low-70s by afternoon.

We picked up the tow path off of Wisconsin Ave in Georgetown.

The majority of this section of the canal is well maintained clay and crushed stone. This was one of the rare opportunities to get a little dirty - on the way out, I took the bridge - Pablo took the water; coming back, we both got wet.

I don't remember exactly where this was so I couldn't geotag it, but this was the first lock that we encountered. We'd both seen locks before up on the Virginia side of Great Falls, but they have fallen into disrepair so it requires some imagination to appreciate what a feat they truly are. All along the tow path, you get to see great examples of the locks in pretty good condition.

Locktenders were responsible for efficiently getting the boat traffic through the lock at all hours of the night. For their efforts, they received a small house and an acre of land...

... and a sweet commute.

I'd love to see how the gears actually worked to open and close each of the upstream lock doors. I suspect the park service would frown on a can of WD-40 and some genuine curiosity though.

This was a more sophisticated "double-lock" that flows into a basin. We didn't stop to read what it was all about though.

And finally... Great Falls... Either the falls look much more dramatic from the Virginia side or the water is really low.

A trout? No. A salmon? No. Just some dood thinking he's gonna be the one to beat the odds;) In our 15 minutes of observing, I calculated the score to be:
- man-in-little-boat = 0
- thousands-of-gallons-of-water-per-second = 8

more pictures here.

and map view too!

Heading out...

2007-09-09T07:18:00.001-04:00

It stormed last night and isn't looking so great this morning. I
typed a day 2 summary but was having trouble posting it. We are
packing up and heading out from just south of Boston. More later...

--
--tim

http://williamstw.blogspot.com

Road Trip Audio #11

2007-09-08T14:27:00.001-04:00

Gabcast! Road Trip Audio #11

Road Trip Audio #10

2007-09-08T06:38:00.001-04:00

Gabcast! Road Trip Audio #10

Road Trip Audio #9

2007-09-07T18:45:00.001-04:00

Gabcast! Road Trip Audio #9

Road Trip Audio #8

2007-09-07T13:09:00.001-04:00

Gabcast! Road Trip Audio #8

Fuel stop and a honey bun

2007-09-07T08:14:00.001-04:00

I didn't top off yesterday so we just had to stop after about 100
miles or so just south of Harrisburg, Pa. It was warm when we left,
now not so much. I think we're bot ready to put on our inserts for
warmth. I resisted the urge to ride through Gettysburg so as to have
more time for things further north.

--
--tim

http://williamstw.blogspot.com

Road Trip Audio #7

2007-09-07T06:15:00.001-04:00

Gabcast! Road Trip Audio #7

L.L. Bean Ride Plan

2007-09-05T22:01:00.002-04:00

Well, I'm at it again. I'm taking a long weekend to do some real mileage on the bike. The plan right now is to leave from L.L. Bean in Tysons Corner, Virginia at 6am this Friday and head [the long way] towards L.L. Bean, Freeport, Maine - hopefully by Saturday;) The route will take us through Pennsylvania to Hancock, NY, then take 30 across the northern border of the Catskills. 30 then turns north and will lead us directly into Adirondacks. The current plan has us camping overnight somewhere in the Adirondacks but we'll see how inviting the ground looks after that many hours on a bike.

The next morning we'll head east through Vermont and New Hampshire arriving in the afternoon at L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine. From there we'll head home. My "plan" pretty much ends there other than we'll get home sometime Sunday - and even that, I reckon, is somewhat flexible. I'd like to hug the coast as much as possible but we'll just see how we're doing on time as we get there. Anyway, that's the plan, I'll try to post along the way and certainly post pictures at the end.

Click the "View Larger Map" link to see the rough route.

View Larger Map

Feasting on Pork Butt

2007-08-05T18:15:00.000-04:00

I was excited about the new "Feasting on Asphalt" premiere last night so I thought a fitting tribute to Alton would be to smoke a butt. So, to wear off some anxious energy awaiting the new episode, I dove into the spice cabinet and whipped up a good blend. After rubbing the butt real good, I properly wrapped it in plastic wrap for its rest in the refrigerator for a few hours. After getting the BGE to ~225 degrees, I rubbed the butt one final time, tossed some chunks of hickory on and closed it down. Now, normally, I simply wait it out but this time I added a couple handfuls of apple chips when the butt reached ~175/180 degrees. It's final destination would be a couple hours later at an internal temperature of 195. I've tried various temperatures and now believe that 195 is perfect. So, after 17 hours - and long after Feasting On Asphalt had reached its end - I took this hunk of meat off the smoker:

Pulling it was a trivial job resulting in this pile:

Sometimes I impress myself;) This was good. I mean, really good. I made two sauces to top it and was suprisingly partial to the slightly sweetened one. I'm still just playing around with the sauces so this makes a very small quantity but it was something like this:
1/4c - Cider Vinegar
1/4c - Water
2T - Ketchup
2T - Mustard
2T - Dark Brown Sugar
1T - Worchestire Sauce
1t - Chili Powder(generous t)
Few squirts of Hot Sauce (I used Goya)
Freshly ground black pepper to taste (I probably use a teaspoon or so)
a couple flakes of red pepper

I bring to a boil, then lower to a simmer for a while until it reduces and starts to thicken. I feel like adding the water; then reducing it back out again, does something happy with the vinegar - but it could be in my mind;)

Anyway, Alton didn't disappoint. He's ride for this journey was an R12GS - the perfect machine for it. Happy riding Mr. Brown!

Shenandoah River Ride

2007-08-05T18:07:00.000-04:00

A little late posting my ride last Sunday. I headed west on Rt 50 with no clear route in mind. Immediately after crossing the Shenandoah River, I noticed a nice dirt road running parallel so it was an obvious choice. The road was well maintained:

Shortly, the fun alongside the river ended with this bridge:

Which had a view like this:

The dirt then gave way to unlined old roads higher in elevation:

Noticing those mountains in the distance made me want to see them closer. So, I went back up Rt 50 and took Blue Ridge Mountain Rd. which was a nice way to finish up. Unfortunately, I put the camera away and just enjoyed the curves of the mountain roads.

Carne Asada

2007-07-23T21:14:00.001-04:00

Rebecca found my recipe for carne asada marinade the other day so I was excited to give it a try again. Smelling the marinade alone gets me all excited. It's roughly (from memory) juice from 1 lime, 1 lemon, 1 orange; 3T chile powder; 1T oregano; 2 jalepanos; 1 medium onion; 5 cloves of garlic; 2T cumin; and 1/4 cup of soy sauce. I put it in the food processor for a few pulses. I put the flank steak into a large ziploc bag along with the marinade (sucking out the excess air) and place it in the fridge for several hours - massaging the meat every time I happened by the refrigerator. I fire up the Green Egg to ~450 with lump coal. Right before cooking I throw on some hickory chips and grill it. Here's what I came up with:

I must say, it was tasty. I personally would have liked more char on it. Had I known at the time I was going to take pictures of it, I wouldn't have done the wimpy thing and cut into it as my "done-ness" check.

Gateau di patate

2007-07-23T20:40:00.000-04:00

I finally made Gianugo's Gateau di patate[1]. I think it turned out well and by Rebecca's 5 servings (yep, that's not a typo), I think she enjoyed it too. It's essentially a potatoe pie with a nice little surprise on the inside. For the inside surprise I chose bacon and sharp cheddar cheese - I reckon Gianugo would frown on the Sharp Cheddar part but I had to make it my own.

Gianugo takes an in-precise approach to cooking which to the amateur can be challenging to follow. I don't work so well with a 'couple spoonfuls of flour' or a 'handful of parmesan' but I made do. I worked from his instructions and interpreted the following:
- plum cake mold? - yeah, I used a 10" cake pan;)
- 'some spuds' == 6 medium/large potatoes (I used russet)
- 'handful of parmesan' - 3/4 cup
- 'two-three spoonfuls of white flour' - 2 Tablespoons all-purpose flour.

I would have liked a better crust on top. I think if I would have followed his guidance better and used grated cheese instead of finely shredded, it would have melded into a better crust for me. Anyway, with good quality parmesan, bacon, and cheddar, it was really fool-proof anyway;)

Rebecca suggested that some chopped smoked pork butt would be a perfect filling for this too. I think I'll be firing up the Green Egg with a couple of butts soon and see if she's right...

Many thanks to Gianugo for publicly cooking again!
[1] - http://www.rabellino.it/blog/2007/07/15/the-sunday-post-summertime-cooking/

Sunday Mountain Ride...

2007-07-22T20:25:00.000-04:00

I rode west today out past Shenandoah into West Virginia. To give me more time at the destination, I took all highway miles (66W->81S) to 42S (exit 283) in Woodstock, Va. Well, rather than listing the whole directions which won't mean much anyway, you can get a feel for the ride here.

While the route encompassed a lot of highway-ish miles, there were plenty of miles on roads like this:

and eventually I was fortunate enough for those to give way to roads more like this:

shortly I climbed towards the top of the hill:

and a better look at the road:

views like this, with only the hum of the beast, are nice:

honestly, it looked steeper as I was riding along;)

Eventually, I had to face forward and head back home - I knew there was a really good beef brisket awaiting;)

So, back down the mountain and into the valley below:

For the most part, these were some well-maintained dirt/gravel roads and worth the ride to get there. The access to the views could have been better but the ride was great. All but the very last bit are worth a try on any bike, but I think from Mathias on are probably most comfortable on some sort of enduro machine.

Isabella...

2007-07-21T17:02:00.000-04:00

It's taken me a while but I finally got some pictures of adorable Isabella. Unfortunately, the light in Rebecca's Mom's house isn't so great, so most of them are either out of focus or have a horrible shadow behind them. Anyway, here's a sampling:

John loves "Baby 'Bella"

Grace definitely learned something from her big brother;)

A proud new Aunt

And the star of the show...

I hope to get some better pictures with natural lighting soon.

Helmet Head

2007-07-21T16:48:00.000-04:00

John occasionally asks to wear my helmet as I mostly leave it sitting on the dining room table. He'll walk around hearing himself talk while raising and lowering the face-shield. He finds it amusing. Here he is taunting Grace with his "greetings Earthling" look.

I reckon the other day he didn't feel quite safe enough with only a helmet so he wanted to go in full gear. He actually tried my boots too but found he wasn't getting anywhere.

I found this amusing;) He'd trip if he took anything more than a baby step - good thing he had gear on.

Isabella is here!

2007-07-16T20:58:00.000-04:00

Quick post to mark the arrival of my niece Isabella Ava Antelo. She arrive today at 3:07pm, 7lbs 7oz, and 19 inches long. I spent the day with John and Grace while Rebecca helped welcome her in. I hope to be able to see her in the next day or so. I have, however, seen pictures on the tiny screen of the digital Elph and she's beautiful. I'll get some pictures posted soon...

Lions, tigers and clams?

2007-07-11T07:09:00.001-04:00

One thing I didn't expect didn't expect with parenting is some of the odd middle of the night conversations I might be having. John has been waking up lately in the wee hours of the morning with irrational fears - apparently not extraordinary. They typically range from a man out of his window, to Santa Claus, to aliens - not sure where he picks up some of this stuff as we've not seen Dora or Blues talking much of aliens these days. Anyway, though I'm not sure if it definitely falls into the irrational fear category or half-dream/half-awake category, last night was particularly odd I thought. I walk into his room and he's sitting up in straight in his bed and looks at me immediately and declares:

"Daddy, I don't *like* crayams!";
Me: "Huh, you don't like crayons?"
John: "Daddy, I don't like *crayams*!"
Me: "Oh, you don't like (I had another guess last night but don't remember what it was now;)"
John: "Daddy, I don't like *crayams*!"
Me: [fully aware this was my last opportunity to guess before melt-down] "Oh, okay buddy, you don't like clams."
John: [calmer now] "Yes Daddy, I don't like clams"
Me: "That's okay, buddy, I don't like clams either. As a matter of fact, I don't think thing Grace or Mommy like clams either."
John: "Daddy, let's leave the clams at the clam store."
Me: "Um... ok buddy, no problem, we'll leave them at the clam store."
John: "Ok daddy."
Me: "Ok, let's get back to sleepy time."
John: [rolls over]
Me: "Sweet dreams"
John: "Sweet dreams daddy"

There was really more to the dialog than this but I can't remember it in full. It was odd to be talking about clams at 2 in the morning with a 2 year old though.

John the artist

2007-07-08T11:32:00.000-04:00

John is very artistic. He loves to play with clay, markers, water paint, finger paint and crayons; our refrigerator proudly displays his work. We've got tons of coloring books and stacks of construction paper to support him whenever a creative moment strikes. Sometimes, though, I'm not impressed. Let's critique this latest work, for example:

I know, your thinking, wow, that's good stuff. From the spiral elements on the left to the short aggressive strokes on the right - it's powerful. What's not to like? It's not the color selection, not the strokes, in short, not the art that failed to impress me - it was his choice of canvas! Below... his creation again in context:

One wall apparently wasn't a large enough canvas on which to express himself so it turns out he expanded to the other three walls in the room as well. Fortunately, Becca too knows a thing or two about paint brushes.

Barbeque Results...

2007-07-08T11:28:00.000-04:00

I was very pleased with the results.

I think I'll be heading to Costco to pick up a few racks of baby backs this week;)

4th Smoking Lesson

2007-07-03T22:00:00.000-04:00

So I've been learning the art of smoked meat for the past couple years with small lessons here or there. During this time, I've been the proud owner of a Big Green Egg which, I'm rapidly learning 'fool proof's' things for me. For example, over this time I've never given a second thought to environmental factors. For my "4th smoke" this year that changed. I still used the BGE but noticed an odd +-2 degree fluctuation in temperature. Odd. I've never seen this before so when I figured out what was happening (it took standing out there and paying attention), I decided to send off a challenge to the senior smokers in the family. Here's what my note said:

"Which one of you can guess what's wrong with my setup? Besides, of
course, the obvious lack of a deck;) Other than pride, no prizes.
First response wins!

http://picasaweb.google.com/williamstw/070703EggSetup

--tww"

Roughly 45 minutes later, much to my surprise, the correct answer came back and he didn't even have to feel the breeze of that fan when it turned on. Congrats to my brother, though he's, embarrasingly enough, not rubbed a butt of his own this 4th - he did get my 4th trivia correct. Very impressive.

Here's the image:

My Brother:
"I am guessing that it has something to do with the sudden drafts created when "that big fan" next to the egg turns on? I would guess that not even the egg can withstand this type of environmental change???"

Yelp, the air conditioning unit in the corner causes a 'wind tunnel' effect.

I'm genuinely impressed...
--tww

Cheesesteak Ride

2007-06-25T08:14:00.000-04:00

Had a hunkering yesterday for a cheesesteak so I took the bike out and got one - in Philly. I left out a little after 8am and, taking I-95 the whole way, got there by about 11:15 or so. The original plan was to try Pat's early, then after a couple hours try Geno's. I got a Whiz wit-out from Pat's and it was pretty tasty. The steak itself was good and juicy with apparently minced onions (maybe some garlic) providing the only enhancement to the natural flavor. I was a little dissappointed with the bun though - it as a little over done and rather tasteless. Not in an offensive way, it just didn't bring anything to the flavor party - if saltine crackers were bread, this is what it would taste like. Anyway, I took my steak over to the baseball field next door and watched some locals play softball for a while. When I finally decided I could handle at least a couple bites of another one, I walked over to Genos. Unfortunately, the line had grown considerably (~40 people) since I'd seen it before so I decided it wasn't worth it since Becca and I will likely re-do this trip again soon. Anyway, it was more about the bike ride anyway, so I decided to use the time to try a more interesting route home. After some significant traffic leaving Philly, I took 301 heading south towards the Bay Bridge. All and all, the ride home was unremarkable but nice. I was in bumper-to-fender traffic on the bay bridge which is a little nerve racking on a bike with the significant cross-winds and ease at which I could look over the side. I got home right at 5pm and just in time for a nice Italian dinner.

Total distance: ~340 miles.
States: (4 1/2) Va, D.C, Md, De, Pa

My "first" birthday party

2007-05-18T08:19:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I came home to the best birthday surprise. When Rebecca
told John it was my birthday yesterday, he was so excited and
immediately began planning. He told her they had to get me birthday
balloons, birthday streamers and birthday cake. She apparently took
him to the store to by all of those party ingredients while I was at
work. I arrived home with yellow and blue streamers over all of the
chairs (done by John himself) and hanging around in other low-lying
areas. He was apparently upset when he realized he'd forgotten the
happy birthday candle for the cake, so yesterday I celebrated my first
birthday (from a candle left over from Grace). Two and 1/2 and I
think he's got better party-planning skills that Rebecca and I
combined.

Thanks John [and Rebecca], it was the best birthday party ever;)

Being different only okay so far...

2007-05-13T20:49:00.000-04:00

One of the books we've been reading at bedtime lately is a Todd Parr book on "being different." The book is well illustrated but, I think, poorly written and no fun to read. Anyway, this is a story about John, not a book review. So for whatever reason, John likes the book. We read pages like the following:
"It's ok to have missing teeth."
"It's ok to have no hair."
"It's ok to be small, medium, large, and extra-large."
"It's ok...", Ok, you get the idea.

So John is all smiles through the most all of the book, enjoying the illustrations and such.

Then we come to a page that reads, "It's ok to eat macaroni and cheese in the bathtub," and John looks at me every time and says, "No way, it is *not* ok to eat in the bathtub. You eat macaroni and cheese at the table Daddy."

2 and a half years-old and he's clearly a lot brighter than this Todd clown.