Christmas of my dreams - from when I was 7

Sometimes I feel guilty about my wedding vows - I felt that I bent the truth and am not living up to what was said. Specifically 1 Corinthians 13:11. I feel guilty, but not guilty enough to put away childish things.

When I was a kid I always wanted lego for Christmas. At some point the question "aren't you too old for that?" started to get asked more and more. Sadly gifts shifted from toys to clothes and other odds and ends. This year when Laura would ask what I'd like, I'd just say "star wars lego". It's not that I was trying to be a pain, I just didn't really have any other ideas.

I thought that I'd get maybe one fun toy, but no, I got a ton. Even my mom and dad got me lego this year. Crazy.

So, in interest of completeness I'll list what I got:
8017 Darth Vader's TIE Fighter
8039 Venator-class Republic Attack Cruiser
8088 ARC-170 Starfighter
8036 Separatist Shuttle (but I think that I'm going to trade it to my 7 year old nephew and get Y-Wing instead)
a 7" (?) lego man with flashlights in his feet
2 star wars cookbooks (yes, you read that right)

I'm pretty sure most of the gifts that I received this year could easily have been for a 7 year old. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is what I was dreaming about when I was 7. I just had to wait a couple of decades.

My co-worker today was relaying a story about how he was speaking last night to his wife where he was telling me about all my star wars lego stuff. His 6 year old has the same interests as I do and overheard them speaking. The 6 year old then asked "what grade is [Jim] in?". Ya... grade...

If immortality is being forever young, then I think that I've found it, of a sort.

Update: I forgot some other star wars / lego related gifts like a "Obi Wan clone wars lightstaber" which lights up and make sounds when its waved around or hits something, Lego Harry Potter for the PS3, and of course Creationary which we played last night and is awesome. ;-)

My Murse

About six months of the year I wear a big winter coat and it becomes my murse. Sunglasses, pens, old receipts, headphones, work ID, candies, I got them all. It means that my coat is lumpy, not so flattering, and weights the same as a medium sized dog. Do I actually need to carry around all that crap? Of course not, but it's so easy to just keep on adding it to the coat's never ending pockets. As the weather warms up I sometimes wonder if I should get a european carryall, but then usually my good okay barely passable fashion sense kicks in.

Girls are so confusing

My sister is 13 and asked for books for Christmas. She asked for things like sci fi, mystery, and fantasy. I have no idea why she has chosen those categories because last summer I tried to get her to read Harry Potter but she just made fun of it. I think that she got through like 2 pages before giving up. When I was 13 I didn't understand 13 year old girls. I assumed that when I got older I would, but apparently that was a bad assumption.

All the books that I'd recommend to her are sitting on our shelves, so I quickly grabbed a stack that reaches to my knee. The trouble is I don't want to give her a lot of them. Borrow them, sure, but not for classics that I know I'll re-read a couple more times. There's an alternative pile of anthologies that she can have, but things like 1984, Brave New World, anything by Clarke, Asimov, Wells or Verne I'd like to keep. I don't know if that's silly though - will I just format shift all them from the dead tree version?

Having a lot of books around can be comforting, but they take up a lot of space that could be put to better use. Like displaying lego for example.

Live a good life

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

- Marcus Aurelius, unsourced quotation

Do as I say, not as I do!

With the recent hubbub over wikileaks releasing documents, I can't believe what some politicians and political advisors are saying, including ones from Canada - "I think Assange should be assassinated, actually". Sure, sure, if you say later "hey, I didn't really mean it!" does it still count?

It just boggles my mind that if the "other" countries were to go through this, any calls for assassination would be condemned by the west. What the hell is wrong with people?? Things like kidnapping people, taking them to a different country, tortured for several months and then released at night on a desolate road in Albania. Why is it okay not to use the law if you think that you have a terrorist on your hands? Disgusting. I won't even get into the campaign of terror that the American government seems to have against their own citizens - a campaign whose purpose seems to be to strip rights and freedoms from not just their own citizens, but the citizens of the rest of the world as well.

If people are breaking the law, put them through due process. If people are doing things that you think that they shouldn't - pass a law that says they shouldn't.

Telling the world that you're the shining example of freedom while not following your own laws is hypocritical at best.

One year

It's been one year already since we lost Ryan. It's strange how large an impact some people have on our lives. I think about him just about every day: when music that he gave me comes on the stereo, when I check this blog, when I think about technical work stuff and how he seemed to have such a clear vision, when I'm hanging out in a pub sipping a beer he introduced me to.

I miss you buddy.

mec

It's funny how once you get used to something, when it changes it just feels weird, even if it's correct. For as long as I can remember, I've called mec, well, "mec". My father-in-law says the letters so that sounds like emm-ee-see. I thought to myself "silly father-in-law, no one says that". You know, other than the people that work there... as I've come to learn. I've left my ears open and I'm noticing more and more people say it like that. Was there a flyer that I missed with the correct pronunciation? Maybe something with clear pictures like they have in airplanes on how to leave in case of emergency.

It could be that everyone is trying to play a very elaborate, sophisticated joke on me. Well, news to everyone else, I'm turning the tables. I'm going to start spelling out the letters of common words. So, when you go home on the bus, I'm going to take the bee-you-ess. I know that people will realize that I now know their joke and it's pointless to continue, but they are obligated to anyways.

I'll just wink to show that I understand. Sorry, I mean I'll just double-you-eye-en-kay. ;-)

Dead trees are dead to me

On our last trip the limitations of a dead tree book really got to me. My book was larger and heavier than an e-reader, but I was annoyed because I had almost finished it before our flight had landed at the start of the trip. So now I was in a land where English language books are harder to come by, and I needed reading material. Same situation happened the trip before and it caused me to buy an over priced used copy of Jaws which was shockingly racist and not a good read at all. I ended up having to haul around the books that I had brought with me and couldn't bear to throw out. The only benefit that I can think of with a dead tree version is that it can physically bend more.

On the last trip, since we were on tours most of the time, we decided to leave our Lonely Planet at home since it is over 1000 pages (more stats if you click through on the link). We still wanted some info from the book, so I made a photocopy we took with us, but apparently I didn't copy enough pages. I would have bought the digital copy, but it felt like a scam since the chapters are so expensive - for a book that we had already purchased. I don't think that I'll ever purchase another physical copy of lonely planet (we've got 7 sitting on a shelf I can see from here). Next time I'll just buy a softcopy, dump it to Laura's phone (since we take that anyways) and print out any "critical" sections that we feel we need to have a physical copy with. That way we'll also not have to deal with another 1 kg outdated book sitting on shelves.

Before our next trip, I'm going to Go Digital and ditch purchasing hard copies. Hard copies seem especially dumb for books with a "best before" like reference or travel books were you want the most up to date. So if you see me with something that looks like a Star Trek PADD, know that I'm not going to a costume party, but am dressing like I live in the future, which is now.

Remember

Remember, remember, the Eleventh of November,
the day the cannons no longer were shot.
I know of no reason why brave men and women
should ever be forgot.

The medium is the message - and your medium is 140 characters long

Yes, that's a bit of a longer title than usual. With the popularity of twitter, facebook status, or other micro-blogging sites, it seems to indicate what's important to our society right now. "I'll read what you say, instantly, as long as it's a soundbite". Fewer well thought out articles, no real discussion, just a tiny random thought. Don't get me wrong - this blog is a source of long winded and rambling random thoughts - I understand that. I also enjoy making FB status updates as well. But if those are the primary ways that people express themselves, that's a bit sad.

The other weird thing about these social network sites is that they seem to form homogeneous echo chambers where your only options are to "Like" or retweet someone else's soundbite. It's nice to show support for someone else's contribution, but sometimes it sure would be nice to have a "-1 You're being a douchebag" option. I guess that it's just an extension of "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't [allow the users to] say anything at all.". Now is that good user design where the app limits the users to the "polite path"?

Somehow I've arrived at the conclusion that facebook is enforcing proper social etiquette and that frankly just feels wrong. That must mean that it's time for bed.

Young Peak

While we were visiting Machu Picchu we did the "optional" climb of Wayna Picchu. Now, I knew that it would be a challenge because there were signs that said "only for healthy fit people". And I knew that it would be bad if you fell because our guide joked that you could get back to the train station in 10 seconds if you were not careful. I didn't really grasp what those actually meant until we were climbing.

The stairs reminded me of the stairs from Lord of the Rings where Frodo, Sam and Gollum were climbing those long stairs outside of Mordor and there was a cave at the top that they had to pass through. Not nearly as nightmarish as that of course, but they were steep. And there was a cave at the top. That was small enough I had to take my backpack off and push it ahead of me to get though it. Going down the stairs was a bit nerve wracking too. I feel I am fairly comfortable with heights, but with how the stairs were shaped and the size of my feet, I was going down them on all fours backwards because that's how I felt was how I wasn't going to die. Because, at the end of a long-ish set of these steep stairs, it was a straight drop off of probably 400 m. Long enough for you to think about what went wrong.

To give you an idea who "close" the train station was, I took a picture of it. Now, wikipedia lists the peak as 2,720 metres and Aguas Calientes (the town below) elevation as 2,040 m. That's a difference of 680 m, but the train station is a bit below the town. Either way, with a misstep you could go for a close to 700 m fall.


I'm glad that we did the climb. The views were great. It's just not something that I'd recommend for most people. Below is a nice rock that sort of had a seat carved out of it. Not sure if there was much underneath it. I didn't actually want to look down.

The parts that photos miss

Traveling is awesome*. I love taking pictures to "capture the moment". But you never really get the whole picture. There are intangibles that can't be captured. Some things you might be luck to catch on video, but others you'll just have to remember, or, you know, blog about so remembering isn't your only way to recall them. I'm going to talk about some from our recent trip to Peru and Ecuador (the Galapagos).

First, Peru:
How at altitude 4000 m or greater, your legs can feel fine, while your heart pounds and your breathing isn't able to catch up, even while trying to sleep. How lone little children seem to wander over a ridge I'm gasping on, looking for some cookies or crackers. That moment after reaching the top of a pass (4500m and 4600m in our case), and how the other side looks like an impossibly perfect oasis. That moment of panic where you notice a group of loaded pack mules charging down the 6' wide path and you have about 5 seconds to get out of the way, and you had better pick the side where you won't be pushed downhill because it can be a long way down. The realization that you're the only one looking out for your safety, so you had better not trip because it's a long, long way down. The swallows that zoom around Machu Picchu in dogfight-esq battles. That feeling that the gods really have smiled upon you, not only because you're able to be there, but because against the odds, the weather is nice.

Now the Galapagos:
How on some places, the sand feels more like baking flour and somehow seems whiter. How the animals have a very different concept of "personal space" than the ones at home. How the Marine Iguanas sneeze all the time, and despite their impressive volume and distance, you somehow are not soaked with snot. How a tree's sap (which I've forgotten the name of) smells. How freaking fast penguins and sea lions swim. Waking up in the middle of the night in your bunk on the boat with a falling sensation - because the seas are so rough. The unbelievable coldness to the water despite it being directly on the equator. The awesomeness of being greeted with hot chocolate and cookies after you get out of the cold water.

Just a few moments to remember. There were so many.

* As long as you're safe, healthy, have enough to eat, etc. Same caveats as "awesome" would normally have.

Goodbye Jaz

My folks are going to put down their dog Jazmine tomorrow. For a medium / large dog, 15 years old is really old. She's really starting to have troubles now. She can't stand for very long and if she falls, she can't get up. My mom thinks that she's having little strokes because some times she really bad, and other times she's better. My mom told me today about their plan, so we went over to my folks place after dinner and took some lamb. No matter how a dog is feeling, they sure perk up when you give them some meat.

She was the smartest dog I've ever had. When I was in elementary and high school, often my mom would walk up the driveway with the dogs to meet me. If they were still at the house or too far down the driveway, I would dash into the long grass (6' or higher) and crouch down to hide. I could fool the other dogs, but Jaz would usually zip up the driveway and then go 90 degrees and a bounding straight towards me, usually knocking me over. I was able to hide from her once but I was in a bit of a gully. She was able to come within a couple of feet, but not find me. I knew she could smell me and knew that I was right about there.

She loved the snow. Didn't matter if it was -35 C, she'd bury her face in it and roll around. She also had a super soft mouth. Because Joe (our older dog at the time) would steal whatever she would be playing with, she'd play with tiny little pebbles. You'd be sitting on the front porch with her and she'd be making a slight scrapping sound. Then she'd spit out this tiny rock - half the size of a grain of rice. If she heard Joe coming, she'd quickly pick up her tiny pebble and run off, because, right then, that was her special toy.

There were some foods that she didn't like. Joe didn't like things like lettuce, but if you would toss it up he'd gulp it down. I don't think that it would even hit his tongue. With her she'd catch it, and only then decide if she wanted to eat it. She might spit it out. If you gave her an old bowl of cereal, she'd eat the whole thing, but if there were raisins in it she would spit them out one by one into the bowl with a little *puh-thua* sound.

In the below picture you can see me playing with Joe and Jaz. Notice how Joe is totally focused on my hand - but Jaz is paying attention to the person. I'll miss her.


Goodbye Jazzy.
June 1995 - October 2010

Polarizing Issue

With my new lens and polarizing filter, I went out the other day and was playing around taking some shots. I was actually a bit surprised by how dramatic the difference was when using the filter wrt the orientation of the sun. Below is a photo that was pointing in the general direction of the sun.


And this is a shot where the sun was at 90 degrees to the camera (sun pointing at my shoulder)


Pretty dramatic difference with the blues and clouds. As my ongoing improvement process, that will just have to be another thing that I'll have to think about before holding the camera up to my eye.

Awkward

Sometimes when you're booking vacations you always assume things are going to go well. Today we booked a hotel room in Quito. You know, the same day that renegade police attack the President Rafael Correa in something that he says is an attempted coup d'Ètat.

Awkward....

Time vs Money

The old saying "time is money" never sticks in my head as much as when we travel. On our first big trip, we took things slow because we couldn't afford to go fast. We did everything on the cheap, even if it took more time. Contrast that to our last trip where we wanted to do a lot and actually had enough enough money to pay for flights that would move us quickly. However we were limited for time. We sacrificed money for time.

It's funny how it's always the resource that's in shortest supply becomes the most precious.

Headache treatment

I get headaches frequently. Perhaps I should see a doctor about that. Most of the time I "self medicate" by drinking something with caffeine, usually coffee. But today I figured out another good treatment:
I walked to the river and sat on a bench there.

Seemed pretty effective. A lot easier on the stomach than other treatments too.

Vegetables are what food eats

Well, the title is what my brothers always joke. I have to admit that the "vegetable" part of my meal isn't always my favourite. Specially not when it's just a pile of one type that fills half of the plate. Ugg.

One of my least favouite veggies has been eggplant Fried, baked, chopped, ugg. But then I discovered a secret - (almost) everything tastes better if you bbq it. So my quick way to satisfy the "half the plate should be veggies" requirement is that I just make a huge grilled veggie salad. It's easy, stays well in the fridge, and tastes great (as much as veggies can). Below is a rough guideline of possible ingredients for my salad. I never make it with the same things twice, so it really is just a rough idea.

Grilling ingredients:
1 eggplant, sliced length wise 1 cm thick. Lightly brushed with oil
1-2 zucchinis, sliced into thirds length wise, brushed with oil
1 red pepper, cored and cut into flat sections (usually 3)
1 red onion, cut into 3 slices
1 bunch asparagus

Non-grilling ingredients:
1 little box cherry tomatoes
2-3 sticks celery
1 handful chopped coriander / cilantro
1-2 handfuls small mushrooms (possible to just cut into 1/3 or 1/4's)
3-6 cloves roasted garlic chopped / pressed / whatever (optional)

Grill the grilling things, then cut into bit sized pieces. Toss everything into a bowl and either add a oil based salad dressing or some red wine vinegar and oil. Season with some salt pepper and you're done. Makes enough for 6 (at least).

Everything will have a nice smoky flavour and you'll be able to trick yourself into eating veggies.

Travel to the sights and listen

When traveled to Costa Rica, one of the things that we went to see was the Arenal Volcano. Before going I knew that we weren't going to see the spectacular eruptions that they have in the pictures. What I didn't expect showing up was when someone said "ya, you should be able to hear it well today". Whhhaaat? You can hear it?

The rumblings, the tumblings as rocks rolled down the sides, the crack of rocks hitting each other. There weren't many people around, but usually people outside aren't quiet. There people spoke in hushed tones - with a quiet reverence. I've read about people feel like they are sitting next to an angry giant when near volcanoes. That feels like a understatement. There was so much power sitting there in a mountain. I totally understand now why people believed that gods resided inside volcanoes.

My advice for anyone traveling - pictures are wonderful, but make sure no matter where you go, you use all your senses because those are what really makes it real.

Jim Likes This

I really don't understand why people "like" things in facebook like bands and movies. I understanding "liking" content that a friend has posted, whether it's a comment, link, or picture, as a vote to that friend that you appreciate their contribution. The thing that I don't get is "liking" things like movies. Maybe it's just because I view facebook as a giant data mine for advertisers, adding a vote to something like a movie or already famous band doesn't seem to help anyone other than the advertisers. You're not going to discover a new friend because you and only 192,281,928 other people like Star Wars. You're not providing your existing friends with any valuable information. Wow, you like movies, books and music - you're such a unique flower.

I just don't understand spending the effort adding content to a site that claims instant ownership over anything posted.

Depth of Field

With the recent new addition to our lens family, I started to play around with setting the aperture to play with depth of field (DoF). I took a couple of sample images with the new lens out our front window.

At F 1.8. Most open, shortest depth of field. Also the fastest exposure time because the most amount of light is entering the camera.


At F 2.8. Might be good for short depth of field portrait were you want the whole person in focus.


At F 8.0. Widens up the DoF with some slight blurring.


At F 22.0. Longest DoF, smallest aperture, which also means the longest exposure which could introduce camera shake.


In hindsight with this experiment, I made a poor choice of subject. I should have chosen something that had more objects along a whole focal range. But I couldn't help it, I was just so excited to play with my new toy.

Damn It Feels Good To Be An Adult

Sometimes life is difficult. Things might not be as good as you had hoped. I think that being an adult means sometimes you do things that you don't want to do, but because they need to be done.

Other times being an adult is just awesome because you get to pick out your own toys for your birthday. And then open them early. Awwww Some. *blogsphere high five*

Where I'd go back

We've been so a bunch of places. They've been wonderful, and I'm always glad that we've went and seen all that we have. Of all the places that we've been, there is one place that I'd go back in a minute: the Osa.

It was so relaxing when we were there. It might not be your speed, but we thought that it was awesome. After flying to Puerto Jimenez we went to a Playa Preciosa and stayed there for a couple of days. When we were there, they still had to run a generator since the government had not finished running the power lines. I think that it was supposed to be done like 5 years before we went, so they were a bit behind. It was gorgeous there with long stretches of empty beaches and lots of playful dolphins around.



After that, we traveled to the Terrapin Lodge were we had wonderful food served on nice plates in the middle of the jungle. Each night around 5:30, the spider monkeys with their babies would come around to eat fruit from the tree beside our lodges porch. From there we took a hike into Corcovado. If we were to do that again, I'd book well in advance to stay at the ranger station and perhaps get a guide as well. Oh, and I'd also take a lot of water. They say that you should have at minimum 3 L / person. Ya, do that. Don't drink out out of a "potable" stream beside a vulcher like we did.


The rest of Costa Rica was wonderful too, but when my mind starts to think of tropics, my heart goes to the Osa.

Stopping the light

For photography you can buy all kinds of filters. Filters for colour, filters for types of light, filters that just reduce the amount of light getting to the camera (ND filters). The thing that I don't get is, why can't this be done in software on the camera. e.g. Set up the picture, and then going under "pre-picture, filters, ND, and then choose a level". All that filter does is cut down the amount of light getting to the camera, why can't the software just toss out every x photons that it gets to the sensor? I would have thought that would be a trivial feature to add. Same idea could be done with an grad ND - choose the amount, chose the transition line, etc. Why bother bringing around more expensive gear with you if this should be able to be done in software.

Sometimes I wish that I could hack the hardware that I deal with. It would make life a lot easier, or explain why this can't / shouldn't be done.

Find all files extension with a given path in unix

Today I wanted to find all the types of files that people are using in their "resources" part of their project. Here's the script that allowed to to ssh to our CI server to find it.

find . -path "*/src/main/resources/*" | awk -F . '{print $NF}' | grep -v "/" | sort -u

"Uncle Jim, do you *always* have a camera?"

I was actually asked that by my 7 (?) year old nephew. I understand why he thinks that - at family events I'm pretty much always carrying around a camera. Why do I do it? Well, first off I love pictures. I love taking them, I love seeing them, I love the memories they trigger when I have not seen them in years. Another reason is if I'm not taking pictures, I'm don't think that I can trust anyone else to have brought their camera. I worst part is that has become a catch-22: because everyone else assumes that I'll bring a camera and will be taking pictures, they don't even bother.

I somehow have ended up becoming one of the family archivist, even for media that I never captured.

Don't get me wrong - I'll still happily take the pictures. If only to get the moments like this:

Working on composition

One of the many things that I'm trying to work on is composition in my photos. To get a nice short depth of field I usually have to use our long lens (55-200mm). It allows you to get in close from far away and give you a more "intimate" feeling like below:


One thing that I love love love with photos are our "perspective shots" like this shot in Barcelona:


I'm now trying to play with this for what I wouldn't have seen as a "perspective shot" before. Here's an example from some pipers on the hill a couple of weeks ago:
.

It's funny, looking back at some of the pictures that we took with our old point and shoot, I'm quite happy with those shots. They turned out quite well. That's just a reminder to myself for when the pictures don't turn out nice: the camera is not my limiting factor.

Looking at the world though pol coloured glasses

I've been a bit disappointed with some of the photos that I've taken with our D60. Don't get me wrong - I love the camera - I just wish that some of the pictures turned out as good as I saw them. A good (bad?) example of a disappointing picture is when we were hiking in Sa pa
.

The picture looks like crap compared to what I saw while I was there. So disappointing. My brother-in-law is also interested in photography, probably more than I am, and he wanted all kinds of filters for his birthday. He strongly insisted that I get a couple of filters, including a polarizer for my camera. So I started to do some reading and figured the artifacts that I wasn't happy with: glare from water, poor looking sky, vegetation that looks gray; all can be solved with a polarizer. It's not even something that can be fixed in software after the fact. Crap. Wish that I had known this before.

One reason why there has been such a disparity between what I saw and the pictures that were taken: my sunglasses are (linearly) polarized. All this time I thought that it was the cameras dynamic range being less than the eye. I guess that I don't have to focus on HDR photos to capture what I see.

The other shots that I was having troubles with? Taking longer exposures of things like moving water to get a really flowy effect can be solved with a neutral density. Below is my best hand-held attempt. I could only get the effect by taking a picture of a darker, less interesting part of the river.


I really wish that I had taken the photography class in high school. The fact that it conflicted with 2 other classes that I had to take to go to university, which forced me to do one class at night school, really sucks. I've read a book about photography, but I think I need to read more and / or take a class.

Printing from a new mac using a parallel printer cable

Just in case that anyone else has this problem, or more likely, that I need to find this again, I finally have printing from the mac to our 1999 laser printer via a Sabrent usb to parallel port printer cable which I bought from tigerdirect.ca. Before I couldn't get it to work at all. I figured that it had been worth the 12 $ for the experiment though. Tonight I decided to look again, and behold, I found a 9 year old post explaining exactly what I needed to do. I just had to go to the Gutenprint project and install the "usbtb" module.

My only explanation for why Laura's printer doesn't need ink is that it's a TARDIS and has a supertanker of printer ink inside - the future's currency standard after gold became easy to manufacture.

Package is more then just a package

People are dumb. It just seems to be how we are wired. For some reason, we end up putting more value on first impressions and packaging then I think that we should. Some times it doesn't even have to be a covering / wrapping, just how it is delivered. I'm sure that there are have been many PhD's written to prove this all, I just can't be bothered to reference them. (aside: People are also lazy).

I try and make dinner seem special most nights. I find the effort is worth it, if only for my enjoyment. No, that's a lie. I do it for Laura. On the nights I'm home alone I'd eat out of a can if only I could microwave it. So, with the idea to maximize the impression of dinner tonight, I presented it as "Poached west coast salmon, served in a cream and bacon reduction, with steamed swiss chard, and sweet Ontario maize". Sounds good. Sounds much better than than "fish cooked a in pan with some water and things Laura didn't want me to add, cooked green wach-ma-call-its and week old leftover corn". It's the same food, just one meal tastes better before you've even lifted a fork to your mouth.

The Accessible Home

We recently got a new front and back door. That means new door knobs. One that I really wanted to lever style door handles (on the inside at least). I got this idea from my dad when he was telling me that it's building code for commercial building to have these because they are easier to open if you can't "grip" - like if you suffer from arthritis. It also makes it easier to open the door if you have your hands full.

With new lever action black hardware for the outside doors, that meant we had to get new matching ones for the inside. I put up a fuss over the cost, but not too much because 1) I also wanted new handles for the inside and 2) the old brass ones don't match any of the changes we've made to the house, and some are quite beat up and crappy looking. Now I've replaced the handles on the main floor and everything looks good. Most importantly, I can now open our doors with my feet if I'm holding milk and cookies. And that, my friends, is the true meaning of "accessible".

Cooking by weight

I keep on thinking about getting an accurate kitchen scale and cooking by weight. For baking I think that it would be much better. Well, at least more consistent. The other day I read an interesting article - To Enhance Flavor, Just Add Water - where they talked about fine tuning flavour. The really interesting part of that was the part about making better coffee. I'm always looking for ways to make better coffee and the idea of being precise with the ingredients appeals to my nerd side. Not that randomly throwing beans and water together would produce anything bad, it's can just always be better.

Overriding selective methods in order to unit test

Today I was trying to test a taglib that was quite old and structured in a way that didn't make testing easy. The class under test was pretty simple, but it called a method in its parent which was quite complicated and made for extensive setup for each test. It occurred to me that if I just override that other method - not the one I was trying to test - it would make my life a lot easier.

The code I had was something like this:

public class MyTag {
public void doStart() {
try {
MyObject ob = hardToTestMethod();

if (ob.doSomethingState()) {
// do something
} else {
// do something else
}

} catch (Exception e) {
throw new JspException("something went wrong", e);
}
}
}

Which gave me 3 use cases: an exception is throw, MyObject is returned in a doSomethingState or not. Inline we can easily override the hardToTestMethod to throw an exception or a mock object, using your favourite mock lib.

@Test(expected = JspException.class)
public void doStart_ThrowsAnException() {
MyTag tag = new MyTag() {

@Override
public MyObject hardToTestMethod() {
// or you could return a mock
throw new RuntimeException("I'm on a boat yo!");
}
};
tag.doStart();
}

I felt all clever. At that point I knew that this must be a well known technique. The closest thing that I found with a couple of minutes of searching is an IBM article from 2002 which talks about refactoring factory code. Not exactly the same thing, but close enough. I just thought that I would share in case other people were dealing with difficult to test java and wanted to know another technique to be able to unit test it.

Tron

Something occurred to me tonight. I can make a Tron costume and not be quite like that guy.

My costume would look normal - during the day. Hell, it would actually be a safety thing. All I could need to do it is get some reflective tape and strategically put it on my helmet, bike, and biking clothes. At night I'd light up like, well, a guy on a light bike.

Where have I been, #3

Another update of my travel history. Other places are tracked in #1 and #2. This one is to track our trip to SEA early this year. I'll have to blog about the more memories before they fade.

Bangkok, Thailand
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Vientiane, Laos
Vang Vieng, Laos
Luang Prabang, Laos
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Sukhothai, Thailand
Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam
Mui Ne, Vietnam
Hanoi, Vietnam
Sa Pa, Vietnam
Halong Bay, Vietnam

My Dearest Jaywalker

It's been several days since our meeting and in my quiet moments my thoughts often run to when our paths crossed. When I first laid my eyes upon you, you were like any other woman in the crowd. I soon realized that you were far different than the others. You have a reckless abandon that is revered in the old and feared in the young.

I know that we shared an emotional connection - hearts racing, adrenaline pumping, thoughts madly flying though our heads so quickly that physical reactions were but a snails pace compared to them. Sitting here, I can't even picture your face. All I remember is a mess of dirty blond hair as you boldly decided to dash out into traffic while looking in the opposite direction. Me calling out to you, slowing as I passed you, steering left so that we would not meet in a lovers embrace of bicycle, spandex and pants suit. Just as Rose's drowning of Jack in Titanic saved them both, your reaction of making yourself as narrow as possible saved us.

Not everyone can make emotional connections so quickly and walk away without looking back, but you could. I'll remember our time together and I hope that the next time that you step out into traffic half way between intersections without looking, you'll be able to make another connection with someone else. But hang in there, because ones of these times it won't be with a bicycle and they won't just make an emotional connection with you. They'll make a embrace that will knock you off your feet and leave such an impression on you that it'll be there for the rest of your life.

Or you could look both freaking ways before crossing the street.

Nuclear isn't always clear

Found an interesting post on /. wrt using nuclear plants and powering the US. Like any project, it seems like the technical ones were the easiest to overcome - it's the political ones that will kill it.

A company of fools

Tonight we went and saw A Midsummer Night's Dream presented by a company of fools. We were late and we skipped dinner to make it there for the 7 pm show. Pretty hungry, but it's okay because you're just sitting in a camp chair, in the park by the river while the sun sets and live actors perform a 400+ year play. You know, just another Monday. I was really impressed how funny they were and how much they interacted with the crowd. Honestly going to see the play I didn't know if I'd like it - I suspected that I wouldn't. But I was wrong, and that's a good thing.

My favourite part was their liberal use of "magic potions" - i.e. water balloons. Funny cast, quick improv when something funny and distracting was going on (airplane overhead, car alarm, etc). More along the way that I can imagine the plays originally were - funny, interactive, and with life. Best pay-what-you-can show that I've seen.

Telemarketers

We often get calls from telemarketers. They might be a company that we already have services with and are trying to upsell us on something. Either way, I don't want to talk to them. At the same time, I am curious about what they might have to say. I usually say the person they are trying to reach isn't home, but can I take a message. They almost always decline and say they'll call back. Which, really does not help reduce the calls we receive. I should probably rethink that strategy.

I'm trying to come up with alternative amusing ways to find out what they want without sitting through a whole sales spiel. So far I've got a couple:

• They work nights. Can I take a message and they'll call back at 3 am?
• They've been institutionalized for a couple of weeks. Can I take a message to give to their doctor to pass along?
• They've got a hearing disability and I'll need to write down the question for them.
• She's a mermaid and can't leave the water and the phone won't reach.
• They're in Chile working on the large telescope array and won't be around until after the next lunar eclipse.
• They've gone on a walkabout and they'll be back after they meet their spiritual guide.
• They're out tilting at windmills right now. Can I take a message?
• Mrs. [last name]? Oh. That was before the operation. It's Steve now. Steve's not in.
• Uhh... this is awkward. His court case didn't go so well. It is okay if he calls back in 2 years less a day?
• He went out and got hammered last night and is the hospital. The doctors will be removing the nails tomorrow.
• He never talks on the phone when his stigmata is acting up. He doesn't like getting blood on the phone.
• Sorry for interrupting, but are you a ninja? It's just that ever since he's been involved in piracy he's been deathly afraid of ninjas...

Got any other good ones?

Three degrees to happy

It's been relatively cooler lately, so 2 days ago we turned off the AC and opened all the windows to get some fresh air in the house. So it got warmer. Not much, just a couple of degrees. Well, those couple of degrees for Laura and me are what separate happy from grumpy. I was grumpy around the house. I slept like crap because it was a bit too warm (I didn't get the fans because of the grumpyness) and to get air flow we left the blind open which meant it was too bright to sleep well.

Today the AC is keeping the house at a chilly 23 C. Sooooo happy.

Taking care of the Jim

What I would like is for the house to take care of me, rather than me taking care of the house. I know that's how the future will go. You can see it starting with things like the roomba and automatic lawn mowers. I want the house to be aware of the people in it. Turn up the heat (or AC) before people come home. Adjust the blinds throughout the day to maximize energy efficiency. Turn off the stereo when I leave and lock the house. Unlock the house when I come home. Turn on the bathroom fan when it's stinky or humid. Keep track of how much food is in the fridge and what needs to be reordered. Sync / push the grocery list to my phone / mobile device or just send the order directly to the store so I can go pick it up without spending an extra 45 minutes looking for the dried cranberries. Give me a heads up that Laura's on her way home. Scrub the toilet automatically daily because that's something I really, really hate doing.

I do believe that we're living in the future. I just want all the parts to catch up to my expectations.

Paging algorithm

For some reasons my brain has trouble with some things. Spelling is one, another one is the algorithm for pagination - at least that's what I'm calling it. Basically it's when you've got a large result set and want to make subsets with a given max size to be processed. I recently ran into this when writing a small program to dump data to a excel spreadsheet and I found out that there is a 256 column limit.

After 10 minutes of fruitless googling I had to think for myself and write something (in java). I'm blogging my solution so that I don't have to think again. Please excuse the formatting.

public static <T> List<List<T>> page(List<T>  artifacts, int pageSize) {
List<List<T>> result = new ArrayList<List<T>>();

for (int sheetNumber = 0; sheetNumber <= (artifacts.size() / pageSize); sheetNumber++) {

int fromIndex = sheetNumber * pageSize;
int toIndex = Math.min(artifacts.size(), fromIndex + pageSize);

// create a shorter view on this list
List<T> subList = artifacts.subList(fromIndex, toIndex);

result.add(subList);
}
return result;
}

Need a new backup / organize strategy

I'm starting to feel the rubbing point in needing a new strategy for backing up photos. The strategy used to be that I would copy the pictures from the camera to the computer. Then I'd upload them to flickr as well as an external drive. But this is starting to break down now that we're getting devices that can upload directly to flickr / facebook.

I've got to make a decision: is flickr the authoritative source? Currently I think that there is pictures on flickr that are no where else due to me losing a drive. There are tools that will allow you to pull down all your pictures, but I'm not sure if it can just pull down the diff's. Ideally I'd love to just be able to cross reference any picture that I have on my computer with what's in flickr rather then re-downloading the ~ 17 k shots.

After I've figured out that issue, I think that I need to start looking at photo manipulation as more of a standard procedure. That way I could merge pictures like this with something like this and end up with a good picture. It seems like it's almost impossible to take a nice picture of groups more than 2. Ah well.

Unconquerable

... I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a game trailer that has a voice over of the Invictus poem. I found it very powerful and it lead me to track down the actual poem and read about it. I can't actually find that game trailer - I think that it was a fan modified version of the Gears of War 3 Trailer - Ashes to Ashes. It's been especially hard to try and track down any info because of the Invictus movie that came out 6 months ago.

I've re-read this poem a couple of dozen times in the last few weeks, and it still sends a shiver down my spine.

Citrix on a Mac - jiggle the handle to get the bits working

Setting Laura up on her new macbook (which I'm extremely jealous of) has gone somewhat smoothly. The problems always seems to have to be around using citrix. Before I had set up windows on my mac. After I had done that, a friend pointed out that there actually are plug-ins for the mac.

This setup has been working on my machine for months. Now, using the same plugins on the new machine, I couldn't get it to work at all. It would just give me a blank screen.

I found a helpful pdf explaining to change the shortcut that you launch safari with to be "Open in 32-bit mode". I changed the computer to this and lo - it worked. It allowed me to get a step further where safari prompted me that I had downloaded a file and should I allow this? Clicking okay got me past this. When I changed safari back to 64 mode, it still worked. So it appeared to be something were it was choking on that dialog box and couldn't figure out how to get past it.

Problem solved. Happy Laura. Mission accomplished.

So hard to not say anything... just use open office...

We spent a bunch of time in the mac store yesterday and ended up getting Laura a new computer. It was all that I could do while the mac employees were telling people about getting MS Office for Mac or iWork to not interrupt them and tell the customers about open office. I don't want to be that guy that hangs around stores and tells people about free software. But I really wanted to. That's probably really weird. *sigh*

In the beginning there was b & w...

Recently with the passing of my grandmother, I've been given all the slides (mostly trip pictures), some negatives, prints, 8 mm, audio tapes, slide projectors, and probably more mysterious things that I have not yet discovered. It literally filled our vw rabbit. I think that the assumption is that I'll scan them all and provide them to the family - which is a pretty good assumption. It just might take me 10 years. It's a bit crazy going though pictures from the last 60 + years.

I miss my grandparents.

Again, I should have listened

Last night I convinced Laura to allow me to update the OS on her iPhone to the latest and greatest iOS 4. "Don't worry", I said - "it'll create a backup and we can restore to that backup". Laura was a bit nervous because this is one of her core tools to do her job. If the phone doesn't work, she's got a much harder day.

I ran the backup, OS update, ran updates for the apps, played around with it all. Everything worked fine. Until this morning when Laura noticed that her expensive medical software (subscription based) didn't work. It looked like it worked last night, but I didn't try to use the part which required the subscription. "No biggie" I said, "we'll just restore the backup".

So I plugged her phone into iTunes, then went to run the backup. When you plug in the phone, it runs a backup and apparently deletes any other backups. So, no I have a useless backup AND an angry / sad / disappointed wife who now has a lot harder time doing her job. Frack frack frack.... FRACK.

This morning the minute tech support opened I called them and had to leave a message. They contacted Laura and let her know that the app doesn't run correctly in iOS 4, but they've submitted an update to apple. So, that's probably 24 - 48 hours from submitting until it's in the iTunes store.

I thought that updating would make Laura's life a bit easier with threaded mail and the move to having things run in the background. Threaded mail wasn't worth this though.

By far the worse part? I had said that it wouldn't break anything. I had made fun of Laura for thinking that things will be broken.

Frack.

Why everyone hates my coffee maker

There is nothing wrong with my electric coffee maker. It brews coffee just fine, but it makes a beeping noise when it's done brewing or when it's shutting off. For anyone who regularly wears a pager, or the spouse of someone who does, a beeping sound means being woken up in the middle of the night. It means a nice time together is suddenly ending. Without being able to help it, when you hear something that sounds like a pager, your heart starts to beat faster, you get this sinking feeling, and you know that you are going to have to change whatever loose plans that you had.

Needless to say, to make coffee I mostly use a french press and our kettle - which make a clicking sound.

People have babies at the most inconvenient times. Ah well.

Urban Wildlife

I find it funny when people talking about living in the country and how you're so close to nature and how "you can't get that in the city". Riiight. Ottawa might be a big city in Canadian standards, but it's really small with lots of green space. That's a good thing.

On my bike ride home today I had a fox dash out 15' in front of me. Yes, you can probably argue that it was a country fox because it clearly did not ding a bell while on the path and it looked like it was breaking the 20 kph speed limit as well. But my guess is that it's just an bad-ass city fox. You know the kind: no reflectors, no paw signals when turning, no helmet.

I think that I've seen a lot more wildlife living in the city than I ever did in the country. I don't think that means that there is more wildlife in the city, I just think that I'm in a better position to see it. When living in the country, everything so was far away that you had to drive anywhere to see it. While living in the city I travel by bike or walking. Slower, quieter, in more green spaces and less in areas where animals probably call corridors of death.

To counteract the people who talk down about living in the city, I've been practicing looking down my nose and my sneer. Honestly it's not been going so well... it's hard to do that and avoid running over small animals.

Exactly what I want - but not

I've been bitching about wanting a smart phone for a while, but not wanting the huge bill. I want the "surf anywhere" functionality but I could not care less about the phone part. I hate talking on the phone. I avoid it whenever I can. The 3G iPad with it's data-only-plan is exactly what I want - except it's way too big. I want it iphone sized. So, so close.

Having said that, I'm expecting that when the iphone 4g or whatever it's called comes out, I'll go pick that up and return my friend's phone back to him. Goodbye 100 $ / year plan, hello 60 $ / month plan. Boooo!

Strange processes

Yesterday I was sick and decided to stay home and rest. When I was a contractor, I'd email my boss and explain, and they would reply with a "feel better soon" email. Now that I'm an employee, it's a bit different: I email my boss and explain, and they would reply with a "feel better soon" email. Then when I get back to work I have to figure out what system to log in and record that I was sick and then submit the time off to be approved.

Going though the form today I narrowed down the choices for reason to be "Sick certified" and "Sick uncertified". My guess at "certified" meant that you have a doctors note, but I decided to ask anyways because I hate filling out forms 4 times (I've become accustomed that I'll have to fill them out at least twice). The answer that I got made me laugh. It went something along the lines of "Uncertified is when you're sick for a couple of day. Certified is longer term leave or when you're sick for a week in February and come back with a tan."

I hate systems where they can't easily boot people who are obviously gaming the system. For any job you should have to show a positive benefit for you being there. Ideally it would be greater or equal to the cost of you sitting there. *sigh*

Strange how fast things change

It's funny how fast things can change. We were in Thailand in Jan. and Feb., and today Bangkok is burning. The roads and parks we hung out at are scenes of death with snipers, fires, grenades, and fire bombs. Scary.

This is how I will remember Grandma

The funeral for my grandma went well. My family handled it as they do all sad things - with a mix of laughter and tears. It's a really nice feeling when you see how my family backs each other up and sort of "moves as one" through the grief. Below is the speech that my cousin and I did.

[My part]
We were trying to decide how best to honour Grandma and we thought we would put together a few of our favourite memories as a tribute to her. This is how we will remember our Grandma.

One of the first things to know about Grandma is that she was a world traveler, and very proud of this. She would often remind us that she had been in 73 countries and 6 continents. She was only 400km away from seeing the elusive seventh continent, Antarctica, when she cruised around the horn of South America. While growing up, the grandkids acquired an impressive collection of souvenir t-shirts and gifts from exotic places. In fact, when Grandma and Grandpa would travel, they needed to bring an empty bag so that they would have room to pack up all of the gifts that they purchased for everyone. When they returned from an adventure, there would be a slide show with detailed explanations and stories. Some of those pictures, like the ones from the horn of South America, evoke interesting images. I can picture Grandma standing out on deck, in the freezing cold and during rough seas to get the best shots. All the while, the other passengers would be cozy and warm indoors, sipping their tea and gravol. She took great joy in exploring new places and seeing the world. That is how I will remember Grandma.

Grandma and Grandpa had a passion for photography. One of Grandma's favourite shots is of a little Kenyan Maasai girl. That picture now hangs in each of the Phillips' girls' homes. In order to take this shot, Grandma apparently had to chase a little girl all around the village. I can see her now, with the camera swinging wildly around her neck as she shuffled after the small frightened child. Somewhere in Kenya there is now a woman who has a deep rooted fear of white giants and flashing lights. That is how I will remember Grandma.

When Grandma was not travelling, I am fairly sure that her favourite place to be was at the Phillip's family cottage. The cottage is a place full of childhood memories and memories of Grandma. A tree was planted when each grandchild was born. It was a regular tradition of Grandma's to lead us around the yard at the cottage and point out each of our trees. Sometimes a tree would not make it through a season, so replacements were planted. Fortunately, she never replaced any of the grandchildren. She was very devoted to her family. That is how I will remember Grandma.

Every meal at the cottage was always followed by dessert. Grandma had a sweet tooth, and could easily be caught in the act of stealing a brownie or a cookie. One of the ways to her heart was with chocolate cherries. These were among the many things that would spread a huge gleeful smile across her face. You can see her beaming back at you in any photo of her. She laughed loud and smiled big. That is how I will remember Grandma.

Grandma was always busy at the cottage, carefully watering her geraniums in the flower boxes on the cottage deck, preparing her famous Waldorf salad, supervising important tasks, and checking in on everyone. She would always want to make sure that everyone was comfortable. She would greet us each morning with "Did you sleep well? Were you warm enough? Did you have enough blankets?" As time went on and her memory faded, this greeting was repeated several times each morning. She genuinely wanted everyone to have a nice time during their visits to the cottage. That is how I will remember Grandma.

[Amanda's part]
The cottage was a place to relax and enjoy. There were many days where it was too cold, too rainy to go outside. So out came the cribbage board. Fifteen's and thirty-one, and learning how to peg. Grandma loved teaching us how to play cribbage, and then playing with us. The first time I beat grandma, was like a rite of passage. I still love playing cards, and sometimes have a hard time finding other people to play with me, but cribbage holds a special place in my heart; I own 3 different cribbage boards! Sitting down at the kitchen table at the cottage, with the cribbage board and a deck of cards between us. That is how I will remember Grandma.

She would enthusiastically recount her adventures as a "flying WOG" and the first time she was asked to fly. Grandma was not an easy person to scare, this pilot tried all her could, going as far as flipping his plane upside down. All grandma could say was "Let's do that again!" Laura recently had a similar experience, flying in a four-seater plane over Toronto, in which the pilot asked if she scared easily and then shut off the engine. Grandma and Laura share this sense of adventure, I call it crazy. That is how I will remember Grandma.

Grandma strongly valued education. She was very proud of her top marks during her training as a wireless operator for the Canadian Air Force during the Second World War As we grew up and started to choose a path in life, Grandma would very generously support us with money for tuition and graduation gifts. She would ask how school was going with great interest. The day I told grandma I was going to go for my Master's degree she was so happy. Grandma was always interested in how school was going, and tell me how proud she was, and encouraging me to continue my education. Well I officially finished my masterís degree on Monday. Thank you. Grandma had a hand in helping me continue my education. That is how I will remember Grandma.

Grandma's generosity also extended to charities. She volunteered her time for charities and fundraising that she felt were important. She was a volunteer at Centenary Hospital for many years, and was involved in many other charitable works, including heart pillows for Sunnybrook, canvassing for the Canadian Cancer Society. As time went by grandma participated less and donated more. She was very generous in pledging her family for our fundraising efforts. Over the years she has supported me and my sister in the Weekend to End Breast Cancer and the Relay for Life for the Canadian Cancer Society. Most recently she supported me in my fundraising efforts in honour of my son Nickolas with the Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus Association of Ontario. Being generous and active in meaningful charities. That is how I will remember Grandma.

Grandma was very pleased to have a number of great grandchildren. There are seven in all, ranging in age from 6 months to almost 9. She was very content to sit with a young great grandchild in her lap, or chat with them about a drawing or a new toy. My last memory I have of Grandma is her sitting with Nickolas in her lap, just staring at each other. That is how I will remember Grandma, and how I wish my children would remember their great grandma.

There is so much more we can say about grandma. Her love of music which has made its way down to her great-granddaughter who loves music and playing on her grandmotherís piano. Her love of animals, and robin eggs that have their own front porch. Her encouragement for her family to travel, and helping however she could. There are so many ways to remember Grandma.

Goodbye Grandma

Tomorrow we're going to Toronto to bury my Grandmother. I still have not collected my thoughts on it. On Sunday morning I got an email that she was sick and had been taken to the hospital, and by 10 pm she was gone. It's just surreal. Even when you know that someone is old and health is such a fragile thing, it still is such a shock when it happens.

In my grandma's wishes for the funeral she asked my cousin and me to speak for a bit. My theory is that my grandma picked the shortest and tallest grandchildren to speak together just to mess with us. That's what I would have done. The weird part? I knew what type of speech that we could do based on the moving speech Ryan's brother gave. How messed up is that - burying friends prepares you to bury family.

I think that this is going to be hard. Burying my mom's mom on mother's day weekend.

I have an extra Awesome Gland. True story.

Last night Laura and I were eating dinner (wings and veggies) watching a movie in our po‰ngs while sipping a beer. Laura turns to me and asks "Is this what you thought being an adult would be like?"

Without needing any time to consider how lucky we are: what a great city that we live in, that we have a roof over our heads and food on our table, a beautiful, funny, smart wife (Laura's stuck with me), good family, good jobs, good friends, a car that doesn't lose parts sitting in the driveway, and all of the other benefits we have, without even a pause I knew my answer.

"No, this is better."

Paperwork and The Two Generals' Problem

Somethings in life are silly. Some are dumb. Some make you shake your head at the ridiculous of it all. Filling out paper work in the gov can be that way. When joining I filled out a bunch of paper work. After some versions being lost several times, some of it got through and I was mailed an acknowledgment (ACK). In the acknowledgment they want me to send back an acknowledgment acknowledging that I had received their acknowledgment. I only can guess that their next step will be to send an acknowledgment to acknowledge that they had received my acknowledgment for their acknowledgment.

It's a real life example of the Two Generals' Problem - which seemed stupid to me when I learned about it. Maybe I just didn't understand it in school, but it seemed to me that their would be an end state. I'm just going to be sad if I have to keep on sending paperwork around.

Sometimes you have to plan for stupid

Today was itil training day. At one point the teacher was talking about types of disasters in disaster recovery and he added a type that wasn't on the slide: stupid. I almost spit out my banana when he said this because it caught me by surprise.

Fires, floods, sabotage, terrorism, strikes, mass power outages: these are things that could happen to your business, but might never happen. I almost guarantee that stupid will happen, and it'll probably strike more than once. After the first case of stupid, you should evaluate the degree of stupid. Was it stupid that was just a slip up that can be fixed with more training or process to catch it, or was it unstoppable stupid - US for short.

Now US is a crafty foe. Process, reviews, or training will not prevent US. US is less of an event, and more of a permanent and final state. The best that can happen is that you remove the source of US (henceforth known is unstoppable stupid source or USS) from your organization and hope that they find work at your competitors. Actually, you should encourage them to find employment there. Now if your org is a government department, it's a little more problematic - you actually have to encourage the USS to leave the country, hopefully to a non-trade partner country.

It's funny that org's spend so much money on things that are really not likely to happen, but don't take a more active role against guarding against something with a high likelihood and high impact.

Airport Express joys and pains

For a while now we've had an airport express playing music through the stereo. It's been far from "just works". At one point I was losing the drive mount on the router where the music was stored (different story), but lately the computer has been losing the connection to the stereo with a "Unknown error -15000 occured". (aside, I think that it was -15000, but some posts talk about -15006).

The only solution seemed to be to reboot the routers and wait for it to happen randomly again. These problems don't seem to just me either. I finally found a solution that seems to have worked for a couple of days, so fingers crossed. If you look at the log for the router, you can see all these errors like "AirTunes time sync receive error -6730". Now, I'm not sure why the device is trying to time sync, nor why it's not working since it's got the DNS router configured to be our airport extreme (which should work). Either way, turning off time sync for that device seems to have fixed the issue for now.

On a positive side, I've discovered internet radio and joined the rest of 1997. Now I can play CBC Radio 3 through the stereo and it's actually clear. Good times, good times.

Next I'm going to have to figure out how to stop the microwave from messing things up.

Update (2010-04-28): I don't get it. I ran into the dreaded -15000 error again after trying to start the music after it was paused. Then I cursed. Then I hit the play button again and it worked. Checking the log it has "AirTunes time sync receive error: -6730" in the log, but I have the "set time automatically" turned off. AHghhghhghh!! But it's working again, without a reboot. *deep breath*

Update (2010-05-02): Shortly after my last update I was having troubles with the express again. Same error messages, even with the time sync disabled. I re-enabled the time sync, but this time instead of time.apple.com I used the airport extreme as the time server for the network. No problems in the logs since the 28th. I hope that it keeps up.

Feeling like a grown up somehow involves hydraulic tools

In my family I'm somewhat of a anomaly. For example, my ideal vacation isn't a version of the Baja 1000. Yes, that would be really cool, but it's not my ideal vacation. That's where the strangeness comes in. I'm still my father's son and my brother's... well, brother. I can be excited about these things, but I'm not passionate about them. Short story: our interests differ.

However, there are things that I do that really make me feel like an adult. Like a man. Having grown up in the house that I did, this usually involves tools of some kind. Extra points if it's powered, or huge, or hydraulic. Super extra points if it's all 3. It's getting warmer now and it's (probably past) time to put on the summer tires so yesterday I went out and bought a 3 ton jack. You know, because I need that to change a tire on our car with a listed curb weight of 1376 kg - works out to just over 3 tons. In other words, I should be able to lift the whole car with that jack, not just one corner. I think that it'll be the last jack that I'll ever need.

There is something really satisfying about being able to do some basic servicing on your own stuff. Now I have an 80 lb jack that I'll use twice a year, so if you need your car jacked up to change the tires or something, come on over. ;-)

Not so good at the bike maintenance

Admittedly I am not the best at doing maintenance on my stuff. Last bike I had I rode it until the rear wheel fell off. My current bike makes a "woan woan woan" sound when I accelerate hard and a horrible screeching sound when I break. Really helps let people know you're close to them, but that's a different story.

Today I oiled my chain, but that didn't seem to fix the woan sound. Going to need to look into that a bit more. I also discovered why my breaking sounds so wrong. On bike breaks it looks like there is a metal strip under the rubber to let you know that you should have changed your breaks by now. Helpful.

I think that I need to take a class or something on bike repair / maintenance. My only problem with it is that I don't really like to do that type of work. I guess I'm just going to have to suck it up.

Music library consolidation

A year or 2 ago I became so annoyed with the quality of our music collection that I started over, re-ripping all music that I cd's on hand for. But this meant that I didn't have all our music: lost cd's, cd's from my folks, etc. So lately I've been migrating some of this music back in.

The steps went along the following lines:
1) sync the files on to my local drive.

2) wrote a small app that made a hash of the files, and removed files that had an identical hash so that I wouldn't have to deal with duplicates

3) clean up the tags so I used MusicBrainz's Picard app to bulk fix the tags.

4) Then the trouble of having something that would read the tags from the files. Ideally I wanted iTunes to do this to make comparisons easy. After a while I figured out that if you launch iTunes using option click (on mac, shift click in windows), it will allow you to start it with a different library. That created the xml library file.

5) the format of the xml library file is kind of stupid as xml goes so that makes parsing harder than normal. Luckily I was able to find an example where they parse the file in java.

6) wrote more code that plays "which files are missing" and using blacklists (don't import this) and whitelists, I started to get files that I want to move.

7) I looked into calling iTunes programmatically to import the files, but that started to look like a no-go. So with a little help from commons-io to copy the files I wanted to a specific directory and then I got iTunes to import that directory.

There is still a bit more work, but that was the basic steps.

Shaggy - It was me

Lately I've been experimenting with a longer beard. I decided to do it half out of laziness, half out of curiosity and half out of desire to have more beard to play with. Yes, because of all three of those half's, I've been keeping my beard at maximum trim level.

I'm not sure what look I've been able to achieve. It's somewhere between "raised by wolves" and "mad scientist". It's been fun, but I've Been Told that it's pretty shaggy looking. So sometime soon it's going to be reduced back to "normal, less shaggy, level".

Food to mess with people

Sometimes I think about trying to come up with the best menu to mess with people's heads. Have them come over and make a meal where the after effects really freak them out.

Something along the lines of broccoli, beets, asparagus served with a main course that's spicy and high in iron.

Broccoli: gas
Beets: red poop
Asparagus: stinky pee
Spicy: "Oh god, oh god, it burns! (on the way out)"
High in iron: black poop

Now, I don't think that I'd actually do this with the motivation of freaking someone out, but thinking about doing it amuses me. ;-)

Ready for retirement

I often joke with Laura that she's my Freedom 30 plan - but I usually make sure that I'm out of arm reach first. She jokes that I'm an old man in training because of my love of jello and rice pudding, but in some ways it would be awesome to be retired. I'd putter around the house, go for bike rides when the weather is nice, write software when the mood or need suited me, and be able to focus on making the next meal.

Aside: tonight's a prime rib roast (because Oma said it's not worth it making a roast for 2 people, and I disagree) with homemade horseradish. Homemade horseradish is something that I've wanted to make for about 3 years now, and I only found the root at the store the other day. Now I just have to figure out how to make it...

Back on topic: My biggest concern about being at home would be actually running out of things to do. Having not enough to do will suck the life and soul out of you, whether you're at home or at work. That amount of nothing leads people to be concerned about the dandelion count in their lawn or, even worse, the dandelion count in their neighbours lawn.

Luckily I've still got like 30 something years before that becomes a concern. Until then, I've just got to keep myself busy on long weekends - of which there seems to be too few.

Farting is just another way to say "I love you"

One of the most magical things with a couple is the ability to share those little moments of intimacy. Sometimes it's with a smile or look, sometimes it's with a gentle touch, sometimes it's ripping a fart. Those are moments that you usually only share with those you are very close to, someone that you feel utmost relaxed with - those that you truly love.

You might go the whole day and never let a squeaker out, but when you get home and embrace a loved one, there is nothing that says "I'm so comfortable with you. You make me so relaxed." quite like cutting some cheese. I think that the the best way to build up long term memories are with olfaction. So if you want your loved one to smile and think of you every time they smell some sulfur, you need to cut those nasty farts.

Easter is a time for family and strengthening bonds. Make sure you serve beans and broccoli and start those magical memories now. And when you hear me make a "pphhppphh!!" sound, just know that's my way of saying "I love you".

Zero motivation

Sounds dumb, but when I'm home by myself I've got zero motivation to cook. When Laura's come, I want to cook, make it look pretty, do fun and interesting things. Try and make her say "wow" when she sees the plate. When I'm by myself it's just a chore - nay, it's a hassle. It's just too difficult to surprise myself.

Rsync files based on extension

Using the includes / excludes with rsync always gives me a headache. The best that I can say is that it's confusing, but when you finally get it to work, it works well. But that's the hard part.

Yesterday I was trying to sync all files that have a given extension (*.mp3 or *.m4a) from a slow external drive to local to figure out which ones should I need to import into iTunes (can't import them all since that would create duplicates).

I found a helpful post that show that you can use the unix tool find and then have rsync use those files. Very, very helpful since I'm much more comfortable using find than rsync.

Here's my solution for sync'ing mp3's or m4a files from a mounted shared drive to a subdirectory (called "music") from where the command is being run.

find /Volumes/Shared/ -name *.mp3 -o -name *.m4a | rsync -av --files-from=- / music

One in the hand is worth two in the bush

That phrase makes me giggle, but it's a very good lesson. The other day I had posted about having a hard time deciding on how to start solving a problem because I was aiming for perfect. Talking this over coffee with Andrew, he asked if I was trying to solve the problem, or was I trying to learn something new. If it was solving the problem, go with the tools that I was most familiar with and get it done. Otherwise I could go with the whole "learn new stuff and take 10x as long" path.

It's good to figure out what the actual goals of any project are. After thinking about it for a while, I figured out that it was actually solving the problem, even if my solution didn't benefit anyone else.

So I hacked some code out that did 2 things. The first code for migrating our existing pictures in flickr or a set that I created. That way I had a "status quo" set of pictures to put on the frame. The second chunk of code pulls all pictures from the "picture frame set" on flickr to the local drive (as a cache), sorts them by vertical vs horizontal, and removes any files from the cache that have been removed from the set. Then I just rsync the files to the SD card to put into the frame.

One benefit of this that I had not thought of when I started was that I don't actually need the original sized images. The "large" size on flickr is more than large enough. The file size dropped by at least an order of magnitude, so we can fit so many more images on the same card. It even works better in the frame - the pictures load faster. It seems snappier.

While it's great to provide a nice tool for others to use, most likely that altruistic thinking will be enough to prevent me from actually getting the project in a "works right now" state. Better to have a finished hack than project ideas sitting on the shelf.

Windows XP on my macbook

For a while now I've been stalling on getting winXP running on my macbook. Mostly I have not had any need for it since if I really needed windows I could always use Laura's laptop (IBM thinkpad). Said laptop is just shy of 7 years old, the "t" key works only about 1/3 of the time and I fear the potential spyware that is running on it. (aside: I'm highly annoyed with the tech's at U of O for issuing laptops with OS update set to "off" and no firewalls or virus protection). I suspect that computer is not long for this world.

The problem: Laura needs to be able to use IE 6 on win XP (or Vista) for work. We had updated her computer to have IE 8, but the software she uses does not support that. I find it ironic that it's to use a "secure" site that it requires the most insecure browser.

First issue: Since Laura would want to quickly log on, bootcamp was out. I was debating between parallels and vmware, but had not made a final decision before going out and paying 100 $ for the software. After talking to some guys at work, they highly recommended VirtualBox. Getting it up and running without reading the doc's took me just a couple of minutes. Really easy.

Second issue: For our XP computers, I could not find any install disks and I couldn't find a license key. I was expecting to have to go out and buy a new copy of XP because even though I was lent a legit OEM disk, I didn't have the key. I had looked at the computer for the license sticker, but had not found it. Today Andrew pointed out that they put the stickers on the bottom of the computer. I had to turn it over... I feel like the biggest idiot, but I think that I'd feel like an even bigger idiot if I had gone out and paid the 200 $ for a new license.

After everything was installed, including the guest additions, my only thing that I didn't know how to do from my macbook is right click. A couple of forum searches later I figured out the trick was "place 2 fingers on the trackpad, then click the mouse". Apparently this is a setting under system preferences (in my mac), but I didn't even have to change that.

Total time to get things up and running, not including waiting for the XP install to finish, probably around 1 hour. Now we have an XP install that's much faster than our hardware install of XP. Good times, good times...

GUI toolkit is one of the first decisions

It's weird. My blocking point for learning new stuff seems to be that I don't know how to learn to start.

I want to do some small home projects, and I think that these would be useful to other people. But I can't provide an app that would be "okay, now go out and install library x, open a command prompt... oh, make sure you are using OS [fill in name here] version y". So I figure that I need a cross platform GUI toolkit for stand alone projects. If they contact a service, it probably won't be any server that I am running so trying to make it as a webapp would be pretty pointless - and difficult.

At first I look for something for Ruby. All signs seem to point to shoes, which has been difficult to read about after the lead developer committed virtual suicide. I need to look into it more, but when the creator disappears, I wonder if the people left can keep the flame going.

Then I looked at eclipse RCP since I know the java community and I figure that I could make good progress in it. But then my body sighs - it would seem too much like work. The point of doing a home project would be to learn new things as well as scratch my itch.

Any MS specific solution is pretty much a no-go since I'd like to support my current OS. As for python, I don't even know where to start there either. We'll see how long my patience is for this type of work.

Features through flags

Wasting time on the 'net is one of my favourite things to do, especially when I'm learning new things. I stumbled upon the flickr developer blog and a post about how they use source control: features enabled using flags. Here's one quoe that I found really interesting:

Flickr is somewhat unique in that it uses a code repository with no branches; everything is checked into head, and head is pushed to production several times a day. This works well for bug fixes that we want to go out immediately, but presents a problem when weíre working on a new feature that takes several months to complete. How do we solve that problem? With flags and flippers!

For a site that has a huge load in hits as well as content, this really surprised me. My first thought was "wow, you have to really trust your developers" followed up with a general "wow". At work from the code commit to going to prod it usually involves much more process and work that I think is worth. I'm all for pushing for shorting the feedback loop so that the developers know about problems right away, but the scale of this shortness had never occured to me for a large and "corporate" site like flickr.

This kind of thinking, feedback, and speed is what Ryan was always trying to get me to see. This type of thing is what he would say "would leave everyone else behind who couldn't keep up".

They don't want you when you're damaged

One of the frustrating things when we were traveling in SEA was using US currency. Some places prefer it, but all the places require that it was in mint condition. I ended up taking a photo of a 10 $ bill that was refused by over a dozen people in 4 countries because it was missing a small piece. I'm not sure why they wouldn't take it because in north america it wouldn't be a problem using it. Mostly it was a pain because people wouldn't want to give change for a 20, and they wouldn't accept a 10 like that, so you get a bit stuck.

Winterlude - best when cold

Sometimes you luck out with the schedule and weather gods. Sometimes not so much. We always like to check out the snow sculptures during Winterlude. Over the last couple of years we've had mixed luck checking them out. A couple of years ago the weather was cold, clear and sunny. It made for great pictures.


Another year we went and we were so early that the snow was still formed into huge blocks and carving had not even started. I didn't even bother to take pictures that year.

This year we went late in the festival on a grey day. The snow was all pitted and the pictures didn't turn out great because there wasn't a lot of contrast between the snow and the sky.


Next year we're going to have to go early, on a clear (probably cold), day. Something that will give a better chance of trying to capture it well.

An archivist's nightmare

I have spoken about Project Archive before. My scanning slowed down to a halt, mostly with just the rest of Life getting in the way. My grandmother, whose slides I had borrowed in the first place, bought a scanner and offered to scan the slides since "she's got nothing but free time". My grandmother is 86 and very computer savvy, considering her age.

On Sunday we were hosting a dinner and she mentioned how she had gone through the slides, picked out the ones she wanted to scan, and thrown out the rest. Already picked up by the garbage men. I have no idea what she actually saved, but I would guess it's close to 5% of the original slides.

I was, and am, heartbroken.

Of the few slides I had scanned before, I have ones from parades from 1958 (I think - the box with the details is not probably at the dump) as well as the one below - which is one of my favourites. It has my dad and his brothers, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents. My only great-grandparents that I remember. The best part about the picture is the coffee table which is in use in our basement.

Short of destroying everything, I can't think of anything worse for an archiving project that someone selectivity destroying artifacts. If my grandmother had called me in the middle of the night with a "if you're not here in 30 minutes I'm going to burn them", I would have been there in 15 - and it's a 20 minute drive.

I'm just so upset. I want to go and take them all away before more get thrown out, but I can't. They are her's and what she decides to do with them is her decision, even if I don't agree with it. And that breaks my heart.

I think that it's time to shop for a bulk slide scanner.