Everything I learned about parenting, I learned from Jurassic Park

While taking care of our new arrival, I've been able to apply the lessons from Jurassic Park while taking care of her:

• If you don't move, she can't see you


• You don't want to be trapped in a locked car with a hungry / angry baby


• Her claws can rip you to shreds if you're not careful


• When you think that you've got her all cleaned up and then she starts to pee or poop on you. Clever girl.


• "Anybody hear that? It's a, um... It's an impact tremor, that's what it is... I'm fairly alarmed here." - that's when you know you're in deep shit because she's just filled her pants. Again.


• If you take don't care of things, you know that the babies are going to run wild and someone's going to have to call in the government to take over


• Even having an all female population of babies, you know that somehow when you turn your back there is going to be more.


• She can't open doors. Yet...

Things to remember

It's funny, but I'm forgetting simple things some days. I had to check the calendar the other day to see what day Alice was born. I can't imagine what I'll have forgotten by the time she's one, let along 20.

Some of the things that I'm sure to forget is how she crosses her legs at her ankles (right over left), her clumsy headbutts or how she can go from severe rage to calm baby in a couple of seconds. I think that she gets that last part from me. :-/

I still don't understand how anyone would have thought that I'm responsible enough to have a child. I keep on expecting an official to show up and ask for proof of my maturity and me trying to hide the lego and not be wearing a t-shirt that makes me giggle. Either way, I think that we all have a lot still to learn.

Cheating somehow

I feel like we're cheating somehow with both Laura and I off and looking after Alice. Aren't we supposed to be at our wits end by day 8? I think that everyone is quite happy so far with us being able to tag team and work at getting things done. I can't imagine how difficult it would be with a new child by yourself. It wouldn't be fun.

I feel very lucky with our setup. I feel we're doing something that most people would never get the chance to do and in a way I feel a bit guilty about that. But there is no way that I'd ever pass up this opportunity to be at home with my girls for so long.

And now we are three

Last Thursday we welcomed the arrival of Alice, 7 lb 10 oz at 03:37. It was the first snow fall of the season when Laura went into labour, a wet snow. So far Alice has been wonderful and we're starting to get into the rhythm of being a parent. I think that means "making it up as you go" and "rolling with the punches" all at the same time.

The word "labour" seems so inadequate to describe the process. It reminds me of a old Dave Barry joke where he said "boating enthusiast" was an understatement like saying "heroin fancier". I actually found it quite upsetting at seeing someone I love be in so much pain but not be able to do anything about it except fetch ice chips. It was a feeling of helplessness, but like all things, it too did pass.

So now we're all home, working on feeding, clothing and changing a baby. As a family. Of three.

38 weeks

I feel a bit silly counting the weeks like I have been, but I can't really help it. I am now one of those annoying people. Help me if my posts become just about naps and fluids coming out of orifices of my offspring. Help me, but forgive me.

I feel like the days are counting down to an almost surprise party. I'm not sure when I'm going to turn a corner and Laura's going to yell "surprise! I've wet myself!" Not exactly the type of party most people are surprised with. I just hope that there is balloons and cake.

Tick tock.

Pay attention

One of the things that I don't want to be is one of of those fathers that has a bluetooth ear bud in while he's watching his kids play. I want to be focused on the present, the now, the "right in front of me". The extreme little that I know about buddhism (attachment to desires) makes sense to me. The posts today on boingboing / google+ about "multitasking" or continuous partial attention remind me a lot of the buddhism philosophy.

In layman's terms I think that this translates into:
- go for more walks with my loved ones
- enjoy a hot beverage and focus on the people in front of me
- with kids, put down the camera / take my eyes off the screen more.

If I'm really good at it, no one will ever notice all my effort. Bwahahahaha!

What's one more...

My boss informed me of an interesting Portuguese expression: O que È um peido para quem est· cagado. It translates into "What is another fart when you've already shit your pants".

I laughed and laughed... such an awesome visual when dealing with yet another problem on something that's just full of them. Much better than talking about the broken windows theory.

Home stretch

It's less than 1 month to the due date. Laura's been doing wonderful, most of the things have been taken care of that we need to be done (other than the car seat). My level of terror is dropping off, which I hope is a good thing. I don't feel "ready", but I figure that I'm feeling about as ready as I'm going to be. I'm actually getting a bit excited about meeting our new addition. When I think of that excitement, the terror speaks up with a "I've not left yet!", but it's a quite voice at this point.

The thought of me being a father is still surreal, but I think that I'll grow into it. ;-)

Person first adds perspective

It's all about putting things into perspective. I've said things like "disabled child", but was corrected to "child with a disability". I didn't understand how the ordering of the words mattered, but Laura helped me understand it a bit better. Apparently it's person first, disease / condition second because the person is the most important part. They are not the disease. They are not the label. They have their own identity.

It's all about perspective. Talking to a guy at work with a disability, he says that the disabled community refers to people without a disability as the "currently abled". That has a strong tinge of this too shall pass.

Along this train of thought I'd like to post Invictus which I find an extremely powerful poem.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

"Are you happy that it's a girl?"

It's funny the questions that ask you when they find out that you're going to have a girl. Probably the most common is "Are you happy that it's going to be a girl?". Such a dumb ass question. I usually response with "No, not really. I was really hoping for a boy" just to see how they react. Of course I'm ecstatic that we're having a baby. It seems like such a useless question to me, like "Do you like breathing air?".

On the weekend I had a funny reaction where a woman thought that I was serious and said something like "well then..." and got up and walked away. I'm not my fault that when they asked an idiotic question and I replied likewise but with a straight face and they didn't get it. Should I feel bad about the interaction? Maybe. But I'm just so tired of the question.

Busy September

It's been a busy month. We've gotten new windows, 2 exterior doors, siding, exterior lights, ripped up the baby's room carpet to expose the hardwood underneath, my father-in-law has painted that room, got plumbing in the basement changed including removal of the 1958 concrete sink, had the exterior drain cleaned out, gone out west to Banff, Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay and Calgary, had the microwave die and replaced, worked on closing my business totally down, and probably a couple of more things that I'm forgetting.

Today Laura is 31 weeks, 4 days and I'm just wondering how we're going to be able to take care of another person. Doing all the above stuff, it goes through my head "how would any of this be possible with a baby? I have a hard enough time taking care of myself"

Now Laura wants to rip up the carpet on the other 2 rooms and repaint them. Oh, and we'll have to look into getting more things like a car seat and a crib. I missed the honeymoon trimester in which I was supposed to get everything done. Oie.

I really don't know how other people do it, but pretty soon I think that I'm going to find out.

Prestidigitator

I always like the titles people choose in IM at work. Mine is "prestidigitator", mostly because it's a pretty obscure word from some forgotten novel that I read in highschool. I'm blogging this because there isn't any way that I can remember how to spell it, and at best the key word that I can figure out is "magician".

Perspective

When speaking to Laura's 90 year old grandmother the other day she was talking about this young person that had just died and how sad it was. How early. I didn't realize at first she was talking about someone who was 71. I guess so much depends on your certain point of view.

Imax iCal is at an end

My little side project that I used to scrap a site and build a usable ical file is at an end. I mentioned it just in May but now it totally broken because they have totally revamped their website.

They still have not provided an ical format that I can use in my phone, but the info on the site is usable enough that it's not worth my effort at this time to scrape and reformat. It was fun and I learned a bunch, but it's now time to disable it. I'll make the source view-able for interest's sake.

BBQ Roast

Tonight I tried something that I've wanted to try for quite a while: making a roast on the BBQ. It went quite well - roast on the top rack, potatoes under to collect any drippings. Mmmm... I have a fantasy sometimes of having an outdoor kitchen (including sinks) where a BBQ would be my oven for most things. Cleanup would be minimal since it would be outside. No smoke detectors to set off. My only experience with outdoor kitchens is that you have watch for scarlet macaws that steal spice containers.

Perhaps one day. Perhaps.

Dot, blip, baby

When Laura told me that she thought that she was pregnant it was weird - a floating realization that didn't seem to have sunk in. The first ultrasound was along those lines as well. "Hey, see that dot there? That will be a baby". Strange and abstract. The next ultrasound was like that too "Hey, see that pulsing blip there? That will be a baby". I felt like I was sort of missing something. I knew in my head that dot would become a baby and that our lives would change, but that knowledge felt like water and my brain was the ducks back. It just wouldn't stick.

The ultasound after that was very different. That was where it now looked like a baby. There was a beating heart, head, arms, legs, movement. I felt like someone had made a brick of emotions, dropped it into a sock and hit me upside the head with it. Excitement, fear, happiness, gratitude. Now it felt like it started to sink in and feel real. I find it simply amazing how quickly things can go from a dot to a blip to a baby. Our baby.

A good evening

It's been a good evening. Saw a robot action movie (transformers 3), with lots of tie-ins / references to other sci fi (Firefly and Star Trek), followed by a drive home in a freshly washed car, under the stars and a full moon, saw someone on an over-sized unicycle, while listening to Gnarls Barkley and then the Indiana Jones soundtrack. That, in one long run on sentence, are a few things that made me smile tonight. The others of course being Laura and my Earl Grey, hot.

Lub dub

Yesterday I watched a man's heart beat in his chest. I could see the valves open and close, watch the blood flow, see the heart rate changed as the man's breathing changed. It was fascinating. The coolest part was that it was my own heart.

Not that echocardiograms are new. It's just fascinating when these things are so "close to home". I've seen a bunch of fetal ultrasounds and my feeling was always "that's neat". Contrast that to seeing an ultrasound of your own unborn child - well, I'm not such a wordsmith where I can accurately convey the emotional upwelling and wow factor of it.

It's funny, because I expect that if it's part of your job to do echo's then I'm sure that there is no magic to it. It would just be another day at the office. It's funny how easily the fantastical can become mundane.

Public or limited?

I've never had a twitter account. The only social networks I've joined so far have been facebook and google+ and I'm starting to debate my policy of only posting things limited to my "friends" / "circles". Is the world currently missing out on something truly profound? Absolutely. Should I open my most random and deep thoughts to the community at large? Meh.

The only benefit that I could think of making my google+ posting public would be that I could easily write (if it doesn't currently exist) something that would cross post it to FB. Or I could just abandon FB altogether and decide at that point if I should make things public / private.

I have most of my random stuff on the 'net as public (this blog, most photos). So why am I restricting my blatus's?

Microdata

After getting a little bit more into the microdata after mentioning microformats it seems to be a lot more complex. There is RDFa as well as schema.org which apparently MS, google and yahoo want people to move it. Seems like it will provide a lot of control, but for this blog, it seems like it won't be needed.

The changes that I have made I think that I'll back out and work on seeing if I can instead just move this into a html5 presentation. I figure that with just the core tags, without needing to use the itemtype attributes, I'll be able to express the blog in a more semantic way.

Microformats

Today one of the things that came up was microformats. When I think of html I don't think "machine readable". Turns out I'm wrong. I didn't think that by just adding some css classes in sort-of a structured way you could create info that was reusable. I assumed that you'd have to set up another view (xml, json, ical, etc).

Turns out that's how you can have a google recipe search and how google can show you (from its search page) customer reviews (4 out of 5 stars). From a website owner I can see the appeal since they have to tweak the markup that they already provide. From consumers of that markup (google, etc) it's good because its more likely the data the users are being show is the same that's being shown to you.

I started adding some span's, css classes, and other containers to the index page to line up with the hAtom 0.1 format. I'll continue to update it since the page neither validates "properly" or using the Rich Snippets Testing Tool from google. More work can be done, but interesting none the less.

Aside: if you ever need to find the ISO 8601 date format for perl, it's "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S". Via dzone.

Vasovagal

Yesterday I had what might have been called in older times "an episode". Laura calls me "vasovagal" which is fancy doctor speak for "fainting". So far I think that I've had 5 vasovagal responses: 1) when I tried to put in contact lenses for the first time 2) when we got to Barcelona from the over night train from Paris. 3) At Laura's parent's place once 4) When I was having some blood taken for insurance for the house 5) last night at dinner.

I think that in all cases it was at the start or right before a meal, and I was probably a bit dehydrated for them all. Last night was one of the worse ones. I felt my eyes rolling back like I was falling asleep and I started to nudge Laura to get her attention. The third time I was finally able to and she and my dad helped me to the car. There is no way that I could walk on my own and probably not with just Laura's help. They reclined the passenger seat and waited for some of my blood to decide to visit my brain again. Not fun. I was actually scared at one point because my left arm was tingling but I figured it was because how I had my arm on the rest and it was cutting off the flow to that limb as well.

Needless to say I'm staying at home today and trying to fully recover. To top it off I'm fighting off a cold. *sigh* Even though people tell me that I've lost my mind, I still think that my body will fail long before my mind does. This is why we should be building cybernetic replacement parts. But that's a different post for a different time.

Kick in the ...

Today is the first day that I can actually say that I've felt our baby girl that we're expecting at the end of November kick / punch. To say that I'm excited and scared would be an understatement - if she can kick like that when she's 300g, what will she do when she's 13 kg.

Someone today asked if I felt "ready". I laughed. I'm not sure that anyone can ever be "ready" to have a baby, not really anyways. I can say that I'm ready to have everything turned upside down. I was once told that what I don't know would fill libraries. This new chapter in our lives will make one of those libraries a tiny bit smaller, and hopefully I won't screw up too bad. When it all comes down to it, I think that's every parent's prayer.

So baby, if one day you're reading this on your neural interfaced holographic augmented reality, please forgive the mistakes that I've done.

Earl Grey, hot.

I decided a couple of months ago to start to purge all the tea in our "coffee" cupboard. We had a lot of tea because people would give it to Laura to drink, but she wouldn't drink it often. A cupboard full of fancy teas and most of the time she wanted red rose.

So I started to drink Earl Grey (hot), mostly because of Jean-Luc. At first I wasn't impressed - tasted too "flowery". Second cup was "okay". Third was "not bad", followed by the fourth "pretty good". Pretty soon the box was empty and I was bemoaning the lack of my new favourite tea. *sigh* My plan to get rid of the tea by drinking it has backfired because now I've added that tea to the grocery list.

But I really do enjoy a cup o Earl Gray, hot.

Hate on for DRM

Up to now I've tried to stick to my guns about DRM. If something had DRM, I'd either return it or not buy it in the first place. I've not been perfect - I've bought things like DVD's and bluerays which are at least region locked. I never bought anything from itunes when they had drm, but I've purchased a metric crapload since.

I'd like to get some non-dead-tree magazine subscriptions (Analog and Asimov), but they are all drm'ed when you buy from amazon, sony, barnes and noble. At this point my only option is to buy higher priced individual issues from fictionwise which is owned by b&n - which could mean that it gets killed off in favour their own competing store. I even emailed the publisher and they told me they "do not have any plans for DRM free subscriptions in the future". *sigh*

Why do I hate drm so much? To me it removes who owns the purchased item. At any time the company can decide not to support the device or (if it calls home) servers that the drm uses. You're locked into the devices which the company decides you can use.

Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem paying for content or using docs that are clearly linked to me like they generate at the pragmatic bookshelf. I know when I download a pdf from them, I can view it on my computer, my iphone, or any device I get in the future.

I know that I can strip off the drm. I could just ignore the law. That's not the point. I don't like being a "good customer" and being treated like a criminal. I'll do the only thing that I can do - vote with my wallet and go somewhere else while letting them know why I won't be a customer of theirs.

First run

Today I went for my first run at lunch in a long, long time. Not that I've been running much at home either, so it's not super easy to get back into the swing of things. Perhaps if I had not decided to go up the stairs behind the Centre Block my chest and head wouldn't have felt like they were going to explode. But I discovered that my old route around there is less accessible since they put up all kinds of security fencing. Now I just have to remember to bring my phone so that I can get an accurate timing (because I'm too lazy to do splits with my watch). My current time was slow and off because being just a couple of blocks away from Wellington means that it's a lot longer before my run "starts" and it is sort of weird when it "ends".

Even with a pounding headache for the rest of the day I felt great. I had forgotten how good the high is.

Speed biking

Today I took a longer bike route home. I started to time myself when I got to the canal and from the Laurier bridge down to hogs back and up the Rideau river to home it was 18.27 km. Average pace on the path was just shy of 24 km/h. At least I know that I'm not breaking the 30 km/h limit on the paths, but I'm slower than I thought I went. My fastest km was 28.6 km/h.

Today I started feeling like my energy tank was at 1/8, and I went as fast as I could, only slowing down north of Bank St. When I finished, I felt like I wasn't at zero energy, but maybe 1/16. I was tried. Some days I feel like I just need to burn off whatever energy I have left and empty myself out. It feels good to do that.

It's weird because I thought that I "boot it" sometimes. In the news today a professional biker did an average speed of 52 km/h over 31 km. Ya, I'm slow. That's what it feels like when I'm going on the path and I see someone on the road. They are usually faster than me, and once I timed a guy and he looked like he was moving at double my pace. Apparently that is possible.

I guess if I want to go faster I should probably fix up the old road bike I have and maybe oil the chains on all the bikes. Installing the clipless peddles would help too.

Advice for your wedding day and beyond...

Shortly before we got married a friend messaged us some "wedding day advice". I really liked it and I just wanted to capture it here rather than it being lost in the bowels of facebook.

I'm no expert on any one thing, but I am good at learning enough to get by... This is some advice that I have given everyone I know who has gotten married since I was enlightened by it.

You will find that on your wedding day, time goes 5x faster. You will be running from place to place for pictures, wedding, speeches (I hear there will be few.. good..hehe), visiting each table, and then cutting the cake - and suddenly the night is over and you 2 would not have spent more than 30 minutes together total. Seriously - your wedding day will be a blur.

My advice, which has been 3 years in the works is - take some quiet time together at some point during the reception and just look at each other. You don't have to speak, just look. Take a mental picture of how good the other looks, because chances are - you will be looking better that day than you ever have, and may ever look again.

Make a mental note of how happy you are at that moment. Your wedding day will be the best day of your life (until kids start popping out - which may be a while) - you will likely be as happy as you ever have been.

Once you have taken that time together and have committed everything to memory - carry on with the evening.

You will find over the rest of your lives together that marriage is not always "great" - there are arguments, disagreements - whatever. It's up & down over what should be the rest of your lives.

When you have a down time - remember what you had previously committed to memory. Jim - remember how beautiful Laura looked, and how you felt the first time you saw her in her wedding dress, and when you said "I do" and when SHE said "I do". Laura - same deal, substituting the dress for a tux/suit/whatever.

So many people forget about the good times when things get rough and would rather take the easy route out. Your wedding day will have been the best day EVER, so remember it and you will have a long & happy life together.

You guys are perfect together - don't forget that.

Kevin

ps/ future "best moments" include when Laura says "I'm pregnant", followed by the first ultrasound... and it goes up from there. ;)

Get'er done

One of the things that I've been really bad about with this blog is that I have not had it backed up by myself. It's got about 8 years (and counting) of my life and random thoughts documented here. It's not something that I want to walk away from.

I wrote before about exporting the blog but that's not something that I can run all the time. In the mindset of "get'er done" and something working but less than ideal is infinitely better than something not done at all, I decided to just pull down all the archives in html format. If I really needed to the future, I could parse out the files.

It's simple to do using wget with the mirroring functionality. Unfortunately mac's no longer ship with wget. After wasting too much time on how to do it with curl, I just installed wget myself using some instructions I found. The only difference is that rather than using the 3 year old version, I installed the latest.

After that it was a quick script that pulls down all the files, and I'm done.
#!/bin/sh
# mirrors archive section of blog
cd ~/Documents/blog-backup/
wget -m -l 1 http://www.beernut.ca/jim/archives/

Timemachine kicked in, and now I have a copy of my blog on at least 3 computers. Not ideal, but a good first step.

Offline webpages for the iphone

My wife asked me for an easier way to access data on her phone without going through a couple of clicks to get there. The first way that popped into my head was to make a webpage that she could do the whole "Add to home screen". However this is something that she needs to access, even if there is only a shitty wireless connection. After a little digging I found that you can have a base64 "data url" which can contain the whole page. There's even a website called iWebSaver that someone built that can do a couple of the steps for you.

I didn't want to put this page up public, so I just used the tools on my mac to base64 the page that I wrote:
openssl enc -base64 -in my-page.html | tr -d "\n" && echo ""
I used the tr to strip out the newline characters and the last echo was to just make it easier to copy and paste from terminal.

So I emailed the base64 text, but prepended with "data:text/html;base64," (no quotes). For example, you wanted to have a web page with "hello world" you might do something like this:
echo "hello world" | openssl enc -base64 | tr -d "\n" && echo ""
That will give you aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK to which you'd put into the url bar of safari
data:text/html;base64,aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK
(I understand for "hello world" you probably should have the content type of "text/plain" rather than "text/html", but I don't want to confuse anything too much.)

The only issue that I ran into was that the page didn't look very nice on the iphone. Doing a bit more digging I found a meta tag that I could drop in that fixed everything:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,user-scalable=no" />

No childhood pictures for you

Looking at a lot of the pictures that end up getting uploaded to facebook and other sites, it seems that a lot of the pictures are all taken from cell phone cameras. I like the idea of using whatever camera that you have with you, but so many of the pictures are going to blurry photos with crappy colour. Because people always have something that will take photos with them, they don't take a camera. I love the old family shots that my dad took with his SLR. They look great and it's a great feeling to see them. The shakily held, poor colour, soft focused crap that a lot of the cameras turn out won't create that feeling.

Don't get me wrong, I'm guilty as the next person. I forgot my slr and used my phone at my nephews birthday once. Even with the "wow, your phone did that?" quality the pictures still look like crap. Kids today will have their life documented from before they were born, but I fear the sharpest, clearest picture will be the ultrasound.

Open data

One of the things that I would love to get changed at work (and across all gov) is to have all public information provided in formats that are easy to mashup. It's nice that gov sites have a consistent look, but that only helps if people are looking at a page. It does not make it easy if you want to transform the data into another format. The part that makes it a bit more difficult is that it's another output that an app would have to be tested to make sure that it will support the new format. More code, more testing, more cost. Not necessarily a large cost, but a non-zero cost.

It's funny - I just did a search for open data and I found Open Data in Canada. It looks like I have some reading to do.

Public criticism

Today was training day. It was an orientation to an organization that I've been working for since 2004 (add another year if you count co-ops). I have to say that I did learn some things, and others that I hoped to learn but didn't. Ah well. I always knew that blogging could be a risky business. I've heard of people being fired for blogging about the org they worked and their bosses weren't happy about those details surfacing. I didn't really feel that this applied to me in the fact that as long as I was somewhat professional on this blog, I'd be fine. Apparently it's a bit more formal than that.

"Employees violate their duty of loyalty if they engage in public criticism or act in a way that is detrimental to their employerís legitimate business interests." from section 5.6 of of A loyal and non-partisan public service: a legal requirement. Huh - "public criticism". So, for example a public blog post saying that I don't like the new government's policy of painting the roses red would be a violation of my duty of loyalty. This is pretty tricky because of the government is involved in so much and at some point they are going to do something that will piss me off.

Crap.

That's what I use this blog for! For ranting, for formulating arguments, for documenting what's going on in my life as it's happening. Now, I can't see myself publicly criticizing my employer and having that fall under my own definition of professional behaviour, but this is going to make me even more cautious.

One of the guy's at my table today knows a guy that was (recently?) fired for blogging something critical. I'm not sure what he was blogging, or when (from his workstation?) but it really brings it home. You know, that I know a guy that knows a guy who it happened to. I've heard stories of people having criminal convictions against them for stealing stuff from work and they still weren't fired. But let this be a warning to you all. You can tell people that you read online about a guy who knows a guy who was fired for blogging or something - and they'll believe you.

Most days

Most days I know that I'm very lucky. We've got a roof over our heads, food on the table, and people that love us. But some days when the pvr has run out of comedies and there's a long list of "work" that I need to do, I feel a bit bummed out. On those days I just have to ask myself: WWMVD? I just have to blame it on the rain.

<del>ExposÈ for FF</del>, no, I mean <del>Tab Candy</del> ... or Panorama (for now)

It took me a while to figure out what the new feature in firefox we stumbled over at work was called. It doesn't help that they kept on changing the name. And the keyboard shortcut to get it to work. *sigh* Currently it's Ctrl+Shift+E for windows and Command+Shift+E for mac. There's a video of the feature somewhat early on explaining what "tab candy" is. Pretty cool.

Where have I been, #4

An update of the usual places we've traveled to. Other places are tracked in #1, #2, and #3. Last October we traveled to Peru and hiked the Lares trek for 3 days as well seeing Machu Picchu. After that we headed to the Gal·pagos Islands where we did a boat tour. Awesome, awesome vacation, but a little too rushed.

Places we visited included:
Peru:
Lima
Cusco
Ollantaytambo
Sacred Valley

Ecuador:
Quito
Baltra / North Seymour
EspaÒola Island
Floreana Island
Santa Cruz Island

Places that we saw the inside of the airport included San Salvador (El Salvador), Miami and Washington, D.C.. I have a whole other post about D.C....

On our next trip we'll be making stops in:
Labadee, Haiti
Falmouth, Jamaica
Cozumel, Mexico
Fort Lauderdale, USA

IMAX schedule for the Canadian Museum of Civilization

I promised that I'd talk about my little side project. Like most software projects, it came from an itch that I wanted to scratch. The museum has a schedule that I find difficult to use. It works under the assumption that you pick the movie you want to see, then figure out when it's playing. For the people that have a membership pass, we usually want to see what's playing in the time slots that we have.

I took their pages, scrape them and format it into an iCalendar format that is useful to me - works in google calendar AND my iphone. I don't know if it works in Outlook, but I assume that it does. I tested it in iCal as well, but that's the first time that I've opened the piece of software.

I wanted to learn more ruby and for me to find that interesting I needed a "project". As my first foray into ruby, I'm sure that my code was more procedural that "rubyish", but what are you going to do. I used nokogiri for pulling down the html and parsing it out. I used RiCal to create the icalendar file as well as tzinfo for the time zone stuff.

At this point I don't think that anyone else has even looked at the page, and I'm okay with that. It serves my needs right now. But if anyone needs a schedule for the imax moves at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, I hope that this will help them as well.

Fire and forget

One of my goals at work for any of the "infrastructure" that I maintain is that I'd like it to run without interaction for 6 months. I want the other developers to not have to know how much disk space there is, what resources other projects are using, what crappy files some of of our tools use, etc. I want everything to be fire and forget. Unfortunately I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it.

Accented chars in calendars

I've been working on a side project where I scape a bunch of pages and change the info into an ical file so that I can use it in google calendar. More about that project later.

I ran into some problems with accented characters (of course) always showing up broken. I think that I have a solution (not 100% sure yet because it takes a while for google to refresh a feed). A super helpful post mentioned that "The HTTP/1.1 standard says that if content-type is text/* and no charset is given, the character set (encoding) is ISO-8859-1 (latin1).". A quick "curl -i" on my url and sure enough the http header only had Content-Type: text/calendar.

Mostly I've always dealt with server code, not configing apache, and especially not on a host where I may not have access to change config. A little bit more searching lead to a post about changing the .htaccess file. Added a line saying AddType 'text/calendar; charset=utf-8' ics, double check with my curl command and the file is returning the correct header.

This took me a bit of digging because I thought that it was something wrong with how I was writing the file and needing to change the libs that I was using. Apparently I was just screwing things up because I was opening them with textedit which showed the files as broken. Opening them in ical (which I don't use) showed everything correctly. A day of searching leads to new knowledge and a 3 minute fix. Ah, software...

Update: it worked.

Lego - It's the arrangement, not the pieces

I don't usually blog about things like comics, but I've had xkcd 659 open in my browser for a couple of days. It's the arrangement that's important, not each piece. This comic makes me happy and sad at the same time.

Clutter up my life

When living with someone there are rubbing points. Differences in comfort zones for little day to day things. How often the lawn is mowed, where the toothpaste tube squeezed from (end vs middle), if silly hats should be worn all the time or just during special occasions. We have those things. I think that our biggest rubbing issue is the amount of clutter we feel comfortable with.

Perhaps some background first. Laura comes from a home where everything is exactly in its place and things are all lined up, including the carpet. Everything looks new. I on the other hand come from a family that's the opposite side of the spectrum. Tidy-challenged. Neatphobic. Organizationally inhibited. Messy-abled.

I understand that things being messy drives Laura crazy. It must be like being in a room packed full of people and everyone yelling. You can't think. Chaos. I try to help keep things tidy but every item that I put in its place moves me farther from my comfort zone. When things are all put away I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a darkened stadium with only an incandescent penlight with the battery running out. Luckily for us we've got several places that are compete disasters and when I'm feeling a bit bonkers I can just go there. So if you ever see me moving a comfy chair into the furnace room, you know I'm just satisfying my ancestral yearnings to be surrounded by clutter. And sheet metal, but that's a different story.

Stop mocking me!

The last couple of days there's been some discussion about mocking frameworks. Is mockito better than easymock? I don't care. Use whatever tool you need to or that you are most familiar with. Add tools to your toolbox of solutions.

The bigger discussion came about if we should mocking everything. My experience is that I've been burned by mocks hiding the actual behaviour of a component via it's dependencies. I've had what I call "integration tests" - junit tests that use most of the app's code and talk to a db ultimately - uncover bugs in the underlying dao's. Because of those experiences I'm not a fan of mocking everything. Mocking has it's place, but I've found those to be rare. For example, if you wanted to simulate an "impossible" condition in your code, or if you're want to simulate a scheduled task, I've used mocking there.

One of the biggest strengths about mocking is that you're testing your class / module in isolation. I think that one of the biggest weaknesses is that you're testing your class / module in isolation. You still need to test the components connected. You still have to make sure that when you give valid inputs at the top, it's not going to blow up at the bottom. I can hear people saying that "that's were your integration tests come in". Sure, but I like a quick "is everything working" without deploying it to containers or dealing with data leaking between tests.

Another thing that I don't like about mocking is that it tends to turn the code under test inside out. I have to know what services it will call, what it will pass in, what's going to be returned from those services, etc. I'd prefer that my unit tests are testing the public interface of the class. Yes, it's really white-box testing, but I only really care that the class is doing what it says it's doing. I don't care exactly how it's doing it. Do I care that the class calls or private method or an external service to get a job done? Hint: the answer starts with a "na" and ends with "uh".

Short answer: use mocks where it makes sense, but favour "real" code from the app where you can.

Japan

I can't help but think of Japan and all the people there. Watching the videos seems so unreal. When I used to think of a tsunami I pictured one huge wave that would wipe out everything on the beach. The fact that it's not a wall of water, but more of a flood that pours over the land destroying anything in it's path seems much more sinister and horrifying.

I've been playing over in my head what we'd do if we found out that we had to go right now but I don't think that we're prepared for that kind of emergency right now. Maybe it would be a good idea to put together a "go bag", but I think that it would include our common traveling / hiking stuff that we'd constantly be taking out and reorganizing. Do I think that we need to plan for a tsunami in Ottawa? No, not at all. Would we be able to deal with it if everything that we owned was wiped out? I'd be sad, but we'd manage.

It's the loss of life that's irreplaceable and the true horror of a natural disaster.

These people didn't know that day might have been the last day they would ever see their loved ones. You might never know that. That's why I think that you should never hold back how you feel about someone because you won't always have a chance to tell them. I came across a xkcd comic that seemed appropriate for this.

My thoughts are with everyone in Japan and anyone who has friends or family there.

Head up Billy Buddy

I'm going to start this one with a joke:

Q: How do you tell an extroverted engineer?
A: An extroverted engineer will look at your shoes instead of his own

I'm guilty of this. Walking down the street I don't look at other people's faces, I look at them as just things to be avoided in a real-life sort of frogger game. A game to figure out the best way through the crowd. But I always notice people's shoes because apparently that's the height I'm looking at. I'm really conscience of this now because people have to wave for me to see them. Not a little wave of the hand, more like a "don't drive into Tokyo because Godzilla is attacking" sort of wave. That or they crouch so that their face is more where my eye level is, somewhere around knee level...

I feel that I should be interacting with people more, but I just find it exhausting. I need my hidden corner of quite time to recharge, and that's what I make my walks alone to be - recharging.

Simple things

It was funny last night. Visiting Karen we brought a set of nesting cups (among other things) as a belated new baby present. The nested cups generated discussion about the Tower of Hanoi, which lead to someone (non-computer) playing it with the cups and coasters, which lead to pulling a text book off the wall to try and remember the formula, to us discussing that we never saw a "tower" while we were in Hanoi.

I find it a bit funny that I never put 2 and 2 together when we were in H‡ Nội. I think that the vendors are missing out - I so would have bought a "tower of Hanoi" game while we were there. Ah well.

Stupid drivers

I can't believe how stupid people are. What causes you to feel so self-righteous that you feel it's okay to hit a stopped bike? Especially after you had just hit them while you drove by? I guess that the driver of a white ford with license BEPT 819 here in Ottawa knows what that feels like. Do they hit cars that stop in front of them in traffic? I guess only they and their body shop knows.

Depending on the weather and where Laura is going to, I commute by bike, car or bus and I'm always conscious of the "others". The person with the less mass will always lose, but that doesn't make them the loser in the interaction. - as the video shows.

This just makes me mad. I hope that the driver gets charged and convicted for this senseless act of aggression and danger. How many times does this kind of thing happen without a camera?

I'm sorry they are not here right now

My standard filter for suspected telemarketers when they ask for "Mr. [butchering wife's maiden / my surname]" is to reply "They are not here right now, can I take a message". Yes, I lie to people who cold call me. I'm okay with that, I really am.

Lately I've been following up with "and what is this in regards to?" to try and flush them out. Most of the time they just reply with "I'll call back later".

Time to change tactics.

I think that I'll start with trying to figure out what it's about on the off chance it's a legit call. They sometimes happen. I think that I'm going to answer with "I'll see if they are available if you let me know what this is this is in regards to". The only thing is that this seems to open the conversation too much. Maybe I should just stick with my standard, and if they don't want to leave a message I'll just ask them not to call again. I could go with the classic "Who's calling please?"

The next step should be a phone system that checks a whitelist of incoming numbers, and if it's not on that list, it goes directly to voicemail. Then of course does voice to text and emails me the result. Ah, one day.

Photos from my iPhone

For some reason I can't seem to remember how to get photos off my iphone easily. Yes, you can use iPhoto and "everything work magically" but I don't use iPhoto (at this point). I'm old school: I like dealing with the files myself.

Yes, I *could* just upload them directly to flickr, but then I am not sure which ones are backed up in more than one place. It's also nice to be able to see them on a larger screen to tell if they are crap.

So, with the idea of being able to find it in a timely manner, I can easily get photos from my iphone to mac using Image Capture.

Update: Frack. It seems when when you use image capture to get the photos it does not copy over the gps latitude / longitude position in the exif metadata. Booo! I guess I'm going to just upload directly from my phone and then pull them back onto my computer. Or I'll have to move to using iPhoto (assuming that works).

Something Canadian...

There is something distinctly Canadian about the sound of mittens clapping. It warms my heart to hear that muffled womp womp womp sound.

Failing Successfully

In my last post Kibbee introduced me to a new word: Scrummerfall. That lead me to some interesting posts as well as another word: Waterscrum. Some interesting ideas and insights. I feel that it helps reading that - at work we're not alone in the suffering. It sort of lets the wind out of the sails too when you discover that the grass isn't actually greener on the other side.

I feel that we've failed at being "agile" at work but I will still count the experience as a success. Yes, failing successfully as it were. We've introduced things under the agile banner that I count more as basic software engineering tools / processes like a CI server, the standardized use of a build tool, adoption of unit test writing, use of static analysis tools to quickly provide feedback on the current state of the project. So even if people sit down at standups and want to plan 2 years of iterations, I'm glad that we did "agile". And I'd be glad if we could do it again, for the first time.

Calling it Agile does not make it so

At my work about 7 years ago there was a big push to turn our process into "XP / Agile". It's been an interesting ride but at this point I don't consider what we do "agile". True, we've taken some ideas from the agile methodology, but very few of them have stuck. The thing that I find the most funny is that some co-workers believe that we're fully XP - which I am amused by because I think that we never were. I was discussing this with a co-worker (CW) today and the conversation went like this:

CW: But we're doing Agile things like standups.
Me: How many chairs do you use?
CW: All of them...
Me: Then it isn't really a standup, is it?

I'm not trying to be a jackass, really I'm not. The fact that people aren't following the steps that are in the name of the activity without realizing how they are deviating from the process boggles my mind. Just calling something "agile" does not make it so. Imagine going to a car dealership and buying a BMW and they show up with a ford focus - "But hey, it's got 4 wheels and a windshield, it's pretty much the same thing! Tell all your friends that you drive a BMW! Vooommm!"

If you're driving a ford focus, it's better to just tell people that. Then at least you're all on the same page. If you're telling people that you drive a BMW and then find out about your ford focus, then you'll lose any credibility that you had. It'll just add to confusion and doesn't help anything. You could argue that it'll help you get a new job (because it's a buzzword) but in the interview they'll probably suss out your answers and figure out that you don't understand the terminology of your industry.

*sigh*

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we shouldn't call it an Agile Frog. It just confuses people with images of a duck-frog-hybrid. (I hope that image stays in your mind all day.)

Let me know what's wrong

As part of the simplifying and ditching cable idea, I bought a DNS-323 that I'm going to hook into the ps3. Trying to set up the email alerts and have them use my isp (currently ncf) I was going nuts. It looked like it was timing out, but I there isn't any logging or anything useful. After a lot of failed attempts and some desperation, I decide to try google's smtp server.

And it works.

I'm half happy and half angry. I hate it when I feel that I've wasted a bunch of time. *sigh*

Best time to write a test

Today we were discussing using jQuery function rather than the $-function. I thought "there's no way that I'm going to remember to do that" - *ding! light bulb!* That's the point where you need to write a test. If there's any manual step that can be forgotten, then at some point it will be forgotten.

The 3 R's start with Reduce

When talking about the 3 R's order mattered - the first step was to reduce. I'm trying to apply this to more than just garbage. We're currently looking at ditching our cable tv and perhaps even the home phone line. The money isn't even the big issue - it's the fact that we're paying for things that we're barely using. The fact that the pvr cuts off programs and we lose the last 30 seconds and have to find it on the internet anyways just adds salt to the wound.

That's not to say that we won't watch tv - we buy plenty of dvd's, find episodes that we missed (again, cursed rogers and pvr) and now I'm looking at buying a OTA HD antenna.

In the end I think that I'd feel better if I just read more books and exercise more. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with tv.

At this point the only shows that we watch are: Glee, The Daily Show, Big Bang Theory, and How I Met Your Mother. The only one that I'm concerned that we'll not be able to get in a timely manner is The Daily Show. We'll figure it out.