Saturday, January 21, 2012

14 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Fox Spotting

22 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Spotted on the way home from dropping Ava off at school.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

1 month 1 day ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Monday, January 2, 2012

1 month 2 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Sunday, January 1, 2012

1 month 3 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Sunday, December 25, 2011

1 month 10 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Saturday, December 24, 2011

1 month 11 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Saturday, December 17, 2011

1 month 18 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

New Phone: Samsung Galaxy Nexus

1 month 20 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

First (Controlled Domestic Fireplace) Fires of the Season

2 months 2 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Saturday, November 26, 2011

2 months 9 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Annual Tree Home Minivan Roof Ride 2011

2 months 10 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Drive to Huntsville for Turkey Day with Mom

2 months 11 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Saturday Mexican with the Fam

2 months 16 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Ran a few errands and then grabbed some mexican food at Uncle Julio's.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

2 months 19 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Thanksgiving with Ava's Class

2 months 20 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Fun Run with Ava

2 months 23 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Friday, November 11, 2011

2 months 24 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

New Brakes and Front Tires

2 months 26 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Emergency Dental Extraction

3 months 8 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Last week I felt some pain in a tooth. Nothing major but enough to make me set up a dental appointment. I expected a 30 minute something or other. Instead I was told that I had a cracked tooth. Apparently it's fairly rare. There were a number of people checking my x-rays, wiggling my tooth. This isn't a Joe Didn't Brush sort of thing. I eat a lot of almonds and I figure I caught one of the hard ones at the wrong angle. I don't remember it cracking but it does seem like a few weeks ago that it started to feel loose when I flossed. Who knows. Just my luck.

The remedy... how bad could it be, I figured? Pretty bad. The tooth had to be extracted immediately. Well, ok... I'll get a fake tooth, right? Yes, in ten months. Huh? The extraction heals for four months and then an implant is drilled into my jawbone. Then that takes six months to heal after which a fake tooth can be installed. My immediate fear was that I'm going to be doing a lot of meetings over the next 10 months and Missin' Tooth Joe isn't nearly as good at selling Big Data services as All Tooth Joe. Dr. Snyder spent the time to talk me through it. I could get a fake tooth. But in his estimation it would make it hard to talk. Bad Talking Joe is even worse than Missin' Tooth Joe. And Dr. Snyder assured me that it wouldn't be as visible as I thought. The tooth is on the bottom right, halfway between the front and back teeth. I was skeptical. But he was right.

On Tuesday I went to a dental surgeon... Dr. Silverstein. Text book author and world tour speaker. Nice guy. Willing to explain what he's doing. The procedure was quick. And violent. I've had plenty of adult teeth out. Never anything like this. Afterwards I was numb. Made it home. Showed the kids the hole in my teeth. And promptly hit the floor from pain. The anesthetic wore off all of a sudden and it was miserable. I should have taken the pain pill the moment I left the surgeon's office. Holy tamole. One of the worse hours of my life waiting for it to kick in. Not kidding.

Yesterday was fairly bad too. Lots of pain. I took some pain meds in the morning but by 11am didn't want to take any more. I'm terrified that I'll have some sort of mini-withdrawl headache on a 10 hour flight tomorrow. I wanted that junk out of my system. Which made yesterday rough.

Today was no picnic. But it was better than yesterday. Some swelling but so far no bruising. We'll see. Travel for work all next week. Convention, manning a booth... need to be crisp and presentable.

The lesson? Don't eat almonds? I don't know.

Mexican Dinner: Mom Busted by... Reading

3 months 13 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Ava: "I don't want to eat the quesadillas... I want chicken nuggets."

Mom: "They don't have chicken nuggets here... just eat the quesadillas on your plate please."

Three minutes later. Ava, pointing to the menu: "Mom, this says 'chicken nuggets'... see, right here."

Mom busted... the kiddo can read now! Good work Aves!

Disney On Ice

3 months 20 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

MacBook Pro 2011

3 months 28 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

First Mac product I've purchased in 15 or 20 years. Coincidentally, I pushed the Order button just 10 minutes before the news flash about Steve Jobs. They interrupted prime time television to make the announcement of his death. These days I'm working with Hadoop and other open source big data technologies from the Hadoop ecosystem. After working on a desktop from home for some time my many laptops have gotten old/slow/obsolete. I need to be able to run an OS inside of a virtual machine. I've watched MacOSX gain acceptance in the developer community for years now but have resisted jumping in. I compared the specs on the MacBook(s) to a windows machine and realized that while there was a premium price being paid, it wasn't as massive as it used to be. So I jumped in. MacOSX is backed by linux which I use for all of my production stuff. Most of the open source big data projects maintain some MacOSX compatibility. Plus, the machine is pretty. Really is. Biggest fear: right click says what!??! I'll figure things out. Specs: MacBook Pro 15", 8Gb RAM, 500Gb 7200rpm drive, hi-res glossy screen 1650x1050, 1Gb video ram. I bought the 8Gb outside of Apple, can upgrade myself. Planning on moving to a main SSD drive with a secondary big drive. I figure I'll install everything, learn about the OS and generally screw things up before reinstalling when I get the SSD. Onward.

Update: Initial observations after 20 mins playing with it (the MacBook.) A softer experience with gradients and gentle bounces on screen. Maximizing windows seems to be discouraged leaving me with off-center windows which makes me feel disorderly. Icons free-floating all over the place feels disorderly. Definitely a user interface for those that don't like rigidity. I tend to like some rigidity on the interface because it acts as a crutch... organizing things and providing structure... so that my thinking can be more exploratory. The old lesson that we live in 3d but work in 2d... because the loss of a dimension allows us to think.

Update: I've used other people's macs hundreds of times throughout the years. I'm finally starting to understand some of the structure of this UI. Previously it was hunt and click.

Update: Less Save and Apply buttons in general. That's nice. I click a preference and it's automatically saved. In Windows the mindset is to make preference changes and then Save or Apply them, which takes a little extra work (but has some benefit.)

Update: I'm definitely negotiating with myself when it comes to changing config to be more familiar. For example, making the icons snap to a grid. I'm used to that and want to make the MacBook do that. But I'm also challenging myself to adopt the new freewheeling mindset of the UI. Fighting the current, at least this early on, not the best plan.

Update: So the default icon for a windows machine on the network is a 1994 CRT monitor and a BSOD. Well played.

Update: Obviously a mindset to limit system feedback to the user. No flashing lights telling you that stuff's happening. Can be scary for somebody who's worked on machines built with a mindset of giving as much feedback as possible. That said, I can't argue with simplicity.

Update: My move to the cloud a couple years ago has paid off tens of times with windows box reinstalls... I can usually be up and running in a couple hours while in the past it took weeks to get all of my data and apps moved. Thanks to GMail, Evernote, Dropbox, XMarks and other synchronizing apps I already feel like I can get some work done on the MacBook. Like, say, updating a blog.

Update: Ctrl-C driving me nuts... I keep hitting Fn-C.

Update, about a week later: I'm now about as productive as I am on a Windows box. Dev tools work. User interface makes sense. Microsoft Office runs. I really like the swipe gestures for Mission Control and Spaces... makes a laptop feel a lot like a multi-monitor machine.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

4 months 6 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany

Sunday, September 18, 2011

4 months 17 days ago | Posted to: Miscellany