Critical Moss - Blog

25 Things (You probably don't really care to know) About Me

2009-01-31T12:54:00.002-07:00

I am an inveterate collector of geek toys, most of which I use on a daily basis; a few of which turned out to be less ideal investments. I love my iPod Touch, my netbook, my latte maker, and my scooter. I almost never use my handheld GPS unit, and I probably would have never missed the convection feature of my oven.
I get addicted to TV dramas far too easily. I wish the networks would just release the DVD box set once a year, rather than dragging the seasons out for months at a time. As an added bonus, this would leave more time on TV for reruns of the aforementioned series, awards shows, 'reality' programming, March Madness, and maybe even the Super Bowl.
I'm an intensely private person. I engage in plenty of introspection, and don't object too strongly to extroversion, I just can't stand it when the two start to converge.
I'm not as good of a programmer as I should be, or as some people seem to think I am. I have lots of good ideas, and usually don't have a problem with the technical aspects of coding them, but seem to struggle with the ability to follow through.
I've always thought that the ultimate challenge in my life would be to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate. My inability to identify closely with either major political party makes that a highly unlikely scenario. There are other factors which make it pretty far-fetched as well, of course.
I don't think it's likely that I'll be working at my current job in a year. I like my boss (and his boss, for that matter) and I'm fairly sure I'm well liked in return. With that said, I can see the handwriting on the wall, and in this poor economic climate combined with a state government that's suddenly hostile to educational spending, I'm not sure I'll even have the option of working here next year.
My favorite food groups are pizza, beer, ice cream, and Dr. Pepper. Unfortunately, I can't seem to lose weight when I keep any of them in the house.
I like hiphop and pop music more than I like to let on in general company. As proof, I own at least two Britney Spears albums, and I bought a Fountains of Wayne album on iTunes once.
I'm amused by people who think Twitter is useful.
I'm not ashamed to say that I have a Twitter account, or that I update it fairly often. Not all internet phenomena need to be useful.
I absolutely love big words, puns, and humor complex or obscure enough that research is required to even begin to 'get' it.
I waste far too much time on social internet applications. Facebook, Fark, and World of Warcraft probably top the list, but there's a long tail of others as well.
I drink at least one triple-shot latte just about every day. Fortunately, I've learned how to do a decent job of making my own in the last few months, which is how this habit became economically feasible.
I enjoy cooking, but I have extremely high standards for my own food, so I don't always enjoy actually eating the food that I cook. I understand the concept of chewing a steak then spitting it out to avoid the calories, because I'd love to apply the same logic to my cooking; if I could make a dish then toss it in the garbage disposal (without feeling both guilty and wasteful), I probably would.
I don't make friends quickly, but I don't lose them easily either. Unfortunately, this is not a particularly good model for relationships when working for either the military or a University, which is where I've spent my entire adult life; about the time you start liking someone, it's time for one or both of you to move on.
I wouldn't want to have been born at any other time in history; while I'd love to visit other times, the fact of the matter is that for better or worse, we live in an exciting era.
I have an incorrigible crush on Scarlett Johansson.
I'm very fortunate to have a wife who seems more amused than irritated by #17.
I almost always prefer planning to spontaneity. This document will have been through at least three revisions by the time it makes it to Facebook.
I always wanted to get a pistol qualification in the military but never had an opportunity to. I now own a Glock and enjoy casual shooting, but the first time I got ready to fire one, I nearly broke my thumb because I was holding it incorrectly.
One of my favorite pastimes when I'm alone is watching online collections of speeches and presentations by extremely smart people; the TED talks and Google Tech Talks are easily my favorite such collections.
My favorite exercise equipment is my ancient Cannondale road bike, especially during springtime here in Tucson. More often than not my bike sits idle every winter.
I'm a big fan of prime numbers. I did not -- in all seriousness -- intentionally wait until #23 to put this on the list; it just happened that way.
I have a personal policy of trying not to encourage the proliferation of pointless Facebook apps. If you get an invitation to install one from me, I probably mistakenly thought you already were using it. In that vein, my intent is to only tag in this note people who've already done the "25 things" meme.
I didn't actually expect to make it to 25 things on this list. My original plan was to post a couple of generic things, then mark the remaining items REDACTED. It didn't turn out to be as funny as it seemed at the time.

Overheard (sorta)

2008-12-14T09:03:00.001-07:00

"Why can't I have three kids!? Julie gets to have three!"

"Julie had twins -- she got pregnant twice, just like you"

"Well, I'm not splitting hairs, here"

"Or zygotes either, apparently"

Time Flies

2008-08-13T10:31:00.003-07:00

Wow, so a month has gone by since my last post... yeah, that's pretty much 'cause my family got back in town almost a month ago. Which is certainly a good thing.

...

And... wow. I wrote that about two weeks ago. Didn't get very far on that post, now, did I? Let's try this whole thing again, shall we?

So, it's been a long time since I last wrote anything; as I'm reminded by that first line above, my family was still out of town last time I published a post. Now they're back, summer is pretty much over*, and school started today. Right now I'm signed up for six classes/seventeen credits. If I stayed in all of them, I'd graduate this semester. But I'd probably have no job or family, and be little more than an empty shell sitting in the CS computer lab, mindlessly writing code; just about half of the core CS curriculum is on my schedule right now. So the plan is to attend a few sessions of each class, figure out how many of them I can juggle without going crazy, and drop the rest. As it stands now, the lineup is:

CS372, comparative programming languages
CS460, databases
CS472, automata
CS453, compilers
CS397B, PHP+MySQL
NS302, Navigation and Naval Operations

That last one is a Naval ROTC class that was added because I was told it would be an "Easy A", and I needed the upper-division credit. I usually view such claims with skepticism, but this one was made by the instructor, a Marine Corps officer who apparently I worked with both in DC and Okinawa; and now we're both here ~ it truly is a small world.

Anyhow, I've only been to one class so far, compilers. The instructor seemed pretty reasonable:

Easy to understand
Doesn't take attendance
Doesn't allow much in the way of in-class interruptions
Doesn't care if we comment our code
Doesn't care if our code is pretty as long as it meets the specs
There don't seem to be ANY group projects

The downside:

This class will be a LOT of coding; I'd be writing a compiler that can handle a subset of C.

Unfortunately, I expect that particular downside to be true of most of my classes, so most likely, this one will stay.

* Though not in the "No more 100 degree days in Tucson" sense, of course.

2008-07-13T20:04:00.002-07:00

9pm is kinda late to be eating dinner -- for me, at least. But I got off to a pretty slow start today (out of bed a little before 10, breakfast at 1pm...) so I guess it's not too bad. Anyhow, it's 8pm now, and there's just under an hour left on the oven's timer, so my goal is to write for an hour, then eat a yummy meal of a Cornish game hen and some baby potatos. Its mostly the yummy part that's up in the air, though it's a hard dish to screw up, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

Anyhow, last week (err, last time I posted...) I'd finished describing my trip to Boston, and left off with a cryptic comment about a "jailbreak". I'm sure my techie friends probably had a good idea of what I was talking about, and any Apple fanboys probably even had strong opinions about it, but for the rest of you, I'm gonna disappoint you by explaining that I have not been inside a jail lately, let alone broken out of one. Rather, it's my iPod that I broke out of its jail; Apple ships iPods like mine and iPhones with a stripped down version of their operating system, but the lock them down much more than they do their computers, so there's no way to add non-Apple-approved software to them, or to access most parts of the filesystem. The protections that they put in place to prevent this are known as a software "jail", and the process of slipping past those protections and unlocking access to the full features of the system is called a "jailbreak". Why isn't it just called "unlocking"? I'm not sure; the obvious answer is that the geeks who figured out how to do it thought jailbreak sounded cooler, but a more reasoned answer is that since this applies mostly to iPhones, the term "unlocking" already applies to a different function, that of freeing a cellular phone from dependence on a particular wireless provider, so that had to come up with a different term, and jailbreak already had the aforementioned cool factor going for it. So anyway, I can now do arcane things like create SSH tunnels, perform nmap scans, and connect to VNC servers from my iPod. Mostly useless, but fun, and I imagine that I will (every once in a rare while) come across a situation where I'm glad I have these "features". So, that pretty much covers the jailbreak. I did pretty much immediately after getting back from Boston, as I'd somewhat scared myself while trying to ressurect my laptop; what if I'd been stuck there for a week with a dead laptop!? I know, it may not sound all that bad to most of you, but trust me, it would be my own personal version Abu Ghraib... I'd make up and spill my innermost secrets in a heartbeat...

Moving on, I spent the 4th of July and a couple of surrounding days in California -- I rode my scooter out to Twentynine Palms to meet up with Matt and Jason, a couple of military buddies of mine, who for their own demented reasons both decided to stay in the Marine Corps for the long haul. Anyhow, we had a packed few days. Not wanting to stay in the triple-digit heat of the desert, we drove out to Temecula and went to a handful of wineries, where we discovered the delightful fact that most of the wineries had military discounts, and one (incidentally, the best winery we visited) even offered free tastings to active-duty military (prompting Ian, another Marine who went with us) to suggest making it a daily destination.) After the wine tasting, we went over to the San Diego County Fair, where we scared ourselves silly on the rides, particularly this one, called the Evolution, which had us harnessed in to benches, then spinning around and turning over; towards the end, something holding the benches in place is let loose, and we ended up falling off the benches and basically screaming for our while holding on to our harnesses windering what possesed us to go on the ride.

The next day was the 4th, and we spent it at Del Mar beach, a military beach on Camp Pendleton, which is where we've spent the 4th of July for the last three years. We took a couple of tarps and a lot of Margaritas, and just hung out in the sand all day. It was cloudy and a tiny bit chilly, so I didn't spend much time in the water, but we had a blast. The only downside to this year's trip was that about a half hour before the firework show, the fog rolled back in, and we didn't really get to see more than a few of the biggest fireworks.

Saturday we drove from Pendleton into Los Angeles, and met my cousin Rene at the Yard House for lunch. After lunch we went to the California Science Center, hung out at a Barnes and Noble for awhile, then in the evening we went to a club in Hollwood with a couple of Matt's former roommates.

Sunday was depressing for both Matt and I, in that it marked our return to our respective deserts; we drove back to 29 Palms, and I headed on from there to Tucson. The trip was going well, but a couple hours outside of Phoenix, I started to see two large storms in the distance, one on either side of the road I was on. As I approached, I was feeling pretty good about my chances of avoiding them -- they didn't seem to be moving very fast, and I was still headed between them. Unfortunately, as I entered Aguila, a tiny town along the route, the highway slightly to the south, and I was staring right at the larger of the two storm clouds. I kept going, and the storm wasn't really all that bad -- there was a little bit of hail, and a lot of wind and rain. The worst part was not knowing how long the storm would last, or when it would stop getting worse. At one point my visibility was bad enough that I had to pull over on to the shoulder and wait for a couple of minutes, but other than that I crept down the road on my scooter and did my best to ignore the sogginess of every square inch of my clothing. Anyhow, I got through the storm, and kept going until I reached Surprise, AZ, where I stopped for gas. To my absolute horror, I couldn't find my wallet. After scouring the scooter and all of my pockets several times, I realized that just before the storm, I'd stopped to put on my jacket, and had taken my phone and iPod out of my pockets and put them inside the "trunk" on the back of the bike. Although I patted my pockets to make sure my wallet was there, it must have been jogged just loose enough to fall out in the storm, so I was stranded there with no money, no credit cards, and not enough gas to get anywhere. Fortunately I was able to get a hold of a friend in Scottsdale (about 50 miles away) who came out, let me crash at his house, and lent me enough money to get home the next morning. I'm still waiting for my replacement driver's license to arrive, along with my various bank cards, but fortunately I'd left at home my debit card for Missy's bank account, so I've been stealing her money for the last week.

Well, it's been just over an hour now, and the smell of garlic and oregano is starting to become distracting, so I'm going to call it quits for now and go eat. Chow! err, Ciao!

My Week In Review

2008-06-22T20:39:00.002-07:00

Okay, so I know it's a little cheeky to post nothing to my blog for the better part of two months, then casually imply that I post at least weekly, but regardless, here goes. As a matter of fact, the title comes from two different trains of thought which ended up colliding with each other and leaving a mess of wrecked railway cars all over the place inside my already disorganized mind. The first was that I've had a pretty interesting week, and have been coming up with all sorts of things to write about if only I had the time. Initially I was jotting these things down, but then my computer crashed on me, and that kind of turned out to be a wasted effort. The second thought was ... drumroll ... that I don't write enough on my blog, and I should try to do something at least once a week. Once a week, granted, isn't much. It's certainly not ambitious in any way, but it's better than nothing, and it's better than the perhaps once a month (if that) that I've been writing up to now. So, the mishmash or unrelated ideas and the vague goal of once-a-week blogging coalesced* in my aforementioned clutter of a brain into the trainwreck that is to be My Week In Review. And if I actually write at least three each month, I'll consider it somewhat of a success.

* unrelated: coalesce is approximately the word I want here, but the nuance is completely wrong. Is there a word for that? It's technically more of a synonym than an antonym, but still, it's got to be an anti- something...

A Very Long Day (for an old man)

Monday was a long day; it started around 7 AM, in Tucson (thus MST), like most days do for me during summertime, but it didn't end until about 7:30 AM, in Boston (thus EDT). Since you know that

It was a long day
7:30AM EDT is actually earlier than 7 AM MST, and
Time travel will be released about the same time as DNF

it's safe to assume that my waking Monday lasted somewhere about in the low-20-hours range. Which would actually be fine if I were still my my low-20's, but I'm not.

The Geek Conference

Anyhow, I went to work, then came home and headed to the airport for a trip to Boston, where I attended the RedHat Linux summit, an event put on by none other than RedHat, along with Intel, IBM, and a host of lesser linux-bandwagon companies. The conference was great; I went to technical sessions on a host of topics, many of which I felt completely bewildered by (ATA over Ethernet, SELinux policies and domains, realtime debugging). The presenters, almost all of whom were RedHat/Fedora/Linux developers, were often less than eloquent when presenting but usually came into their own in the Q&A sessions that followed pretty much every presentation; this didn't come as a suprise to me; geeks, after all, tend to be awkward turtles in front of crowds, but give us a specific technical problem to work on and we come alive.

Design Patterns

Of course, the people they were talking to were sysadmins and developers, predominately -- in other words, gurus -- except that there, in front of these uber-gurus, we were users of the operating systems, tools, and technologies that were being presented. And so, as true users, we managed to ask an awful lot of absolutely stupid questions. To their credit, the gurus managed to do a superb job of keeping a straight face when asked completely ridiculous questions, but I started to see patterns emerge in their answers. It's as if some agile development people got together with marketing and PR people and wrote up a list of design patterns for deflecting idiots. Fortunately, I was there to translate (quietly to myself, mostly):

"That would be an interesting feature..." -- You are insane
"I don't know why you would do that, but..." -- You are an idiot
"That's an exaggeration, actually..." -- Our marketing bunnies lied to you
"That wouldn't be difficult at all..." -- So do it yourself

And my favorite:

"What I think you meant to ask was ... " -- That was such a blindingly stupid question that I'm going to give an unrelated answer in hopes that you'll have some time to realize your mistake and not embarrass yourself with an attempt at a "clarifying" followup

Speeches Galore

Prior to the technical sessions each day, we were subjected treated to several hours of keynotes. The conflicted choice of verbs in the previous sentence was intentional -- the quality varied greatly between the various sessions. The best, in my opinion, was Joel Cohen, who is a comedy writer, most prominently for The Simpsons. His talk was less focused on the general theme of the conference than many of the others, though he did have a few talking points that he dutifully brought up. Mostly, though, he cracked jokes about his work, The Simpsons, Fox, and pretty much everything else. Sadly, that talk turned out to be one of the few that was not posted on RedHat's website for public consumption. One of the other highlights, though, was a talk from the Dean of Technology at Harvard Medical School, who spoke about using open standards to increase interoperability in the medical information community; trust me when I say it was interesting, because it was way better than it sounds on paper.

Sports

Ahh, yes, I was in Boston when the Celtics won the world series. Err, something like that. It actually was confusing on Friday night, because the Red Sox apparently hosted the Celtics at Fenway Park; even though I'd only had a kahlua and coffee earlier, it made me think maybe it was time to catch up on my sleep. There was also a big parade on Thursday, which went right past the conference center, but unfortunately I almost entirely missed it because I was trying desperately to find a reliable wifi signal, because I'd almost completely broken my laptop earlier that morning.

Doh!

So, since I was going to a linux conference, I figured I'd want a linux machine to play around with. My laptop, however, is running XP, and I like it that way. Since I definitely didn't want to take two systems, I figured I'd just set up a linux virtual machine and use that as a sandbox for the week. Unfortunately, the place I was staying didn't have reliable wireless access, and though I brought a Fedora 9 DVD, I din't bring VMware. So I thought "what the heck, I'll just dual boot it" and set up Fedora in some empty space on my hard drive. That part, actually, worked out fine. But dual booting wasn't really what I had in mind, and for some reason Fedora made my wireless issues even worse, so once I got settled in at the conference center, I downloaded VMware, and went about trying to get Fedora running inside it. Using the disk partition that I'd set up earlier to run on it's own. Before you scoff -- I've done this before.

It works. I. Have. Done. It. Before. And I thought it was pretty straightforward.

Apparently not.

Somehow I managed to disappear my partition table. Completely. Fortunately I figured this out before rebooting, so I downloaded and burned an XP CD as a precaution (thinking how foolish it was that I'd taken mine out of my bag before my trip), and went about trying to fix them problem, but before too long I confused my hard drive just a little too much and windows bluescreened. Sighing about the various minor bits of data I'd lost, I put the XP CD in and started rebuilding my system...but the CD didn't quite burn right. I was able to install something that looked like Windows, but it wasn't. I couldn't get any drivers to load, and software to install, or do much of anything, really, other than play freecell. Then I remembered my Fedora CD. So, I installed Fedora, managed to get it on a wireless network, and downloaded yet another copy of XP. This time it worked; after two more failed downloads, I should say. Finally I was able to get a working system again, but the whole process took the better part of one keynote, three technical sessions, and of course, the Celtics' parade.

Culture

Boston wasn't all geekery and reinstalling operating systems more geekery; I got to experience some culture as well. My personal views on the world of culture can pretty much be summed up in two words: sushi and books. Actually, naturally caffeinated beverages rank pretty high as well. Anyhow, I didn't even realize it until midway through the week, but every time I tallied up the places I'd been, I'd gone to about as many bookstores or libraries as all other places combined. Tuesday afternoon before the conference started I went to Cambridge, and my itinerary was roughly:

Grab coffee and a scone outside Harvard
Stop in at used bookstore outside Harvard
Wander into Map/Travel bookstore outside Harvard
Hurry wistfully past a Borders outside Harvard, consider getting latte and browsing their books
Browse the selection at a children's bookstore outside Harvard
Pick up a pocket map of Boston at Staples
Find my way back to Harvard Station and head back into Boston

Of course, when anyone asked me what I did, I simply said "Oh, I went to Harvard and did some sightseeing". On Wednesday, I asked one of my hosts where to get good sushi in town, and was directed to a little basement restaurant on Newberry Street. Newberry Street is apparently Boston's equivalent to Fifth Avenue in New York or Rodeo Drive in...California. Somewhere. Anyway, it was clearly the fashion district. Despite that, the sushi was impressively good -- especially considering that they used brown rice, which so far hadn't ever worked out for me at U.S. sushi places -- and quite reasonably priced. After dinner, I went to a Borders (hey, it was on the way to the subway).

The conference ended early Friday afternoon, so I had some time to spend. I was somewhat tired, and had planned to sightsee on Saturday, so I cast around for something laid back to do. I was staying about a block from the Boston Symphony Hall, so I decided to see if there was a performance scheduled. To my delight, there was, and I got tickets to hear the Boston Pops and Angela Palmer perform. It was a little bit of an odd matchup -- I'd never heard of Palmer, but apparently she's a famous Boston indie artist; the programme descripbed her as one of the leading performers of "punk-cabaret" so I really had no idea what to expect. It was an odd performance. The Pops were great, as was Palmer, but they were very different, and trying to make them work together didn't work out very well. To my great amusement, however, I was seated at a small table with a couple of older ladies who were visiting from Milwaukie. If you've ever heard Julie Mitzel tell a story that had any lines spoken by an old lady, well, then you know exactly what they sounded like when they spoke. Anyhow, they were very excited to be there, and their enthusiam wasn't dampened at all by the fact that the "amazing deal" their concierge had gotten them for their tickets turned out to be significantly more than the box office price. It was dampened somewhat by the punk/goth/emo/whatever people surrounding them in the audience -- one turned to me after a few minutes of frenzied exclamations to her sister over a guy with about a footlong spiked mowhawk and said "we're veeery conservative in Milwaukie". They were very nice company though; they seemed to have a great time, and it was a testament to Palmer's performance that midway through it -- after coming onstage in a corset and tails, and dropping an F-bomb that garned gasps from more of the audience than just my tablemates -- one of the ladies turned to the other and said "oh, isn't she CUTE?", though I don't think that "cute" was exactly what she was going for.

Oh yeah, and between buying my Pops tickets and actually going to the show, I had a few hours still to spend, so I went to see a matinee of Get Smart. As a huge fan of Steve Carrell, I highly recommend it.

M.I.T.

Saturday I actually did some sightseeing -- I went to Boston Commons, back to the Sushi place, pretty much all over downtown, then I went back out to Cambridge and wandered around M.I.T. This time I was looking for the library, but couldn't find the one I wanted -- you know, the one with the computer books, of course -- as there were about a dozen, and none of them actually seemed to be related to computer science. So I headed for the most promising one, and discovered that the little cluster of core buildings in M.I.T. -- where the library was supposed to be -- leaves a lot to be desired on the usability front. Typical engineers. Anyhow, I decided that if I couldn't find the freaking computer book library on campus, it's probably a good thing that I didn't get accepted there back in 2002.

Big Sigh. I'll get over it. Someday.

Maybe.

Falling back to plan B, I went to the campus bookstore.

Home

Saturday afternoon rolled around, and I headed to the airport to come home. My flight from Logan to Las Vegas was delayed, which was ominous since the last time I had a delayed flight into Vegas, I missed the Tucson connection and had to stay overnight, but fortunately I made my flight with a few minutes to spare, and managed to get home at about 2 AM, MST. Miraculously, Ben's fish were still alive, Missy's tomato plant hadn't died, and my scooter was right where I'd left it, in the middle of the living room. Since it was late and I hadn't turned the light on, I ran into it with one birkenstock-clad foot, and nearly took a toenail off.

But I was home. And it felt great.

Next week: Jailbreak!

Stained-glass CPI

2008-05-05T07:57:00.002-07:00

I'm a bit of a sucker for interesting data visualizations, be they useful or otherwise. Over the weekend, the NYTimes posted a very intuitive view of the U.S. Consumer Price Index, a measure of how and where we spend our money:

An Average Consumer's Spending

Personally, I feel that rectangles (particularly squarified treemaps) tend to do a much better job of displaying the relativity of this type of data, but I have to admit that the semi-random bubbles on this particular graph were very, very pretty. The heat-map representation of rate of change is also pretty cool; unsurprisingly, oil-related spending was the big gainer. The only thing I don't quite get is the exact nature of the relationship between "rent" and "owner equivalent rent", but I suspect a few moments of CPI research would clear that up.

In Tech We Trust

2008-05-01T09:02:00.003-07:00

The article got off to a bad start. In writing about a pretty cool new DARPA project, IEEE Spectrum referenced a military incident involving Israel and Syria in which Syria's radars apparently failed to function as intended, then brought up the spectre of chip-level hardware sabotage. Their basis for this theory, over, say, the fact that Israel has some pretty good fighters and special forces units? Military analysts, perhaps, or off-the-record conversations with chip makers? No, it was entirely based on "military and technology bloggers," of course.

Many of my professors refuse to allow Wikipedia as a source when writing a research paper. While this is sometimes an annoyance, I can see their point -- Wikipedia strives to always be a secondary source for information, which means that either the information in it has a reference to an authoritative source, or it's potentially unfounded. Apparently journalists need a similar restriction on using blogs in their work -- either put in the effort to track down a legitimate source (many bloggers are highly respected experts; many orders of magnitude more are not) or just don't write it.

Anyhow, once I got past my initial irritation with the author -- and my amusement at the mistaken assertion that "the universe has existed for about 4 × 1017 seconds" or just over an hour -- the article was quite interesting. The basic premise is that we in the information age tend to put blind trust in the building blocks of our technology to work the way they claim to; the Department of Defense, realizing that this might be an okay for an iPod, but not for a stealth bomber, is sponsoring Trust in Integrated Circuits, a research program looking for ways to verify the functionality of the microscopic electronics that make up the brains of virtually any modern gadget.

Personally, I'm nowhere near smart enough to participate in this type of exercise; like most geeks, I have a general understanding of how chips are supposed to work, but wouldn't know where to begin looking when they don't, except to sniff around for a faint smell of ozone. However, it appears that Raytheon, one of the two or three top employers of (smart) graduates from my department, is among the most likely contenders for the research dollars that come with this program. I'm always amused when I ask my friends that have started working there what they do -- every single one of them has responded with "Oh, I'm writing (or debugging) code for radar systems." I'm convinced that during orientation, they've been told to use this instead of the more traditional line "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you". After all, while I realize that "it takes a lot of people to write radar code" (the response I got from one person when I pointed this out) people at every other company I've talked to -- GD, Google, IBM, Lockheed, Microsoft -- tend to give varied answers, but apparently Raytheon is REALLY into radars.

Anyhow, here's to hoping they can use some of that radar code to sniff out bad chips, because let me tell you, if one day my iPod gets shut down remotely, the terrorists will have won. Big time.

Partie Deux

2008-04-28T11:42:00.002-07:00

I'm proud of my kids.

Suppose, for a moment, that I'd led into that with a brief intro; I had intended to do exactly that, but it didn't quite work out. The irony here is that the mailing list story had nothing to do with my original reason for wanting to write this, really; a couple of birthday parties did, however.

Ben started kindergarten this year, and is in a class that is a combined K-2 class; for the uninitiated, that means that Ben will (conceivably) be in that class through second grade; it also means that he's in a slightly bigger than normal class. In the past couple of months, we've had quite a few birthday parties to attend (or throw -- Ben's birthday was in February) for current or former classmates, and as the excitement was building for a recent party -- this process takes several days; if it was allowed to continue much longer than that I think our kids would literally explode with unfulfilled anticipation -- Ben stopped gushing about the wonders of the upcoming party, looked at me with a serious face, and asked "Is Maya going to come with us?"

My usual response to this type of question is to assure him that no, Maya will be perfectly fine alone at home for a few hours; in fact, we're thinking of going out of town for a few weeks and leaving her to enjoy some peace and quiet. It's fun to watch Ben's response to this type of answer; first, depending on whether he was hoping for a "yes" or "no",there'll be a moment of elation or disappointment, then concern as he realizes that my answer is out of sync with what he knows about the world, and finally amusement when it occurs to him that once again, Daddy is Joking. An accusatory scowl usually follows as he explains the folly of my ways. Anyhow -- off track once again -- this time, because the party was indeed of great importance to his little world, and I didn't want to trample his expectations too roughly, rather than suggesting that we'd leave Maya home, I asked him whether he was hoping for her to come. I really wasn't sure what the answer would be; Maya and Ben love to torment each other, and the "love" and the "torment" seem to be inseparable. I really wasn't sure if I'd talking to this Ben:

or this one:

As it turns out, Ben without hesitation replied that he did want Maya to come with us, and he brightened visibly when I told him that was part of the plan. He also very gallantly announced that Maya was quite welcome at his birthday party back in February, and more recently, he invited her along last week on a Benjamin-and-Daddy outing to a few nearby play areas (the mall, Himmel Park, and of course Jamba Juice). I know that it might be a long shot for me to hope that this kind of accord between the two of them will continue ("kepe out" signage notwithstanding -- that policy has been completely unenforced in the weeks since it was posted) but even so, I do hope that they'll continue to love tormenting each other for a very long time, maybe even forever.

Mailing Lists I'm Proud of My Offspring, Part 1

2008-04-25T13:36:00.007-07:00

I've been on a handful of U of A mailing lists since I started working/studying here; mostly technical lists for IT people. As with any online community, the long-running discussions that come up through these emails tend to imbue the authors' email addresses with a personality that may or may not jibe with the authors' real life personas. And although I'm sure some people actually glean useful info from these lists, I'm still subscribed more for the entertainment factor than anything else -- I generally ignore 95% of the chatter and tune in only when I'm specifically asked to, or when I see a juicy topic pass by that's just too good to pass up. This hands-off policy has gotten me a bit of a reputation for commenting rarely, and only to either add genuinely useful data to the conversation, or to steer it wildly (and deliberately) off-course; there's usually no middle ground for me.

I further reinforced this the other day when I started catching up on a too-long-running discussion about energy-saving measures we could take at the university, and whether more harm would be done than good by, for example, turning off computers at night (my favorite suggestion: we turn off servers on evenings and weekends; no more after-hours support duty!) Anyhow, it was a pretty typical discussion, until one of the admins, a self-described "confirmed auntie", suggested that really, if we were serious about minimizing our carbon footprints, we should all stop having kids. Or at least stop having so many.

Now, I don't know about you, but I've never really thought of IT as the "baby factory" demographic that it seems to be in this woman's mind, but apparently I and others in our happy little geek family are having way too many kids for her. I certainly don't care if she or anyone else decides not to have any children; it's great decision for some people, and it's one that I'm sure just about every parent has thought longingly about at 3:00 a.m. while scrubbing poop of their elbows. But it's none of her business how many kids I have, and more importantly she was doing it wrong. I mean seriously, how hard is it to derail a serious yet mundane email thread!? She tried, and failed.

My reply was that although Confirmed Auntie had gotten us off to an okay start, if we were really serious about environmental impact, we'd not merely remove ourselves from the gene pool, but from the CO2 emission pool as well...just stop breathing for a while, and see where that takes you, so to speak. Talk about becoming part of the solution, rather than part of the problem!

This had the desired effect -- while the thread continued for a while, I don't think I saw a single email after my that actually had anything to do with IT or rational, measured strategies to mitigate power use on campus (of course, the latter had died out long before I came along.)

Anyhow, I really didn't mean to get into all of that; I actually started typing with the intent of saying how proud I am of my two kids. The above was supposed to be a brief intro, a segue; not an entire blog post of it's own. But I'm already reaching my internal limit on this post (also, I'm hungry) so I'll continue later.

Time well spent

2008-04-09T12:01:00.001-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, my mom sent me a link to a ten minute video of Randy Pausch giving a speech on Oprah. A Carnegie-Mellon professor of Computer Science diagnosed with terminal cancer, Dr. Pausch was delivering a shortened version of a now famous speech he delivered at CMU as part of their "Last Lectures" series, answering the question "If you had one final opportunity to speak to your students, what would you say?" After watching and being impressed by his speech, I went ahead and took the time to watch the full thing on YouTube; it was well worth it. Anyhow, an article in yesterday's Times reminded me that I'd meant to share the video and hadn't gotten around to it. So, if you have some time:

The NYT article
The short version
The full speech

Japan: The beginning of the end of an era

2008-03-25T12:05:00.003-07:00

One of the things about Japanese culture that always amazed me was their reliance on vending machines for a massive array of retail products. As in the U.S., you can buy basic food and drinks, but in Japan, beer, smokes, pizza, sex toys, and articles of clothing (sometimes worn). To be fair, as far as I can tell, the latter two are mostly found in love motels (yet another oddity of Japanese culture, but one that makes a fair bit of sense when understood), but even so, the Japanese are way ahead of us when it comes to vending machines; the closest thing I've seen in the U.S. was a vending machine in a major airport selling iPods, which didn't make a lot of sense to me -- how are you going to get music on an iPod in an Airport!?

Anyhow, the great thing about the alcohol and tobacco dispensers in Japan is that they never asked for I.D. -- if you had correct change, you got your vice fix. However, in an apparent response to abuse of this "feature" (who knew?) the Japanese tobacco association is introducing the "Tobacco Passport", or, in true Japanese style, the "Taspo," an RFID card that can only be obtained at the age of twenty. Read more about it on the official site (In Japanese here -- showoff).

What impact this will have on 18 and 19 year old Marines and Airmen, I don't know. I suspect that cigarettes are cheaper on base anyhow, but I know a few guys who had odd fetishes for specific Asian brands of smokes, though I never cared enough to find out where they bought them.

Nerdcore and Geek Folk -- More free brain candy

2008-02-25T12:36:00.001-07:00

So, lately I've been trying to rediscover my ipod. Not that I've ever failed to use it regularly, but my playlist editors had been getting lonely; other than on our road trip over Christmas, I think the last time I'd made a new playlist was when I hastily gathered some kids songs together to replace "Maya's Mix", which iTunes had accidentally eaten one day. Why the sudden interest in the ipod? I'm trying to convince myself that I need a new one, a Touch to be specific. Granted, proving that my current one works fine for playing music is not a very good rationalization strategy, but it's all I've got right now. Plus, I can only fit about a quarter of my music on it; if I get a new one, I'd be able to walk around with at least half of my music, maybe even more...ya, I'll keep working on it...

So, anyhow, what have I been putting on my ipod? A lot of stuff, but in particular, I've been enjoying a couple of artists who are relatively unique in that they both release their music for free, one under a Creative Commons license, the other with no specific license that I can find, but available for free download. The first of these is MC Plus+, an "Iranian-American nerdcore rapper" from Purdue who sings about encryption ("Alice and Bob"), disses Engineering and MIS ("Dear Engineer"), and so on. I was introduced to MC Plus+ by a friend who is a web designer here in Tucson, and I think probably only people who work with computers all day long are gonna get much out of this genre.

For some music which probably has a wider appeal, check out Jonathan Coulton*, a geeky Folk signer from Yale. I first came across his music without really realizing it ~ there's a code monkey at Adobe who thought it would be fun to create machinima music videos for some of his music using WoW, and who created what is probably the best-known version of Coulton's work, a video featuring "Code Monkey," an ape, a night elf, and a goblin. Seriously, though, the music does have all-around appeal; other tracks celebrate Ikea and Skymall (so-named, respectively), and "Creepy Doll" lives up to it's name fairly well. I'd forgotten all about Code Monkey until a completely random Facebook status update from a friend of mine who now works at Google brought it back to my mind, and I discovered that Coulton had recorded quite a bit of music. Much of his music can be downloaded for free from his website, though he charges for some of the tracks. If you're too cheap to buy it, it's perfectly legal to download via P2P (how often do I get to say that? Pretty much never, unless I'm talking about linux install CDs).

* His site has been up and down for me today; ymmv.

Updated: Having posted a link to Coulton's music on The Pirate Bay, I realized that the music posted there was not entirely free, legally speaking. A number of Coulton's songs are covers of songs like "Baby Got Back", "We Are The Champions", "We Will Rock You", and the like. These songs aren't CC licensed, so treat them the same as anything else you're likely to find on TPB. If you REALLY want to hear one of Coulton's songs and can't find it anywhere you're comfortable with, let me know.

School

2008-01-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again, the time when I disappear from Critical Moss and get absorbed into keeping up with my classes. I'm registered for four classes this semester, but only really need to take three of them -- the fourth is there mostly for fun, and partly to keep the VA from screwing up my last few months of G.I Bill coverage. If I find that this is too heavy of a course load, I'll cut back to "only" three classes.

The three "required" classes I'm taking are CS352, a course in unix programming; CS401, a course in digital logic, and Hist343, a course in, well...some kind of history. It's not exactly a required class, but I do need the upper division credit, so there you have it. The "other" class I'm taking is Chem103B, which is the second semester of general chemistry. I've already taken the engineering equivalent of this course, which is why it isn't required, but I took it a long time ago, and I did fairly poorly. Plus I really enjoyed my professor from last semester, and his section was open when I was registering.

As mentioned, I'm pretty bad at keeping my blog up to date when I have other stuff going on, but I'll do my best!

A few more pics...

2008-01-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

here, I've added some pictures from Christmas morning, and from a sledding excursion a day or so later.

Sevens

2008-01-04T10:36:00.001-07:00

We've been home for a couple of days now, but I've been too exhausted and busy with other stuff to update this site, though of course I did update the map (see below; if I don't bother linking it from this post, it's on quite a few older ones).

The title of this post comes from my obsession with finding interesting number patterns on our odometer; you have to do something to ward of boredom on long road trips...and trips to the store. This habit causes Missy no small amount of annoyance, since frankly, I'm pretty liberal about my definition of "interesting patterns". However, shortly after leaving Kingman, our odometer turned over 77777 miles. I told Missy that we should have headed back to Las Vegas just, and parked in a casino right at 77777, miles; our car would be very lucky, though WE probably would have lost our shirts...

Just south of Phoenix we hit 78,000, and since we got the oil changed a day or so before our trip at 72,770 miles, that means we went slightly over 5,000 miles on this trip. All without any wrecks, engine/transmission problems, serious bad weather, or tickets. Quite amazing, and frankly, more than I expected out of our car. Or my driving abilities. We did lose one set of keys, a shoe, a ring, and a glove, but its still possible that some or all of these things will turn up, either in the depths of our car, or in our mailbox; the ring was already found by my aunt Kathy and mailed back to us.

Anyhow, I have a few pictures from Idaho which I will put online shortly, and some videos of the kids sledding only one of which has successfully uploaded. I'll let you know when they're available.

I have to give some credit for staying awake over the 60-75 or so hours of driving that I did to the music on my iPod; spending that much time in the car gave me an opportunity to listen to a lots of well-liked music, and well as to discover some new music. My rather eclectic "Road Trip" playlist, by the end of the trip, was made up of the following songs, the only criteria being that the music not put me to sleep:

Alibi	Doubletop	Firewater
I`m Not Strong Enough To Say N	BlackHawk	Strong Enough
Me Love	Sean Kingston	Sean Kingston
If I Had $1000000	Barenaked Ladies	Gordon
Kryptonite	3 Doors Down	The Better Life
Smack That (Ft. Eminem)	Akon	Konvicted (Deluxe Edition)
Stacy's Mom	Fountains Of Wayne	Welcome Interstate Managers
Sway (Bonus)	The Pussycat Dolls	PCD
Bubble Pop Electric (Feat. Joh	Gwen Stefani	Love. Angel. Music. Baby
Reckless	Alabama	For The Record
God Blessed Texas	Little Texas	Little Texas: Greatest Hits
Sad Lookin` Moon	Alabama	Dancin` On The Boulevard
Bye Bye	Jo Dee Messina	I'm Alright
One More Night	Cascada	Everytime We Touch
The Trinity	Sean Paul	The Trinity
All Good Things (Come To An E	Nelly Furtado	Loose
Silver Thunderbird	Jo Dee Messina	I'm Alright
Remember The Name (Ft. Styles	Fort Minor	The Rising Tied
Temperature	Sean Paul	The Trinity
Banana Pancakes	Jack Johnson	In Between Dreams
Bananza	Akon	Trouble
Dancin`, Shaggin` On The Boul	Alabama	Dancin` On The Boulevard
Lonely Boy	BlackHawk	Love & Gravity
Lonely	Akon	Trouble
Hung Up On You	Fountains Of Wayne	Welcome Interstate Managers
Gangsta Bop	Akon	Konvicted (Deluxe Edition)
Blown Away (Ft. Styles P)	Akon	Konvicted (Deluxe Edition)
Stronger	Kanye West	Graduation
Sorry, Blame It On Me	Akon	Konvicted (Deluxe Edition)
Fast Movin' Train	Restless Heart	The Best Of Restless Heart
Hot Stuff (I Want You Back)	The Pussycat Dolls	PCD
Hate (I Really Don't Like You)	Plain White T's	Every Second Counts (Deluxe Edition)
Your Sister	Sean Kingston	Sean Kingston
How To Save A Life	The Fray	How To Save A Life
Hey There Delilah (Bonus)	Plain White T's	Every Second Counts (Deluxe Edition)
Amy's Back in Austin	Little Texas	Little Texas: Greatest Hits

Ringing in the New Year

2008-01-01T00:18:00.000-07:00

We're home, in a sense -- we've made it back to the right state, at least. In the original scheme of things, I guess we would have actually been back in Tucson yesterday, but then we stayed an extra day in Boulder, so we pushed back our departure from Idaho by a day. Then we decided to stop overnight in Reno, at Trish and Dave's house...and we spent an extra day there. Obviously, we're not terribly good at stopping overnight anywhere other than at a Days Inn (incidentally, where we are now -- our third this trip). Our excuse yesterday was that Maya had gotten some pretty bad diaper rash, and we needed a place where she could run around for a day without a diaper on; where better than a relative's house? At least they have hardwood floors. Plus, Trish offered to babysit if we wanted to go out, so Missy and I went to see I Am Legend (I never thought Missy would go to another "scary movie") and to Starbucks. Maya, diaperless, peed on their bed while we were gone; at least they have dogs, so they're kind of used to it. Later, Missy and Trish went out to a casino and got a few free drinks while playing poker, and (supposedly) broke even, more or less.

Anyhow, I'd sort of hoped to make it home in a marathon trip today, but it was not to be. We lost 45 minutes in Reno trying to find the best route home, then once we finally got on the road, Ben threw up all over his seat. Oh, did I mention that Missy has been terribly sick today? She woke up with a bit of a stomach flu, and it only progressed throughout the day. Finally around midday, Missy, Ben and Maya all fell asleep, and I was able to get in a couple hours of driving uninterrupted by urgent trips to the bathroom or the side of the road. Wanting to make tomorrow an easier day, I kept pushing on, even after everyone woke up. As we were debating where to stop, I asked Missy what the next major town after Kingman was, and without looking at the map, she instantly responded "Divorce". After weighing my options for a while, I decided that it might be best to stop in Kingman for the night; we're not supposed to get divorced for a few more years.

Anyhow, we should be home tomorrow...or rather, later today! Happy New Year!

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"Like a drunk sorority girl"

2007-12-25T22:44:00.000-07:00

Those were Missy's words around 5 a.m. (approximately; that's about what it felt like to me, while Missy, who usually checks the clock, doesn't remember anything until about 7:30 or so) to describe Maya last night when I followed the muffled cries into the closet and dragged Maya out from under a row of hanging clothes, still in her party dress from the night before. We'd gone out to Missy's aunt's house on Christmas Eve for their traditional family gathering, and Maya stayed up the whole time. By midnight, she was completely exhausted and passed out, not even stirring when I set her down on her makeshift bed in the closet doorway, so we left her in her dress and tights, taking off only her shoes.

We made it to Idaho in one piece

2007-12-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

Yes, miracles do happen; we made it to Idaho in one piece. Well, four pieces if you count us each separately, and 173,203 pieces if you include articles of dirty clothing and Cheerios...but you get the idea.

Anyhow, we're here. Missy's sister was in town yesterday, along with her husband and assorted kids, and we spent the evening at the Paulin family's Christmas Eve get together, where Ben spent the entire evening wrestling with second cousins, and Maya followed them around, occasionally getting caught in the crossfire, with typically disastrous results.

Ben woke up early this morning, of course, and made a beeline for the stockings. After "adjusting" the ownership of some of the items in his and Maya's stockings (he wanted the green snowball, not the red one, etc. Or maybe it was the other way arounds), he and Maya started in on their presents, while Missy raided a box of chocolate that her dad got for Christmas. Pictures and video will follow. For now, enjoy a video of Ben's first sledding trip.

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Some things have to be seen to be believed

2007-12-23T23:27:00.000-07:00

This leg of the trip was supposed to end in Idaho Falls, but bad weather in Wyoming forced a change of plans; we started on the southern route from Denver to Boise, and made it a little past Salt Lake City before everyone pooped out. We stopped at a Comfort Inn in Layton, Utah, and got a room and a pizza. By about 9:30 p.m. Maya, Ben, and Missy had all passed out, and I was still sort of tweaking from the copious amounts of caffeine and sugar that had fueled the last couple hundred miles of our trip, so I grabbed my laptop and headed down to the lobby. Hence, this blog post.

Anyhow, about half an hour after I came down, a crying woman came in and booked a room. I couldn't hear quite what transpired between her and the hotel desk clerk, but it clearly involved the Christmas tree that I was sitting next to. About ten minutes later, she came in from the parking lot with about half a dozen oversized shopping bags full of Christmas presents and set them under the tree. She looked over at me and asked if I was ready for some Christmas cheer; not knowing what to say, I replied that I was, and asked if I was going to be in anyone's way. A couple of minutes later, her three teenaged kids came in, and started laughing and protesting what was clearly going to be their Christmas celebration, a day early. I had to laugh at some of the comments ("Oh, look", pointing at me, "we even have guests over!") being made by the kids.

Anyhow, as I typed most of this up, they opened their presents by the tree, and then headed back up to their room. As best I could tell from the clerk's comments to a coworker, they'd left home nearby due to some sort of domestic disturbance (in-laws, perhaps?) and were trying to make the best of the situation. Once the kids got into the spirit, they seemed to have just as much fun as any family I'd ever been around on Christmas day, so though I don't know who they are, here's to a merry Christmas to this family over the next couple of days.

Wow, it's amazing how far you can travel in a day if you pretend that cops don't exist...

2007-12-21T21:49:00.001-07:00

...yeah, that pretty much sums up our day. Today was the longest day we have scheduled (so far) on our entire trip. I would update my Google Map of our trip, but I'm on a fairly limited net connection right now, and am actually posting this via email (here's to hoping you actually can SEE it!), so it'll have to wait. We made it from Ames, IA to Boulder, CO in pretty much exactly 12 hours, which works out to about 60mph, with kid-stops factored in. So, yeah somewhere upwards of 80mph on average when we were actually driving. I know, of course, how fast I was going most of the time, but I have a policy of not admitting to illegal activities on my blog, ergo the vagueness. And while we're on that subject, I've never physically assaulted an ECE professor, I was merely a "person of interest" once or twice...

Anyhow, we're in Boulder, and staying at my aunt Kathy's house. We're probably actually going to take an extra day here, since the next trip will also be fairly long, and there are people we'd like to see while we're here. I've done a horrible job of keeping in touch with my aunt Kathy and her children; I found out today that I've taken trips to the towns where both of her girls live within the last year or so, but never got in touch with them. I didn't even realize that my cousin Sarah, who has a son a little younger than Ben, was living in Portland, where we went for a wedding a month or so ago. So, I guess I have some improvements to make in my personal communications...

Anyhow, on Sunday we'll head out to Idaho, and stay with one of Missy's aunts for the night before reaching New Plymouth, and the dreaded (by Missy more so than me) immediate family. Until then, safe travels, as applicable, to all, and have a great weekend!

As if we weren't driving enough...

2007-12-19T23:18:00.000-07:00

...we decided to make a side trip up to Cedar Falls, Iowa, home of the University of Northern Iowa, and of Seth Bokelman, and old friend of Missy's. Cedar Falls is about 90 miles away from Ames, so it wasn't a bad trip, but even so, the kids were a little antsy once they realized that we weren't just taking another in-town trip. Ben also realized that he'd left things at the hotel, which perturbed him. When we were back in the car on the return trip, he asked where we were going. I told him we were headed back to the hotel, and he asked "So that we can get my flashlight back?"

Anyhow, the trip was nice. We got to take a tour of UNI's server rooms, and see a little of the campus. Actually, we saw quite a bit of campus, but mostly just through a window -- it's COLD up here in Iowa in the wintertime (who knew?) Speaking of which, there's been a few inches of snow on the ground pretty much the whole time we've been driving since about Kansas, and Ben has been loving it; he's been tromping though it every chance he gets, throwing makeshift snowballs (snow handfuls, essentially) at Missy and I, and yesterday, we made his first ever snowman. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me, and I fell on a patch of ice on the way back to our room, so I didn't feel much like going back to take a picture. I'll try to get out there tomorrow to get a picture, though.

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Butterflies

2007-12-18T19:33:00.000-07:00

So, as mentioned, we spent much of the day with Sande and Margo McNabb. They did not run us into the ground, but mostly because they did manage to wear Maya out, so we had to take her home for a nap. At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Breakfast was wonderful; after three days of eating absolutely horribly (there was McDonald's involved at least once) it was wonderful to sit down with a plate of fruit and veggies. The last couple weeks I'd kind of gotten into the habit of having salads for lunch, so eating junk food was taking its toll on my system.

Anyhow, after breakfast, we went with the McNabbs to the Reiman Gardens at Iowa State University. The Reiman Gardens is a large indoor and outdoor public garden, which has a conservatory and a large butterfly habitat. Earlier this year, we went to a very similar exhibit at the Tucson Botanical Gardens, though this one is far more polished and better presented. Nevertheless, there were a lot of similarities; non-native butterflies and moths are regulated by the USDA to protect native plants, insects, and habitat, so the butterfly rooms have "air lock"-type areas in which visitors have to be inspected to make sure that there aren't any stowaway butterflies on them; some of them are perfectly friendly and happy to land on a shoulder, leg, or head as you walk through. Most butterflies do best in warm humid climates; while this was somewhat evident at the Tucson Botanical Gardens, it was striking here in Ames in December, where the ground outside was covered with several inches of snow.

Maya was a bit grumpy by the time we got to the butterflies, and as usual when she's tired, she did NOT want to be held, so she struggled to get out of my arms. I was concerned that she'd go on an unintentional butterfly mauling rampage, but to her credit and my surprise, she was extremely gentle, didn't make any rapid motions, and while she touched plenty of plants, never managed to nail any butterflies.

We made it!

2007-12-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

We made it, finally, to Ames, the home of Missy's college mentor, Sande McNabb, and of his wife, Margo (Democrat). Tonight we'll be staying in our hotel, trying to work the kinks out of our backs, legs, shoulders, digestive systems, and whatever else we've managed to put through the wringer these last few days. Tomorrow we'll be visiting with Sande and Margo, and over the next few days we'll also hopefully get to see some of the campus here, and maybe some other old friends.

Missy went to school at Gonzaga, of course, but the summer after her freshman year (oh so long ago...) she spent doing an internship in plant pathology with Sande at Iowa State. This lead to some ongoing research after the summer was over, and to a friendship and mentoring relationship that has lasted much longer than that. The McNabbs came to visit us in Washington, D.C. in 2001, and despite being, well, old, they managed to run us into the ground. We visited tons of museums and places, and I think they probably kept on going for a few hours after we begged off to go home and soak our feet in salts. I'm pretty sure they got asked to leave Zanzibar's at about 1:00 a.m.

So, anyhow, I'm looking forward to seeing them in the morning, but I'm a little nervous; We've all gotten a few years older since the last time we saw them, but for me, proportionally speaking, it's a much bigger difference. Plus, I don't really work out any more to speak of (not that I did in the Marine Corps either...but that's a different story). Anyhow, I'll let you all know how it goes. As long as I don't have to spend time in the car tomorrow, I'll be a happy camper no matter what we do!

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Wi-Fi, Wy-Fi, Why Fi? The economics of free wireless internet service.

2007-12-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

WiFi internet service is the staple of most modern coffeeshops. Almost as much as the quality of soy double latte a barista can pull, the ability to provide a caffeine junkie's laptop with it's own invisible IV of information seems to define each individual coffee house today, at least near the campus that I spend my days on. In this regard, I can't stand Starbucks. Yes, they may be the company that brought France to Seattle, and Seattle to the rest of the U.S., and (along with MacDonalds), the U.S. to the rest of the world, but even so, Starbucks is not a place I go to sit and sip on my coffee; thanks to their insistence on charging à la carte for WiFi service, I've become one of those people I despise, the ones who actually prefer to find a Starbucks with a drive-through window. At any other coffee house -- Caffe Luce, Paraiso, or Bentley's in Tucson* -- I love to sit, not necessarily with my laptop out, but I like to have the option of doing some work, some studying, or just some mindless surfing while I enjoy my coffee

Anyhow, this post wasn't meant to be a rant about Starbucks; rather, its about pricing models that work for wireless access in different situations. I started thinking about this a few weeks ago; I'd gone to dinner with a friend at a fairly new pub opened by some friends of hers, and while there, got to catch up with yet another friend I hadn't spoken to in a while, an IT guy who's worked with a couple of the ISPs in Tucson. He mentioned that his company had installed wireless in the pub just recently, and that they offered two hours of free service to anyone, with an option to purchase access for a longer period. That struck me as an excellent way to balance convenience for customers with an ability to pay for the costs of offering bandwidth, and I filed it away in the back of my mind, until yesterday.

Last night we stayed at a Days Inn, in Albuquerque, and since they didn't trumpet it like most of the higher end hotels I've been to, I assumed that they wouldn't have any sort of WiFi service. I was pleasantly surprised to see two different "DaysInn" networks on my laptop, and even more surprised that they were completely free to use; unlike coffeeshops, hotels like to aggressively monetize their internet offerings. Again, at the hotel where I'm typing this, my internet service doesn't cost anything extra (they advertised "Wy-Fi" service, which made me a little nervous); I had to call down to the front desk to get a login for it, but I was assured that it was free, and sure enough, the login was a shared login for all visitors.

I started thinking about the hotels I've been in over the last couple of years that wanted anywhere from $5 to $15 for in-room internet access; most of them cater to business travelers, who like me consider the internet to be indispensable, and unlike me, probably rarely care or even notice if they have to pay a little extra. As an amusing (to me, and probably only to me) side note, when I interviewed with Google earlier this year, they put me up in a very nice hotel in downtown Seattle. My travel instructions specifically stated, however, that Google -- Google, mind you! -- would not reimburse me for any internet service charges I incurred. You want a nicer rental car? No problem! An extra day to sightsee in Seattle? Sure thing. But access to the internet? Who needs it? Nikesh, Bianca, if either of you is reading this, let Sergey, Larry and Eric know that y'all should probably rework that minor point in the recruiting process. Okay, non-amusing side story over.

Anyhow, I'm not sure that there's much of a point to this story. I'm sure that at least a few of the companies I've patronized have done some market research and determined that either giving bandwidth away for free to customers, or alternatively, charging them for it, is the best way to make money in their particular circumstances. Some of the other probably have taken the advice of their service providers, and still other probably ran down to Best Buy and picked up a wireless router, and told their tech guy to "just make it work, so we can put up a 'We have Wy-Fi' sign."

To those who offer their service for free (at least for the first hour or so, or to already paying customers) I say thank you. To Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, The Doubletree, and all the other companies out there who don't offer any kind of free service, well, y'all make a lot of money off of me every year already; you could make a lot more if you would just stop trying to ring five more bucks out of my every visit.

*Currently, in that order. Bring back the salmon quiche, Paraiso, and you'll move straight back to the top. Oh, and keep working on that liquor license; I want Irish coffee!

Liberal, Kansas

2007-12-16T21:08:00.000-07:00

So as it turns out, we didn't head to Oklahoma City today, after all. We were going that general direction, but decided to be brave and get off the interstate onto some unknown highways for a while. And it's turned out okay so far; we didn't run into any real traffic, or any serious slowdowns, and while the speed limit is a little lower, heading straight to Wichita will cut off a good bit of road. We were (at least, I was) hoping to make it all the way into Wichita today, which would have given us a nice easy day tomorrow, but the kids were getting cranky (and by kids, I mean Missy...) so we decided to find a place to stop where we could soak in a hot tub for a bit and get a good night's sleep, then hit the road early tomorrow.

Liberal Inn, in Liberal, Kansas, is where we ended up. I was worried about the whole "liberal" thing, as I of course, would be more comfortable in, say Moderate, Kentucky or something. Or maybe Just-right-of-center, Louisiana. As it turns out, though, they hunt pheasants here, which means they must own guns, and they all have trucks, so really, I'm not sure the name applies all that much. And they serve Dr. Pepper -- no Coke where I went for dinner, but they did have Dr. Pepper -- so I'm pretty sure the people are all right.

Tomorrow we're heading out early (in theory) and should get to Iowa by late afternoon if everything goes okay.