April 30th, 2008
So in the last four days, there have been three people give notice. Two of our developers and a TPM in our sister group. The two developers leaving are going to hurt, they were the two most senior on the team. I wish them the best, but it is going to suck for a while. The TPM leaving is a bit of surprise, but really not. He has been stuck in a world of pain for a long time and at some point people just say fuck it, I’m out of here. I guess there are a number of developers on his team thinking the same thing. That doesn’t speak well of management.
So I just took a peak at Kelly’s pictures from his chain & sprocket upgrade. I can’t believe he snapped off so many bolt heads in the process. I also can’t believe he doesn’t have work bench to-do that kind of thing on. Bending over and doing it on the floor must suck.
So tonight is Isaac’s first official swim lesson. I’ve been sort of teaching him myself as we have access to pools and I think he is actually pretty advanced. But this will be the first real class, we’ll see if I’m just daddy crazy or he really is comfortible with this stuff.
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April 27th, 2008
Remember how I said the new toilet came with everything you needed, well I lied. Of course the hose to connect the water from the wall about 2 inches to short to work, so I got to make a late afternoon run to Lowe’s to get a new one. I’m starting to like having the new Lowe’s so close, it isn’t really any closer then the Home Depot in Bellevue, but it takes about 20 minutes less to get there and back. I’m hoping that once Isaac goes to sleep tonight, I can finish the toilet install and again have my own private throne. :-)
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April 26th, 2008
I almost forgot – I’m getting hooked on twitter. The whole thing is crazy and cool at the same time. But I don’t have anybody following me, will you be my friend?
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April 26th, 2008
Last week was just plain long. Spent most of last weekend driving to Oregon for my nieces birthday. I think we decided to not do that in three days again, just to much. But it means we got back and really didn’t get much down time. Although we did have fun in Oregon and Isaac was really great on the trip this time.
So Monday was day one of the big push for a project at work. There has been this thing we have been trying to figure / work on for the better part of eight months and last week it got launched. Really tough technical problem, our network operations people said it wouldn’t work, had to rope in lots of teams to support the solution, etc. And like the story of my life, the best I could hope for is that nobody would notice anything.
So all week was fighting battles and finally on Thursday the last marketplace was launched. (I own three sites; one for North America, one for the EU and one for the Far East.) There were some bumps, but it really went pretty well over all. I’m looking forward to getting to focus on something else for a while now.
This weekend so far has been pretty good, the weather decided to turn spring like again. We took Isaac to this little kid circus this morning, which he really enjoyed. We had lunch and then the whole family came home and took a nap. When we got up, I went to mow the lawn while Rosie and Isaac played in the drive way.
Now that the lawn is mowed again, I’m going to try and get the new toilet installed tonight. I managed to slip, fall and kill the toilet in our bathroom a couple weeks ago. I tried to just buy a new tank, but that proved impossible. Luckily one of the new water efficient models came on sale last week and I got one for just about the same price as the tank I bought that didn’t fit. Hopefully the install will be smooth and not to frustrating. Oddly enough I noticed that the new toilet included all the stuff you need to install it. Which is sort of weird….
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April 17th, 2008
The family is taking off tomorrow afternoon and heading to my parents. It is the annual April trip for my nieces and dads birthdays. Basically it is the three month trip down there so they can see Isaac. It should be fun, other then the 5+ hour drive and the annoyingly high gas prices right now.
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April 12th, 2008
It was over 70 degree’s here today, just amazing. Rosie left around noon for Whidbey Island, she is running the half marathon tomorrow. So it was just the little guy and me. We had a nice nap, hit Home Depot and Toys-R-Us (which is sort of like a toy store for me and one for him) and then had Mexican for dinner. Very nice daddy and little guy time.
So this is going to be one of those weird comments that won’t make sense unless you have kids, but I can’t help myself. Last night I took Isaac for a walk while Rosie got dinner ready and we went on the trail behind our house. Isaac has been potty trained now for about 3 weeks, but is still in the stage where if he says he needs to go, it means now. So we are walking in the woods and he says he needs to pee. So I told him it was time to learn how to piss in the woods. I have to say this was really special in a way I don’t understand. :-)
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April 12th, 2008
Way funny Merlin video….
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April 5th, 2008
I’m sure this is old news, but someone has build VMWare applications which gives you a virtual OLPC. The Mac version isn’t 100% like the Linux or Windows version, I could load it up with the 30 day trial, but I hate putting that kind of thing on my machine. Sort of bummed there isn’t a way to-do it with Parallels. Maybe with some more digging, I’ll find a solution.
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April 5th, 2008
I spent today at a ham radio event called the Communication Academy. It is suppose to be focused on emergency communication topics, but any of the interesting things seem to have nothing to-do with e-comm.
First interesting talk was by Dr. Charles Simonyi, the local MSFT guy who went into space. He spoke about his experience going to ISS. There were somethings I’d never considered before with doing this, I think because you always get hung up on the $20M part. Since this service is run by the Russians, you pretty much have to have a working knowledge of Russian. (All the knobs, switches, etc in the ships are Russian obviously) I guess they give you translators for the training, but Charles spent 6 months learning Russian before going to Space City.
So considering that there have only been about 450 people who have gone into space since 1961, you’d think that being in a room with more then one would be a pretty rare event outside of NASA. Oddly enough I happen to be in a room with two today. Besides Charles, Dr. Bonny Dunbar was also attending todays conference.
The other interesting talk was on Cognitive Radio, which I have to admit took me quite a while to wrap my head around what it was. Think a network aware spread spectrum SDR radio, so the radio itself figures out on the fly based on all sorts of conditions where to frequency hop to find a open channel. I guess this is the new big field researches are working on, I don’t think radios really exist yet for a number of reasons. Just getting a A to D converter that would be able to sample enough spectrum for it to work is almost funny today. (We need a direct conversion from 1Mhz to 1Ghz A to D converter please)
http://www.museumofflight.org/display.asp?Page=050921DunbarAnnouncement
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