Category: Life. Don’t talk to me about life.

Summer, 1999.

In 1999, my dad rented a house out on Fire Island, and invited the family to come out for a week or so. Zach was less than a year old, and I hadn’t seen my sister in quite a while. They came out, and we all spent a week together on the island.

It was an important time for our family. Many of us thought it was the last time we’d see Dad – we knew his health wasn’t that great, and wondered if this was his way of saying goodbye. In some ways it was, but he slugged it out another 2 years, including another week out at the house the next summer.

This visit was rough because Zach was so young and needed 100% of both Cat and my’s attention, and it was ALMIGHTY hot there – that summer-in-New-England humidity-laden-heat that makes it impossible to sleep well, let alone with a clingy toddler.

I remember when I was there, we actually ended up leaving early (after 3-4 days) because of the sand, heat, and the bugs, and I don’t remember anything particularly inspiring about it. But looking back now, it was an opportunity to get a picture like this one, an option we don’t have anymore.

In the front is me with Rosie, my dad’s dog.

In the back, from left to right, are:

My dad died about 4 years ago now. I think about him all the time.

Music rhythm button smacked but hard.

I swear Stevie Wonder is one of the least acknowledged masters of modern music. Radioparadise just served up his beautiful mix of soul and gospel “As“. The pattern of… well, it’s not really a refrain. It’s a series of 12 measures sung gospel style with a female chorus, backing Stevie. The pattern just settles right onto you and you can’t help but start dancing to it…
Until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky
Until the ocean covers every mountain high
Until the dolphin flies and parrots live at sea
Until we dream of life and life becomes a dream
Until the day is night and night becomes the day
Until the trees and seas up, up and fly away
Until the day that 8x8x8x8 is 4
Until the day that is the day that are no more
Until the day the earth starts turning right to left
Until the earth just for the sun denies itself
Until dear Mother Nature says her work is through
Until the day that you are me and I am you
Loving you…

Just dead on the spot for me tonight. Thank you RP!
Full lyrics are here.

Insane bicyclists.


Inspired by my bikeride posting yesterday, EJbythesea pointed me at this collection of insane bike videos. I’ve watched a few of them, and in particular the drag race through NYC (linked with the image above) is insane.
On the one hand, I think these people are loopy. On the other hand, I can -totally- see the adrenalin rush from doing this. Predicting all the patterns and knowing that that bus will NOT close the gap narrower than your handlebars, and that person crossing the street WILL stop before you get there, and that car on the crossstreet WILL be gone by the time you get there.
Think I’ll go ride some more.
[Edit: there was some bad markup in this, I fixed it, but LJ may take up to an hour to update. Sorry! -dbs]

Booyah day!

Holy cats what a day.
Zach and I just got back from a great bike ride. This was the first chance I had to pull the ‘bent out of storage and get it prepped for riding. It was a little recalcitrant about getting up and working, but liberal application of chain lube and minor rerouting of cables, and things came together nicely.
We took the bikes over to the Assabet River Rail Trail and biked in a sort of see-saw ‘start in the middle’ pattern up and down and back on the trail. We went through the great tunnel under Rt 290, and made it all the way to Rt 85 just south of Hudson where it looks like the paving has ended.
I do know the paving goes the entire other direction all the way to the center of Marlborough, but Zach wasn’t up for that long a ride.
All told we did about 4 1/2 miles on an absolutely beyootiful spring day. It was cool enough that I didn’t even notice the heat I was generating, and warm enough that I didn’t get chilled, though I did have a sweatshirt on.
I’m thinking of some changes I want to do to the bike as the season ramps up. I think getting a real live functioning computer is going to be required (the first one I had was a Bikebrain (a great idea, btw, but a little pricy and as far as I can tell, no longer supported). The second was a wireless hand-me-down from a friend that really never worked well. I got a wired el cheapo one for my Giant Bike ($17. Whee!) which works fine, but I think I’ll need something El Geeko for the ‘bent.
Anyone know of folks doing the bike computer thing on a palm still? The only other one I can find is Bikini which seems pretty dated. If I can get something to run on my Kyocera 7135 that’s be great (since I’m carrying it anyway). Any pointers?
This was after a very intense 5 hour coding window today, where I really make some great progress on the project for my client. I got very into working some things that I had figured out together, and things just plain worked.
Tonight I think is going to be a relaxing evening, perhaps with an hour or two of Evil Genius.

‘What Philosophy do you follow?’ meme, and a rant at QuizFarm

A brief commentary before this quiz…
I like online quizzes. I think with a little judicious filtering (“What form of dirty plastic spork are you?!?”) you can find ones that have interesting results.

Some sites let you generate your own online quizzes. This one comes from QuizFarm, the latest darling of the LiveJournal crowd.

Most quizzes allow you to ‘cut n paste’ a little block of HTML into your journal or blog, and QuizFarm is no different. However, the HTML they are generating is BUTT UGLY. It uses the worst of the worst in HTML practices and design, resulting in a dense block of nested and obfuscated HTML rendering tags that would make any FrontPage developer squirm with envy.

I took the output from QuizFarm and totally reformatted it, removing 80% of the font, page break, tables, and other noise that is completely unnecessary to present results. I did this in about 5 minutes, and the design can be tweaked much further (using styles to set fonts and not rely on an external graphic for the image) but I was in a hurry.

I’ve poked QuizFarm and offered to help them clean up their results. We’ll see.

And with that, on with the quiz results…

What philosophy do you follow?
You scored as Existentialism. Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of yourlife.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
–Jean-Paul Sartre

It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.
–Blaise Pascal

More info at Arocoun’s Wikipedia User Page…

Existentialism 70%
Hedonism 65%
Utilitarianism 60%
Justice (Fairness) 55%
Kantianism 50%
Strong Egoism 35%
Nihilism 35%
Apathy 35%
Divine Command 0%

What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03)
created with QuizFarm.com

Sometimes…

… the urge to just pack up all this weird technical junk and run off to a mountain top, find some old hermit willing to teach the deep dark secrets of fiddle playing, and disappear for 20 years… is mighty hard to resist.
(this “wanna run away” moment brought to you by the wonderful wailing fiddle of Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek. She’s 23, (was probably 21 when this particular track – ‘Smoothie Song’ – was recorded), and is an absolute master of the instrument.

And just to make sure all is NOT spit and vitriol

The first bike ride of the season is always special. Zach and I went riding yesterday for the first time this year (well, anything over just noodling around in the driveway or the like). We took a loop I’ve ridden many times that goes around the south side of Bolton. Total distance is about 6 1/2 miles.
Unfortunately I was riding the Giant trail bike, as opposed to my recumbent (which hasn’t been season-prepped yet), and it reminded me why I dislike upright bikes so much. Very hard on the tailbone (even with a sculpted seat), as well as hard on my overly-sensitive hands (too much weight on the handlebars).
Anyway, Zach did great and we paced at 8-9mph the entire way (mostly flat), which is just fine for a kid on a bike with 20″ wheels 🙂
Need to fix my rear derailler (which, being a click-shift, has drifted to ‘between gear’ state, which also means I can shift right down into Gear 0. Troubling 🙂
On the plus side, the Assabet River Rail Trail group met last week, and I volunteered to help out with some projects on the trail (new kiosks, some clearing, etc). The trail should have about 5 miles of paved road this summer (last year only a mile and a half or so was done). Zach and I took a look at the new tunnel and some of the new trail last week, and things look great. It’s going to be a beautiful ride.
Yay spring!

Dayblogging Ubercon – Day 1

Today we start our bi-annual Ubercon event. We’re up to Ubercon V, so I guess we’re an institution now, eh? We’re just getting ready to go start setup, reg opens at 2:30, and I have some small code changes and database updates to complete, so we’re off to see the.. er… hotel event manager.
I’ll try and post some updates as things go along. So far, I set up all the equipment and tested it last night, things are working fine. This was, unfortunately, before 4 of the new Gateway terminals fell off the shelf I was working on. They seem okay, nothing rattling around, but I was not in the mood for powering up my terminals at midnight to watch them smoke, so I just quietly went to bed.
Off to breakfast and setup!
Update – 4:15pm
Aaaaaaaaaand, we’re off.
Reg is open, and folks are flowing through okay. We have 4 Gateway terminals running, and 3 kiosk terminals, plus one badge printer. Equipment lossage has been limited to One (1) Gateway DOA, one bad keyboard, and One (1) I-Opener dying. We have another Gateway that’s prone to sporadic reboots, so that gets a little annoying. I need to keep the active ‘operator’ terminals at 4 – 3 just backlogs too easily.
We have a slightly different arrangement with the helpdesk this time. We ran a cable up to the helpdesk / ops desk area, and there’s a clued operator at the terminal there. If folks have problems at Reg, we can send them along to the help desk (about 50′ away), and they can fix / research / find out hte problem. They can also send a badge print request to the main printer, which is close enough that the folks don’t mind coming back over to pick up the badge. There’s never a backlog at the printer itself, so it’s really just a walkup.
I have some pictures, I’ll try and post them during the next lull.

Ubercon – March 11-13th!

One of the fun things about my business is I get to go to cool conventions.
One of my oldest customers is UberCon, a gaming convention held twice a year in the Meadowlands, NJ. A weekend long gaming experience, they have board games, RPG, LARP, and LAN events running all weekend, 24×7. Everything from walk-up fragfests in Unreal through sanctioned Munchkin tournaments.
I’ll be there all weekend, running registration and doing all sorts of fun things with badges and badge printers and terminals and stuff. Plenty of time for gaming and socializing, so why not cmon down!