Its a sci-fi free fourth quarter!

it's been observed that I was probably an obsessive compulsive librarian in a past life. Getting books in order on shelves is one I'd those things that I really get nuts about, so it won't come as a supeise to learn that our whole book situation here at the fortress was driving me crazy.

Finally a few weeks ago as part of our ongoing "let's live like adults" program, I sat down and burned a week getting the library here in order. And I couldn't be happier. We got the rest of our books unpacked, and I finally got every thing into some kind of order. As an example, I'd been wanting to get all my Asimov books together in one place for years, and now I finally have. (Three whole shelves worth.)

Looking at all our books in one place, the one thing that really jumped out at me was - wow, I have a lot of science fiction. I mean, that's not all THAT surprising, but the scale compared to the rest ofthe collection was something of a shock.

I consider myself to be a pretty well-read guy; I got a minor in English. To steal a line from High Fidelity, I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and understood it. I actually LIKED Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. So, what's up with all these robot books?

Well, I like robots, obviously, but I really hadn't ever clicked that given the choice between a book with and without robots, I'd choose the robot EVERY TIME.

So, I made a decision. Between now and the end of the year, I'm not reading any SF. I'm going to sit down and read some of those not-robot books I've been meaning to read.

First up, then, is something I've wanted to read for years, but never got around to. And, why not just head for the deep end?

Shakespeare's Henry IV, part 1.

We have passed the probation period

Had Gabriel and I married as a job, we'd have just passed our 90 day probation period last week. I guess we are now full-time hires as hubby and the bride. I think our review would have gone well.

Marriage Manager: So you've made it to the 90 day mark and seem really happy, that is great. We are happy with the team-forward attitude you two bring to the reputable institution we call Marriage.

Heidi: I am glad you noticed. I have to say it has been a great 3 months and I am very happy with the status of our positions. The combining of our individual intellectual assets really seems to gain new respect from others.

Gabe: I am so excited about this merger I can hardly speak.

MM: Is there any aspects of the job that you feel needs improvement?

Gabe: I was worried we would never get the house in order, but my complaintless solo efforts in organization have sparked us both to optimize our surroundings.

MM: Yes, we saw the pen drawer in the dining room, very impressive.

Heidi: I am glad Gabe took the lead with that project and let me warm up to the idea of handling other tasks on my own. I was slow to start, but I think we will both make a great finish.

MM: That's good Heidi, we were afraid that future children would have contracted tetinus had the area not been improved. Parenthood called and said they would like to interview the two of you in January to see if you could afford a future membership to their club, it is just one of the perks of being a part of Marriage.


Yikes :)

Self Discovery!

I was having a bit of down time at work (no one in the office this morning to say "hey, what are you doing?") and wondered if there were any songs written with my name in it. I am thinking along the lines of "Oh Sherry" by Journey, "Rosanna" by Toto, "Allison" by Elis Costello, you get the idea. A song by a musician that loves that lady so much he has to croon/rock/whine about it. Well I found the only Heidi song out there without "Heidi heidi heidi hoe" in it, like to hear it here it goes:

"Heidi is a Headcase" by the Ramones.

WHAT!? On one hand, that is very awesome because the Ramones rock! On the other hand, it figures. No sweet ballands for my name, just a dire warning of the antics of an unstable lady. Here are the lyrics:

Headcase baby
She's a cool kind of crazy
Wild and she's willing
(It's an early Dylan)

She drives me crazy, oh yeah

When I look into her big blue eyes
I'm so glad to know she's mine
My little headcase, yeah
Ooh, ooh, yeah, my little headcase, yeah
Ooh, ooh, yeah

Heidi is a headcase, a rebel and a rouser
Blasts away for hours
What's she doin' now on the escalator
Snorting up some speed on the picture of St. Peters

What 'cha doin'?

When I look into her big blue eyes
I'm so glad to know she's mine
My little headcase, yeah
Ooh, ooh, yeah, my little headcase, yeah
Ooh, ooh, yeah

Ooh, baby baby, whatever you do now
Don't ever go away

Ooh, baby baby, whatever you do now
Don't you ever go astray
Don't you ever go away - ooh, ooh, yea

Heidi is a headcase


Well there you have it. I have to say that middle bit on the escalator makes me sound very much like an SNL sloth.

Lovable, but problematic.

A New Addition...a post by Heidi(!)

There is a new addition in the kitchen, a Krups convection toaster oven. Seems our old toaster oven wanted to be put on the back porch until trash day since Tuesday night it hissed at me and shot blue smoke in my face, for the fifth time. "Fine!" I yelled and unplugged it. I had visions of swinging it by the cord and hurling it into the alley with a satisfying SMASH, but that would not have been what they call "classy" and I probably would have needed what they call "bail."

So now we have a very cool and overly appointed robot to make toast, and other stuff. It heats up using six crystal quartz rods -- I am not kidding, it is like the toaster oven of solitude. It has a matte black finish (not the happy shiny chrome of most designs I saw), it means business and looks a tad menacing to be honest; but I guess I shouldn't be surprised since it was made by angry Germans. When your toast is done it shouts "KRUPS! KRUPS! KRUPS!" When and if you burn the toast, the oven shouts "NEIN!" and flings the toast into the trash bin. Just kidding, but the instruction manual DOES explain how to use the broiler setting by displaying the steps of cooking four large bratwurst sausages. You know it is roomy if it can accommodate 4 brats.

I haven't named it yet, will keep you posted.

UPDATE: The toaster oven's name is Odin, the Norse god of fire seemed appropriate :)

Quantum of Trailer

There's a new trailer out for the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. No, I'm not going to link to it; my iPhone doesn't have copy-paste, and you know where YouTube is as well as I do.

It looks like they're picking up the quality torch where Casino Royal left off and are keeping that train rolling.

Still. One of the major aspects highlighted in the new trailer is the "mysterious organization" the bad guys all work for, code named (apparently) Quantum.

Look, all I'm saying is, if Quantum doesn't turn out to actally be SPECTRE, EON is going to have some peeved nerds on their hands.

Must be September.

I had to turn on my heater on the way to work for the first time in
months this morning. So long, summer. See you next year.

Condition Win

I'm stopped at the last light before my freeway onramp this morning, and I look up to my left. Buisness 80 is stopped dead. Ouch, I think, but it's far too late to take the back way to work. So I grit my teeth and pull up the onramp.

To discover that the accident that's brought the freeway to a standstill is about eight feet behind where the ramp enters the freeway, and that I just pulled on to an essentially empty freeway. Made it to work on record time.

Here's hoping the rest of the day goes as smoothly.

There ain't no party like a hat party

Gabriel and Cristi looking pretty happy thanks to cocktails and lots of them :)

Google Chrome

Damn. I'm kinda in love with it.

It's not just fast - it's amazingly fast. Clearly, they've done some really nifty things up and down the whole pipeline to speed things up, and I approve wholeheartedly.

The new JavaScript engine is just fantastic. Gmail just sings in this thing, and google maps is pretty spectacular. As the world gets more AJAX-y by the day, this is a really good direction to be moving, I think. Also, as someone who is essentially a web desinger who wishes he could use more client-side scripting in an efficient manner, this gets me really excited. (I know Mozilla keeps talking about how great Firefox will be eventually, but it's hard to argue with the kind of results that Chrome actually has.)

The integrated search / URL bar actually works. I know every other browser out there also has such a creature, but this thing is so much better it's ridiculous.

Tabs are each their own processes and fully sandboxed. Fantastic. Really - why didn't Firefox do this from day one? (Yes, I know. Because it was 1997 and they thought they were writing Netscape 6 when the code's foundation went down, and no one knew multi-core processors were going to become the norm. Still, though.)

Also, the google gears "web application link" thing is just super slick.

I tend to swap between browsers a lot for testing purposes in my day job as a developer of web-based data systems, and there are a lot of things about Firefox, Opera, and Safari I really like. Chrome has, essentailly, glued all the features I like together into one browser (quite literally in the case of the mozilla and webkit code bases).

And then, there's the Terms of Service, which are INSANE.

On the other hand, it's also a fully Open Source program, so I fully expect someone to start publishing "Bronze" as a TOS-free alternative.

But, on the gripping hand, what I'm really looking forward to is Firefox 4 ganking the half of the codebase that wasn't theirs to begin with.

Words of Wisdom, stolen from an Email Thread

Chris: Bugs are like children. They know that, for best effect, they
should wait until you're in public to start flipping out.

Jordan: I use a tech. diff as an opportunity talk about our top notch monitoring... "So, y.com is the beta site and this does happen from time to time, but what you don't see is all the stuff going on behind the scenes right now. We use a fantastic system called Nagios and this exception is automatically getting captured and placed into our sustaining engineering queue where someone is going to prioritize it to get fixed... blah blah blah..."

Chris: Smooth! Turn it into a demo of something else entirely. That's like a weapons manufacturer turning a live demo into an impromptu bonesetting tutorial.