46 Dogs

Free Memory in Ubuntu

2012-02-08T23:27:00.000-07:00

I was so happy to figure this out that I wanted to post it for my own memory and anyone else who was also interested.

On one of my computers, my RAM was being eaten up and I couldn't figure out why. Running 'top' resulted in the following line:

Mem: 505908k total, 478736k used, 27172k free, 41888k buffers

Out of my half gig of ram, 95% was being used. Browsing the list of processes didn't give any indication that there were any particular memory hogs.

Running 'free -m' (the -m prints in megabyes instead of the default kilobytes) resulted in the following output:

user$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           494        469         25          0         41        315
-/+ buffers/cache:        112        381

From that, I was able to discover that the majority of my RAM was tied up in caching data. Not necessarily bad, since if you have spare RAM lying around, you might as well use it for something, but it was slowing down my SSH terminals to the point where they were effectively unusable. The previous couple times I had this problem, I had simply rebooted, but that was a hammer=nail solution and I wanted a better one. I finally found the solution on ubuntu-unleashed.com.

Flush file system buffers for safety

user$ sync

Become root (simply sudo-ing the final command won't work because of the redirection)

user$ sudo bash

Free cached memory

root# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To check that Ubuntu had given back my RAM, 'top' resulted in the following:

Mem:    505908k total,   120384k used,   385524k free,      204k buffers

Additionally, 'free -m' resulted in the following:

user$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           494        128        365          0          0         24
-/+ buffers/cache:        103        390

Street Musician

2012-01-31T23:09:00.003-07:00

I just watched a very pretty performance by a street musician on YouTube. Two things in the video struck me:

1. A surprising number of passer-bys put some money into his case.
2. None of them stuck around to listen to the music.

I wonder why?

Presidental Elections

2012-01-31T21:31:00.003-07:00

Right now, if I had to vote for someone for President, and wasn't allowed to abstain, my vote would go as follows:

1. Mitt Romney
2. Barack Obama
2. Rick Santorum
3. Newt Gingrich

I was listening to Mitt Romney's celebration speech (for winning the Florida primary) this evening on the way home from work, and I had to shake my head several times. Most of it was at the attacking nature of speech: "My opponents are doing this stupid thing! The president wants to destroy America!" Other times it was at the black and white nature of the positions he presented. "The president wants to disband our entire military! I'm going to make it into the greatest military juggernaut in history!" (Yes, I'm exaggerating.)

Apparently Florida has been just about the most negative political race in history. As a huge believer in decency, respect, and diplomacy, my estimation of Mitt Romney (and the other candidates) has been lowered because of the attack ads they've ran.

At the same time, I know why the candidates run attack ads: they get attention, they get press, and they get results. People are swayed by them. The unfortunate side effect is that candidates are willing to run incorrect (read: lying) attack ads, because by the time they're exposed, the damage has been done and of course the expose gets much less attention than the ad itself.

I'm guessing most people in country would agree that the state of politics in our country is pretty bad. It's hard going to the polls when you're only selecting the least distastful of two choices.

Year-end Letter

2011-12-24T17:38:00.001-07:00

Hello all! In the revered tradition ofyear-end updates on our lives, we'd like to let everyone know how Drek, Child, and Ash are surviving the punishing, temperate climate of California.

Hanging Christmas lights in the dead of San Diego winter

In a year full of raising a kid, buyinga house, and holding down a job, our family's crowning achievement,of course, was getting chickens. Four of them, although onlyone seems to be laying eggs, and then only once every few days. Afew days ago, another chicken made a half-hearted effort leading toa marble-sized egg which was more of hors d'oeuvres than a meal. Lazy chickens. Little dothey know that their carefree, freeloading era is near its end. Asthe old saying goes, "An egg in the fridge is worth two in thechicken." Those who don't produce end up as dinner. Or so Drek's boss tells him on a regular basis.

Speaking of 5D Robotics, Drek has managed to hold down a job for a full year. Even better, he'squelled nearly all the robotic revolutions he's instigated. Forthose worried about robots taking over the world, don't be—the endwill be swift and painless. The company is doing well, having movedto a larger building nearly a 400 foot trek from the old one. The“big bay” itself in the new building is nearly the size of ourold digs, with plenty of room to get a robot up to speed beforeslamming it into a closed door (protip: laser rangefinders do nothandle highly absorbent paint well).

As winterapproaches, Drek misses his yearly tradition of snow cavecamping, but he's taking what solace he can in weekly visits to thebeach or early morning outings to the neighborhood Frisbee golfcourse.

Child spent 2011 taking care of a Sunday School class of fourteenteenagers, a new house, a ten-year-old car, a two-year girl, and fourchickens. It's totally understandable how confusions could arise,with the occasional chicken sitting up for dinner at the table orAsh locked inthe chicken coop on one of her “spirited” days.

The most beautiful woman in the world

Child and Ash took the brunt of the enjoyment of the aforementioned zoo passes,visiting once a month at least. The passes also gained them accessto the Safari park, which supplies much of the animals to the SanDiego and other zoos.

The future of Humanity

Thezoo is located near La Jolla, yet another of the beaches that dot theCalifornia landscape. At La Jolla, Child and Drek got to experiencescuba diving for the first time, at which Child excelled but whichinvolved a little too much water for Drek's taste (Drek prefers his beaches above sea level and boat engines not leaking oilslicks into his mouth). As beginners, they stayed in a shallow,churned-up lagoon, the theory apparently being that the lessvisibility there was, the more likely they'd be to want to return inhopes of actually seeing something. They did see a few fishclose-up, but they were chance meetings in the murk and as much of asurprise to both diver and fish. Still, they (Drek and Child, not thefish) enjoyed it enough to probably attempt it again—preferablysomewhere tropical.

Scuba diving (brochure picture)

Scuba diving (actual picture)

Oneof Redacted's primary accomplishments was buying their first house.Having had enough of wall-sharing neighbors testing their soundsystems at 11 pm at night, upstairs dogs peeing onto their porch, andwalking through a fog of cigarette smoke on their way to their car intheir Sunday clothes, they decided to leave that world behind for therelaxing, care-free life of a home-owner.

Listing photo of new home in Vista, CA (lawn photoshopped in by real estate company)

Thefirst month in their home, they received a visit from arepresentative of the water company. They were informed that theirhome was using enough water to supply a small village and that ifthey weren't, in fact, operating a clandestine water-park, they mightwant to get that looked at. As they found out, their home wasleaking water underneath the cement foundation, which according tothe plumber was “a mite hard to get to.” That's plumber-speakfor “we're just going to cut off your pipes at the foundation androute everything through the ceiling instead,” or more succinctly,“Looks like I'm going to Hawaii this year.” Three days and onevacation package to Hawaii later, the Redacteds were able to showeragain and reestablish social contact.

A fewdays later, cleaning up the backyard became a priority when thenext-door neighbor asked if the Redacteds were growing marijuana backthere (no). A few days later, Drek met the back-fence neighbor andmentioned this anecdote to him with a laugh. The back-fence neighbordidn't laugh. “I grow marijuana. For my injured back, you know. Butnever around the kids.” Oh, good.

Interestingaspects to home-ownership aside, it's been enjoyable having a garden,chickens, and yes, neighbors at property-line distance. Our backyardis big enough for tents, so everyone is welcome to visit, as long asthey don't mind the possibility of a chicken slipping into theirsleeping bag with them.

2011-12-16T10:40:00.002-07:00

This may be the height of nerdiness, but the sheer length and impenetrableness of the following compiler error message amused me so much I decided to post it.

Yes, it's a single error message, for one line of code:

error: no match for ‘operator&&’ in ‘behaviorOption.std::_Rb_tree_iterator<_Tp>::operator* [with _Tp = std::pair<const int, std::map<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::less<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, std::allocator<std::pair<const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > > > > >]()->std::pair<const int, std::map<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::less<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, std::allocator<std::pair<const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > > > > >::second.std::map<_Key, _Tp, _Compare, _Alloc>::find [with _Key = std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, _Tp = std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, _Compare = std::less<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, _Alloc = std::allocator<std::pair<const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > > >](((const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >&)(& std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >(((const char*)"reportParams"), ((const std::allocator<char>&)((const std::allocator<char>*)(& std::allocator<char>()))))))) && std::operator== [with _CharT = char, _Traits = std::char_traits<char>, _Alloc = std::allocator<char>](((const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >&)((const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >*)behaviorOption.std::_Rb_tree_iterator<_Tp>::operator* [with _Tp = std::pair<const int, std::map<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::less<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, std::allocator<std::pair<const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > > > > >]()->std::pair<const int, std::map<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::less<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, std::allocator<std::pair<const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > > > > >::second.std::map<_Key, _Tp, _Compare, _Alloc>::operator[] [with _Key = std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, _Tp = std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, _Compare = std::less<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, _Alloc = std::allocator<std::pair<const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > > >](((const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >&)(& std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >(((const char*)"reportParams"), ((const std::allocator<char>&)((const std::allocator<char>*)(& std::allocator<char>()))))))))), ((const char*)"true"))’

"Oh, yes, I clearly see what my mistake was. Using the C++ Standard Library."

2011-11-13T08:34:00.001-07:00

Child made me a wonderful Halloween costume this year:

Those poor chickens had no idea who they were up against. It was a hard-fought battle, four-on-one, but let's face it, the outcome was never really in question. Besides, there's nothing dishonorable with a retreat in the face of superior numbers.

While strolling through downtown as part of the city's Halloween activities, I noticed this sign on one of the storefronts:

The "around back in alley" part would really seal the deal for me, if I were looking to sell my gold or silver. You can tell just from that that you're dealing a an upstanding, reputable businessperson.

Function transformations

2011-11-04T13:31:00.001-06:00

I wish I had a little cheat-sheet like this during my math classes:

Given vertical translation a (+ to shift up, - to shift down), vertical scaling b (larger to grow, smaller to shrink), horizontal translation c (+ to shift right, - to shift left), and horizontal scaling d (larger to grow, smaller to shrink), the function transformation would be:

(f((x-c)/d)+a)/b

You can pick and choose values. If you don't have a or c, replace with 0. If you don't have b or d, replace with 1.

Assume our function f was the sine function. sin(x):

Say we wanted to shift the whole function to the right by +1, i.e. up the x-axis. c=1 and our transformation would be sin(x - [+1]):

Note how the graph used to cross the x-axis at 0 (red), but now crosses it at 1 (green).

Say we now wanted to stretch it longer, i.e. horizontally scale it. Maybe stretch it twice as long. If we choose a horizontal scaling factor of d=2, our new function would be sin((x-1)/2):

Now perhaps we want to shift it upwards, e.g. a=1. Our new function is sin((x-1)/2)+1:

And finally, we want to stretch our function in the vertical axis, perhaps also by double, so b=2. (sin((x-1)/2)+1)*2:

Before, it ranged from a minimum y of 0 to a maximum y of 2, now the maximum y is 4.

Halloween

2011-10-31T11:40:00.000-06:00

Today I biked into work in full ninja regalia. There were a few honks, a few shouts--presumably of fear, or perhaps in surprise at seeing a bike travel by itself--and an "Avast, ye scurvy dog!" emanating from a pirate sword being waved out a car window.

At a stop light, a "pro" biker pulled up beside me wearing spandex tights, black/lime-green socks, and a neon-yellow logo-covered shirt. "Nice costume!" he said. "Likewise," I answered. He seemed a little huffy as he left me in the dust, but I'm not sure why.

Arriving at the back door of work, my ninja-invisibility came in handy as I made a less-than-graceful dismount from my bicycle, thanks to the baggy ninja pants. Walking to the front of the building to assassinate my boss and assume his position, I saw three visitors from another company approaching the front door, so I opened it for them. They stopped, looking a little confused--probably terrified--checked the company name on the window, glanced at each other, then finally approached. I took pity on them and lowered my mask, calming their fears. They didn't offer to shake my hand though. Probably afraid of being shurikened.

This afternoon, we're having a barbecue with them using a new grill the company just bought. I'll probably demonstrate how I can hold fire in my hand without getting burned. I'll let you know how it goes.

War Update, Plus Work Productivity Note

2011-10-20T09:35:00.000-06:00

After the last three public executions, the mice decided to lie low for a while. We didn't hear a peep from them until last night, when a scout foolishly ventured into the garage while we were paper mâché-ing jack-o-lanterns for Webelos. He was quickly apprehended and incarcerated, then met a swift end at dawn at the hands of our chickens.

On a different note, my productivity at work has soared since I blocked a few websites in my /etc/hosts file. I realized I had gotten in the habit of working, then every time I hit a complicated spot, I'd almost instinctively switch to a browser to read a quick Slashdot article or CNN report. The waste of time was adding up quickly, so I decided to block a handful of sites for myself at work.

127.0.0.1 ksl.com
127.0.0.1 cnn.com
127.0.0.1 slashdot.org
127.0.0.1 failblog.org
127.0.0.1 espn.com

It's worked surprisingly well over the past couple weeks. Even though I could unblock them in a few seconds, the very fact that I'd have to jump through a hoop reminds me that I'm supposed to be focusing on work.

Camping Trip

2011-10-16T17:41:00.001-06:00

Friday and Saturday was our Elder's Quorum camping trip.

My wife blogged about it from her end and was fairly accurate in her description of the event being presented as a way to work off some testosterone poisoning. There were promises of guns, fires, possibly explosions, and definitely no kids.

There was a hairy road to get to our remote wilderness campsite, but we all made it alive. There were seven of us, four of who were auto mechanics, so the campfire conversation was distinctly auto-oriented. The moon was nearly full that night and it was surprisingly bright, which led directly to The Incident.

About 11 p.m, as we sat around the campfire, the manager of the property (who was also camping with us) told us that the narrow, rutted dirt road we had come up continued on to the top of a nearby peak. One of the mechanics had brought an old BMW that he had fixed up Baja-style, and he promptly jumped up. "It's bright enough out here," he said. "I'm going to go check it out. Who wants to come?"

Another guy took him up on his offer and a moment later, the two of them were roaring up the dirt track towards the top of the mountain. The property manager watched them go, then said, "They're going to get stuck. There's no room to turn around on the road."

There was silence for a moment. "You probably should have told them that before they left," someone finally suggested.

The property manager shrugged. "They said they wanted an adventure."

They apparently had one, because an hour later they came hiking on foot back down the mountain. As they later explained, they had reached the end of the road, where there was a small dirt patch. It was just large enough that with their small car, they probably could have done a hundred-point turn and ended up facing back down the hill. Being 20 year old guys, the thought of doing it that way didn't even enter their minds and the driver decided to try to gun his engine, spin out on the dirt, and swing the car in a circle.

All he succeeded in doing was going off the road and nearly rolling down the mountain, fortunately stopped from doing so by the brush on the side of the road. The car was holding on precariously with two tires, necessitating cautious climbing out through the driver side door for both of them.

"We'll get it in the morning," said the property manager, unperturbed.

The next morning, we started up the mountain in a pickup truck. The goal was to somehow use the pickup truck to rescue the car, but true to the form of all ill-fated rescue missions, we only succeeded in nearly getting the pickup truck stuck. It was only "nearly" and not "completely" because we ended up physically lifting up the rear end of the pickup truck and swinging it around.

Fortunately, that led to the realization that if seven guys could lift up the tail end of a pickup truck, surely we could heft a small Baja-style BMW. We finished the hike up the mountain on foot and finally arrived at the car.

It was dangling pretty solidly over the edge of the hill, but it was nothing we couldn't handle. The Elder's Quorum president gave a stirring speech based on Elder Utchdorf's talk, "Lift Where You Stand," and we manually hefted it out.

Unfortunately the first video section was fairly large and was rejected by Blogger. This second section I videotaped is just as good though, because it's shorter and still demonstrates the prowess of our biceps.

So all the people and vehicles survived, but one casualty of the event was my sock, forgotten by the campfire as it dried out from the previous night's dew. It's the tragedies in life that make us stronger, though, so it was probably a good character-building experience. And a reminder to bring a spare pair of socks next time.

We finished the morning on a lighter note, shooting large amounts of ammunition from a wide variety of weapons. The cows in the nearby field cautiously moved to the far side of their enclosure, but the wives would be pleased to know that we were extremely safe and that the only casualties during this portion of our event were about 250 clay pigeons and a variety of soda pop cans and assorted campfire detrius.

We even cleaned up when we were done.

Defense News Feature

2011-10-16T16:05:00.001-06:00

We're in the news! Our partner, DRS, demoed our joint product at a conference in Washington, D.C. where Defense News did a feature on it.

The War is On

2011-10-09T10:32:00.000-06:00

This morning, I woke to find that a mouse had brazenly eaten the cheese from the mousetrap with the unmitigated audacity to not die in it. Even more offensive, he left a taunting note to the effect of "Sucker!" behind.

Okay, he may not have left a note, per se, but I could tell he had thought of it. I reset the trap with the cheese embedded deeper than a CNN journalist in Iraq and placed it back under the sink.

An hour later, a spider the size of the hamburgers in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was discovered in the hallway to much shrieking and violent jumping about. My wife was also a little startled by it. I quickly vacuumed it up, then extracted the plastic vacuum container to empty it out. Imagine my surprise when I discovered two mice saboteurs inside, a little wide-eyed and windswept but very much alive.

Caught red-handed, their protests of innocence did them no good and I delivered them to the gallows. Our chicken executioners made short work of one, but let the other escape to warn his comrades.

The stakes have been raised.

No honor among mice

2011-10-08T19:01:00.002-06:00

For the past week I've been hearing mysterious rustlings in the walls and under cupboards. We've had a wet week too, which led me to suspect that a gang of mice had been driven inside. On my near-daily meander through the hardware store today, I spotted mice traps and got a package. When I got home, dinner was ready so I placed a mouse trap under the sink and sat down to eat.

By cleanup time, we had our first victim. Interestingly, the cheese I had placed on the trap was gone, so either he had gobbled it down then went back to lick the grease off the trap trigger, or another mouse had crawled over the first one's dead body to get to it. Either way, it doesn't speak much to the intelligence of the mice, although I guess they don't make particular claims along those lines.

On the plus side, the chickens loved the mouse. As my wife pointed out, one of the downsides of belonging to a vegetarian is that the chickens don't see much food "on the hoof," so to speak.

Yard Saling

2011-10-08T14:56:00.000-06:00

Another good find obtained today at a yard sale: an A-frame ladder for $3.

I felt like Patrick McManus explaining to his wife why he needed so many different types of guns. "Well, I need an extension ladder for getting on the roof or climbing trees, then a smaller section of ladder for...well, small trees. Then an A-frame ladder for high light bulbs and killing spiders on the ceiling, plus a step-ladder for..."

We also signed up to clean the church building this morning. There were another handful of people there helping as well, and I overheard one mother say to her eight-year-old son, "My, you're grumpy this morning." Personally, I couldn't really blame the kid. Instead of watching Saturday-morning cartoons, he was cleaning bathrooms at 8 o'clock in the morning.

Moving on to yard work: over the past couple days I've been pulling weeds from our old, falling-apart asphalt driveway. I got a tube of asphalt repair goo, but I think I grossly underestimated how much I would need. Pulling the weeds left ravines the size of irrigation canals behind, some of which were quite possibly harboring wildlife. A amazingly wide variety of bugs for sure. Anyway, I'm hoping the goo will hold together the pieces of our driveway at least for another year or two. We still have a garage door, fence, yard, painting, and a million smaller things on our list to do before we can afford that.

Beginning of the End

2011-10-06T23:48:00.000-06:00

I finally took the plunge. I downloaded a password manager.

Until now, I've either remembered my passwords, used some algorithm to determine them on a per-website basis, or tracked them in my emails. All of those had shortcomings, so I decided to try a password manager.

Using no particular criteria, I devided to try Revelation. Simple, to the point, and for the handful of days I've used it, it's gotten the job done. Using a password manager has its own shortcomings, but having to look up a password in a single application beats trying to find passwords in my email or guess until my account is locked.

Ice Shaver

2011-10-04T19:35:00.000-06:00

The best $1 I ever spent:

Not the pumpkins: those were $3.33 each. The ice shaver was $1 from a garage sale. To make a delicious ice shavee, you will need the following ingredients:

Ice
Jello powder

Step 1: Grind up the ice

Step 2: Liberally dust it with jello powder to taste. If you're gourmet, add a teaspoon of lemonade powder for an extra kick.

Step 3: Mix it all together.

Step 4: Hop your kid up on sugar and red dye 40 an hour before bed. Which may explain last night's experience...

Resolution!

2011-10-04T04:02:00.000-06:00

It's never too late to make a new resolution, so I'm going to attempt to start posting with renewed vigor. Perhaps even daily.

First post of the new resolution: WHY IN THE WORLD IS MY DAUGHTER STILL AWAKE at 3 AM?!?!

Follow Me

2011-08-25T10:23:00.000-06:00

Last week, half of our company was at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) conference in Washington, D.C. By all accounts it went well. We may not have people hurling sacks of money at us yet, but soon enough.

One of the conference attendees uploaded a video of our follow behavior running on a robot called the Landshark, made by a company called Black-I.

Falcon

2011-08-17T21:48:00.000-06:00

Summer Vacation

2011-08-05T09:42:00.000-06:00

An overseas contact wrote the following line in an email he sent our company yesterday:

"Our company is going to be off tomorrow so I will follow up late in August."

That is no typo. Apparently most of Europe takes August off work.

How come the U.S. doesn't do that?

Scrambled Eggs

2011-08-05T09:38:00.000-06:00

Coming home from work a couple days ago, I found out that someone had egged our house. After some questioning, my wife admitted that it had been her. She claimed our 2-year-old daughter made her do it. I tell you, what is the world coming to?

Travels

2011-07-17T09:51:00.000-06:00

Just got back from a business trip to Alabama. One problem with living on the west coast is that every time you go back east, you have to wake up far too early according to the home timezone. Since John and I arrived at our host's workplace at 8 am every morning, we met up at 7 am for breakfast and travel, which meant I was getting up around 6:15 a.m. --central time. My body thought it was 4:15 a.m.

It's obviously worse when we travel to Boston, which I did last month and which it looks like I'll be doing again in a week. Boston is on Eastern time, which means even earlier mornings. It wouldn't be so bad if I could then go to bed around 9 p.m. Pacific time, but the trials and troubles of integration trips usually mean I lie awake in the hotel bed with my mind racing 100 miles per hour, trying to think through problems and find solutions and playing out scenarios in my mind for how things could have gone better.

At least our most recent trip to Alabama was a success. Not the perfect success we could have hoped for, if such a thing exists, but a reasonable success. There's always so many variables we have no control over, and given our time constraints, there's often no time to implement the solution we want to.

On the last two days before the trip, I coded up a "follow" behavior. The idea was for the robot to use the laser range-finders mounted on it to track a person and follow them around. When we were out behind our building testing it out, there were a handful of people from our neighboring businesses watching us, and it was amusing to hear their conversation. "Do you see that?! That's crazy! It's following him like a dog! That is so cool!"

Sometimes I think I get a little jaded working with robots all day, and it isn't until I hear comments like theirs, or like the manager's at the company in Alabama, talking about how cool our work is, that I remember that it actually is a pretty cool job.

Chicken Run

2011-06-27T21:27:00.000-06:00

A lot has been going on. Fun progress with robots, a very interesting and educational business trip to Boston, Child's friend coming to visit for a couple weeks.

And a chicken in our house.

Tithing

2011-06-17T07:55:00.000-06:00

I've mentioned on this blog before that I pay tithing, and that I feel that I receive a lot of blessings as a result. Here's the most recent:

Every now and then, my previous employer will call me up and ask me to do small jobs for them. Shortly after we moved into our new house, he called me up and asked if I could do a project. It was a fairly good-sized project, and I told him my estimate would be $1500-$2000, but I ended up turning it down because I wanted to spend my few free evening hours working on my novel rather than programming.

Well, the next day, we got a visit from the water company. Apparently our house was using 15,000 gallons of water a day. We called a plumber who discovered there was actually a couple leaks--one of them underneath the concrete slab that our house was built on. The estimate? $1590.

Well, since we had just bought a house, we had no money left. Without the side-job from my previous employer, we would have been in trouble. I called up my old boss, told him I'd do it, and spent the next couple weeks of evenings working on it.

The final bill was $1725, which after I paid tithing, covered all but $40 of the plumbing bill.

Uber-nerd

2011-05-29T22:34:00.000-06:00

"Does dreaming about Captain Picard teaching me how to play chess make me an uber-nerd?"

"No, saying 'uber' makes you an uber-nerd."

What does this say about me?

2011-05-29T09:52:00.000-06:00

While driving in the car yesterday, I flipped on the radio and caught the tail end of a program on NPR. It seemed to be profiling somebody:

"He just went out and did things! He was spontaneous. Didn't stop to think, didn't worry about the consequences."

You know, I should be more like that guy, I thought. I should be more spontaneous--go out and do things. Live a little.

Then the program ended. "This has been 'Profile of a Psychopath' on NPR," the announcer said.

Hmm. Maybe I should be a little more careful about who I desired to emulate...

Robot Peripherals

2011-05-16T17:10:00.000-06:00

I've been working for 5D Robotics for almost a year and a half now. Early on, a large part of what I did was write drivers for various USB, serial, and Ethernet peripherals that we'd plug into our system.

That led to a realization. The robots that we controlled using our Behavior ENgine were nothing more than peripherals themselves. They plugged into the computer using the same USB, serial, or Ethernet systems as any other peripheral, and I had to write a driver for them just like any other plug-n-play device.

That realization sculpted how I designed the Behavior ENgine. Rather than having everything centered around a robot, I designed the Behavior ENgine so a robot was nothing more than an additional peripheral. Designing it that way has had a couple benefits.

One, there is nothing special I have to do when I integrate our Behavior ENgine with additional robots. I simply have to write an additional driver for the device. That makes our Behavior ENgine highly portable between robots, if you want to view it from the robot's frame of reference. It also makes our code clean and easy to maintain, since everything robot-centric is pushed down inside a driver instead of in the core of the Behavior ENgine.

Two, it makes the robot unnecessary. This was a benefit I didn't anticipate, since I never anticipated using our robot-controlling software without a robot. However, it turns out that the computer is useful even without a robot attached. For example, the computer could have other sensors plugged in, e.g. chemical or radiation sensors. Since the robot is unnecessary, the user can pull the computer off the robot and walk around with just the computer and sensors, reaching places the robot can't get to or even leaving the sensors at a position to monitor the area.

Yard Sale!

2011-05-06T16:31:00.000-06:00

In about a week, my dad will be driving from Utah to Mexico to take part in a service project. On the way, he's going to stop here in California to pick up my brother and help with some projects around the house.

One of those projects is trimming some palm trees. He's bringing a chainsaw, but until today I haven't had much luck finding an extension ladder. On our way out the door to visit the beach, however, we spotted a yard sale literally a block away from our home.

Normally I never stop at yard sales, but for some reason I decided to pull over, even though we were late. There, lying in the grass, was an extension ladder! And a dolly, which I've been wanting (probably thanks to all our moving), and a carpenter's square, and a little tricycle, and some horseshoes. Thanks to Child's shrewd bargaining, we got the whole lot for $57. Definitely a good find.

Punishment

2011-04-29T10:57:00.000-06:00

Day 1	Friend:	"Could you do me a favor? I need someone trustable and unswayable such as yourself to change my minecraft account password and not give it back to me until after finals. If I try to convince you to give it back to me before the semester is over, just tell me to work on my homework or to do something productive."
	Me:	"Sure. Done."

Day 2	Friend:	"The new minecraft update is out! Let me have the password, just to check it out. Pls?"
	Me:	"No."

Day 3	Friend:	"Man, giving my minecraft password to you was both the best and worst decision, depending on how I'm feeling about it. I know you'll never give it back, and so I'll have to stay on task... but then I know I'll never be able to convince you to give it to me either. Well now, you should try the game out yourself. heh heh"
	Me:	"And turn into an addict like you? Nuh uh."
	Friend:	"I'm not an addict! I like wasting time by assembling virtual blocks in fun shapes."

Day 4	Me:	"I'm changing your profile picture to a picture of Sean Hannity." (Okay, maybe I baited him a little.)
	Friend:	"Curses! You'll ruin my reputation!"
	Me:	"Well...I can make it Glenn Beck if you'd prefer."

Day 5	Friend:	"Can I minecraft for a bit? I want to check out the new features."
	Me:	"No."
	Friend:	"Dreeeeeek!"
Later	Friend:	"I'm dying of productivity, I've already gotten 2 assignments done early. Just a little minecraft wouldn't hurt..."

Day 6	Friend:	"Can I have my password? I have nothing to do this weekend."
	Me:	"Except study?"
	Friend:	"Study? I'm done with homework!"
	Me:	"I would have thought you'd have forgotten about minecraft by now."
	Friend:	"Well I've given up trying to guess the thing you changed the password to."
Later	Friend:	Offensive emoticons
Later	Friend:	"I'll buy you your own account, just give me the password"
	Friend:	"I thought I could trust you"
	Friend:	"WHY THE HECK DID I DO THIS!"

Day 7	Friend:	Suspicious silence
Day 8	Friend:	Suspicious silence
Day 9	Friend:	Suspicious silence
Day 10	Friend:	Suspicious silence
Day 11	Friend:	Suspicious silence
	Me:	Checks minecraft account. Can't log in. Friend must have reset password.
	Me:	"Can you look me in the eyes and say you haven't played minecraft in the last week?"
	Friend:	"A person needs balance in their life..."

Right-handed rotation matrix for roll/pitch/yaw

2011-04-29T10:00:00.002-06:00

Specifically, an three-dimensional orthogonal matrix corresponding to a counter-clockwise/right-handed rotation where roll is the rotation about the x-axis, pitch is the rotation about the y-axis, and yaw is the rotation about the z-axis.

You wouldn't think this would be hard to find online, but go figure.

Thanks to Phaedrus for his explanations and...well, doing most of the work.

Note: this matrix effectively yaws first, then pitches, then rolls. For the opposite order (and the one I ended up using), look below.

[	cos(pitch)*cos(yaw)	-sin(yaw)*cos(pitch)	sin(pitch)	]
	cos(yaw)sin(pitch)sin(roll) + sin(yaw)*cos(roll)	-sin(yaw)sin(pitch)sin(roll) + cos(yaw)*cos(roll)	-cos(pitch)*sin(roll)
	-cos(yaw)sin(pitch)cos(roll) + sin(yaw)*sin(roll)	sin(yaw)sin(pitch)cos(roll) + cos(yaw)*sin(roll)	cos(pitch)*cos(roll)

And to put it another way:

//Top row

rotation[0][0] = cos(pitch)*cos(yaw); 

rotation[0][1] = -sin(yaw)*cos(pitch);

rotation[0][2] = sin(pitch);

//Middle row

rotation[1][0] = cos(yaw)*sin(pitch)*sin(roll) + sin(yaw)*cos(roll);

rotation[1][1] = -sin(yaw)*sin(pitch)*sin(roll) + cos(yaw)*cos(roll);

rotation[1][2] = -cos(pitch)*sin(roll);

//Bottom row

rotation[2][0] = -cos(yaw)*sin(pitch)*cos(roll) + sin(yaw)*sin(roll);

rotation[2][1] = sin(yaw)*sin(pitch)*cos(roll) + cos(yaw)*sin(roll);

rotation[2][2] = cos(pitch)*cos(roll);

Note: this matrix effectively rolls first, then pitches, then yaws. This turned out to be the one I used for my system.

[	cos(pitch)*cos(yaw)	-sin(yaw)cos(roll) + cos(yaw)sin(pitch)*sin(roll)	sin(roll)sin(yaw) + cos(yaw)sin(pitch)*cos(roll)	]
	cos(pitch)*sin(yaw)	cos(yaw)cos(roll) + sin(pitch)sin(yaw)*sin(roll)	-sin(roll)cos(yaw) + sin(pitch)sin(yaw)*cos(roll)
	-sin(pitch)	cos(pitch)*sin(roll)	cos(pitch)*cos(roll)

//Top row
rotation[0][0] = cos(pitch)*cos(yaw);
rotation[0][1] = -sin(yaw)*cos(roll) + cos(yaw)*sin(pitch)*sin(roll);
rotation[0][2] = sin(roll)*sin(yaw) + cos(yaw)*sin(pitch)*cos(roll);

//Middle row
rotation[1][0] = cos(pitch)*sin(yaw);
rotation[1][1] = cos(yaw)*cos(roll) + sin(pitch)*sin(yaw)*sin(roll);
rotation[1][2] = -sin(roll)*cos(yaw) + sin(pitch)*sin(yaw)*cos(roll);

//Bottom row
rotation[2][0] = -sin(pitch);
rotation[2][1] = cos(pitch)*sin(roll);
rotation[2][2] = cos(pitch)*cos(roll);

Nudist Beach

2011-04-28T09:35:00.001-06:00

Equations

2011-04-17T20:45:00.000-06:00

Am I the only one who finds it amusing that recreational drug proponents clamor for the "freedom to choose" to do something that removes their freedom to choose?

And does anyone else find it laughable that one of their primary arguments is that it "doesn't affect anyone else"?

Foot in...pot?

2011-04-17T20:29:00.002-06:00

Yesterday we had an early Easter celebration, since Child is going to be in Utah over Easter while I remain here in CA and work. While we were outside hunting eggs, I noticed our back-fence neighbor out watering his ducks and chickens. I went over to say hello.

Mr. Chicken seemed a nice gentleman, although it quickly became apparent that he didn't have a very high opinion of the previous residents of our home.

"Apparently the low opinion is universal," I said. "A few days ago I met Mr. RV, our next-door neighbor, and one of the first things he asked me was if I was growing pot! Ha ha!"

Mr. Chicken didn't blink. "I'm growing pot," he said.

Mr. Chicken clearly wasn't joking. "Just two or three plants," he added. "I have a lot of neurological problems and it's medicinal. I grow it legal."

Oh. Okay. Note to self: you live in California now.

(Edit: I should add that Mr. Duck called me up this morning and asked that I meet him by our back fence. There, he presented us with the nicest flat of 18 eggs from his chickens, as well as bacon, hash browns, and a jar of raspberry jam. He's a very nice neighbor.)

Low Expectations

2011-04-15T00:15:00.002-06:00

I met one of my neighbors today. He was climbing out of his RV as I left for work, so I jumped out of my car to say hello.

ME: "Hello! My name is Drek. I just moved in next door."
HIM: "That's nice. Are you growing pot over there?"

Apparently the previous few occupants have greatly lowered his neighborly expectations.

Of course, some of his initial assessment of me may have had to do with the fact that our plumbing is broken so we haven't had running water, much less hot water for shaving, showering, and washing wrinkled work clothes, for over two days now.

He also suggested I fix the gopher holes in our yard. Apparently whenever it rains, the water pools in our yard, then drains out through the holes into his yard, which is at a lower elevation. That didn't make a very convincing case for fixing the holes--in fact, it suggested that putting out gopher treats might be a great idea from a landscaping perspective.

Overall, he seemed like a pleasant, friendly gentleman, at least once he understood that I was not, in fact, growing pot in my new house.

Port Forwarding

2011-04-14T22:48:00.007-06:00

The post is more for my own remembering than anything else, although I'm posting it here just in case someone stumbles across it and finds it useful

The goal: allow a remote computer to view a website hosted on my local computer.
Steps:

Set up an account with dyndns.org
Install ddclient on my Ubuntu machine to periodically notify dyndns.org what my IP address is

Don't prepend "http://" to your domain name in the ddclient setup!

On my router, assign my computer a static IP address
On my router, forward incoming traffic on port 8080 to the new static IP address
On my computer, port-forward port 8080 to port 80, where my apache webserver is listening

sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 8080 -j REDIRECT --to-port 80 (add the port forwarding rule)
sudo iptables -F (flush the rule)
sudo iptables -t nat --list (view the rule)
sudo bash -c "iptables-save < /etc/iptables.rules" (save the rule to a file)
sudo echo -e '#!/bin/sh\niptables-restore < /etc/iptables.rules\nexit 0' > /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/iptablesload (to create a script to restore the iptable rules every time the network interface comes up)
sudo chmod +x /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/iptablesload (to make the script executable)

Visit my site in a browser at http://subdomain.dyndns.org:8080

iptables: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo

First Impressions

2011-04-10T20:13:00.000-06:00

My plan was simple, really: trick the Lord into giving me a prime job at church. We finally moved into our very first house last Monday, so today was our first Sunday in our new ward. The idea is simple: wear a really nice suit the first day at church, and make sure you shave and comb your hair. The Lord thinks you've turned a new leaf and inspires the Bishop of your new ward to give you a calling commesurate with your new duds, like...well, anything but nursery worker. The Bishop wouldn't dream of sending you to a room where little grubby paws would wipe boogers and animal cracker crumbs all over your sparkly suit, right?

I think I may have blogged about doing this when we moved into our previous ward and it actually worked out pretty well. I got called to be the Elder's Quorum secretary, where the worst thing I had to deal with was no one turning in their home teaching reports on time.

Apparently the Lord got wise to me. Maybe I shouldn't have blogged about it.

So this morning I shaved and combed my hair for the first time in--well, however long it's been since the first Sunday in our previous ward. I pulled my dusty, unused-since-the-first-day-of-church-in-our-previous-ward suit from the closet and put it on. Church time rolled around and I put Ash in her car seat, blissfully unaware that as I gave her a bottle, I was setting in motion events that would result in my doom.

We arrived at church, made a good first impression as we strolled confidently into sacrament meeting, and found our seats near the front where everyone could admire the back of my combed head and the Bishop and his counselors could get a good look at my shave and slightly-wrinkled suit. We sang the opening song, said the opening prayer, conducted a little ward business...then the Lord pulled the trigger.

Ash peed on me.

Child was apparently in on the plot. Before I could move, she whisked Ash and the diaper bag away and was gone up the aisle. I was left completely exposed, with nothing to hide a giant wet spot in the middle of my lap. Disaster! Ash had hidden my scriptures as we were rushing out the door that morning so I didn't even have those. They were all in on it!

The boy carrying the sacrament tray was coming from the left! The man who counted attendance was coming from the right! The person in front would turn around to introduce himself at any moment!

I thought fast, grabbing a hymnal and opening it on my lap as if I were deeply absorbed in the lyrics to "I Believe In Christ." Three ice ages later, Child returned with Ash and I was able to snatch her back and make a hasty, damp exit from the chapel.

So the Bishop's only impression of me was what he got from the all of five minutes I spent in sacrament meeting. "Must be a less-active member," he probably thought. "Maybe not a member at all. Probably just came because his wife nagged him to be supportive on her first day in a new church. Wonder why he was reading that hymnal? Bit of an odd fish. Nice hairdo, though."

So...yeah. Nursery for me for sure. No way the Bishop is going to trust me with a calling that deals with anything above the most rudimentary gospel principles. So much for that plan.

And don't get me started on the service

2011-03-28T21:21:00.002-06:00

Only five pillows on my bed?! And they call this a four star hotel...

Halfway decent v. Not that bad

2011-03-26T14:54:00.001-06:00

Our check engine oil light has been flickering for a while, so I finally decided to get the oil changed before I left for Boston tomorrow. (I didn't want the transmission to fall out on Child while I was gone.)

We just moved here to CA a few months ago and Child took the car in last time in needed an oil change, so I didn't have any particular place I liked. I called the Valvoline Instant Oil Change place in Vista and the person who answered the phone sounded so sullen and short that I immediately decided to try a different place. My second phone call was to Firestone Complete Auto Care, and the way the clerk there answered the phone was like night and day. He was bright and cheery and suggested I look on their website for a discount coupon. I immediately decided to go there instead.

Unfortunately, that was the highest point of the experience. Not that anything went particularly bad, but there were several areas they could have improved. Like all auto places, they tried to upsell me on several more services, but they went even further than most places by throwing in a credit card offer.

Of course my tires were bad so they wanted to replace those, as they always do, but the man who helped me (different than the one who answered the phone) seemed genuinely peeved that I didn't take him up on his offer. "But I'm giving them to you at cost plus a buck!"

I understand it's a great deal. I've bought tires before. But regardless, I just don't have $250 in the budget to drop on tires right now.

The other annoyance was that even though there was supposedly only one car ahead of me, and I was assured that they would be done by 11:30 AM at the latest, I didn't walk out until 12:30. That was 2 1/2 hours on my Saturday gone. I expect that at a doctor's office, but changing tires and oil isn't brain surgery. It shouldn't be terribly hard to estimate time-to-completion, especially if there's only one other car. (Of course there were more--I could see them in the bay.)

Would I go back? I really, really wanted to like them after the way that first man answered the phone. But I've been to better places, and would probably look around first. Although actually, now that we have a house (or will in a few days) I'm going to try changing my own oil. It'll save money, and after the first couple times, I've no doubt I'll save time too.

Nobel Peace Prize

2011-03-20T20:55:00.001-06:00

Nobel Peace Prize, here I come. I have just solved world hunger.

All we have to do is send our daughter's booster seat to a country currently experiencing famine, and all their food problems will disappear. At any given meal, it will easily amass three times the amount of food that was actually served at the meal.

As I tipped the chair on its side and shook it in preparation to sweeping the floor after dinner this evening, it produced:

Raisins
Avocados
Spaghetti
Spaghetti sauce
Bread
Cheerios
A cat
Orange
Granola
Potato
Apple
Plastic St. Patrick's Day clovers

Everything but the plastic clovers looked edible, and much of it actually looked better than many of the meals I ate as a college student. I see no reason why the booster seat's particular capabilities couldn't be put to good use.

And who knows? Maybe the living room recliner will come up with plan for world peace.

Love Unfeigned

2011-03-20T15:21:00.000-06:00

In our men's group at church today, we had a new person show up. He was obviously not your usual church-going type, and when he was asked to introduce himself, he said some things that made it clear he had some mental issues, probably schizophrenia.

Later in the lesson, the teacher asked a question and this man answered with a rambling response that ended with him saying he wanted to have a family, and how should he go about doing that?

Everyone in the room listened until he was done talking, and I expected everyone to do what I was planning to do: humor the man while maintaining a polite expression, then turn back to the teacher and let him guide the lesson back on-topic.

Instead, to my surprise, a couple of men in the class answered with very thoughtful, serious responses. The marine with the grenade stickers on his truck explained that the man's first goal should be to make himself right with the Lord then blessings like a family would follow, while the silent man at the back of the room spoke up and gave encouragement for starting with the small things like coming to church. Before the class was over, the man had been invited to a church activity, lined up with a ride, and shaken hands with half the class.

I was ashamed of my initial reaction of brushing off the man, while simultaneously rejoicing in belonging to an organization that built men like the ones who had just taught me a lesson. Next time, I'll hopefully be a little more Christlike thanks to their example.

Robotic Rodeo -- Day 3 -- Murphey backs off

2011-03-17T14:10:00.004-06:00

So after I blogged about day 0, 1, and 2 of the Robotics Rodeo, life intervened, and I never got to day 3. However, when John mentioned that Davin mentioned that my blog post about 5D Robotics stealing some lady's bag from airport security was on the first page of Google results for "5D robotics," I figured I better tie up a few loose ends.

First, we returned the lady's stolen bag. We had left my phone number with Delta so they could give it to the lady if she called them, which she did. As it turns out, the lady was moving from CA to GA, which somehow equated to carrying a carry-on full of brand-new clothes and 50 garbage bags, but she wasn't particularly inconvenienced by the bag being stolen. We promised we'd leave it at Delta on our way home, and they would see that it got back to her, which they did. (After we spent ten minutes convincing the Delta employee we were in fact returning a stolen bag rather than looking for a lost bag of our own.)

Second, we almost ran over Boeing's robotics team. They were standing in a small group making snide remarks about the clearance and overall appearance of the Segway robot I was driving when it accidentally swerved towards them. They managed to scatter in time to avoid getting ran over by 240 pounds of steel and clawing tires, but only barely. Fortunately we had the velocity capped on the robot.

Third, the demos went marvelously, and not just because our CEO didn't like my blog post about the previous day's disaster showing up on the first page of Google results for our company's name. They actually went really well. Antenna Products pulled out a wireless spectrum analyzer and found us a channel that was fairly free, so our radios worked much better. We were actually able to demo our robots for some important people that Davin roped in, and the Segway representative only mistook one middle-school boy for a girl.

So all-in-all, it ended up being a positive experience. We had sushi for dinner, John didn't get tazed even once on the way home, and we got the next day off work to catch up on sleep.

Day 0
Day 1
Day 2

Favorite Baby

2011-03-08T07:45:00.002-07:00

Last night, Child and I were in bed. Ash was sleeping in her bed beside ours. Child and I laughed about something and in her sleep, Ash laughed also. Child and I thought that was pretty funny.

Foot, meet mouth

2011-02-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

Following is a cautionary tale on never saying anything in private you wouldn't want repeated publicly. Names have been changed.

We here at 5D have an intern working for us...we'll call him Scone. Coworker John, Scone, and I all work in the same room, although we can't see each other because of the dividers between us. This fact led directly to the incident.

Scone is a smart and articulate kid, so I sometimes forget that he just doesn't have much programming experience yet. He came to me with a programming problem, so I told him the solution.

"Well, the obstacle avoidance behavior file is conditionally compiled based on the mission flag in the CMake file, which is currently set to mission_dave in your virtual machine. Since the behavior should be unconditionally compiled in now, you'll have to move it out of the conditional and into the normal list of included files."

It makes perfect sense, right? Apparently not, because Scone gives me this blank stare like I was talking in German. That was doubtful, since I don't speak German, and I realize it just went right over his head. I go over to his desk and walk him through what he needs to do, although I'm a tiny bit annoyed because I'd rather him play around and attempt to figure it out on his own for a few minutes before coming to me.

A few minutes later, someone walks out the door heading in the direction of the break room. For some reason, I think it is Scone, which means John and I are left alone in the room. I start talking, which incidentally is where a lot of my problems throughout my life have come from.

Me: "John, do you think I'm helping Scone too little? Or too much? Because I just don't think he's getting anything I'm saying."

Scone: "Um..."

Me: "Um..."

So yeah. There were a few frantic moments while I mentally went over what I said, trying to think if it was too insulting or patronizing. Had I said Scone wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer? Had I mentioned anything about a light being on but nobody being home? Because I could have easily said something like that, just joking of course, but not the sort of joke you'd want to say to someone's face.

And apparently, not the sort of the joke you'd want to say if you're not absolutely 100% sure of whose face you're talking to. And even then, probably not, because you don't know what your listener might pass on, or what microphones are hidden around, or who might be just around the corner.

Living Truth

2011-02-20T20:41:00.000-07:00

Since our daughter has been sick (she seems mostly better now!), I've been doing a lot of reading about healing blessings and miracles. There is a wealth of knowledge and information in the archives of Latter-day Saint church talks that is fascinating--even more-so when it applies personally to yourself given your particular circumstances.

Something struck me just now while reading.

Every now and then when I channel surf on the radio through the lower end of the dial where my NPR news likes to hang out, I stumble across some religious speaker. I listen on occasion, and it brings back memories of attending various other religions' sermons while I was a missionary in Tennessee.

There is a striking difference between those sermons and the ones I've been reading online. The average sermon from a pastor will take an incident in the Bible and delve into it: history, background, various teachings or takeaway messages from it, etc. Sometimes the sermons will be topical, drawing from a variety of Biblical references to make an interesting or helpful point on a specific subject.

These sermons are good, as is anything that lifts, enlightens, and gives direction to peoples' lives. They can only rehash Jonah and the Whale so many times, though. At some point they reach the end of what the Biblical writers managed to jot down and there they have to stop. In the end, they're all missing a critical element: living revelation.

Contrast this to a talk on, say, healing blessings given by an Apostle. The Bible mentions several incidents of healing blessings, but doesn't go very much in depth into how they're done, who can do them, prerequisites, requirements, expectations, and limitations.

The Apostle isn't limited to the Bible, however, or even to the Book of Mormon, the book of Doctrine and Covenants, or revelation from a variety of modern prophets and Apostles, living and dead. He has his own personal revelation as a mouthpiece of the Lord.

As I've read through a half-dozen or so talks over the past couple hours, it keeps striking me how clearly and understandably the doctrine is laid out, how simple and organized it is, and most of all how much knowledge is added above and beyond any existing canon. In short, a sermon given by an apostle or other inspired church leader has an incredible power impossible to find anywhere else.

RedBox

2011-02-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

While getting a movie from RedBox yesterday, I watched the person in front of me walk away with five movies in hand. Either they were planning to watch 10 hours of movies in the next 24 hours, or they were going to rack up some nice charges on their credit card.

Who knows. Maybe the lady lived a hundred miles from civilization and this was her annual excursion to The Big City to "see what-all is goin' on."

Haircut

2011-02-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

My wife had a little accident last night. I have to admit--I had a hard time keeping a straight face and murmuring the proper sympathetic phrases.

Besides, it could have been worse. She could have been shredding paper instead of cutting it.

Updates

2011-02-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

A hot-green motorcycle in our parking lot has the word "Ninja" painted in black letters on the side, with a giant grenade stencil beneath it. Because when I think of ninjas, the first weapon that comes to mind is a grenade...

--------

Every time I go outside in the morning to leave for work, when there isn't much activity, a crow sitting in a tree along the sidewalk will give a brief caw, presumably to alert any other crows who cared that a human was nearby. Another lookout crow did the same thing on our way to the park today.

--------

Yesterday evening I finally got another robot driving. I was pretty excited since I had been working on it for the whole past week. Child called me about 5 pm and asked when I was coming home. It was a good thing she called, since I was so into my work that I probably would have worked until 7 pm before I realized what time it was.

On a related note, the company that built the robot apparently has no idea what a "standard" is. If you decide to use the JAUS architecture for the nice standardization it brings, it's a little counter productive to put the left wheel speed in the "velocity" field, and the right wheel speed in the "turn rate" field. It's wrong, and it defeats the whole purpose of using the standard to begin with.

--------

My writing group is great. They gave me some good ideas for how to progress my characters and make them more realistic. I like where my current novel is going.

Power

2011-01-30T22:47:00.001-07:00

Everyone's heard the saying, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." (Paraphrased from John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton)

I decided I don't agree with that. I don't think power corrupts, I think it merely exploits or exacerbates existing corruption. It's like putting pressure on a stone--the stone will eventually crack along existing imperfections or fault lines.

Taking it a step further, the more power granted, the smaller the imperfections that become a problem. Following it to the conclusion, absolute power would cause anyone with the slightest corruption--anyone less that a perfect being--to be destroyed.

Mormons differ from other Christian religions in our beliefs concerning the afterlife. For one thing, we take very literally the idea of being children of God and joint-heirs with Christ. As such, those who fulfill to perfection their responsibilities on Earth will (as joint-heirs with Christ) obtain all that God has and become all that He is.

Now we see the need for a judgment. That inheritance includes absolute power--the power to create and destroy worlds without number. The power to create and destroy life itself. No sane person, no matter how degenerate they personally were, would want that power given to anyone with the least predilection for evil. Imagine the potential for destruction.

No, most of us would agree that there should be a stringent teaching process (life), including frequent tests (trials), followed by a final judgment as to worthiness (and who knows--perhaps many more millenia of learning), before such an awesome power should be granted to anyone.

Sweet Relief

2011-01-22T19:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it's been a long day and you're exhausted and all you want to do is sit down and watch the basketball game and eat something sweet but there's nothing but vegetables and coconut milk in the fridge and you're disappointed because there's never chips or cookies just lying around and you open the freezer and there you find a giant ice-cream/chocolate-chip cookie that you left there a week ago and forgot about and it's a little freezer-burned but you don't care because all you wanted was something sweet and it's like a little bit of heaven.

Robots!

2011-01-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

We finally lined up our robots at work and I snapped a shot with my camera. We're missing one from the picture due to the simple expedient that it's too large to fit through the door (it weighs 4500 pounds), but when we get a nice picture I'll post that as well.

A Plus Updates

2011-01-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

In a surprising "coincidence," a week to the day after an unsatisfactory phone call with A Plus, I got an email indicating that they "noticed that you do not have an account manager" and were assigning me one. Before I even read the email, I got a call from the person who had been assigned, indicating she was my new account manager and casually asking how things were going.

I knew exactly why they were calling and repeated my previous complaints, as well as indicated my plan to leave their services. After listening, my "account manager" apologized profusely for the unprofessional behavior of the previous person I had talked to, and offered to give me the domain service that had prompted my original call for free.

For the price of a phone call, an apology, and a $6 perk (well, it saved me $6; it cost them nothing), they kept a customer who pays them $50-$60 per year. That's doing business the right way.

Wombat wombat wombat!

2011-01-11T20:53:00.000-07:00

Most people who've been to been to Latter-day Saint seminary know the mildly interesting acronym spelled by a few words in 2 Nephi 9:39: "[To be] spiritually-minded is life eternal," or SMILE.

For the fun of it, I decided to see what other acronyms there were in the Book of Mormon. Following are a sampling (not all the phrases that make up the acronym make sense; I just chose a few of the more interesting/amusing acronyms):

PALATES: "perish as long as the earth should" (tied for longest)
HANDOUT: "hearts are not drawn out unto the" (tied for longest)

WOMBAT: "words of my beloved are true"
SITCOM: "strong in the city of moroni"
TWEETS: "the whole earth except they shall"
MAIMS: "mine account i must speak"
SCUMS: "son came unto me saying"
WITCH: "which is to come having"
PANIC: "peace and now it came"
NACHO: "naught and cast him out"
ALOHA: "and lowliness of heart and"

All in all, I found over 400 that were 5 letters or longer, although some were duplicates.

A Plus moves to my Do-Not-Buy list

2011-01-03T15:50:00.001-07:00

Another company bites the dust. After buying over a half-dozen domains from A Plus.net, my next domain purchase will be from a different company. My primary complaints:

1. Terrible security. They actually require you to give them your password before they'll help with your account. Verifying who the account belongs to is good; asking a user to give up a password is a huge no-no. Any security professional can tell you that. No one but the customer should ever have access to or know their password.

2. Terrible customer support. When a customer calls with a complaint, immediately responding with a bad attitude is very poor service, especially if the customer is (I thought) polite. Giving them the run-around about not being able to talk to a manager before putting them permanently on hold is worse.

Goodbye, A plus.net. You get an F in my book.

New Year Goals

2010-12-27T10:22:00.003-07:00

It's amazing how much I consume. Food, media, entertainment, services, etc. After far too little thought, my goal for the new year is to become a producer. Following is a list of what I regularly consume, and therefore am going to attempt to produce:

Movie
Novel
Board game
Web service
Web game
Short story
Children's book
Food

This is just my initial thought; I'm open to suggestions if I'm missing something big.

I'm not planning to impose any personal standard as to level of quality or usefulness. For example, the movie will most likely be produced using a handheld camcorder with few props and less experience. On the other hand, I will likely put more effort into coming up with a fun board game and writing a good story.

To carve out time for my effort and limit distractions, I'm going to (not) do three things over the next year:

No TV
Only watch movies with wife
No browsing news websites after dinner

Numeric

2010-12-15T09:23:00.001-07:00

Exactly what part of the confirmation number "JDHXCV" is actually numeric?

2010-12-12T21:54:00.001-07:00

I liked this quote: "If you're unwilling to take the difference between a comma and a semicolon seriously, you have no future as a software developer." --jc42

Sweeping Science

2010-12-07T14:24:00.003-07:00

Sweeping every religious belief under the umbrella term of "religion" is like grouping astrology, alchemy, homeopathy, and economics with real science. Sure, you'll find people that believe it, but that's hardly a reflection on the scientific community in general.

At best, extrapolating your average Christian from Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps is unfair. Worse, it's disingenuous. Calling religion "bad" because of their ilk would be like dismissing all science because of what Dr. John C. Cutler or Dr. Eduard Wirths did.

Goose, meet gander. Let's all play fair.

Problems

2010-12-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

When a problem occurs, how do I respond? Do I ask: "Whose fault is this?" or do I ask "Whose problem is this?"

Those questions lead down very different paths. The first leads to blame, recrimination, and abdication of personal responsibility. The second leads to a solution.

The answer to the first question varies widely. It's occasionally "Mine." Regardless, it's not particularly helpful for finding a solution.

The answer to the second question is always "Mine." If Slugger McHurty is beating me up in a dark alley, the problem is not that he's a maladjusted member of society with a punching addiction, the problem is that I'm getting hurt.

By taking the point of view that every problem is my own (albeit not caused by me), it becomes clear that every solution is going to involve some sort of change on my part. Slugger's not going to change--he's having a great time. Why, this is the most fun he's had since he stole a lollipop from that baby two days ago. Instead, I'm the one who is going to have to do something different. Run, fight, or if nothing else is possible, adopt an optimistic mental attitude and watch for signs of Slugger tiring.

My goal for the next problem I face is to not ask, "Whose fault is this problem and how can they stop causing it?" Instead, I will ask, "What is my problem, and what do I need to change to deal with it?"

Sunny California

2010-11-23T17:38:00.002-07:00

Sure, we went to the beach a couple days ago. Sure, it was so sunny and warm I was in my short sleeve shirt. Sure, Ash ran around in her shorts.

I still wish I was back in Utah for the upcoming snow storm. I lived there ten years--and Child lived there her entire life--without seeing a snow day. And here BYU is closing.

I'm jealous.

Foundations

2010-11-22T08:03:00.003-07:00

For the past little while, I've been focusing my scripture study around questions, such as:

How do I increase my power in the priesthood?
How do I recognize the Spirit better?
Why are there so many tree parables in the scriptures? (Judges 9, Daniel 4, Matthew 13, Matthew 21, Jacob 5, Alma 32, 1 Nephi 8, etc.)

It's interesting to see how the answers to all these questions (except maybe the tree one) universally return to the foundations of the gospel. Study and ponder the scriptures. Pray sincerely. Improve your personal righteousness in the little things.

At the end of the day, the gospel isn't complicated. It's not even particularly hard, it just requires steady, constant progression. Focus on that, and you'll be presented with a wonderfully diverse bouquet of spiritual enlightenment.

Holidays

2010-11-21T10:58:00.005-07:00

This blog post has a happy ending.

I have to say that up front, because otherwise it would just look like my annual anti-holiday rant. Don't get me wrong, I don't consider myself a grinch. I enjoy the opportunity holidays offer for quality time with family and friends, games, relaxation, and even a little personal self-sacrifice for the good of everyone.

But honestly, how often is that the way it really plays out? Some sacrifices are necessary, I understand that. You can't usually have family-togetherness-time without shelling out for plane tickets or gas and traveling for hours with squalling kids. However, I feel that much of what we burden ourselves with over the holidays is unnecessary, commercial, and downright detrimental.

So here's the two questions:

1. How many people complain about how commercialized the holidays are?

2. Now how many people do something about it: i.e. stop commercing?

Although Christmas is the prototypical example, let's look at Thanksgiving, since it's the next holiday coming up. I actually think Thanksgiving is one of the least commercial holidays on the calendar. Sure, commercial interests push all sorts of food, but you're going to eat on that day regardless. Still, the holiday seems all about fiddling on the roof, without really stopping to think about why we're up there in the first place.

The reason, of course, is thanksgiving, quality time with family and friends, and happiness. If you can achieve all that while spending days preparing, cooking, and cleaning up after a giant meal, more power to you. If you can do it without subjecting those around you to a choking haze of stress-induced freneticism, even better. One problem: you still haven't even asked if preparing food, cooking, and cleaning is the rest of your family's idea of a good time.

Not to detract from the work that so many people put into maintaining Tradition (and the fond memories I have of my own family's Thanksgivings growing up), sometimes it's worth stepping back and determining of new traditions are needed. If you don't like turkey, cooking, cleaning, or spending large amounts of money, and your wife doesn't like any traditional Thanksgiving food and happens to think that Thanksgiving celebrates gluttony and killing Native Americans (not necessarily in that order), then why in the world are you having a traditional Thanksgiving?

Which is why our family is not this year.

Rather than wake up at 2 AM to put a turkey in the oven, we're going to sleep in as late as Ash lets us. Instead of making an endless succession of cranberry, bread, and vegetable dishes, we're going to order pizza. (And open a can of olives and cranberry jello.) With the time saved by not cooking, we're going to spend quality time with Ash at the playground, followed by some disc golf. Later that evening, rather than washing dishes, deboning poultry, and trying to fit leftovers in the fridge, we're going to play board games.

There's obviously trade-offs. There will be no delicious cranberry, bread, and vegetable dishes. There will be no pie unless we decide to buy one. There will be no turkey wishbone. However, these are traditions I'm willing to give up to create new ones that I think fit our particular family situation better.

My hope is that some of our local friends and family will join us for pizza, disc golf, boardgames, or some subset of those activities. I believe that strengthening relationships is one of the key aspects of a holiday. However, I understand that they might want to stick with their traditional Thanksgivings. We'll see. Either way, I think we'll be doing our part to turn our personal observance of the holiday back to its foundations.

Caulk Fighter

2010-11-16T08:32:00.003-07:00

I've always wanted a caulk gun, ever since I was a little boy watching my father apply that smooth white bead to any sort of crack you cared to name.

Well, I finally got an excuse to get one. We've had ants on our kitchen counter, under the kitchen sink, and oddly enough, the top of the shower. After a little investigation, it appeared that the ants on the kitchen counter and under the sink were related, and appeared to be coming from a crack under the sink. The ants in the shower were coming from a hole in the top of the shower.

One trip to Home Depot later, the crack and hole are history, and hopefully the ants are too.

Actually, to be honest, I'm sorta hoping the ants aren't history. I want to caulk more cracks.

Crayons

2010-11-16T08:02:00.003-07:00

Ash's box of 24 crayons is down to 16. Given that she received it two months ago for her birthday, that's a monthly CDR (Crayon Dissipation Rate) of 16.667 percent, roughly.

Borscht borscht borscht!

2010-11-11T19:07:00.002-07:00

Holy cow. I didn't know beets could be so delicious. Child just made the most amazing borscht, and topped with sour cream with a side of focaccia bread, it was the most delicious meal I've had in a long time.

Robotic Rodeo -- Day 2 -- Somebody taunted murphey

2010-10-29T18:33:00.004-06:00

The day started out early--about 3 AM Pacific time. We headed straight to Fort Benning to set up for our demo in the chilly morning air, fortified by a breakfast of soggy, lukewarm egg muffins.

From that high point, the day rapidly went downhill. The radios, which had worked so beautifully the day before, gave up the ghost with a vengeful permanence. If I had known at that point that it was simply the first taste of what was to quickly come, I might have followed suit.

The demo was at 10:30, a couple hours away. At first we didn't panic, assuming that the radios could be resuscitated. As time ticked away and radios remained stubbornly silent, however, the Antenna Products people became more and more frantic. A team of heart surgeons racing to beat a rising flood wouldn't even have approached their intensity. We were working on issues of our own so we couldn't watch, but Davin kept us updated on their progress. It went something like this:

"They're checking the connections."
"They're checking the linux kernel."
"They're reinstalling linux."
"They're opening up the radios."
"They're checking the circuit boards."
"They're replacing the circuit boards."
"They're stomping on the radios."
"They're rebuilding the radios from scratch."

The Antenna Products people were under a lot of stress, and Davin finally decided to stay at our own booth after one too many over-the-shoulder suggestions got him threatened with a fist to the face (these were big Texas guys). I don't think the guy was joking, either. At one point, one of the Antenna Products guys came over and said that the boss had just fired two people back home.

Like I said, though, we were dealing with problems of our own. For some reason, an ugly bug had chosen that morning to rear its head in our code. I finally had to give up working on that because we had to attempt to implement our fall-back comms solution: off-the-shelf wireless Internet.

Since we hadn't worked with it hardly at all, and we were down to our last few minutes before the demo, that predictably didn't go well and we finally gave up on that as well. What we didn't realize until later was that most people were having communication issues, due in part to the sheer number of people in the same tent all trying to use the same frequencies.

Also, it didn't help that someone had brought a massively overpowered radio that was drowning everyone else out. That was our suspicion by that point (confirmed later) and Davin got the person-in-charge to make an announcement over the PA for everyone NOT doing a demo to turn off their radios, but of course the vendor didn't. Their comms worked great.

The time for our demo to start came and went with us still trying to get a robot working. We finally gave up on the comms and simply planted our robot at the front of the demo area. If nothing else, we could demonstrate how you could plug and unplug two different sensors and they would automagically work.

Except one didn't. As we discovered later, the actual cord for the sensor had gone bad. The cord. When was the last time you ever saw a cord go bad? That's right, never. It just doesn't happen. Davin glossed over the issue as best he could, but at the end of the day it was a totally disastrous demo. The one tiny saving grace was that most of our audience was just a busload of school kids who had been trucked out to look around, and they don't usually have fat, multi-million dollar contracts to give out.

The rest of the day was spent working over radios, robots, and sensor cords. By evening time, everything was coated with dust and we were all hungry and tired, but at least the radios were starting to work. Mostly due to everyone else going home and freeing up the airwaves. We finally packed up and followed suit. Davin had pushed off all the unofficial demos he had promised people to the next day, so it would be a late night. Hopefully, the next day would be better.

Robotic Rodeo -- Day 1 -- Setting up

2010-10-20T08:08:00.006-06:00

Wednesday was setup day. The rodeo was held right on the military base, with the building-sized tent set up on an old firing range, to judge from the number of empty shell-casings that littered the ground. I contemplated throwing a few of them into John's backpack, just to make things a little more exciting when he tried to go through airport security on the way home, then thought better of it. If he were wrestled to the ground and tazed, it might hold up the whole security line and I'd miss my flight as well.

The tent had probably 50 booths, otherwise known as "folding tables." Since our company had turned borrowing other companies' equipment into an artform (our robots, laptops, radios, pretty much everything but the code we brought had been bummed off someone), we saw no reason to stop at the rodeo and talked AMREL, a laptop company, into letting us share their booth. We were even generous enough to give them one of the two tables on the second day.

Over the course of the rodeo, we borrowed additional robot parts from Segway, tools from AMREL, and additional antennas and radios from Antenna Products. We took AMREL's demo slot (you can't really demo a laptop, right?) and crashed the last 10 minutes of one of Segway's demo slots. In the afternoon, Davin talked AMREL into buying us lunch.

I felt a little bad about all our mooching, especially since it was more of a cycle than straight-up borrowing. We'd take one of Antenna Product's radios, break it, give it back, and borrow the next one at the same time. They could barely fix their equipment fast enough to keep up with us. Davin had to promise them ever-increasing future profits from our partnership just to keep them from beating us with wrenches.

The two robots we took to the rodeo, sans all their radios, laptops, and other hardware accoutrements
Left to right: Segway RMP 50, Segway RMP 400

By the end of the day, however, everything was looking rosy. With the help of Antenna Products, who made the radios, we got the RMP 400 to venture further from Home Base than he ever had before. The laptops were in fine form and the computer programs had brought their A-game. Our first demo was at 10:30 the next morning and our confidence was high.

There was one thing we forgot to take into account, however: Murphy's Law. We would discover three things the next morning.

1) Having an early demo slot is a bad idea. If something goes wrong, you have no time to fix it before showing--or not showing--your demo to top military and civilian leaders whom you've specifically invited.

2) It's a lot easier to make your radios work when there's not 49 other companies trying to make their radios work at the same time. Especially if one of them is nefarious.

3) Working radios are kinda essential for a good demo. When your robot is tethered to your control computer with a three-foot cable, it's hard to explain the advantages of your system to, say, a bomb-disposal technician.

If you've got an iron stomach and don't mind a little carnage--at least someone else's--tune in tomorrow for the next compelling segment in our ongoing saga: Robots Gone Wild: How Boeing Almost Lost Their Entire Robotics Team to a Crazy Robot From 5D Robotics, Inc. Fortunately, the Driver Managed To Evade the Military Police, Since I Really Didn't Want to Spend the Next 10 to 15 Years With Three Off For Good Behavior at Fort Benning, Charming As It Is.

Also, we need to talk with our saga-naming people.

Latest project: robotic bike

2010-10-19T20:23:00.004-06:00

Our latest project at work has been robotizing a bicycle. Here's what we have so far:

Robotic Rodeo -- Day 0 -- The Seventh Carry-on

2010-10-17T09:14:00.005-06:00

Tuesday morning, three of us from 5D Robotics, Inc. arrived at the San Diego airport. Our destination, by way of the Atlanta, GA airport, was Fort Benning, GA. Our mission over the course of the week was to demonstrate 5D Robotics' capabilities at the Robotics Rodeo.

Everyone knows that a trip of this importance does not go flawlessly. We got things off to a quick start.

You have to understand that the three of us arrive at the airport with 11 items of luggage in tow. Two suitcases or carry-ons each, two large crates of equipment, a carry-on-sized battery charger for military-spec batteries, a banner in long tube, plus a Segway robot. Even after checking what needed to be checked, we had six carry-ons between us. It should be understandable that a little confusion might arise about whose luggage belonged to whom and what exactly we had in tow.

Going through TSA security, John (names have been changed) is pulled aside. He's carrying the battery-charger as one of his carry-ons and that many wires and electronics in a military-green case is a little suspicious. He's taken to a nearby table for interrogation and trying to expedite our traveling, Davin takes a suitcase off the conveyor belt that he thinks belongs to John.

John is finally released by TSA and Davin hands the suitcase he grabbed back to John. John, of course, thinks that the suitcase belongs to Davin, and that Davin was just trying to pawn the job of carrying his luggage off on him. "Why does Davin even have three carry-ons?" John wonders to himself. "He's a Platinum member of Delta's frequent flier program. You'd think he'd learn to pack lighter." Being the nice guy he is, though, John says nothing and takes the suitcase.

We reach the gate, seven carry-ons in tow. Being a Platinum-level member of Delta's frequent flier program, Davin has a seat in the first-class section while John and I will slum it in coach. First-class people get to board first and as they are invited to come forward, John finally tires of lugging Davin's third suitcase. "Here, take this with you," John says, shoving the suitcase at Davin. "Being first-class, you'll have an easier time getting three carry-ons past the gate agent than either of us."

At this point, Davin thinks that John is now trying to pawn his luggage off on Davin, but he takes the suitcase anyway. The gate agent manning the microphone sees Davin coming with his three carry-ons and quickly makes an announcment--"We remind our passengers that there are only TWO carry-ons allowed per passenger"--but it's too late. Pretending not to hear, Davin gets past the ticketing agent and is free.

Arriving in Atlanta, Delta does its best to give us all heart attacks by cleverly moving our equipment crates from the regular baggage carousel to the oversized-baggage area, but we finally locate at and load it into our rental minivan. We drive for an hour and a half down to Columbus, GA, finally arriving at our hotel late at night. As we unload the minivan, John turns to go inside with a single backpack in hand. This is too much for Davin. "Do you want to take your stupid suitcase?" he asks, shoving the seventh carry-on at John.

John looks at it. "It's not mine," he says. Davin looks at me. "It's not mine," I quickly say. Davin frowns. "It's not mine," he says.

We stole someone's luggage. From security.

We take the bag up to my hotel room and start digging through it. We don't see any identification on the outside (Owner: "It's a carry-on! There's no possible way it could get lost.") and there's nothing inside but a stack of brand-new clothing with tags still attached and, inexplicably, a complete roll of about 5o Hefty trash bags.

Doing a second inspection of the outside of the bag, I finally notice a tiny scrap of sticker left over from some long-past flight with the name "Doe/Jane" on it. Since we took the bag from security, we don't even know which airline the person may have been flying, so I just call Delta.

It takes several minutes to get across to the baggage claims lady that we were in fact trying to return luggage rather than looking for a lost bag of our own, but she finally understands. "Well, just bring it back to the airport when you fly home," she says. Since that won't be for another another three days, Davin gets online and starts searching for every Jane Doe he can find. There are several, so he sends emails to the most likely ones.

One of the Jane Does, according to Google, ran a 17-minute mile in some race, which might explain her lack of catching up to us if she was, in fact, the one we had stolen the bag from. "Wait!" she calls out in her wavery voice, shuffling after us with her walker as we casually stroll off into the distance. "Come back with my suitcase! It has all my trash baaaaaagggggs!"

Anyway, by that time it is late and we are tired. "The day could have been worse, though," Davin points out. "Someone could have stolen our bags instead of vice versa. At least Jane Doe has the clothes she's wearing, and you can pick up trash bags practically anywhere. We wouldn't get very far at a robot demo without a robot though."

As we would find out the following day, however, there are more things than just losing a robot that can make a presenter start sweating at a robot demo. Stay tuned for the next installment of "Murphy's Law: An In-depth Exploration."

Nothing like a good addiction to while away the hours...

2010-09-12T11:25:00.002-06:00

If ever there was a time to give up smoking, you'd think it would be when you were trapped half a mile underground with limited ventilation, limited diet and exercise opportunities, and other people who might not share your same opinion of the health benefits of cigarette smoke.

Apparently not.

According to CNN one of the first requests made by 33 miners trapped 2300 feet underground was for cigarettes.

Credit Scores

2010-08-31T20:20:00.003-06:00

Child has an excellent credit score, but no income.

I have an income...but as we found out today, no credit score. Not a bad credit score, just no credit score. Apparently credit cards don't build your credit if you're responsible and pay them on time, and (car) loans over seven years old don't count.

That leaves us with basically four options as far as obtaining a house goes.

1. Wait a year to buy a house while I build credit by taking out loans I don't need and paying interest I don't want to. Note that credit scores are a black box, so this isn't actually guaranteed to give me a credit score.

2. Wait a year to buy a house while we save enough money to put down 20% on a home, jump through all sorts of crazy hoops to prove to our mortgage lender that I'm a responsible buyer despite the lack of a credit score, then almost double the amount of interest we pay on our mortgage.

3. Save money until we can pay cash for a house. Note that this would actually be our daughter's house, since given California prices, Child and I will be kicking the bucket about the time we finished saving. Since the plan is for Ash to be supporting us in our old age, not vice versa, this option is out.

4. Steal one under cover of darkness and move it somewhere convenient like the beach, or perhaps my work's parking lot. I'd have to look into how much it costs to hire someone to move a house though. And they'd probably run a credit check.

Backwards

2010-08-27T08:53:00.001-06:00

I'm teaching Ash the alphabet backwards, but I'm thinking about teaching her the numbers backwards also. We'll start at infinity and work our way down.

Writing Meeting

2010-08-25T10:10:00.004-06:00

So I finally found a writing group locally and attended a meeting last night...and this morning.

Yes, it went that long.

Pros: nice people, decent critiques.

Cons: I arrived at the meeting at 7:30 p.m., and got home at 1 a.m.

When I arrived, it was only the host and I. My first irritation was that it was 15 minutes after the meeting was supposed to start that the next person came in, and 45 minutes or more before most of the people had arrived and we actually started the meeting. Apparently this wasn't uncommon. From the joking as people straggled in, I gathered this was the usual modus operandi.

The second major irritation was that it took five hours to critique what every other writing group I've attended has done in two. The problem started because we didn't get each other's entries ahead of time. Each person showed up with their submissions and started by reading them aloud at the meeting. Seven submissions, ranging from two pages (mine) to six or seven pages, and you're talking probably 45 minutes just for the reading alone.

Without any advance preparation, you're critiquing on the fly, which is inefficient and doesn't allow for any sort of thought-gathering or organizing, which means most critiques were stream-of-consciousness. Throw in one or two people who like to ramble, and there was a very low signal-to-noise ratio.

That said, the critiques were good enough, but again, nothing that couldn't have been accomplished in half the time with a little more organization.

I'm not sure I'm going back. The usefulness of the critiques didn't really seem to outweigh the late bedtime and frustrating meeting procedure. Maybe I can find another group that follows the sort of format I'm a little more appreciative of...or perhaps start one.

You're kidding, right?

2010-08-14T15:11:00.004-06:00

The above poll from CNN.com astonished me. I can completely understand there being a huge variety of opinions about the wisdom of building an Islamic center near Ground Zero, but there should be no question as to whether they have the right. Isn't religious freedom one of the foundation stones of our country?

(Granted the poll is unscientific, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of the respondents confused the "right" to build an Islamic center there with it being a "good idea" to build an Islamic center there. If that's the case, though, then I can rant about the poor comprehension skills of poll respondents.)

Slow down there, big guy!

2010-07-30T09:40:00.004-06:00

Today I biked from our new home to my new job for the first time. According to Google Maps, the route I took was 5.1 miles, which isn't terribly far, but the terrain is very hilly. A lot of ups and downs. I was planning on it taking about 45 minutes, so I allotted an hour, but managed to make it in about 30 minutes. Not nearly as bad as I was afraid it would be.

Of course, it was overcast, calm, and a cool 65 degrees, but even when we get to the hot summer weather it shouldn't take longer, just be more uncomfortable. (Mostly for my coworkers, since they'll have to smell my sweat.)

A few blocks before the office, there's a giant hill. As I approached it on my bike, I glanced up to the snowcapped top, where I could see wispy clouds and giant condors slowly circling. (I might be exaggerating: they were probably just vultures, lying in wait for hapless bikers foolish enough to challenge the hill.)

Anyway, I was halfway up the hill, in the lowest gear, barely going fast enough to keep from falling over, when I saw one of the giant snails that I've been noticing since we moved to California. I kid you not, my first thought was: "At least I'm going faster than him."

Pretty sad.

P.S. I called the snail "him" because only a guy snail would be stupid enough to set off on a trek across four lanes of traffic when your top speed is 6 inches/hour. He wasn't even at a crosswalk.

Stir-fry

2010-07-13T22:55:00.002-06:00

Sorry about more geek humor, but this made me laugh.

Today I was on an airplane, browsing through some third-party computer code looking for a particular programming function (a block of code that performs a given task). In the file I was looking in, all the functions manipulated strings of characters functions, so all of them were prefixed with "str," short for "string," and pronounced "stir."

I passed such functions as strcpy (copy a string of characters), strcmp (compare two strings), and strlen (get the length of the string), then I came across another one: strfry.

The description of the function? "Sauté string briskly."

It was so out-of-the-blue in the staid programming code that I started laughing. Even though it obviously wasn't the function I was looking for, I had to do a little more digging to find out what the function did. Apparently it randomizes the order of the letters in the string. Apt.

Open Source Software

2010-07-11T18:40:00.000-06:00

I love Ubuntu and open-source software. I love that I can download and install an entire operating system and a comprehensive suite of software...in half an hour. For absolutely free.

5th of July

2010-07-06T07:14:00.003-06:00

Yesterday, Child and I went to my brother-in-law's family's land to relax a little. While there, Child took Ash out on an inner-tube for a little casual floating around the pond. The water was freezing cold (so I heard; water isn't my thing, particularly freezing cold water), so most of the kids stayed on the inner-tubes.

Of course, the problem with that was that when Child started floating downstream, she could either get into the ice-cold water, or end up in the Gulf of Mexico. Due to logistical reasons (I was holding an iPhone) her husband was unable to save her, but fortunately my brother-in-law swam to her rescue.

TCPlease make up your mind

2010-07-02T09:51:00.003-06:00

Sorry about the geeky post. People not interested in network protocols can skip it.

I was trying to figure out which network protocol (UDP or TCP) a robot was using, but I wasn't getting much help from the robot provider.

Email: Communication will be TCP/UDP (Can be TCP/IP if you prefer).
Documentation: Robot Control uses a standard TCP/IP protocol.
Code comment 1: This controller opens a TCP/IDP connection
Code comment 2: Waiting for data on port UDP

Half those statements don't even make sense. I finally had to look at the actual code to figure out that it was, in fact, using UDP.

Long Week

2010-06-24T18:09:00.003-06:00

Drive to Utah. Attend wedding reception. Attend baby blessing. Attend family reunion. Fly to California. Look for a place to live. Fly to Utah. Drive to Idaho. Attend wedding reception. Pick up extra baby for three weeks.

Whew. It's been an exhausting week. Let's start from the top.

The week began with my cousin's wedding. The reception was held in my aunt's back yard, and seemed to go very well. If there's one thing my extended family is good at, it's making up food for large numbers of people. It's a skill honed over years of family reunions, but even so I was impressed with the spread (can you tell I'm a guy?).

Child's one disappointment was that the fudgeballs on toothpicks turned out to be meatballs on toothpicks, but not before I rescued one that was about to go into her mouth (after first putting it there). The six chickens in the backyard also enjoyed the reception, or so I gathered from their delighted pecking at the continuous stream of food conveyed from the tables to their coop by numerous small children.

That was on Saturday. On Sunday, we attended the baby blessing of a small niece. She was very well-behaved for a two-week-old and the blessing went well.

That evening, we discussed the placement of two small children (1 1/2 years, 6 months) who are currently parentless due to their parents being in jail (for the umpteenth time). If anyone tries to tell you that drug use affects no one but the drug user, feel free to laugh in their face. I could probably list 500 people (by role, if not by name) whose lives were negatively impacted by the drug use of these parents.

Of course there's their children (who deal with physical and emotional neglect, if not abuse, which will probably destroy the rest of their lives, as well as future generations), their friends, parents, siblings, a constant stream of people they steal from to sustain their drug habit (including parents, friends, and family members), judges, lawyers (actually, maybe it's a positive impact there!), policemen, jail employees, drug program employees, religious leaders, landlords/motel employees...that's just off the top of my head.

I could rant on for several more paragraphs (and started to, before erasing it), but that's probably a topic for later. Moving on with the week...

Family reunion! For a change, the weather was sunny instead of rainy, but for some reason my extended family apparently has a fascination with alpine retreats. Just once I'd like to camp at an altitude lower than 8,000 feet. The scenery might be nice, but it's frigid at night. Not so bad when you're snuggled in a double-wide sleeping bag with your wife, bad when there's a baby sleeping between you who hates being under covers. Worse when your allergies kick in the moment you step out of the car, and apparently morph into some sort of cold, complete with fever and hyper-sensitive skin. Add to that the dry alpine air that dries your lips to the point that it hurts to smile, and you don't have a very relaxing vacation. Ah, the good ol' days of Missouri, with the warm air, warm lake, warm river, and chipmunks that don't pee on your air mattress...

But I shouldn't dog the family reunion too much. It was nice seeing everyone again, and...well, yeah, that's about it. When you're trying to deal with two squirmy kids, both of who need constant holding and one of which will stick any alpine detritus she can find into her mouth, everything else is mostly a blur.

Wednesday morning we drove to Salt Lake City, flew to Long Beach, rented a car, drove to Carlsbad, and checked into our motel. Kudos to Child for putting so much effort into our itinerary; everything went very smoothly. The company was paying for the trip, but in an effort to keep costs down we stayed at a Motel 6 for $55 a night. Granted, that price didn't buy us amenities such as a toilet seat lid, alarm clock, a working TV, or a continental breakfast, but they threw in morning coffee and the soothing sounds of the nearby interstate for free.

Our daily activities in Carlsbad consisted mostly of driving, eating, and looking at houses and apartments. We hooked up with a real estate agent who went far, far out of his way to accommodate our brief stay (I guarantee his commission, should we end up purchasing a house through him, will not have been worth it). We found a few possibilities, but I think we're going to end up just renting for a few months after we first move there while we continue looking. It's very hard to purchase a house when you're living in a different state, and I don't even want to try.

My mental view going to California was a picture that consisted mostly of traffic and gang wars. Although we didn't see any overt gang members, Child claimed she heard gunshots during one night and the traffic was everything I feared. Every road seemed crowded, and even though people complain about Utah drivers, they have nothing on California drivers. Because of the thick traffic moving at high speeds, if you have to change lanes, you just have to swerve out in front of another driver. The hope is that their car is enough more expensive than yours that they don't want to get in a wreck, and so slam on their brakes to let you in.

Returning to the airport Friday evening during rush hour on I-405, I found out why Karen (our GPS unit) had taken us by a toll road on Wednesday when we first arrived. Traffic was stop-and-go for about 15 miles on the regular interstate, adding about an hour to our travel time. Watching the estimated arrival time on Karen slowly converge with the departure time of our flight, I simmered in my juices and mentally kicked myself for trying to save the company $4.75 ($4.75 for a toll?! What is this, California?! Oh, right...) but it was too late to change horses at that point.

After exiting the interstate, we made sure to stop at every traffic light on the way to the airport. Finally reaching the airport, we hurled our rental car key at the Alamo people, sprinted to the JetBlue kiosk in the terminal...and found out that our confirmation code didn't work. Neither did scanning the barcode or looking up our flight by our credit card. A desk attendant called for people leaving on the SLC flight, so we ran over to her and she finally got us checked in. We reached the gate at the very end of pre-boarding, so we actually had a few minutes to spare, but that's cutting it too close for my liking. In a normal-sized airport (Long Beach is a small one), we wouldn't have gotten through security nearly as fast.

Arriving in SLC around 10:30 PM, we picked up our car and headed down to Provo to spend that night. It's normally a 45 minute drive, but we didn't arrive at Child's parents' house until after midnight. There was nighttime construction going on along I-15, so the entire interstate narrowed to a single lane for several miles. More stop-and-go traffic. After dealing with it on the other end of our flight, I wasn't particularly happy to see it again--much less in the middle of the night when I was exhausted and just looking to crash in a nice soft bed.

We finally made it, slept for a few hours until Ash decided that it was morning time, then got in the car and drove four hours back to Idaho. After unloading the car and putting everything away, all I wanted to do was nap but it was time to go to the wedding reception of another cousin. At least they had cream puffs.

While at the reception, Child and I picked up one of the afore-mentioned children from my parents (the six-month-old). We'll be caring for him for the next three weeks, then returning him to my parents when we move to California.

It's been a long week.

Yellowstone

2010-06-06T12:19:00.013-06:00

Yesterday we finally got around to visiting a scenic wonder in our metaphorical backyard: Yellowstone National Park.

It's an amusing place to visit because you'll be driving along, minding your own business, then suddenly hit a traffic jam of cars in the middle of nowhere. People will be running along the road carrying binoculars and cameras, with new arrivals parking haphazardly wherever they can find a spot and hurling themselves from their cars to join the crowd.

The reason, of course, is that Wildlife has been spotted. A wolf, a bear, or perhaps a particularly scenic buffalo all warrant the mass destruction of several hundred yards of roadside wildflowers if there doesn't happen to be a pullout handy. The downside is that sometimes, you have to have a 200X zoom lens on your binoculars to actually see the Wildlife, so those of us who weren't smart enough to bring binoculars with that magnification are left squinting into the distance trying to figure out if the black spot we're looking at is an elk or a tree stump.

Of course, a lot of the more common wildlife know that their only chance for personal recognition is to make themselves readily accessible. Buffalo were especially good at this, and could be found near the road at many locations. By the end of the trip we were buffalo connoisseurs, only deigning to stop if the buffalo was closer than 5 yards to the road, had particularly well-groomed fur, and perhaps threw in a little song-and-dance number.

At the beginning of the trip, though, we weren't sure what we'd find so we snapped pictures of whatever black stumps we could find:

Pictured below: Roaring Mountain. It was interesting enough, although I didn't actually hear any roaring. Or snarling, hissing, or even grumbling for that matter. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. It seemed to be a common theme throughout our trip that the sights we saw didn't quite live up to the pictures we saw in the various Yellowstone-sponsored publications. Either Yellowstone has a dedicated Photoshop crew, or we just hit the park at a bad time of year.

Pictured below is another prime example. This is supposed to be Mammoth Hot Springs, which in all the pictures I've seen has brilliant colors and pouring waterfalls. We were lucky to see a trickle of water from one or two pools, and the predominant color was grey. The below patch of dried-mustard yellow was pretty much the only other color we saw. Ash's expression accurately mirrors my own feelings.

The below picture was the best part of Mammoth Hot Springs, and it wasn't even at the Hot Springs proper. It's from the little loop that goes behind and above the main hot springs.

For lunch, we stopped in the little town by Mammoth Hot Springs, where three doe elk had smartly positioned themselves near the picnic tables to take full advantage of lunching vacationeers. Their migration patterns seemed to be dictated by the flow of tourists rather than the seasons, and about the time that lunch finished they moved off across the main square to take up a new position by the botique stores to catch the after-lunch window-shopping crowd.

Ash's hightlight of the trip was the strawberry she got to eat at lunch. Would that we all were satisfied with so simple a delight.

Some of the buffalo were clever enough to bring along the kids, knowing that tourists are unable to resist taking pictures of baby-anything. (Child took dozens of pictures of a "baby geyser," which I would have classified as a gurgling golf-hole but since it was 1/10th the size of a normal geyser, it was apparently much more attractive. I don't pretend to understand.)

On the plus side, I did manage to catch a shot of the elusive 8-legged buffalo. Seldom seen (i.e., photographed less than 500 times a day), he slipped across the road like a 2000 pound shadow before fading into the grass a few feet from the roadside.

The obligatory Old Faithful shot. Our timing was excellent; it began to erupt right as we walked across the field towards it. Other than that...yeah. Old Faithful. In its defense, it's probably kinda hard to live up to the hype it gets.

The Fountain Paint Pots. Bubbling mud holds a strange fascination for me. Maybe I should see a psychologist. I think it's because geyers are all up in your face, shouting, "Hey, here I am, everyone look at me," while mudpots are more like, "Heh heh heh, you have no idea what I'm plotting beneath this opaque, mysterious liquid, but I'll give you a few cryptic hints in the form of a sulphuric-smelling bubbles."

Yeah, I should probably see a psychologist.

Monkey Business

2010-06-01T21:29:00.005-06:00

Friday afternoon (5/28/2010), Child and I left Idaho and drove the four hours down to Provo. There, I dropped her off at her parents' house and drove another four hours down to southern Utah. In the North Wash area, some friends and I hiked a canyon known as "Monkey Business."

I'm not sure if some of the people want their names posted, so I'm going to leave them off. (I've become a little more sensitive to this issue as of late...)

Sometimes it's hard to tell where a canyon really begins. Most of the time, a few shallow gullies through the desert come together into a wash, which eventually turns into a canyon. The wash we started down came to a nice, abrupt drop-off, though, albeit one that could be hiked around and downclimbed.

I liked this multi-level shot. Traffic jam in the canyon. Actually, someone else was taking a picture from the front, but for some reason I liked this better. I think it gave a better idea of the 3D nature of canyons.

So the below picture isn't anything particularly spectacular, but it amused me. It looks like S. is squeezing through a tight spot, which he is...only this picture isn't right-side up. It's sideways.

The picture below is actually the correct view. He's lying on his side, squeezing under a boulder.

I realized after picking my favorite pictures from this trip that none of them were just normal pictures of the canyon. It's like anything you do a lot: the activity itself becomes a little ho-hum, and it's just the little out-of-the-ordinary things that become interesting. Anyway, I scrolled through the pictures and found this one just to show off the canyon itself.

This picture was taken by one of the girls that came on our trip, and I just liked it for some reason. It doesn't have the pretty orange and reds of some of the other parts of the canyon, but it has a very...canyony feel to it.

One of the most common canyon creatures you'll see are small lizards. Like the canyon frogs, they have the ability to climb straight up the walls, and they're fun to watch as they scurry around.

This was one of Child's favorite pictures so I threw it in.

I liked this one. We reached a narrow section of the canyon that was easier to stem over than go through. A lot of the time, the group was spread out so much that it was hard to get a picture of more than a couple people at a time, but this time I managed to catch them all together.

This is what's known as a "guided rappel." The trick is to guide the rappeller into the pool of water.

And everyone's least favorite part: the climb out. This climb is known as the "Kelsey Exit," named after the man who first found it, I believe. I've actually been up it once before while leaving a different canyon, and it has only gotten worse. The rock is primarily rotten sandstone, so everything you touch is sandy and slippery. Not only is it steep and hard to climb, but you constantly feel as if your handholds and footholes are going to break, crumble, or slide. Not fun.

But it finally came to an end. Freedom!

Biscuits and...oatmeal?

2010-05-22T08:56:00.004-06:00

News flash: despite their similar visual appearance, biscuits and oatmeal doesn't taste nearly as good as biscuits and gravy.

And why in the world would you put oatmeal in a crockpot, much less right next to an identical crockpot containing gravy? Sure, they had giant labels reading "Oatmeal" and "Gravy" on them, but who reads those?

Highly mathematical average

2010-05-18T09:01:00.003-06:00

Before a comet or asteroid hit Jupiter last year, astronomers had calculated that an impact like that would happen on average every 350 years.

How did they arrive at that number? The lay-person might (amusingly) think that they had simply taken the only two other known impacts (Shoemaker-Levy in 1994 and a possible impact observed by Giovanni Cassini in 1640), subtracted the two, and got the value of 354 years, but not so!

According to arXiv, arriving at that number involved taking those two impacts, adding "crater counts on Jupiter's large moons and various theoretical calculations", and THEN deciding it was 350 years.

I am suspicious.

Allergies

2010-05-16T03:36:00.003-06:00

There's nothing quite like waking up at 3 AM because your eyes are itching like crazy and you can't breath. Relatedly, slowly suffocating in your sleep gives you strange dreams.

And I think evolution got it backwards. Sitting up, it's slightly easier to breath but hard to sleep. Laying down, it's harder to breath, and therefore still impossible to sleep. Why not make it easier to breath when you're laying down? I'd rather spend my days (and nights) flat on my back...although I guess that would make doing my job rather difficult.

The big One Over Five!

2010-05-14T22:37:00.002-06:00

I cross the 20% mark of my story today! (Who cares that my goal wordcount is more-or-less arbitrary, making the achievement more-or-less arbitrary as well!)

I don't know if I'm just being more dedicated, or if I spent so much time thinking about this story before writing it that I have a good idea of where it's going each time I sit down, but the writing seems to be going fast.

It still doesn't seem like very good writing yet, and I keep wanting to go back and redo things, but I'm (mostly) forcing myself to wait until I'm done.

Bit of a contradiction...

2010-05-10T17:22:00.002-06:00

Restaurant name spotted by Child: "Original Thai 2"

You sly dog!

2010-05-09T18:36:00.001-06:00

Tell me we don't have to fear for the future...

Siete de Mayo

2010-05-08T11:46:00.004-06:00

Last night Child and I attended a church Cinco de Mayo party that was actually held on the Siete of Mayo. There was a lot of delicious food, but by far the best part of the party was the pinata.

One of the guys had made a life-size deer pinata, complete with horns, as the "adult" pinata. The legs were made out of thick cardboard tubes, while the body was a box wrapped in duct-tape, then wrapped in carpet, then wrapped in saranwrap. This bad boy wasn't going down without a fight.

And what a fight it was. The participants had their choice of an aluminum or wooden bat, then they were blindfolded and a sombrero was placed on their head. The deer was on a rope looped through a ring in the ceiling of the outdoor pavilion so the deer could be lifted and lowered. Each bat-wielder got a couple minutes to swing, hitting the floor, their legs, their sombrero, and occasionally even the deer. With the deer swinging wildly back, occasionally the deer and the human would get tangled up, at which point it started looking more like hand-to-hand combat then a casual party game. The person would be fighting grimly in ominous silence, swinging the bat as if they were in the jungles of New York going down under a wave of zombies.

The legs of the deer were the first to go, although the tubes were so thick that even they lasted through several swingers. When each one was finally cracked open, beef jerky and candy would spill out, because nothing says, "Deer Pinata" like meat-flavored lollipops. There were a few close calls when children, seeing the candy go flying, would dive under the pinata to collect it, apparently not understanding that being within the strike zone (or even a 20-foot radius) of a blindfolded man wildly swinging a 26 ounce Louisville Slugger probably wasn't a good idea.

The torso of the deer was an entirely different story than the legs, however. The carpeted sides were effectively impervious to the bat, and it soon became apparent that even a wrecking-ball would have a hard time getting through. When pretty much everyone present had exhausted their ingenuity, the deer was "skinned" of its carpet protection and finally finished off. Overall, it ranked right up with the most hilarious things I have ever seen in my life, and I only wish I had thought to take my camera.

There was a second pinata waiting in the wings, a full-sized "golden calf" that was actually wrapped in metal bands, but unfortunately Ash was getting cold and we had to take her home.

Blockbuster

2010-05-05T08:01:00.002-06:00

This morning I threw away the Blockbuster card from my wallet. Does that company even still exist?

NO CAPS LOCK!!!

2010-05-04T10:38:00.003-06:00

You don't realize how often you accidentally press the caps-lock key until you disable it and have an icon pop up on the screen every time you press it.

Civil Defense Caves

2010-05-01T21:56:00.007-06:00

This morning, we decided to trek out to the Civil Defense Caves, which are about a 1/2 hour from Rexburg. After starting with a wrong turn out of the Rexburg dollar store parking lot, I figured we had that all out of our system.

Two more wrong turns later (in my defense, the sign pointing the way had been knocked down), we arrived at the caves. It had sprinkled a little on the way up, but hey, we were going into a cave. The cave was actually a lava tube, where a hard crust had formed over flowing lava, then the liquid lava beneath had drained away leaving the shell behind. Word on the street was that they were called the "Civil Defense Caves" because back in the day, the plan was for the town of Rexburg to move in there if a nuclear war destroyed the world.

Despite not being the nearby Ice Caves, this cave had plenty of ice in its own right. Some sections of the cave had dozens of these ice balls, formed from water dripping from the ceiling.

I liked the ice slug crawling up the rock.

Wordcount vs. Percentage

2010-04-30T23:27:00.003-06:00

I've decided I like seeing a "% completed" indication more than a wordcount indication while I'm writing. Sure, % completed is just an estimate while the wordcount is exact, but it just seems like I make progress faster. Going from "8% completed" to "9% completed" seems like a solid achievement, while going from 7147 to 8154 words just doesn't mean much.

And maybe I shouldn't be focusing on what I've done, and work on what I still need to do...

Madame Guillotine

2010-04-30T07:57:00.004-06:00

A couple months ago I decided to try an experiment: switching from Gillette Mach 3 razor blades ($15 for a 3-pack) to cheap, one-blade Bic razors ($2.50 for a 10-pack).

The results were about what I expected. The three-bladed razor is much nicer on the skin. It shaves better, easier, and quicker. The one-blade razors scrape my skin much more easily, leaving cuts behind. However, the problems seem to be diminishing, perhaps as my skin gets more used to the rougher shave. I was seriously considering switching back for the first few weeks, but now I'm going to try it for a while longer. Over time, it's a pretty significant cost savings, at the expense of a little bit of the environment and a little of my comfort.

So...who wins?

2010-04-29T12:20:00.002-06:00

Recently I was reading a forum thread that was talking about Linux distributions. Three comments in a row went thus (paraphrased):

Person 1: After 10 years of Ubuntu, I'm running Fedora.
Person 2: I gave up on Fedora back in 2003 and went with Gentoo.
Person 3: I used Gentoo for almost 3 years, but personally, I dumped it for Ubuntu.

Hacked!

2010-04-27T07:21:00.002-06:00

Yesterday, the animal shelter called me. "Our website doesn't work."

Their website is hosted on my server, and I maintain it for them so I went to take a look. The first problem was easy to find: their domain name simply went to a GoDaddy.com landing page. "Looks like the domain name must have expired or something," I said. I'd seen it a dozen times before. "Just make sure the credit card didn't expire or something like that."

After fixing that, the shelter manager called me back. "It's pointing where it should, but they said it'd take a few minutes to update."

"Great," I said, but that reminded me that I had a second temporary link I could use to view the site if the domain name was down. Just for the heck of it, I checked out the site, and was greeted by flashing images and random text. Oh no! Their site has been hacked! Thousands upon thousands of mostly-empty folders with random names clogged their account. The shelter's own files and folders remained, except for the home page which had been replaced with the hacker's own page.

This was a kick in the pants. As security-conscious as I am, I had failed somewhere. Doing a little research, it wasn't hard to see where. When I set up their FTP account, I had chosen too easy of a password. It was a non-dictionary word that I had appended some numbers on to...but the non-dictonary word was their domain name and I hadn't stopped to think that a brute-force attack might toss that into the mix.

That wasn't the primary problem. Their unique password I could change, but I realized I had a bigger security hole. All the sites on my server that need to use the database use the same username/password to access it. If the hackers cared, they could glance at the database configuration file in the site that they hacked and get into the database, where they'd have access to every site's data. There wasn't anything particularly sensitive in there that wasn't encrypted, but still not a good thing.

The first thing I did was change the password on the account. The second thing was change the database password. The third thing was to give each site a unique password to the database with limited access. That way, if one site was hacked, it couldn't spread to other sites, and it would be easy to cut off that single access.

Fortunately, I keep good backups so it was easy enough to restore the hacked site. The hardest part was wading through the massive number of folders the hackers had created.

I wish I had fixed that particular security hole BEFORE something happened, but at least it's better now.

Wordcount Widget!

2010-04-25T00:33:00.005-06:00

Note the awesome wordcount widget I added to the right sidebar. This widget is awesome because it AUTOMATICALLY tracks the wordcount on my latest work-in-progress, no manual updating needed.

For those who are interested in the technical side of it, here's how it works:

1. My computer automatically backs up all my files to a remote server every night.
2. Since I use OpenOffice, the document in question is in .odt format. I discovered that a nice feature of this format is that the word count of the document is availabe in the raw document code (search for "meta:word-count").
3. The image you see is actually a PHP script on the same remote server. When viewed in a browser, the script extracts the wordcount directly from the document and generates the image on the fly.

Result:

Hi-Ya!

2010-04-24T18:37:00.001-06:00

Child thought it was funny, but I'll bet SHE can't kick her pizza off her plate while she's holding it and send it flying behind the bed.

I build robots, not time-travel machines

2010-04-17T13:33:00.002-06:00

Child: "There's a text message on your phone. 'Ultimate Frisbee at the stadium tonight at 6 pm.'"
Me: "That was from yesterday."
Child: "Oh, okay. Are you going?"
Me: ...

Child's defense was that she had just gotten back from a 9.5 mile run, so I can't really blame her. And the Frisbee will have had been fun, after I invent my time travel device.

Please don't do this

2010-04-04T21:25:00.002-06:00

If you're playing a game, and you realize you can't win, don't change your strategy to simply making the frontrunner lose. It's not the game, it's not cool, and it's not fun.

Sexy hot man abs!

2010-03-24T11:48:00.003-06:00

When I need information on a basic programming function, such as the "abs" (absolute value) function, I like to check the standard manual page. The easiest way to do this is to type "man [function name]" into Google.

I have to issue a caution, though. If you type "man abs" into Google, the results you get may not be exactly what you're looking for...