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Friday, January 28, 2005

Fog, smog, or inversion

Stardate 58012.8 (1-28-2005)

Fog, smog, or inversion. I can't really tell which this is, but I miss the sun. I think it's been about a week since I last saw it. I don't mind cold, and in fact I love to sleep under a couple of heavy blankets, which is something that doesn't work very well in the summer. But growing up in the desert means I get a lot of sun, and I miss it when I don't see it in a week.

Thanks to Carl Stark and Mike Gibby, I spent much of Wednesday night/Thurday morning reading PvP archives. I had to be up anyway, because the third grade newspaper had to be printed. 60 pages, double sided, time 3 pages, takes time to print. They had a source for printing it in color, but the source lost access to the printer.

Most of my nights I have something to do and somewhere to go. I have basketball practice on Wednesday night for both Rachel and Patrick. The boys on my team got a little rough. I think I need to get some armbands so that I can enforce the one on one defense. I see why the league insists on it. The tendency is to follow the person with the ball. Now if the other team learns to pass, this could be a problem. But the bigger issue is that the person with the ball gets trapped, and since most of the time they won't pass it, everyone starts to grab and claw for it. Eventually someone gets hurt. So I see the point of one on one, aside from the tactical.

Lori and Bolo, the married wrestlers, were eliminated from the Amazing Race. They were my favorites this season. The common theme this season for getting eliminated is missing a detail. Last week the team to go out missed one, and it happened again this week. I also watched SuperNanny, because someone at April's work told her she needed to see it. It was interesting, and this episode had a child that took three hours to go to bed at night. That bought a few memories back. Rachel was the same way (still is, but she generally sits in her bed and reads now). There was also a boy that talked back and acted up. I would have to agree with the nanny, the parents are treating the kids as adults. Nice show, but I am not sure I want to bother with catching it every week.

The last thing is that I read in the paper Thursday that a group supporting family values is up in arms over Spongebob Squarepants, because he lives a homosexual lifestyle. Gee, all the times I have watched it with my kids, and that NEVER OCCURRED TO ME. People see so many demons in everyday life.

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Monday, January 24, 2005

His Excellency

Stardate 58012.4 (1-24-2005)

I finished "His Excellency" Saturday. It was a pretty good book. The author seemed to have a pretty good analysis of George Washington, and explained it well. I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in history and the man himself.

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Sunday, January 23, 2005

Basketball

Stardate 58012.3 (1-23-2005)

Basketball Saturday went well. The boys didn't win, but they had a good time. Patrick complained that the guy I had him guard some of the better players, but he does still to them well, so he gets the job. Rachel's team did well in the first half, but the passing in the second half ended up in the hands of the other team. Thomas was invited to a birthday party at the same time. I think the parents were a little puzzled that we drop him off and leave. Thomas had a good time, though.

Rachel went to ski lessons today. She gets to go with her best friend. She had a good time, but it was harder than she thought.

Well, I'm tired, so I think this one will be short. I need to catch up on the Enterprise reviews, and a host of other things.

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Monday, January 17, 2005

National Treasure

Stardate 58011.7 (1-17-2005)

Been a busy week and weekend. I can't go into much detail, sufficed to say that adding a feature after a software development cycle is done, and not expanding the development and testing is asking for trouble. It's not bad as far as the product release goes, but there was a lot of extra work put in for it. So the last two weekend were high stress.

I've also discovered that .NET 1.1 is very stingy about resources when you try and run multiple copies of the same program. It seems like Microsoft is not exactly clear on multi-tasking yet. I might try a few things in 2.0 to see if the same issue exists.

Basketball went well, although there is a lot of work to do with the boys there. It was the first game, so I don't expect that they can absorb everything about playing the game, much less as a team. One boy is pretty good, and I noticed the other team was getting a little rough with him toward the end of the game. I did laugh when my team finally got a basket, and then were so busy congratulating each other that they failed to notice the other team running to score again.

We went to see National Treasure Sunday. It was an ok movie. I sat next to Thomas, who was bored with the movie, so I didn't get into it. It seemed to stretch the envelope of belief for me. Patrick wants to see Star Wars: Episode III now (and I mean today) after seeing the posters. I keep trying to explain that it is not out yet. It's hard to tell if he just does not understand, or he is trying to annoy me. I am thinking the latter.

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Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Sid Meier's Pirates

Stardate 58011.2 (1-12-2005)

Last Friday I purchased Sid Meier's Pirates!, using some money I got for my birthday. The gameplay is very simliar to the original release a decade ago. You are a 17th century buccaneer captain, and you plunder ships and towns in the Caribbean. The graphics are, of course, much better than the original. One of the complaints I do have is that the graphic sequences as you board a ship and fight the captain are repetitive. The updates and changes are not significant. You now have to do a series of keystrokes to follow the governor's daughter around a dance floor (Patrick was very concerned that I could not master this and get married). And in the original, you had to align yourself with either the English, French, Dutch, or Spanish to survive. Now they have "Pirate Havens" so that you can be a pure pirate and plunder everyone. I have not tried that yet, but it sounds interesting. I will say that if you did not like the original, this version will bore you.

Basketball starts Saturday. The games are later in the morning, so at least we don't have to get up at seven. I am not sure how long Patrick is willing to play. Last year he got pretty frustrated that no one would give him the ball. Practices go from 6:30 to 8:30 on Wednesdays, so the day gets long. Good thing Enterprise was moved to Fridays.

I had a meeting at work on Tuesday to set up a timeline to move to web development. It's not as aggressive as I would have hoped, but it's not bad. Possibly by September half of my time will be on that. Not that what I do now is bad, but after 8 years it would be good to do other things. I have to fight the tunnel vision and look at different techologies. It doesn't help that with software development the rate of change is high. I've tried to branch out and still keep doing what I am doing, but learning new things takes concentration, and I have to keep going back and complete tasks, which breaks up my line of thought. It's kind of like a TV show that gives you two minutes of the show, and switches to something else for a half hour, and then puts on a bit more (I am reminded of Cartoon Network's Star Wars: The Clone Wars five minute episodes). You loose track of what was going on, or I do anyway. But it does feel like a weight is lifting.

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Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Cognitive Overload

Stardate 58010.5 (1-5-2005)

Bet you didn't know all the highlights for 2004 in math. Well, neither did I. I readily admit to not understanding what a lot of it is about, and I didn't even know Bobby Fischer was a wanted criminal.

If you hadn't heard about these, you might be suffering from Cognitive Overload. I'd agree with some of it. Nowadays, you can't go anywhere that is not connected by cell phone, email, IM, and a host of other ways to stay in contact. I heard on NPR that internet access is now available in the nations parks. Generally, it's a good thing, especially when you get into trouble. And I am old enough to remember the little drawers of cards at the library, and spending sometimes hours searching for the book I was looking for. But at other times it would be nice to get away from it all. I personally have times were concentration on a task is necessary to get it done, so email, IM, and cell get shut off. It probably annoys people, but it needs to be, at least for me.

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Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Now I remember

Stardate 58010.4 (1-4-2005)

Now I remember why I needed to update the menu for each log entry. The calendar script picked up the entry for 12/29/04 as the last one. Since I am a little more comfortable with Perl now, I went in and wrote a custom sort routine. I agree with Bruce Eckel on the point of learning different programming languages. It's good to do so, just to see how things are approached for issues such as this. With Perl, the sort algorithm can be changed within the call to sort, which I thought was pretty cool. Most other languages require you to implement an override method, or supply a function. It took about 30 minutes, 15 of which was trying to figure out why 12 is greater than 110 (think lexical comparisons).

Today I had a reminder of how the Dilbert comic is based in reality. I can't go into details online, and it was just funny as opposed to being bad.

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Monday, January 03, 2005

New Year

Stardate 58010.3 (1-3-2005)

Old year out, new year in. I hope everyone had fun at the Mid-Winter BBQ. The house stayed cleaner than before I started to clean. The morning after Rachel and Patrick slept until after 12.

Patrick's birhday party went pretty well. We rented the Ogden Indoor soccer place for a couple of hours. One boy did not like the way the game was conducted, another was more interested in video games, but other than that, everyone had fun. We ended up with an extra pizza due to some of the people having other plans.

I think Rachel is getting burned out on soccer. The indoor season completed on her birthday, and the new season starts tomorrow. She is not interested.

Sunday April and I cleaned out the office. We gave a boxload of books to the library, and threw out (or will throw out, since the garbage cans are full) a ton of other stuff. The playroom was repainted before the party, and cleaned. This leaves the storeroom. We are a little burned out on cleaning, so that will wait until the end of the month. I will need to build shelves for it.

Other projects that are on the list: Finish the railing and front of the deck, remove the swing set and build a new one, put new bark down, and buy a trampoline. Our next door neighbors are selling thier house to move closer to her parents, and I assume they are taking their tramp with them.

I fixed another problem with the online log entry. The month portion of the stardate left off the leading zero. It was a simple fix.

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