I woke from a weird dream this morning. A new colleague (who doesn’t really exist) was objecting to some work that I wanted to do that would leverage the cloud and improve the user experience because it would “cause more workload.” Some time later, we’re at a webdev meeting and I realize I’m the supervisor of all these people and the team is so large it’s unwieldy. Someone higher up in the organization is talking to us about something that’s not particularly engaging. A mentee is sitting next to me and sniping at the new colleague (who doesn’t really exist) in an under-his-breath kind of way. I tell him that’s rude and he should either say it loud enough to be heard, or keep it to himself. It turns out this webdev meeting is outside on a field and I realize we have a big enough group to play soccer with each other which is what I want to be doing.
I tweeted that I was going to drag myself outside today, and probably be glad I did. I did, and I was. I decided to go for a wander on my street bicycle. I’d not gotten more than a couple hundred yards when I had a little trouble shifting, so I immediately turned around to diagnose with tools at home. I eventually decided that the support for Sam’s sidecar was pinching the shifter cable. I removed it, tested and it was good enough to go.
I don’t really think of myself as an adrenaline junkie, but the way I’m beaming at the moment may be betraying me. I just got back from a mountain bike ride. It was amazing (or if you’re reading this from the UK, it was brilliant. Or if you’re reading this on teh inter webz, it was teh awesome)!
The girls are away, there are trails nearby that I’ve only begun to explore, I had no plans for the day, and because it’s California, the weather was simply perfect. So, I cycled out to [I don’t really think of myself as an adrenaline junkie, but the way I’m beaming at the moment may be betraying me. I just got back from a mountain bike ride. It was amazing (or if you’re reading this from the UK, it was brilliant. Or if you’re reading this on teh inter webz, it was teh awesome)!
We’ve been making an “outgoing” chart to help Sam, in social situations, to be more, well, social. She’s been doing a good job, and recently completed said chart so as a reward, we’re going to Fairyland in Oakland. This morning, we were talking about the day and she said she was going to go as a fairy. Because it’s fairy land. Mom asked what Mom and Dad should go as.
Sam: “Mommy should go as a carrot.”
<p>
The three of us went to the Maker Faire ((Carolyn especially enjoyed the spelling of “Faire” as it’s the French infinitive of “to do” or “to make”! )) today. I was ambivalent about going originally as it seemed like it would be a bit of a hassle to get there. Originally, it was going to be only Sam and myself going, but as Carolyn helped us figure out how best to get there, she decided it looked interesting to her too, so we decided to all go. We took our bicycles on BART from the far north east corner(El Cerrito del Norte), to the far southwest corner (Milbrae). From Milbrae, we rode our bikes along the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition’s <a href="http://bikesiliconvalley.org/files/nsroute/nsroutemap.pdf">commuter route map </a>which follows along near the <a href="http://www.caltrain.com/">CalTrain</a> route down to the San Mateo County Expo Center where Maker Faire was being held. By virtue of arriving by bicycle, we got discounted admission (win!).
</p>
<div class="imageleft">
<a href="http://gallery.accapehart.com/v/Events/2009_Maker_Faire/IMG_2594.JPG.html"><img alt="Ca and Sam Swing" src="http://gallery.accapehart.com/d/12875-1/IMG_2594.JPG" title="Ca and Sam Swing" width="150" height="113" /></p>
<p class="caption">
Ca and Sam Swing<br />in the PlaySoundGround
</p>
<p>
</a></div>
<p>
.The faire was full of all kinds of wonderful oddness. Carolyn and Sam went swinging in the <a href="http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/2548">PlaySoundGround</a> which was interesting, but I was surprised at how few sensors there were contributing to the soundscape, and how hard it was to tell if what impact those sensors were having. From there we wandered around and saw someone bouncing around on strange stilts, cars with all kinds of “art” on them, rocketry, music, pedal-powered carousels and ferris wheels.
</p>
<div class="imageright">
<a href="http://gallery.accapehart.com/v/Events/2009_Maker_Faire/IMG_2617.JPG.html"><img alt="Bicycle Carousel" src="http://gallery.accapehart.com/d/12927-1/IMG_2617.JPG" title="Bicycle Carousel" width="150" height="113" /></p>
<p class="caption">
Bicycle Carousel
</p>
<p>
</a></div>
<p>
The “life-size” mousetrap, SCA sword fights, a huge Lego model train set, and battleship. Sam really enjoyed working with clay at one of the demo stations for Oakland’s <a href="http://thecrucible.org/">The Crucible</a> as well as playing with <a href="http://www.legojeep.com/">the lego jeep</a>.
</p>
<div class="imageleft">
<a href="http://gallery.accapehart.com/v/Events/2009_Maker_Faire/IMG_2623.JPG.html"><img alt="Jack Sparx" src="http://gallery.accapehart.com/d/12939-2/IMG_2623.JPG" title="Jack SparX" width="150" height="113" /></p>
<p class="caption">
Jack Sparx
</p>
<p>
</a></div>
<p>
There were all kinds of places represented that I want to play at in the future too, including The Crucible, <a href="http://www.sawdustshop.com/">The Sawdust Shop</a> and <a href="http://techshop.ws/index.html">TechShop</a>. An excellent day was had by all, and it was topped off surprisingly well. On the way back, we stumbled across the “CrepVine” restaurant where we had some delicious savory crepes and Sam very much enjoyed the chocolate cake she split with Mom. (I had my own, thank you very much.)
</p>
<p>
We liked it enough that if we hadn’t already planned to be lazy tomorrow (and have dinner out east with “Unkie John”) we might have gone back for a second day. We’ll certainly do it again next year, but next year, we’ll leave quite a bit earlier! More photos are in <a href="http://gallery.accapehart.com/v/Events/2009_Maker_Faire/">the gallery</a>
</p>
<div class="imageright">
<a href="http://gallery.accapehart.com/v/Events/2009_Maker_Faire/IMG_2682.JPG.html"><img alt="Happy Sam" src="http://gallery.accapehart.com/d/13063-2/IMG_2682.JPG" title="Happy Sam" width="150" height="113" /></p>
<p class="caption">
Happy Sam
</p>
<p>
</a></div>
I wrote the following on my birthday, the day before we left for the UK for a month. Alas, our home router died that day too, so I didn’t actually publish it. I’m going to date-adjust the post back in time to when I actually wrote it instead of when I finally got back to the states and therefore around to publishing it.
Today, I turn 39. It’s feeling kinda old. But people have been great about celebrating it with/for me. People were very nice at work today both about my birthday and wishing me well for my next month in the UK where I’m kicking off a new project with my Brighton-based development team.
Sam got her first “bicycle” today. We got her a “balance bike” or “walking bike”. We’d looked around and found some pretty good deals on amazon, but we wanted to try it out in the shop before making a purchase like that. So we went to a few different bike shops including Performance that didn’t have any. We wound up at “Mike’s Bikes” where they had a few from Specialized. Sam was really cute as she skuut’ed around the store on it, making “ch” “ch” sounds. I’d been wanting one with a hand break so she’d learn that skill too, but apparently hand breaks aren’t actually standard until much larger bikes, so no big deal.
Something has happened at work that has caused me a certain amount of anxiety. In response to that, I decided I really needed a pet project. I still don’t know what that project was going to be, but there were a few technologies that I thought I’d like to know better / play with. Specifically, Twisted, Stackless and RabbitMQ.
I got on to the ubuntu box that I host in the amazon cloud and started doing updates so that I had a current box to do some of the above installs on. Only the updates started failing and in some really odd places like update-rc.d. It was chewing up big CPU and a strace on it showed … well, nothing. I eventually figured out that I had a full disk, but even nuking a whole bunch of files in /tmp (some spew from gallery it looked like) didn’t help.
Sam and I were looking at a map of the UK and Ireland and I asked if she knew who comes from Ireland? She didn’t know that that’s where her (great-)aunt Janet is from, so we talked about that. She asked where her (great-)aunt Scotties is from, and I said “Richmond, where Grand-mère lives now.” The following conversation ensued:
Sam: Daddy, I’ve got a new country coming.
Dad: Oh? What’s the name of the new country?
We took the Eurostar from London to Paris on Thursday, and returned today (Sunday). I took Thursday off, and then worked from “Home” on Friday. We have about a 15 (adult) minute walk from the flat to the Brighton train station. From there, it’s a little under an hour to London, St. Pancras. From there, a little under three hours to Paris Gare de Nord. From there, 15 min on the Paris Metro and 5 minutes to the flat. Of course, that’s just the travel time. There was enough transition time to make that a pretty much full day.