Monthly Archives: November 2005

Vittles

This year we will be attempting the Alton Brown method of cooking our turkey. This involves days and days of brining the turky, and only hours of cooking. In theory this will be the best turkey dinner we’ve been involved with. In actuallity I think it will be yet another fine turkey meal. The best part is that we’ll have lots of family at the place, the worst part is that those same wonderful people will generate dirty dishes. My mother-in-law has been doing so much housework that I’m almost certainly going to volunteer to do the dishes after the meal, it is only fitting that if everyone else is involved with all of the other aspects I shall be the one to clean up the left-overs, clear the table, wash the table, wash the floor, wash the dishes and make sure I check all of the belly-buttons of the dishes for lint.

What sort of Thanksgiving traditions does your family have?

Scarred But Smarter

I just walked through our family room. Oprah was on while Jessica is nursing. Oprah was doing a show on how to know the right bra size. I saw a woman who is not my wife wearing a bra that was not right, and it was not right in way too many ways.

I’m going to gouge my eyes out now.

Why do I catch this stuff? Why can’t they just do shows on how Oprah is a weird religious cult leader and that she wants us all to be happy about that? Can’t we have that instead of older breasts of women being flapped about on network television? If I wanted that sort of smut I’d get a premium cable channel.

Yikes.

14 GB and Still Not Satisfied

Yesterday I finished importing my MP3s into my computer. I have been through this process before but had to do it again. I ripped them at 128 kilobits per second so that they’re of decent quality but do not take up my entire hard drive. Its over 8 days of MP3s. What on earth am I doing with this much music, and why don’t I have more? I’m going to have to record some of my own music into this array of music so that I can be inspired to write more (because my own stuff will eventually prompt me to write more, it always does).

I can understand why people have 60GB iPods though, it would be easy to fill them up.

Currently listening to Poor Old Lu, Cruciality

Happy Birthday, Uncle Eric

Happy Birthday to my uncle Eric (My middle name is his first name) who today turns $$ years old. My Uncle has taught me many, many things in this life, including a few goofy jokes, a lot of theology and how to have only girls. OK, not the last part, he has three beautiful girls, they’re just older than mine. He’s an elder (co-pastor for those of you outside of the Christianese circle) at a church in Northern California where I grew up part of my life. I’d get more biographical, but you can read more here.

Nursing

Tonight one of Abby’s dolls began crying. Jessica then said to her, “You better feed her.” Abby lifted up her shirt and placed the baby doll’s plastic mouth on her chest. We all chuckled at this innocent mimicry.

About 2 minutes later Abby walked over to the couch with two of her babies and said, “Mommy, you better do it. I don’t have any milk.”

Umbilicus Offus

Evie’s umbilicus fell off yesterday at some point in time (in a disgusting side note: we have no clue where it went…yet). She’s now a rather ‘normal’ looking baby. Except by ‘normal’ I mean cutest little girl in her age bracket (apologies to any other girls in this age bracket, I’m biased). I’ve got more pictures to post that I plan on posting later today.

Quite the Character

I am amazed at how fast character arrays are compared to their string alternatives in every programming language I’ve ever used. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise but I thought I’d point out that by switching from Standard Template Library strings to char arrays in C++ on a project I’ve got going things sped up from around 25 seconds to process 55,000 lines of files to 15 seconds. Furthermore, in Java, using threading and database insertion on a previous project I was able to get even more performance increases (it was an older version of the runtime, and I switched from String to StringBuffer, which is basically an array). In JavaScript, If you have to accumulate characters into a buffer, I strongly recommend using an array and either pushing the data (if you can afford to not support IE 5) or using arrayVar[arrayVar.length] = value;.

By learning to think this way you’ll have faster code out of the box, which is always nice because it means you don’t have to spend time refactoring. You do refactor, don’t you?

Thanks to Tony Nuzzi for the String->StringBuffer conversion in Java, and Craig Kaes for helping me to better understand char *pointers and char arrays a little better.

Yoga. No!!!

So… Nick posted about yoga on his blog this morning. And I left him a comment of encouragement, but also, I had to blog about this so that he might laugh, and that I might not effect his SEO with references to flatulance or any of the other lovely parts of my yoga experience.

You see, my wife is a yoga queen. She’s capable of all sorts of contortions, flexes, twists and positions that are apparently inidicative of being a flexible human being. She married me. I basically have three positions which I can assume: sitting, standing and laying down. There are brief times that I am not doing one of these, but they are merely when I am in between the transition from one to the other. She and I got a video of Yoga exercises to be done at home in the privacy of our living room. This was back in Texas. This was before Abby, I believe. So it has been some time. Jessica has been trying to get me to do yoga again since then.

We would change our clothes into the attire of people who were going to work out and then start the video. The problem is that, as many of you know, yoga is partially flexibility. I am about as flexible as a wet noodle. Well, a noodle formerly known as wet. So a once-wet-but-now-dry noodle. So I would sit on the floor, start the positions, nearly give up due to not being able to reach my toes with my legs not bent, be repremanded by Jessica and then make it about 1/3 of the way through the 30 minute video. For those of you keeping track, that’s 10 minutes. Ten minutes of flexing my body in ways it is not used to being stretched.

One of the claimed benefits of yoga is that it helps your body detoxify. Well, my body apparently stores up toxins in a gas form. About 10 minutes into the video I would start ‘passing wind.’ And then with each change of position I would continue to do so. This is one of the single most powerful non-yoga arguments I can come up with for men. It is very difficult to streth into a position that requires muscular control and balance while also trying to have control over other muscles that may prevent the room from being uninhabitable. So, once things would start ‘detoxing’ we would be either laughing or crying but the yoga would be heavily interupted.

Is it just me? Am I the only one who gets gassy due to yoga? It may be possible, but I’m hoping that I’m not alone, unless I’m doing yoga, and then I should be left alone.

Attention Data

Nick Bradbury has written about attention data on his blog several times. What I see as an interesting use of attention data (that fortunately costs you some money. Yes, fortunately. You get 10 hours free to try it out.) is the site Pandora.com. While it may sound like you would be opening up a world of trouble by clicking on that link, I challenge you to check it out. You can type in artist names and Pandora will then start selecting songs that might fit your taste. What’s interesting is that you can rate the songs (click on the song in the player and choose from the popup whether or not you like it) and then they are able to take a list of songs that you’ve liked and can then compile a list of songs that you might like based on your attention data. I am amazed at the value of this sort of attention data.

Pandora’s musical evaluation of the songs is based on a complicated grid of characteristics that basically rank each song by each artist that has been rated by their group of music evaluators by various qualities so that if you’re a big fan of certain songs with various characteristics you’ll most likely get other songs with similar characteristics. Other bands with songs that sound similar will be brought in so that you can be introduced to new music. Sure, you could listen to the radio and hope that the record labels happen to be promoting the next thing that isn’t just a cookie cutter cut out of other music but this is quite amazingly good at nailing my musical preferences. As a former music department manager I can attest to the challenge of doing this manually. A database of music is just amazing in this context.

So, you pay them to use your attention data to be exposed to quality (ok, that’s a bit subjective) music, and then they learn from you to help play what you like but also they can take your attention data and discover what various tastes are and can give even better suggestions to other users.

Brilliant.

Thanks to Robin for pointing me to Pandora.