Author Archives: brad

After years of effort, I’ve finally been recognized as an evil genius.

You are an SEDF–Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well–even those you have known a long time–because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

That’s what this test says about me. I’m curious to hear your results, as well as your analysis of mine.

Thanks to Dave and to Noel for the link.

You may have noticed in the header above that we’re celebrating ten years of matrimony. That’s right, Jen and I passed the ten year mark on Friday. I can’t believe it’s been ten years.

I know the common thing is to say, “Oh, it only seems like a couple weeks!” But that’s not true. It seems like forever that I’ve been with her. And I mean that in a good way. I don’t remember what I did before she was in my life. And it doesn’t matter. Nothing that happened before her really matters.

We were high school sweethearts. We were assigned to be dance partners in the spring musical during our senior year. My girlfriend-at-the-time, who had jealousy “issues”, came up to Jen and said, “I’m glad you’re his partner, because I don’t trust any of the other girls around here.” Whoops. Bad judgement, there. Jen and I started dating a few weeks later. Three years and change after that, we were married.

We’ve been through a lot together. Four homes. Six vehicles. Twelve jobs. One church that we left in disgust, and another we helped to build and then dismantle. One miscarriage and one stillborn son. And the best thing we ever did: Gracie.

Here’s to the next ten years, Jen. I love you more than ever.

I need help from diabolical minds. Here’s the situation. My sister let me know the other day that neighborhood kids, mostly teens, are using her yard for a bypass. They cut through all the time, about six to twelve on any given day. This is rude, but it wouldn’t be so bad if not compounded by the fact that they tend to linger there, near the deck, and socialize. They tend to use language that she would rather not explain to her four-year-old and seven-year-old sons.

Now despite my sister’s attitude about Thin Mints, I want to help her. Of course, the situation gets more complicated. Her neighbor doesn’t care, and so won’t cooperate with any efforts to keep kids from wandering through.

So what we’re looking for is this: some way to prevent or deter miscellaneous people from cutting through her yard that doesn’t rely on the cooperation of neighbors. I thought of some sort of motion sensitive hose, but that may prove to be difficult to build. The catch is that it can’t be anything that some kid’s parents would sue over.

Looking for suggestions. Thanks in advance.

Dave Winer’s How To Avoid Flamewars: When you’ve written something strong and personal, before posting, re-read it and pause for a few moments. Re-read what you’ve written and imagine that someone said what you’ve said, about you. Would you like it? Would you feel it was fair? Or would you feel angry? If so, you should probably reword it, so at least you would be okay with it. That doesn’t guarantee that the person you’ve written about will be okay with it. We’re all different, our buttons are in different places, we’re sensitive to different things.

I think my head just exploded.

I’m back from Tennesee. Actually, I’ve been back since Saturday. I’ve been busy doing things like sleeping in my own bed, hugging my wife and daughter, and not eating in restaurants.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it back. I was booked for a 7:30 flight on Saturday morning. Let’s see, try to get to the airport around 6:00 so I have time to drop off the rental car (Chrysler Sebring, a car I’d be happy never to drive again, but not as bad as Clair’s work truck, a GMC Behemoth that handles exactly the way I would expect an elephant with a gland problem would handle), get through security, etc. Hmm. Better wake up around 4:00. Shudder. Go to bed around 11:00. I can function on five hours with no problem. Noise in the hall; can’t sleep. Finally start to panic around 12:40. I can’t function on three hours. What if I don’t wake up? I woke up in time after all. Ate my well-planned breakfast of a Diet Coke and two Atkins bars. Dropped off the rental car and started through security when I realized that I still had my car keys. Whoops. Back to the beginning. Make it to the Atlanta airport, which is ridiculously large. Take a full twenty minutes to walk to the right terminal. Foolishly chug a soda about a half hour before departure. I did go to the bathroom, but as soon as the plane started to taxi, I felt an amazing pressure in my bladder. It was intense and sudden. OK, no problem. In ten or fifteen minutes, we’ll be in the air, and I’ll be free to move about the cabin. What’s taking so long. Sorry for the delay, folks. We’re number four for takeoff, so it’ll be a few minutes yet. Please don’t say number one. We’re in the air. I’m dancing in my seat. There’s a marine in the back row giving me funny looks. I guess I seem nervous. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the pilot speaking. We’ve reached our cruising altitude, but it’s a bit rough, so I’m going to leave the seatbelt light on for a while. When I turn it off, you’ll be free to move about the cabin. I don’t think I’m going to make it. I wonder if they charge you extra if you wet yourself on the plane? Beverage and snack service? Great – now I can’t go anywhere even if I were allowed. Finally, after 45 agonizing minutes, I had my first airplane restroom experience.

On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t have shared that story.

Other ramblings:

I’ve got Gmail (thanks to dda). And it’s killing Dave. Pretty cool so far. It’s one of the best web interfaces I’ve ever seen, which isn’t terribly high praise from me: I dislike the overwhelming majority of web interfaces. So does Deane.

Speaking of Dave, here’s a great story that reminded me of him. But Dave did point me to the 50 Coolest Song Parts, so thanks for that. The bass riff from out of nowhere in Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” is number 36.

And I ran across this link about a guy who made the switch in several ways: Philips, an account manager for Choice Communications, was baptized shortly after his conversion and is in contact with Apple computers as a potential candidate for the company’s popular “Switcher” ad campaign. Pretty funny stuff.

On another note, I got my 17″ PowerBook the other day. What an amazing machine. The screen is huuuuuuge. The illuminated keyboard is wonderful. I have yet to come up with a proper name for it. My last PowerBook (15″ titanium) was named Scooby.

And here’s something for Dan and Mike.

First, let me say that it’s not just me that thinks Ariel is hot.

I’ve just learned that INXS, who was my absolute favorite band for a couple years in high school (yes, yes, I know, just shut up), is going to do a reality show called Rock Star, in which they’ll hold auditions on five continents to find a replacement for Michael Hutchence, who died in 1997. I’m so disappointed in these guys. I thought they had more class than this.

One random reason why I don’t drink: The man went to the hospital last week complaining of serious stomach pains, and X-rays revealed the construction bars were lodged in his stomach. I do enough stupid things while I’m sober.

Lava safety tips:

– Stay inside the National Park Service’s rope perimeter.
– Do not go near the water and do not enter bench areas. Stay at least a quarter-mile inland.
– Move inland quickly if you hear cracking or booming sounds or other unusual noises.

I’ve also learned, after less than 48 hours of relative solitude, that if I were still single, I’d probably be dead.

So here I am in Knoxville, Tennesee. I flew this morning. My flight arrived just after noon and I was settled into my hotel room and unpacked shortly thereafter. My training (the reason I’m here) begins tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM. Wish me luck.

I’m travelling alone again, since plane tickets for this trip were so expensive. So once again, I’m here without Jen and Grace, so my evenings are free and boring.

Dave and I tried to get iChat AV to work, but we had trouble since he’s still at work. We’ll try again when he gets home. Hopefully it’ll work when he’s no longer behind that particular firewall.

So, Apple kicked in a couple free iSight cameras for our recent order. Naturally, being the inquisitive and investigative types we are, we tried them out right away.

The iSight and iChat AV work great over our cable modem connections. We got great frame rates (15-20 per second) and phenomenal throughput (about 190 kps). Sweet! Audio was perfectly intelligible, but not CD quality. Here’s me chatting with Dave:

And here’s me chatting with Dave’s cat, Dart:

Dave is a much better conversationalist than Dart, but Dart held his own until we started discussing the influence of The Kinks on 80s new wave bands. After that, I could tell he was faking it.

I’m getting ready to release Tangelo 1.0b5 to my beta testers. This version supports multiple weblogs and provides valid RSS and Atom feeds, plus a few minor interface improvements.

Warning: minor geek speak to follow, but nothing too deep.

Getting the RSS feed to validate was a chore. I worked on it for days. I couldn’t understand what was wrong. The file that Tangelo generated on my own machine was perfectly valid and perfectly fine. Hmmm. Must be something wrong the FTP code, because once it’s uploaded, it has a null character toward the end of the feed. Weird.

Now, I’m programming Tangelo in REALbasic and I’m running the latest release, version 5.5.2. I also keep 5.5.1 handy, as I’ll often launch the older version to test something quickly. This is what I was doing with Tangelo. I had my main code open in 5.5.2, and my demo code open in 5.5.1. Everything worked in the demo code, but as soon as I switched to my production code, BOOM! Feed’s broken.

In REALbasic, all networking is done through sockets. So once I realized that the difference was between 5.5.1 and 5.5.2 (and not in my code, which is correct), I figured there must be something that changed in the socket code between 5.5.1 and 5.5.2. So I posted a question to the incredibly valuable REALbasic Network User Group, the best and most informative mailing list I’ve ever participated in. Turns out there’s a bug in REALbasic 5.5.2, but it’s not in the sockets. It’s in the BinaryStream, which is simply a way to read data from a file (as opposed to treating the file as text). As the BinaryStream reads in data (in chunks, the size of which is determined by the programmer), it adds a null character to the stream. Thanks to Lou Forlini for pointing me in the right direction.

So, the fix for now is to revert to 5.5.1, which isn’t that big a deal, I suppose, and hope for 5.5.3. And if there is no 5.5.3, hey, that’s cool. That just means RB 6 is coming faster.

But I’ll settle for one or two.