truetech

As I was tucking Jonathan into bed tonight, we read today’s entry in his “God and Me” book, a little devotional book for kids his age. Tonight’s devotional was on creation. Here’s a brief excerpt of our conversation.

Me: Do you know who made all the trees and plants and beautiful flowers?
Jonathan: [referring to my father-in-law] Pops?
Me: No.
Jonathan: [referring to my niece] Emmi?
Me: No.
Jonathan: [blank stare]
Me: It was God.
Jonathan: Oh. Where does it say that?

And now my Rickenbacker is gone. I ended up with just shy of twenty serious inquiries, including people asking if I could ship it to California and/or Indiana. In the end, a really nice guy drove about two hours each way to try it out. He fell in love on the spot and gave me more than asking price, in cash. I think he and his sons will give it a good home.

For nostalgia’s sake, here’s the last picture I took of my Rickenbacker.

So I put my Rickenbacker up for sale on craigslist last night. Within 24 hours, I’ve had seven serious inquiries about it. Wow! I didn’t think it would generate that much interest. But truth be told, it’s a great guitar. I just don’t play it much anymore, since Sybil came to town.

Tomorrow is the second annual paintball outing of my church’s men’s group. Last year was my first time playing paintball, as you may recall, I took a shot to the head:

This was the game where I took my biggest beating. I was shot in the head. With an evil paintball. Fired by Bill, my friend and pastor. Man, did it hurt. As I raised my arms and yelled “I’m out!”, I took a shot from behind in each shoulder. These are wonderful friends I have.

Here’s what it looked like during the game and the day after:

Good times. And tomorrow we should have an even bigger crowd than last year. I’m bringing three guests: my dad, Tom, and David (who tried to prank me today at work and earned himself a head shot of his very own tomorrow). Should be a blast.

This winner, hands-down, is Mac OS X Hints, who for a brief time this morning, became Mac OS 9 Hints. They even redid the site theme with a Mac OS 9 platinum-esque look (which was actually really good). They’ve since come back to the present, but not before posting a slew of hints related to OS 9. Wow, OS 9 seems like so long ago now. Anyway, major kudos to Rob Griffiths and crew for a prank well done. Check out a PNG of the full spread.

Tomorrow is April 1. My favorite holiday. Frivolity awaits!

As the title says, I pick on David. A lot. Probably more than I should.

For those who don’t know, David has been my boss on and off since 1999. He’s also one of my closest and dearest friends. I often compare him to the older brother I never had. I’ve been very blessed in my life to work with someone with whom I get along so well. David is easy going and good natured, which are great qualities in a boss.

But, partly because he’s so easy going and good natured, I pick on him more than I should.

I love a good prank. And David sets himself up for pranks pretty regularly. Yesterday, for example, he left his laptop in my office while logged into Twitterific. So added something to his Twitter feed: I think Ted is crazy hot. Ted is our network administrator.

Now you have to understand something about my pranks. It’s never my goal to hurt, only to amuse and occasionally embarrass. But even then, not in a big way. So, when you think about it, I could have posted something far, far worse on his Twitter feed.

Today, I posted to his Twitter feed again: “Tom may be even hotter than Ted.” Tom, of course, being another co-worker. Dave deleted that one and wasn’t very happy with me. Rightfully so. Once was funny, twice was just being mean.

So this is my public apology to David. I’m sorry, my friend. I really am. I know I pick on you a lot, but it’s all honestly in good fun.

Having said that, here’s an abridged history of the pranks I’ve played on David.

– Changed his time and date settings to Swiss French and Catalan.
– Took a screenshot of his computer with many open windows then set that picture as his wallpaper. He actually re-installed his operating system because of that one.
– Wrote a program to play the mosquito sound at random intervals and installed it on his computer. I didn’t realize at the time that he would be using his laptop to demonstrate something for the scouts that evening. Oops.
– Same as above, only with a Sam Kinison scream instead of the mosquito sound.
– Rotated his iMac’s display by 180 degrees. I was actually unable to set it back, and it took some serious finagling (mostly by Mike) to fix it.
– Repeatedly set his wallpaper to a “Bisexual and Proud” picture prominently featuring a rainbow.
– Intercepted the replacement iPod hard drive he had ordered and switched with a standard 3.5 inch ATA drive.
– Stuffed a beach towel into the ductwork leading into his office. This was in the middle of a very hot summer.
– Disconnected his peripherals and ran dummy cables to his computer. He couldn’t figure out why his iPod wouldn’t synch.
– Made a modern art arrangement of iMac “hockey puck” mice and hung it from his vent (this was actually Ted, and not me).
– Sent him a before-and-after video of his office challenging him to find ten (non-existant) differences while he was out of the office (this was mostly Tom and Ted).

There were more, but you get the idea.

David, all of us in the tech department love you. We wouldn’t trade you for any other boss.

Except maybe Ted.

As much as I always enjoy attending REAL World (and this year was no exception), it’s always good to be back home again.

Today was a good day. We woke up early so the kids could find their Easter baskets, then headed to church for an early worship team practice (couldn’t practice earlier in the week since I was in Texas). Then lunch at Jen’s parents’ house followed by dinner at my sister’s, with all the requisite egg hunts and gift-giving therein.

After we got home, our realtor stopped by so we could sign the papers to finalize the sale of our current home. What a weird feeling. I always thought I’d be in this house for the rest of my life, but I guess that wasn’t in the cards.

Yep, it’s official: the Rhines are moving. Not far, only about fifteen minutes away, but it’ll be a different town and a different school district, so there will definitely be some adjustments to be made. We’ve been looking on and off for a couple years now, but never found the house that really just “grabbed” us until a couple weeks ago. It’s a half acre out in the country, but just a few minutes away from civilization. There are horses in the field behind our new home. And we’ll have a lot more space, which we need.

Now that the adoption’s done, I guess we just needed something else to fill the stress-void that was left.

Well, this was an interesting day.

As mentioned yesterday, the morning began with a meeting to discuss the creation of the Association of REALbasic Professionals. The response was overwhelming and more than anyone expected. The meeting was almost standing room only. Those present voted to create the association. After that, it was time to nominate and vote on the board of directors. I am proud, shocked, and honestly somewhat horrified to say that I was nominated and elected to the board.

Anyway, the first session I attended today was Enterprise Web Development, but Brad Weber and Joe Strout, the minds behind Inspiring Applications. They talked about Yuma, which I mentioned the other day. It’s really, really cool. I can’t wait to get back to the office and kick the tires a bit.

After that, I attended two sessions about the community around REALbasic: The REALbasic Community by Paul Lefebvre and Expanding REALbasic via 3rd Party Developers by Christian Miller. Both were interesting and well presented.

Following another excellent lunch, I attended Build Engineering: The Art of Version Control, Scripting, and Process by Nathan Regener, REAL Software’s new build engineer. I have to say, I have high hopes for what Nathan wants to accomplish there. I think he’ll bring REAL Software’s beta testing and releases to a new level of quality. Here’s hoping.

At the end of the day was the annual feedback session, which is always an interesting time. To be honest, this year I kind of wandered in and out a couple times and didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. I was pretty tired by then.

To wrap things up, I went out to dinner with some of the other board members to make some plans for the association. We have some exciting things coming up, but more on that later.

The shuttle will be here to pick us up tomorrow morning at seven, so I need to wrap it up and get some rest. But I would be remiss if I didn’t say a great big thank you to Dana Mason and Alyssa Foley of REAL Software for all the hard work they did putting REAL World 2008 together.

After another good breakfast, I started the day by attending Designing Client Server Applications by Charles Yeomans, which was very informative. Since I mostly do database work, I haven’t had much experience with designing client-server solutions, but I have done some work with XML-RPC and other web services, so it wasn’t totally foreign. I’m just not used to designing the server.

From there I sat in on Understanding REAL SQL Server, taught by none other than Marco Bambini himself, the primary developer of REAL SQL Server. And really, who better to teach the session? It was the first of three REAL SQL Server sessions that I attended, along with Packaging REAL SQL Server in Your Application and What’s New in the Upcoming REAL SQL Server 2008r2. So you could say that the bulk of my day was spent hearing and thinking about REAL SQL Server. It’s an amazing piece of technology. It’s built on SQLite, the most widely deployed database in the world. SQLite is also public domain, which is rather amazing in and of itself when you think about it. Anyway, I was pretty excited to hear about some of the upcoming features, some of which I’d heard during yesterday’s keynote. The big news was that REAL SQL Server 2008r2 will be able to handle over 10,000 simultaneous connections (Marco said he got 12,000 on his iMac). I can’t wait to get back to the office to test that out. That would open up a lot of possibilities for me.

During the third session slot of the day, I actually played hookey and stood around chatting with Christian Miller, Dave Wooldridge, Bob Keeney, Marc Zeedar, and Joe Strout.

In the afternoon, I taught my third and last session, All About Toolbars. After that, I was really tired, and so was David, so we headed up to the hotel room and just hung out until dinner time.

Dinner was a hoot. Aside from some great food and conversation (we lucked into sitting with several members of the REAL Software staff), there was a trivia contest, which was a lot of fun. REAL Software’s Nathan Regener was the emcee, and he did a great job keeping us entertained (and giving us lots of prizes – I even won a book!).

Tomorrow morning there’s a meeting to discuss the formation of the Association of REALbasic Professionals, spearheaded by Bob Keeney and some co-conspirators. I’ll definitely be there.