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Last year I went to the Aquarium of the Pacific. I took a some video of the place and the “behind the scenes” tour. Here’s a link to the video. It’s a 1.5 gig file, so watch out for that. I haven’t figured out a way to embed video directly in the post yet. Once I do I’ll update the post.

I love aquariums and have been to a number around the country. This one in particular has some truly amazing displays, especially their tropical reef displays. I had been to this aquarium when it first opened a decade ago. I was there for a Python Conference and missed the last day and part of one evening to hang out there. Recently I worked for a company that sent me to L.A. a couple of times and couldn’t resist going again. Each time I go I am stunned in awe of the beauty.

Oh wow is it ever snowing. I can’t remember the last time we’ve had this much snow for this long. I’ve spent all day watching the fall snow and the wind pick up what was already on the ground and blow that around too. The first year my family and I moved to Oregon it was like this, all winterwonderlandish. I remember riding my dirt bike up and down the streets in my t-shirt while -10 degrees with windchill was nipping at my nose. In 2006 we had an ice storm for a few days that made me ride the bus to work. It was cold, but there just wasn’t that much snow. There were some other ice storms I’ve lived through while living in Oregon. Two of them I remember distinctly as I was trapped and couldn’t travel far for all the ice. This is different. Lots and lots and lots of snow (by Portland standards). It almost reminds me of growing up on the east coast, almost. I remember watching my parents dig out the car from the piles of snow.

I baked cookies today. I made chocolate chip cookies from the recipe on the bag, only I used splenda instead of sugar. They are still way yummy. The only issue is if you use splenda, you have to make the cookies flat to begin with, cause they won’t fall on their own in the oven. I found that out the hard way.

@jaacob showed me a book reader for my iphone the other day that rocks. Its called Stanza. My iPhone is now the dream machine I’ve always known it could be. I’ve read 2 books since putting it on. One was A Christmas Carol which I could download for free in the app. It was really interesting to read all the descriptions of food and parlor games people played back in the day (19th century style). For some reason I don’t read books unless I can carry them around in a portable device. I guess it’s just way more convenient.

I finally got tired of having to delete all the spam I get in the comments section of the site. At first it wasn’t so bad, but somehow they found me. Even with the capcha system, I get half a dozen new spams a day on my site. When I had my old site up, there was an exploite that allowed spammers to post an infinite amount of comment spam on the site. I didn’t realize it till I was allready google cached like crazy. Even today if you google my name or this site, you’ll get a bunch of links on other people’s sites that point to that old spam. So now you’ll have to register with the site to be able to post comments. We’ll see how that goes. I really don’t want to be on the front page of a google search for some happy pill again. Thanks for your understanding.

I went to OSCON 2008 this year. it was not only a great chance to see people and go to fun parties, but very educational too. Click below to read my list of things I did and a short summary of the talk along with links to all the slides I could find. The summaries are my off the cuff description of what I got out of it. To get a better feel for the talk, please read the slides. I’m happy to talk about anything I learned if anyone is interested. If I got something wrong, please let me know so I can correct it.

(continue reading…)

Last weekend Shayna went from taking 1 or 2 steps then falling down on Friday night, to taking about 5 steps on Saturday afternoon, to running around the house full time on Sunday. Me, Brooke and the folks at her daycare have been working with her for a number of months now, trying to help her get her footing. We all knew she could walk if she wanted, as she could stand fairly well, though shaky, on her own, and with someone holding her hand, she could almost run. Well now she’s doing it on her own and isn’t so interested in anyone helping her. It’s awesome to see. She’s getting more and more independent all the time. She can feed herself, walk, and communicate in lots of ways, if not using full words.

A few days ago, I asked her to find her shoes for me as I didn’t know where they went. She walked over to one shoe, picked it up, handed it to me, then went over to the other one in the other room, picked it up and handed me that one. If that wasn’t the clearest sign yet that she understands what we say to her, I don’t know what would be. Just cause she can’t communicate back yet with full words, doesn’t mean she isn’t processing what we say to her. I have memories of being very young, maybe even a few months old, and understanding what the people around me were saying, but being frustrated that I couldn’t respond back. It’s nice to be validated in some way that they are real memories.

So I’ve been listening to Shayna’s baby babel become more and more sophisticated as time goes on. She’s been able to clearly say mama when she want’s to for at least a month now, but I don’t know if that really counts since it’s such a natural extension of baby babbel. She says dada sometimes, but not in any really directed way. So this week I was told that she clearly said the name of her dog. While driving with her in the car that day she said the word baby quite a few times, I think because that’s the first thing other kids say when they first see her. I haven’t heard anything as distinct since, but that was the first time I heard her say something not quite baby babel.

This all makes me realise that the process of baby’s learning language skills isn’t always an on off switch. I always hear about a baby’s first word, and first sentences, but that comes after weeks and months of trial and error on their part. I don’t know if there really is a first word . Does it count if she says it, but not focused or directed at anything? How far away from baby babel do you get before it counts? Anyway, its amazing to watch her grow up and develop into an amazing person.

So if you came to my sight via Google in the last month, you were probably looking for the Randy Sebastian Renaissance Homes post that I had up since last summer, at least according to Google analytics statistics.

I am not interested in that article or Randy being the focus of my site, so I took it down. It was clear that it had moved from being a way for me to tell a story to something much more, which was not my intention when I originally posted it. For the people who emailed me about this previously, feel free to leave a comment on this post or contact me. If you haven’t already and you really want to hear the story, buy me a beer sometime.

Now, on to much more interesting topics….

A friend of mine has a boyfriend who works with national geographic. He was working in China when the recent protests erupted. His account of what happened is attached.

I’m a firm believer in global trade and open economies. It truly is the most fair way to distribute wealth, goods and services. That doesn’t mean I think government doesn’t have a strong roll in creating a fair and open environment that serves the people. I think there are things we could do that are consistent with those principles that would help make people aware of where their money is going and how it’s being used. Creating public databases for goods and service’s chains of dependency for one would allow everyone to know where the things we purchase and the services we use come from and who their money is supporting so we can make informed choices on a daily bases. More transparency is always a good thing in a open economy, as well as being highly democratic. This is especially true in cases like this so no one can hide behind a bureaucracy.

Click the Read More, link to see the email.

Wow, so this is my first post in a long time. Sorry about the delay. Lots of stuff going on, plus it was winter in Oregon, which doesn’t motivate me all that much. Not that I don’t appreciate how beautiful it can be. I’ve been getting comments about my site from lots of people just randomly looking me up on the web, you know who you are , so I started feeling like I needed to put more on since it was embarrising how old the posts were. Thanks for all the comments and please keep in touch, even if I don’t keep the site as fresh as it should.

Shayna’s growing up quick and I haven’t been good at updating pictures. I’ll do that too soon.

So, back to the subject of this post. I haven’t written much about this but I’ve been growing my fish hobby over the last year or so and now have 2 new fish tanks, both salt water. One of the tanks I built from parts, but the other one came complete with livestock and everything. Unfortunately the livestock were Maroon clowns which turn out to be vicious and territorial when they get older. In one night I lost 4 other fish that I bought for the tank. Since then I’ve been trying to lure them into a net with food. It had been a month or more and I they just weren’t interested. Yesterday I found instructions on building your own fish trap. I’ve been reluctant to spend $40-$50 on trap at the store so I was really excited to find these. It’s a pretty simple idea and I followed them last night and what do you know, it worked!!

http://www.floridadriftwood.com/fish_trap.htm (http://www.floridadriftwood.com/fish_trap.htm)

I have the big one (the female) in my other tank now. I just hope she doesn’t kill the other fish I put in there. I’m going to try for the male of the pair tonight.

My other big project last night was performing surgery on my macbook. When I was doing consulting in Oakland last year, on my first day I dropped my bag with my laptop in it. I was really grateful it still worked as I wouldn’t have had a computer to do my work otherwise. The one thing it did do was make a couple of small dents in the front of the case. One of those dents blocked the cd drive. Since then I’ve had to use usb keys or the network to transfer files and load new software. It also has meant that I couldn’t upgrade my system to the new osx OS leopard. Since the new iPhone sdk only runs on leopard, I’ve been really feeling hindered lately without it.

The other day I found instructions on how to repair and replace macbooks. I finally got around to following the instructions last night and what do you know, it worked!! Now I have a working optical drive on my macbook again! I can’t wait to upgrade the OS now. For anyone else who gets quoted an outrageous sum to fix their macs, $700 in my case, check out:

http://www.ifixit.com/

Just in case any one reading this uses the IDE editor Eclipse with Java, remember that when you check a project out of CVS, make sure and convert it to a Java Project. I learned this the hard way recently. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why code completion didn’t work. Once you’ve checked out the code. delete the project (but not the files), then create a new Java project and select from existing sources. Select the directory you just checked out. It should build a new Java project out of the existing source. I’m using Eclipse 3.3 for the first time, along with MyEclipse. 6.0. MyEclipse is good for debugging Java applications using different application servers, in this case Jboss. Works good.