Hyperbole

On Having Three Children, redux

2008-08-22T06:15:23Z

...or "Allow myself to TrackBack...myself."

Almost a year and a half ago I wrote this post. I'm writing now to tell you that my aphoristic statement still holds: Raising three children is much like raising two, except there is one more of them. To me, having the one more makes it infinitely more rewarding; but it really isn't any harder, at least not so far. Sometimes it can be a slightly harder, especially because they are so close in age. (Consider the logistics of taking all three to a highway rest area bathroom so one of them can use the facilities.) But that same issue makes it easier sometimes, since they are better playmates for it.

So if you have two children, don't be afraid of another, it really is quite wonderful.

(This is the part where someone asks me when we're having our next child. We're done, thanks, we've hit the target. :)

Nods to David Seruyange for reminding me of this post.

Back up!

2008-08-20T17:33:32Z

...but did you even notice I was down? :)

Irony at 100m

2008-03-18T05:17:43Z

Here's another story to add to the whole that is my ironic life:

Went on vacation to Puerto Vallarta last week. First time to Mexico-South-of-Frontera-BC. Went parasailing! First time ever. Always wanted to try it. I was third to go (my dad and wife went before me), and we were all getting hungry for lunch. After they rigged me to fly I had to wait a long time (the boat was pulling "the banana", a water-toboggan-thingy, and the passengers kept purposely falling off, forcing the boat to stop and wait for them to get back on.) Anyhow, finally the boat returned, they hooked up my tow line, and I was off and flying. Parasailing is awesome! It's really breathtaking...I highly recommend it (despite what I'm about to tell you next.) The only part of the experience I missed having was landing back on the beach – I got dropped in the drink instead. :) As it turns out, the boat ran out of fuel. Fortunately, the tropical Pacific is plenty warm (even in March), and I was wearing a life vest of course so treading water was no problem. And I got a free WaveRunner ride out of it to boot! :)

My wife knows me well enough not to worry (once she could see I was afloat), my kids worried only a little bit, and my mother might have had kittens. I personally had a blast. :)

Clinton vs. McCain

2008-02-02T14:34:54Z

I've said it to anyone who would listen, and now I'm going to blog it. I have no polls, facts, figures, statistics, or damned lies to back this up; this is solely my personal opinion based on "gut" instincts. Here it is:

In a (H.R.) Clinton vs. McCain presidential contest, McCain wins in a landslide.

That's it. If you are a Democrat (by registration, anyway), and you want a Democratic president to be elected in November, vote for Barack Obama; he has a fighting chance against McCain for independent voters. In a Clinton/McCain bout, independents will fly to McCain who they recognize as one of the most independent (read, not beholden to party leadership) members of the Senate. (Conversely, Hillary Clinton is perceived by independents as a party wonk.)

Incidentally, IMHO (assuming McCain wins the Republican nomination) all McCain need to do to win the presidency against any challenger is to enlist his Senate Democratic counterpart (his comrade-in-laws) Russell Feingold as his running mate; the two of them would be unstoppable.

P.S. - Yes, I'm still alive.
P.P.S - I am a registered Democrat because of more issue alignment, though not a partisan.
P.P.P.S. - Barack Obama is the only of the field of Democratic candidates I can vote for without "holding my nose." I actually like him as a candidate. He's not the guy I actually wanted, though.

iPhone review in process

2007-07-06T18:16:33Z

Just an FYI: I've started writing a review of my iPhone experience thus far. I know some people were waiting for it. (That's you, Greg :)

Watch this space!

I'm a sucker...

2007-07-01T02:55:44Z

So I'm writing this blog from my new iPhone. Yes, I took the plunge-- I stood in line and got one in hour one. I will probably write more on the subject later. More to come...

80GB iPhone?

2007-06-26T20:30:15Z

So I was just watching the recently posted Apple - iPhone - Activation & Sync video and something caught my eye: during the demonstration of iPhone sync features, it was clear that the presenter's iPhone has 80GB of space. Check this out:

I just went back to the video, and it's already changed! Now it's 8GB!

Something is fishy...

UPDATE:
Looks like Engaget caught this too:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/26/80gb-iphone/

Will iPhone JavaScript engine hook multi-touch gestures?

2007-06-20T21:42:34Z

There has been a lot of hullaballoo in the Mac developer community about Apple's decision to make Safari, or "Web 2.0" the "SDK" for the iPhone (in lieu of an actual "SDK", maybe even some sort of XCode plugin.) Without going into the miry mud of this debate, the burning question I have about this revolves around the part of the iPhone technology I would most like to experiment with: will the iPhone Safari browser make it possible to write a JavaScript app/widget that can respond to multi-touch gestures.

As I see there, there are three ways they could expose this:

A high-level API with a collection of hooks for the various gestures used in native iPhone apps.

(e.g., pinch horizontal/vertical, spread horizontal/vertical, chord horizontal/vertical, and maybe some idioms for new single-touch patterns like toss up/down, or whatever they're calling it.)

A low-level API that gives raw (or barely normalized) data about gestures

(e.g., reports position pairs)

Both of the above

As I see it, if they could expose both high and low level tracking for gestures, they would gain immediate benefit from developers implementing rich, iPhone-specific UIs for their web apps. They would also gain from the having the developer community be able to invent new gestures, most of which will likely be confusing, but some of which may actually be adopted by the iPhone in future software iterations.

Granted, I recognize that writing code to recognize new gestures based on the low-level API I describe above is no small matter. Consider something as simple as the "chord" effect being complicated by the diagonal chording gesture (currently supported in MacBook(Pro) trackpads): you would have to disambiguate finger fluctuations in such chording from the motion of spreading or pinching either by timed modes, tolerance thresholds, or some combination of the two. Not for the faint of heart!

Anyhow, that's what I was wondering...

Still haven't decided if I'm in for version 1 (err, mass-market public beta 1, more likely.) Some more details from AT&T would be helpful.

Ploughshares into Swords

2007-06-11T21:03:56Z

Whatever you may think about the state of war and peace in the world, it is clear
we continue to melt down our ploughshares only to reforge them as swords.

And this is the world I have brought my children into...

AdSense in poor taste #98,472

2007-05-26T04:28:23Z

What's wrong with this picture:

Now for page 2:

Perhaps google was jealous, the article was about someone converting to Christianity, the ads were hawking conversion services to other religions...

On Having Three Children

2007-04-24T07:02:49Z

Here it is, the promised articulation that struck me a few days ago on the subject of having three children. (Parents or potential parents of multiples note, this probably doesn't apply to you):

One child is hard. Very hard. Raising even one child (or at least, doing it right) requires enormous dedication, suspension or deferment of many goals and aspirations, and huge, heaping volumes of patience. It is worth every loving moment, but should not be entered into lightly.

Two children is immensely harder than one child. With one child, you can focus your undivided attention on him (in my case, first is a boy, so you will please suffer the pronoun), pour all your energy into him and let none of his thoughts or sayings slip through your proverbial mental cracks. With two children, you must divide your attention between them somehow. You must keep the older from maiming the younger (in misguided attempts at affection.) You should listen to all they both have to say, and play with both of them, even on the days when they want to play in totally different rooms. Sometimes, one or the other will say something that does slip through the cracks, and you must deal with the consequences of that. Even more patience is required, but now balance, and also an aura of justice and consistency that both kids must perceive clearly (whether it works in their favor or not.) Raising two kids is really, really hard: if you felt like you were in over your head with one kid, stop now and raise him as best you can. But if parenthood sits just right with you, and you feel your heart aching to love even more, bring another one home. If that still doesn't satiate the aching in your heart, then...

Three children. It's everything I said about two children, only there's one more. That's it. Really, that's it. At least, so far that's it. But having had two children, very different from each other and yet fitting together as a family system, it isn't hard to project with some clarity into the future how things will go. And the future looks a little like the past, only better because there's one more of them to love (and to be loved by.)

I suspect that four is probably a lot like three, only with one more. I think the one->two transition was the real test of Parenthoodability™. It was enormously difficult – and singularly rewarding – so much so that my dear wife and I felt compelled to do it again.

I have a blog?!? Oh, yeah, that's right...

2007-04-24T06:38:46Z

'Nuff said on that subject...

So as an update, I'm a father! I mean, again. Three kids now. "Table for five, please." And he (numero tres) is such a beautiful boy. But I'm supposed to say stuff like that, biased opinion and all that, so I'll stop there...

Or rather, digress into the articulation that struck me a few days ago on the subject of having three children. I think it deserves it's own entry. Stay tuned...

"You suck differently than Mommy"

2006-09-30T23:36:26Z

File this under "conversations you never thought you'd have with your preschooler."

Context: I gave my son (or DS, if you insist) a kiss on the head, but he didn't want it. (He's a preschooler – they can be so fickle.) So he said "suck it back out". I've heard my wife and him play this game before, so I made a sucking noise and said, "there, I sucked it out." He laughed and exclaimed, "you suck differently than Mommy! You should suck like Mommy does!"
What could I say, other than, "Yes, I do suck differently than Mommy. That's just the way it is." This actually went back-and-forth a few times, and I did everything I could to keep from laughing hysterically.

Now I can't decide what is funnier: this conversation, or the many, many conversations surrounding the character from the Toy Story movies, "Woody". (He has several "Woody" toys, of varying sizes. Consider these past gems: "I have the big Woody now!", "Where is my little Woody?", "Can I bring Woody with me?", ad infinitum.)

Eye update

2006-09-10T22:42:10Z

Previously I wrote about the eye disorder I am struggling with, called "keratoconus". I mentioned more recently that I felt it was worsening. Well, I went to see the ophthalmologist again, and found out something very interesting. Turns out that the disorder is greatly effected by heat and dryness, and that lots of his patients had been coming to see him about blurrier-than-normal vision. He sent me home with over-the-counter eye drops, and told me to use them when I saw things blurry or felt eyestrain. So I did, and sure enough, it worked. So for now, fewer blurry days. Huzzah!

OSCON 2006

2006-09-10T21:48:00Z

Still catching up...

My primary reason for going to Portland this year was to attend OSCON 2006. This was my fourth OSCON (I went to 1999, 2000, and 2005 previously), and as always an excellent conference. Bringing my family along this year made it considerably less stressful than last year – last year I was always worrying about what was going on at home, having left my Casey West, and he told me that not only did he bring his three kids, but he brought babysitting (in the person of his sister-in-law!) He stressed that the 1:1 child/adult ratio was key to success; perhaps when el tercero/la tercera comes along we'll have to find someone to drag to conferences with us...

I met a lot of folks at this conference (I'll spare the names to avoid gratuitous "name-dropping"), some in the "hallway track" and others simply from going to the "right parties". Saw a lot of cool tech, which I might rehash in some later blog entries. OSCON is always such a great conference, and I hope to keep attending every year (given adequate sponsorship.)

Another note: I observed in an earlier use.perl journal entry that Perl 6 development seemed to have stalled out, as far as I could tell. It seems that the problem was that the wrong folks were doing the wrong jobs – since the reshuffling around the time of YAPC::NA things seem to have much more momentum. It's hard to know the future fate of Perl 6, but I'm much more optimistic now about it than before, and expect I will start using some of the Perl 6 stack that is already implemented in Perl 5 soon.