Trouble adding posts lately

The "kind" folks who administer the firewall, or proxy, or web filter, or whatever, here where I work have severely hindered my ability to post to this blog lately. Some times I get through and get something back, and some times I don't. When I don't get through the display a page indicating that I am blocked from that site. Other times I get some things back but It looks like I'm not getting a CSS style sheet or something because the pages render like they are plain old HTML. Blogger has a great web interface and sometimes It seems like part of the interface is blocked and part off it isn't.

Well Blogger also has the ability to post via e-mail. So I'm trying that with this post. We will see if it works.

Paul Graham is my hero.

His latest The Age of the Essay is a wonderful explanation and example of his style of writing. Most of his writing while technical is incredibly easy and fun to read. I think this essay explains why.

I'ts an essay about essays as only a lisp hacker could write it, obliquely self referential and reinforcing.

Diet Air?

I just saw it in the cafeteria. It's a beverage called Diet Air. It's got Ginseng and Guarana!

That is wrong on so many levels.

Anouncing Ruth Elaine Wilson!

She was born this morning at 8:28 AM by cesarian section. She weighed in at 10 lbs. 3 oz. Bigger than both her brothers. She was 21.5 inches long, which is just a hair shorter than her brothers.

So now I have two boys and one girl, the little princess.

I'ts been a long day. I'm going to bed.

Gmail me!

Woo hoo! I got a Gmail account today! The kind folks at Blogger, which is owned by Google, who also own Gmail, offered me a Gmail account. Since it's the latest thing for the technologically elite (and I have such a burning desire to be technologically elite) I jumped at the opportunity.

So, now I have three active email accounts. My work email is running all day, but it's Microsoft exchange and outlook which I'm not really crazy about. (I think it's losing my old emails) I check my SBCGlobal email (provided with my DSL connection) probably once a month it seems to be mostly junk. I think I will try to split the difference for my Gmail account.

I think I will redirect most of my mailing list traffic to that account. I have already redirected the mail for the two Perl mailing lists I am on to that account. In fact I may re-subscribe to some other mailing lists now that I have a place to send them that doesn't belong to the company.

Work email will be for work, Gmail will be for mailing lists and social stuff, and SBCGlobal will be for junk (email for registrations etc.).

I have no idea what I'm doing.

There! I said it. I feel better.

Template Tweaker IV

Titles! We've got titles. Yay!

Template Tweaker III

Blogger just underwent a fairly major upgrade. Among other things they now host their own comments. Cool! As of this post I am now using Blogger's comment facility instead of enetation's.

There is also a way to post pictures. I have to try that soon.

They also upgraded alot of the profile stuff. It seemes to act more like a social networking service now. Cool! It looks like I have to complete my profile now, favorite movie and such.

Apparently, I do more technical tweaking on this blog than actual posting. Oh well, Cest la vie!

WARNING! Dangerous Substance: DHMO

Are you at risk from DHMO?

What can I do to minimize the risks?
Fortunately, there is much you can do to minimize your dangers due to Dihydrogen Monoxide exposure. First, use common sense. Whenever you are dealing with any product or food that you feel may be contaminated with DHMO, evaluate the relative danger to you and your family, and act accordingly. Keep in mind that in many instances, low-levels of Dihydrogen Monoxide contamination are not dangerous, and in fact, are virtually unavoidable. Remember, the responsibility for your safety and the safety of your family lies with you.

Second, exercise caution when there is the potential for accidental inhalation or ingestion of DHMO. If you feel uncomfortable, remove yourself from a dangerous situation. Better safe than sorry.

Third, don't panic. Although the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide are very real, by exercising caution and common sense, you can rest assured knowing that you are doing everything possible to keep you and your family safe.

;)

Worst Album Covers

Oh, great! now there's coke all over my keyboard! And, if that wasn't enough here's more!

Template Tweaker II

I needed to actually write some code today and see it do something, so I decided to make some changes to my layout here.

I have been planing to move the archive list to the right for a while. So, today I just went and did it.

I also added the Firefox button on the left. I highly recommend using Firefox as your default browser, especially if you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer. Tabbed browsing will change the way you surf the World Wide Web forever. I don't even remember how I got by with out it.

I'm reading The C++ Programing Language by Bjarne Stroustrup and I was getting sick of the theory and wanted to produce something. I have been trying to get through this book for about two years now. I have now read more of it than ever before. (I have to start from the beginning every five or six months because I get distracted for two or three weeks and when I come back I don't understand what I'm reading if I just start where I stopped.) So far, I understand objects inheritance, polymporphism, etc. I am currently wrestling with templates. They seem simple in theory, but I don’t completely understand how the function overloading resolution is done. With all the argument/type conversions and function overloading I have trouble reasoning exactly which function template will be called by a given function-argument configuration.

A Steamy Anecdote

Tonight Luke and Elijah discovered the wonderful effect of steam on the sinuses. In the bath Luke was blowing gobs of snot out of his nose and Elijah was wiping them off and setting them adrift in water. He would float them around in the water a little then pull them out and play with the stringy muck on his fingers then set them adrift again and get fresh snot from Luke. They had quite a little flotilla going before I stepped in and stopped the mucus production.

Write More!

In Joel on Software - Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother? Joel writes:

Staring at a blank screen is horribly frustrating. Personally, I overcame my fear of writing by taking a class in college that required a 3-5 page essay once a week. Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you'll be able to write. If you need to write specs and you can't, start a journal, create a weblog, take a creative writing class, or just write a nice letter to every relative and college roommate you've blown off for the last 4 years. Anything that involves putting words down on paper will improve your spec writing skills.

So, that's why I have a blog. That's why I only feel a little bad about writing about non-work things at work. I just need to do it more.

He Learned Me Good.

I just wanted to put a book mark here for The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto. The introductory comments note that you should set your irony detector to the on position, and I second that remark. I agree with most of what he says but disagree with some of the conclusions he draws. Notice that schooling and education are two different words and I think Gatto draws the distinction between the two quite well.

In other news... Elijah gets to keep the third tooth. There is a chance that it will move back to a normal position, and he will just be missing the two teeth he already knocked out. Unfortunately, there is also a chance that it will fall out, or it may get infected and have to be removed later. He has an appointment to go back to the dentist in two weeks.

Introducing 2004

Well, it has been one hell of a year so far!

It started about two hours before midnight on New Years Eve. On the walk way into Cris' condo Betsy fell down a set of two steps she didn't see, and twisted her ankle. We stayed at Cris' to celebrate the New Year and had a pretty good time hanging out and playing Risk. We left at about twelve fiteen. On the way home we decided that since we were up, and the ankle looked pretty bad, we should go to the emergency room to make sure everything was ok. In the waiting room we sat next to a little girl with a broken arm who had been waiting for three hours, and still hadn't been admitted. With a wait that long we decided we could go home and get some sleep and come back the next day.

That night Grammy had offered to stay at our house with the boys so we could stay at Grammy's and sleep in after our revelries. When we arrived at Grammy's we noticed that the neighbors were still up and playing cards, and we thought we would go in and show them Betsy's swollen ankle. When they saw her ankle they immediately insisted on applying a Witch Hazel poultice. Applying the poultice took a few minutes and then they invited us to play cards and have some snacks with them. Minutes turned into hours and when we finally left to go to bed it was four AM. The Witch Hazel poultice worked wonderfully, and we decided not to go back to the emergency room. Today, four days later, the ankle is almost as good as new.

Our mistake was not completely disinfecting our selves after leaving the emergency room, or even washing our hands before we had snacks with the neighbors. The afternoon of the first Betsy and I came down hard with the flu. I was able to take TheraFlu to treat my symptoms but because she is pregnant Betsy could only take Sudafed and Tylenol. The flu wiped us out for the first and the second of the year. By the third I was a little better but Betsy was still having trouble getting out of bed. This morning, the fourth, we decided we would try to keep both boys at home and see if we could cope. Elijah had been spent the first and second at Grammy's.

Everything seemed to be going OK until naptime. Mom and Dad were wiped out, but the boys weren't quite ready for naps. I collapsed into bed and immediately fell asleep. Betsy was resting and reading on the couch when I fell asleep.

Apparently both of the boys got out of their beds at different times and Betsy had to put them back to bed. Luke finally went to sleep but Elijah tried getting up one more time so Mom had to put him back to bed. While walking thru the dinning room holding Elijah's hand Mom's sock slipped on the laminate floor and she fell down. In the panic of falling and while trying to regain her balance she forgot to let go of Elijah's hand. Elijah was pulled off balance and bumped his mouth on the leg of the dining room table. To make a long story slightly less long Elijah knocked out two of his teeth and twisted another one around enough that it will probably have to be surgically removed tomorrow.

I woke to the sound of a Betsy and Elijah crying and calling me. When I got to the dining room I saw both of them in a ball crying, and hugging on the dining room floor. I don't remember exactly what happened next but I do remember the first time I saw Elijah's tooth lying on the living room floor. I remember thinking, that can't be his tooth it has absolutely no blood on it at all. Elijah had blood all over the front of him but the two teeth were pristine white and longer than I expected.

We put ice on his gums to stop the bleeding and took him to the dentist. Grammy came over and babysat Luke while Mom, Dad and Elijah went to the dentist. (If you think Grammy is a hero, always sweeping in to help us out in a jam you are pretty close to the mark.) The dentist told us that trying to reinsert the teeth back in to the gums puts the teeth buds for the adult teeth at risk so we are better off just leaving Elijah at least two teeth light until the adult teeth grow in. We have to call an oral surgeon tomorrow to get an appointment to get the final word on the third tooth.

About thirty minutes after the whole incident Elijah was running around playing like a normal three year old. Later in the evening he was a little weepy, but Mom and I think it was because he never got to take his nap this afternoon. For dinner he wolfed down two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut up into small pieces. We gave him a tablespoon of Children's Tylenol before he went to bed but he was sound asleep long before that could have taken effect. We will see how things are tomorrow.

Old Year, New Year

Did I say I couldn't get sick? Well, since I am off work this week, I guess it's ok to get sick. Just a little coughing, nasal dripping, and fatigue to fill the vacation days. Bleah.

This morning, while I was still mostly asleep, Betsy asked me if there was anything I would like to accomplish this vacation. I responded with the only thing on my mind at six thirty in the morning. "I would like to sleep in until ten AM!", I foolishly replied. She spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how this could happen. Obviously, this will never happen if I sleep at home. The boys just wake up too early. So, I have an invitation from either, my parents or her mom to spend the night at their house and sleep in till ten. Now I feel like an idiot. I'll go back to work and some one will ask me what I did on my vacation and I will reply, "I slept in until ten AM on one day!" Wow! Go me! So now I'm thinking about just what I want to do on this vacation, and realizing that I was largely unaware that there is this week here and I have no plans for it. I think I'll just spend most of this time hanging with my kids. Elijah has learned how to play the memory game (you know the game where you try to flip two cards over and have them match) and it's kind of fun to play with him.

New years for this year should be interesting. Every year when I was in college I would go to Cris' house and have probably the hardest drinkin' and partyin' night of the year. After I graduated and got married I wasn't able to go anymore but Cris continued to throw New Year parties. A couple of days a go I heard that Cris had a stroke a few days earlier. He is younger than I am. He is a bit heavy and smokes a lot, and I guess his job is pretty stressful, but I was totally shocked when I heard the news. Brian decided we should get together for this New Year. It certainly won't be an old fashioned R.O.G. party, but all the regulars should be there, Cris, Doug, Brian and I, and we probably won't drink a drop of alcohol.

A few weeks ago my parents had their fortieth wedding anniversary, and we kids completely shocked them with a surprise party. Events conspired in our favor, and they had no idea what was happening right up to the moment we yelled "Surprise!" I think my mom cried four or five times during the evening and she said that my dad was even more touched than she was. Good times! The week before the surprise party they went on a trip to Mexico. A few days after they got back my oldest sister, Molly, arrived from Minnesota for the holidays with her little boy, Milo, who is around six months old. So, they were swamped with other activities and did not notice some of the suspicious stuff we did, like take a bunch of old pictures out of the house to display at the party. To get my parents to the restaurant Molly and her husband offered to take my parents out to dinner for their anniversary. The battle to get my parents to the restaurant is an interesting tale in its self. (Molly, tell about Carol's lunch menu campaign in a comment) At the restaurant we assembled all four of us kids, our spouses and children, and seven or eight of their closest friends. Sarah, my youngest sister and her husband drove down from San Francisco without my parents' knowledge to participate in the surprise. I think everyone had a good time, and most of the credit goes to my other sister Kate who really did most of the organization and my wife Betsy who helped a lot.

When the Lights Go Out

Hey, according to today's GPF comic Jeffry Darlington is a Danny Elfman fan! This is cool of course, but the sad news is the oingoboingo.com site is apparently off the net. At least some one is keeping the flame alive.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Has it already been three weeks since I last posted anything? Where does the time go?

Everyone at our house has been sick but me. I can't get sick. If I got sick I'd never get enough rest to get well again. So, I don't get sick. Not an option.

In the last three weeks, Elijah has thrown up about four times. I think he has figured out how to puke whenever he wants to, so he doesn't have to eat "yucky" food. On the other hand, maybe I'm just a cold, unsympathetic father.

Work has been insane. We had about three months worth of work to do this month, and the last week and a half of this month is Christmas vacation. The plan was to bring in two new people to help with the load. So I spent the first week of the month training the new guys, and then spent about two hours every day after answering questions. In his book "The Mythical Man Month" Fred Brook's makes the great statement, "It takes nine months to produce a baby no matter how many women are assigned to the job." The point he is trying to make is that some tasks just don't breakup and process in parallel very well. Even when they do there is the problem that the amount of over head, and communication rises with the square of the number of workers but the amount of work performed rises only linearly. Therefore, in the end, adding more workers to a late project often just makes it later. I think that is what happened here this month. The copyright date on my copy of "The Mythical Man Month is 1975. It is considered a classic in the field of technical management, but I doubt anyone here has ever read it.

The holidays should prove to be equally insane. Three of the four out of town Aunts are coming for the holidays. The one I get along "least well" with is arriving at our house tomorrow with, among other things, her three-month-old daughter. It will be interesting to see how Elijah and Luke react to a baby in the house.

Speaking of babies in the house, (cue the trumpets,) we should be having our third little bundle of joy around July or August of next year. That's right, we're expecting again! I am excited, but the boys have been such a handful lately that the prospect of adding another into the mix is a little overwhelming right now. So I am coping by completely ignoring the fact. So, if I haven't told you personally it's because I'm still trying to come to grips with the situation myself.

Elijah is turning three in January and Luke is turning two in March. However, I think Luke is developing a little ahead of schedule because he is trying to keep up with his brother. So right now, we have two boys in our house who are going through the "terrible twos", and boy, are they terrible!

Let me tell you about Luke's fascination with step stools. He started out using them to turn lights that the rest of us left on, off. The first time we saw this, Mom and I thought it was so cute. He would go to the bathroom where we keep the stools for brushing teeth, pick up the one with the handle in the middle (we have three stools of varying sizes). Then, he would carry it, like a little handyman carrying a heavy toolbox, to his room. Put the stool down. Climb up and turn the light off. Then he would climb down, pick up the stool, and carry it back to the bathroom. This is a very involved process for a little boy who is not even two yet. Then, on his way back down the hall, he would realize the light in Elijah's room was on. So, he would repeat the whole procedure to turn the light in Elijah's room off. Then, since he had turned off all the lights at that end of the house, he figured he might as well turn off the hall light too. However, he wouldn't realize this until he was half way down the hall again. So, he would turn around, and head back to the bathroom for the stool, and repeat the entire process a third time. He probably performed this entire routine four or five times over the course of three or four days. Then, Elijah, who doesn't need a stool to reach the light switch, caught on. Whenever Luke decided it was time to turn a light off, Elijah would notice that he had gone to the bathroom and brought back the stool, and while Luke was climbing onto the stool, would walk over and simply flip the light switch off. As you can imagine, this did not go over well with Luke. Like a good boy, he would still haul the stool back to the bathroom but he had been robbed of his chance to switch the light off.

I can hear you thinking, "But, he's using the stool to turn lights off", and "At least he is returning the stool to the bathroom, and not just leaving it lying around like Elijah would". These things are true, and like I said we thought it was cute and wonderful. But, that was just the beginning. Now Luke just goes and gets the stool for anyting he is just not tall enough to do. Using the stool Luke has extended his reach by a good two feet, (he grabs the largest stool whenever he needs a little vertical assistance). Now he can reach tables, counters, cupboards, etc. that even Elijah has never gotten into. I didn't realize that there was so much stuff in the house that we just put up where the kids couldn't reach it. We used to think that stuff on the dinning room table was safe from the kids. Not anymore! The medicine cabinet in the hall, he has already been in it (hopefully the whuppin he got will deter him from going in there again). The pile of bills on the dinning room table? He thinks they're chewing gum! The vitamins on the kitchen counter are candy to Luke.

I think the source of the terrible twos stems from the fact that, as parents, we count on the fact that there are things that infants and toddlers just can't do. For example, reach high things. So we let them do the things they can do while protecting them and the fragile stuff by just making it impossible for them to get to the trouble. But, these stinkin little guys are constantly growing, and learning, and what they couldn't do yesterday is now the skill du jour.

Eventually they learn the skills to overcome the barriers we put between them and the dangerous/destructive things they want to do. Then the struggle really begins, because at this point the only thing between them and grabbing the butcher knife off the counter, for example, is their little underdeveloped conscience. You could put the knife in a cupboard, eventually they'll just find it. You could put it up higher, but they'll just climb higher (this obviously carries risks of it's own). You could put locks on all the cupboards, but they figured out how those work on the lower cupboards months ago. It's an abilities arms race, and in the end the child must learn that there are things that they can do, but should not do. This is the struggle.

Self-control is difficult enough for adults who have been "practicing" it all their lives. At around two years old, I think every person is introduced to the concept of self-control for the first time. Up to this point, the little sponges have been soaking up skills at an amazing rate, and we have encouraged every new skill. They are born explorers and up to this point, we have been encouraging their exploring nature. From their perspective, the only limits on exploration are their abilities. We removed all the trouble spots. Removed them so well the poor kid did not even know they existed. Now it's getting harder/impossible to remove the trouble spots, and the little guys just have to learn self-control. The arms race could go on until all the cabinets require two hands to open and slicing up an orange requires a trip to the garage for the ladder. Eventually we parents just decide the kid needs to learn there are things he can do but should not. In the end the actual tipping point is really a point of convenience for the parents.

I think part of the trouble stems from us parents being inconsistent with the tipping point from situation to situation depending on what is most convenient. For example, If I'm washing dishes alone and Elijah reaches for a knife in the drying rack I might use the situation to teach him that there are things that he should not do. This will inevitably involve some tears and probably a time out or two, but slowly he will learn self-control. However, if the situation is the same except I am in the middle of a conversation with a guest, I will probably just move the knife to a place he can't reach it without even breaking the flow of conversation. With this choice, I remove the responsibility for self-control from Elijah, but there are situations where the interruptions that would be caused by a lesson in self-control are just not acceptable. Another issue with the ability to move the tipping point is the guilt I feel when I have to reprimand him and punish him when I know I could just move the knife.

Vacation! All I Ever Wanted...

Well I'm back from Hawaii. (You did know I was going to Hawaii, didn't you?) Overall it was a nice trip. I have a little trouble totally enjoying vacations since I became a father. Unconsciously I compare them to the vacations I took before I had all the responsibilities of children. Without children you simply decide what you want to do on a vacation and then you go do it, subject only to time and budget constraints. With children I must consider what the children will be doing while I am enjoying whatever activity I want to do on vacation. Think I can just sit on the beach? I can't; I have to make sure the boys don't wander of down the beach, or get sucked away by the rip tide. Think I can sit by the pool? I can't; I have to play with the boys in the pool. Think I can read my book? I have to make sure the boys don't get stir crazy and damage themselves or the hotel room.

Really it's not better or worse it's just different. Vacations with kids just include different activities than vacations for adults. I think there are different vacations for kids of different ages, and as you get older your vacations naturally evolve until they are adult vacations. When you have kids it is a huge leap backwards in the vacation evolution, and that takes some adjustment.

I like to read on my vacations. Betsy, my wife, gets mad because I like to take four or five books for a one week vacation and decide which one(s) to read while on vacation. (Frequently I switch to a second book with out completing the first.) On our last one-week vacation before we had kids I think I read about 1000 pages from two different books. On this vacation I read about fifty pages from one book. The only quiet time to read was during the kids' naps, but that was also the only time to nap myself (I must have my naps while on vacation). We had two six-hour plane rides where I the only reading did was glancing through the in-flight magazine, the rest of the time was spent trying to convince Elijah he wasn't really bored out of his mind.

We were able to spend a lot of time with aunt Brandy (Betsy's sister), and uncle Mark who live about half an hour from the hotel we stayed in. Aunt Brandy stayed with us for three days and babysat the boys for a day so mom and dad could go on a snorkeling trip. We saw lava tubes, and lots of tropical fish and coral, and we swam with a green sea turtle, which was pretty cool. It seemed to be completely unfazed by people in the water with it. Apparently it is illegal to touch green sea turtles in Hawaii (so I didn't lightly touch him with just my finger, no sir, not me, uh-uh, ... , at least not after I learned it was illegal, and not before either, really! I don't know what your'e talking about!) so the turtle wasn't afraid of us.

In other news: I will be receiving my master's degree in Applied Mathematics from Cal State Fullerton on January fifth. Yay! Apparently I passed the writing proficiency test.

Pseudologic?

Clay Shirky has an article on a fairly esoteric concept called The Semantic Web. He makes several interesting points, as usual. However, the most interesting part for me was the following.

The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence projects generally.) The great popularizer of this error was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to people's understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than Rene Descartes. Doyle has convinced generations of readers that what seriously smart people do when they think is to arrive at inevitable conclusions by linking antecedent facts. As Holmes famously put it "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."


This sentiment is attractive precisely because it describes a world simpler than our own. In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic.

This illustrates a theory that I have held for a long time that we humans are no where near as logical as we think we are. Which raises the question why do we think we are so logical? Do we believe that if we just knew the right facts, and proper techniques, we could reason out how everything works and the universe would unfold a myriad of treasures at our feet? Or we believe that logic is the only tool for comprehending the universe and other people? I think at some level we do. I think logic has been hyped for centuries as the cure to all ills, and the above reference to Descartes illustrates how long the hype has been going on. While logic is obviously a useful tool, it falls far short of most this hype, and even in the arenas where it is useful it is often much more tedious and unwieldy than we want to believe.

The first place I heard the statement about eliminating the impossible was not from Sherlock Holmes, but from from one of his many intelecual heirs, that paragon of "space age" logic, Spock. But Spock and Holmes, are only two characters in a long line of "super logicians". Some other popular super logicians, James Bond, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and Doc Savage. Frequently we accept the "super logician" myth while simultaneously mocking it. For example Buckaroo Banzai, or Austin Powers.

Truly great logicians respect the limits of deductive logic. For example, Einstein said "Where math describes reality it is not precise, and where it is precise, it does not describe reality."

Obviously, I'm not advocating abandoning logic completely. Logic is a very powerfull tool, but it is probably one of the most misused intellectual tools, especially when trying to figure out how and why people do what they do. The biggest abuse is when we try to figure out why not everyone else thinks as "logically" as we do.