My wife just turned her permanent age: 29. That’s a good number. It think she’ll stay there awhile.

It’s been a big year for her, and it’s been gratifying to be her husband and watch her grow. This year she saw Maria through infancy, and planned + executed our first family vacation. She dealt with her first summer without Joey, and Maria’s burn and recovery. She dealt all the issues I had this past year–changing jobs, frustrations, dependency, Mom’s cancer. I was horrid through most of that. She supported me, and kicked my butt when necessary.

This is kinda “duh” stuff, but here goes: What does all professional software have in common? What attributes do all non-trivial programs share?

When you’re in school and you write assignment programs, often, they’re command-line, single-execution processes. These toy programs exist as drivers for some concept you’re trying to grasp–string operations, numercal calculations, or Object-Oriented programming. An example might be: “Read a file that contains a maze and print out the steps to find the exit as coordinates.”

empty printer boxes to get for bart and bridgette….

Whitney - Apr 2, 2008

empty printer boxes to get for bart and bridgette……

I vote for VI++, except that sounds like a hopped-up text editor.

How is it that I’ve lived 29 years (21 of those a gearhead) and not seen Vanishing Point?

This film is hard to pin down. It’s like:

• Easy Rider, in a car

• Smokey and the Bandit, but no midget and it’s not funny

• Cannonball run…no Dom DeLouise, and it’s not funny.

• Apocalypse now/Heart of Darkness but no jungle

• Homer’s Odyssey but no boat

More precisely, this film has the same overall theme as “Cool Hand Luke”–an ordinary man comes back from war (in the case, Vietnam), knocks around awhile and gets into trouble, and pays the price. As the audience, we’re supposed to identify with the main character, and see how “the man” and “the squares” are hell-bent on destroying the utopian hippie vision of freedom and love.

You win your first event in 2 years

In the cold, in the rain, the Beamer was awesome. I set the tires at 35psi front and 40psi rear, and let ’er tailslide around the 4 on-course sweepers.

This was CKR’s first points event of the year, and it was an inspired and safe course design, using the small dump-truck training pad to the utmost. Braindump of me out there:

_
First gear, rev to 4k…sidestep the clutch. Okay, wheelhop, wheelhop…HOOK! Pick-up your slalom cone, now BANG second. Both hands on the wheel. Floor it into the braking zone for the first left hand sweeper. Brake, okay now crank your neck left to pick-up the second cone on the slalom. WOOOO…feel that rear come around.

Wow, I understood like 25% of that, but the happy …

Jeff Roberts - Apr 1, 2008

Wow, I understood like 25% of that, but the happy happy joy joy I got :-)

Mmmmm…

15x7. Correct offset (+25mm). Correct hubcentric diameter (57.1 mm)

Shine-y.

White car w/black rims…SHINE-Y!

R-r-r!

Jeff Roberts - Apr 5, 2008

R-r-r!

Professor Djikstra–Mister Syncronization!

So, I’ve been doing some heavy work with multithreading on windows lately, and I must say I’m impressed. Win32 went whole-hog for the multithreaded model, and has great Kernel support for some very useful primitives:

If you want to work within your process exclusively, you have Critical Sections, which give are ways to ensure only one thread is executing in a code block at any one time. Nice, but nothing too exciting.

Brrrrrrrrring

“This is Harold”

“Hey, Honey! Listen, where would you and Joey like to sit at the Legends Opening Day Game tonight?”

Blink. Blink.

“WHaaa…?”

“I’m getting you guys tickets to the game. Where would you like sit?”

* * *

Yes, I have the best wife in the world. Don’t know how she knew, but it was great.

The team this year is so-so. Well, so-so…so far. The starting pitcher made it into the 5th inning, but the middle relief guy (Koons) got tagged early and often, including a classic “throw it to first but brain some guy in the stands” error that lead to a score 1 play later. Fielding was uneven, with two more errors leading to scores or extra bases.

Watched Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers, and don’t quite know what to make of it. Told as a series of flashbacks about the American assault on Iwo Jima, the film follows the novelist son of one of the flagraisers on Mt. Surabaci from this famous picture taken in 1945.

The film is a fine piece of work, and the acting in it is tremendous–Ryan Phillippe shines–but I didn’t like it at first. It’s not the deep immersion of Saving Private Ryan. Where Ryan was a gritty, sweeping story about a platoon amid the massive invasion of Normandy, Flags feels very small, almost claustrophobic. We’re rarely in fire-fights; mostly, we see the fearful anticipation or the horrific aftermath. A few days after watching it, I realized: The hardest part of surviving WWII was living with what you’d seen and done.

Lots of randomness from an awesome weekend:

• Saturday was the Georgetown College Academic Team (GCAT) tournament at my Alma Mater. I served as scorer in the Division I room, alongside my old pal Joe Guillory and the delightful freshman, R. (Did I see R. making eyes at Joe? Perhaps!) Georgetown’s dominance and capability stunned me–this was a team of depth and quiet competence, obviously playing a level above their competition. They’re going to Nationals (College Bowl?) and I expect they’ll do well.

a.k.a. Nothing like brake fluid that’s so old it’s green….

Installed the new Brembo rotors and Akebono ceramic pads from the Tire Rack yesterday on our 2000 Camry, and for once I did it right.

- I jacked the car up one night.
- I disassembled everything another night
- I did the install, brake bleed, tire rotation, and power steering belt adjustment yesterday.

Nice having zero pressure to get the Daily Driver back on the road before morning. I took my time, read through the Haynes procedure 3 or 4 times, and did each piece meticulously. I regreased the pins the caliper slides on, and made sure I put plenty of Moly-Lube on everything as it went back together.

Well, we got the final diagnosis of Maria’s 9 days of diarrhea today: Rotavirus. She’s been one sick girl, admitted to the ER twice for fluids.

She seems to be over the worst of it; no diarrhea today, she’s just really sleepy and wanting fluids but not much solid.

Took the day off work so I could do a few jobs around the house and finish the brake job on the Camry. Got a sweet set of Brembo rotors and Ceramic pads, and things are going famously so far–everything disassembled without any WD40 or torch application :D

Nasty stuff

Jeff Roberts - Apr 5, 2008

Nasty stuff

I’m cross-wired.

I intuitively perceive what must happen in a situation, yet I delude myself into carrying-on as if I didn’t know.

I’m optimistic about people (despite all advice), yet am unsurprised when the worst comes out in them.

The only thing I can reconcile about it is the two sides of my personality, one of which is recent. I grew up a pessimist; selfish, I kept account of people’s sins. On the average, people seemed pretty crappy–ruled by their emotions, rationalizing bad choices, hurting others for their own gain. What’s there to be optimistic about? Society was one big, entropic system that’d eventually devolve into chaos.

GMail custom time

Hehe…

Link to their research blog

1-800-GOOG-411

Just tried it and it’s pretty slick, and free. :-)

Yes, it’s over-the-top. Yes, it has plot holes you could drive a pumpkin carriage through. Yes, it’s not IMPORTANT CINEMA.

So what?

This is a fun romp through fairy tale land (and into modern-day New York), complete with a wayward princess, overblown prince, and evil stepmother/witch. It’s a mashup of every cliche from the Golden Age of Dinsey, right down to the poison apples. The premise is…er…complicated: Giselle is about to have her happily-ever-after in Fairy Tale Land (Andalasia), but the Prince’s evil mother casts her down a well, delivering her to Times Square in New York.

Article

Those of us who have been prudent, lived within our means, and didn’t overborrow are paying a huge price for this. Income on our Treasury bills, money market funds, and CDs has dropped sharply, thanks to the Fed’s rate cuts, and our wealth has eroded relative to foreign currencies and commodities

Sloan’s article (or commentary, take your pick) is clear, concise, and scary as hell. My intiuition tells me there’s another Bear Stearns out there, and that the Fed can’t bail out everyone–trillions upon trillions of dollars of “bad money”. Hoo boy.