Leave it to the Japanese…..costumes for your cat. As an added bonus, the company translated the site into Engrish.

Posted on 23 May 2003

There’s an interesting thread on /. about the geek’s desire to learn. Everything. Homebrewing beer, gardening, metalsmithing, you name it, and there are geeks into it or learning it. And I’ve got to put myself into that category. I really like the process of learning, and the process of teaching myself. I remember in high school, some friends of mine in another school had to read The Day I Became an Autodidact. The whole concept was pretty foreign to me then, but now I’ve really embraced it. I appreciated the fact I went to college, and that I had the opportunity to hone my thinking process (because heaven knows my philosophy degree didn’t get me much else 😉 ), but I appreciate even more the journey I’ve had since college–learning how to run a business, learning how to be a programmer, learning how to be father.

So, here’s a short list of things I’d like to learn how to do sooner rather than later:

1. Build a bicycle wheel from scratch
2. Change the clutch plates on my car
3. Carpentry/home repair
4. Learn one or two more programming languages (Ruby and Python) and learn more about *nix system administration

Posted on 22 May 2003

Not that most people care, but Annika Sorenstam is currently one under par at the Colonial Invitational. In case you haven’t heard, Sorenstam, the best female golfer on the planet, is playing in a PGA tour event. Many people have cried that she doesn’t deserve to be there, but here she is, 3/4 of the way through the first round and she’s 3 shots off the lead. If she continues to play like she is, she will easily make the cut and get to play this weekend (which was her main goal). Looks like she does deserve to play with the big boys after all…..

Posted on 22 May 2003

I still don’t have a fully functioning sound system on my machine at work. I can listen to my MP3s, but I have to restart the sound server every 20 minutes because the driver for my Soundblaster Live 5.1 card is only an evaluation copy. “What gives?” you ask….”Don’t you work on a linux box? Isn’t everything free as in beer?” Well, no. Since CreativeLabs hasn’t completely released the code for the driver, and the new chipsets on the Soundblaster cards aren’t compatible with the old ALSA drivers. 4Front Technologies has a driver for linux boxen, but it’s not free. Now, if anyone might happen to *find* a license key floating around the internet, please let me know, but for the moment I have a script to restart the sound server (and XMMS) every 20 minutes…..

Posted on 22 May 2003

Did anyone else notice my mother-in-law’s translucent hand in this picture of Seb? Wacky….

Posted on 21 May 2003

In case you didn’t look at the home page, there some new photos of Seb.

In other news….here’s the beginnings of an interesting discussion on Slashdot about a potential flaw in the .NET framework. Simply, hijack private fields within classes via tools within the .NET framework. Now, with this being on Slashdot and all, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a bit hyberbolic, but time will time as smart people concerned about the facts contribute to the discussion. Many people are crying “security leak”, but that’s really not the issue. If you’re hiding sensitive data in class fields (private or otherwise), you’ve got bigger problems. A lot of folks are also pointing out that Java allows this as well via Reflection, but alas, you cannot access private fields, classes, or methods via Reflection.

Posted on 21 May 2003

Here’s an interesting idea. The RIAA Radar bookmarklet will allow you to see if the RIAA will take some of your precious money when you buy a CD from Amazon. The bookmarklet will query a database and let you know if the artist is a member of RIAA. I love this idea, but how many people won’t buy albums because of RIAA membership? Most of the stuff I listen to is on indie labels, so the RIAA membership thing isn’t even an issue (heck, I’m lucky to even find some of the stuff I listen to on Amazon).

Of course, it’d be nice if this service worked with something other than the patent-spewing hydra we call Amazon….but at least it’s a start….

I was saddened to find that Matador is a member of the RIAA

Posted on 20 May 2003

It struck me on the ride into work this morning that I now have another day each year I can receive gifts (father’s day)…..sweeet!

Seb is doing well. He’s eating normally most of the time, and he’s sleeping for 4 hours at a stretch at night, which means we’re getting at least 6 hours of sleep. No complaints there…there should be more pictures up in the next day or so…we’ve been staying at the in-laws, so I haven’t had a chance to get the images off the camera.

In other news….

Good news for Subaru. Petter Solberg has inked a three year contract with the team. Solberg is due to win a few rallies this year, and he will compete for the driver’s championship in the coming years. Interesting to note that Solberg would like Tommi Makinen to return for another year. Tommi has had bad luck with Subaru, retiring from many rallies he could have won, but his experience is invaluable to the team and to Petter. Remember last season when Petter won the Rally GB and gave a lot of credit to Makinen for his support of Petter on the final day.

The rule changes for next season (a team’s third points scoring driver in a rally must not have a rally win to his credit) should make for an interesting offseason. This rule obviously hurts Peugeot and Citroen, whose rosters are stacked with rally winners. I expect to see both Harri Rovanpera and Gilles Panizzi leave Peugeot for the opportunity for full season drives for other teams. Imagine if Gilles went to Skoda or Hyundia….suddenly they would be a contender. I wouldn’t be surprised if Subaru just promoted Toshiro Arai (as they did in 2001), as he’s had some strong results in a full factory car (4th in Greece in 2001).

Posted on 20 May 2003

I’m attempting to get back into the swing of work life this morning. Lil Seb is doing well, and he’s eating better, which makes life easier for everyone involved. Hopefully within the next week he’ll establish a little schedule for himself, and we’ll be sleeping even more every night. Also, sorry to anyone we haven’t been in touch with this week….it’s amazing how the time just flies…

I read an interesting article this weekend about the XP tactic of test-driven deisgn (sorry, no link to the actual article…it was on a dead tree). Interesting stuff, and something that we’ll probably implement here at the new job, since we’re redesigning the system. It should be difficult to think about programming this way, but in the end, it should pay off. There comes a time when you have to take off the hacker hat and pretend to be a software developer….

Posted on 19 May 2003

There’s an interesting story in the Christian Science Monitor about the “buy local” movement. Lots of good ideas there. Consumers in the United States need to realize that they are a critical piece of the market. Personally, I think most consumers don’t realize the power they actually have. Sure, monopolies will still exist, and companies will still find ways to abuse the system (and consumers), but the average person can make a difference.

But unfortunately, this also requires a bit more effort on the part of the consumer, and we can’t have that, now can we?

Posted on 16 May 2003