Year: 2012

Tonight we went to another of Kyra’s band concerts. As a flute player, she sometimes feels like her music can’t be heard above the racket of the rest of the band. (And yes, with a group of eighth-graders it’s often a racket.)

She had this to say about it:

It was hilarious. Maybe it was the way she said it– very matter-of-fact, like this was a great pronouncement and a piece of timeless wisdom that should be inscribed in stone somewhere.

At the concert I couldn’t help but admit she’s right. The flute players sit right in front of the trumpets and saxophones, and they played a little Mexican number (lots of brass) and the only way I could tell Kyra was even playing was by watching her fingers move on the flute.

The good news: as band players mature and become more skilled, the brass quiets down a little. Last weekend we were at a statewide honor band concert (Kyra was fourth chair, meaning she’s the fourth-best flutist in Colorado!) and those middle-school kids were really quite impressive. The brass wasn’t as overpowering; it sounded more like a group effort than an attempt by the brass players to drown out everyone else.

I remember the days, early in my business, when a new client or a new project was a cause for celebration. Every little bit of work helped, and I was always eager and excited to pick up something new.

It’s interesting to note that today, I continue to get new projects but in a weird way I wish they would stop coming so I could take a breather. We’re getting one project after another– which of course is a great thing– but we’re badly understaffed and so it just creates more pressure. We simply don’t have the capacity to do all of the work we have now, and these new projects just add to the pile.

I really, really hope I can hire some more developers soon. I can’t keep burning the midnight oil six days a week…

Today was a gorgeous teaser for spring… sunny and 70 degrees. My car’s dashboard has the proof:

Of course that means lunchtime ultimate was on, although the breeze was a little stiff. The good news there is my out-of-practice throws didn’t seem so bad. I could blame the wind.

I was testing some stuff with my camera and kind of liked this macro view of my monitor.

I’m at the airport early today, and I learned two things:

1) If you don’t print your boarding pass ahead of time, you might get lucky and get assigned a better seat. I moved from 26A– second-to-last row in the back– to 5A, which I’m hoping is a “premium” seat with more than twelve inches of leg room. Yay!

2) The TSA is no longer using metal detectors at all, and forcing everyone to go through the millimeter-wave machines. Ugh. Of course I opted out, which meant a pleasant early-morning groping. Good times.

Seen in an email signature:

I didn’t really feel old when I turned 40. But today Alex is going to get his driver’s permit. That makes me feel old!

I saw an article the other day about WindowMaker, which is the desktop windowing system I used for many years back when I worked at Raytheon. I had been using CDE in college, and then at Raytheon I had a bunch of massive SGI workstations running IRIX, so I first used CDE but switched to WindowMaker because it seemed to have more customizations and just a nicer “feel”.

WindowMaker has been sitting idle for probably a decade, and finally some developers who like it decided to start working on it again. So the article I read was an announcement that a new version had just been released. It’s still the same window manager at heart, but they’re actively working on adding new features. Funny that after all this time the project has been resurrected.

Since I’m using Jinux now, it was a simple matter to download the source code for WindowMaker and compile it. It literally took about two minutes (compared with two hours for KDE). I installed it and fired it up.

It worked right out of the gate. Awesome. All of the old familiar “dock icons” were there, along with support for multiple workspaces, custom themes and docs, and of course the default purple-grey background. Keep in mind that in those days, when I was using WindowMaker as my main windowing system, it was around 1996. Windows 95 was the king of the hill. It didn’t do any of the cool things that WindowMaker could do. Even today Windows doesn’t have support for multiple desktops (as far as I know).

Of course I’m still a KDE fanboy so it’s not like I’m going to switch back to WindowMaker as my main desktop environment. But it was kind of fun to grab source code and within a few minutes have that old familiar desktop in front of me. A geeky happy birthday to me.

When I was in my teens, I was over at my friend Morgan’s house. A bunch of us were playing cards or something, and I grabbed a soda from the fridge. Next to the fridge was a wall calendar. With a bit of a grin on my face, I picked up a pen and wrote “Jeff’s Birthday” on February 18.

On February 18 I was surprised to get a birthday card from Morgan’s mom, Carol. She mentioned that she’d seen my birthday on the calendar and if it’s on the calendar, it deserves a card. Cool.

That was more than 20 years ago. Since then, every February 18 I’ve received a card from Carol. She hasn’t missed a single birthday. How awesome is that?

I just ran out of disk space on one of my web servers. Looking more closely, it seems that the Apache error log grew a little too large…

That’s 39 gigabytes of error messages (which really turned out to be low-priority “notices” from the PHP engine). Yikes.