Blogging Roller

re: Science for the Curious Photographer

2009-06-16T22:24:04+00:00

To follow-up on my previous post on the topic: my father is starting to publish excerpts from his book Science for the Curious Photographer on Luminous Landscape.

His first piece is titled The Quest for Good Photographs and How the Brain Perceives Images and it's one of my favorite parts.

By the way, he's still trying to figure out the best way to publish the book.

Science for the Curious Photographer

2009-02-11T21:14:06+00:00

You may remember that my dad, Charles Johnson, was working on a book that explains the science behind photography, from "quantum mechanics to physiology and art appreciation." He's finished now and while he negotiates with publishers he is making a limited number of copies available on CD, mostly to his photographer friends.

The book is beautifully illustrated with color photographs, diagrams and lots of equations. Yes, I said equations; you'll need to brush up on your physics and calculus to really appreciate the entire work. I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters and the later chapter on appreciation of art in photography, but I have to admit, I haven't read the whole thing.

I'll try again when I have the printed edition

You can download a detailed table of contents via his blog photophys.com. He'll also be making selected chapters available there to get feedback; the first is How to get really high magnifications.

Snow and other distractions

2009-01-20T08:43:03+00:00

That's the view from my desk this morning. We woke up to snow in Raleigh for the first time in years. Here, even the threat of snow is enough to cancel school across the whole state, so the kids are ecstatic and outside perfecting their snowball combat skills. I'm trying to focus on getting back to work after a long weekend. With the momentous inauguration today and other (less positive) changes coming later in the week, that's gonna require some serious amounts of caffeine and determination.

Filmbabble's 2007 films

2008-01-29T08:42:32+00:00

Dan says 2007 was an exceptional year for films and he's posted his top ten films of 2007 list, with links to his original reviews for each film. Based on the four I've seen (Simpsons, No Country, I'm Not There and Ratatouille), I'd have to say it's a good list. I'm looking forward to tonight when Dan and I are going to see Blade Runner, The Final Cut at the Carolina Theater.

No Bee of the Bird of the Moth

2007-10-27T11:30:51+00:00

That was the only complaint the kids had about the They Might Be Giants show last night, their first "real rock concert" as they called it. Otherwise they loved it. My brother and I took Alex (10) and Linus (9) to the show at the Carolina Theater in Durham. They had a great time, pogoed around like the rest of the crowd and didn't get to bed until after 1AM.

<img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2299/1769031497_172ac0e733_m.jpg" alt="TMBG in Durham" title="TMBG in Durham by ncgoth" />
by ncgoth

I loved the show too. The last time I saw TMBG was probably before you were born; just the two Johns with a guitar, accordion, saxophone and a jam-box playing a drum tape. This time they had a full rock band with an amazing guitar player but unfortunately, no horns. They put on a solid show, played a wide variety of songs not weighted too heavily to their latest release, The Else, which was good and bad. Good because they've got a giant back catalog of kick ass jams. Bad because we've been listening to The Else and the boys really dig Bee of the Bird of the Moth -- guess they needed the horns for that one.

Here are some related links: There are still about 20 shows left in the TMBG tour. David Menconi of the Raleigh N&O blogged about TBMG and scored an interview. And Pat Mueller remarks on the nerd-fest that is the TMBG audience.

NC State Fair 2007

2007-10-14T21:39:19+00:00

We spent most of the day today at the state fair. Kids loved it. Parents endured it. We saw the bunnies, roosters, cows and pigs. We avoided the fried-thing of the year. We used up a fist-full of pre-purchased ride tickets and learned that the dubious safety factor makes the rides much more exciting than the big sturdy ones at the theme parks.

Fuzzy war birds

2007-10-06T18:22:19+00:00

I just happened to be looking for air show opportunities this morning and found out about the Pope AFB Airshow and Open House, which is happening today and tomorrow. What luck! So I packed up the kids and drove the 1.5 hours from Raleigh down to Fayetteville.

We parked at the Ft. Bragg fairgrounds, took a bus over to the base and despite the waiting in line and the heat, we really enjoyed ourselves. We saw several aerobatic displays, T-33, F-15, F-18 fly-overs and a Heritage Flight* with a F-15 and P-15 flying side-by-side (see below). We got to walk through several C5A and C130 transports and check out tanks and other armored fighting vehicles. There were also some vintage planes on display: a B-25, a Japanese torpedo bomber, P-40 Tomahawk, Hawker Hurricane and others. Very cool stuff (yes, I'm one of those pacifists who is fascinated with military history and hardware, kinda like this guy).

I wasn't able to get many good pictures because of my crummy little camera, which seems to be going bad. I uploaded some of best shots to my Flickr account and tagged them with <a href= "http://www.flickr.com/photos/snoopdave/tags/airshow/">airshow. Here are a couple of my favorite war birds, a P-51 Mustang and an F-15 Eagle:

* There's a nice gallery of previous Heritage Flights here.

Film Babble scores mention in NY Mag

2007-08-06T11:52:23+00:00

My brother Dan is a great writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of films, rock and pop music in general, and he's blogging, so it's only natural that folks start to notice. This weekend he got another boost, this time it's a mention in New York Magazine: The week in Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman.

Bergman and Allen

2007-08-01T14:34:27+00:00

Another great in-depth post from Film Babble Dan: Ingmar Bergman - The Woody Allen Angle. Dan made the IMDB front page again.

10 definitive films within films

2007-07-11T17:38:05+00:00

My bro Dan, who clearly understands the secret to blog success, has done it again with another lengthy and well-researched blog post. Thanks to his most recent post <a href= "http://filmbabble.blogspot.com/2007/07/10-definitive-films-within-films.html">10 definitive films within films, he was featured on the IMDB hit-list again this week.

Five years ago today

2007-06-21T22:59:20+00:00

This little guy, Leo Michael Johnson, was born:

http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/date/20020621

And this is what the little guy looks like today:

What's he like? He's an absolute joy to be around, happy, tough and smart. He loves lemonade, Star Wars, Jango Fett, building Legos, eating all of his veggies and making an ungodly racket with his big brothers. I've been working at home for most of his life, so I've gotten used to having him around pretty much all the time. Sometimes he brings me lunch. Sometimes he helps me make coffee. Sometimes I forget to lock my office door and he busts in during a telecon. Sometimes he calls out "daddy, I'm going potty and when I call you, you come and wipe my butt" at precisely the wrong time. But no matter what he does, I love him so very much. I'm really going to miss the little guy when he goes to all-day kindergarden this fall.

Happy birthday Leo!

Film Babble Blog on the IMDb Hit List

2007-06-14T11:32:00+00:00

My brother Dan's blog, Film Babble is listed on the front page of IMDb today. Well, OK, you have to scroll-down a little but it's there. Dan's recent post on 20 Great Modern Movie Cameos caught the attention of some folks at IMDB and elsewhere. Congrats Dan.

Home again

2007-05-12T15:29:16+00:00

It's been a fun four weeks of travel with the APP interop event, vacation, ApacheCon EU and JavaOne but damn it's nice to be home with Andi and the boys.

By the way, my talk went very smoothly yesterday and I estimate that about 300 people showed up. I pitched my book at the end of the talk and pointed people to JavaOne bookstore, but by that time it was sold out.

Film Babble Blog 80th post

2007-05-07T14:43:32+00:00

Celebrating with Movie and TV mind teasers

1. What was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?
2. What was in the package left in the care of Barton Fink?
3. What state in Springfield in on The Simpsons?

...and more from bro man Dan.

QOTD

2007-03-29T08:50:10+00:00

"Hey Dad, guess what? I killed Linus in the wilderness."

Not exactly what a Dad wants to hear first thing in the morning. Don't worry, Linus is still alive here in the real world and in the virtual world of Runescape.

Bone head

2007-03-10T20:15:16+00:00

Linus really digs the Bone comics. He's proud to be a Bone-head and recently expressed his great desire for a Bone t-shirt. So this weekend we did a little craft project and made one. We started by creating stencils based on a couple of my sketches. Here are the stencils that we created with a manila folder and an XACTO knife:

Then we took a trip to the craft store to get some airbrush friendly fabric paint and a couple of t-shirts. It was nice and warm today, so we did some airbrushing out on the porch. This is the end result:

Photophys.com updates

2007-02-27T23:59:30+00:00

Dad has posted Chapter 8: How To Make Lenses That Are Good Enough for Photography on his blog. At his request, I added an about page for him with a mug-shot and links to his other books.

Photography: Appreciation through Understanding

2007-02-13T19:49:40+00:00

I mentioned before that I convinced my Dad to start a blog. Well, now after a week or so of back-and-forth with Kattare.com getting the domain handling setup properly and modifying Roller to support multiple domains, his blog is live running on the same Roller instance that I use for this blog (but with the domain photophys.com).

Dad's blog is titled Photography: Appreciation through Understanding. He's publishing draft chapters from his new book there, hoping to get feedback and attract some new readers.

Hmm... RSS and Atom feeds don't seem to be working correctly. Apparently, I've still got some multi-domain work to do...

Heart of Gold

2007-02-12T23:15:00+00:00

And before I leave the topic of movies I'll mention this; recently I've been enjoying Neil Young's Heart of Gold, an absolutely wonderful concert film of and documentary about the debut of Neil's Prairie Wind album last year. See also, my brother Dan's brief review of the film over at Helium.com.

So Dad wants a blog...

2007-01-29T23:35:55+00:00

Over the weekend I convinced my Dad to start a blog and I offered to host it on my site with Roller (of course). We've already started to set the site up. Dad picked up a nice short domain name, I added it to the kattare.com name servers (Kattare is my ISP) and I added support for the new domains to my Apache/Tomcat setup there.

Now I have to to figure out how to host multiple domains with Roller. That's a topic that has come up before.

A while back LinPro Norway developed a multi-site capability for Roller. I called it multi-domain at the time, but now I think that was wrong. As I understand it, multi-site allows one Roller database to serve multiple Roller sites. Each site having it's own Server Admin settings and serving one or more domains. Mutli-site requires significant changes because the each table must have an additional field that indicate which site it belongs to. Unfortunately, the patches were too extensive for us to incorporate into Roller.

What I'm doing now is multi-domain, which appears to be much easier. I'm not sure multi-site and multi-domain are accepted terminology, so I'll explain. I want one Roller database to serve multiple domains, but with all domains sharing the same Server Admin settings. It's definitely going to require some code changes, but with the new 3.0 rendering system, I'm finding that those are pretty easy to do. In fact, I've already got some working code ready to deploy. Once I get it deployed and working, I'll write up a proposal and see if I can get simple multi-domain support into the Roller codebase.

Science blogger without a blog

2007-01-25T22:35:42+00:00

Speaking of science writing and making more science accessible to lay people, check out my Dad's article at Luminous Landscape where he explains Why Is My 50mm Lens Equivalent to 80mm on a 35mm Camera and Why Is There More Depth-of-Field? And check out the comment he received:

Nathan Myhrvold: I think that Charles Johnsonâ€™s article on DOF and sensor issues is excellent and will inform the discussion of the relative merits of various sensors and cameras. It covers the basic optical facts very well. However, I think that there are some additional points that can help clarify the issue...

Yes, that Nathan Myhrvold. Apparently, he shares both Dad's love of nature photography and of physics. Dad was pretty happy to see such detailed and well-informed feedback. See what happens when you post interesting writing on-line? Cool things! and you might make an interesting new friend or two. Get a blog Dad.

Farewell to 2006

2006-12-31T23:11:21+00:00

I've been too busy with year-end projects to blog over the past couple of days and now suddenly, it's time to say farewell to 2006. So I'll do that with a quick summary of the year.

2006 was a pretty good year for me. I published my first book: RSS and Atom in Action. Roller is still growing, reached 3.0 status and is now very close to becoming a top level Apache project. IBM started contributing to and announced a Web 2.0 product suite that will include Roller. I did my first solo JavaOne presentation and spoke at both ApacheCon EU and ApacheCon US. And, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I also landed a new job inside Sun, which starts on January 8th (more about that later).

On the home-front: the boys (now 4, 8 and 10) are all healthy, happy and doing well in school. We celebrated my dad's 70th birthday and Alex's 10th birthday. We took family trips to Ocracoke, Atlanta, Austin, Northern Virginia and made numerous visits to the in-laws beach house near Topsail Island. Plus, Andi and I escaped from the kids for a week in Ireland to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary -- our first kidless vacation in about ten years.

I hope you had a good year too and will have an even better 2007. Happy new years!

Smithsonian Air & Space Udvar-Hazy Center

2006-12-27T10:09:46+00:00

The Smithsonian Air & Space Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles airport is simply amazing. The center "provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and sapce artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall." I could have spent a lot more time there, but not everybody in the family shares my fascination with air, space and military history.

Here's a mosaic I created from some of the photos I uploaded to my Flickr account (I used Mosaic Maker to put this together).

Christmas loot and NoVa

2006-12-26T10:50:42+00:00

We opened presents in Chapel Hill on Xmas eve, at home in Raleigh on Xmas day and then drove up to Northern Virginia for one last round of paper ripping, twisty-tie unfastening and worship of the one deity that really matters to the kids: the good lord Lego. Lego ruled christmas here again and this year, for our kids the holy trinity is Lego, Star Wars and the Cars movie.

Lego's hegemony over the Johnson playroom has some history. Long time readers may remember the Jack Stone incident. Jack Stone has been replaced by a series of increasingly complex Lego Star Wars vehicles for the older boys and an oddly intense Lego Boba and Jango Fett fetish on the part of our four year old. And Lego is also serving as a gateway-drug -- Alex (10) got Lego Mindstorms earlier this month and has been spending hours building bots and some pretty complex programs.

I had to include the Cars movie in the holy trinity because Leo eats, sleeps and drinks it now. I'm almost too embarrassed to admit that he's got Cars movie plastic cars, die-cast metal cars, carrying case, models, pajamas, a blanket (known as fuzzy), socks, shoes, underwear and pull-ups -- but no Cars movie Legos (yet).

I got a couple of nice gifts too. As usual my brother gave me some user-generated content; his year he put together a wonderful CD full of about 30 Who covers. I also got a couple of books: Innovation Happens Elsewhere and The Innovators Dilemma.

We'll be in the Northern Virginia area for the next couple of days. After a short pilgrimage to the Lego store today we'll head over to the new Air & Space museum at Dulles airport. Tomorrow, we're expecting good weather so we'll head down to DC to check out the National Mall.

Jingle bells

2006-12-24T09:42:47+00:00

Here's a little video gem I found while working on our annual video review DVD; a little spontaneous singing and cuteness from the kids on Christmas eve last year. It's my first YouTube upload:

10

2006-12-08T23:07:00+00:00

We celebrated a milestone tonight, Alex's 10th birthday. He's grown into a great kid, smart, healthy, eager to learn (math) and questioning everything. We're very lucky. It's hard to believe 10 years has gone by since we started building this family. Seems like yesterday, a dream and an eternity ago all at once. I didn't have a blog back then of course, but I had a web site and I posted a birth announcement with photos, measurements, foot-prints, doctor's names and this little stroller that I drew for the printed announcements:

Film Babble

2006-11-23T21:18:19+00:00

Here's a little something else I'm thankful for. My brother Dan has been low-frequency blogging for a while and he's getting better and better. His blog is called Film Babble and it's definitely babble (and I mean that in the absolutely best way possible), but his writing style is interesting and he got a pretty deep knowledge base to draw on when it comes to movies and music. His latest post is about director Robert Altman, who just passed away.

Happy Thanksgiving

2006-11-23T21:10:30+00:00

Happy Thanksgiving to those that celebrate this fine American holiday and happy Thursday to those that don't. As always, I'm thankful for my happy and healthy family and happy that we'll be able to get together this weekend. And, as usual, we enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at my parent's place over in Chapel Hill. For us, the traditional dinner is turkey, stuffing, gravy, rice, cranberry sauce, stir-fried veggies and dessert of pumpkin pie and chocolate pecan pie (my personal favorite). Tomorrow we'll head down to Andi's folk's beach house near Topsail Island, NC for a couple of days of doing mostly nothing -- the water will be cold but with temps around 70F my crazy kids might just brave the icy waves. Hope you have a good one too.

Statesville balloon-fest

2006-10-30T22:10:30+00:00

Over the weekend, we drove about three hours west towards the mountains to Statesville, NC for the annual Carolina balloon-fest. We saw a tank, an assortment of military helicopters and we even saw some balloons attempt to inflate. Unfortunately, it was way too windy for ballooning. So it was a bit frustrating, but the kids love any chance to take a road trip so it wasn't a total loss. You can see some of my photos on Flickr.

Panzer Blitz

2006-06-17T22:05:53+00:00

Alex and I made the jump from Steve Jackson mini-games to our first full-blown wargame tonight with my old copy of Panzer Blitz.

The Awful Green Things from Outer Space

2006-05-09T21:49:07+00:00

With the book out of my hands again, I'm trying to return to normal life by doing things like leaving the house, watching movies and playing games with the kids. Tonight's fun was The Awful Green Things from Outer Space, an easy-to-play and very cute Steve Jackson mini-game (a board game) with an interesting set of rules. It's perfect for Alex, who at 9 is absolutely fascinated by game systems and rules.

TAGTFOS is about a space ship that is boarded by green monsters; monsters who grow each turn from eggs to babies and from babies to egg-laying adults. To fight off the monsters, the ship's crew members grab whatever weapons they can find, things like bottles of acid, cans of rocket fuel and blow torches. Problem is, the crew has no idea what the weapons do until they use them (and they change every time you play). So, if you fire a stun pistol into a room full of monsters you might blow 'em to bits, which sounds good until you realize that all of those bits will grow into babies next turn.

I got my copy of TAGTFOS from The Dragon magazine back in '79. The game is out of print, but you can find copies at used game stores online (around $15 a copy).

Four years blogging

2006-04-17T23:44:37+00:00

I'm a week late with this post. My first post was April 11, 2002 (also here) but the 17th is the date I remember because that's the day that the Roller article was published at OnJava.com. I started blogging with Userland Radio and moved to Roller in June of 2002 right around the time Leo was born. Ah, the memories...

Back to the grind

2006-04-02T21:43:35+00:00

We just returned from a most excellent spring-break trip down to Georgia for some sight-seeing in Atlanta and a family re-union in Callaway Gardens. I had hoped to get some serious work done on my ROME chapter, which is due Wednesday, but that didn't work out so well. I did get some work done, but I'm definitely gonna blow my deadline. That's OK, I had fun instead. The kids did too. We did the new Georgia Aquarium, which was incredibly crowded but well worth the effort. The next day, the kids managed to sit still through the Cyclorama, which you'll find interesting even if you have only a passing interest in Civil War history. We also had a wonderful dinner at Mu Lan with my parents, thanks in part to little Leo, who slept right through dinner.

Callaway Gardens was beautiful and the villa we picked was the perfect spot for a small family reunion and multi-birthday celebration -- we celebrated my dad's 70th, my grandmother's 90th birthday and others. We visited the butterfly house, the vegetable gardens and then I ducked out on the birds of prey show to get some work done. We also pored over a small mountain of unsorted memorabilia and most of the items pictured on this page about my great great great grandfather James Mason.

Now it's back to the grind. The ROME chapter is a little more difficult that I had thought as I'm finding some deficiencies in ROME (some are my fault) and fighting an overwhelming urge to fix them or at least document them in depth.

Spring weekend

2006-03-11T22:12:19+00:00

Since the book was supposed to be finished by Friday (more on that later), Andi and her friends left town for a girls beach weekend at Topsail Island. So the boys and I have been fending for ourselves and enjoying a beautiful early spring weekend with temps in the high 70s.

On Friday night we went to dinner early, around 5:30PM, hoping to get an outside table at Mellow Mushroom. The patio was packed with after-workers and college kids, so we settled for an inside table. After eating half a pie and a small hill of black olives, we took a long walk around the Glenwood South area stopping for ice cream at Turkish Delights.

Today, I strapped the bikes on the back of the van and we drove down to Meredith College to ride the NC Museum of Art trail. The kids love the bike bridge. Fortunately, Leo at three is still light enough to ride in the bike seat. We took a ride, crossed the bridge and then walked through some of the outdoor pieces, that's one in the (Treo phone) photo above. After that, we went inside to walk through the European collection. It was a quick walk. Alex and Linus are old enough to appreciate the paintings, but Leo no so much. Then we made our way home. All and all a very nice way to spend a warm spring afternoon.

Today is...

2006-03-07T10:47:50+00:00

...the birthday of a truly great man and a wonderful father. Happy 70th birthday DAD!!!

(c) Charles S. Johnson, Jr.

Day 1

2006-01-01T19:06:20+00:00

After wrapping up writing last night, I took a break from the book for most of the day with some shopping and some time with our neighbors. Our neighbors across the street, invited us over for some candle lighting, latkas and dreidling -- a very nice way to wrap up the holidays.

One of my non-health related resolutions for 2006 is to switch over to Tiger, by which I mean Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and Java 5.0 Tiger. So I dragged the boys over to CompUSA and bought a LinkSys NSLU2 Network Storage Link and a Maxtor 200GB external USB drive. They didn't have Mac OS X, so I drove over to the Apple store in Durham. I bought both Mac OS Tiger and iLife, because I was warned Tiger doesn't include the Apple software goodies I've been digging recently (iMovie, iDVD and iPhoto, grumble grumble). All and alll, a way too expensive day. Once I use my Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my Powerbook (hmm, is that gonna work with a network mounted drive?), I'll feel comfortable installing the new Mac OS.

Another resolution on my list is to do some 'casting. I'll be making the first non-snapshot release of Blogapps this week, so I'd like to make a couple of screencasts. I've got two ideas in mind. One screencast will walk you through the installation and setup of the Blogapps server (i.e. my Roller/JSPWiki bundle). The other will explain Atom protocol (as it stands today) using the Blogapps server and some command-line utillities I wrote for the Atom protocol chapter. I was quite impressed with what Brian McAllister did with Snapz Pro X in his ApacheCon talk, so I'm thinking that is the package to buy for Mac screencasting. Please pipe-up if you know better.

Home for the holidays

2005-12-23T18:02:30+00:00

See you next week...

I'm back

2005-12-16T09:12:49+00:00

And it's very nice to be home.

Walk the Line and a night out

2005-12-03T19:40:54+00:00

For the first time since three-year-old Leo was born, Andi and I dumped *all* of the kids off with my parents (thanks Mom and Dad) in Chapel Hill and headed out to movie, dinner and a show. We saw Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash bio-pic. <a href= "http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051117/REVIEWS/51107006/1023">Ebert gave it the thumbs up, <a href= "http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/_/id/6131985?pageid=rs.ReviewsMovieArchive&pageregion=mainRegion&afl=imdb&rnd=1133652941305&has-player=true">Rolling Stone says its Oscar material and we both loved it.

After the movie we were hoping to try Panang again, but we didn't have time for dinner. We had to meet Andi's brother and head back to Raleigh to see Carbon Leaf at the Lincoln Theater. Carbon Leaf put on an enjoyable show, but the music didn't really grab me, at least not enough to inspire any CD purchases. If I had to triangulate (using my out-of-date reference materal), I'd say they were Connells-style white-boy jam-pop, with celtic influences (penny whistle included) and Phish-like sing-along lyrics.

All and all, a very nice and kid-free night out.

Weekend project

2005-11-24T09:51:15+00:00

Last weekend, I helped Alex finish his first model: a 1/48th scale replica of a Republic P-47D Thunderbolt fighter. Alex did everything except for the putty/sanding work and some of the finer painting. I spent a *lot* of time building models and painting miniatures when I was a kid. I entered hobby store contests and even convinced my parents to buy an air-compressor and an airbrush for me. It's cool to rediscover some of that fun with Alex.

Kit by Revell/Monogram.

The underwear experiment

2005-11-19T16:16:18+00:00

Since this is a "professional" blog, I would never tell you the story of the underwear experiment, in which a little boy decides to test the limits of parental odor detection, fabric strength, and personal hygene by seeing how long he can go without changing his underwear. But I will say this, the experiment lasted two months.

Mostly off-line today

2005-07-14T12:17:26+00:00

Andi and I went out to celebrate our 14th wedding anniversary last night (thank you very much) and as we left, a Time Warner truck parked right next to our cable box. When we returned from our dinner/movie date (both were excellent: Margaux and Batman Begins), I found that my cable modem was dead. After an hour on-hold with the Time Warner folks, they finally offered to come out in a couple of days and fix things. Isn't that nice. Until then, my availability on AIM will be spotty. I'll probably park myself at Sun's Cary office once I figure out how to get acccess there, but for now I'm at Helios coffee.

Back to work

2005-07-11T09:56:20+00:00

I'm back to work after a week of JavaOne and week of summer-shutdown imposed vacation. What did I do on my vacation? After returning from JavaOne, I joined the rest of the family at the grandparent's new beach/golf house close to Topsail Island, NC. I tried my best to avoid work. I did pretty well and that's not as easy as it sounds; I first starting working on Roller during a summer vacation at Ocracoke Island.

I forced myself to take a break. I did the beach thing: dragged beach chairs and umbrellas around, covered my body in sunblock, built sand-drip castles, etc. I showed the boys the original three Star Wars films. I saw The War of the Worlds, which was surprisingly good in a summer fun movie kind of way. I read Freakonomics, also good. That was great; I needed a break. Now I'm back, the older boys are in all-day camp at the YMCA, I'm ready to get back into Roller 2.0 group blogging work.

North Ridge fireworks

2005-07-03T23:06:23+00:00

(Raleigh, NC) Fireworks over the North Ridge Country Club, as seen from my driveway and taken with my Treo 650. Not the greatest picture, but it shows how close they are to my house.

Star Wars weekend

2005-06-20T21:37:56+00:00

I convinced Andi that Alex(8) and Linus(7) are old enough for the Star Wars films. So, this past weekend we watched episides I, II and III. We started with Episode 1.1: The Phantom Edit, a fan-edited version of the film that includes much less Jar Jar than before. They boys thought they could have cut more; I kid you not. I thought the Phantom Edit was a little too fuzzy to enjoy. I guess that's because it was created from a VHS copy of the film.

I think the boys enjoyed Episode II: Attack of the Clones more than Episode I, but there was a little too much kissing. It's funny to see the kids cringe when Anakin and Padme get all mushy.

It was Andi's birthday on Sunday, so she took Alex and Linus to Episode III and I stayed home with the little Leo. They enjoyed it the most of the three, but Linus was a little disturbed when he saw what happened to Anakin. I don't think he was really traumatized, at least not as bad as he was on The Mummy (whatever you do, do NOT mention The Mummy to Linus).

I wonder what they're going to think of the original films. Will they see IV and V as the awesome classics that I know them to be, or dated and dull after the orgy of special effects they've just gone through in the prequels.

Kids online

2005-06-12T23:27:16+00:00

Today, I set up a new computer for the kids. I took the new 2.8Ghz Celeron box that had been serving as my Linux file-server and swapped it with the old 450Mhz P3 box that the kids were using. I was a little surprised how easy it was to make the switch. I just took the hard-drive out of the Celeron and put it in the P3 and Linux came right back up.

I set up Windows XP Home on the Celeron box and installed the important software (Warcraft and SimCity 3000) for the kids. I would have preferred something other than Windows, but we have quite an investment in games and educational software for Windows.

I also added a wireless adapter. So now, for the first time, the kids computer is on-line. I didn't setup any parental controls or filtering software and I'm not really sure what to do about "internet safety." The boys are 7 and 8 and I'm pretty sure they aren't going to go looking for trouble quite yet, but I am a little worried that Google will send them to a site of ill-repute or some horrible porn-spam message will land in their inbox. If you've got kids around that age on-line, I'd love to hear what you do to protect them from porn-spam and other internet threats.

Under contract!

2005-05-25T08:15:22+00:00

To continue my little string of personal entries, I've got great news. The house that we bought when I worked for Rogue Wave in Charlotte, couldn't sell when we moved to Raleigh to work for HAHT in 1999 and have been renting-out ever since is finally under-contract (and for a reasonable price).

First flight

2005-05-19T09:46:34+00:00

My boys Alex(8) and Linus(6) didn't know until this morning, but today they're about to take their first airplane ride. Their mom's taking them down to Orlando to see uncle Chris compete in the Florida Half-Ironman and spend a day at Universal Studios. I'm staying home with Leo(2). I told them the news this morning and Alex's response was classic Alex: "awww, I don't wanna to miss school for two whole days." Linus, who consistently plays Pig Will to Alex's Pig Won't, was ecstatic.

The worst thing about vacation...

2005-03-21T18:20:32+00:00

Is of course, coming back. We just got back from a short trip down to Stone Mountain, Georgia for a family re-union centered about my grandmother's 90th birthday celebrations. It was great spending time with the small family. When we gather together for a re-union, it almost feels like a big family. The kids loved the Stone Mountain train, the cable-car up to the top, and jumping from rock to rock all the way down. I wasn't expecting much from "redneck Rushmore" but the Marriot resort there is very nice as is the rest of the park. I might actually go back there someday.

Anyhow, upon my return I find that my blog has been down all day (due to a misconfiguration on my part) and, as usual, one of my office computers is freaking out. When I leave town, I power down the computers in my office (a Sun box, a low-end Linux box, and a Windows machine. No matter what, everytime I return, one computer won't start up correctly. This time it is the Windows box. The symptom: on start-up it boots Redhat Linux and I didn't even know I had Redhat on that box. Oh well.

In other news... I was supposed to finish Blogs, Wikis, and Feeds chapters 14 and 15 this weekend (you can probably guess how that went). Back to work...

Leo's leave taking behavior

2005-03-03T19:36:40+00:00

You can't say goodbye to Leo without going through this routine:

Hug
Kiss
Bunny nose
High five
Low five
Tickle five

It's a little inconvenient at pre-school drop off, but I love it.