Blogging Roller

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.

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.

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.

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(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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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...

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

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

She doesn't know it yet, but Andi's getting a Mac mini. The kids can have the old Windows box, but we'll have to disconnect it from the net so they can use it safely ;-)

And suddenly, *MAS is here. As we have done for the past couple of years, we took the kids to the dollar store so they could afford to buy presents for everybody.

CookieCulture: Don't ask me how but Shatner and Folds really pulled it off here. A smart sincere album that's funny in the right places.

Cookie hasn't learned the art of linking so here ya go Has Been, William Shatner

We had nice quiet Thanksgiving and that's the way I like it. We travelled only about 30 miles, for dinner with my parents and my brother over in Chapel Hill. We had turkey, gravy, stuffing, rice, cranberry sauce, veggies, and of course, pumpkin pie and homemade ice cream. After lunch we took the traditional nice long walk around the neighborhood and this year the walk included the muddy path along Morgan Creek.

Now, we're back in Raleigh and I'm trying to get back into writing mode. I'm going to put the XML-RPC and Atom Protocol chapters on hold for a couple of days and work on revisions to the first 1/3 of the book. Reviews came back overwhelmingly positive, but that is just not good enough.

I've got a lot to be thankful for, but right now I'm most thankful for my wife's seemingly infinite patience -- that, and the fact that she is taking the boys away for a couple of days so that I can work in peace.

I should rename this contrived little blogging crutch to Saturday photo. I never seem to get to it until 11:30 Friday night. This week, another photo taken by my father. The photo is a view from the Snowbird Mountain Inn in North Carolina.

I missed a couple of Friday photos, so today I have two for you. Both from the soccer double header last weekend. Alex and Linus had back to back games and my dad was there with his telephoto. First, here is Alex seconds before scoring a goal:

Linus didn't score a goal during his game, but here is a shot of him playing goalie.

Those boys are about as sad as can be today. We just learned that the stray cat we took in last year has stomach cancer. Luna was the sweetest cat. She got along great with my three loud and rowdy boys because she was totally deaf. We will be having another one of those tear-filled back-yard burials again tomorrow. Sigh.

Our home improvement projects are finally complete including our new screened-in porch. Screens are a must here in Raleigh where swarming mosquitoes will literally eat you alive within minutes of your walking outside. We've been enjoying the bug free living for about a month now. Two big ceiling fans make it comfortable even in August.

Over the past couple of years, I've been scanning my photo collection using a HP slide/negative scanner. My dad, who is an excellent photographer, has been scanning his collection as well. So, to add a little life to this tired old blog, I'm going to start taking advantage of my .Mac account (no longer active) and posting each week a photo from my collection or my dad's collection. Here is the first one:

Jamaican carwash - My old VM Golf in the carwash close to Ocho Rios, Jamaica

I've been reading the Harry Potter books to my older boys since Christmas time and, now, we're speeding through the Prisoner of Azkaban, hoping to finish in time to catch the movie at the IMAX theater. The other day, the boys were drooling over the Harry Potter goodies in the Lego catalog and reading the blurbs next to each of the Potter Lego sets. Each set is based on some event in the book and the blurbs reveal all sorts of spoilers, plot-points like... uh... well, I guess I shouldn't say. Alas, my boys have been spoilered.

One of the things that makes kids movies fun is the two-level appeal. The movie makers try to throw in some adult humor that passes right over the kids heads or they make some pop-culture reference that, generally speaking, only adults will catch. The problem here is that kids can become "pre-referenced." That is, they get exposed to a pop culture reference before they experience the actual pop culture being referered to. For example, in Toy Story 2, Buzz Lightyear learns that the evil Zurg is his father, which, of course, is a reference to Star Wars. Now, when my boys see Empire Strikes Back, they are going to think "what a lame rip off of Toy Story 2."

Yep, that's what Dads worry about. Thanks for reading. I think that fulfils my quota for random nonsense this week.

Whenever I'm away from my boys, even for a couple of days, I find that when we are re-united, the little guys look like they've each grown a year. Andi sent me the picture below and, sure enough, Leo (who just turned 2) is looking like such a big boy and not the baby that he was only the week before.

JavaOne is fun, but I miss that little guy (and you guys too, Alex and Linus).