Kevin

For what it's worth...

Age 18-29 -- Yes 39% No 61%

It's not fair, but sometimes equality takes time.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#CAI01p1

Recently a friend sent an email to me encouraging me to vote for John McCain. For anyone who is interested, a trimmed down version of my response is behind the cut.

( Response... )

Many of you know that in the past I've been a supporter of John McCain. I want to be clear for the record that most of my respect for him evaporated in 2006 (torture bill). More recently, this is completely disgusting. And now, McCain thinks he can keep playing the terrorist/fear card, but still "respect" Obama. He's fanning flames of hate that he can't hope to control. Oh, and if he's trying to tone down the rhetoric, he might want to make sure that his campaign staff is on the same page--unless he really does approve of this message.

A quick follow-up to B's 'Hate People' post: Today while we were driving home B was talking about a snail that R was fascinated with. He was very curious, but wouldn't go near it. I remarked that this was probably because "it might jump up and bite me." B chuckled a bit, and then R started yelling, "Bite me! Bite me!"

Of course, laughter from the front of the car just encouraged it.

On Monday we took a trip down to Monterey to visit the Aquarium. We'd been talking about taking R for a while, and for several reasons this last weekend seemed like a good time. We had a blast. R did really well, considering the car ride down, lack of a nap, and constant activity from 10am to about 3:30pm. We got to see pretty much everything, though I think we spent half of our time in the Wild About Otters exhibit (mostly because they had a slide there that R refused to leave).

Anyways... some pictures behind the cut.

( See pictures... )

I've been lj-nudged. I suppose there are many things to write about, but I'll break the posts up into a few entries over a few days. This is the one where I talk about family (including a new family member).

R is almost three. His vocabulary is exploding, finally. After a long period of a relatively small set of words and a few short phrases, he's finally starting to use words for almost everything. He still signs a few things but he's using about half dozen new words every day.

The whole family is going to have to make some adjustments now, because R is going to be a big brother. We have another little boy on the way in May. May 15th is the absolute latest date for the delivery according to the Doctor's orders. If there are any complications it will be sooner. I should post the ultrasound video when I get a chance....

B hasn't had any of the severe precursor symptoms she had last time, so hopefully that's a sign that things will go more smoothly *knocks*. She finished up her last week at the school on Tuesday of last week. She's going to do the stay-at-home mom thing for a while.

The Big G gives me 7 weeks paid family leave, and I can break that up in week-size increments over the course of a year. So I'm going to try to take 3-4 weeks initially and maybe another 3-4 weeks when extended family visit later in the year, but that depends on how things are going at work (in short: really well overall, but that's another post).

R is finally going to try sleeping in the "Big Boy Bed" tonight. We'll see how it goes. He's getting out of the bath now and it's my turn to do nite-nite.

So yeah... "Nite-nite, everyone!"

Barbecue! Pork shoulder smoked with hickory.

I've been meaning to try home-made BBQ pulled pork for about a year now, but I was a little worried I wouldn't be able to control the heat on my charcoal grill. I finally tried it on Saturday. Smoked the pork for about 4 hours, and finished it simmering in apple cider. The pork came out great.

I tried two different BBQ sauces. One had too much vinegar (home-made), the other was too sweet (pre-made, but you can't buy it in stores... yet). I have some left over scraps and I'm going to try another home made BBQ sauce tomorrow. If the new sauce comes out right I'll probably post a recipe sometime this week.

Anyone have any barbecue/smoking tips to share?

It has been a while since I last read this. Today seemed like a good day to revisit it.

The Declaration of Independence.

Occasionally when R is going down for bed time he likes to have us sing Old MacDonald for him. He'll make an animal sound, and that's the animal that Old MacDonald has. Apparently Old MacDonald has acquired an elephant... and a train.

Well, this is the end of the first week at the new job. Obviously I can't share much. Though there are two observations I can discuss.

1) The commute is not fun. On the way home it's around 45+ minutes. It's pretty consistent no matter when I leave (any time between 4pm and 7pm). Definitely longer than before, but it's tollerable. On the way in, it's a different matter. If I leave at 6:40, it takes about 25 minutes. If I leave fifteen minutes later it takes nearly an hour and a half (87/101 is crazy like that). Fortunately there's a shuttle stop near my place, so I'm thinking of checking that out next week. If nothing else it'll save me 2-4 gallons of gas per round trip.

2) The variety and quality of the food is great. Which can be a mixed blessing if you're trying to lose weight (as I am). The upside is, it's pretty easy to differentiate between the stuff that's good for you and the stuff that's bad for you; and the stuff that's good for you still tastes great. I had two lunches this week without any meat, and both were delicious.

But I'm not sure I can resist the pulled pork sandwich next time I see it on the menu...

The proverbial cat is pretty much out of the bag at this point. I'm leaving Global VR.

I really do like my job. I like my co-workers. I like my boss. I like the VP of Product Development and the CEO. I have confidence in their ability to move the company forward. I like the project I'm working on. I'm well respected at GVR and I'm fairly compensated. I wasn't looking for a new job, but an opportunity came up that I simply couldn't ignore.

May 21st will be my first day at Google. Obviously I'm excited about it, and a bit nervous.

Anyway, there's a lot on my mind but nothing I feel like specifically adding to this post. Just wanted to keep all y'all in the loop.

Question for everyone out in LJ land. Have any recommendations for a website Content Management System?

I need something for non-techies to edit content with a WYSIWYG interface... text, images, tables, etc. Open Source preferred, but not required. I'm not worried so much about page style, navigation and things of that nature. Just the content itself.

I'm looking at open source CMS systems right now, but I really haven't used any. The only thing I've actually looked at so far is Joomla (but that was only for about 20 minutes). I'm not too optimistic about finding something that is at the ease-of-use level that I'm looking for.

I was working on MM3D last week and I realized that I hit 100,000 lines of code.

That includes vertical whitespace, comments, copyright headers, and a fair amount of dead or duplicated code (I'm not sure but I wouldn't be surprised if the dead/duplicated was as high as 5%, maybe more). At least 5% of the total is contributed by other developers. So it's a "100,000 lines of code" milestone in the same way that 2000 was the start of the third millennium CE--arbitrary, inaccurate, but noteworthy nonetheless.

In total, it works out to about 2.2k lines of code per month.

I have a survey posted on the project website for user feedback. I don't check responses very often--probably every 6 months or so. I have no idea how truthful the responses are or how accurately they represent MM3D's user base overall; but I do get some useful information out of these surveys, particularly when people fill in specific free-response answers.

I went through the responses today. For the curious, here are some things that I thought were interesting (as of 12/31/2006)... behind the cut.

We're back.

20 days. 33 family members (including all inlaws and outlaws). 2 close friends. 4906 miles (not including 4 round trips from Denver to south Colorado Springs at 140 miles each [not in our car]).

CA -> NV -> UT -> WY -> CO -> KS -> MO -> IA -> MN -> IA -> NE -> CO -> WY -> UT -> NV -> CA.

Longest single travel day: San Jose, CA to Salt Lake City, NV, 13.5 hours, including stops.
Shortest single travel day: Rochester, MN to Des Moines, IA : 4 hours, including stops.

It snowed all day on the day before we left Denver. Fortunately ice and slush was minimal on 80 on the way back. That was the only real weather we had to deal with (missed the snowstorm that hit MN by about 6 hours).

All things considered, R did very well on this trip--even dealing with some 24-hour viral thing with vomiting and explosive diarrhea (TMI?).

Pictures will be up sometime this weekend (not including explosive diarrhea). I'll post again when they're ready.

Now that I've taken three weeks of PTO, I need a vacation.

Ryan got his first fortune cookie today. His fortune: "Seek out the significance of your problem at this time. Try to understand."

For the record, his problem at the time was keeping his left shoe on (or not being able to get his right shoe off, depending on how you look at it).

I haven't had an update on here in... well... forever. New car, heat wave, baby toddler updates, Talmud reflections--all behind the cut.

Also, some home-grown herb questions (of the completely legal variety) for the culinarily inclined.

It's a long post, so I put headers on everything in case you just want to skip to the part of the teaser you're interested in.

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To whom it may concern at Lucas Film,

I've been waiting patiently for the original (non-special edition) Star Wars DVDs. I was very happy to hear about the upcoming release that would include the originals as bonus material.

Today I learned that the original versions will not be 16x9 anamorphic transfers. I am surprised and disappointed that Lucas Film would attempt to do this "on the cheap" when the films were so financially successful. To say that you are doing this "for the fans" is a bit insulting, when the fans of the original movies are exactly the sort of people who care about these technical details.

I know that as a fan and a customer you do not "owe" me anything. However, I hope you will reconsider your decision and do a proper DVD set. Otherwise you would be wise to not waste your time. I will not be wasting my money--and I will be sure to tell my friends and family why.

Yeah, I know they don't really care what I think. But I love these movies enough that I want to see them done right.

I came across a quote recently and it perfectly summarizes something that's been bugging me for years. Specifically it's from Brian McLaren (a pastor and author) in reference to "The Da Vinci Code". I discuss the Da Vinci Code behind the cut (includes conspiracy theory details, but no plot spoilers).

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I always believed that Lucas Film would re-release the original (non-SE) Star Wars trilogy on DVD after the Special Edition DVDs had been out for a while. I refused to by the Special Edition DVDs and today my patience was rewarded.

http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/release/video/news20060503.html

I'm going to go have a cookie now. Maybe when I'm done with my cookie the source control server will be back up and I'll be able to start my work day.

So a few weeks ago the grocery store had Peaches--I finally got to try making Peach Cobbler. Now as it turns out peach season isn't until May-Oct. I have a serious peach cobbler craving that I can't satisfy. So I've been looking for peaches every week since then with no luck.

Fortunately chocolate pudding is always in season.