Written by a software engineer in the Bay Area
Aug 13
Was just watching the movie “the game” with Michael Douglas on TiVo. AMC played it a couple days ago.
What I found interesting is that douglas’s character, who is supposed to be a wealthy businessman from San francisco is living in the filoli house which is a historic house/park. We’ve often taken family there when they’ve visited to see the amazing gardens.
Nov 29
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On Nov 11th at 4:58pm, my daughter Caitlin Joy McCormick was born. She arrived a bit earlier than we had planned, but healthy and happy, which is what really matters.
Oct 04
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We had our first rain of the season last night. It’s always soothing and everything just seems cleaner the next day.
Aug 29
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There’s an article on Techdirt discussing the motivation of some musicians for not putting their albums up on iTunes. My personal experience is that if it’s not on Amazon or iTunes then it simply doesn’t exist. My family’s entire music infrastructure has been based on the ipod and apple tv. If I can’t purchase singles that will be easily playable on these devices, then I don’t want it.
Aug 27
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Stumbled across a new author, John Scalzi, when perusing recommendations on my Kindle. I made the mistake of reading his second book first, but it didn’t ruin anything to read it that way. Since I started reading his books I haven’t been able to stop. I’ve raced through 5 books and am just about to start his just released latest book Zoe’s Tale.
Scalzi has created a universe a bit into the future where humans have moved out into the Galaxy and found that it’s a very crowded place. All of the books have quite a bit of action, but also some plain good old sci-fi. My idea of good sci-fi is when it’s used to test out new ideas and the story is a dry run to see how they would work. The best sci-fi has a good story to go with the good ideas.
I also love his sense of humor, think Heinlein’s Starship Troopers with a touch of Monty Python satire. The book “The Android’s Dream” deals with the interplanetary fallout of a disgruntled diplomat killing a visiting alien ambassador with his flatulence. For the first bit of the book you’ll be wondering where this could possibly be going, but the second half is well worth your patience.
Jul 29
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Watched a few minutes of the new show tonight. Looks like the producers were going for some sort of mix of MXC and Ninja Warrior. It missed on every count. Was not funny at all. The challenges just weren’t that challenging. I predict a very quick demise for this show. Had to watch a little MXC afterwards to get a few real laughs.
Jul 17
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While watching the first two episodes of the HBO John Adams series tonight I felt my daughter kick for the first time. It’s still early, so it was a subtle movement. But it was definitely exciting.
Jul 16
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Nothing tastes better than a cold Diet Mountain Dew as you sit down to read the news in the morning. It cuts through the fog of sleep and brings your brain to the proper state for getting the day started.
Jun 19
Personal, Programming 2 Comments
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a big fan of 
tv as an alternative to broadcast television. However, today I noticed an interesting video on YouTube on scalability. I started to watch it on my laptop, but watching a long video on laptop just isn’t all that great. So I went over to the tv to pull up the video there. The problem was that the tv wasn’t pulling anything more recent than 4/18/08. A bit strange that it seems to be exactly a two month lapse.
I compared searches for “Seattle Conference” which pulls up a large number of the GoogleTechTalks, but all of the recent posts were missing from the tv results. The rest of the results were all there. Finally I tried adding the video as a favorite. It still won’t show up though. tv still says there’s nothing there.
I’ve tried looking around to see if there is anything about a two month blackout on tv but haven’t come up with anything yet.
Update:
Hmm, looks like this might be part of the problem. Trying to determine if there is a way to determine how the video is encoded.
May 19
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Wish I could have gotten some picks, but it was moving pretty quick. I was in San Carlos today to pick up some items and it went tearing down a sidestreet. Can’t wait till there are more of them out on the road.
Apr 23
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Hmm, just finished the update to the latest version of Safari. Afterwards, I was doing some work and then everything suddenly froze. A few seconds later a screen came up saying that I would have to hold down the power button to restart my laptop. Upon rebooting it asked to file a crash report to Apple, which I let it do.
This is the first time ever that I’ve had a Mac actually crash hard on me. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of things to come.
I’d hate to use this as a reason to have to upgrade my laptop. It still works great, but it is starting to show its age. One of the clients that I’m working with at JBM Labs has a rather dirty office due to the type of work that they do and doing troubleshooting there with my white Macbook has caused quite a few stains on the keys and surface of the laptop. I’d really like to get one of the new Macbook Pros, but just can’t justify the price right now.
Mar 03
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Determining what the best way was to find new people on twitter wasn’t exactly intuitive. I wasn’t going to open up my email address book to twitter and finding the people search option wasn’t obvious.
Added a few people that I’m interested in hearing from. I’ll have to see if this is just a distraction or if there is actually value there.
Dec 17
Personal, Programming 1 Comment
I’m a huge fan of the courses from The Teaching Company. It’s a great way to make better use of a commute into the city and I’m especially happy that they’re now offering mp4 downloads that you can put on your ipod. I had ordered several courses on CD awhile back, which were great, but managing all of the CDs was a real pain. Now that I know I can just download a course I’ll have to pick up a few more, especially since they’re cheaper than the DVD or CD versions.
Nov 25
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Wow, the narrator makes all the difference. We picked up a different book for the drive home from Thanksgiving, “Basic Black” by Cathie Black on business. The 6 hour trip was over before we knew it. We’ve still got 3 hours left in the book, but a good audiobook makes the drive go by so much easier.
We’re planning on having a full library on our ipods before all trips from now on. And while I’ve still got 5 months left in my transition out of Webshots, I’ll be listening to a lot more books during my commute up into SF.
Nov 24
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We spent the weekend in SoCal with family for Thanksgiving and got to see what a California Forest Fire looks like close up. The Malibu fire was about 15 miles from where we were staying, but it looked like it was right over the next ridge. Took a couple pics with the cell phone, I’ll have to get them uploaded later.
It’s a bit of a surreal experience. 1000+ firefighters actively working on it, dozens of aircraft in the air all day, last I heard 50+ homes destroyed. But from what we could see, life was just going on as normal. People were still out and about running errands and visiting friends. Just shows that different areas deal with different types of disasters.