::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

What were you doing in Canada, eh?

News ·Sunday August 27, 2006 @ 15:54 EDT (link)

High time for an update. Also high time to update the financial records system; it's been two months since I've added any entries, but now I have plenty of time since Honey's in WV for two weeks (I'll be joining her soon). I dropped her at the airport Friday morning; we left at 0830 and got there around 0930; her flight was at 1130. We thought it prudent to be early given the possibility of traffic (although it wasn't too bad), and the new FAA travel requirements and possible increased searching leading to longer than usual delays.

For anyone that needs a rebuttal to something they may have sent me recently, try that link to a 6-month old post (some filtering required); thanks to LjSEEK.com for a most excellent search engine that I discovered for this purpose. Note also that the amount about 50% low compared to more up to date studies, and even then, it's more than I pay for my car, and it gets me places. Anyway; I got over it and decided not to block the sender from all my domains.

I finally baked the fruit cobbler (crumble) that I was meaning to, about two weeks ago. (AT cooked it for the second part of SW's farewell, which we didn't attend so I got to see it but not taste it.) I put in just about all the fruit mentioned on the page, except I had to substitute peaches for apricots. It's been years since I've had rhubarb, and it was delicious. I ate the last piece Friday; it will be missed.

So I'm home alone this weekend, and I haven't done much except read the Mallorean and watch The Fugitive and U.S. Marshalls and practice piano. I did go looking for garage sales Saturday morning, after my mom called (Hi mom!) but didn't find many and the few I found didn't have anything to tempt me. Heather Morris stopped by Saturday evening after the neighborhood grillout (I would have attended, but had nothing to bring...) to drop off some manuals and warranties for various appliances, and to talk; we should have them over sometime.

I'm also eligible to file my N-400 (application for naturalization) form on our third anniversary, the 30th; my mom's worried about me getting drafted, but (1) you have to register for the Selective Service when becoming a permanent resident ("green card" holder) anyway, and (2) it's only between ages of 18 and 26, so I missed it since I didn't get my green card paperwork until after my 26th birthday, although it's back-dated to the year before. So I'll probably go for it - the U.S. is pretty tolerant about dual citizenships these days, so I'll be able to keep my U.K. and Canadian citizenship - and it'll let me vote, and get a gun (yay).

I came across an old observation that it was 26 hours from my parents' place to Minot, ND. From here, it's 23.5 hours - it seems to be right in the middle. Still on the memory lane trip (I was looking through old entries, trying to find dates for the N-400), I found some debates that MM and I had had over various issues, so I decided to check if her page was still up, and it is, and she has a LiveJournal account, but it hasn't been updated for a while. I'm still digging through old paperwork to fill out the N-400: exact employment, moving, and traffic citation dates can be hard to find. The last thing I need is dates that I was out of the country for 24 hours or more, since I become a permanent resident (i.e. approximately over the past three years). That'll be fun... although this log was written for times like these.

Over the past month I had a good deal of dental work done; first, a cleaning, then about five fillings over three two-hour appointments; the last one was last Wednesday, the 23rd. I don't have to go back there now until February, for my regular cleaning. Our total out of pocket was about $150, not too terrible. Honey had a filling come loose and had to have a cavity underneath it filled, too; fortunately her dentist (we go to different ones; I go to Dr. Brian D, Brooks, since he's not far from work, she goes to a Dr. Dirakshani (sp?)) could get her in quickly to fix it.

At work, we're just finishing B2TR (beta 2 technical refresh); I got what I think was the last Word fix into it, for a License Wizard (OEM tool) related bug. Now we're looking only toward RTM (release to manufacturing) in October, and every bug must be triaged. Also, we're back on Workaholic Wednesdays (work until the bug goal is reached, no matter how late it gets); we've had three so far.

(Title is a nod to "What are you doing in Canada, eh?" quote from That '70s Show, when they end up in Canada talking to the RCMP.

RAS is still super-unreliable

News ·Wednesday August 16, 2006 @ 01:11 EDT (link)

Lately (and by that I mean over the last few months), RAS (Windows remote connectivity into work) has been very unreliable. There are two steps to logging in remotely: connecting to the VPN, and then connecting to the remote machine via terminal server. First the first broke, and I was getting strange errors connecting to the network itself (which MS IT eventually got fixed for me, though neither they nor I am sure which step actually fixed the problem); now I keep getting random network errors connecting to my remote machine (any of the three), although I can ping then and connect to servers on them just fine. I wish the incompetent twits over there would just leave well alone and not try to "fix" what wasn't broken.

And finally some extracts from an article on pregnant teens (for sources see article itself; warning, crude language):

"Nearly 80 percent of unmarried teen mothers end up on welfare."
"Among unmarried mothers age 25 and older only nine percent had college degrees."
"Each year, teen pregnancy costs the United States around $7 billion." ($53 per taxpayer*)

* Well, 131 million returns which means there could be a lot less people actually paying taxes; divide it out, about $53 each.

Garage sailing in Duvall

News ·Saturday August 5, 2006 @ 14:05 EDT (link)

Twit of the Day

I'm going to start featuring twits, mainly drivers. Our first contestant is WA plate 328 LZM, a purple Chrysler PT Cruiser, who doesn't understand that "yield" doesn't mean "try for a collision." This was at the merge lane right at the end of the WA-520 (Avondale Road), and this idiot just kept driving like he was blind. Good going, you're our first twit!

Our second twit isn't so bad, and was a day or so later; he just never signalled, all the way to Duvall. Dark (navy) blue extrawide truck, WA plate A96056U.

We finally got out to a few garage sales this Saturday, starting on our own street. Altogether we bought:

Two (more) "deluxe" folding beach chairs and a wicker picnic basket and set, $10
An Ikea desk; we put it on top of the car and I held it out the window, $40
A Quartz clock and a camera bag (a spare one, padded for hiking trips), $5

We put the desk upstairs in the media room with my camera gear, frames, etc.; I put the legs on with my drill. No chair in there yet. We'll probably put the new computer there when we get it.

Five barrels and no gophers

News ·Tuesday August 1, 2006 @ 21:47 EDT (link)

As we descended from this dome we arrived at a spot, on the gradual descent of the hill, nearly four acres in extent, and covered with small holes. These are the residence of a little animal called by the French petit chien (little dog), which sit erect near the mouth and make a whistling noise, but when alarmed take refuge in their holes. In order to bring them out we poured into one of the holes five barrels of water without filling it....

—William Clark, Corps of Discovery

The site has been down for a few days due to Gentoo bug #135238, which is still stuck at status "NEW". Sometimes, you get what you pay for (hint: bugs don't sit in the Office12 database that long without investigation). The fundamental problem is that two packages want Kerberos, but they want a particular flavor (either MIT or Heimdal), and they're incompatible, but one claims it'll take either, but it lies.

We had a great weekend with family from Pullman; they arrived Thursday and stayed with us, visiting Seattle during the day, and then on Saturday we headed to Cape Disappointment State Park (named by a British sea captain who expected more of the headwaters of the Columbia), camping overnight and visiting the lighthouse and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center on Sunday. We headed back at around 1600, making good time on US 101 and then highway 12 to the I-5, a quite scenic drive.

We're doing workaholics Wednesday again tomorrow; hopefully it won't go too late. I found the crumble recipe I was looking for (that AT made for SW's leavetaking); it's called a cobbler on the site, which misled me. I found Infamous Adventures' King's Quest III, a VGA remake of the original; looks pretty good, although mere VGA resolution is pretty coarse by modern standards.

Honey says I'm weird because of my titles

News ·Friday July 14, 2006 @ 20:10 EDT (link)

I used to use joker.com for domain names; they're OK, but they lost one of my domain names (4031.net, without the "i"). I've switched some over to godaddy.com; they're pretty cheap and are quite reliable so far. I like to use register.com to look up addresses for availability, but I don't buy from them.

I discovered the Minuet in G from the book that came with the piano isn't that hard, although most of the other classical pieces in it are.

My car battery died in the Microsoft garage after our "workaholics" on Wednesday, at around 2130; I thought it was just drained, so I got AAA, but it died again after I'd got it out of the parking spot (and the AAA guy had gone), so it had to be towed to a nearby mechanic. Fortunately only the battery needed replacing; the alternator was fine. Honey came out to drive me home; we didn't get back until 0230 and I worked from home the next day.

At work we're getting ready to release Office 12 (Office Vista) in October, so we're busy fixing bugs (or not fixing them, as the case may be). I really got slammed with a lot of bugs this week; I started with 5 at the beginning of the week and have probably got ~50 new ones; I'm down to 16 now. Some are easy, some are hard, some are completely bonkers. I've been given a lot of new areas of responsibility; I handle a lot of the print code, and printer bugs can be tricky. Also I own the object model (VBA interface), and test has been hitting it hard this week.

We're reading through Mark now; I may have mentioned my Bible program before; I have a couple of scripts linked to my email system that send us both a daily chapter; we prefer to read together, but if we can't this keeps us caught up. One script is Bible-preacher, it sends the mail, and Bible-reader listens to commands to select a different book when it's time. I let it randomly select the last few and it picked a lot of minor prophets in a row; it's good to read them but they can be obscure.

We're planning a trip out to WV to see Honey's parents at the end of August; I may get up to Fonthill during that trip too, to see my parents, and Steven Tempest, a friend from back home who wrote me recently; much of this update was first written in an email to him. Must go, Honey's getting impatient.

A very buggy weekend

News ·Monday July 10, 2006 @ 01:58 EDT (link)

O soul, are you weary and troubled?
No light in the darkness you see?
There's light for a look at the Saviour,
And life more abundant and free!

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face;
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.

—Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus, Helen H. Lemmel (1864-1961)

Lot of time spent on bugs this weekend, and unfortuantely not very much to show for it, although I did make some check-ins before the screws are turned down another notch and the bar is raised for the coming week. First I was trying to reorganize my OfficeArt print performance fix to run over the layout rectangles (LRGs) one less time, but I don't think that work will get in (nor do I mind very much) since it requires a lot of shuffling around of the print code for very little gain, and we're trying to avoid those sorts of changes at this point. I actually got another print bug (thanks SI), but it needs a real printer, so I won't get to look at it until Monday (alright, later Monday, when I arrive on-site). I did make a small fix, and punt a few.

I also made some headway in a print bug; background printing, 2-up, draft mode, A4 pages; print once normally, then on the second print the 2-up pages are skewed. Looks like we're setting one of our internal page structures to A4, and either not clearing it, or not resetting it, for the next print. Which page bounds, you say (c'mon, you're curious, I know it). Is it the vprsu.zaPage, vprsu.cPrZoomZ, vprsu.zaPrZoomPaper, vpri.pageDflt, vpri.pageRqd, vpri.cPrZoomZ, vpri.pagePreZoom, vpri.zaPrZoomPaper, vpri.pageAcetate, vpri.drcViewport, vpri.dzaZoomGoal, vpri.prdev.drcPrint, vpri.prdev.dzpRealPage, or perhaps the vpri.prdev.dzmmRealPage? Only time will tell. Updates will be posted when available; stay tuned to this space.

A shout out to Ali, in return for his link; a fellow Word writer. Speaking of writing with Word, here's a cover for the 2002 gansta version.

I've been playing the piano a fair bit, through the Hymns of Truth and Praise hymnbook, practicing the left hand mostly with Take Time to be Holy (Langstaff). I'm getting better at it; not much in comparison to anyone that's ever taken lessons, I'm sure; I'm barely ready to face the metronome. I still think an B-flat to D reach on the left is a mean trick; it's just beyond my reach. But playing is a peaceful way to spend a few hours.

We biked down the hill out the left of our street; it was a nice little ride. The road ends at a private drive, with a couple of pretty nice houses on it; I also found the private drive beings a bit earlier than I thought it did. There are fields and wildflowers and horses, and even a goat. Yes, a goat. Just sitting in a field, tied to a shelter of some sort. It's quite idyllic and I hope the recent annexation of some areas near the city limits doesn't cause any of it to be destroyed; nor any of the woods to the back of our property, where one can occasionally see deer.

I wish I hadn't spent so much time on bugs now, because Honey's right, the weekends should be our time, not Microsoft's, and it didn't even gain me all that much anyway. It's great to help the team, but perhaps working weekends and nights is a sign that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark (but on the other hand, as Brooks' law states so elegantly and a graph on AT's window well illustrates, adding manpower to a late project makes it later). Most of the time I love my work, and that's fine, but (uncompensated) overtime should never feel obligatory.

We picked up a few more of the DVDs that Grebel lost in the move that we'd remembered, and season one of Star Trek (the original series, not the one with the "bald-headed idiot", as my father in law likes to refer to Picard, although I think he'd enjoy The Next Generation if he gave it a try). Speaking of science fiction, try some short stories that I've been reading lately.

The Roasted Rat

News ·Tuesday July 4, 2006 @ 10:58 EDT (link)

Lion's Gate Bridge Monday, June 26: Actually, it wasn't a rat, nor was it roasted. We heard a scrabbling in a vent above the microwave (fortunately accessable via a cupboard above), and were worried it was a rat, so we turned the oven on a few times since it seemed to quiet it down. The big pest control places (Orkin, Terminex) were quoting rates in the $200-$300 range to come out, but we found a local guy (Eagle Pest Eliminators) to come take a look. Upon cracking the pipe open a little (it wasn't very well sealed), we saw a beak; I suppose better a bird than a rat. The guy recommended darkening the room and opening the door in hopes it would fly right out, and so it progressed. He charged his $65 minimum plus tax.

Wednesday, June 28: Picked up a portable vacuum cleaner from Home Depot for cleaning out the car and hard to reach areas. My life is so exciting.

Friday, June 30: Friday had me looking at a fairly interesting layout bug; one of our new title pages (a car in the background with some shaded textboxes in front) showed up fine on the screen, but when printed the car image was in front of the textboxes. The print code just takes the layout rectangles and print them back to front (and the car was in front, which was wrong), but the display code renders the layout rectangles into three different types of drawing rectangles (text, old-style shapes, and generic, which includes new OfficeArt pictures), and then merges them later by height (Z-order). However, if two items have the same height (as the picture and shaded textboxes did) it puts generic drawing rectangles in front. The fix is to make some changes to how Z-order is calculated for inline pictures.

Saturday, July 1: Happy Canada Day! We drove into Bellevue and shopped around for pianos, stopping at Prosser (Roland), Helmer's Music (Kawai), Sherman Clay (Kohler), and Washburn (Yamaha). We eventually settled on a black Yamaha CLP-240, which I picked up Monday afternoon.

Sunday, July 2: We drove into Vancouver; we had no trouble at the border either way personally, although lines were long, it being Canada Day weekend and all. We mostly drove and walked around Stanley Park; there are some nice beaches. We wanted to eat at a restaurant one one of the points, but they'd unexpectedly lost power. We did also go up to the Capilano Bridge, but the rates they're charging are extortionate ($25 Canadian per adult). Things to bring next time: picnic basket, swim gear, bikes, hat, sunscreen.

Monday, July 3: I now share responsibility for OfficeArt bugs with WB, especially print bugs; it's an area that's converging slower than others. The more I fix, the more areas I get, which isn't really a bad thing, in terms of possible advancement. When I went in yesterday, one (non-OfficeArt) print bug I had didn't repro, and two non-critical ODMA bugs that we might punt (decide not to fix because their severity is low, and at this point in the development cycle we want to reduce code churn, as every change could introduce new bugs).

As I mentioned, I picked up the piano (it had to be unboxed to fit into my car), took it home, lugged it out of the car (the "head" or top piece was a beast), and later, with Honey's help, set it up. It's a beautiful instrument.

Grocer's apostrophe's

News ·Wednesday June 21, 2006 @ 00:16 EDT (link)

Long time, not much to tell. On the Warcraft III front I won a titanic game with an Orc about a week back, and played a few games at work, win some, lose some.

Gerian got married to Liz Turner on May 27; we were invited but had to send our regrets and best wishes.

Loss for Word: SW is leaving the Word development group in a few weeks, for greener pastures (not to mention improved girlfriend proximity) in New York City; we had a party for him last Saturday, first at AT's, then at Emily's, although we only went to part the first. We ate at Niko Teriyaki and AT baked a crumble from a Jamie Oliver recipe, I'd like to try it, long time since I've had any decent baking, much less a crumble. Although, I did finally cook up the brownie mix I'd salvaged from Upward Bound 2001 or so, and it was delicious.

The SUV backlash: People are setting their SUVs on fire for the insurance money, although as someone pointed out, Ford F-150 owners might not have to trouble themselves. And someone questions why people buy SUVs in the first place and has a new business plan:

I'd rather know why people buy those behemoths in the first place. When I see people whose SUVs barely contain enough people and/or stuff to half-fill a VW Golf, I'm stumped. Could they think of nothing better to do with the extra $10K+ they spent versus buying a normal car? Ten thousand dollars people - that's real money!

And then they go upside down on it. *sigh*

Maybe my new business plan is to take $10K from people and then walk behind them one day a week commenting aloud what a big penis they must have.

Apple's and Orange's: I nearly wept (I did hit myself in the forehead, hard) when I walked down the aisles at the Redmond Fred Meyer and saw grocer's apostrophes—like "Pot's and Pan's"—everywhere. I must state that the state of education in this state is sadly lacking, and that's an understatement.

RAS is busted: I'm on day 9 of a ticket with Microsoft IT, trying to get my broken RAS (remote login) fixed. I can connect, but then I can't reach any sites or any of my machines. They think it's an IPsec issue. It's really handy to be able to check in from home; this breakdown is a loss to the company. On the upside, I did excellent well with bugs last week, top fixer and top percentage, partly due to a lot of duplicates, which probably shouldn't count toward the resolved total. Although it could be possible to spend a lot of time on a bug only to find it's a duplicate. I have a feeling the bug resolution statistics would change a great deal if duplicates stopped counting.

Sources, please! The 05/06 Focus on the Family Bulletin mentioned a 1975 Ann Landers survey asking 10,000 women, "If you had known then what you know now, would you have still had children?"; 70% said "No." Then it mentions a "subsequent" (undated) Good Housekeeping survey that asked the same question; 95% of responders said "Yes." However, while there are many citations of the former article, I can't find any for the latter. Not one. I'm not claiming it doesn't exist, just that if you quote surveys, you need to include a source (an issue number or date would have been fine).

The paper goes on to say "It's impossible to explain the contradictory results from these two surveys", but I don't think it is. The audiences are different (and I would venture to say that the Good Housekeeping survey was also much smaller). I think it's fair to say that the Ann Landers survey probably reached a wide breadth of women, but Good Housekeeping readers are already (if you'll excuse me) not exactly hyper-ambitious career women. It's a bit like asking Electronic Gaming Monthly subscribers if they like video games: the bias is in the audience.

Large lips sink ships? Either something bit me or I had a bad reaction to Ibuprofen, but my lips and cheeks swelled up like balloons late Saturday and it lasted about 24 hours. Doctor said not to worry, though.

OS/2 lives! I surfed to the local cable listings channel, MDM's OnCable, last night, and happened to catch it rebooting OS/2 Warp. I think that's the only time I've ever seen an OS/2 machine, albeit from afar.

And in honor of Father's Day: "Parenthood is a return to infancy" and Does fatherhood make you happy (from Time magazine). I called home this weekend to say Hi, wish Dad a happy Father's Day, and discussed our plans to travel out east in September, and theirs to come out here in August.

Senate ignores American people, film at 11

News ·Thursday May 25, 2006 @ 23:43 EDT (link)

Front foliage Now that the desk's here, yesterday I arranged the computers and cables (without disconnecting the power, although we lost network and hence telephone connectivity for a few minutes), and played a game of Warcraft for the first time in about three months (playing on the floor just doesn't seem all that much fun). I played a level 7 (I'd fallen down to level 9 because of my long absence) yesterday, and won, and a level 19 today, and managed to win that one too (probably the highest level player I've ever defeated).

Still on stale bugs this week; making more of a dent than last week, partly because I tossed a few License Wizard bugs back asking for developer investigation (they like to just send the error message, which sometimes isn't even from Word). True, it should work the same as Word 11, but sometimes it doesn't, and some investigation from their end would be very nice. Fixed a nasty one with "online documents" in the wee hours of this morning; we were leaving behind the "owner" files (~$foo.doc) on a "save as" for a file on a UNC share.

Comfy chair Looks like the U.S. senate's ready to sign the "amnesty for illegals" bill. The house version is much better (close the border, make being here illegally a felony, fine employers, and actually enforce it). The senate is totally out of touch. Personally I think rounding them up and deporting them would be a great idea, even if the price of lettuce goes up a few cents (and back down after robots are developed to start picking fruit). Hopefully the house can hold them off.

And now for a small rant about driving, specifically, merging. When you merge with other traffic, you come as a supplicant, that is, you yield until there's a space to merge; if you have to, you stop. Drivers already in the flow of traffic may, even should try to make a gap to let you in, but, if all the a**hole drivers in the world lined up and went past your merge lane at once bound and beholden not to let anyone in, well, too bad. You wait. You don't drive forward as if it was some sort of high-stakes game of chicken. That is all.

I've also finally fixed the photo links on this page; if you click the thumbnails you will once again get to see a larger image (but not the full size, because people's screens usually aren't that big).

The great desk adventure

News ·Sunday May 21, 2006 @ 21:50 EDT (link)

Back garden Today at the Lord's Supper at Northgate Gospel Chapel I was remembering another assembly that I used to attend: Cowley Road Gospel Hall, in Uxbridge, England; it would be nice to go back and visit sometime. I remember the large text over the platform at the front: "Jesus Christ is Lord"; the worn chairs, the cupboard for the hymnbooks at the back, the dark brown carpet, the drafty entryway; the wall around the outside, and the sign outside advertising services. My dad has a wedding picture of him and my mother outside it.

Dr. Who was on again Friday night at midnight (Saturday morning if you want to be picky about it); another excellent episode, I'm really getting into it. It's only the second episode I've seen; I know it's a British tradition and I've heard of it all my life, so it is indeed surprising it's taken so long for me to catch a show. During commercials I tidied up most of the remaining items we had sitting in a pile in the basement; deciding where things go and putting them in their proper places can be very relaxing (but only the first time!)

We had a drawer fall apart in the move from Boston, and I took a serious look at repairing it Saturday morning, but no go. It looks like Grebel (the movers) tried to repair it themselves with a nailgun, some random pieces of wood and acetylene plastic, and a complete lack of finesse, and did rather poorly. If I had the tools it might be possible (I need to be able to cut a groove), but we'll probably just do without it and keep the telephone there.

I've been wanting a decent (large) desk for a while—the one my parents gave me when I moved to Memphis is great, but somewhat small—so now that I have an office to put it in I lined up a few promising candidate desks on the Micronews Classified Ads, and even made an offer on one, but it wasn't the highest; most required hauling or were more than I wanted to pay, so we headed to the local Ikea store to make a selection from the Galant collection.

From Ikea's side, the store is great; it forces you to walk past absolutely everything, but that's very unhelpful when you're looking for a particular set. It didn't take long to decide on a combination (one matching one of the demos: corner table, extension, and a curved end, but without the hanging computer cage which looked somewhat flimsy).

The new desk When it came to load the car—Honey's VW Golf—we found that the largest piece didn't fit in the car. No problem, they provide cardboard roofracks and twine. I heaved it up there, we passed a large quantity of twine over and around it, and off we went. The front end was up on the sunroof visor, and the back was against the antenna, so it flapped around a bit on the I-405, but the three times we pulled over it was fine, although it was probably the weight rather than the twine that kept it in place. It made for nervous driving, though—especially on Novelty Hill.

After I got it unpacked I was very impressed with the design, construction, and assembly instructions, especially considering that they don't use words, just pictures and numbers (saves translating). My drill, with a Phillips screwdriver bit, was very helpful as always. The hardest part was turning the desk back over after assembly, given its weight and the space available. But it's a magificent desk, L-shaped, medium brown, plenty of space, about 6'6" on the long sides. I assembled it while Honey was sleeping after we got back from church; it took about an hour. I'll probably put the small desk I had upstairs in the "media room" (it has my photographic equipment in there now and will probably host the piano when we get one, and since it's wired for Ethernet I'll probably put a computer in there too).

Made my bug goal this week, but not the secondary "stale" goal, due to some stubborn old bugs and not a few ambushes.

And the lawn keeps growing, and I keep cutting it....