::::: : 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.

Traffic lights high above in the wood-railed marshes

News, Work ·Monday March 10, 2008 @ 23:56 EDT (link)

20080310: 0945-1000, black Lexus RX330 SUV, WA 847 RID: super-slow, and then sped up to abuse the HOV lane (no passengers) to pass people, getting off WA-520W to 40th/51st.

20080308: Went shooting with AF from work, at a range in a small town called Ravensdale; not very busy. He brought three handguns for us to try, a Glock 34 (9mm), FN P-40 (.40 S&W), and an SA XD 45 (sorry, Flash). I prefer the Glock, may get a 17 or even the same 34 (longer barrel, easier magazine release).

I had a strange dream: I, and several others, were in a huge marsh, with wood-railed (think bank teller line guides) swamps with traffic lights suspended high above, with the swamp divided into "rooms" by the wooden rails. Some family was there, I think. At one point we had to crawl into a swamp tunnel. We were talking about it and Honey proposed having a certain loud person on a submerged skateboard for Honey to ride on. It was a bit weird.

20080310: Finished Coulter's Slander, and almost finished How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (primarily a selection of her columns). Fear the unholy trifecta: "Icky, yucky, and nasty", like spaghetti dried on a plate. Honey's working on a Great Depression essay, which I helped her conclude, bravely, with "... a strong and stable human environment!" (We thought of other additions with potential for high marks from the politically correct: "Of multi-cultural communication!" "And Indians!" "Running casinos on their native hunting grounds like they did in the 1600s." (And drinking firewater and huffing gasoline.) "Praise Allah!") At work, finished the ECMA OpenXML diff tool: oh the wonders of multi-pass XSLT (node trees in variables) and the full flexibility of XPath.

Watched the Canterbury Tales pilot; not impressed; as one review says:
[Margulies] plays Elizabeth Canterbury, a reckless and rebellious defense attorney who isn't averse to tweaking a few rules to secure justice for her clients. In her legal playbook, the ends definitely justify the means. From "House" to "The Shield" and beyond, flawed lead characters are all the rage on television, and Canterbury fits right in. She drinks too much. She cheats on her husband (Aidan Quinn). She abuses her underlings and she taunts witnesses with an almost malicious glee.
In other words, she's a law unto herself, which makes her not the hero, or even a "flawed lead character", but just another villain. Hello, liberals in Hollywood: people like good guys (or gals), and it's not "edgy" to pretend evil is good, it's morally bankrupt. (Godwin:) Hitler thought he was right, too, and that the ends justified the means, and look what that gave us.

The whiteness of the whale

Technical, Work ·Saturday March 1, 2008 @ 20:46 EST (link)

20080215: Had Valentine's a day late since Honey had late classes yesterday; cards and chocolate for all. Yay!

20080216: Working for RL on the ECMA Office OpenXML spec. tools is pretty interesting; I started on a tool to import our XSDs to a database, and optimized it some, and worked on some bugs; next I worked on the internal web site: I wrote code to find dependent bugs that need revisiting when sections of the spec. are checked in. Since the parent/child relationships have a lot of holes, and the XSD importer is very pessimally written, I'm doing a rewrite to fix bugs and improve efficiency (right now, it walks all of the important elements/attributes/etc. as "X" and then for each, it walks the entire schema as "Y" and asks "is Y a child of X", an O(n2) process at best).

Going out to Fred Meyer (to buy DVDs we've been looking for that are cheaper than Amazon), Home Depot (light bulbs of various sizes), and Circuit City (more cheaper DVDs), and will look at some camera stores on 20th in Bellevue. Bought Ghost Rider and ER season 8, and went to Cameras West and looked at the Nikon D300 (with the 18-200 VR lens, and took a look at the 85/1.8). Circuit City tried to charge more than the advertised price of ER, but Honey caught it.

Modified the MythTV episode scanner to parse out the episode list from epguides.com and store that in the cache rather than the raw page, and that let me improve matching by canonicalizing names: lowercase everything, strip non-alphanumeric characters, add 'a.k.a.'s, fix up part numbers, remove preceding the/a, etc. Burned SG:A season 4 part 1 of 2 to make space for trying out Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5. Started recording Mythbusters on the Myth box. Upgraded Postgres database from 8.1 to 8.2, which was atypical in that it required backing up the database and restoring it. I realize it's open source, and you get what you pay for, but would it be so hard to do automatic conversion from the previous version?

20080224: New ECMA schema processor is about done (that was what I worked on most of last week; lots of database table diffing); RL did some testing over the weekend, fixed one glitch; will probably check in Monday. Wrote a mail to BM about C# (parts of which follows); the environment is seductive.
I'm working on some C# XSD-processing tools, and an ASP.NET site, backed by an MS SQL database. I haven't done much C# previously but it's a pretty decent environment (the lure of the dark side...), except sometimes I wish I could trace into the System libraries and I can't1 (although a 3rd-party tool called Reflector lets me at least see what's going on in there). The tools were written by a "technical PM" (program manager), so while it's great that he got them written at all, they're not terribly efficient (one tool that imports all the OOXML XSDs into our database used to take 10 minutes, now down to about 2 seconds, for example, although fixing bugs is the main task, not making it faster).

Part of the code is to find parent-child relationships; the old code went through each schema element and then walked the entire schema and checked if that element was a child; the new code just traverses the schema once, pushing parent items on a stack. Anyway, C# isn't bad, .NET isn't bad and is getting better (we're using 3.0, 3.5 has some nice things though and DML in 4.0 looks interesting). It may be useful to have C#/.NET/XSD stuff on my resume, too.

* I recently found out about a possible way to trace into .NET's System libraries (thanks AT), but I haven't tried it yet.

Picked up some leaves and bamboo (left piled from last year) yesterday, put in the yard waste container to take out with this week's trash; yard is in pretty good shape; I cut back some branches overhanging the path from the driveway to the back yard. Grass is a little long, needs cutting when it's a little warmer; probably also de-thatching and weed treatment. Louis Voyer, a preacher with Christian Transportation, will be staying with us for a couple of nights at the end of April (29-30), and may speak at the Northgate midweek meeting.

20080228: Starting on the ECMA OpenXML documentation comparison ("deviations") tool; did some more refactoring (since starting on these tools, I've factored out BookGeneration, a library to generate the Word document from the database, so it can be used in a command-line tool as well as the web site, and EcmaDatabase, the database class definitions, so they can be used various places, and written CmdLineParser from scratch).

20080301: Finished Moby Dick (Melville) finally! Also finished Treason (Coulter) not too long ago. Next: The Companions (Daniell; Dragonlance Meetings Sextet 6/6) and some more books by Ann Coulter (surprisingly, it didn’t take long to fill the holds I placed on several of her books in the King County library system; liberals don't like to read much, and even less like the truth). Starting Slander and Torchwood (video) series.

Liberals write essays like kids making up a melody

Political, Work, Photography ·Tuesday February 5, 2008 @ 18:54 EST (link)

20080203: Worked some more on the photo management application: so far it has a left selection pane with a tree control (populated from a database, which doesn't have all my photos, just a limited older subset, which is enough for testing; I'll bring in the rest later), and then the right is divided into a thumbnails pane at the top (which works, and allows for multi-selection and clicking pops up a window with a larger image), and at the bottom, a small pane which will be used for tagging and categorizing selections, and showing existing information.

I just finished Living Blue in the Red States (Starkey), which I picked up in a recent visit to the Woodinville library when Honey was getting some books for her cultural communications class, a required "political correctness" class where they tell you how evil it is to be white (even now, as she's studying a chapter of Intercultural Communications in Contexts, she is repeatedly piqued into comparing her textbook's bullheaded statements with something that comes out of a completely opposite end of the bull). Starkey's book isn't always that bad: it ranges between objections to morality, pablum stories, lamenting Bush's election (and impugning his character, usually in the same breath), and of course, the war in Iraq. I actually didn’t find too much to get upset about; everything was so bland. Coulter says it best in Treason, my next book, an antidote:
Liberals write essays like kids making up a melody. They meander along, issuing contradictory snide remarks about Bush, until they run out of energy and finally conclude with some incongruous, throaty peroration.
The left, especially ivory tower academics like these authors, is so afraid to take a stand or assume an absolute; so I just sat back and enjoyed the stories, and, during parts describing the South, looked favorably back to our time in Memphis, Tennessee: to the warm, tree-lined avenues, the polite accents, the food, and running in Shelby Farms.

Finished the chart OM last week (a "super-hotfix" to restore the ability to access the various chart sub-objects through Word), but a few properties are still failing so I mailed the chart developer, asking him why they're sending us a null view (argh); aside from whatever's broken on their end, it's finished, thanks to a perl script that converted all the chart objects to Word objects.

20080205: With the chart OM wrapped up, I'm now working for RL (Publisher dev. manager and ex-Word-lead) on a C# application to process the OpenOffice XML documentation and XSDs, which involves some SQL, which should be fun.

Model railroad exhibit

News, Work, Photography ·Saturday February 2, 2008 @ 21:33 EST (link)


Wheelhouse 20080119: Watching MASH season 11 (second time), Stargate SG-1 season 10 (first time... last season: the threat of the Ori); watched Ocean's Thirteen (last of three DVDs we got it for Christmas); Honey's reading about oppression ("Help, help, I'm being repressed!") in her "PC" (a mandatory content-free cultural communications/sensitivity) class; I'm catching up on log entries going back to September (I'm up to mid-November, yay). The Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design.

20080120: Went to Pacific Science Center for model railroad exhibit; took the bus from Overlake to avoid parking.

20080122: Registered on B&H so I could create a Nikon wishlist: the budget-conscious version is a D300, 2 backup batteries, a remote shutter release cord, 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR (but not the kit, which is more expensive than getting the two separately) (note! DX lens, not so useful on a full-frame camera), 50 and 85mm f/1.4 (or perhaps 1.8) primes, and some UV filters.

20080125: Picking Honey up from Autobody by Foote at 1000 so they can fix her car (scrape from the 17th); working from home. Got a letter from our prescription coverage company: Zyrtec is now over the counter, so they won't pay for it any more; decided to see how bad it would get if I stopped taking it. Worked some on my new photo manager; I have a navigation tree on the left, thumbnails at the right populated by AJAX results triggered by the tree selection. Still working on a good way to show multiple images selected; I was using an absolutely-positioned diff, but scrolling breaks that.

20080128: Worked from home due to heavy snow; PA cancelled the dev. meeting and sent people that showed up home at around 1430 so they could drive home before temperatures dropped and the roads iced up. Allergies frequently itchy but bearable.

20080129: Went to the doctor (for toe); said looks good; said he didn't know of any prescription alternative to Zyrtec. Still wearing the wrist brace. Went home early to pick up Honey and get her car (Autobody by Foote, about $325 total; had them look at my headlight since it was popping out; aftermarket parts, can't do much for it); she drove to school, I worked from home the rest of the day (wrote a perl program using Parse::RecDescent to pars e the MSO chart ODL (object definition language) file into a Word-specific object model format). Still no Zyrtec; allergies are bearable.

20080202: Went out to Black Angus for steak for my birthday; got a free chocolate dessert.

Prototype/Scriptaculous chosen as Javascript library for new photo site

News, Technical, Work ·Friday January 18, 2008 @ 20:20 EST (link)

20080112: Costco trip: got a 4Gb CF card ($40 w/ coupon) along with the groceries (I'll need it for the D300 (review)...).

20080113: Sore throat started Saturday, turned into a full-blown cold/sinus infection Sunday: Drippy, Scratchy, and Wheezy all stopped by for their pound of flesh. Set up wireless networking again, since it's handy to be able to sit on the couch here and type.

20080114: Left work early (noon), worked from home the rest of the day. Shuffled some shelves to put the Forgotten Realms books that I'd brought back from my parents away, and the Dragonlance Meetings Sextet too.

20080115: Home sick. In the evening, evaluated JavaScript libraries, decided I liked Prototype/Scriptaculous best for its simplicity and power and handy shortcuts (tied for first runner-up were Dojo, with dynamic layout features, and Yahoo (YUI), which is massive and somewhat scary, and neither do dynamic full-screen layout, although I may decide I don't need that later...). TI-84+ calculator and Vacancy and Transformers DVDs arrived. Decided on another must-have for whenever we move: a home theater.

20080116: Co-authoring coroutine PR finally ready for check-in (PR testing done, code reviewed, qtests passed, BB tests running). Scanned 4 DVDs (Andy Griffith season 1, Ocean's 13—had to add it, Canadian version, Vacancy, and Transformers). Dishwasher fixed (signed up for Sears plan, ~$200).

20080117: Checked in coroutine PR. Honey scraped her car parking at school.

20080118: Honey slammed a drawer in the kitchen so hard that the Isaiah 40:31 eagle picture that my parents gave me fell down, chipped an outlet cover below it, and splintered the frame. Playing with Photoshop CS3 (or should we say I saw a demo?) MRI, right hand (Evergreen Radia).

Zune sucks

Technical ·Thursday January 10, 2008 @ 13:49 EST (link)

Prepared UW transcript request forms. Fixed/punted/duped a few of bugs. Tried installing Zune software (Office got a free 8Gb black Zune as a late Christmas gift), it's buggy and slow as expected from (the rest of, heh heh) Microsoft. Seriously, the download is slow, the "preparing your computer" crap makes me think I'm installing from a stack of 25 3.5" floppies, it got to the end the first time and spontaneously aborted itself with a random error and a link that looked like it might be useful but redirected itself to the generally useless Zune troubleshooting front page.... Woo hoo, this time it got past preparing and into installing. I suppose I should be happy. The packing leaves a fair bit to be desired too: it's awkward (e.g. the earphones are rolled up into a little cardboard tube-box), and they provide these fiddly little earphone covers; I swear my eyesight was about half a diopter worse after putting them on. Also, by default it doesn't show up as a drive, although someone's found a registry hack to make that work (sort of). Nobody wants to fight your idiot Zune software, just give us a drive interface. Anyway, not bad for free, wouldn't pay (very much) for it: at 8Gb, it's smaller than my clunky old (as in 5+ years old) 10Gb Archos Jukebox (Studio 10)—granted, the Archos is much heavier and bulkier.

I plugged the Zune into my Linux box (minas-tirith); it found a USB device, but nothing mountable. Further reading suggests it uses MTP (Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol), and may be mountable via FUSE (the same wonderful userspace filesystem library that made mounting via FTP possible for me not so long ago) and libmtp. Unfortunately, that doesn't actually work: mounting appeared to work, but ls was really slow and only showed an empty Playlists folder. Probably some sort of security, and you can bet that someone in Linuxland will make the Zune mount properly on Linux, to the approbation of Linux users everywhere. For now, the title says it all.

The voyage home

News ·Thursday January 10, 2008 @ 02:48 EST (link)

20080101: Annual Brockview football game canceled due to weather (not that I was in any state to go). Slept as long as I could with the pain; got up sometime around noon. We were invited to my Uncle Tom's place for 1600, arrived 1630; Anna and Drew and cousin David ("CD") were there too; snacked on nuts until dinner, ate, played Scrabble, went home. Watched Stargate (9.20, "Camelot", last episode in season 9) at around 2130; also watched Star Trek: Voyager (3.19, "Rise"), the first on the DVD we brought.

20080102: Dug up my old Dragonlance atlas and Forgotten Realms book from the basement, and found a few books we'd missed. Some power outages in Fonthill around 1900; fortunately we only had a flicker here, but my parents' Internet has gone out. Dave Trotter called around the same time; they just sat down to eat and he'll call again about meeting for coffee afterwards.

We went to see Dave and Nancy Trotter (parents let us have the car); left a little after 2000, got there around 2030; instead of going out for coffee they invited us in for coffee (and tea) and we sat around the kitchen table and talked until about 2230, prayed together, and left. When we got home we packed (including a stack of my old Forgotten Realms novels that we wanted to bring back, that we fit into our suitcases) watched some season 1 House episodes then went to sleep at around 0500 (0530 for me).

20080103: We got up around 1100, finished packing, ate (or not); I drove the van to the airport (with Mom to drive back) at 1430; customs was good, and security wasn't even too bad: we were sitting at gate 6 at 1620, boarding 1655. Left pretty much on time (1725). On the flight Honey had the window, and I was in the middle next to a girl who was visibly upset, so I switched seats with Honey and she talked to the girl, Rachel: she had just left her fiancé and wouldn't see him until March, and didn't like to fly very much; she's in Equestrian Studies at Rocky Mountain University in Montana but was going to see family in Portland. When we got into Philadelphia, oh joy oh delight, they had a Chick-Fil-A; Rachel ate with us, then we talked for a while and parted to our separate planes.

That's where the trouble began: the flight finished boarding around 2100 (supposed to take off 2035); they had overbooked, so they were fishing for people to leave; it took a long time to load luggage, and everything was just slow and inefficient and incompetent, the hallmark of air travel these days. We finally left at perhaps 2130 and (insert long boring flight here, relieved only by Rush Hour 3, sleep, and Quiddler) arrived at about 0030 Seattle time (i.e. 3 hours later, 0330 Eastern). Fortunately, our luggage came out fairly quickly (as it should; they had hours to load it), and Shuttle Express, which we'd booked from my parents', was up to their usual efficient, courteous standard. Just an observation: they seem to have a lot of older, frequently bearded men working for them, all very friendly and helpful and a credit to the company, however. It's about 0112 local time in Seattle: we've unloaded the car, had a Coke, unpacked most of our stuff, and are ready to sleep or relax a little.

20080104: Worked from home due to back/wrist pain from the fall: looked at a few bugs, and at EOD rebuilt the world. In the evening we watched a few recorded Jeopardys and opened Stargate SG-1 season 10.

20080108: Got an X-ray at Evergreen in the morning (car needed a jump, battery drained after vacation, Honey had already left for school; called AAA); the doctor looked at it, said he didn't think my hand was broken, but talked with a colleague who specializes in upper body extremities and recommended an MRI. "MC" (Milestone Compliance—binary documentation and OpenXML deviations) started at work (but for now I'm still on co-authoring: bug fixes, and still trying to get a working PR since build is still failing).

20080109: Honey diagnosed with allergy-related asthma, got her inhaler yesterday. Got my Zune from work (black, 8Gb), as promised in December; it's a big letdown, details to follow.

A painful fall from grace

News ·Monday December 31, 2007 @ 23:59 EST (link)

20071226: 0200: Watched Stargate (09.13, "Ripple Effect"); opened Mom's wok, fixed the handle, found the tempura grill. Up 1300; neighbor Brett Newell called from our house; I had him reboot the computers in the study and the cable modem; it didn't seem like it helped, but after he hung up we did get connectivity back (~1350). Downloading the Doctor Who Christmas Special ("Voyage of the Damned") via μTorrent, wirelessly. 0330: Watched Stargate (09.15, "Ethon") and had a snack (trail mix/Nesquick cereal) (after joining fark.com and doing some math at 0220).

I've learned that one week at Christmas is plenty; it's not really beneficial to travel 3500 miles (2500 back... go figure) to watch DVDs that you brought with you or be alone doing other things—everyone's very busy; even shopping is best done at home, although that let us spend time with Dad which was good. Maybe a little more than a week, to hit Christmas Eve and New Years? I tend to miss our home if I'm gone too long.

20071227: Left around 1345; drove to Newmarket to Uncle Murray's place, arriving about 1730: we played some poker (chips, no money involved) and euchre with dad and Mike, some people played pool; Uncle George read my IEEE Spectrum magazine (I finished it so he could take it home); had pizza and dessert, and left around 2308. Jamie and Karen's twins were there, frequently caterwauling; perhaps a little too young to be brought to such an event?

Large rant elided; boiled down to Julia's boyfriend Joshua staying overnight on one couch—he should have gone home, he lives about 15 minutes away; Julia's 15, it's preposterous for her to have a boyfriend stay overnight—and so Mike ("My-kool!") had to sleep on the couch that we were sitting on, which was an annoying disruption.

20071228: (early am) Went upstairs, watched Charmed. Up 1300 (got to sleep about 0500); had breakfast, ate Honey's biscotti since it was gingerbread and she didn't want it. Started plans for the new photo database (should that be 'new new'?), although I'll go back and update all old photos too.

20071229: Watched another Charmed ending at 0045; talked to Rebecca and Theo about bad airlines, and showed them gethuman.com so they could register a complaint. Wrote up a new photo database plan (backend, viewer, manager, import, and overall changes). Up 1300. Ate, played Quiddler (just us, no points, Honey quit when I kept going out early), Dad made some bread, and made turkey sandwiches at 1800. We watched House 1.1 and The Bells of St. Mary's with Dad, but didn't play Scrabble as planned.

20071230: Various magic systems (thinking especially of the TV show Charmed and D&D) require words, gestures, and physical components (sometimes quite rare ingredients) for spells. Who's supposed to be listening? or are the ingredients, words, and gestures supposed to be naturally powerful? The latter idea seems totally incongruous/nonlinear and thus impossible; so if there's Someone listening, clearly they have a strange sense of humor and like to see people jump through a lot of odd hoops. At least with Belgarath (from David Eddings' Belgariad etc., which presents a more logical and linear system) we know where the power comes from; there are no quantized spells per se.

20071231: Went to the evening meeting, and afterwards waited for singing practice and got a ride with cousin David to Anna and Drew's for some food and Fawlty Towers and car ogling (Drew has a new VW Rabbit, and we were looking at mods online); quite a few people there; Honey was home sick. Snowed while we were there, so Dave did some drifting on the way home; pretty nice. Back home around midnight; watched Stargate, did more math with Honey. Didn't get to sleep until around 0545.

Didn't do much all day—started reading User Friendly through, from the beginning (November 17, 1997); am now (1830) caught up through May 31, 2000. Watch night service at 1930 tonight (at Brockview); going someplace with Dave and Steve and others afterwards; they won't say where, but it's probably some other spot they've discovered to put down a few old pieces of furniture and have a fire.

After service was going to go with the young people on a scavenger hunt in St. Catharines (Steve and cousin David got us together 2130, probably left around 2145), but I fell off a roof (at Brockview, fortunately—the shed out back) looking for a clue; I managed to walk around after lying on the ground winded for a few minutes, and thought I was good to go, but fifteen minutes or so of being squashed into the back of Shaphan's truck convinced me otherwise, and my back and (sprained) right hand (used to break my fall) started to stiffen; parents had already gone home so they came to pick me up at around 2215 and we stayed in to see in the new year.

Christmas 2007

News ·Wednesday December 26, 2007 @ 01:27 EST (link)

20071221: My connection to my home server is spotty; it looks like Whidbey Telecom is dropping packets (but that's just the last visible tracert hop (pre-long-filename Windows' name for the traceroute utility); current ping stats show 12% packet loss but wget is not even daring to show an ETA, our transfer speed is so poor. Watching downloaded Journeyman episodes (2, from the 17th and the 19th). Party at Anna's at around 1930 (arrived late); I drove the car and took Honey, Emily, and Julia and her boyfriend Joshua (Sabourin).

20071222: Hung out, watched second DVD of Charmed season 4, Stargate SG-1 season 9, etc. Were going to visit cousin David at his, Steve, and their random carpenter friend's place in Welland, but couldn't get a car. Lost connectivity to minas-tirith in the middle of the day; no ping, and traceroute died at Whidbey island telecom.

20071223: Went to Brockview morning (Brian Gunning's meaning of Christmas) and evening (Art Taylor's canal anecdotes, tried to teach Tim Heyhoe about f-stops and shutter speeds), hung out in between. Called our neighbors Andhi and Brett to turn our computers on; left message, but nothing yet. Borrowed Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut) from Julia and read it.

20071224: Shoveled snow to help Dad, he used the snowblower. Cousin David got called out to take care of snow (he does roofing for Tim Heyhoe), so couldn’t visit him today either. Ate a Christmas tea (Anna and Drew came over, and (Sharon's) Michael was here), played Euchre, girls played Dutch Blitz; Michael and Drew won one set, we one the next, then Anna and Drew had to leave. Watched new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Johnny Depp). Set up the wireless network in the wee hours of the morning (WPA pre-shared key, for the first time); layered it on top of my parents' existing router (so we're on a 10.0.0.0/24 inside a 192.168.0.0/24 connected to the ISP, with 3 DHCP servers, including the ISP's).


Breakfast 20071225: Fixed D100 clock (was -4h from EST, -1h from PST; fixed to be current PST, moving +1h, so times between DST and leaving for Canada will need to be adjusted +1h). Got to sleep around 0430, up 1000; opened stockings at 1030 (see below). Breakfast, including mother's famous Cranberry Coffee Cake, began at around 1100. Christmas gifts begin at 1145 after Sharon finished showering (she had to go to work at 1300). Gift opening over at around 1215. Called Honey's parents around 1300. Slept a little; dinner at 1700-1800, after Murray and George, Lois, and Carolyn arrived. Traditional turkey, cranberry sauce, home-made stuffing, sprouts, and carrots, with crackers at the end (dessert to follow later). 1930 back to the table for dessert (Christmas pudding and chocolates). We showered around 2015; writing here again at 2040, with dad talking to Theo about the gap theory. 2300, started A Christmas Carol (black and white, not the colorized version; Honey and I and dad); got something to eat at around 0000. Emily and Julia got cell phones (added to address list database).

US Airways fails it

News ·Thursday December 20, 2007 @ 23:33 EST (link)

20071218: Leave 0941 for Fonthill, Ontario, Canada, by way of SEA, SFO, CLT, and BUF; got up at 0530, left the house 0610, and were waiting for Shuttle Express in front of Microsoft's building 36 at 0640; Honey drove there but I parked so she could wait with the luggage out front.

I had an idea for co-authoring on the Shuttle Express on the way to the airport: when reading an updated document from the server, instead of completely leaving out paragraphs that we already think we have (which would require changes to merge), we can copy pieces ("PCDs") from the in-memory document's piece table (XReplace, which also gets us bookmarks etc.), which has the advantage of speeding up open but not requiring changes to other code, and it leverages code we already have to share pieces between documents.

Our flight to SFO was late leaving and was delayed due to bad weather in SFO (25 minutes), which made us late for our flight to CLT (originally scheduled to leave 1300, then it was delayed to 1330, but when we got to SFO the status monitors all said "On time", and eventually it left at 1400, an hour late). We chased around the airport, in and out of security2 to find United and then US Airways customer service; after several exhausting slogs (wearing winter coats and carrying backpacks and me my camera case too), we were told that the original flight had not in fact left and we needed to try to get on it; finally we staggered up to it. This was the longest leg (the others were both about 2 hour flights): about 5 hours, although we made good time and it was closer to 4, which made us able to make our last connection to BUF: fortunately this one was close, just a few gates down. Because we'd had to rush so much, we'd had nothing substantial to eat all day, just some snacks. Last leg wasn't too bad, and we were a little early; my parents met us at the baggage claim at about midnight.

We had no trouble at the border, although the Canadians always like to ask about my status. We went into the duty-free to get some food (sandwich at Tim Horton's) but there's no way out without going over the Peace Bridge again1, but a customs agent took pity on us and let us go through without going all the way around. To add insult to injury, US Airways lost our luggage and it had to be delivered the next day; they removed the caps from various toiletries and didn't replace them.

20071219: Got up around 1000; Dad made us breakfast, and we went shopping at the Pen Centre (1600; our luggage was delivered early afternoon) for gifts: this year us siblings (and SOs) are just doing a gift exchange and getting gifts for our parents. Went to That's Entertainment (new and used DVDs), stopped by Art Taylor's to pick up some turkeys (one for us, one we delivered for him). We still went to Tim Horton's, our treat, then came home. I helped Julia with her Who Has Seen the Wind homework and confused her online friends. Honey took a pill for her back that makes her sleepy, and I hacked a bit and watched an episode of M*A*S*H.

I worked on making recorded TV shows from home available to watch here, which meant setting up transcoding (Gentoo makes it easy: install the nuvexport and xvid packages, and some dependencies), exposing Cirith-Ungol (the MythTV box)'s web server to the Internet on a high port via iptables (naturally, with host IP and other access restrictions, since we really don't want random people deleting our saved recordings, thanks all the same). So, transferring a show involves:
  1. Run nuvexport, pick the show/episode, bitrate (settled on 720), and other options (I've concluded that noise filtering and multi-pass are worth the extra time), and have it emit an XViD-encoded AVI file.
  2. The file is already placed in a web-accessible directory, so download it via wget to my laptop.
That's it (now that I've streamlined it)! As part of the process, I set up a router that I'd brought to share my parents' upstairs Internet connection; last time I had to switch it out whenever I wanted to connect.

20071220: Up late, 11xx; showered, shaved, etc. (first time since arriving, due to luggage loss). Left at around noon to complete our shopping (Chapters and Future Shop at the Fairway Mall, and Costco, using our card, although only Dad bought anything), then Office Depot. Watched Zathura with Sharon.

1. "Never get out!" he yelled. "That's it. Of course. We shall never get out. What a fool I was to have thought they would let me go as easily as that. No, no, we shall never get out."
—Lord Rhoop, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis.
2. SFO is wretchedly designed: they make people leave the secure area and pass through security again when moving between terminals.

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