Nine years ago today, Valkyrie and I dressed up in some really spiffy clothes, looked deep into each others eyes, and said "I Do."

Thanks for asking me to marry you, Valkyrie.

The tradition of posting something to my journal this year seems to be pretty firmly established: Here is what I had to say for all my anniversary posts.

We seem to have done more for our anniversary this year than last year. I got Valkyrie a new coffee maker. Last weekend, we went up to Lake Tahoe. The kids and I played, while Valkyrie danced in a belly dance competition. Today, I took a couple hours off of work, and Valkyrie and I got massages.

Somehow, I have been negligent. I should have posted this picture back on August 17, when the kids started school.

Kjersti is doing great in Kindergarten. She's learning to read, right on schedule. Corwin seems to be doing OK in third grade too.

This last Christmas, the one present my little Kjersti truly wanted was a Little Mommy Gotta Go doll. Valkyrie and I, being the procrastinators we are, didn't get around to hunting for one (without Kjersti present) until just a few days before Christmas.

At the absolute last minute, I go to the local Toys-R-Us, and spend quite some time combing through the store looking for a couple of last minute items for the kids. I find a very nice stuffed dog for Corwin, and a few things for Kjersti, but I am having a very hard time finding the one doll my little girl absolutely wants.

Finally, I go over the shelf where this doll should be, very carefully. And I finally find one! Only, it's this one: Little Mommy Gotta Go Hispanic. I say to myself, "OK ... this only speaks Spanish, but it's marginally better than no doll at all." And I look a little more.

Then I find this: Little Mommy Gotta Go African American. I look at the two dolls ... and my choice is clear. It's better to get my little girl a doll that's close to what she's seen before and is expecting, and it's better to get her the one that speaks English.

So I go home, show Valkyrie the doll, and we wrap it up and put it under the tree. All along, my mind is buzzing, awash in the cultural stereotypes this country has shoved into my head - the white doll is for white girls, the black doll is for black girls, the brown doll for the hispanics ... and my little girl will reject the doll as not being like her.

I've tried to take a very light hand on the subject of race with my kids, and not make an issue of it. Also, I try to teach by example, in dealing with everyone around me with the same degree of respect and courtesy. I just hope this wears off on them somehow.

So we go into Christmas morning, and I'm fretting as to how Kjersti will react to the doll. She has some hint as to what this package is, and eagerly opens it. I tense in fear that she will reject the present.

I shouldn't have worried. The wrapping came off, and her gasp of joy, and squeals of delight were instant and unrestrained. This present was Exactly What She Wanted, and she was thrilled with it. I mean, just look at that picture there - what an expression of love and contentment. I felt relief and pride - my little girl got exactly the doll she wanted, and failed to make an issue out of the skin color being different from hers.

I've been mulling over this episode in my mind for most of this last year. This year seems to be a somewhat important point in the evolution of what race means to people in this country, and what being an American is. This episode says something about were all of us are - including the corporate machine that made three different dolls, targeted at different races; about me; and hopefully - a positive light about how our children will see race.

Here's a snippet of code inspired by this page, on an minor technical feature of the email server I work with on a regular basis.

#!/usr/bin/perl

sub hashdir($) {
  my ($orig) = @_;
  my $hashval = 0;

  foreach my $char (split(//,$orig)) {
    use integer;
    next unless $char;
    $hashval = $hashval*31 + ord($char);
  }
  $char1 = $hashval & 0xf;
  $hashval = $hashval >> 4;
  $char2 = $hashval & 0x7;
  $hashval = $hashval >> 3;
  $char3 = $hashval & 0xf;
  $hashval = $hashval >> 4; 
  $char4 = $hashval & 0x7;
  return sprintf ("%x%x/%x%x/", $char1, $char2, $char3, $char4);
}

print hashdir($ARGV[0]), "\n";

For my friends who are long term followers of this journal, you may remember a time almost four years ago where I had to raise a couple of computers from the dead. Well, the saga of one of these computers took a new turn today. Specifically, Bocana, which was running on my desk for just under four years, has been turned off.
( Read the story of my computers behind the cut )
So, now there will be only two computers living in my office, and I have some computers I need to sell. Anyone need a MacBook Pro?

Of all the "Social Networking" sites out there, three have really worked for me. LiveJournal, Twitter, and Facebook.

It seems like Facebook has been the place where more people have found me and tried to claim friendship with me, more than any other place. That is - real people, who really did meet me sometime in the past. I've got an account on Friendster, that one gets pure spam. The downside - Facebook is also the place where I have to look hard at the name and claim to friendship, and sometimes say "No, you aren't my friend".

It seems like everyone has a different level bar to for them to make a connection with someone else on a social network. LiveJournal is one place where my bar is real low, and has little to do with the real world. My criteria for following some body's journal are simple - am I interested in what you have to say? Well, then, I'll follow you. If I see you are following my journal, I'll ask myself - why is that person following me? If I can't come up with an answer to that, I'll likely ban you from my journal.

Facebook and LinkedIn are different, though. LinkedIn, in particular, the standard I use is along the lines of - do I know you, and do I know your work, and would I work with you again? If the answer to all that is yes, I'll make a connection with you there. Facebook, well, is a purely social site, and seems to be where some pretty random people have popped up.

The first test I use is to say - "Do I even remember who you are?" If I have a hard time with that, then you probably never were my friend. I've had a few people from my high school try to claim that we were friends, and I have to go digging through my old yearbooks to find out if they even really went to my school. My high school didn't have a lot of students - maybe 100 each year I was there. In theory, I could remember every other student who went there . . . but in practice, I find that I don't. So if you went to my school, and I can't even remember who you are - somehow I don't think that means we had any sort of strong connection when we were at school together.

My second test is - Did I like you? If the answer to that is no, well ... your friend request will be ignored.

My other thoughts on facebook ... there are too many applications that want you to join up and invite all your friends - and that seems to be their only purpose. Sorry, no thanks.

This night, at dinner, Valkyrie and I were grumbling about what a mess the legislature in California is, an how destructive it was to the state that they didn't pass a budget for about three months. Valkyrie was recounting how various state employees were getting furloughed, or getting their pay cut, and she said "I bet the legislators aren't getting their pay cut." Also, we should hit them where it hurt - their wallets.

I a burst of insight, I said "Don't cut their pay - get them where it really counts - campaign contributions."

So here's a proposal for a state initiative:

For every day in the current fiscal year that the state is operating without a budget, every member of the state legislature must forfeit one percent of their gross campaign contributions for that fiscal year into the state general fund.

In other words - if the budget is 50 days late, that's 50% of the campaign contributions forfeited to the general fund.

What do you think?

The fall weather here in Cameron Park has been wonderful. This last weekend, we got to one of the typical fall chores - raking up leaves.

And then, playing in them.

I didn't let the kids play too long. However, once we had the big pile made, Corwin did the most amazing front flip right into the pile of leaves, and almost disappeared into it.

I wish that I had the video camera handy to capture that ... but oh well. These flips he did are pretty good too.

There are two high tech companies that I follow the stock price for closely, because I have stock purchased through employee stock purchase plans. Both companies, at this point in time, are in essence, turning a profit. The one where I no longer work is just barely turning a profit, and it's stock price is down to about a third of what it was at the beginning of the year. The one where I work now, is getting great profits, and it's stock price is down to about half of what it was at the beginning of the year.

I get that stock markets follow rumor and emotion far more than logic and profit - but this is just plain gruesome.

Eight years ago today, Valkyrie and I dressed up in some really spiffy clothes, looked deep into each others eyes, and said "I Do."

Thanks for asking me to marry you, Valkyrie.

The tradition of posting something to my journal this year seems to be pretty firmly established: Here is what I had to say for all my anniversary posts.

Today is a work day, although with lots of interruptions. We are planning on going out to dinner tonight, and leaving the kids at a drop-in daycare place. I took the Subaru to the dealership to get serviced, and got my teeth cleaned. Valkyrie had a yoga class.

About all I got for Valkyrie was a nice card. She seems happy with that. Somehow, we now seem to be more involved with living our lives, than giving showy displays of affection.

Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions.


( A few more picture variants )

I arrived in Australia for the first (and last) time on September 11th, 2001.

Of course, since Sydney is about 16 hours ahead of NYC, I went through the whole day blissfully ignorant of what was to come. The whole nightmare started around 11PM that night in Sydney, right around the time I went to bed.

My wife didn't know the hotel I was staying in, so she couldn't reach me to tell me about what was going on. I got up around 7am Sydney time on September 12th, and turned on the TV, and sat with my mouth hanging open, stunned at what I was seeing.

I was scheduled for a short trip in Sydney, then was to go to Hawaii to spend a week with my then seven months pregnant wife. She got there on time, I was delayed a day. We had a lovely vacation.

Those of you who follow me on twitter may have noticed that the family took a trip across the country, and I posted about once a day about the trip. We drove about 4250 miles over about 16 days. Went from California to Iowa, spending nights in Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska on the way. Then, went to Minnesota, did a festival in Decorah, IA. Visited my father-in-law and his brother in Red Wing, Minnesota; Maiden Rock, Wisconsin; and LaCrosse, Wisconsin. During the trip, we decided that we had a chance to see parts of the country we had never seen before - so we went back through South Dakota (saw Mount Rushmore and some of the Black Hills area) and Wyoming (drove through Yellowstone and saw Old Faithful).

The kids were overall pretty good during the trip. I can't say that they really enjoyed it, since all the sitting in the car was quite boring for them. They started wanting to see the "Bee Movie" over and over again - maybe seeking one familiar thing with constant change going on around them. They ate lots of cheap Kraft macaroni and cheese at all the diners we stopped at. I won't say it was all bad for them - they did get some good play time in hotel swimming pools, and both seemed to really enjoy the cave in South Dakota.

As announced here, my sister drarwenchicken gave birth to a baby girl, around 6pm tonight.

My little niece shares a birthday with my beloved wife, Valkyrie. Happy birthday to the two of you!

I've been kinda wanting a skirt I could wear for a long time. I finally broke down and ordered a kilt from Utilikilts.

Update: I wore this, with my cloak, to an SCA event this weekend. The shirt drew more comments than the kilt - the joke being that I was a member of "Clan MacIntosh".

My work project where I wanted a list of names has been completed. I chose moons of the solar system as a theme, and picked nine of them - luna, phobos, deimos, io, europa, ganymede, callisto, titan, iapetus.

A while back, I posted something about how Corwin would say to me "I don't love you, Daddy". Well, by now he's mostly grown out of that sort of emotional blackmail. Now, it's Kjersti's turn.

She's telling me, usually in a shout "Daddy, I don't like or love you!". Somehow, I find this easier to deal with than when Corwin did the same thing - and it's all about the timing and delivery. When Kjersti plays this game with me. I know that she's mad at me. After all, she's in the middle of throwing a fit. When Corwin did it, he was holding onto his upset about something else that happened a while ago.

Either way, it's not an insult I take personally, or get upset about - it's just a way of my kids telling me that they are mad at me. And, that they have progressed far enough with their emotional development for the concept that withholding their love from somebody, may upset the target.

As many of you may know, my day job is to administer the email servers for a large computer company. I also run a small server at home that does email and DNS, and acts as a backup for digitalsidhe. Recently, we had some incidents that highlight problems with anti-spam blacklists.

( Wherin I ramble about blacklists )

The bottom line for me is this: Knowing all the pitfalls of blacklists, I'm still going to use them. All the positives (immediate rejection, order of magnitude reduction in work scanning message text) far outweigh the potential negatives.

Due to the techie life I lead, I've managed to collect eight different phone numbers. All these route phones or devices that I might answer, assuming I'm in the right place at the right time. I won't list the numbers here - instead here is short descriptions of all of them.

1. My home phone.


2. The toll-free number that routes to my home phone.


3. My personal cell phone.


4. My work cell phone.


5. My office phone in my primary office.


6. My office phone in my secondary office


7. My work-provided pager.


8. My Grand Central number.

Wow, that's too many. There's no way I'll ever give all of these out to people.

If I did what Grand Central wanted, that would be the only number I'd ever give out. Instead, I'll probably never give that one out. Too many of the other numbers are embedded in people's contact databases for me, I won't be able to give them up and hide them behind Grand Central's service. The Grand Central number was free, and is kind of a toy - I'll probably forget about it or delete it eventually.

Generally, I'll give out #1 and #3 to friends and family. My parents and Valkyrie's parents use #2. However, #4 is a more reliable number to call recently - that number rings my iPhone, and that's the one I've been keeping on me all the time. #5 and #6 are set up to ring both my desk and my work cell at the same time. #5 is the one fellow employees will probably see and use, and is the one I give out on forms that ask for a "Work Number". Nobody should use #7. That one only gets monitoring alerts from systems at work.

Now the rant: Area codes. Hey everyone - printing a seven digit number on a car or a sign is useless. Giving out a seven digit number is useless. If you want people to actually be able to call you, give out the area code as well.

Why? Well, phone numbers without an area code imply that the person seeing that number has a shared bit of context with the person giving the number. That context being where the number resides, and what the area code is in that place. Having this implied context is just fine, if your world is tiny and you only ever interact with people inside that small world. I think this is a horribly bad assumption. Personally, I drive through enough different parts of California on a regular basis to pass through 6 to 8 different area codes. I don't have a map memorized of the boundaries of all those different area codes - and any business that gives out the seven digit form of their number will never get a call from me, because I will never know what area code they are in.

Those eight different numbers I have? They are in four different area codes.

Personally, I try to always write down and give out numbers using the "+1-NNN-NNN-NNNN" format. The "+1" indicates to those people in other countries that this number is in the United States. To people in the United States that are clueless about the meaning of a + in front of numbers, they tend to ignore it.