Capitan Holy Hippie's journal

Nine Years!

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:29:25 GMT

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.

Kjersti's first day of kindergarten

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:49:06 GMT

IMG_0310
Originally uploaded by capitanholyhippie

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.

An overdue story

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:20:48 GMT

Kjersti's doll
Originally uploaded by capitanholyhippie

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.

hashdir in perl

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:28:58 GMT

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";

Bocana is dead, long live Bocana!

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 19:48:44 GMT

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.

I've been looking at the pile of computers around my desk for a while now, going "I have got to do something different." For the past two years, I've had four computers living in my home office pretty much full time:

Bocana: a SunFire v120. I use this as a permanent presence on the internet, it does DNS, web and email services.

fehu: A MacBook Pro. I use this as my main computer for personal stuff - my photos and videos are here.

unnamed: A Sun W2100z workstation. I got this to be a personal lab machine, and hadn't used it very much. I mostly used it to run various other environments in VMWare. This system was a pain to work with, since the video drivers never wanted to cooperate with my monitor.

ehwaz: Another MacBook Pro. This is my primary work computer, and goes everywhere with me.

For a while now, I've been looking at computers 1-3, saying to myself "I don't need these, I should consolidate." Well ... in part, because Valkyrie needed a new printer, I finally placed an order for a new system - a Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro is an impressive and sweet system. Apple charges way to much for add on disk and memory, so I got a pretty much base system, and ordered 8G additional RAM and an additional disk from Other World Computing. The extra RAM makes a huge difference.

Rather than run DNS, web and mail services on Mac OS X - Mac OS X is a great desktop OS, but it just isn't a great server OS, and the mail server I run works best on Solaris - I decided to run them in a virtualized instance of Solaris. VirtualBox turned out to be the best answer here.

So, after about a week of hacking away at my systems to transfer all the services from the old Bocana to the new VirtualBocana - at about 2am this morning, I finally shut down Bocana. VirtualBocana is now chugging along merrily in its place.

In the rebuild work, I took the time to do things better. I put some effort into making each service run as a separate account for that role, and that everything restarts cleanly when the server has to reboot. And, I made sure that if the Mac Pro ever needs to reboot, it will freeze the virtual machine with the Solaris instance first.

The one real big difference for me right now - my office is now eerily quiet. The Sun V120 is a nice small server, but it is meant to live in a data center, so its fans are kind of noisy. The Mac Pro was meant to live in a house, its fans are very quiet.

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?

Some thoughts on Facebook

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:27:30 GMT

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.

Test post from my iphone

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:52:29 GMT

Testing!

A cute picture of Corwin with a frog on his head is part of the test.

A California state initiative idea

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:45:46 GMT

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?

Corwin jumps in leaves

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:25:51 GMT

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.

Stock market - WTF?

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:06:17 GMT

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!

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:49:57 GMT

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 meme

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:12:08 GMT

Take your picture meme, at work

Original version.

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.

Take your picture meme, at work

Mirror image version, so you can read the shirt..

The first person I saw do this meme was digitalsidhe. At the time, I was at work, and didn't bother taking a picture. Later, I saw quility post a picture. At that time, I was in the hot tub at my gym, so didn't take a picture then. (Multiple reasons: it's not easy to take a pic of yourself with an iPhone, the gym doesn't like you taking pictures without their permission, and it is really hard to put together a LJ post from my phone.)

By now, I've seen a bunch of other people on my friends list post pictures, including netmouse, rustmon, and feyandstrange. So I decided to spend a few minutes on this, and popped open PhotoBooth - and found out PhotoBooth takes mirror image pictures. The original one PhotoBooth takes is on top, and you can't read my shirt. I flipped the picture so that you can read my shirt.

My manager's manager tells me that his manager (who is the company's CIO) would not be amused by my shirt.

Writer's Block: 9/11

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 01:48:23 GMT

What were you doing on September 11th, 2001? How do the events of that day hold meaning for you now?

View 500 Answers

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.

Grand trip across the country

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:38:22 GMT

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.

I'm now an Uncle

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:07:42 GMT

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!

Kilt!

Sat, 24 May 2008 18:20:01 GMT

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".

Followup to my request for a list of names ...

Fri, 16 May 2008 22:27:37 GMT

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.

Kjersti's affections

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:06:58 GMT

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.

Blacklists and such

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:59:54 GMT

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.

Whatever you may think about blacklists as an anti-spam fighting tool, I am firmly convinced that they represent the path spam fighting is going in the future. The key here is not to focus so much on the content senders of email generate, but the reputation of the senders. The best organizations that create and maintain spam blacklists focus on finding the worst spam gangs, and making sure that any servers they use have a bad reputation. Organizations that use blacklists extend trust to the compiler of the blacklist. The blacklist user trusts the compiler to get it right, at least most of the time, that the addresses on the blacklist shouldn't be allowed to send email.

The bulk of the schemes floating around the net now to provide domain-level authentication of email will end up having a reputation component in the end - after all, once every email message is authenticated to come from some domain, should you accept every email message with an authentication signature as not being spam? No, what will happen is that some domains will get a reputation for being spammers, and all the authentication does is make it simple to block those sources.

Blacklists have one very positive effect for the true reliability of email delivery - then enable the receiver of a message to reject it immediately, if the sender is on a blacklist. This is a good thing, since if the sender has been falsely labeled with a bad reputation and put on a blacklist, they can know right away, and fix the problem.

The bad part about the current situation with email delivery in the Internet today, is that too frequently anti-spam measures will lead to silent delivery failures. This is a good thing if everything that is discarded by the anti-spam measure is truly spam, and a bad thing if the false positive rate is ever anything above 0%. Blacklists enable noisy delivery failures, and without ever having to see a message - a win all around.

Now to personal experience administering email at a large company - the large majority of delivery attempts to our servers, well over 90%, and frequently over 95%, are blocked simply because of bad reputation of the source IP address. We do get some infrequent complaints about messages that fail to be delivered - but those always fall into the chunk that are not blocked because of reputation. The complaints about messages that fail to be delivered are always because our inbound email scanners thought the message was spam, and silently deleted it. So, filtering and rejecting messages up front is a huge win for us - we reduce the amount of messages that need to process by an order of magnitude, with a nonexistent secondary support burden for us.

The 5% - 10% of messages that get through the blacklist -- about half are deemed spam, and silently deleted. There are problems reported to us on a very infrequent basis - maybe one a week, usually less. So the incremental amount of spam those filters delete give us a small incremental support burden. Still overall a win.

Now the downside of blacklists - depending on the maintainer of the list, getting added to the list can be trivially easy, and done for bad reasons. Getting off a blacklist can vary from fairly trivial (fix the glaring problem you had in the first place, and request a removal) to caving to extortion, and paying a price. I'll point fingers here - no sane admin should ever use UCE Protect. They have included in their listing criteria a simple "We received a bounce message from you", and their immediate delisting cost is 50€. Spamhaus is one of the better blacklist maintainers. We use their Zen blacklist, and it works pretty darn well.

Until ... well, it didn't. Recently, some of the systems on our network got blacklisted.

The first issue we noticed was one of our two primary outbound mail servers got blacklisted. The reason it got blacklisted is still a mystery to me, although I can guess why. We got it delisted pretty quickly, and promised that it wouldn't get re-listed for a week.

The second issue ... One of our monitors was having a problem. To debug the problem, my boss logged into the system doing the monitoring, and connected to a remote server. While doing debug commands by hand, he did things that looked to the remote end like he was spam software. (There is a lot of spam detection that works like this - there are behaviors that spam software has, and well-designed mail software does not. Mostly this has to do with things around standards compliance - well designed software is very compliant, spammers don't give a damn about compliance. So far, this works in the favor of the good guys.) The remote machine that my boss was talking SMTP with decided that our monitoring server was a spammer, and reported it to Spamhaus. Spamhaus put our monitoring machine on a blacklist.

While all of this was going on, I did some work on my system at home, and made it check the Spamhaus Zen blacklist. digitalsidhe had an outage on his home systems, so all the mail for his domains got sent to my home server. I called digitialsidhe and told him that yes indeed, mail for his server was queuing on mine, just not a lot of it since the Spamhaus blacklist was blocking a boatload of spammers. digitialsidhe was telling me that he would never use a blacklist, because it was too easy to get listed for bad reasons, and too hard to get off, and he's seen too much legitimate mail lost this way.

While I was on the phone with digitalsidhe, my cell phone was beeping at me, telling me that a whole bunch of SMS messages were coming in. I get off the phone and check my messages - wow! All my inbound servers are down! Wait ... No, they aren't down. The monitoring server just can't talk to them. Because the monitoring server has been blacklisted.

My boss got this resolved pretty quickly in a e-mail exchange with the nice people at Spamhaus. However, it nicely served to show the point digitalsidhe was making - false positives adding a host to a blacklist can cause lots of damage.

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.

eight phone numbers, and a phone number rant.

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:40:58 GMT

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.

My home phone.

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

My personal cell phone.

My work cell phone.

My office phone in my primary office.

My office phone in my secondary office

My work-provided pager.

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.

Soliciting suggestions for a list of names

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:10:33 GMT

My work has been with computers, mostly planning and deploying systems that provide email services. When dealing with a lot of computers, one of the problems you quickly have is what to name them all.

I've seen environments that have had (in my opinion) a complete failure of creative thinking, and decided to come up with a pattern for names that encode information about what the system does into the name. I always find this extremely awkward to work with, since the patterns chosen tend to combine about a half dozen different pieces of information, award each of those pieces of information one to three characters, and the result ends up looking like a random jumble of characters to an outsider. Even for insiders, it takes time and care to think about what the string of characters mean. Plus, I find that this leads into a great deal of fragility in names, and a tendency for an explosion of names - any little change in one of the pieces of information encoded into the name implies a need for either a new name, or a name change.

Personally, the naming pattern for systems that I strongly prefer splits names into two classes: service names, and host names.

Service names are names exposed to end users for a service that they are supposed to access. The most well known of these is "www" This implies that what is behind the name is a web server. There's quite a few other well known ones. I like things like "mail", "ftp", "ns", "webmail". These are short, to the point, and give users an idea of the service that is accessed with that name.

Host names generally aren't exposed to end users, and should be something: a) short, b) unique in the environment, and c) recognizable as a name. Sometime before I started my current job, the people working in my group decided to name most of the systems I work with now after spices. I think this is fantastic, and a smart and creative way to pick names. It hasn't always been easy to pick new names that fit with the pattern, since a lot have been used, and there aren't a lot of commonly known spices - but seriously, I got to name one of my hosts "catnip" and one "cinnamon". How cool is that?

Now, I've got a naming problem that is a bit different. On some of my machines, I divide data up into different buckets, and each bucket needs a name. I inherited this environment with names that are based on latin words for ordinal numbers - almost. The first few you would recognize - "primary, secondary, tertiary." After that, rather than use the anglicized version of the latin ordinals, they switched to the latin ordinals "quatro, quintus, sextus, septimus, octavus". I hit a point where I needed new names, so I chose to extend the pattern - "nonus, decimus, undecimus, duodecimus." Now, I need new names again.

I could keep extending the pattern, but the words that follow get pretty long and hard to write: "tertiusdecimus, quartusdecimus, quintusdecimus" .... uh, no thanks.

I could take the "failure of creativity" route, and pick something simple like "1, 2, 3, 4". Not pretty. I can do better.

What I'm tempted to do is use one of these two lists - the names of the dwarves from Snow White ("Bashful," "Doc," "Dopey," "Grumpy," "Happy," "Sleepy" and "Sneezy"), or the names of the dwarfs from the Hobbit ("Thorin", "Dori", "Nori", "Ori", "Balin", "Dwalin", "Fili", "Kili", "Oin", "Gloin", "Bifur", "Bofur", "Bombur").

Are there any suggestions from the audience? The criteria I'm looking for here include that the names are recognizable as a set, that the set includes at least six names (hopefully more), that each name is reasonably short (preferably under 8 characters long), that the names are at least somewhat recognizable and pronounceable to speakers of American English. They don't have to have an implied or explicit ordering.

Kjersti sings the baby coffee bean song

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:32:31 GMT

Finally! We managed to get her on video, singing the "Baby Coffee Bean" song.

Macworld.

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 02:32:19 GMT

I went to Macworld. Walked around. Lugged a lot of weight on my back. Had lunch with digitalsidhe. Went back, covered a few things again that caught my eye the first time.

Am really tired now.

Twitter

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 04:24:28 GMT

After a while of ignoring Twitter, I finally got curious enough to sign up for an account and try it out.

I don't know how often I'll post a tweet there, but if you have any interest, my page is here, with an RSS feed here.

I do think the Twitter team has done a very good job at making the service mesh well with updating from mobile devices. It's stunningly easy for me to send a status update from my iPhone.

Privilege meme

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 23:36:03 GMT

Personally, I think we were pretty solidly middle-class growing up - although not much above poor. My father was the sole worker, and he had a managerial job for Social Security. Not great money, but plenty to buy our home and eat expensive organic food.

The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. The exercise developers ask that if you participate in this blog game, you acknowledge their copyright.

Father went to college.

Father finished college.

Mother went to college.

Mother finished college. (Although not her masters degree)

Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor. (My grandfather was an optometrist. My great-uncle was an attorney general and senator.)

Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers. High school was a private boarding school. Here, I think I was about same class.

Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.

Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.

Were read children's books by a parent . And adult books like "The Lord of the Rings"

Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18.

Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.

The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.

Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.

Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs. Grinnell is famed for making sure students that can get admitted can afford to go there - so there was scholarships, a small amount of loans, and some work paying for the rest.

Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs.

Went to a private high school.

Went to summer camp.

Had a private tutor before you turned 18. (Not for long - voice lessons)

Family vacations involved staying at hotels. (Family vacations involved camping.)

Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.

Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.

There was original art in your house when you were a child.

Had a phone in your room before you turned 18.

You and your family lived in a single family house.

Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.

You had your own room as a child.

Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course.

Had your own TV in your room in High School.

Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College.

Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.

Went on a cruise with your family.

Went on more than one cruise with your family.

Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up. And to national monuments, and archaeological digs - my mother almost got a masters degree in archaeology.

You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family. Although I think the heating bills were pretty low. The house was heated mostly by a wood stove.

Here, I think my kids will score higher than me. Although by now, the "Had your own TV" question should be replaced with "Had your own computer", and the "Had your own phone" should be replaced with "Had your own cell phone."