No Open Blockers » Random

Teaching an Old Dog

Jay — Mon, 18 May 2009 01:14:23 +0000

I turned 30 a few weeks ago. Ok, so it’s probably time I learned how to ride a bike.

The actual learning process itself was pretty uneventful. My wife and I went up to the parking lot of the community pool, I got on her bike, and just went. No catastrophic falls, no accidentally riding into oncoming traffic. Twenty minutes later we were at Dick’s buying me my own shiny bike.

I became addicted. I’ve gone riding every day since then, even if it was just 30 minutes at lunch. I’m happy to report that I haven’t fallen yet. Though after that much riding that quickly, I have to admit that my ass is killing me.

That isn’t to say it’s been without incident. My wife and I have been taking the baby for rides after work (she has a baby seat on her bike, I’m not daring enough to risk Leanne’s well being, just my own). Every time we go, I insist we leave the front door unlocked. That’s in addition to my wife leaving the garage door unlocked when she closes it. Call me paranoid.

Call me unlucky too. The one time I forget to leave the front door unlocked is the one time I accidentally locked the garage door when I closed it. Seven years of instinct in simultaneously closing and locking the door kicked in before I realized it. Half a second after I heard the click I realized what had happened. Then I cursed. Loudly.

It gets worse. Here we find the family locked out of the house, yet I could see the spare key. It was in the little box attached to our front door for when realtors come to show the house. There it hung a mere 4 inches below the lock itself, mocking me.

I thought back to a month ago when we put the house on the market. The realtor gave us an option…

“Do you guys want the fancy digital one that only realtors can unlock or a combination one that you guys could unlock as well?”

The geek in me smelled technology.

“We’ll take the digital one. We’ve been here seven years and haven’t locked ourselves out yet, why the hell would we need the combo lock?”

In addition to my keys, I also left my cell phone inside. So on top of everything else, I had to suffer the indignity of asking a neighbor to borrow his phone so I could call our realtor to come let me in. To make sure I fully paint the picture of how big of a douche I looked like, realize I was wearing one of those stupid looking bike helmets at the time.

So one 45 minute bike ride later, our realtor showed up to let us back into our own house. Any longer and I was about to carry out my carefully devised yet extraordinarily stupid plan to scale the outside deck to the second floor screen door into the kitchen which, by our estimates, had about a 66% chance that we left it unlocked.

Getting back to the actual bike riding, the timing of my new found skill is great. I was running out of new options for cardio at the gym. We had been looking for something to do outdoors as a family. And I had been looking into possible Python projects for the summer, and I already know of a really cool combination of the two.

So what did I learn from this whole experience? Apparently not much, since I once again declined when the realtor offered to swap out the digital key holder for the combination one (I don’t think she wanted to be called out here again the next time we do this). Mmm… the sweet smell of digital technology on my front door…

My Little Geek

Jay — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:42:44 +0000

Of course I bought her a Mario. A Donkey Kong too.

Sorry for the quality, my wife’s phone is such crap that it might as well be a banana.

She apparently spent the day carrying him around and hugging him (I was at school at the time). And when I take her to GameStop, she runs to the Mario games yelling his name.

Hell. Yeah.

Summer Movies

Jay — Mon, 04 May 2009 01:53:41 +0000

I’ve been boycotting the movies for about a year now. I don’t really like… well, people in general, so the prospect of sitting in my family room watching a movie three months after it was out in crowded, noisy theaters is really appealing. And with the recent flood of pure crap in the theaters, at the end of the day I’m still just watching Fight Club rather than renting the new releases anyway.

I do love the feeling of a good summer movie and was happy to realize that this summer shows promise. After poking around IMDB for a while, I came up with a quick list of potential summer movies to get me out of the house. Maybe.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine – Actually, I’m already behind on this list. I just got back from seeing it. Surprisingly better than I expected. It had the cool explanation aspect that is usually reserved for the first movie in a comic book series with enough foreshadowing that you can pick up on because you know the story. Really excited to see what they do with the next ones about Magneto and Xavier. Though I have to admit, I’m pissed they didn’t get Sawyer from Lost to play Gambit. That would have rocked.
Star Trek – Over the course of my life I’ve watched approximately 6 minutes of Star Trek. I’ve just never been into it. This one, however, has me pretty excited. It’s got the guy from Heroes, the guy from Harold and Kumar, and the guy from Shaun of the Dead (too damn lazy to look up any of their names). How can it not be good?
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – I have virtually no doubt in my head that this is going to suck. I loved the first one, it was the epitome of summer blockbusters. Sure, the plot made about as much sense as the ramblings of my 21 month old daughter, but seeing giant robots throwing each other through buildings kinda negates the need for a plot. That said, I’m afraid they are going to try to really out do the first one in this one, in the end producing a disaster of a sequel. Let’s just hope it doesn’t do to Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one was amazing) what its abominations they called sequels did.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Anyone reading this site for longer than 3 minutes will realize I’m enough of a geek that this shouldn’t come as a surprise. This was my favorite book in the series and I’ve been pretty happy with the movies so far, so I’m hoping it doesn’t disappoint.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra – A Transformers and a G.I. Joe movie in the same summer. I think part of my excitement is that it makes me feel young again in a year where I turned 30. Whatever the motivation, this has the potential to completely rock (like the first Transformers) or be a complete failure (like Spiderman 3 — someone needs to be publicly flogged for that one).
Inglourious Basterds – Ok, so Quentin completely dropped the ball with Death Proof. It would have sucked on its own but was made all that much worse by having to follow Planet Terror which was simply awesome. But I’m still a big Quentin fan and this looks like it has some real promise. In short, it’s Brad Pitt kicking the shit out of Nazis in graphic gore. It’s like Fight Club 2. Except with Nazis.
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – A cookie cutter romantic comedy that is the theatrical equivalent of stabbing yourself in the eyes with a spoon. Anyone who thought for even a second that I was going to see this, please send me your IP address so I can add you to my firewall. And then go find the nearest person and ask them to slap you for me.

Can this guy kick any more ass?

Jay — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:02:45 +0000

I just found out that Hugo Weaving is the voice of Megatron in both Transformers and its upcoming sequel. That’s in addition to playing Elrond in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Agent Smith in The Matrix Triology, and V in V for Vendetta. If it somehow came out that he was in Empire Strikes Back he’ll legally be declared a god among geeks.

Blowing off work

Jay — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:37:18 +0000

I went downstairs to get more coffee and came back to find a substitute sitting in at work for me. Might as well put her to work.

This picture doesn’t do justice to the scenario, but she’s banging away at my second keyboard mounted under the desk.

Disappointment

Jay — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:25:27 +0000

On Monday nights, I take care of my daughter after work so my wife can go to the gym and just have some general non-mommy time. Since the weather is getting nice lately, we usually walk around the neighborhood and go to the park down the street. Tonight it’s a bit cold and windy, but since I couldn’t bring myself to suffer another night of Elmo and trying to keep her from eating crayons, I decided we’d head to Game Stop and Barnes & Noble.

Yes, I know that sounds lame, but she likes running around taking the games/books off the shelves and unlike in the house, I don’t have to bother cleaning up after her.

I drove approximately 6 seconds from the house when Leanne starts asking for her Elmo CD. Shit, it’s in my wife’s car. I entertained her as best I could until we got to B&N and decided it was worth the trip to the music section to have some sort of backup CD in my car.

After wading through a sea of complete and utter shit (the inventor of Yo Gabba Gabba should be pushed off a cliff) I found a Disney CD of nursery rhymes. With the onset of Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers plagues, buying Disney these days is a bit of a risky venture. However, the large hackergotchis of Mickey and Minnie on the front of the CD offered a sense of reassurance.

After twenty minutes of chasing my daughter around B&N to try to wrangle her into the car, we found ourselves ready to listen to our newly bought Mickey CD. But instead of Mickey, it’s some dude singing. At least he wasn’t the creepy child molester type singer you normally find on these CDs, but the fact still remained that 5 songs into it, he was still singing. Not a single peep from Mickey or Minnie. I had at least hoped for an intro and maybe a few tracks here and there of him spouting off mind-numbing messages to children. Nope, not a single word from the iconic mouse.

I am so disappointed. Mickey, the symbol of the happiest place on earth, has whored himself out to sell 7 dollar CDs to toddlers.

Home Office

Jay — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:50:13 +0000

I always get one of two reactions when I tell people I work from home:
“Oh man, that’s so great, I’d do no work.”
“How do you actually get any work done?”

I’ve been at Red Hat for two and a half years now, so by now I should hope I’ve settled in and found a way to get things done. A bunch of my students were curious about what my “home office” looks like (and I’m waiting on some really, really long test cases to run), so I figured I’d give a quick virtual tour.

Pro: I have a window with a view…
Con: … of nothing.

Above the windows are autographed pictures of MMA champions: Rich Franklin, Tito Ortiz, and Matt Hughes. The plant is hanging on for dear life and trying to survive the two months between when I actually remember to water it.

I think much better on a white board. I also tend to organize using colors, so the 12 pack of various markers has been a solid investment. And if I catch any of my students not recognizing that the spaceships are straight out of Space Invaders, you immediately fail.

One side of my desk is almost entirely devoted to monitors. For a while I was running dual-monitors with the center and right monitor, I just haven’t set it up again since my last install. The left monitor belongs to whatever random machine I have in my office at the time. That’s my work laptop on the left where I keep up on e-mail and my work chat rooms.

The Red Hat posters were an attempt to keep the office professional. As you can see, that failed pretty miserably. My office is the one area of the house that’s mine, so I felt inclined to go a bit overboard with the weird decorations.