jake

can't trick this kid...

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:02:08 GMT

liya_rowan and I just went out to look at the snow, and she brought back a dry leaf, which I promptly put on my head and said to her, "Regarde mon chapeau!" ("look at my hat!"), to which she responds with a frown, "cheveux!" (hair!) and then runs across the room to pick up her hat, brings it over and holds it out to me.

I'm not sure if she was correcting my french, or my just my imaginative logic ("Silly papa, that's just your new hairdo, *this* is a hat!").

Damnit, I just knew he was going to disappoint us...

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:08:03 GMT

The truth comes out about Barack Obama.

I knew it was too good to be true, but somehow, I just had hope...

Looking for a job?

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 05:30:02 GMT

I know the economy isn't doing so hot lately, but there are still job openings out there occasionally - this one looks promising, if you happen to have deep thought sometimes about apples or horizons...

Crazy?

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 06:33:14 GMT

It's indeed possible that I've finally gone off of the deep end, but it's hard to tell sometimes, what with that whole catch-22 and all. I will probably have more to say on that topic, but it's far past my bedtime.

this post made possible by Google WiFi, a kind and generous public works project (even when it doesn't always work)

Thanks!

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:14:03 GMT

I'm thankful for amberphlame having made such an amazing mini-monster (as her/our fav. pj says), and I'm thankful that said mini-monster is finally feeling better, with less tummy pain and more alert time checking out her world.

And I'm thankful that oranchina and Stanton and their little Oona is doing great and were able to make it over for turkey-day, and we all look forward to when these two little brainy-babies will start hangin' out and getting to be best friends (so that when one day, one of them is a superhero, and the other is a supervillain [which is which will be up to *them*], they'll have the cool backstory of having been friends since their age was measured in *weeks*).

And I'm thankful that hw has come to work for my company and so will be around for the next who-knows-how-long, getting to see me and hang out with my clan and be here for xmas and so forth (and much geekery will be had by all!)

And hell, I'm thankful for a job which lets me get there at 10ish in the morning, leave at 3:30¹, do incredibly cool R&D projects [and buys me a nice dual quad-core monster of a box with 16G of ram to try stuff out on], and then give me a raise, a promotion, and possibly a bonus [pending] within the first 6 months being there.

There's of course always more that I'm thankful for, but the above list is pretty above-average, I'll say, so I'll cut it short at that.

Oh yeah, and I'm thankful for the fact that liya_rowan sitting still long enough for me to catch a few smiling pictures (finally!) and amberphlame has ordered those printed out so I can have them on my desk at work. :)

1: Although I do then get a shitload of work done back at home at night and on the weekend, much to amberphlame's dismay...

damnit, have we sent out the birth certificate yet?

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:55:45 GMT

I have not been reading these all day.

I stopped for lunch

[Edit: I just finished them. Now I am sad.

Would it be creepy if I just started calling Randall's cell phone every five minutes and asking if he's finished the next one?

It's better than hitting refresh, right? 'Cuz it shares the love?]

xkcd of the day

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:00:42 GMT

an oldie, but a goodie. So how I wish it worked like this:

You know you get up too early when...

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:27:04 GMT

a) you're on the *first bus* of the morning
b) you're the first one on that bus
c) it's dark when you get to work after a 45min commute
d) your *bakery* next to work doesn't open until 20 minutes after you drop by, so you don't get your morning croissant
e) all of the above

:(

What is this "work" thing of which you speak?

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:21:44 GMT

I'm not sure if I approve. I certainly know that liya_rowan and amberphlame don't.

this moment...

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:56:27 GMT

will last forever: liya_rowan sleeping for hours on one arm. One handed coding up a math-tutor webapp for starmail / drinking an organic Amber ale with the other, amberphlame flitting about cooking something that smells delish in the kitchen...

At least, this moment will last forever if the Trafalmadorans view of the universe is correct (which I hope it is, for at least this moment).

Mon petite grenouillette

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 21:40:27 GMT

I guess I haven't said it here yet, but just in case it needs verbalizing (in a written way), I am totally in love with liya_rowan. She's the most amazing little creature. There's nothing more wonderful than having her cuddled up, conked out in a little beanpod shape on my chest/shoulder while I'm dozing off, and hear her maman quietly say from across the bed, "she sure loves her papa..."

doot doo dee DOOOOOO!

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:14:16 GMT

Announcing: liya_rowan! (and her first extra-utero lj post!)

Weighing in at 7lbs, 10 oz, after only a lighting-fast 2.5 hour labor, she flashed into this world so quick we barely had time to think straight. No "dad sitting around looking useless and worried and just waiting forever", no "breathe, conserve your strength, this will take a while". Nope, it was more like, "Hi, amberphlame, let me check your cervix and see how far along you are, now that I've finally gotten to your house" ... "ok, looks like you're *fully dilated*, the baby's coming... oh, RIGHT NOW!".

If I ever doubted the efficacy of labor-inducing acupuncture, I was wrong. amberphlame was only 1 cm dilated wednesday, and Liya was already 3 days overdue, but then 10 hours after getting acupuncture to help speed things along, *wham*, baby's here!

Pictures will be forthcoming, of course, but for now, a certain hard-working mom needs some breakfast.

In contrast to my last post...

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 13:57:00 GMT

It's not that I don't love you guys... it's just hard to post (for some reason, my 6am brain wrote "poast" first... and I thought it was right - I must be hungry for some tost) these days. Roughly 8 weeks until impending fatherhood (if you want to get liya_rowan a nice and practical 0'th birthday present like a pack of tushie wipes or a portable high chair, swing on over to her gift registry: here [if that link doesn't work, just go to myregistry.com and search for my first and last name]), whee!

In other news, to contrast with my last post - at work yesterday, the ability to get my job done depended on knowing what the average angle between two randomly chosen vectors in N-dimensional space (for large [but finite] N). It's not hard to figure out what the answer is if the vectors lie in the unit cube (it's O(log(N)/N), I think), but on the unit sphere is trickier (and as N grows, the disparity of the two answers is probably large). Anyone else happen to know the average dot product of two unit vectors in R^N, given an even distribution on S^N-1 ?

And now, I'm late - off yer butt, pbrane! Dog must be walked, bus must be caught! Next week: World Diplomacy Championships in Vancouver, where my diplomacy scoring system (and rails app to calculate it) will be used to determine The World Champion Backstabber^TM.

Friends:

Sat, 12 May 2007 02:06:59 GMT

Meet the soon-to-be Liya Rowan O'Manichean de Baradat. liya_rowan, meet friends!

or just linked to them

... but what kind of excited father to be would I be if I'm not spamming your friends page? :P

I have only one thing to say regarding the passing of the late great Mr. Vonnegut...

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 06:37:08 GMT

and it's not even something *I* have to say:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

Interestingly enough, the Tralfamadorians aren't the only people who believe something like this - even some theoretical physicists do. But I guess there's some sort of conservation law for the number of time dimensions there are, because some other folk think there *2* time dimensions!

And so it goes, indeed.

Beginnings and Endings...

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 06:36:11 GMT

Yesterday, I

Heard another heartbeat, at about 140 beats per minute, within my lovely amberphlame's body. Zoinks! *That* is a serious trip. :)
Got an email from UW Physics, telling me to take a hike: they say they would need to take serious convincing to be willing to fund me again. Like, evar. Hmmmm... was not really planning to go back just at the moment (see previous bullet point), but I kinda liked the idea of having that little "thing to do before leaving Seattle" sticky-note on my brain. :\

Ah well... I guess that is the way of the world: some amazing things come, other amazing things go, and life... well, life goes on.

Dungeons and Dragons help!

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 05:05:33 GMT

Calling all nerds! I've got a horde of seven 9 year-olds coming over for a *sleepover* party of starmail's tomorrow night, and as Dungeon Master, I'm tasked with coming up with a way of maintaining their attention throughout 4pm - 10pm, and a little again in the following morning.

We're not playing the entire time - there's pizza break, play outside (weather permitting) while it's still light break, watch a little of Harry Potter / LOTR / Willow break, but still. They've been playing now for a year and a half, but they're still, well... 9 years old. And keeping the attention of 4 kids that age is one thing. But 7? The rounds of battle go too long, with too much "not doing anything" for each individual player.

I need to figure out a way (in the next 20 hours, after having had maybe 12 hours of sleep in the past 4 nights) to either a) plan an adventure around a Tourney / Faire / Gladiatorial something-or-other, so that we can have groups of them sometimes fighting others, but sometimes battling each other, and sometimes not everyone needs to be present: they can go off and play a video game or make noise or a mess or whatever 9 year olds do, while 3 or 4 of them battle it out in 2:2 gladiator combat or archery competitions. Orrrr... b) puzzle-filled adventure where they get split up in the maze, and half of the party is stuck trying to work its way out of a labyrinth, while the other half is searching for clues of what happened to the other half... but then how do I set one half loose with a map they're supposed to decipher and keep them occupied for 15-30 minutes? Or c) put them in command of a bunch of "troops" in some war sort of situation, and they're all rolling dice for battle (under my watchful eye!) in a chaotic simultaneous fashion, so they're all involved all the time, and I somehow just become a 7-part DM. Hmmm...

Any suggestions, Oh LJ-Nerd-Genie? The party consists of:

Half-elven Ranger(2)/Sorcerer(1)
Wood elf Barbarian(3)
Gnome Bard(2)/(1) [will determine what to do with the new level tomorrow]
Dwarf Cleric(2)/(1)
Dwarf Fighter(2)/(1)
Halfling Rogue(3)
Half Dark Elf Rogue(1)/Cleric(1)
Human Wizard(3)

Thoughts and Resolutions

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 16:47:04 GMT

Every day (or at least every other day) I need to a) spend 15 minutes writing up some of my thoughts. Just because I have no time, doesn't mean I don't have thoughts I've thunk. b) unwind at night (after everyone's gone to bed) by playing some Go online. You can easily spend a mere 30-45 minutes on a good solid game, and I miss that. It's better for my brain then watching HBO, that's for sure.

Abbey is finally totally great at the off-leash dog park, and the weather is getting better, and I really need more exercise, soooo, I need to start going running/biking with Abbey down to Marymoor. She'd love it, I'd get a little better in shape, all around a big win for all.

I think I might be able to try this whole "morning person" thing. I took a different bus in to work today, the fastest of the expresses: route 268 starts a mere 600 meters from my house, then makes only 5 stops before hitting downtown seattle, but only makes 4 runs each morning (the latest leaves at 7:35am). Even better: I can do that 600 meters in record time if I'm willing to pull a little Parkour action (a la David Belle in Banlieue 13, but about a million times less hardcore).

Advantage of early morning person-ness:

I think better, or at least differently, before 10 am.

If I get to work by 8am, I can take off by 4pm, get home to spend time with the family, the put them all to bed, and then get in a few more hours of work in the late evening. I think that other than the 7am - 10am timeslot, the 9pm - 12am timeslot is my other best work period.

Getting in this habit will be good practice for once the baby is around: amberphlame will want me home super early to relieve her of trapped-at-home-with-baby-all-day duties, and getting up early will be par for the course with an infant in the house, as will staying up late, I'd imagine. I can sleep at work in the afternoon! :P

Commute time is *way* faster. Door to door including walking/Parkour'ing transit in under an hour, from the depths of east Redmond to Pioneer square. It can be easily 1.5 hours otherwise, and 2 hours if I'm walking to the Park and Ride to catch the other busses. That sucks donkey butt.

Can get work done, at work, when nobody's here. Yay for that!

Ok, speaking of work, I should go do some - we're pitching to more VC's today, so gotta be on the ball...

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:43:33 GMT

mayhaps by you,

mayhaps by a grue.

but I when it comes down to it,

I don't really know who.

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:55:51 GMT

sometimes I fear I will be eaten.

random java programming rant

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:09:47 GMT

Carry on, nothing interesting to see here...

apparently if you have a java.util.Date object 'date', and a java.sql.Timestamp (which extends Date) object 'timestamp', it is *not* necessarily true that date.equals(timestamp) == timestamp.equals(date), for this reason:

Note: This type is a composite of a java.util.Date and a separate nanoseconds value. Only
integral seconds are stored in the java.util.Date component. The fractional seconds - the
nanos - are separate. The Timestamp.equals(Object) method never returns true when passed 
a value of type java.util.Date  because the nanos component of a date is unknown. As a result,
the Timestamp.equals(Object)  method is not symmetric with respect to the 
java.util.Date.equals(Object)  method. Also, the hashcode method uses the underlying 
java.util.Data implementation and therefore does not include nanos in its computation.

Huh. a.equals(b) =!=> b.equals(a). Now isn't *that* the most retarded thing I've ever seen (and was a "fun" bug to track *that* down)?!?

And the reason why this impeccable logic is ok?

Due to the differences between the Timestamp class and the java.util.Date  class mentioned 
above, it is recommended that code not view Timestamp values generically as an instance of 
java.util.Date. The inheritance relationship between Timestamp  and java.util.Date really 
denotes implementation inheritance, and not type inheritance.

Ahh, so the reason why you feel the need to violate all natural intuition for the rules of logic, oh writers of the Java core class library, is because you openly admit that you're horribly misusing the entire concept of inheritance? "Implementation inheritance"? You mean you're just lazy, and you're reusing code without actually checking to see if this makes sense? You can't just say "they're equal if equal to within the minimum precision of the two of them"?

But seriously... it should never be the case that effectively ("1.1").equals("1.10"), but !("1.10").equals("1.1"). That is fucking stupid.

6 years, maaaaan!

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 08:38:26 GMT

Last week, the end of my sixth year on LJ snuck past me unnoticed, which is not unsurprising (that it's unnoticed, not that it's actually been six years!), given how frequently I post these days. I keep meaning to climb back into the lovely warm LJ-hobbithole, but eh, life, and all, ya know?

Speeeeeaking of life, and all... those of you on amberphlame's f-list already know this, but the lil' family we've got going out here in the boonies is going to be getting a lil' less lil' later on this year, if yaknowwhatimean: my wonderful witchy lady is brewing up a magical little concoction deep inside of her, and I'm pretty excited to see how it all turns out :) - had our first midwife's appt. today, she's awesome (helped deliver starmail back nearly a decade ago), and made me feel pretty comfortable right away.

I haven't said anything about it yet because a) I haven't been "supposed to" yet [but we're nearing the end of the first trimester, and I've been patient enough damnit!], and b) she's been so sick and tired and feeling like crap, that it's been hard for me to feel comfortable getting all giddy and giggly and excited about it - at least on the outside, you know?

But enough o' dat! I will say "Yay!", and ya can't stop me! :) And all of youze who have the ability to influence the universe by sheer force of will, and can make amberphlame's exhaustedness and nausea less sucky (or at least more like what most normal women have, where the so-called 'morning sickness' actually fades away after time, unlike the way she had it with starmail: 24/7 straight through 9 months), send your vibes that way, because her lovely alien blood (read: Basque genetics) seems to make building up from scratch a tiny human inside of her more of a pain in her... everything. :(

Okee... beddy time for pbrane, 'tis a late night already, and tomorrow's a work day. And while it's great to finally actually have a job which requires the use of my brain (some fun machine learning stuff, too, which I'll maybe post a little of what I can sometime), it means I actually do need to sleep to make sure my brain can function during the day. Fancy that!

Politics, schmolitics!

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:09:20 GMT

So my new company is showcasing our fancy new technology with a State of the Union "Smackdown", where you can search through both Prez. Bush and Sen. Webb's "democratic response" for words/phrases/conceptually related ideas.

We've got last year's version up there now, so if you're a politically interested sort of person, zip over and check it out - I especially like searching for words like "war", and noting how rarely (like, um, never?) it came up in Shrub's speech last year. But he can't fool us - do the search anyways, and see where his "codewords" pop up!

Speaking of politics, my favorite quote of the day, from over at The Onion, re: Hillary's oh-so-surprising announcement of a presidential exploratory committee: "The last thing America needs is a radical liberal who supports the war and the death penalty while opposing flag-burning and gay marriage." 'taint that the truth.

d000d!

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 01:08:59 GMT

Wifi on da bus! Speed's not fantastic (I'll have to stick to ASCII pr0n), but Wifi on da bus!

A few pictures from NYE...

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 02:56:49 GMT

Some of you asked for some pictures ("as proof") from NYE, so here we go:

I'm going to upload a bunch more pictures from the rest of 2006 Real Soon Now^TM, and I think I'll make a big long Year in Review post where I'll link to them. It is *nice* having my old "yetanotheruseless.com" domain back up and running again. Now to figure out what to do with it other than use it for picture/mp3/pr0n-hosting service, subversion repository and as a Diplomacy game/player database (my semi-toy rails project)... hmm... I guess that's a good start, anyways.

New job starts tomorrow... hoping it will turn out to be fun.