Remember the Reason for the Season: December 24th is my birthday!

In the dawn of my 42nd year, I'd like to reflect on what made the 41st so superb: Me, I am awesome.

Have a great Day After Grub's Birthday tomorrow, everyone! :)

This feels like a mega-spam entry, and I'm very self conscious about posting it, but I'm excited about this and I wanted to share . . .

I just published my third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I mention it here because it's all about growing up in the 70s, and coming of age in the 80s as part of the D&D/BBS/video game/Star Wars figures generation, and I think a lot of Slashdot readers will relate to the stories in it.

I published a few of the stories on my blog, including Blue Light Special. It's about the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?

After our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper were piled up in our cart, our mom took our three year-old sister with her to the make-up department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the make-up department, and my brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.

"Can I spend my allowance?" I said.

"If that's what you want to do," my mom said, another entry in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for . . . things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.

"Keep an eye on Jeremy," she said.

"Okay," I said. As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn't bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn't want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn't be a problem.

I held my brother's hand as we tried to walk, but ended up running, across the store, past a flashing blue light special, to the toy department. Once there, we wove our way past the bicycles and board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.

I'm really proud of this book, and the initial feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been reluctant to mention it here, because of the spam issue, but I honestly do think my stories will appeal to Slashdotters.

After the disaster with O'Reilly on Just A Geek, I've decided to try this one entirely on my own, so I'm responsible for the publicity, the marketing, the shipping, and . . . well, everything. If this one fails, it will be because of me, not because a marketing department insisted on marketing it as something it's not.

Of course, I hope I can claim the same responsibility if (when?) it finds its audience . . . which would be awesome.

http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/jacket/jacketrequest.jsp

Those wiimotes can be slippery rascals, I guess. Nintendo is going to ship these rubber jackets with new systems, but fill out the form and they will ship you four or so free 'remote jackets' for those who have a system.

Bless their hearts - they are giving away this old game. I suspect I have each and every one of this (as well as the Red Alert fork) sitting on my shelf.

GDI ISO, NOD ISO

Be sure to see the readme for what you need to get it up and running on XP, as I know I let my Win95 box fade away.

Once again I reach out to that vast pool of knowledge at slashdot...

Scenario: I have a couple of decent machines on the desktop at home. One is an AMD-2500xp+ running Win2000. It's used for games. The other machine is an AMD64-3800x2 (64 bit dual core thing) It's running Ubuntu. Rest of the place is all OpenBSD on various machines and one FreeBSD box.

I'm thinking that I really don't need to keep 2 machines running on the desk. Ideally I'd have some sort of VM manager running on the Linux AMD64 box which I could run a Windows VM in for when I need my gaming fix. I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for a VM manager. I have only a few needs:

- It has to run a normal 32 bit Windows in a VM on this 64 bit box so I can reinstall Win2k on it or a copy of normal XP, not XP64.
- It must support the 3d capabilities of my graphics card (ATI 9800 Pro).
- It must support my Audigy2 sound card (no stuttering, etc)

I've looked at Xen but my processor lacks the AMD-V (nee Pacifica) goop to run Windows unmodified. QEMU and VirtualBox also look nice. So far, though, it looks like VMWare is the one to beat. I'm not shy about spending a few bucks to get it.

There you have it. All suggestions are appreciated.

I'm on both right now ('grieder' on Multiply) and find that Slashdot is much more to my liking. Granted I haven't done much on Multiply other than read and post a few comments but it's just not my thing. Much of what I see on Multiply has been linked over from slashdot and I just don't see the need for a second discussion forum.

Rather than deleting my multiply account and dropping it entirely, I've turned off all email alerts for everything other than private messages. That way I can see if I really miss it (doubtful)

Slashdot is a news site (or so they claim ;)) with some good discussions in the comments geared to the story. Multiply seems much more contrived... Come up with a topic and hope people talk about it.

YMMV, but I'm sticking close to the loveable ol' hag known as Slashdot.

Rewind Life's TiVo back to June 13, 2006 1:10 AM

I awoke to Kim's shrill "Gord, we have to go to the hospital now!" Arriving at the hospital her water broke and the nurse said "You're going to have her today".

What?! There was still 22 days left! Are we ready for this?!

Fast forward the TiVo to 12:33 PM There's our little girl just out. We are parents, a whole different demographic group than we were just a minute before at 12:32. Holy shit. All the reading and planning can't prepare you for that. I felt amazed and helpless and proud and scared.

The hospital sent us home two days later. Huh? They trust us with this fragile little entity? Aren't the car seat straps too tight? No, they have to be snug. That idiot is tail-gating us. Hrm, no he's far enough back. Our first drive home as a family was a blur. I was beat from not sleeping well on the pull-out 'dad' chair they had in the room. Kim was understandably a bit rough.

Here in .ca you're allowed about a year off of work for parental leave to be split however you want. I took the first month and Kim overlapped with me. Most days she would slept in while I drank a Bodum full of freshly ground espresso beans, it was the only thing that kept me going. I'd stay up late with Anna so Kim could get her sleep at that end of the day. The month flew by, it was a complete blur of diapers, espresso, downloaded TV shows and watching little Anna. Just watching her sleep. Hours would go by as she slept in my lap. Those were some of the best moments of my life.

Fast forward the TiVo to yesterday Our little girl was one year old. They picked me up at work for lunch. Took some nice pictures at 12:33 which will soon be on Anna's website.

So a year of diapers, some crying, watching her grow, working on her 9th tooth, standing, trying to walk, bathing her, swimming with her, watching her eat by herself and picking her favourites off the tray first, dancing in spot to music (yes, she likes the beat of Motorhead and High On Fire, don't tell Kim!) A year of watching her personality flourish and of enjoying her infectious smile that always seems planted on her face. A year of can't-wait-to-get-home-and-see-the-family after work, of walking to the park with Anna in her wagon.

Happy Birthday Anna!
Pics to be here soon

WTF moderators... I hate the 'overrated' mod that will not be m2'ed.

[edit update]
My bride wandered down to my home office asking if I 'did anything' to her MacBook since it halted unexpectedly. She closed the lid and was walking to another room when it made a shutdown sound. She had several applications open with stuff she was working on, so this was not a good time to just stop. When she restarted it, it prompted her to install the update, which she did. Did it did shutdown as part of an update? Untimely static electricity that would do a proper shutdown? (she did not believe she was responsible for the restart)

A bit of background from the Windows world. If you have your machine set to "automatic" updates, Windows will occasionally download, install, and then reboot your system. It will prompt you to 'restart now or later', but selecting later will cause the dialog to pop up again... only later. If you ignore the dialog (and possibly leave the machine idle) it will take it upon itself to reboot your system. Does OSX do this same sort of thing? We are fairly new to OSX in our home and to be honest I really don't know.

This thing just got stranger... The shutdown might not have anything to do with an update after all.

Simple tasks like switching between Firefox and Thunderbird are driving the load on my machine up over 4, and if I'm trying to run Amarok at the same time, it drives it up to 8. In fact, my machine frequently climbs up into the 7-9 range, bringing my apps to a crawl and frustrating the hell out of me.

So I've decided it's time to buy a new computer. I'm going to replace my aging Sony Vaio desktop machine (which runs Linux) with something newer that has more RAM, a faster processor, and a bigger hard drive.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure where to start looking. A quick walk through Circuit City a month or so ago lead me to believe I can get a rather "big" computer for as low as five hundred bucks, which further leads me to believe that if I were to buy something online, I can get a huge pile of RAM, a fast processor, and a big honkin' hard drive for even less.

I run Kubuntu, and use KDE as my desktop (though I occasionally switch to Gnome when I get bored) and I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and run PokerStars in wine. I'm looking for something that can do all of that without slowing my machine to a crawl.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking?

Edit: I don't think I have the patience to build my own machine out of individual parts. I also don't have any real loyalty to any particular company or architecture. New Egg has lots of machines with AMD processors, and though I've always had Intel processors because more things seemed to run on x86, that's not as much of an issue as it once was, right?

I just tried upgrading to Ubuntu Linux 7.4 Fiesty Fawn beta 1 last night. I started the update-manager -c to chose to upgrade online. I had one little problem ....

Anne turned off the lightswitch where teh laptop was plugged in during the upgrade. :-( So my laptop is half 6.10 and half 7.4.

Nervously, I turned on the laptop expecting it to not even boot up. Ubuntu booted up and I got a message saying I have 1022 updates available. I clicked on it and I got a message saying my version of Ubuntu linux is downgrading back to 6.10 and is fixing itself! Sweet!

In Windows if you had a partial upgrade the whole system would have blue screened. Ubuntu Linux will heal itself back to the original.

Anyway I think Ubuntu Linux is the best operating system ever made and I think average Joes can already use it. Its so easy to use and Linux should have been this easy years ago.

Battery recall - I win again! I'm really hard on my batteries - lots of time in the airplane running a full dev environment. I probably would qualify as a good caregiver to the battery pack - the current battery only gives me 2-3 hours now (running vmware and a bunch of other stuff). A fresh new FREE battery is fantastic news.

Description: Lenovo sold these extended-life batteries with new ThinkPad notebook PCs or as optional or replacement batteries for the following ThinkPad notebook models: R Series (R60 and R60e), T Series (T60 and T60p) and Z Series (Z60m, Z61e, Z61m, and Z61p). The recalled 9-cell batteries have the following part number, which can be found on the battery label: FRU P/N 92P1131.

Hazard: If the battery in the laptop is struck forcefully on the corner, such as from a direct fall to the ground, the battery pack can overheat and pose a fire hazard to users. This is not an internal battery cell defect.

Well, for those with a Thinkpad - www.lenovo.com/batteryprogram - roll the dice and see if you get lucky. Saw the initial notice at the register.

Not sure what the /. deities have been tweaking but I've received mod points twice this week after a few years of never getting them.

Ohhh the power... it's going to my head already. Grovel, swine!

People find it odd that I run ubuntu Linux on this laptop but my argument is why run Windows?

Why do I need to use what everyone else uses from a convicted monopolist? I don't want to be different. When I run Windows I feel its Microsofts computer and not mine. Its that simple. I just want to run something that does not suck goatballs and is expensive. Sure Windows is no ok I guess but some of microsofts products such as MS Word I can not stand. For programming Linux suites my need and I dont have to wrestle with restore disks that no longer work.

However I am going to have to switch back to Windows again on my notebook.

The cell phone developer kit software for Java requires windows and its odd that Sun Microsystems would bother with a win32 only port of their mobility toolkit. Sun hates Microsoft with a passion and java supposed to run on many different platforms.

Well I suppose it may not be too bad. I heard postgresql and mysql now have native windows support where Linux is no longer needed.

Oh and I just applied for a new entry level web designer position in a windows only shop where frontpage and IIS skills are admired. Hmmm

Well compaq was cheap and did not give me the restore cd so I will have to see what I can do to order another one in the meantime.

I've got some larger projects around work, mainly networkish things (SNMP trapping, {Squid|PIX|routers|switches|WLAN|VPN} log parsing, nmap, etc.) and I'm at a crossroads between what language to use. I'm most comfortable with plain ol' C but that would be overkill for these jobs

I've done a fair amount of Python and am happy with it but have read great things about Ruby.

Basically I'm wanting something that works well with SNMP, has a good networking library and plays very nicely with Apache & PostgreSQL. The ability to script telnet and ssh stuff (ala Expect) would be a definite plus.

Simply put: I want to settle on a language for these types of projects. Input from anyone would be appreciated!

EDIT: Perl need not apply, I'd rather use awk.

• Messed up a SVN merge so badly one of the other guys asked if there was room in the budget to 'fix' my kneecaps.
• Drove out for some lunch to gather thoughts. About to drive back and the "check engine" light comes on.
• Drop off the car at the shop, get shuffled home, and fire up my PC. Windows up date runs, reports a problem with the install. Stupid me tries to fix it. Why, oh why, did I think that to even *open* regedit...