My 16month old daughter just got her first set of baby Legos ("MegaBlocks"). She calls the whole bag "house" -- anything we make out of it, by extension, is a house.

How long do you think it took before I was down on the floor with her, pulling bricks out of her hand and saying "Nono, sweetheart, let me see that...Daddy's building something....damnit, daddy needs another yellow one..."

:)

My 15month old daughter Katherine groks Tivo. When she wants to watch Sesame Street she will seek out the remote control, differentiating it from the DVD one, and bring it to the nearest adult. She is not happy until she hears the familar chirpy noise and sees the green menu come up. Once this happens she will happily plop herself down in the middle of the family room floor, knowing that the show is about to start. God help anybody who wants to watch something when she is in the room, because if she sees that menu and Sesame Street does NOT come on, she gets pissed.

The best part is that if I pause the show she will get up, come over and press the yellow pause button to start it up again, and go sit back down. (It's actually become a very nice "drink your milk" compromise -- pause, come get a few sips from sippy cup, resume show). It's gotta be the fact that the button is yellow. Because she cannot differentiate all the other buttons yet. Likes to push them, but has no clue what they do.

It's got me wondering how different tv watching will be for her as she grows up. When I was a kid, shows were on at a certain time and if you missed it you were out of luck until tomorrow (or next week). Her introduction to tv has been that she can have a show whenever she wants.

Duane

So perhaps people have heard the story by now that the bassplayer for Phish was at a Grateful Dead concert when he decided to take the 9yr old daughter of a Hell's Angel off to a secluded spot for some 'art photos.' Reports are saying that the Hell's Angels got to him before the cops did and were "not kind to certain sensitive areas of his body." Ouch.

What not every report is mentioning (I think I found this in the NY Post) is that he apparently enticed the girl to go with him by taking her for a ride on his Segway transporter.

D'oh!

Finally got to interview at a place with an ex-Microsoft guy. Here are the the questions I got:

• You have one room with 3 incandescent lights, all off. You have another room with three light switches. Starting in the room with the switches, how many times do you have to go in the room with the lights in order to determine which switch controls which light? (Assume all the obvious stuff like you can't see the light through the door, and so on). There is an easy answer, which I got, and a harder one, which I got with a hint.
• You have a block of cheese. You wish to cut a smaller cube of cheese from the middle. How many cuts does it take. I got this one.
• Write "string reverse" on a char array, in place (i.e. without cloning the array). I wasn't happy with my answer to this one, I overthought it.
• Insert into a binary tree. (Not sure why he put this one in there, it seemed kinda easy. Maybe it was to see if I knew how to answer a recursion question.)
• Reverse a singly-linked list. Annoying pointer math.
• Count the set bits in an unsigned int. I gave him an answer he called "a good, brute force answer." This bugged me so much that the next day I emailed him a better answer. I even wrote "You probably don't care but my head will explode if I don't write this down."
• You have randomly distributed numbers from 1-n in an array of size n-1. In other words, one of the numbers in the range 1-n is missing. Determine which one. When I gave him a standard answer (since I knew this one) of "While iterating through the array once, make separate sums of i and a[i]. The difference at the end is your answer" he said "That's a good, optimal answer. Now give me a different one." That really threw me. Even when he showed me the answer he was thinking of I tried to optimize it for him (and couldn't).

Pardon me while I rant. My new consulting gig is still standardized on Java1.3 because of their app server. They give me a project to work on which is about 80% separate from everything else so I work it standalone on my laptop, using Java1.4 and deliberately staying away from 1.4's new features. I thought. Today I put it back onto 1.3 and it crashes miserably. Turns out that Calendar.getTimeInMillis() is available in 1.4 but protected in 1.3. Why? How should I know? The only subclass of Calendar, GregorianCalendar, does not make it public. And I'm not about to go throwing a new subclass of Calendar around strictly so I can get at the time. That's stupid. They must know it's stupid, that's why it's not protected anymore. But there are always workarounds. Calendar has the getTime() method, which returns a Date object. Forget about how silly I find this (why is it not called getDate()?), but let's remember at this point that Date is 99% deprecated and pretty much exists only to be a placeholder for "current system time". Sure enough, Date *also* has a getTime() method, this one returning a long representing the number of milliseconds. Fine. Perfect. So if you're ever looking at my code and a line like cal.getTime().getTime() causes you to pause and look at it funny, don't blame me.

This is too good to pass up. President Bush jumps on a Segway, and falls off. I'm still looking for video.

So for Memorial Day my wife and I went away for our first vacation with the baby (Katherine, 10 months). Friday night our waitress was on her first day. She demonstrated the extent of her training by dropping a beer (Sam Adams Light) on my daughter. Not the bottle itself (luckily) but it tumbled down right next to her and drenched my child in beer. I couldn't help but feel sorry for the waitress who ran to the back room and yelled, "I just dropped a beer on a baby, am I a bad person?"

But everybody's fine, bottle didn't hit her, she didn't seem to be phased by it in the least. A quick bath later and everybody happy.

I've become intrigued with the idea of combining a projection clock ( like this ) with a scrolling message display like this). There is apparently a big hacker market for scrolling LED displays, but I want to go one step farther and have the same concept without the big ugly hardware hanging on the wall.

Can't quite find the combination of parts I need to start. I have to figure out what the technology is behind the projection aspect (i.e. can I make it project anything or just segmented LED?), and then whether it can be applied to a scrolling display (I assume that if I have n-char LED display and can refresh at a good rate I can scroll). There's a zillion kits that will show you how to drive an LED display from the serial or parallel port (such as a recent slashdot article shows). After that it should be easy. :)

Anybody got any suggestions?

So my wife and I have a regular sushi restaurant we go to about every Friday. The manager knows us, asks about the baby (who was with a babysitter this night) and so on. We're seated and put in our regular order, but to a new waiter. Now, our regular order includes 2 orders of salmon sushi, which would be 4 pieces. Well, the waiter comes back and says, "Do you like salmon?"

"Ummm....I guess....we ordered.....huh?"

"The reason I ask is that you ordered 2 but I screwed up and put you in for 4." Which would be 8 pieces.

"That's too much, we don't want that much."

"Ok, I'll take care of it."

He then, get this, comes back with $4 cash, sticks it under the menu on the table and says "We're all square." Eh?

Manager comes over to bring us our food and chat. He looks at our order sheet and asks, "Two orders of salmon, right? Not four?"

"Right. I guess there was some mistake when he put the order in."

"Ok, don't worry, I fix."

A few minutes later over comes the waiter to actually scold us! "Guys, that was my manager. That's why I gave you the cash so we'd be all square."

"Oh. You want your cash back? I never asked for it."

"No, keep it."

Manager brings out the 8 salmon, as well as an additional order of shrimp for our trouble, and tells us our drinks are free too. I wonder if we'll ever see that waiter again. :) The thing I find funny is that the only real inconvenience was them bringing us more food than we ordered. It's not like they got our food wrong or didn't bring something. My guess at what happened is that rather than tell the chef his mistake, the waiter put the burden on us to keep it quiet with his $4, and thats what pissed the manager off.

For the first time we actually ended up leaving sushi on the boat.

So now I have a question (for my few fans that will read this :)). You're in a sushi restaurant where the staff all knows you. They've poured free food on you (we also often get samples from the chef, and at the very least extra tea when coming in for takeout). While leaving and saying thank you, they're all bowing like crazy people. Do I bow back? How, exactly? Is it better to not bow at all or to do it incorrectly (and possibly offend)?

I have two freaks. I find that weird. One is DarkKnightRadick, who apparently went a little nuts and 'foed' everybody that sounded like a Linux zealot. Okey doke. He has a large foes list.

The other one is this deblau person, and I have no clue. Has no journal. I don't know anything about his sourceforge project. I can't even find any threads we both contributed to in which I might have pissed him off. The strange thing is that he's only got like 2 foes. So I really wonder what I did to get on that short list.

Oh well.

You were running to catch a train, your daughter in your arms. I was waiting in line at Dunkin' Donuts to get a Diet Pepsi. I heard something fall and turned around to see that your daughter had dropped her pacifier. You didn't notice it, but she did, and I watched her face as you kept walking as she watched it sitting there on the floor.

I should have called out after you. Sure, a binky that falls on the train station floor is disgusting, but you can boil it when you get home. At least, you'll know what happened to it. I know the expression on my own daughter's face when she is playing with a toy and it drops out of her reach. She can't ask anybody to pick it up for her, or even alert you that it is gone.

A few minutes later I did scoop up the binky and go looking for you up and down the station. There were only two trains at the platform so I walked up and down looking in the windows hoping to find you, but couldn't. Too little too late.

So, tell your daughter I'm sorry. I felt horrible when I imagined you strapping her into the car seat and saying, "Where's binky?" just like we do, and it being gone, even though she'd know what happened to it and not be able to tell you. Somebody did find it and try to return it, he just didn't try as hard as he could have.

Ok, one of my guys at work brought this one in a few weeks ago, and now that I've been told I'm gonna be given a similar test I thought I'd post it.

You have an array of 1..N-1 randomly sorted integers in which one of the sequence is missing. Got that? So if N=3 you might have 1,3 and 2 is missing.

The challenge is to determine, in as efficient a way as possible, which number is missing. Give you a hint, the answer doesn't involve sorting the numbers at all.

I really enjoy this show. Just saw it the night before Easter, coincidentally enough. The interesting thing to me is the characters and the story. Honestly I don't care about it having to do with the bible, or whether or not it's true. I just think it's a great story. We actually left right before the last two scenes, because I find them boring (I won't spoil them, just in case). But really I think that it's a play about Judas. He opens the show, and to me, he closes it.

On my list of favorite shows, it's in the top 5. I think Les Mis, Hamlet, HAIR, JC Superstar. How's that for a mix? It's all for different reasons, of course. Comparing Les Mis and Hamlet is just weird. :)

[just experienced this one.]

...you call 411 on your cell phone to get a number that is automatically dialed for you, only you wish that the operator issued a redirect, instead of a forward, so that the number is locally cached on your cell phone for later.

I have a phone that has talking caller id. It is the coolest thing ever, because I can sit on the couch and hear "Kerry, it's your parents" and know that my wife can get up and get it herself. Well, that phone broke, and we're on a quest to find a new phone. I ask my wife, "We want another one with talking caller id, right?" She agrees.

Short story, we go looking in several places, can't find one. The one we have isn't made anymore (though I have contacted AT&T to followup). We get one without that feature.

Undaunted I come home and start surfing. And I find CallCo a company that makes a dedicated box that does exactly what I want (and more!) and can attach to any phone. $60. Nice. I show it to her. "Oh," she says, "So it's another box? I don't think we need that. I think the phone we got will be fine."

I stare, flabbergasted. "Didn't we agree earlier that we really loved this feature?"

"It's nice, but we don't have room for more gadgets."

I look over to the small end table where the phone currently sits. It is surrounded by innumerable pictures and Easter-themed dust collectors. I wisely make no comment.

(When she's not looking I keep researching and discover plans for making your own talking caller id using an old 28.8 modem. Since that box is in the cellar I can theoretically get it running there then string some speaker wire up to the top of the cellar stairs....Mwahahaha...)