Book Club:

Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope. - Philippe Petit

Book club finished up reading "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann and had our nearly-monthly meeting last Friday.  The book?  Pretty good.  I really enjoyed reading (and by reading, I mean listening on Audible) it as it spanned a bunch of different stories in NYC that intertwine with one another.  One of the central stories that bound things together was that of Philippe Petit doing a tight rope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in NYC.  When I first started reading the book I assumed that the story of the high wire routine was fictional, like all the other stories in the book.  Later I learned that it was a historical event.  In fact, there is a documentary "Man on Wire" that has interviews with everyone involved.  The movie was awesome.
The other stories in the book were fiction, but good fiction.  There are even a few stories on about computer scientists and phreakers that I thought were basically accurate.  That is hard to do and I was impressed by it.
Of course, the other part of book club is just about the company.  Everyone else is a group of friends that met in grad school - and we are connected because Mrs.Chaos worked with some of them.  They are such a different group of friends from what I am used to from college - where everyone I know works in technology, all of them do jobs for the state of California (more or less).

Equipment Failure

It is better to go skiing and think of God, than go to church and think of sport. - Fridtjof Nansen

Every year my company makes a pilgrimage from the office on the peninsula to Tahoe for a ski trip.  I've gone nearly every year, though not skied all of them.  This year was looking to be interesting and different.  The last few years that I've gone skiing there has been a beginner in my group, either a friend, or a coworker or Mrs.Chaos.  This year Mrs.Chaos' school schedule got in the way of making the trip and most of the coworkers I am good friends with have moved on to other places.  I had coworkers going, but many are from India and its their first time in the snow or they are on the exec team and so have do nothing but play in the snow all winter of the double black diamond runs.  It was going to end up being me going solo.

This year we've gotten the long summer and there wasn't a winter.  There hasn't been snow in Tahoe the entire season and the roads have been open and relaxed.  We bought chains for the car in December in case we needed them for a trip through the mountains, but had never opened the box--because of that 'no snow' thing.

On Sunday it was raining in Sacramento and I checked the weather report.  Still no chain requirements by Sunday night.  Monday's forecast was "chance of light snow."  So went to bed warm and cozy and woke up early to discover it raining and see that there were chain requirements to make it to Kirkwood.  That's okay, right?  Light snow and we had the chains we bought back in December!  So I jumped on the road at 7am excited for a good ski day and maybe a chance of a little powder.

They started requiring chains at the second spot where they do that sort of thing and I pulled over and put on the chains.  I've only put chains on a car one other time way back in college.  I'm no expert, but they sure looked loose to me.  But then I thought, "well I'm no expert, and the guy at AutoZone came out and looked at the car and then gave us chains, and he probably knew what he was doing."  But they sure did look loose.  So I crept forward a little bit just to see they had a good bite.  One of the chains just flopped right off the wheel. Flop.

Well, that's not supposed to happen and that confirmed my nagging suspicion: "I am smarter than the dude who works at AutoZone."  At this point it's only 8:30am.  I threw the chains in the trunk, took the exit, and headed back towards Sacramento to my father's house to see if I could borrow his SUV.  The gods were good to me (Note: "Game of Thrones" reference, not paganism) and he was home and the car was in working order.  So I tossed all my stuff into the car and headed back up.

The road was rough and it kept going into and out of chain requirements.  Luckily for me I had a 4WD with snow tires so there was no need to keep switching the chains on and off, but it made traffic slow and I didn't get to the mountain until 11:30am and didn't get on the slope until 12pm.  As I was leaving the lodge for my first run I pulled my goggles over my head and *crack*.  A small little crack appeared in them.  It didn't seem like too big of a deal.  Then I thought, "well I could just get my sunglasses which are... in the car sitting in father's garage. /sigh."  So I jumped onto the slope and started going.  There was fresh snow falling the whole time and it was beautiful.

I did my warmup run and had a great time and then jumped on the high-speed quad for the top of the mountain.  That's how I was trained--do one warmup and then go to the top of the mountain.  Yet once I reached the top I realized the only paths down were black diamond.  There was a time in life when I would proudly boast, "I'm not concerned about my ability to get down any hill.  Some I just can't do very gracefully."  Looking over the top of that black diamond, 10-years since I could call myself a skier, I would not make that boast.  Thankfully knowing how to get down a tough hill is more intellect than muscle and I worked my way down without my fanfare but also without much difficulty.

Except it was warm enough that the snow wasn't staying frozen.  It was melting.  Are my gloves waterproof?  Not so much.  Each chair lift ride up I'm getting coated in snow and my gloves are getting wet through to my fingers.  At least my jacket was fine?  Nope - the zipper kept separating on the bottom side and I would have to unzip the whole thing and struggle through the mismatched separated part and then re-zip it.  All the while my googles were slowly falling apart more and more.  Every time I got off the ski lift the operators would say, "dude you goggles are broken."  "I know, they just broke."  "That's dangerous you need to get off the mountain."  It looked far worse than it was.  They were holding together pretty well with my hat and the back side of the mountain opened up so I was struggling to make it over there.  *crack*  My goggles disintegrated on me.  I did my best to mold them into a semi-solid state and made a break for the lodge--making it there without any kind of problem.  A quick check at the ski shop to learn that a new set of goggles was going to runme $120-$160 and I decided it was time to be done for the day.  But golly-gee, those goggles look awesome!

The car got snowed on - but not that much.  I think that's just business as usual.

Museum Day

I was everything, patriarch, priest, father and judge. - John Sutter

I really love Sacramento and like most people, I spend less time indulging in the city as I wish that I did.  It's the standard thought that people have who move to cities as and adult, "you know, I never go and see the local sites."  I was somewhat lucky to be a kid in this town and be able to go see Sutter's Fort, the Crocker Art Gallery, the Zoo, Safety Town, and dozens of other places on various field trips growing up.
As and adult, I don't indulge that much in the history of this place and all the nooks and crannies around town.  Sacramento has an annual museum day where it opens up all state city and state museums for free entry to encourage us to get out and enjoy the town.
Mrs.Chaos and I went downtown to see Sutter's Fort.  We part in front of the fort almost every weekend when we go swing dancing, but she had never been inside and I hadn't been there since I was in a grade school.  Of course, for a place that hasn't changed in hundreds of years, it hasn't changed much in the past few decades.  It was still fun to see and I really enjoyed reading all the history - especially about what a really good man Sutter was.
There were cannons in all four corners of the fort and it was heavily fortified for attack.  Yet, no one thinks it ever was attacked.  Perhaps it was because Sutter let any travelers come in and stay and share in the meals without paying him.  Perhaps it was because he entered into trade business with the Indians instead of trying to swindle or convert them.  It was nice that least his early years at the fort seemed happy and prosperous.
One of the quotes from an interview late in life had the historian saying something like, "though he was swindled and cheated out of most of what he had built in California he remains a man full of smiles and complimentary of all the kindness around him."  I think some dust in my eye made me a little tearful as I read it.

Sutter's Fort

I say - whether you live in Sacramento or some other town - take some time to visit some historic spots or museums or whatever.  It's cool.  Ya know?

Welcome Back Random Photo

Expert means that you know more than anyone you need to talk to about the subject. - Timothy Ferriss

In the before time, the long, long ago, my website was statically put together on my computer and then uploaded to Lycos for hosting. To make my life easier I moved it the main story handling to blogger and all the hosting over to GoDaddy. As part of the transition I knew there would be a loss of some functionality, but that generally everything would be easier, faster and all around better.
One of the losses in the transition was the "random photo" widget I had running in the header of my website. When I clicked "published" in my old system, it would run a perl file that would find all pictures and build a giant static javascript file that could randomly select and load one. With the most, all of my photos are now hosted in Picasa and I can't do that. So I just let it go. Or so I thought.
But one particular friend (hi Timmy!) told me that I was not allowed to do that! He asked (demanded?) that I fix the random photo display on my website. Since he might name his firstborn child after me, I felt like I needed to figure it out. I have! It works! Let me tell you how!
I am using JQuery and Picasa Web APIs to do it and it wasn't that hard! Wasn't that hard at all with a grand total of 30-lines of javascript that would be a lot more compact if I wanted it to be.
One call to get total number of photos in the album:
https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/username/albumid/albumId?alt=json&max-results=0&fields=openSearch:totalResults
Generate a random number between 1 and the result and then one more call to pull back the URLs for that image.
https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/username/albumid/albumId?alt=json&max-results=1&start-index="+showPhoto
Then you get a random photo!

Falling Behind on Content Consumption

Where you are is not really different than any other place you could be. - Dennis Kas

Over the past few years I've basically had all the time I once spent reading be slowly replaced with other activities.  For a long time I was always reading three books at a time.  One book in my backpack for use on the train to work, on flights, at coffee shops, etc.  One book next to my bed to read for a little while before going to sleep.  One book on my Palm Pilot that I could read when in didn't have the others around: waiting for meetings, standing in line for something, etc.
For the past many years I've always had my iPhone on me and I've slowly migrated away from having a written book towards having podcasts and audiobooks.  I veraciously consume these while I'm cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, commuting in my car and copy-pasting spreadsheets at work.  Over this Christmas, I'm on vacation with Mrs.Chaos' family and have been spending nearly all my time talking with the family and playing with the nieces and the nephew.  Often the nieces are playing make-believe while I'm sitting in the room and it would be the perfect opportunity to read a book on my phone, but I don't have one.  I just have audio and that doesn't work as well.  I am being constantly asked questions and it's just too tough to pause the audio, ask them to repeat, answer the question and then start it again.  Reading is great; it automatically pauses when I look away.  So my list just keeps getting longer and longer.  

Fourth Annual Graham Cracker Shacks

Sharing tea with a fascinating stranger is one of life's true delights. - Iroh (Avatar)

We tend to have two big parties every year. The first party is my birthday, obviously a tradition that I have held for many decades. The other big party is the annual graham cracker shack party which originated with Mrs.Chaos. This year we were a little worried because we invited more than fifty people and we were sure we had enough space for everyone to work! A total of twenty-three people showed up throughout the evening and it was fantastic.
It was also the most diverse group of friends we've gathered that included my usual suspects, people from swing dancing and people from the book club we joined half way through the year (did I mention we're in a book club now?).
Some year we should start presenting awards for things like: most professional looking, most creative, most geeky, etc. Not this year. A few standouts:
1) The Farm. Obviously planned, Meghan brought colored frosting for the red barn and frosted mini-wheats to make hay barrels.

Graham Cracker Shack - The Farm

2) The Tower of Babel -or- the Jenga Tower. Built so high that the teddy graham people started talking other languages. The creator learned that our second year someone had made a seven story tall tower and needed to beat it.

Graham Cracker Shack - Tower of Babel

3) A Prius and a Snowspeeder - proving graham crackers build more than houses.

Graham Cracker Prius

Graham Cracker Snowspeeder

Something I found amazing was at the end of the night, my gang of usual suspects had gone home to bed. These are the people I expect to stick around until 1am or 2am discussing the finer points of playing Ticket to Ride or Dominion. Instead they turned into pumpkins, and the newer groups of dancers and readers stuck around for the final picture. And.... video fly through.

Download Video: MP4

2011 in Review

Work hard, be kind and amazing things will happen. - Conan O'Brien

Another year is coming to an end. What amazing year. This is the first year end video where I actually have videos taken during the year I want to include. This technology thing is crazy!

Download Video: MP4