Robots on Mars

I hope that another part of the legacy will be that the mission has been a source of inspiration for young people, encouraging them to pursue careers in science and engineering and technology. - Steve Squyres

In January 2004, I was in Europe with my brother for a couple of weeks and I was complete mesmerized by CNN International as it reported on Spirit on Opportunity. We were in Greece and there was all that great history to see, but it seemed difficult to impress upon people that we had put ROBOTS ON MARS.

Now, less than a decade later, it seems almost pedestrian to PUT A ROBOT ON MARS! How did the world learn about the success of the landing? The Curiosity rover tweeted it, complete with internet meme and hashtag: @MarsCuriosity "I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL"

I have to admit it makes me sad how much focus we have on robotic exploration over human exploration. As much as we NASA is trying to anthropomorphize our little space explorer it is not going to have the childlike sense of awe and wonder that Neil and Buzz did. At this rate it will not be long before there isn't anyone alive who has actually been to the move. I want my tax dollars going to research that will invest technology to let me fly in space. Get with it!

Coughing on Podcasts

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn. - Alan J. Perlis

Though great effort I've achieved a working relationship with the Apple Podcast app. My old system of working with Podcasts remains slightly better than the new way I have to interact with them, but I drink the Apple Kool-Aid, even when I need to choke it down. That's what Apple aims for, right? A slightly worse user experience?
When I first installed Podcast and just let it go to town importing all my postcasts, subscribing and autodownloading it completely broke background sync services. The first consequence of that was my device could not download anything. Any download would get put in the background sync queue and never download. Podcasts wouldn't download. Apps wouldn't download. WiFi Sync never activated either. The worst part was the sync services would never let the phone go to sleepy mode. So the battery would die after about 6 hours. It took a while to correlate all this crazy behavior with the install of the Podcast app.
I wiped and restored the entire phone. I subscribed to all my podcasts on my computer and sync'ed them to my phone. Same issue. I turned off the auto-download feature for all of them. No fix. I wiped and restored the entire phone. I subscribed to all my podcasts on the phone. Same issue. I disabled auto-download feature. SUCCESS!
So there you have it. Pretty simple really. Just wipe your device and restore. Then subscribe to all your podcasts directly on the device by DO NOT turn on the auto-download feature. Now all you have to do is go into Podcasts every day or so for it to show you what new shows you have to download and you must download them.
There are still a couple problems. If you don't turn on autodownload you can't turn on auto delete. So Podcast will sync all your podcasts to your computer and keep old copies of everything you've listened to. You have to go in manually to delete them. The other interesting thing is that really old episodes (3-6 months old) will randomly show up in the list as new and unplayed. So those need to get deleted.

Skinny Bay Area Folks

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. - Steven Wright

First week at my new job is done with. I'm staying with one of my coworkers who lives in the Berkeley hills. I stayed here, instead of my usual Palo Alto home-away-from-home, under the assumption that the communite from Berkeley to San Francisco would be better than the commute from Palo Alto to San Francisco. That may not be the case.
The commute here involves a 1.2 mile hike down the Berkeley mountains to the BART station followed by the BART ride into the city and another 0.8 mile walk from BART to the office. The commute home is different - because it would likely be something like 20 stories hiking up the hill from the BART station. So instead it's around a 1 mile walk from the office to the bus station followed by a final 0.5 mile walk down the very steep hills to the house. So each day I'm easily walking 20+ stories and 15,000+ steps as part of the commute. This is why bay area people are some of the skinniest in the nation.
What I found most interesting about this whole thing is that by leaving the house at 8am, we get to the office at around 9:15am. So a little over an hour for the commute. If I run the numbers from Palo Alto, it would end up taking just about the same amount of time. Since the baby bullet gets me from Palo Alto in 38 minutes, I would just need to calculate in the time to walk on both ends. Honestly it might be shorter. This week I'm planning to spend one night in Palo Alto, so I'll figure it out.
By the end of this first month at the office I would be a greek god of physical stature. Or something like that.
 

It's Full of Pixels

We often put so much energy into the big picture, we forget the pixels. - Silvia Cartwright

Done with week one of four working full time at my new office while MrsChaos is on the road. What a change it has been to go from the crazy insantiy of my old job to the restful life of the new job. I'm sure I'm still in the week one honeymoon system, but at the same time it will be different. There is no offshore office. None. I've spent the last 10 years with an office somewhere in India and now I wake up in the morning and there is silence.
Which isn't to say that people are working. I spent most of the nights my first week going over notes and translating them into strategies and plans. I saw bugs getting closed. I saw builds getting generated. But e-mail? Silence. The glorious silence of it all.
On another bonus, my job also got me a MacBook Pro with Retina display (and 16GB of ram). That means I know have the MacBook Pro with Retina, the new iPad (iPad3) and the iPhone 4s. There are so many pixels available I can smell them - saturating me.
 

One of Five

We only part to meet again. - John Gay

It's weird. When my wife and I started dating we were living 100+ miles apart, but we saw each other every weekend. Mostly I drove to see her, but sometimes she drove to see me. Yet - we saw each other every weekend. And that was extremely consistent.
We got engaged. We got married. During the past three years there have probably been two weekends we haven't been together. I would guess that 4-days was the longest stretch we've been apart.
That changed this summer. My wife is working as a counselor at a summer camp program for international adoptees and we're apart for five weeks... five weeks.
The future is amazing and so we have the ability to text throughout the day. We can call each other every night. Many nights we can video chat (skype or Facetime). It's kind of funny and weird to think that this might be the longest time we are apart... ever... in our lives.
We talk every day. I miss her.

Best Boss Ever

Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties. - Doug Larson

I'm sentimental. The opening sequence of Up destroyed me. I'm leaving the company this week, but my employee in India sent me a surprise present. "Jordan, you have a package at the front desk." What?!? A package for me? I wasn't expecting a package.

I got a mug that said, "Best Boss Ever." That alone was pretty amazing to me. Then I posted it on Facebook and multiple other former employees agreed with the sentiment. Tear.

No User Serviceable Parts

Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable - Kyle Wiens

A few weeks ago I took my car into for its standard maintenance. They pointed out that one of the systems was leaking and said it wouldn’t be a problem as long as I wasn’t taking any long trips and sticking around for mild bay area weather. I was doing neither so I had them make the fix. They didn’t tell me my headlight was out, which would have been useful, because the next day on my drive from Redwood City to Bishop I got pulled over THREE TIMES for having a headlight out.

The first time I was pulled over on the way into Yosemite by the park patrol. I had no clue why he pulled me over, but he let me know that my headlight was out. No big deal, just get it fixed. About an hour later on the other side of Yosemite I was pulled over the second time. If only these park rangers had some sort of system to communicate with each other over radio waves. The second park ranger let me on my way too; no fix it ticket, just a reminder that it was unsafe. In Bishop, when the third law enforcement office asked me if I knew why he pulled me over I let him know, “it’s probably because I have a headlight out. That’s the reason I got pulled over twice in Yosemite.” He chucked and asked, “when we was the last time you were pulled over?” “About an hour and a half ago.” “Well that’s not so bad. You should get that fixed.”
I tweeted about it and got lots of, “you should change you headlight dummy!” It turns out that there weren’t a lot of AutoZone’s open between Yosemite and Bishop from 9pm to midnight. Even if there were, they probably didn’t have the part.
I spent an hour taking apart my car to get to the headlight. The car manual was worthless. “Open and disconnect the lamp” was not a useful Step #1 so I proceeded to YouTube and watched video after video. There were two types of video’s out there. Type #1 - “I am awesome. Let me demonstrate how I can change the headlight in less than 2 minutes” and Type #2 - “This is really hard and because of the tight spaces involved I cannot get a video of this, but let me describe how it feels.” The only problem in making the change is that there is only about an inch and half of space to fit in a hand to work with and that is not enough space to fit a camera to show what the heck is going on - so removing the headlight cover, disconnecting the electrical cable, detaching the metal pins and removing it is all an operation of tactile hope. Oh - also I had to remove multiple panels from the engine case.
After the hour of excitement I had the bulb in hand and went to AutoZone. $102 and a special order that would take a couple days to arrive. So I called the Toyota dealership. $74 and a special order that would take a couple days to arrive. REALLY?!?
This morning I put the whole car back together again in about twenty minutes. I hope it will be easier this weekend when I try again.