guod.net

This weekend has been a time to chill out and come down from an intense past couple of weeks at work. I'm beginning to realize the problem with working a lot of hours. I used to think it was "bad" because it meant you couldn't spend as much time with your family. Now I see it a little differently. At least for me, the hardest part is not being away from my wife and daughter--it's changing my schedule once the work is done and I am supposed to "relax". It's the inconsistency that kills me. There's a lot to be said for just 9-to-5ing it. In fact, sometimes I feel like I'd get more done if I only worked 30 hours a week, but I guess that's not the American way. I have a dream of one day having a life like my parents, but without having to go to dental school and deal with patients and blood and guts during my 3-day work week.

I went on a sick run yesterday with my buddy Ara. We weren't really paying attention to time or direction, so the run ended up being close to around an hour and a half (I forgot to turn my watch on). I wasn't planning on doing anything even remotely long this weekend, so I'm using this unexpected long run as justification for eating a big lunch at Le Peep and not running today. Besides, it's the Sabbath, right? ;) Seriously though, there's something about running on the weekends that makes it so much easier to put off than on the weekdays. It's more of an escape on the weekdays, and it feels more like work on the weekends. Oh well. I'm just hoping I can get my stuff together by April for the Greenland Trail. Ara also mentioned doing the Pike's Peak marathon (he's only planning on doing the half-marathon because he doesn't like running downhill--yeah, he's weird like that). I think I'd like to try training with him for that, but I have at least a few months before we would start.

I'm going to go read a book. I've been meaning to comment on an interesting Aldous Huxley short story I read the other day. It really got me thinking about public school math curriculum...but I'll have to save that for later. I could write an entire post on that subject.

I've been extremely busy lately and also pretty sick with this darn cold. I've been living on Sucrets, DayQuil, and NyQuil for the past two days. I'm in one of those situations where, even if you stopped working to recover from being sick, you wouldn't be able to rest just because you're so anxious to get stuff done. There are some fast-approaching deadlines at work, and I've been given the opportunity to do a few projects that I've been waiting for weeks to get my hands on, so I don't really want to take a break right now.

I'm hoping that it quiets down around here soon so I can do some things that I've been wanting to do for a long time. Those things include:

• Switch to netrack as my ISP.
• Buy and configure a soekris box to use as a gateway.
• Set up IPSec for my wireless network.
• Port this blog to rails 9.x.
• Write up a tutorial on how I wrote this blog.
• Go skiing.

At the moment, Elly is out at Barnes and Noble and Tova is fast asleep so I can't spend anymore time blogging... back to work!

I think one of Tova's favorite Christmas presents this year has got to be her Bilingual Baby Swedish video. I put it on for her this afternoon, and she has been sitting quietly watching it ever since. I mean, she watched right through the credits without making a sound. She would look over at me in the kitchen for a few seconds, but then turn back in time to see the grön groda and the gul fågel. It's pretty amazing. I can see why some parents couldn't live without the TV. I feel guilty just letting her tune into the TV like that, but I feel better in knowing that at least she's watching something educational. It's better than Boohbah or Teletubbies or any of that other weird crack-smoking baby stuff on PBS these days.

Elly and I have been hanging out this weekend, not doing much of anything except playing with our new computer (and I've been working a little bit on stuff from work). For the most part, I've been playing this weird dinosaur flying/shooting game called Nanosaur 2, which is totally addictive. Elly, on the other hand, has been a little more productive by learning how to use iMovie. She's already got about a ten minute sequence with music, fades, and titles. I think our parents will go nuts when they get their first Tova DVD. It's funny how when you put music to video, anything becomes sentimental and meaningful.

I went on a long run yesterday, which was absolute torture. I stupidly ate a Qdoba cheese quesadilla before the run, and I paid for it dearly. I was gone for a little less than 2 hours, but I only clocked 1:31 of actual running time. The rest of the time I spent getting familiar with all of the wonderful portable toilets along the Boulder Creek path. Obviously, I won't do that again. The whole experience made me even more negative on the American dining-out experience. Seriously, if you want to cut back on your restaurant expenses, here's the surefire way to do it:

1. Go out to eat somewhere like Qdoba, the Cheesecake Factory, or McDonald's.
2. Go running within an hour or three of your meal.

That's it. I guarantee that after your rich, greasy, oversized quesadilla or filet-o-fish comes up about twenty minutes into your run, you will be swearing off any food except crackers and lettuce for the rest of your life. That's actually been my diet plan lately. I don't really need to watch what I eat, as long as I run everyday. I find that running everyday keeps me accountable in my eating too because I pay for my gluttony immediately.
Well, now I suppose I should go finish up some work while Tova is asleep and Elly is glued to the iMac...

I'm writing this post from a new Apple iMac G5. All I can say is thanks Mom and Dad for a killer birthday/Christmas present. This rocks. I promise I will make a DVD of Tova as soon as possible as a thank-you for this.

More later, but for now I'm off to explore this thing...

Friends,

If you ever find yourself designing a j2ee web UI framework from scratch, please, I beg you, stop and ask yourself, "Why am I reinventing this wheel?" Then ask yourself, "Why is this wheel I'm reinventing lumpier and less round than the wheels I'm trying to copy?" Then stop reinventing that wheel and use some already-established open-source framework. If you have problems with it, contribute and make it better instead of complaining and using that as a reason to reinvent your own misshapen, squeaky wheel.

By the way, this is totally off-topic, but I think the new apple iPod shuffle is really cool. When I was running with an mp3 player, sometimes I would waste a half-hour before a run trying to get new songs onto my mp3 player. What took them so long to think of this?

Well, apparently this site should still be considered unstable and "in beta". Last night I made a quick bug fix and restarted apache, only to log in this morning and find the site totally hosed. A half-hearted look at the logs this evening didn't turn up any hints (I'll get more serious about it this weekend when I have time to sleep and think about things other than work). I've got a feeling it's related to the hodge-podge setup of FCGI I have running here. I had to fiddle with the FCGI gem to get it to install correctly, and I also (lazily) installed FCGI and mod_fcgi from two totally separate sources. So I actually consider it a small miracle that I am still serving pages using FCGI on my poor little PII.

In other news, I went for a good run today after two days off. The first day back after a break like that tends to be very challenging, but I had a lot of mental distraction (work-related) that kept my mind off the fact that my legs were carrying me out and back several miles. Actually, at one point I had this epiphany that running is a weird sport. And here's what I mean: you're moving along, sometimes at a pretty good clip, but then you can totally lose track of where you are and what you're doing. I'll be running through a forest somewhere and then just space out for five minutes as I think about a programming problem or some philosophical question. It's almost like you're riding in a convertible that has these running legs instead of wheels. But then you wake up and you're like, "wait! those are my legs!"

I'm tired and caffeine doesn't even work anymore, so that's how I know it's time for bed.

Well, this is my very first official post on my very first real attempt at a website. Up until now, I've squeaked by without having a real web-presence, unless you count the hodge-podge of php scripts and downloaded CMSes that I had cobbled together on my poor old web server. I think I've been promising myself that I'd write my own site since I got back from Sweden in 2002. I don't know what has taken me so long, although I suppose changing jobs twice, moving three times, getting married, and having a baby are all good excuses for not doing it until now.

Besides, I didn't know it at the time, but what I was really waiting for was an awesome web framework to come along that would make it fun to write my own site. This site is written in Ruby, using a framework called Ruby on Rails. I must give "mad props" (as the kids say these days) to DHH for writing it, and I'd like to thank my friend Ara for never shutting up about ruby. Without Ara's tireless rubyvangelism, this site would probably be a junky php script with database errors on every other click... so thanks guys! I'm afraid that my exposure to Ruby and rails has made me somewhat of a rubyvangelist as well. Of course, I am still living in the belly of the beast (java) at work, so ruby and rails are only a hobby for me. Still, they're fun enough to make me stay up late and neglect my family, which is more than I could ever say for perl or java.

Speaking of staying up late, it's getting late enough that I need to end this post and go to sleep. But before I do, let me ask that, as you peruse guod.net, if you find bugs or have any suggestions for improvements, please drop me a line or post a comment! Later...