A Somewhat Scary Birthday

Yesterday was my 39th birthday. Among other things I got a vasovagal syncope (aka I fainted), a trip to the hospital and an MRI.

Yeah, I’ve had better birthdays. But I’m feeling much better now.

Since Monday, I’ve been having weird numbness and tingling in my hands, feet and midsection. Ever have your foot fall asleep? You know how it feels when your foot wakes up again? It’s kinda like that. After three days of that, I decided it was time to go see the doctor. My doctor is right by my daughter’s school, so I try and schedule my appointments so I can drop her off and save my wife the trip. But the only appointment they had yesterday was thirty minutes before my daughter’s school starts, so I ended up going alone. That turned out to be a very good thing.

Diabetes is one of the things that can cause this numbness and tingling, so my wife and I figured that I shouldn’t eat anything in case the doctor wanted to check my blood sugar. Sure enough, they wanted to run a few blood tests. My wife called as they were drawing my blood – she had dropped off our daughter and wanted to know if I wanted her to stop by.  I told her to stop by if she wanted, hung up, and promptly fainted. Luckily, Jules had decided she wanted to stop by so she was there when I came to.

Apparently, vasovagal syncope is the most common cause of fainting and having your blood drawn is a common trigger. I’ve never had that reaction to having my blood drawn, though I can’t remember ever having my blood drawn while fasting. But I tell you what, I don’t ever want to go thru that again. All I really remember was trying to get my brain to focus, and it wouldn’t. Pretty scary.

Playing it better safe than sorry, I was sent off to the hospital to spend two hours crammed in the MRI machine to get an scan of my brain and spine done. Also not a pleasant experience, but much better than fainting. There was much more ominous talk like “admitting for observation” and “lumbar puncture”, but apparently the MRI didn’t show anything requiring all that so I was sent home.

I still have the numbness and tingling, though it’s somewhat better today than yesterday. The good news is that it’s not diabetes or my thyroid or anything like that and they don’t think the fainting was related at all. Since the tingling and numbness is a little better today, I’m thinking it’s something like a pinched nerve. My doctor wants me to go see a specialist, so I’ve got an appointment with a neurologist in a couple of weeks. We’ll see how it feels by then - in the meantime, I’m taking it easy. I even skipped work again today – five day weekend FTW!

As for my birthday, we did decide to postpone my “FANTASTIC surprise”. Jules had arranged for us to go camping on Orcas island over the weekend. I’m really excited for the trip – it’ll be our first real camping trip outside of the back yard - but I’m not sure if I’ll be up for it this weekend. My parents sent me a bunch of Capitals gear as well as some money for new hockey equipment – I really need a new helmet and elbow pads. My kids both made me awesome cards – Patrick’s new thing is to make pop-up cards. He also made me a paper “cake” crown.

So even though that whole tingling/vasovagal/hospital/MRI thing was a less than fun way to spend the day, I still ended up having a pretty decent birthday. I’m especially thankful for my awesome wife, who does an amazing job taking care of me when I’m sick – much better than I am able to do for her when she’s sick I’m afraid.

Happy Birthday Riley!

Today is my daughter Rileyanne’s fourth birthday. She was born on 5-5-05 (at 5:25pm no less!).

Jules and I were picking out pictures for Riley’s “birthday ribbon” and we came across this one from her birthday party weekend before last. We had it a week early because my mother-in-law had surgery on her foot last week. It was a girls-only princess tea party, so I didn’t get to see her chasing bubbles in person. I loved this picture, but we ended up using one where you could see her face better. Still, I thought it was just too good not to share.

Happy Birthday big girl!

Morning Coffee 172

• I took the kids to see Fly Me To The Moon recently. We had to trek to Monroe (about 30 minutes away) because it's a special 3D movie, and it was only playing there and in downtown Seattle. The movie's story is insipid - three flies stow away on Apollo 11 - but all the space shots were actually kinda cool. It sure felt like they wanted to be scientifically and historically accurate about the the actual mission (well, other than the part about the flies). Patrick really liked it (he wants to build a rocket in the back yard) and Riley sat thru the whole thing with a minimum of fussing.
• I'm a big fan of Joe Biden, so I'm really happy Obama picked him to be his running mate.
• I know it's old news but what the frak was John Edwards thinking? I like his policies, but the arrogance it takes to run for president when you know you've got that skeleton in your closet is mind-boggling.
• On the other hand, watching the Sean Hannity and guest's hypocrisy on Edwards' affair, only to watch them scramble like cockroaches when Colmes points out McCain had admitted to having an affair was frakking hilarious.

OK, onto geek stuff:

• My new boss Dave Remy has moved to a new blog. If you're curious what he was up to for the 10 months he was away from Microsoft, he's happy to share.
• IPy and IRuby developer Curt Hagenlocher (aka Iron Curt) is blogging. Cue the Ozzy...I AM IRON CURT. Or don't. Anyway, he dives in the deep end of the pool - no "hello world" lollyblogging for Iron Curt - digging into the stack implications of rethrowing exceptions and debugging emitted IL.
• Srivatsn writes about static compilation of IPy scripts. Note, we're not talking about static typing - it's still the same good-old dynamically typed IronPython, just packaged up as an assembly, rather than as a bunch of .py files. Note, if you're interested in compiling IronPython, you should check out the PYC sample we published as part of Beta 4.
• Speaking of IPy Beta 4, Shri Borde posts about the COM dispatch support which is enabled by default as of Beta 4. If you're driving COM automation clients (like Office) from IPy, this is a huge improvement over the old mechanism.
• Jeff Hardy has released a new version of NWSGI, a managed version of Python's Web Service Server Gateway Interface. My understanding is that this would allow any Python web stack written against WSGI to run in IIS with IronPython (subject to IronPython's compatibility with CPython). Jeff's been documenting his efforts getting Django running with NWSGI on his blog. Awesome work Jeff! (Thanks for the correction Seo!)
• I never really bought into the "Attention Economy", but Chris Anderson's economic analysis of his DIY Drones site traffic was fascinating.
• Lutz announces "it is time to move on" from Reflector and there was a collective horrified scream in the .NET community. He's handing it over to Red Gate, who promised they "will continue to offer the tool for free to the community".
• I missed this when he posted it in June, but I really liked Nikhil Kothari use of the DLR in Silverlight to cut down on the XAML verbosity in his ViewModel action binding.
• Brian McNamara previews the new Add Reference and file ordering support in the upcoming F# CTP. I'm really looking forward to the project-to-project reference support. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten burned because my main project recompiled but my test project didn't. You just get used to hitting Rebuild All instead of Build. As for file ordering, it's a bit of a bummer that F# requires it, but the new experience is hella better than editing the project file by hand. I'm really looking forward to the new CTP.

Morning Coffee 147

• My son Patrick turns five today. The big treat was his cousin Jack coming up for a visit. Here's a picture of the two of them at Patrick's party on Saturday. My wife has all the details on her blog. Update: My wife just posted a whole slew of Early Patrick Pictures.
• If my son is five, it means this blog is also five - I started this blog about a month before Patrick was born. I never remember to mark the occasion until Paddy boy's big day comes around.
• Major props to the House of Representatives for growing a backbone and not caving to President 30% Approval on telecom immunity...yet. Personally, I'd like to see the House bury the measure completely, though I'm not holding my breath. But given that even the right-wing Washington Times reports "Analysts say FISA will suffice", maybe the House Dems will do the right thing.
• After tearing it up since Thanksgiving, the Caps have gone a little cold. 5-4-1 in their last ten and 2-2-1 in their last five. In the month of February, they're 1-3-1 against SE division opponents. Good news is that they're still even with Carolina (two points behind with two games in hand), half a game up on Atlanta, a game and a half up on Florida and two and a half games up on Tampa Bay.
• Bill Gates announced a new program called DreamSpark to provide college students access to all of Microsoft's developer and designer tools, including Visual Studio, Expression, SQL Server, Windows Server and XNA Creators Club membership. This looks like an outgrowth of the MSDN Academic Alliance program. I think it's a great idea. Update: Looks like high-school students will be able to access the DreamSpark program too. However, since they're minors, they have to get the software via their teachers. (via LiveSide)
• The winners of the XNA Silicon Minds contest have been announced. Of the five winners, Specimen looks the coolest to me. I wish I had more time to get into game development. (Via LetsKillDave)
• Speaking of game development, this week is the Game Development Conference, so be on the lookout for lots of game-related news. Xbox Live VP John Schappert is giving a keynote on "Unleashing the Creative Community". XNA GM Chris Satchell said last year they would "announce full details on, and ... vision for, opening XNA creations to the community" sometime this year. I'm guessing this is said announcement.
• Speaking of Xbox, there's a rumor that Microsoft and Netflix will announce this week that Netflix is bringing their Watch Instantly service to Xbox 360. If true, sign me up!
• Grigori Melnik announces the GAX/GAT February 2008 final release. Key feature is VS08 support. Is it just me, or does calling it the "final release" make it sound like they won't be upgrading GAX/GAT further?
• Speaking of p&p, Grigori also announces the Feb 2008 CTP of Unity, p&p's new IoC container. I've seem lots of folks echoing the announcement, but not much in the way of specifics on Unity itself. For example, Chris Brandsma describes IoC and mentions Unity, but he doesn't cover any Unity specifics. :(
• MSIT EA Nilesh Bhide has started blogging. His first post is on Customer perception of Service Quality in S+S/SaaS. I've worked closely with Nilesh in the past two years, so I'm excited to see him take to the blogosphere. (via Nick Malik)
• I don't know how I missed it, but the MSDN Code Gallery launched last month. As Charlie Calvert explained, this is logical successor to GotDotNet's user samples area. Between Code Gallery and CodePlex, GotDotNet has finally been shuttered for good.
• Telligent, makers of the very popular Community Server, have released Graffiti CMS, which looks like a more flexible content platform than Community Server. (via DNK)
• In somewhat unexpected news (at least, unexpected by me) Microsoft has released specs for the Office binary file formats. I'm not sure why this is happening now, rather than say when we released the specs for the Open Office XML file formats. (via DNK)

Afternoon Coffee 123

• Morning Coffee is late this morning because we went for our Christmas portrait this morning and it took forever. The pictures turned out great though.
• Nick Malik finishes up his series on business operation models by covering the diversification model. Also, Nick's points about the synergy between a diversified model and the coordinated model are spot on. I happen to be a big fan of those models (aka the models with low standardization) which probably drives some of the  more my "unique" perspectives on SOA.
• Scott Guthrie starts out a new series and future technology, this time it's ASP.NET MVC Framework that gets the series treatment. The first entry in the series is a general overview. I wonder why there's no cool code name for the MVC framework? Whatever it's named, I like the auto routing and action rules - it seems very Rails-inspired.
• Over the weekend, Don Box points out that the REST authentication story "blows chunks". I've recently given up on the reliable part of the original "Secure, Reliable, Transacted Web Services" vision - and I never believed the transacted part. Security, on the other hand, is the one part of that original vision that has worked out IMO. My experience with the WS-* security stack has been pretty good, though Dare Obasanjo thinks that OpenID and OAuth are the final nail in the WS-* coffin.
• Speaking of Dare, he goes on to say WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice. He makes the point that "The only times I encounter someone with good things to say about WS-* is if it is their job to pimp these technologies or they have already “invested” in WS-* and want to defend that investment." I gave up pimping evangelizing technology a while back and I don't want to be in the position of defending a bad investment, so I'm spending lots of time looking at REST.
• Jesus Rodriguez takes a look at the Managed Services Engine and comes away excited. Jesus is a self-described "strong believer" in SOA governance. I'm a self-described strong disbeliever in SOA governance, so MSE sounds like more of the Worst of Both Worlds to me.
• A little light reading: I pulled Applied Cryptography and A New Kind of Science out of my garage last weekend. Plus my copies of RESTful Web Services and Programming Erlang just arrived yesterday.

Morning Coffee 121

• My daughter had her tonsils & adenoids out on yesterday. It was a routine procedure and it went by-the-numbers, but any parent will tell you it's hard to see your kid in a hospital bed.
• Given the previous bullet, I'm not at the SOA/BPM conference for the big announcement. Don't worry, there's lots of other folks covering the news.
• It was a crappy sports weekend in the Pierson house. Va Tech snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, Southern Cal never led at Oregon, the Capitals lost twice, and the Redskins got blown out by the Pats. At least the Caps won big yesterday in Toronto.
• Speaking of the Capitals, Peter Bondra retired Monday. I still think it's a travesty that he didn't spend his whole career in DC, but I've made my peace with it.
• Nick Malik has a great series on business operations models and how they apply to SOA. Regular readers should be unsurprised that I favor low standardization, though I can see the value of high integration. That makes the Coordinated Operating Model my fav, though I can see the benefit of the Diversified Model as well. I can't wait to read what Nick has to say on changing models.
• Speaking of Nick, I'm doing a roundtable with him on "Making SOA Work in the Enterprise" @ the Strategic Architect Forum. Should be fun. Sorry for the lack of linkage on this, but it's an invite-only event.
• Jezz Santos has a new series of white papers on building software factories. First up "Packaging with Visual Studio 2005"
• Aaron Skonnard has a new whitepaper on using the WCF LOB Adapter SDK with BTS 2006 R2. I've been building one of these things recently, so I'm looking forward to checking that out. (via Sam Gentile)
• Tim Ewald looks at Resource Oriented Architecture (when did ROA become a TLA?) and wonders "what if your problem domain is more focused on processes than data?" I wonder that all the time. (via Jesus Rodriguez)
• It's not just durable messaging - Libor Soucek also disagrees with my opinions on centralized control. I agree 100% with Libor that centralized management would make operation's lives "much, MUCH easier" as he puts it. However, that doesn't make it feasible at any significant scale. Furthermore, I wouldn't describe an approach that requires that "all services adopt [the] same common management interface" as "pragmatic". Frankly, just the opposite.

Morning Coffee 98

• Morning Coffee was canceled on Thursday and Friday on account of a kidney stone. So not fun. Luckily, it was a little one and it was alone, but I will be listening very closely to my doctor's advice to avoid another.
• Took the kids to see Ratatouille last Tuesday and saw Transformers yesterday with my wife due to fluke babysitter luck. I liked Ratatouille, but I'm not sure it's the 51st best movie of all time. On the other hand, major props for making a kid movie with a significant lack of toy tie-ins. Ratatouille is a better movie that Cars, but I don't see my four year old boy trading in is Lightning McQueen toy car for a Remy the Rat. Transformers on the other hand obviously did not forgo the toy tie-ins! Still, it wasn't bad. Kinda reminded me of The Rock with a bigger budget.
• Micahville listed DevHawk on it's list of 69 Tech Blogs That Don’t Suck. Thanks!
• David Ing boldly writes that C# is getting fat. Or maybe it's just big-boned. My take: no question that integrated query is a big feature that covers a lot of surface area. But given the prevalence of databases and other queriable stores, it's critical to improving programmer productivity. Go read Todd Proebsting's talk on Disruptive Programming Language Technologies. Two of his candidates for disruptive language technologies were Database Integration and Manipulating XML. LINQ neatly covers both.
• According to John Shewchuck, the new BizTalk Services release is available. However, when I click on the "what's new" page, it tells me they're experiencing technical difficulties. (Their error page is Oops.aspx. Funny!)
• Scott Hanselman has Programming Personas 2.0. Who are you? I thought I was and "Order n" Architect (the quote "Where's the whiteboard" is spot on) but my CS background isn't as strong as the persona's.
• Sam Gentile is starting to dig into Concurrency and he has a great list of links that have influenced his design.

Morning Coffee 97

• For the first six months of 2007, I posted 158 times in 181 days. I'm obviously off the pace I set in January of averaging a post a day, but I am averaging just under nine tenth of a post per day. Not bad. At this rate, I'll post almost as much this year as I did the last two years combined.
• It was a great family weekend. Saturday, three of my friends helped me move an upright piano that we got used for a great price. Luckily, one of said friends is also a physics teacher, otherwise I don't think we could have gotten that heavy thing in the truck. To say thanks, we BBQed for them Saturday evening. Then yesterday we took the kids to see a Sesame Street Live show. Both days were beautiful, which my wife greatly appreciated.
• The Caps hit the free agent market running yesterday, picking up Tom Poti (four years, $14 million) and Victor Kozlov (two years, $5 million). They weren't the A-list free agents, but they both seem like solid pickups. According to Japer's Rink, the Caps were about $6.5 million under the new cap minimum. These two signings just about close that gap, but it doesn't sound like they're done. That's good news for Caps fans.
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on LINQ to SQL. While I've seen most of this before, the cool thing Scott shows is hovering over the LINQ to SQL result and bringing up the exact SQL statement in a debugger window. That's pretty cool.
• Nick Malik is now "Mr. SOA" inside MSIT. As you might imagine, I'll be working with him fairly closely. Actually, he's late to a meeting with me as I type this.
• John Shewchuk announces a new version of BizTalk Services coming soon. The big new feature is access control for services exposed via the BizTalk Services. If you can't wait, you can try out the new stuff in their pre-production environment right now, before it's live. Is this a beta of a beta?
• Soma announces the MSDN Small Business Developer Center. I took a quick look thru the site. Strangely enough, it doesn't cover Dynamics - Microsoft's business software primarily targeting small and medium size businesses.
• Ted Neward called object/relational mapping the "Vietnam of Computer Science". David Chappell gives us our next war / technology analogy, declaring that the REST vs. WS-* war is over, ending in a truce like the Korean war rather than "crushing victory for one side".
• Like Jeff Atwood, I didn't realize About Face has been updated, twice. I am a huge fan of the first edition, but Jeff calls About Face 3 "the best edition of this classic yet". I just ordered a copy for myself.
• David McGhee transcribed a fantastic session with Dr. Don Ferguson at the Australian Architecture Forum on SOA/ESB integration in the real world. Go read the whole thing. Udi Dahan pulls out the quote "there is no such thing as a centralized ESB." Amen to that. My other favorite quotes from this discussion is "The temptation is often to get everything in a repository, but often you cannot rely on people to put everything in the registry" and "there is sometimes the “Highlander” philosophy of there can be only one service". If you're design depends on centralization and/or significant change in human behavior, it's doomed from the start. Frankly, it's amazing how often that happens.
• In response to my What is the Rails Question post, Hartmut Wilms wonders why "the .NET community (for the most part) ignores Open Source Projects". I wonder the same thing, though I don't think you can lump the whole .NET community together on this. While some parts of the community ignore anything they can't download from MSDN, other parts strongly embrace open source projects.

Morning Coffee 91

• My wife loves me. I'm a very lucky man.
• I'm starting to really dig Safari Books Online. Having a tablet really helps here, I can sit in bed and read and it's ALMOST like reading a real book. Is there an offline experience? Something like the NYTimes WPF Reader app would be killer.
• I'm not a Twitter guy, but I like the idea of using it to publish CI results. Not quite as cool as using the Ambient Orb, but close. (via DotNetKicks)
• Soma details the dogfood usage of TFS in Developer Division. Sorta interesting if you're into knowing that stuff. Brian Harry apparently has much more.
• I realize that linking to Pat Helland every time he writes something is fairly redundant. If you want his feed, you know where to find it. But he writes great stuff! The latest is Accountants Don't Use Erasers, which talks about append-only computing. His point that the database is a cache of the transaction log is mind blowing, yet makes total sense.
• Bruce Payette blogs a PS DSL for creating XML documents.
• Jesus Rodriguez details WCF's new Durable Service support in .NET 3.5. I get the need for the [DurableServiceBehavior] attribute, but do I really have to adorn each of the service methods with [DurableOperationBehavior] too? That seems redundant. Also, I wonder how this looks at the channel layer?
• Speaking of WCF's channel layer, I recently picked up a copy of Inside Windows Communication Foundation by Justin Smith. This is the first book I've found that has more coverage of the channel layer than the service layer, so I like it.
• Dare writes about Web3S, Windows Live's general purpose REST protocol. Apparently, WL started with Atom Publishing Protocol, but found that it didn't meet their needs around hierarchy and granular updates. David Ing says it's "not that similar" to my concept of REST, but I going to read the spec before I comment.
• Scott Hanselman writes about how he learned to program and some thoughts about teaching his son. Patrick has recently started expressing interest in programming (he want's to do what Daddy does). At four, I'm thinking I'll start him on Scratch (though ToonTalk looks interesting). As he gets older, I was thinking about Squeak, though I'm a smalltalk noob. I really like Scott's idea of creating a connection to the physical world via something like Mindstorms. Patrick loves Lego almost as much as his dad, so that would be cool.

Morning Doughnuts 7

Once again I get the chance to fill in for Harry while he is gone. I will attempt to keep up with the high standard he has set.

• Be careful with trampolines. I have a four year old that was bouncing on a trampoline this weekend. He twisted his knee slightly on landing, and decided that the fastest way to get comfort was to jump off the edge. His knee gave out and he fractured his tibia. I don't think this was how he planned to start his summer. At least he is pretty calm about the whole thing.
• It looks like there is a good product out there named CliSecure to obfuscate .net code. From what I was able to read it looks like a pretty decent product, even hiding the code while its in memory. (via Larkware)
• TechEd started this morning. While I am sure Harry will be giving some on-site reports there is a link to the virtual site here.
• There is a great video showing Gregor Hohpe talking about SOA, and the many unrealistic claims in the industry. If you have read any of Hohpe's work it is clear that he has a great understanding of the topic. (via Nick Malik)
• The NBA Finals will begin this week with the Spurs playing the Cavaliers and King LeBron. I wonder if this will help rescue the NBA from what seems to be a real apathy on the part of the average fan. Other than the series between Dallas and Golden State earlier in the play-offs it really seems there haven't been any compelling stories. The NBA really needs a shot in the arm to become relevant again.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Today is my father's birthday. Yes, I realize mine was Monday. To make it even weirder, my brother Ted's birthday was yesterday. Let's just say this week was hard on my mother when Ted and I were kids.

Happy Birthday Dad! He's on the road today, so he won't see it until after his birthday is officially over, but it's the thought that counts, right?

Morning Coffee 74

Light on the geek factor this morning:

• My daughter Rileyanne turned two Saturday so we had a little pool party. One of the major selling points when we bought the house was the double sized hot tub in the back deck. So even though it was only in the mid 60s, we could still get in and swim.
• Saw Spiderman 3 yesterday. I liked the first two very much, but this one is iffy at best. The problem with these blockbuster movie series is the perceived need to be "bigger" than the previous installments. So we get more effects, more action, more villains. But that usually means less drama and less story. Spiderman 3 is no exception. Here's hoping that Christopher Nolan's Batman series doesn't suffer the same fate.
• Lost announces an end date. There will be three more shortened seasons for a grand total of 48 episodes (plus the three remaining this season). While I love Lost, I'm glad they're going this route.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: according to their blog, QubeTV.tv is "the conservatives’ answer to YouTube". Two thoughts on this: First, Having a site of conservative videos for conservatives seems like preaching to the choir. Second, to quote Andrew Sullivan: "It's not a good sign when a movement cannot engage the mainstream."
• John Shewchuk as more details of the BizTalk.net connectivity service. Hybrid mode and Direct connect are nice optimizations, but don't change the messaging semantics at all. But pub/sub eventing does, so I'm primarily interested in that capability.

Parent's Visit Coffee

Obviously, there's some fairly big news coming out of Las Vegas this week. I'll get to that either later today or tomorrow. In the meantime, here's what I did with my parents this past weekend.

• My parents arrived Thursday at the same time Patrick has to be dropped off for school. My office is fairly close to his school, so Julie dropped him off with me on her way to the airport. He and I ate lunch together and then I took him to school. Always fun to spend extra time with the kids.
• Friday was Take Your Dad to Work day - at least it was for me. We had a team lunch out and he sat in on a couple of meetings. He's spent quite a bit of time on IPv6 recently, so infrastructure discussions like my group's are right up his alley. According to one of my team's PMs, my meeting behavior is "much better" when he's around.
• Saturday, we went to the Museum of Flight. I don't know who was more excited, my son or my father. Dad's favorite plane is the Blackbird, so he really enjoyed sitting in the SR-71 cockpit. It was raining the last time we went to the museum, so this was the first time I had seen Air Force One and the Concorde.
• Sunday, we watched the Mariners beat the Royals. It's been three long years in the basement for M's fans, but they have been slowly getting better year over year. Not sure they can make the playoffs this year, but maybe they can at least finish over .500.
• Yesterday, we went to the Woodland Park Zoo. My parents are members of FONZ and my kids love the Zoo. We had fun, though after three and a half days of "go go go" with my parents the kids were a bit worn down. The gorillas were very active, banging on the glass and running away - sort of the gorilla version of ding dong ditch. Another highlight was getting to see the tiger cub.
• My parents flew home last night on the red eye, and everyone is very sad to see them go. It had been about eight months since we had seen them. Here's hoping it won't be that long before the next visit.

Morning Coffee 68

• My wife and I celebrated our seven year anniversary over the weekend. She rocks. 'Nuff said.
• Over the weekend, Gov.Gregoire signed a bill that protecting the rights of same-sex couples. It's not the same as full marriage rights (which long time readers know I fully support) but it's a step in the right direction.
• I picked up the Xbox 360 HD DVD player over the weekend. Rented Batman Begins and it looks awesome. However, it wasn't the stunning difference between standard and high def TV programming. I wonder if my five year old HDTV is showing it's age.
• Scott Guthrie continues his LINQ series with a post on the new Query Syntax in C#3/VB9. While this is feature is great for those who are using LINQ to SQL, it does force pretty much all LINQ to whatever providers to support the from-where-orderby-select pattern. But not all query sources want to be limited to that model. For example, if you wanted to do a LINQ to Data Warehouse, wouldn't you want more flexibility in your query syntax?
• I didn't realize Steve Jones had a blog. At least, I think this Steve Jones is the Steve Jones that I know. But I'm not sure. Either way, it looks good so I subscribed... (via Sam Gentile)

The Ramblings of a Mourning Hokie

As I mentioned this morning, my brother went to Virginia Tech. In trying to come to grips with what happened in Blacksburg yesterday, he wrote the following and asked me to post it here.

My name is Ted Pierson and I am a Virginia Tech Alumni, member of the class of ’95. As I heard and watched the events that unfolded on Monday April 16^th, my heart broke for the families, students and faculty at Virginia Tech. While I lost no one that I knew personally, I feel that I lost 32 of my fellow brethren. The community of Virginia Tech reaches well beyond the confines of the campus, and we all feel a deep sense of pride to wear our Hokie Colors to show support for our beloved home. We also now feel a deep sense of loss. In the coming months, there will be many political debates as to how this could have been prevented, gun control and proper security measures. Please remember, this is more then a political issue to be debated, it is a humanitarian issue. There can be, and never will be a rational explanation to the horrible tragedy the felled the VA Tech campus yesterday. We as a society need to learn a love of our fellow man/woman. We need to look as a people, beyond the surface level issues that we deal with on a daily basis, and ask ourselves, is this the world we want to leave to our children, one that views the death of our fellow humans as trivial or platforms for political gain. The only lesson that we can learn from this is that we are all one race, one gender, one person, and that we need each other, regardless of race, creed, or other distinctions. I urge all readers of this to wear orange and maroon in a showing of support to the Hokie Nation. We are all Hokies today.

Morning Coffee 64

• I took my son to the Pacific Science Center this past weekend to see the Grossology exibit. His favorite was the barfing machine, but we also got to play Urine: The Videogame, stand inside a giant nose, work the burping machine, climb the scab wall and slide down the throat into the stomach and come out thru the colon. We also checked out the dinosaur exibit (Patrick's favorite part: petrified dino poop), Kids Works and the Peter and the Wolf laser show. It was awesome.
• This week's Big News^tm is the rebranding of WPF/E as Silverlight. Tim Sneath has the rundown, including the news that more news about Silverlight is coming at MIX. Personally, I think Silverlight is a great name. I was worried it was going to be another W*F name. (I'm waiting for the day that MSFT marketing tries to rebrand Win32 as the Windows Technical Foundation).
• Gianpaolo Carraro writes about what happens when a SaaS company bites the dust - i.e. "what happens to my data?" I expect that this is one of the aspects of SaaS that you have to weigh, though I doubt most companies will explicitly think about what happens if their SaaS provider goes belly up. As the SaaS market expands and more companies will go belly up (I agree w/ GP 100% that this isn't SaaS specific, rather a natural force of any market) how much will that drag on SaaS adoption? I'm thinking it'll be a fairly significant drag, but the SaaS market will eventually rebound.
• Nick Malik picks up the decentralization meme is started last Friday and compares enterprise architecture to city zoning boards. In general, I agree with Nick's "not in a vacuum and not with a heavy hand" comment, but even more with his point that "we haven't figured all it out yet." Most EA efforts I've seen have been heavy handed and fairly divorced from reality (aka in a vacuum). More on this topic in the future.
• Kirk Evans closes the loop on city planning with a reference to Pat Helland's Metropolis work. Pat's work has been a huge influence on me. I often repeat Pat's point about cities being "interconnected yet independent". Services need to be interconnected yet independent also.
• Roger Wolter has a new Master Data Management whitepaper out, this one MDM hubs. I was literally talking about MDM on a conf call this morning, so Roger's timing is impeccable.
• I haven't read RADAR Architecture yet, but the fact that DAR in the acronym stands for "Dumb-Ass Recipient" made me laugh. (via Sam Gentile)
• MIT Media Lab has cointed the latest 2.0-ism: Human 2.0. I love Nick Carr's take on it: "We're definitely overdue for an upgrade - it seems like we've been stuck in Version 1.x for a few hundred thousand years, and that was after a beta that went on for freaking ever. Still, I think I'll probably hold off until 2.01 or 2.02. I don't want to be on the bleeding edge for this one."

Morning Coffee 55

• Many years ago, I picked .net instead of .com as DevHawk's TLD. My old pal Chris picked up devhawk.com and redirected it to the site because he got tired of typing "devhawk ctl-enter" into the browser address bar and getting nothing. He must have let it lapse because now devhawk.com points to what looks like a splog in development. Part of me is annoyed, but a bigger part of me just doesn't give a shit. You - dear reader - have found this site, and that is all I care about.
• A couple of weekends ago, I re-wired my living room to enable surround sound. It meant adding a receiver to the mix, and that pushed us into three remote territory, which is too many. So I picked up a Logitech Harmony Universal Remote, since they have one specifically for the Xbox 360. So far so good, but I'm not sure my wife likes it much yet. However, their remote config application doesn't run on Vista yet, so I had to bust out the old laptop to get it working.
• I've written about Spec# before, but I've never experimented with it. MS Research just released a new version that support VS05, so here's my chance. (via Larkware)
• Speaking of MS Research, the Deepfish project has released a new tech preview. However, Loke Uei is reporting they've already maxed out on test accounts. (via Major Nelson)
• Jeff Atwood says there's no substitute for learning on the battlefield. I always say that the only way to get good at something is to suck at it for a while. Different words, same concept.
• According to Naysawn Naderi, the "majority" of unit test features are being added to the Orcas Pro version. This is obviously good news, though personally I agree with Brad that they should available separately VS. Not sure it needs to be in the framework itself, inclusion in the .NET Framework SDK is probably sufficient. I also think there should be unit test support in the VS express editions as well. (via Knowing.NET)
• I've been digging Geekdad, but most of the stuff is for older kids. I mean, I'd love to take my daughter karting, but she's only two and can't reach the pedals! However, I'm itching to try out today's post on image searching with younger kids. The kids love to draw on my new tablet, so I'm thinking of not only searching but snipping these images into OneNote for them to doodle on.

Vacation Coffee

After a week's vacation, I'm back in the office. I might have left with an empty inbox and newsreader, but I returned to nearly 300 emails and over 500 news items. Actually, 300 emails for a week is actually really good - most of them are in my "low priority" folder which means they are internal mailing list emails rather than things I actually have to deal with.

Major thanks to Dale for keeping the lights on around here while I was gone. With my renewed commitment to blogging this year, I'd rather not see DevHawk "go dark" for a week while I get some R&R. If you liked what Dale had to say, go subscribe to his blog. I hope he keeps up with his daily posts, now that he's no longer on the hook around here.

Anyway, since I have little idea what's going on in the technical blogosphere, this is a vacation wrapup instead. Normal Morning Coffee returns tomorrow.

• We spent a week in Southern California. Two days with my brother-in-law in Santa Barbara, two days at Disneyland and two days with my uncles in Palm Springs (with travel days between). We had a blast, but that's a lot of driving. Next vacation, we're going somewhere we don't know anybody and staying put the entire time.
• My brother-in-law has three kids, including a son a few months older than Patrick and a daughter a few months younger than Riley. I've long said I would never move back to Cali, but seeing them all play together made me think it might be worth it. I don't have any cousins (my father was an only child and neither of my mother's two siblings had kids) so I didn't realize what a big deal it is. I think Patrick misses his cousin Jack more than he misses Disneyland.
• When I lived in LA, I used to have a season pass to Disneyland. But seeing it thru my kids' eyes made it brand new again. Our two days in "The Happiest Place on Earth" were a blast, though in retrospect we should have taken a day to rest and hang out at the pool between the two days.
• Riley's favorite ride was Pirates of the Caribbean (which she calls "Yo ho ho"). My friend Brooke told Jules that little kids "natural reaction" is to hold on tight during the drops, but Riley put her little hands up and shouted "Wee!" They recently added some elements from the movies (Capt. Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones) to the ride. My wife and I were worried they were going to ruin it, but the changes were fairly small and subtle and we liked them.
• Patrick's favorite ride was Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters but the Jedi Training Academy was a close second. His Jedi training was my favorite moment at Disneyland. He got to train with a lightsaber and fight Darth Maul. Here's a video clip of my young Padawan:
  
  The big problem with Jedi Training Academy is that they only pick a limited number of "younglings" every show. Patrick didn't get picked the first time we went, and frankly I pushed him out there the second time without him officially getting picked. You could conceivably waste an entire day at Disneyland attending all six Training Academy shows and never get picked. That sucks.
• Biggest disappointment of Disneyland: Patrick being 1" too short for Star Tours. I was bummed.
• Disney's California Adventure is a nice adjunct to Disneyland, but as a stand alone park it pretty much blows, though Jules and I did enjoy the Tower of Terror.
• Disneyland seems to becoming Disney-Pixar Land. Pixar movies are the basis for several of the newer rides, including the new Finding Nemo ride opening this summer. There was an article in the Disneyland Pixar Evolution in the airplane magazine so I'm not the only one who's noticed.
• After two days in Disneyland, I expected Palm Springs to be a let down. But instead it was a nice casual cool down after two hectic days in the Magic Kingdom. Plus it was great to see my Uncles, who we hadn't seen since last summer when my brother got married.
• We flew home Saturday so we could have a casual Sunday before heading back to work and school today. We watched Phantom Menace last night, though the kids are still a bit young for it. We decided on Episode I instead of the original Star Wars because it has a little boy (i.e. like Patrick) and a fight with Darth Maul (i.e. like Patrick). But it doesn't hold a candle to the original trilogy.

Morning Coffee 15

• I was checking out the ASP.NET community site, and I noticed a small "Microsoft Communities" toolbar across the top. There's a little menu that links to other MS community sites like Channel 9 and MSDN Blogs. I'm surprised the NetFx3 community site isn't included.
• My teammate Dale is blogging about Proper SOA. He lays out 6 Proper SOA principles, and then drills into the first three: meets business needs, requires governance and responds to changing business drivers. I expect to see posts on the remaining principles this week. Maybe Dale should turn this series into an article.
• Speaking of articles about architecture, Architecture Journal 10 is online as a PDF. This issue's topic is Composite Applications.
• Malbolge is a programming lanugage that is "specifically designed to be difficult to program in." Here's Hello World in Malbolge:
  (=<`$9]7<5YXz7wT.3,+O/o'K%$H"'~D|#z@b=`{^Lx8%$Xmrkpohm-kNi;gsedcba`_^]\[ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA@?>=<;:9876543s+O<olm
  Seriously. Actually, it's worse than it looks. The effect of any instruction depends on where it is located in memory.  Malbolge is so difficult, it took a month to write a Lisp program to generate that program. However, Lou Scheffer thinks we should think about Malbolge as a cryptosystem. I wonder if it could be used for obfuscation? (via Good Math, Bad Math)
• Nat Torkington blogs about teaching kids to program. He makes the point about "them to think in terms of small steps". I was lucky to have a computer teacher in elementary school who did something similar. She had us write down instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she then followed them to the letter. For example, if you wrote, "spread peanut butter on the bread" with out first instructing her to take out a slice, she'd happily spread peanut butter on the entire loaf. (via reddit)
• To this day, my wife thinks the peanut butter and jelly lesson negatively affected my ability to communicate with "normal" people. She'll even say "peanut butter and jelly" when she thinks I'm being particularly obtuse in my communication.

Morning Coffee 9

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up... live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr

• My boss asks "Are We There Yet?" on fulfilling Dr. King's dream. Sadly, the answer is no. I think we're making progress, but we're not "there" yet.
• No back to back trips to the Super Bowl for the Seahawks. They had chances to win it both down the stretch as well as in overtime and they couldn't capitalize.
• I blogged about "Politics 2.0" back on election day. Here's an article about viral video in politics that's very Politics 2.0.
• It finally warmed up enough yesterday to make a snowman. Patrick named the snowman "Capa" which is what he call my father. Apparently, my father and the snowman have the same bushy eyebrows (according to my wife). It's supposed to snow again tonight, so maybe we can make a "Granny" or "Nana" snowman (snow-woman?).
• The new season of 24 started last night. Please review Larry's list of the Top 10 Things I've Learned About Computers From The Movies and Any Episode of '24'.
• My wife posted a picture of Patrick and I playing Lego Star Wars II. We really enjoy it, but I need to watch my language when we play. When we were fighting the Rancor, Patrick announced to his mommy that we were fighting the "big fucking monster". Woops! Patrick already knows several words that your not supposed to say (and he reminds us if we ever use them) so I guess should add that to the list. Or I could start saying frak instead.

Playing in the Snow

It was a little too cold to make a snowman at my house, so we headed over to the big hill near our house for a little sledding. The hill was pretty trashed - we weren't the first ones to down the hill - but we all had a fun time nonetheless.

Here's Mommy and Riley, riding together:

And here's Patrick, riding by himself like a big boy:

Riley calls Patrick "Bubba" because she can't say "brother".

And since I promised my teammate Maureen a snowman photo, here's the last one we built:

On top of all this snow play and sledding, I got my STS working with WCS. More on that tomorrow.

Morning Coffee 8

The news got the amount of snow right, but the day wrong. Instead of hitting yesterday morning, the storm hit yesterday at rush hour. My boss declaired today "1st Annual Architect work from home day" even though we've already had several weather induced work from home days this winter.

• Growing up in Northern VA, when we got snow it was fairly consistent. If there was about four inches at my house, everyone had about four inches. Here, it seems like there's much more variance. My teammate Buzz who lives only 15 minutes from me (when it's not snowing) said he had 10" of snow while I have about half that.
• Speaking of Northern VA, the last few winters have been easy on us but hard on my parents who still live in McLean. This year seems to be the opposite. The forcast for McLean today is only 45, but it's supposed to get up to 65 by the weekend.
• As it turns out, my parents are in the Bahamas right now anyway, so while I make a snowman with my kids today, they're probably on the beach!
• I almost didn't make it home yesterday as I was trying to get my STS working with CardSpace. I have WCS workng in a direct client to service scenario, but not federated with an STS. I probably would have stayed there all night saying "just one more config tweak, and I'm sure it will work" if I had gotten snowed in.
• Speaking of WCS, check out Kevin's screencast on extending ASP.NET's built in SQL membership provider to support WCS. And Garrett published a WCS security token processor for .NET 1.1 and 2.0 a couple of months ago. So you can use WCS on your website, even if you don't have .NET 3.0 on your server. Pretty cool.
• My old teammate John doesn't like the JBOWS acronym. I agree with John that defining a "proper" SOA is waste of time best left to SOAholes. But web services != SOA. Making a distinction between having an architecture where the business and IT levels that rely on independent capabilities and services versus using web services as the protocol between tiers of a distributed application and hoping that you'll be able to integrate in the future makes sense to me.

Morning Coffee 5

I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
I've been waiting for this moment, all my life, oh Lord
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, oh Lord
In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins
Covered by Nonpoint on the Miami Vice Soundtrack

• It was a tough weekend in the Pierson house. For several hours on Saturday, we thought we were going to have to put our dog D'art down. My wife has the details, but the good news is that he had spine trauma, but nothing broken and he seems to be back on his way to his old self.
• I grew up in Northern Virginia, so I'm a long time member of the Dallas Cowboy Hater's Club. So watching them snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against my adopted Seahawks was sweet.
• Last night, Bill Gates kicked off CES with the usual assortment of product news and announcements. The biggest news, in my opinion anyway, is IPTV support for Xbox 360. (Did you know MSFT has a TV product division?) Details are fairly scarce at this point, but I'm hoping this allows for independent broadcasters to directly reach consumers, much like blogs have done for independent writers. Can I use IPTV to launch my own TV channel? Imagine the possibilities. I'd like a Washington Capitals channel, so I can watch post game highlights on my big screen TV rather than on my computer. A Rooster Teeth channel would also be nice.
• No coding this past weekend, though I did reinstall XNA Game Studio Express on my recently paved dev partition. I tried playing Lego Star Wars II with my son over the weekend and he's still having trouble learning how to use the controller. I was thinking I might try making some simple "games" to help him learn.

Us the Inclusive

With the real and serious problem we face in this country - the civil war in Iraq, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, rebuilding New Orleans, etc. - it boggles the mind that we waste any time at all on faux controversies such as the so-called "War on Christmas". Getting Wal-Mart to use "Christmas" instead of "Holiday" in their marketing seems like a dubious accomplishment at best.

But where I rail against such stupidity, my brilliant wife writes poetry. One of Julie's conservative friends sent her an insipid poem that's been making the rounds on the Internet called "How The 'Left' Stole Christmas". I must have missed Wolf Blitzer changing his name to "Wolf Blitzen" or the Senate passing legislation to take away Christian's faith and forbid them to speak of salvation and grace.

My response would have simply been "Read the First Amendment, idiot!". My wife, however, wrote a poem of her own in response. Check it out.

Let It Snow

My wife wanted snow, and main Microsoft campus got it. Not much - less than an inch by my measurement - but enough to snarl traffic getting off campus. Jules and I decided it would make more sense for me to grab dinner in the campus cafe and wait out some of the crowds rather than brave the snow and traffic on a nearly empty tank of gas.

Of course, I don't work on campus any more. My office is way down in Issaquah. Unluckily for me, I had a meeting on main campus today. It was a great meeting - talking about my project with some field architects. But I didn't expect to get trapped on campus by snow or I would have blown it off. Next time, I need a meeting room with windows!

Update - It took me only 45 minutes to get home, which is actually fairly typical for me to get home from main campus in the evening. There must have been an accident on 520 because when I crossed the freeway by campus, it was bumper-to-bumper as far as I could see in both directions. But when I passed the 520 exit by my house, there was only a trickle of cars coming off it. The side streets were surprisingly empty. Maybe everyone was afraid they'd be impassible with snow? Takes more than an inch of snow to stop me and my 4WD Chevy Blazer.

Patrick and Daddy's Xbox

Last night, after his sister had gone to bed, my three year old son Patrick and I spent some time playing on "daddy's Xbox". He wants Cars and Viva Pinata for Christmas, but I fired up the Sonic the Hedgehog demo and handed him the controller. He's only three, so he would basically run around in a circle and jump until he fell off the very tall tower the demo starts on. He enjoyed it, but he was also a little discouraged because he wasn't very good at the game.

That got me thinking about what kind of games would be good for him. He's not that good with the controller yet, so fighting bad guys or navigating a ledge on a tall tower are not great bets. Likewise, three year olds aren't that good at focusing on a specific goal like "pick up all the rings" but would rather just explore the world. Viva Pinata sounds like it's right on target for Patrick (plus, he likes the TV show). But what other games really fit the bill? Not many. Patrick loves Cars - he wants to be Lightning McQueen so bad - but I'm not sure he's going to be any good at the game.

I wonder if there's much of a market for pre-school console games? Probably not at the $50-60 price point, but as a $5 or $10 Xbox Live Arcade game? Maybe so. I've played around with XNA Game Studio, but I haven't really been inspired to build anything. Maybe I've been looking in the wrong place for inspiration!

Update: My father had a great suggestion. Patrick loves Handy Manny and Bob the Builder, so how about some type of Mr. Fix It game where you can go around building and repairing stuff. Sort of Grand Theft Auto with tools, but for three year olds.

Greatest Kids Ever

I'm sure my wife will blog this in more detail, but we're on vacation so blogging isn't top of her mind. Today was my brother's wedding - I was the best man with the whole speech giving and everything. We left the kids with my wife's sister tonight, but last night we brought them to the rehearsal dinner. They were the only two kids there but there were straight up amazingly well behaved. All night. Long past their bedtime (though to be honest, we are in Washington DC and still sort of on west coast time). I mean, I expect my kids to behave - but this was above and beyond. We got to the restaurant around 6pm and didn't leave until 9:30! Tonight, at the wedding, several people told us how impressed they were with our kids. I am too.

Just wanted to blog how incredibly proud I am of my kids.

Rileyanne in Buttercup Field

I normally keep this blog clear of personal and political commentary, saving that talk for my personal blog on MSN Spaces. But this time I had to make an exception. Check out this awesome picture of my daughter Rileyanne in a field of buttercups. Isn't she cute? :)

The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit

Matt got this book as a present for Patrick when he was still a baby. When Patrick was a baby that is! :) It has my favorite line from all of childrens literature:

THIS is a man with a gun.

They don't write them like that any more!

Mourning a Passing

Recently, I learned that a friend of mine from high school took his own life. I hadn't spoke to him in nearly a decade, but it was still a shock and very saddening.

There's a memorial for him this weekend in Northern Virginia, but there's no way I can make time to go back east for it. There will be a large number of old friends there, many of whom I haven't seen or spoken to much since high school. It further adds to my sadness that it took the death of a friend for me to both realize the need and have the opportunity to reconnect with so many old friends.

The New Year Is Upon Us

Christmas was spent with just my local family - me, Julie, Patrick and Julie's mom Patty (who lives ten minutes away). New Year's was spent with Julie's side of the family - three of Patty's four children and all six of her grandkids are at Brother Jim's in Santa Barbara. Even Julie's dad drove up, making it the first time this much of her family was together since Julie and I got married 4 1/2 years ago.

However, it's hard to be happy without feeling for the people who's family and friends were devastated by last week's tsunami. I've got a few friends in the area - I've done TechEd Malaysia twice and have been working closely with the Indian MSFT office of late. I've heard from I think everyone I know in the region and luckily they're all OK (though one had a close call). Of course, there are countless others who were not so lucky and my heart goes out to them. I wish I had more to say, but given the scale and scope of this tragedy, mere words seem almost trite.

I don't make resolutions anymore, since they are pretty much the same every year (more time with family, lose weight, smarter with money, etc.) I make a little progress on each every year - enough to be somewhat proud of but not enough that I can quit working on it. I've been reading Dee Hock's Birth of the Chaordic Age which my Dad lent me at thanksgiving and I'm really enjoying it. I've marked down several passages, but this one seems most appropriate for the new year:

"Riches are not in the number of possessions, but the fewness of wants."

By that measure, I know few richer than myself.

Turkey Day 2004

We've had a good family Thanksgiving this year. We flew to northern Virginia where my parents live on Monday, avoiding the craziness of traveling the day before Thanksgiving. Patrick is such a good traveler! Tuesday, we went to the brand new National Museum of the American Indian with two of my mother's first cousins and her aunt (I think - hard to keep these family relations straight sometimes). It was great having that part of the family around - I hadn't seen them since my grandfather passed away back in high school. They were also over for Thanksgiving today, which was fascinating listening to stories of my grandfather's family as well as their world travels. For example, they recently visited the River Kwai and learned of its history - let's just say it's nothing like the movie.

I've also seen a bunch of old friends who still live here or flew in to be with family who live here. Last night, Jules made enchiladas en mas for the family and for our good friends John and Barbara and their daughter Elizabeth. John works for a defense contractor these days and Barbara is a stay at home mom. (I hate that term, but I don't know how else to put it. Moms work hard - they don't just "stay home") Rich and Jess, who are in from San Francisco, also stopped by. Rich is a marketing expert and also covers the SF Giants for the newspaper. Today, we had breakfast with Rich and Jess plus Dave and Heather and their son Ethan. I didn't really know Dave growing up - more of a friend of a friend who I got to know after high school. Dave has worked at the White House since sometime in Clinton's first term. Rich wore his "Free Martha" t-shirt for the occasion. He also pointed out that Mary Cheney - yes, that Mary Cheney - graduated from my high school a year behind me. It's a small world.

We're here thru the middle of next week - I almost always get to the end of the year with vacation to use or lose. I can't stand traveling the day before Thanksgiving or shopping the day after, so I'm probably going to hang out with my brother while Jules and my mother and my great aunt go shopping. Dad has to work - which seems ludicrous since how much is really going to get done the day after Thanksgiving? Maybe he'll find time to blog. Next week is more hanging out, though I am taking the time to visit a customer before I head back to the grind.

Happy Birthday Patrick

Almost exactly year ago, my life was changed forever by the arrival of my son Patrick. I tried to approach my imending fatherhood with an open mind, realizing that my life was going to change but not really sure exactly how. So far, I think I'm doing pretty well. Today, Patrick is walking (in spurts), talking (in gibberish mostly), eating solid foods and otherwise making everyone around him smile. I don't write as much code, play as much XBOX or read for fun as much as I used to, but I do seem to smile a lot more.

I am truly blessed to have such an amazing wife, son and job.