Life

From where I'm sitting, it looks like Sandy is pretty much over. I wish I could say the sane for the North East. Looking at the news and Twitter, it looks like their night is just getting started.

Power out in NYC; wind driven water at hight tide washing from the Atlantic and the Hudson into the the streets of the city under the mist filtered light of the full moon. Warren Ellis is on Twitter saying it's not his fault.

It looks like a full third of the US is under the clouds that make up the system that is Sandy. There is wind, rain, flooding and even it seems a blizzard. There are power outages (I think my sister posted that the lights were out). And the thing has just made landfall? And it looks like my brother's area might be hosting the eye in the next couple of hours.

And all we have to show for it is one downed branch, some trim, and I don't think I'll be getting a t-shirt. And as I watch, the radar view of Virginia Beach is clear.

Technorati Tags: Life Weather

Today the family got on The Tide and headed into Norfolk for the first annual Norfolk Mini Maker Faire.

I have been a subscriber of Make Magazine for a couple of years (issue 15, I think). And every time they have an event it's always a little frustrating that I'm sitting here in Virginia Beach, and the events are no where near where I am. A few years ago, Brian and I talked about going to a Make event in Philadelphia, but the schedule just didn't happen.

About two weeks ago, I was in a bookstore looking at the magazine rack and someone had left a flyer for Norfolk Mini Maker Faire. Out came my mobile and the family was registered by end of the night. Finally, an event that I could attend.

The Maker Faire was today, at the Norfolk Scope. I am happy that we were able to go.

There were robots playing basketball (ok, shooting hoops, but it was impressive what they could build in six weeks). We laughed when we saw a line-following robot (build the the ODU IEEE chapter) of the same model Sam's team tried to build at DI two years ago.

Technorati Tags: Family Life

In my previous post, one of the areas I felt I needed to work on was getting a decent version control workflow with the systems I had just rebuilt.

My needs for versioning are fairly simple. I predominately work alone. If I am working with someone else and code is involved, odds are it's one of the boys, and I'm doing all the work. When I am working with code, I like to make a lot of small checkpoint commits along the way. I do this because I don't want to loose whatever forward progress I have made by going off on a dead-end tangent that takes the code in a bizarre direction that I'll never remember how to get back to a working condition without versioning. And I have an aversion of making a second or third copy of a file just to try out one idea.

I've been using Unix and Linux enough that I've used SCCS, RCS and CVS both at school and on the job.

Technorati Tags: Life Rants

I've been working on replacing Ping.fm in my social media workflow. In the process of trying to figure out what I need to do to put together a replacement that works the way I want it to, I've taken some time to think about what it is I want in the larger scope of my digital life.

Can you say scope creep?

That isn't entirely a true representation of what happened. I hit one of those phases where there was a lot going on all at once. Some of it has been self-inflicted changes, other have been things that happened outside my control. A few are the result of lots of little things piling up and starting to exert some pressure in aggregate; not one thing, but lots of related things pushing all at once.

One thing has been the start of school and the inevitable challenges that presents.

Natalie is teaching 6 classes across two grades in two subjects. And add to that what sounds like a dozen special education cases she has to manage across three grades. Over the last six years, she's had to teach multiple classes but never classes and cases across more than one grade level.

Technorati Tags: Life

I started writing a post about coming to terms that I wanted to add something new to my free time. As part of putting that post together I revisited a few activities I had tried in the past or been thinking about trying. I now do not have a need to write that post; I found something to do.

About four years ago, after the end of an iteration of Myst, I had tried Eve Online. I only played 12 days of a 14 day trial before walking away from the game. I walked away mostly because of the bias I had brought about the game and things that had happened, both with the end of that iteration of Myst, and events that had happened meta around Eve.

When thinking about MMO, there were some things that I've thought should be available in the game:

Technorati Tags: Games Life