Lack of posting for me (despite the many hand scrawled notes) because I woke up on Friday morning with an injured wrist. I think one of my carpals gave up or something like that; I couldn’t lift up a drink of water without the wrist losing strength half way.
Fortunately it’s getting better - I just need to give it some time to recover and not overdo the typing.
The other week I took the plunge and bought Lego Mindstorms. Thereupon it sat on the table for a couple of weeks until I finally got around to picking up some rechargeable batteries. Friday night we built the robot, and on Saturday we discovered the act of programming said robot to do some basic tasks.
Nathan was very impressed by the concept, but obviously it’s a toy for me. It’ll be a while before he groks the concepts involved. My thesis was on computing and education, and while I did a terrible job at that (average code, with hindsight, and poor research), said thesis sparked an interest in me for the ideas of how computing improves education. I was lucky enough to be a part of the 80’s BBC + Logo/Turtle push in the UK and it’s one of the parts of my primary education that stand out in my and my peers’ memories. Another was raising the Mary Rose - an educational ‘game’ in which we painstakingly dug out the Mary Rose and cataloged our finds.
Hopefully I can keep up the Mindstorms energy and have a good play. Lego recently offered up a Tie-Fighter Tank from the Star Wars Expanded Universe - it’d be cool to take one of the Tie-Fighters I have, mix that with the Mindstorms and have a little Tieby that runs around on the floor doing dumb things.
Even better would be to have a robot with multiple CPUs trying to work together. Given that the future is about event driven multi party systems, having multiple mindstorms seems like an educational thing for the lad.
Yesterday Carrie and Nathan came to work - Nathan in astronaut suit and with Halloween decorated bag in hand.
We walked around the office and our 3-year old got his first memorable experience of Halloween - lots of people happy to see him, offering him lots of sweets and asking how old he was. He in turn would mumble “trick or treat”, then a “nk’you” and run off in search of the next pot of gold. Unless there was a dog present, then he’d spend a bit of time with the dog.
As time went on, the mumbling got softer and softer until he started to hide behind Mummy & Daddy. This was mostly because of an older kid wearing a scary mask - he was verrry unsure of the monster until the mask was lifted and a child shown. Big smile on face after that.
It was a great success - knocking door to door isn’t something we’re very into; our neighbours do not form our community, you have to do it after work, so it’s late at night (when little ones should be asleep) and it’s damn cold. Doing it at work is a great idea, and also let me introduce my family to some colleagues and introduce my workplace to them.
No really, good news. As if a new ‘and now for something completely different’ job in the last month wasn’t enough, and needing to put more time into planning a conference talk, and having fun with my 3-year old every chance I get; we’ve been running along the ultrasound and frequent dr appt path. Yes, we are with child again.
We found out while we were in the UK on vacation at my parents. Due date is April-ish, and we are filled with much hope. Little blip is growing away, giving Carrie some weird cravings (she is so proud to finally get cravings) and exhausting her (both N + C are asleep as Sunday evening rolls in).
Guess it’s time to mention this. I’ve spent the last week in a completely different job, a manager at Amazon.com. Least I will be a manager once I hire a few people 
Mostly I’m meeting people and figuring things out at the moment.
Here’s the post from jobs@apache.org a little while back:
Amazon.com is seeking a talented engineering manager and talented engineers passionate about Open Source!
The Open Source Engineering team has the company-wide directive to own major Open Source packages across Amazon.com including the Apache Web Server, the Tomcat Servlet Container, and the Jetty Web Server.
You will be empowered to design and implement policy, procedure, and tools that will enable Amazon to stay abreast of the rapid ongoing development of third-party open source projects. You should be passionate about Open Source, building great teams, engineering excellence and strong developer community relationship-building.
Your leadership will have a significant impact on Amazon's software engineering community.
S’gonna be fun
Tonight I went with a pretty simple yet lovely recipe from cooks.com. Not the healthiest of meals - I went through a lot of butter, but Carrie and I both loved it. Nathan on the other hand drank his juice and refused to eat anything. Boy barely eats sometimes.
Tried something new tonight, an apple crumble in which a) I used real apples and not a lazy tin, and b) I replaced 40% of the flour with oats. The apple was a hit, though my soul cries out for Bramleys (or at least Cox’s) and not Granny Smiths. No more tins of apple + bad ingredients (sucralose/high fructose) for me. The oats were good, but made the crumble strangely chewy and unsatisfying.
Reading around, it seems English apples don’t grow well in Washington as it’s too warm (or in the other apple centres of Spain and S. France). West Virginia surprisingly is the place to go to hunt some down, and I also saw a blog that had found Bramley’s in Atlanta. It’s a bit odd that it’s too warm here in Washington, the weather seems very similar to the UK. Maybe when they say Washington, they mean the core of the state (east of the rockies), I think someone said that’s where apple growing country was. Perhaps on the Seattle coast I’ll be able to find some apples and get to feel nostalgic.
Write email, hear child being oddly quiet and breathing weirdly. Walk over. He’s playing with his nose. Odd. So I poke his nose very lightly, and one nostril feels a bit firmer than the other. Oh dear… young idiot has put his cod liver pill up his nose.
For once he’s very still, and very responsive to our requests to hold his head up, to stay still, and to not move while his mother pokes the ‘vitamin’ a bit. A strong nose blow later and out flies the remains of a cod liver oil pill and a lot of snot.
Parents sigh with relief.
A few weeks back while Carrie’s mother was here I cooked a Sunday roast. Roast pork, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, peas, bread sauce, apple sauce and my experimental gravy which left gravy behind a while back and is more of a mustard sauce now. Here’s the view of the oven when I opened it and realized that the Yorkshire pudding was heading skyward.
For the second time in two days Nathan has taken a head first tumble down the 14 steps between our ground and first floors. Yesterday I watched him do a cartwheel and then go down the stairs feet first while trying to grab the stair above him; today it seems that he went head first all the way down.
Both times he is understandably upset and then back to normal, while Carrie and I are standing by him in shock wondering what we can do about this terrifying new event.
