Family
Heartfelt updates about family milestones and everyday moments. From taking Mazie to college and annual visits to the Renaissance Festival to Swedish‑pancake breakfasts and VR outings with the kids, this category celebrates togetherness.
- Mac & Cheese from Yum!
- Lion
- Chocolate Cake
- Mango
- Ralph’s World
- Charlotte’s Web
- Curious George
- Elmo
- Water
- Playing in Water
- Green stuff on her Mac & Cheese
- Milk (except chocolate milk)
- Stopping Play to go to the bathroom
- Building Great Products Keynote by Joel Spolsky
- Entrepreneurs On Rails by Dan Benjamin
- Hosting and the Woes by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Jamie van Dyke, Tom Mornini
- CRUD Doesn’t Have an ‘S’ in It: Managing Complex Searching in Rails by Stephen Midgley
- Flexible Scaling: How to Handle 1 Billion Pageviews by TJ Murphy
- UI Design on Rails by Ryan Singer
- Keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson
- Rails 2.1 Keynote by Jeremy Kempter
- Using Git to Manage and Deploy Rails Apps by Scott Chacon
- Asynchronous Processing with Ruby on Rails by Jonathon Dahl
- Build Your Own Distributed, Self Configuring Rails Cluster by Dave Fayram, Tom Preston-Werner
- Custom Nginx Modules: Accelerate Rails, HTTP Tricks by Adam Wiggins
- The Worst Rails Code You’ve Ever Seen (and How Not to Write It Yourself) by Obie Fernandez
- De-Railing: Smashing the Rails Stack by Aaron Bedra
Shopping for plane activities for Mazie. Coloring books!
Summer of Love Resuming - Preparing for London
Tammy and I are doing final preparation for the second big trip of the Summer of Love. We leave on Sunday for London. We’ll be staying there for four weeks and exploring London in detail and taking some day trips as well. We’ve booked a trip to Stonehenge and are also planning a day trip to the Royal Observatory to stand on the prime meridian.
We’ve rented a flat for the month. This will be a very different trip than our 6-week tour around the Western US. We’ll be staying in one place. We won’t have a car and will be using public transport only. I expect to take a lot of pictures and will be trying to post regularly.
Tammy and I will also be taking a short trip to Scotland. My mother is coming over for a couple of weeks. The first week she is spending with us and will be watching Mazie while we are in Scotland. The 2nd week she is honeymooning with her new husband.
There is much planning and packing to do.
At Honda dealership after dropping off Odyssey. Waiting for Tammy and Mazie.
Mazie: Terrible two’s? Ha! No way. I scoff at two. TERRIBLE THREE’S!
Tiny Tonka T-Ball
Mazie and I had our very first Tiny Tonka T-Ball game last night. Sorry, no pictures or video from it. Tammy had plans, and I’m one of the coaches! Next week we’ll get some media coverage.
Of course Mazie just turned 3 a couple of weeks ago and you may be asking how exactly t-ball works with 3 and 4 year olds. Let me explain a bit.
First, this is for fun and there are no scores, no strikes. In fact, there isn’t much left of the “game” and it’s more just fun for the kids. And fun they had!
The first “inning” the kids were really into it and having a blast. It was funny to watch the different kids. There is only one girl other than Mazie on the team and they became fast friends. They were standing in the infield with their arms around each other. On the other hand, some of the boys didn’t feel like taking turns and were pushing and shoving each other to get at the ball. By the second “inning” our entire team, with one exception, was sitting on the infield with their gloves next to them playing in the dirt.
Our team, the yellow team, now known by unanimous vote as the Yellow Bees has one ringer. One of the kids is a future hall-of-famer. He can hit a line drive right up the middle, has a heck of an arm and can play all bases equally well. He was not playing in the dirt.
Take a Lap in the Lazy River
Have a couple of minutes? Join us on the Summer of Love for a trip around the Lazy River at Mandalay Bay. Mazie’s very first time in a lazy river.
Happy Fathers Day 2008!
This year marks something that will not happen again until 2014, when Mazie turns 9. Father’s Day is the day right after Mazie’s birthday! Father’s Day is always the 3rd Sunday in June. After 2014 it won’t happen again until 2025, on Mazie’s 20th birthday. Now, I know what you are all wondering. When will Mazie’s birthday be on Father’s day? Never. It gets to the day before, and then flips back away because Father’s Day moves back due the third Sunday thing.
I love being a Dad and as the years pass I realize more and more that it’s the most important thing in my life. Your job changes, your hobbies come and go. Your family is always your family. Your kids are forever your kids. Taking this summer off has provided a luxury that I’m so lucky to have. To be able to spend all my time with my family. Completely unrelated, I was reading The Soul of a New Machine today and this passage seemed so fitting for the day (p. 279).
During that summer, West suddenly remembered bike rides he’d taken with his father on Sunday evenings, and he found time to reassert that tradition with his oldest daughter. Suddenly, it seemed, he realized that his children were growing, and apparently he intended now to guide them on their way. He said one evening: “That’s the bear trap, the greatest vice. Your job. You can justify about any behavior with it. Maybe that’s why you do it, so you don’t have to deal with all those other problems.”
I like to think that I’ve kept my priorities in order, but I think the “bear trap” reference is appropriate. Its good to remind myself what is important and where priorities lie. I’m grateful to have this summer for that, and to have Father’s Day every year to reflect on it.
See also: Father’s Day 2006
Daddy's Girl Turns Three
Today my little girl turns three years old! Happy Birthday Mazie!
Mazie has been blowing my mind lately. This morning she told us “my birthday is June 14.” I know I easily suffer from being an overly Proud Papa, but she is making leaps and strides in so many areas. Clearly we are witnessing geometric growth. Perhaps this all comes at the expense of some other development. She did just figure out how to jump not that long ago.
In addition to her big jumps in vocabulary, her turn to three has also brought with it some gaming. Now whenever I tell her she can’t do something or cannot have something, apparently “Daddy is saying bad things.” Mazie is clearly establishing her own ideas and opinions and deciding what she wants to do and may, if she feels like it, take some input from you.
In return for this I now get a wonderful “Love you Daddy” at bedtime. I melt on the spot. She’s a little sweetheart with her super grin, chipped front tooth and all.
Mazie is getting to celebrate her 3rd birthday in Las Vegas. We planned this stop on the Summer of Love so that she could have her day. No driving. Morning in the pool. Chocolate cake. Presents. Whatever she wants to do. She’ll have great stories to tell her friends. Most people don’t get a Las Vegas birthday until there 20s.
Happy Birthday (Maze / Sweetie / Pumpkin Pie / Goofball)! I love you! — Daddy
Some of Mazie’s Favorite things:
Some of Mazie’s Unfavorite things:
Super Mom
This is definitely a parent story. If you don’t have kids, you may just want to skip this. :-P Being a parent is really great. When Mazie says “I love you Daddy!” I pretty much melt on the spot. But being a parent brings you really close to things like boogers, poop and puke. Traditionally Mom’s bear this brunt more than Dad’s, and that is definitely true in our family.
Mazie is now totally potty trained. She hasn’t touched a diaper for a few weeks, even at night. She’s doing a great job. Fantastic actually. She sleeps through the night and everything. However, she wont go near a normal toilet. She insists, and will really only use, her kids potty. We have it with us as a result. It sits in the van and has made appearances all over on the Summer of Love road trip. Side of the raod potty stop, check. Sidewalk potty stop in downtown, check. Quick potty in the car while getting gas, check check.
Today Mazie announced at lunch that she wanted to “go and take a poop”. We were downtown Portland at a fabulous restaurant and had finished. Tammy took Mazie to the bathroom and she predictably decided she didn’t have to go when she saw the toilet in the bathroom. Off they went to the van to use her potty. Right there in downtown, in the van, we had a #2 stop but lacked anywhere to “take care” of the potty. So, we started driving with a window cracked open.
We stopped after about 15 miles to get gas and Tammy took care of the potty. Tammy, being a fully immersed mom grabs the ‘container’ in the potty. She doesn’t put it in a bag or anything. No real attempt to conceal anything. She just grabs it and walks right into the gas station and heads to the bathroom. Total bad ass. I chuckled to myself while pumping the gas thinking of the amount of angst that would have went into that procedure before being a parent. What are you going to do, right?
RailsConf 2008 Recap
We just left Portland today on our continuing Summer of Love trip. You wont find much about Portland from me though. Our stop in Portland for me was a visit to RailsConf 2008. Tammy did post about her thoughts on Portland. It was totally awesome that our good friends, the Tangen’s were able to come out and join us in Portland. Kent attended RailsConf with me, and Maril, Simon and Caroline hung out with Tammy and Mazie. Mazie just adored Caroline the whole time.
Let me share some of my comments on RailsConf 2008. I’m not going to dive into super detail on the Rails 2.1 release announced at the conference, or the details of various sessions. You can find that elsewhere online and many of the presentations and sessions are now up on the RailsConf wiki.
Sessions
Here are the sessions I attended:
Sadly, I missed Kent Beck’s Keynote on Saturday evening. I hear it was really good.
Highlights
The conference started off on a strong note with Joel Spolsky’s keynote. Some of you that have mentioned Spolsky to me may have heard my immediate rant. Prior to his keynote I wasn’t a Joel fan. However, his keynote was great. He had a good message, presented it very well, and really got his point across. I liked it a lot, and take back anything bad I’ve said about Joel in the past (or at least most of it). It was really good.
I liked the Entrepreneur session quiet a bit. Unfortunately halfway through it the fire marshall ordered about 1/4th of the people out of the room because it was standing room only. Ryan Singer’s session on design and Rails was awesome. Ryan was preaching what I truly believe is the model for designers and developers to engage and work collaboratively to make great things. The world needs more Ryan Singer’s out there evangelizing and showing how this can be done to do great things. Jeremy Kemper’s keynote on Rails 2.1 was really good as well. The 2.1 feature set looks great.
Perhaps the most high-density presentation was Scott Chacon’s Git presentation. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten barraged with so much high-density information so quickly. At one point I turned to Kent and joked “I feel stupid.” Directed acyclic graphs were being thrown around as quickly and furious as could ever be done. Great presentation though, really liked his stuff. I recommend checking out his site, Gitcasts.
David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote on Friday night was a little odd. He steered away from any technical topics and really focused on giving some input on creating great products and being a great developer. I’m not sure how the talk went over with the audience. DHH is the creator of Rails, and as a result I doubt anyone would pan it that much. He drew a full crowd back from dinner at 8:00pm after all. His talk however seemed to me to be trying to get people to appreciate the aesthetics of code. To admire the beauty of architecture. It seemed clear to me that he was trying to send a message beyond Rails, to creating great things and continuing creative inspiration. I liked the message, but I wondered how many people in the room really heard it.
Lowlights
There weren’t any bad sessions that I went to. Some could have been better, but I wouldn’t say any of them were horrible. However, I would have liked to see a bit more technical depth and heavy lifting in the sessions. Too many of them seemed to gloss on big topics of scaling, deployment and architecture. I realize it’s a big conference, but more technical depth would have been good.
The WiFi network for the conference was a general disaster. It had 14Mb and was 100% full every single day except Sunday. Not sure what was using that bandwidth, but it made even checking email painful.
With that said, I almost wish they would just get rid of the WiFi. There was simply too much social networking, messaging going on. RailsConf has an “official” back-channel in IRC at the #railsconf channel. I hopped on it at one point to see what was going on and found 200 people bitching, whining and making inappropriate comments in the channel. It was horrible. The worst of anonymous streaming spew that you could find. In several sessions I watched more than a couple of people just sit there and type into the IRC channel the entire time. Yikes!
Lastly, I really wish there was some more diversity in the developer community. There was maybe 1 woman in attendance for every 50 or 100 men. The group could use more diversity, I think it would help the developer community in a number of different ways.