Second worst day ...

Don't feel much better after yesterday. It hit M. hardest, of course, and it was so hard for me to see how sad she was.

While we were sitting around being depressed I got mediatomb installed on my upstairs FC8 box had it scan my music directories and photo directories, and had my new PS3 showing our photos and music over our TV. That was pretty cool. We went through a lot of our photos from our trips to the Northeast Brasil and Chile. Also streaming music downstairs to the PS3/TV was really cool.

It cheered both of us to see the photos from our trips. We had a lot of great trips that I'll never forget. I still can't get over how beautiful Puerto Varas and Puerto Montt were. The hotel/posada we stayed in in Puerto Varas (Puerto Duecher) remains the best place we've ever stayed overall for beauty, cost and comfort. Every morning we would wake up amazed by the view, sitting right across from Volcano Osorno.

Worst day of my life ....

Subject says it all.

Testing posting from Google Docs

That last entry was written awhile ago, but I was testing posting to my blog from Google docs.

Contemplating the Good

Contemplating The Good

Imagine a person who was wholly inspired by the genius of Plato that he devoted his whole life to pursing the intellectual contemplation of The Good. But because of this passion and whole-hearted devotion to the contemplation of The Good that he neglected all else: his family, his friends, his work. Such devotion was his that the rest of his life was not good. Because of his contemplation of the The Good, his life wasn't good? Could he really have understood The Good if he subsequently lived a life like that? Wouldn't the quality of his life demonstrate that he really didn't understand The Good?

Shot an 82 today, Longhorns beat #1 UCLA and I didn't get paged whlie golfing ....

Quite a day. I'm oncall this weekend, and it's been a bit busy (been called out three times, Friday, Saturday and Sunday). I had a tee time at 1:39 PM at Avery Ranch and it was in the 80's in December, so really wanted to play. But I got paged out at 12:15 PM while we were still in church. It was someone from a different team who needed help (althought it was never really an issue for my team; the guy from the other team wasn't too bright). I'd brought my laptop with me, and ran out to the car, fired up the laptop and tried to connect with the Sprint broadband card. Every time I use this, it seems to need to update the firmware of the card. It did again, and took about 15 minutes to do it. Meanwhile, my crappy battery in my laptop lasts only about 45 minutes anyway, so I'd barely started, and the battery was already low. I finally got connected and talked with the customer directly. He was getting errors in DB2 (so not sure why they tried to send it to my team anyway). I talked to the customer (internal customer) briefly on sametime, and then drove to Avery Ranch while logged in.

Took me about 20 minutes to get to Avery Ranch while I was still connected via my laptop (which was about to run out of battery power). I ran into the restaurant and plugged in my laptop, ordered lunch and continued to work with the customer. I had at that point about an hour before I had to tee off. Eventually, the customer resolved it themselves (and it was certainly a DB2 issue, so not sure why it was ever sent to my team). I finished eating, paid and even got to hit a few balls at the range.

So it's nearly a miracle that I'm playing golf at all. But the whole time I'm playing doom is hanging over me. If that damn oncall phone goes off, it's all over. But it never goes off. And I shoot an 82. At a tough course. And I only have 27 putts. And I hit the ball as well as I have in a long, long time. One par 4 on the back side I hit a provisional tee shot that traveled beyond the flag on the fly (it was a par 4, albeit a short one). The yardage for this hole seemed all wrong on the card (said 371 for the tees we were playing from, but there's no way that was right). The closer tees said 297, and we think that was probably closer. But it's also possible that it was 320 or 330. The ball actually landed in the sand, else I probably would have rolled another 20 or 30 yards. It felt like the biggest drive I've ever hit (abstracting away weather, steep downhill grades and or crazy bounces etc), and I've other ones that have gone easily 330.

I had a birdie on the first hole which usually doesn't bode well for my round.

When I got home, I helped M. cook, and we had a really nice dinner. And she let me watch the Longhorns play number-one ranked (in the Coaches poll) UCLA at Pauley Pavilion and the Longhorns pulled off a miracle win with Damion James dunking for the final score when DJ just threw up a prayer. We're much better this year that we were last year, even though we lost Kevin Durant. Quite a day. My handicap had started to balloon this year, and I was at 20.60. I'm hoping this will get me back under 20. Although when I checked out the handicap spreadsheet, I noticed I'm losing a decent round off the end, so probably won't get much benefit.

Pregnant!

Should have blogged about this awhile ago, but wasn't thinking about blogging much when we found out: M. is pregnant! She's now 10 weeks pregnant and she's due next Summer.

Pan's Labyrinth, Palm TX and David Roochnik's Book

Watched Pan's Labyrinth, which was quite good (shocker, I think everyone liked this movie). It was more interesting to read the director's commentary. I'd rented this off of Netflix, but might buy a copy for myself just for the director's commentary. It was one of the better director movie commentaries, I've heard (although I didn't listen to it all because M. was getting bored).

Almost done with David Roochnik's "The Tragedy of Reason". There were a lot of things I liked about this book; it takes up the confrontation between truth-driven conceptions of reality and the more anarchic conceptions in a good way. There's several people that I've known who probably would have liked to have written this book, or a book with this theme. However, stylistically, it felt too glib. It feels like a book written on this theme should be written differently, at least stylistically. I like his tendencies toward a narrative approach, but some part of me believes the narrative should be more serious. Also, it never seems like it really gives the positive views of Plato's logocentric view, and is itself too protreptic. I wanted more focus on the journey that would take one along Plato's route (and it seems like the book sees a journey like this is possible).

Just got my Palm TX syncing with Evolution on my Thinkpad T41P running Fedora 7. I had network sync working fine for awhile with this box, but I really wanted to get it syncing with desktop machine at work and I don't have work wireless setup on that Palm. So I really needed usb syncing working. This is what I did to get this working:

1) created the pilot.rules file in /etc/udev/rules that contained:

BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="Palm Handheld*|Handspring *", KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", NAME="ttyUSB%n", SYMLINK="pilot", GROUP="usb", MODE="0666"

2) copied the 60-libpisock.rules file that's included with the pilot-link rpm on Feodora to /etc/udev/rules.d.

3) I already had my user added to the uucp group

4) Was able to get 'pilot-xfer -p usb: -l' to work as a test.

5) Changed the config in gpilotd-control-applet to point at 'usb:' instead of /dev/pilot or /dev/ttyUSB*.

I think the main thing that got this working was changing to 'usb:' in gpilotd-control-applet. Not sure which of the other things helped, and which didn't matter.

Food nightmares ...

Today M. told me she was going to have to stop watching a certain TV show because it was making it hard for her to sleep; want to hazard a guess on what show it was? Iron Chef America. Yup. Not kidding. She also told me after she fell asleep (and ostensibly woke up awhile later): "I need to put water in the pans." I asked her several times because I didn't understand, and she finally explained: "I need to put water in the pans so it doesn't burn."

M. also got her permanent green card today in the mail! Woohoo! We went P.F. Changs to celebrate, and it was really good.

Testing blog entries with my N800

Just wanted tose see how quickly l could post an entry to my blog. lt''s not that slow, although it would be a lot quicker if l was more used to it.

Watched National Treasure tonight. Not very good but not as bad as l thought it would be. (l thought it would ble pretty bad.

What I thought about at Church this Sunday ....

I had a lot of time to think, which is a nice benefit for me. I think I understand Euthyphro (the Platonic dialogue) a little better now. Every Platonic interlocutor seems to have a particular passion that identifies them as who they are and which makes them worthy of being in a dialogue in the first place. Euthyphro's passion, in a dialogue about piety, is to always be in possession of righteousness. He's so enamored with being "righteous" (as he understands it), that he's willing to prosecute his own father in a situation that is extremly murky and not clear morally. Part of the problem is that Euthyphro is unable to see that any moral dilemma can be murky in the first place. In his desire to be "right", Euthyphro probably just sees all difficult moral situations as easily decided.

But it's worse: he's so possessed with this need, that he's separated himself unecessarily from his family and his community. He's ostracized himself, and done so for all the wrong reasons.

The irony of this is that many uninformed readers of the Platonic dialogues would think this is exactly what Socrates is often guilty of. But not being possessed by this desire would appear to be a fundamental requirement of being a philosopher (since these early dialogues reason for being generally seem to be to educate those regular citizens not well initiated into Socrates' ways what it takes to be more philosophic).

Back to Brasil!

M. and I are going back to Brasil today. M. hasn't been there since we got married. Lots of friends there M. hasn't seen in awhile, so it will be great to go back. I love going there; the restaurants in Sao Paulo are awesome, and I love Brasilian food. The people there are great.

We're also going to the Northeast for a resort vacation. I love the Northeast of Brasil.

I'm going to take my PS3 so a friend there can try it out and see if he wants to get it himself.

I'll get a lot of chances to keep practicing my Portuguese, and I need all I can get.

The only negative in all this is the ten hour flight; I can never sleep on these flights for lack of leg room, and M. always plans stuff for us to do as soon we get off the plane. So I'm going to be wreck when I first get to Sao Paulo. But it's all worth it!

AP ...

Talking with AP. Setting up our trip to Brasil; she's going to take us to Santa Efigenia, so I can geek out. Really looking forward to going there and seeing her and everyone.

AP quit Eve Online, partly because of the accusations that they were favoring specific players.

We'd both heard of the new MMORPG for Lord of the Rings, but don't know if we'll try that. I usually don't have the required patience of MMORPG's. I told AP I'd write about her, so here it is. :-)

Hi AP!

Update on Chicago and Party for Leaving Friend ...

I'd forgotten to mention that on Sunday, we'd gone to Millenium Park in Chicago and saw the Cloud Gate Sculpture, which is really cool. You can get some really awesome photos off that stainless steel (or whatever it is made of) "bean".

Had the gang over today, basically to wish C. well, who took the job offer in Chicago. He got a great offer, and we're all really happy for him. Seems like a good change for him. We ordered pizza from Papa John's, who delivered it an hour and fifteen minutes late, and drank beer from growls, and talked about old times (21st Street Coop, for example, where we did stupid things countless number of times).

Back to work ...

It's busier again at work. Already picked up two new calls today in a couple of hours. Hoping to spend some time learning some more java/jndi programming, but we'll see.

I have mixed feelings about writing a blog. It's a bit weird how most blogs are written (and I've always noticed this, but it's a bit more acute when I started writing more in mine): who is the target audience for a blog? Most of them are written like a reporter would write about someone else's life (including mine). You are like a news reporter, reporting on your own life, but in the third person. Whenever I meet people who talk or write about themselves in the third person, I instinctively feel that they are unwell.

The most obvious benefit, at least on the surface, is to provide details about your life to family and friends. However, you need to careful about the kinds of details provided in a blog, since they are publicly visible (so it's not clear it really provide the benefit mentioned above).

Despite these misgivings, I think there is value in writing about and reviewing the activities in one's life, even at the somewhat surface level that occurs in a blog. So I think I'll keep doing this (even though no one will read it).

Sampaio's and Poker ...

Went to Sampaio's with the gang; food was good. We came back home and I got smoked at Poker. Everyone played well except for me. :-)

Sunday in Chicago

We ended up going back to the Navy Pier on Sunday, after having a really poor breakfast at our hotel (which was too bad, since it was otherwise a good hotel). We decided to take the subway back to the Midway airport, which was a little stressful and a little too much walking (to get to the Orange Line), but we got to the airport without any problems. We did get a nice surprise at the airport. We were sitting at the gate waiting for boarding to start, and a friend showed up unexpectedly. Our friend (you know who you are) was returning to Austin after an interview, and we were all pretty surprised to see each other. We got to ride back together on the plane, which was great.

Saturday in Chicago

Today we went to the Bongo Room for breakfast. Holy crap! Don't get the Chocolate Tower French Toast if you don't like messy dishes. This was pretty amazing, and like no French Toast I've ever had (although, admittedly, I'm not usually that adventurous with my breakfast food). They served a lot of food (there's a breakfast theme I'm starting to see here), and the place was pretty cool. We were happy there wasn't a long wait.

Next, we went down to the Museum Of Science and Industry. We paid extra for the CSI Experience and the U-Boat onboard tour. Both were a good idea. We also liked the Old Fashioned Town and the Space exhibits. This museum is a lot more fun than the Fields Museum, with which I was disappointed. The exhibit attached to the U-505 (they have the real uboat captured from the Germans in '42!) was simply spectacular.

When we were walking back after taking the 10 (bus) from the museum (heading to the Millenium Park), it started raining and lightning by the time we got to the Buckingham Fountain. We (and many others) sat under the extended roof of the restroom building. Fun, fun. Eventually, we stumbled our way to a local Dunkin' Donuts, got some coffee and donuts and waited out the storm. Mei didn't like this part of the trip; she got in a bad mood. The rain bugged her, and she started getting fussy about how dirty the subway was. Mei wasn't made for Subways. Overall, we were glad we picked the Bongo Room and the MSI. They were good choices. We're glad to be out of the rain, now, though.

Chicago

We got in Chicago on Thursday morning for a short vacation. Chicago is really a fantastic city. I could easily see myself living here. It's got all the great restaurants and culture of a great city, but more parks than most big cities. The shoreline is pretty amazing for a city.

We were at the Navy Pier walking around on Thursday when I could swear I saw Walter Cronkite. I think it was the most wind I've ever seen outside of a hurricane. The flags at the Navy Pier were whipping so hard, you could hear them snapping and cracking, and it was hard to believe they weren't torn to shreds.

We also went to the John Hancock building and it's observatory; amazing view. A lot like the Sears Tower that we visited today. We went to Fogo de Chão for lunch yesterday.

Today we went to Lou Mitchell's for breakfast (two eggs has never been so much food!) and then to the Sear's Tower Skyview. The sky wasn't too clear, but it was still a great view. Then we went over to the Field's Museum. It was a little more oriented to something like a historical zoo then a standard museum. We also went to Soldier Field, which was much more scenic then I would have expected.

I think we finally figured out the Subway system. The three-day passed we bought were definitely the way to do.