Archive for January 2010
Updated: 28 Jan 2010 10:21 pm by Ron
Filed: Food • Life in General
Tagged: Food • Ian • St. Louis
Teagan (l) and Ian (r) at the top of the Arch on Wednesday afternoon (01/2010)
… and I think we are all ready to be home again.
Ian and Teagan’s presentation on Wednesday morning went really well, striking a nice blend of the geek stuff. They seemed comfortable doing it, and seemed to have fun in doing it. Very well-received by the audience, and I think it was more than just being polite; a number of them were genuinely impressed with what these guys had accomplished. As a dad, to say I was a little proud of these guys would be a big understatement.
They had a bit of time in the afternoon when there wasn’t anything on the conference agenda that appealed to them during the afternoon, so we wandered down to the arch (our hotel is less than a mile from the park with the arch, or “The Arch”, I suppose). I have to admit I was not expecting all that much, but it was way cooler than I had anticipated… and not just the weather, although it did start snowing while we were up at the top. I knew it was big, but I really didn’t have a sense of its scale and it really is pretty impressive. We walked back to the hotel in an increasingly-dense snow shower.
A rare splash of color in St. Louis: cool jazz sculpture in the snow near Laclede's Landing in downtown St. Louis (01/2010)
Food has been a pleasant surprise here in St. Louis, to put it mildly. We had excellent Indian on Wednesday evening at India’s Rasoi on Euclid with Bryan (Ian’s and Teagan’s mentor); it was exceptional and we all came home impressed and stuffed. We went a little lighter this evening with very good sushi (edamame, nagiri, and a couple different rolls) from Wasabi on Washington, then we wandered around in a cool foodie grocery/deli called Culinaria on 9th and came back to the hotel with ice cream.
Tomorrow we head for home, and we’re all ready — at least mentally — to be home again. Likely to be a long day, given that we aren’t scheduled to get back into IF until almost 11pm… I can’t say I will feel bad about leaving St. Louis. It has been cold, almost exclusively grey, and damp the whole time. Aside from the food and the Arch, there just really isn’t much here that we’ve seen that would make me want to come back but I also recognize that we haven’t had much of a chance to get out and do much and January in the midwest really hasn’t given St. Louis much of a chance to impress.
Updated: 28 Jan 2010 09:49 pm by Ron
Filed: Food • Life in General
Tagged: Food • St. Louis • travel
Ian (l) and Teagan (r) on the train into St. Louis Monday afternoon (01/2010)
… is kind of a mixed bag. Ian, Teagan (a friend of Ian’s), and I are back here for the week for a conference (more on that in a bit), but I don’t yet really have much of an opinion aside from initial impressions. We flew in on Monday and rode the train from the airport into the downtown area to the hotel. The train ride was grey, brown, and rust: a grey blustery day, nothing green in sight, and passing through areas of run-down industrial and urban decay on the west side of the city. I’m a little surprised at the lack of effort on the part of the city to do anything to clean up the area, given the impression it leaves on someone new to town. Depressing.
The hotel where we are staying and where the conference is being hosted is pretty decent and is big enough that it doesn’t seem stretched to hold us all. Decent food within walking distance (very good Italian at J.F. Sanfilippo’s on Monday — made even better by great service — and decent Med last night at Nara’s). Looks like several sushi and Irish places close to us, too. We’ll probably check those out the next couple evenings. We haven’t really had much of a chance to get out and see anything, but the food and the hotel have been a bit of a counterpoint to the ride in…
Ian and Teagan were presented their awards at the conference yesterday morning in one of the plenary sessions, following a great presentation by Alan Paller of the SANS Institute. I’ll post a picture or two if I can track them down. They have their presentation this morning; I’m sure both of them will be glad to be past that so they can just enjoy the rest of the conference.
Updated: 23 Jan 2010 10:39 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: chrome • Mac
Just within the past couple of days, the Google Chrome devs released the next build in their “dev channel” (translation: alpha release) for Mac OS X. It had been several weeks since their previous update, so I was curious to see what it held. Looking at their announcement, it didn’t seem all that earth-shaking but I was ecstatic to find after installing it that they finally have allowed users control over default font settings and font sizes. No more monstrously large ugly default fonts for me!
This was one of the two things that have kept me from using it on my Mac as my default browser to this point, which it has been on my other Linux and Windows boxes for several months (other than when I need some of Firebug’s wizardry in debugging Web stuff, although even those times are becoming less frequent with Chrome’s developer tools). The other gaping, glaring hole on the Mac OS X version of Chrome is the ability to manage and organize bookmarks — until that hole is plugged, it really can’t be my default (although I suppose I do some sort of bookmark-manage two-step by managing my bookmarks on a different platform and then using the bookmark sync feature now present on the Mac, but how painful would that be?)…
Gaping hole aside, my initial impression in using it for the past couple days is the same as it has been on the other two platforms: it is simply faster than the other browsers there on the same systems. The browser itself starts quickly, pages just seem to load faster in general, and the JavaScript-heavy Google pages that I use quite frequently (Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, etc.) are more responsive.
My experience with their dev channel on all three platforms has generally been quite good. There have been a couple of their releases there that had big problems, but the catastrophic ones have been quickly fixed. This is the first version on the Mac that has been marginally usable for me for just day-to-day use, now that I can control fonts and sizing, and in summary, I continue to be impressed. Definitely worth at least a preliminary look for those of you on the Mac, and hopefully we won’t have to wait until Easter for that remaining hole to be plugged.
Edit (01/23/2010): As of this morning, their dev channel build 4.0.302.2 on the Mac now has a bookmark manager with at least basic functionality! Woo hoo!
Updated: 08 Jan 2010 07:03 am by Ron
Filed: Life in General
Tagged: Weather
Current weather conditions this morning (01/2010)
This is what we found this morning, in checking the weather. Brutal.
Edit: And as of this morning (Friday, January 8), it’s showing us at -11 degrees F (and still dropping), but without the breeze…
Updated: 07 Jan 2010 10:17 am by Ron
Filed: Adoption • Books & Reading • Geek Stuff • Life in General
Tagged: CFML • christmas • Ian • Li • reading • sleep
It has been a bit since I last wrote anything here, I realize, but I will try to get caught up on a variety of fronts with sort of a catch-all post here…
Christmas and Li
Li and the Christmas tree (12/2009)
We survived Christmas, with the combination of the holidays and an extended break from work (for me) and school (for Ian) being something of a mixed bag. My workplace shuts down (officially) between Christmas and New Year’s Day for a holiday curtailment, so I took all of the week ahead of Christmas (mostly) off as I had some banked comp hours I needed to use ahead of the end of the year (or lose them) and I’m taking a couple more days after New Year’s, as well, which will stretch my holiday break to almost three weeks. Ian has had the past week and a half off from school, too, so we’ve all been home together for the first time in a long time — which has been wonderful.
Li was definitely “in” to Christmas this year, and loved having three Christmases: ours as a family on Christmas Day, followed by two more as both sets of grandparents came to stay with us for a couple days each. We had decided, after traveling with her for Ian’s state soccer tournament in October, that travel just wasn’t in the cards for us at this point and in retrospect staying home with her (and having visitors here) was the right move.
We tried to keep as much of a routine through the holidays for Li as possible, but we still ended up with some sleep struggles beginning the Friday before Christmas. Lots of rest-less nights, particularly ahead of Christmas itself, and several days with no naps… which were trying and exhausting for all of us to varying degrees. Just in the past couple of days, it seems — based on sleep patterns — that she is working her way out this latest cycle.
Li "participating" in her first Christmas program at church (12/2009)
Aside from the sleep problems, Li is doing great. She continues to grow and develop in leaps and bounds. When it comes to food, her palette is continuing to expand (her new favorite is “pork chop” — pork tenderloin, in actuality, which she tried for Christmas dinner when I grilled a couple) and she’s more willing to try new things. She “participated” in her first Christmas program at church this year, where “participated” would be defined as learning “Away in a Manger” and then standing stoically at the front of the sanctuary with the other kids while they sang. It’s about what we had expected; when we asked if she was going to sing, she responded “No, I already sang that song.” She’s close to reading at this point, and her sense of humor is pretty amazing for a not-yet three year old. We took her sledding for the first time yesterday and she loved it, even being willing to go down the hill by herself.
Deb and Ian
Ian and his adoring little sister, both in tye-die splendor (12/2009)
Ian has a bad case of “end of break blues” right now, but other than that is doing well. He found out in early December that he and a couple of other interns from his summer job won the high school division of an international digital forensics competition sponsored by the DoD and will be traveling to St. Louis for a related conference in late January (we’re still trying to figure out how this will work). He’s in the midst of the college application process (continually being prodded slowly forward by Deb) but hasn’t yet decided where he will attend. He’s squeezing in a bit of soccer (indoor) when he can and generally suffering through his senior year of high school.
Deb also has been playing a bit of soccer (also indoor), playing in a women’s league and on a team that competed in a Christmas break tournament which was definitely a change of pace for all of us. The highlight of their tournament was playing the eventual tournament winners 3-2 (Deb’s team lost) with the winning goal being scored in the last minute of the match; not bad for a team with 3 players over 50 against a bunch of college-aged players. She has also been attending a weekly Bible study (one that provides childcare for Li during the class), which is a good change of pace for her in a couple of ways.
A Bit of Reading
Over the break, I managed to squeeze in a bit of reading, too. I finished “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy (a gift from Santa’s bibliophilic elf — a tradition at our house) and “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer, sandwiched around a bit fluff (“Thunderhead” by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child). To Thunderhead’s fluff, “The Road” is flint: beautifully and sparely written, gripping, haunting, disturbing. It’s a movie I won’t see; the book is extraordinary and more troubling than anything I’ve read in a while. It’s the first of his works that I have read, but almost certainly will not be the last. “Into Thin Air” was a gift from Ian; engaging, fairly well-written, tragic.
Some Geek Stuff
I’m in the middle of a couple of projects on the geek front these days, too, in the odd moments of spare time I can squeeze out: working on getting a lightweight CFML and database server environment up and running on my netbook (based on Railo and Apache Derby, respectively) and also working on a CFML mode for ActiveState’s excellent Komodo editor. I will write a bit more on both of those at some point in the near future. I also did a bit of troubleshooting on another project (a cross-platform editor called “redcar” intended to be semi-compatible with TextMate but capable of running on Mac, Linux, and that other OS) and got to play a bit with Ruby in the process.
Those of you with reasonably modern semi-standards-compliant browsers (read: not MSIE) will notice a bit of geekery in the handling of the pix on this particular post. I’ve tweaked the styling for my blog here based on some CSS stuff I was playing with ahead of Christmas. Those of you still clinging to MSIE should consider an alternative…