Ultranormal

  • Lucky With Food

    It’s been a good trip, both work-wise and, more importantly, food-wise. I’ve had some great meals this week at some of the coolest restaurants in Mountain View:

    • Hobee’s – I love breakfast places, and Hobee’s is one of the best I’ve ever found. Great hashbrowns and coffee cake that will make you forget your troubles.
    • Los Charros – Thanks to Kristin’s suggestion, I got the best carnitas I’ve had since leaving Tucson. Good carnitas (shredded pork, sometimes flash fried right before serving) are hard to find.
    • Frankie, Johnny and Luigi Too – Good Italian food, and the dutch apple pie is to die for. If you go, get the sausage bread and the veal scallopini.
    • Sylvia’s – On Castro street, wow, some really really good Indian food. Best butter chicken and lamb roganjosh I’ve ever had. I wonder if they’re open for breakfast…. I could go for a dosa.\
      It’s on a plane this afternoon and home. My ankle survived the trip pretty well, although I’m not looking forward to the plane. My ankle needs a good session with ice and electrocution, which hotel ice is just not doin’. I stood too much yesterday while giving my two presentations (well, one with Arun) and now it’s pretty stiff. Oh well, I’ll know better next time.\
      Oh, and I think I’m going to Hobee’s again for breakfast this morning unless I can find a Mexican place open for breakfast. I’m jonesin’ for a breakfast burrito.

  • About The Headphones

    Thanks to everyone who gave me advice on headphones. I realized that since I have a little time before my flight tomorrow morning, and that the west coast has Fry’s Electronics, I’m gonna go see what I can try out there. Why are there no Fry’s on the east coast? We’re stuck with Circuit City or Best Buy, which is why I buy almost everything electronic or computer-related online.\
    Update: I ended up buying a little pair of over-the-ear JVC’s at Fry’s last night (Roger had to catch a plane, so we left a little early and went to Fry’s before dinner – Sylvia’s in Mountain View – awesome Indian food). They were cheap, but they’re not ear buds, and they’re small. I’ll let you know how it goes. I maybe I just need a bigger backpack…

  • In Need Of Headphones That Travel

    I tried earbuds from the iPod. I can’t keep them in my ears unless I’ve jammed them into my ear drums and the covers always come off. I’ve tried my old over the ear cheap-o headphones. Yeah, they’re small and portable, but the sound quality sucks. I have a pair of noise-reducing headphones, but they’re so large that if they’re in my backpack, nothing else is in my backpack (think old-school studio headphones).\
    So, frequent travelers, what do you use? Have you found a good pair of (ideally noise-reducing) small non-earbud headphones that have good sound quality and are small enough to fit in a backpack side pocket with your iPod?\
    Oh, interweb, help me solve my dilemma before I spend 12 hours in a plane!

  • And So It Begins

    Thus begins the Spring Travel Bonanza! It got off to a good start last night with dinner @ Taqueria Los Charros with my brother, Kristin, Jessa, Valerie (from AOL), Arun (also from AOL), and Michaela (yep, you guessed it). The food was great (mmmm, carnitas), and the company was excellent. Even though I’d spent 6 hours crammed in the window seat of a plane that apparently had no ventilation, it was a lot of fun.\
    It’s been a great week so far. My appointment with Dr. Ankle went swimmingly. He says I’m doing “super” and am doing all the right things. He says my ankle looks good, and other than some knee pain (left knee, which he says is probably tendonitis from favoring that leg for the past 7 months or so), which I’m getting looked at next week, things are moving along nicely.\
    Then, I got my annual review, which went even more swimmingly. I got a promotion! I’m no longer a Senior Software Engineer. I’m now a Principal Software Engineer, which is extremely cool. I already wrote about my standards story. I’m thinking of writing my AOL story, because it’s pretty crazy. I’ve been with the company almost 11 years, and that still shocks me every time I think about it. To think where I started, and where I am now (and where I plan on going – the triangle’s not the only thing I’m planning on turning on its ear), it still boggles my mind.\
    Back to the Spring Travel Bonanza… I’m in Mountain View this week, then next Saturday, I leave for France to attend the W3C Tech Plenary, where I’ll get to hang out with Arun, Mr. Glazman and Molly (and all the rest of the CSS guys, hi guys!). Then, four days after that, it’s off to SxSW and then home for a little while. Then, it’s (probably) off to XTech, WWW2006 and then who knows?\
    I like frequent flyer miles…

  • Watch TV All The Time

    No, really, I have a job and don’t watch TV all the time, but there are a few shows that are on too often that I wish I could spend more time watching. Some of these I’m sure you know, but there’s a new one in there.

    • The Daily Show: They’ve been on a roll the past couple months, and I feel bad when I miss an episode. But, four days a week is just too much for me to keep up with.
    • The Colbert Report: I’ve watched The Daily Show since the very beginning (you know, the Kilborn days), and I love it. But, I think Stephen Colbert’s show may be winning my heart. It’s the funniest thing on TV, and Stephen Colbert pulls off “arrogant jackass” better than the people he’s parodying. It’s perfect satire in a time when we sorely need it.
    • Pardon The Interruption: It’s on five times a week, which is way way too much. I love the banter between Tony and Mike, and I can’t help it but Tony’s bad jokes make me giggle. It’s a great way to catch up on sports without having to sit through the whole 90 minutes of SportsCenter (and there’s rarely anything about NASCAR or hockey, which makes me happy).
    • Brainiac: This is the new one. I just noticed it on G4 this weekend, and it’s hilarious. Think Top Gear for the Mr. Wizard crowd. It’s hosted by Top Gear‘s Richard Hammond, and it’s funny in a ridiculous British way. It’s got zany experiments and hot barely clothed British chicks playing with explosives. What’s not to like?\
      So, set your TiVo and prepare to waste a lot of time. I know I have.

  • Coming Back To Mountain View

    I’ll be back in California on the 15th, who wants to do dinner in Mountain View? Tim Smokler Kristin Anyone?\
    I don’t get in until 4, and should be in Mountain View around 5:30. Anytime after that is good for me.

  • Changing Style Elements In IE

    Everyone knows what I’m working on, right? Well, this is a little story I’m telling so I don’t have to remember it. I’m working on the generic style API so users can change stuff, and wow… I didn’t think it would be as painful as it was. What caused the pain? Oh, you should know by now that it was caused by Internet Explorer for Windows!! Hooray for the truly strange!\
    The other browsers (Safari and Firefox, chiefly) did fine with removing the existing text node in the style element, and replacing it with the new one. I tried using the CSS DOM, but that was a lost cause, so I wrote a simple CSS parser in Javascript (only about 10 lines) to throw all the selectors and properties into objects and then more functions to change, update, delete, etc, properties and update the associated style elements.\
    What happened in IE? It blew up as soon as I tried to remove the child text node of style, or even set innerHTML. What did I have to do? I had to crawl the properties of that element’s object and find the styleSheet property, which is an object and has a property of cssText, which I can set.\
    So, now my code looks like this (\_style is the style element, output is the text I’m setting and yes, I’m using Dojo):

    <code>if ( !isIE ) {
dojo.dom.textContent(_style,output);
} else {
_style.styleSheet.cssText=output;
}</code>

    I hope you never have to do this, but if you do, that’s how.

  • Bad Mommy, proof # 6294

    Everyday I have to wait at the bus stop for my kid, or the driver won’t let him off the bus (it is a kindergartener rule). Today, I was engrossed in Beauty and the Geek I had on tivo and missed leaving at my usual time. When I realized I was late, I fled out the door, barefoot, in my pj pants, the shirt I had slept in and a black sweater (with no bra on) and ran down to the stop. FYI- cold, uneven concrete hurts. I missed what the clock said so I didn’t really know what time it is. I didn’t know if I actually missed him. (I am usually really early and stand around for 10 minutes.) I also didn’t know if the bus would come back around again one more time before taking him back to school. I didn’t have a phone with me, so I couldn’t call the school and I was afraid to back and get the phone in case I missed the bus during this time. So, I was barefoot, dressed oddly, standing on the corner, in the winter and I got lots of strange looks. After awhile, I decided to chance heading back for my phone, constantly looking over my shoulder for the bus. I ran inside and grabbed the school’s phone number, my shoes, my phone, and my cellphone and ran back half way to the bus stop. My cellphone was dead, but luckily my real phone still worked at this distance. I called the school and the nice office lady told me the bus driver was bringing my son back to school. What, no second drive by? Come on! So, I thanked her and went back home. I had to change the baby and change my pants, put on some shoes (I forgot about a clean shirt and a bra) and off I went to claim my son. And then we went to Friendly’s.\
    There were extenuating circumstances though. Brian woke up 2 hours later than normal, and it threw off my internal timeline. Since we hadn’t had snack and he hadn’t gotten cranky yet, I forgot to look at the clock.

  • Mountain View: Day One Recap

    Yes, I am in Mountain View, and I really wish I had more time to see all my friends out here (I’m especially bummed about not having time to hang out with my brother, his wife, and Sam. It’s just a two day trip, and it’s chock full of meetings, all about this. We did a big presentation yesterday about it, what’s coming (shhhh, it’ll be cool), and how the world can join in. It was extremely gratifying to see geeks get really jazzed about it. It proves that even though I can’t explain it worth a damn, we’re headed in the right direction.\
    I’m having a really good dinner last night at Nola’s in Palo Alto, and laughed our fool heads off. We rehashed the “good old days”, talked about geek energy and how to harness it, and what it feels like to be working on something we can truly be proud of.\
    I was talking to Joe afterwards about stuff we’d worked on before, the old projects that still hold a special place in our hearts, and I thought about this silly fulfillment system I wrote when I first came out to Virginia to finally become a “real developer”. It was a maintenance system. People submitted tickets, filled in a bunch of detail about the affected system, the problem, the request, etc. Then, someone got the ticket, did whatever was in the request and then closed it. It ran reports, was extremely flexible in setting up types of requests, etc. I wrote it almost 6 years ago, and thought it was dead. I hadn’t touched it in about five years and figured people stopped using it and forgot about it long ago. Then, I got an e-mail about a month ago (and an IM yesterday) about it, asking who owned it, and if someone could add a feature to it. I was stunned. This thing that I thought was dead and buried has been used every day for five years by a couple different teams. No one’s touched the code, cleaned out the database or anything in five years and it’s still running like a champ, taking requests, running reports, etc. I thought the thing I was most proud of was what I did on AOL Search, but I think I may have a new winner. Almost everything I’ve ever written has a fairly short shelf life between versions. This tool is ancient and still going strong, which not only scares me, but makes my geek pride swell.\
    Today? We’re talkin’ modules, modules, modules and javascript. Oh, and between all the module talk, I have to figure out how to create CSS blocks on the fly in Javascript. I’m really close, but man, does that spec need some work.

  • Uhhhh, yea, I suck

    I just screwed up making instant pudding.