Mediratta.net

As promised, I’ve finally finished uploading my backlog of photos to the Gallery. Check out the following new albums:

New Hampshire, April 2007
Jen, Cole and Ally head to New Hampshire to visit Grandmom and Grandpop in their new house for a week. It snows 6 inchs the night before and promptly upon arriving they lose power. But this is rural New Hampshire so that kind of thing is expected. The kids have a great time, build a snowman, play Chinese checkers with Grandpop and build a snowman.

Seattle, January 2007
Jen, Cole and Ally head to Seattle to visit Jule and Rogers and their chess playing sons. They also saw Daiga, Scott and Dain as well as Karen and Bob and their kids.

Holiday 2006/2007
A set of various photos from our holidays from putting up the Christmas tree to opening presents to visits by Jen’s family.

Brook Olesen’s 5th Birthday Party at the SF Zoo
Brooke, a friend of Cole and Ally’s from Circle of Friends turns 5 and so we head up to the San Francisco Zoo to celebrate her party and go on a wildlife safari. The kids have a fantastic time, although according to Cole, Ally and Lauren their favorite thing was the carousel.

Ok, not so new. But now you can see them. I’ve gone through my photo backlog and published four new albums, including one that’s pretty recent:

Ski Trip: Jan 2007
The first time the kids get to go skiing! And the first time that Jen has skiied in 7 years. We shared a house with Alan and Brian and had a lot of fun. The kids took an all day lesson and learned how to do “pizza” (when you snowplow your skiis) and “french fries” (when you ski parallel).

Ski Trip: March 2007
Second ski trip. This time we shared a house with Lisa, Mike and Luke. The kids took a 2 day lesson and again had a great time. This time we got to see them skiing and actually got a few pictures. Both Jen and I broke our boots which gave us a reason to go out and buy some nice new ones (hers were 20 years old, mine were 15 years old).

Dinner at the Johnson’s
Luca, Donia and Mitchell invited us over for dinner, along with the DiMartinos and the Engers. The kids had a fun time playing in the back yard while we scarfed some of Donia’s killer cooking. I spent most of the time trying to recruit her to come work at Google

Easter Egg Hunt at the Eustace’s
Alan, Kathy, Kaitlyn and Emily had us over for an easter egg hunt. Hiding the 12 eggs per child took longer than it did for the kids to find them all.

Sometime soon I’ll publish the complete holiday album from Christmas. Stay tuned!

I’m incredibly happy to say that Gallery 2.2 has been released. In May Gallery will be seven years old which makes it by far the longest amount of time that I’ve been involved in any software project. I’ve seen it grown from the tiniest seed to a mighty oak in that time and the process has never ceased to amaze me. I’ve learned more about leadership, product development engineering practices from working on Gallery than from any paying job I’ve ever had. And the lessons that I’ve learned from Gallery have helped me greatly with my day job. The 2.2 release is the culmination of 11 months of planning, coding and testing.

Over the years I’ve managed to divest more and more authority and responsibility for the project and I’m happy and proud to say that while I was still a key player in this release, I was not the primary. The project has evolved to the point where the release process was a smooth team effort with small and large contributions from many people, not just a notable few. That’s not to say that there weren’t some amazing efforts made by a heroic few, but it wouldn’t be fair for me to highlight anybody because there were so many contributors to this success. It’s easy to look to the developers as the folks who write the code, but we also had tons of help from the folks who did support in the forums and on irc, all the people who tested the code on an almost daily basis, the horde of localizers who helped us get 10 localizations to the 100% mark (which means translating over 4200 words and phrases!), and our loyal and patient users who waited and waited and waited for us to be done.

It takes a village to raise a child. Thankfully, we have a big village now

Happy day after Thanksgiving! We went over to Bob and Jill’s for an excellent Thanksgiving feast with their family and Jennifer and Jim. The kids had a great time playing together, especially Ally who got to play dress-up with Bridget. Sadly, I forgot to take my camera but I took some photos with Bob’s camera so I’ll hopefully put up some pictures soon.

In other news my car showed up in Valleywag in an article reflecting on Google hubris. Ironic, since I bought the car and the license plate long before I got to Google.

Jen’s phone died, so we went phone shopping for her… but we wound up buying a new phone for me instead. I gave her my not-so-old Motorola v360 along with my old bluetooth headset and bought a new Blackberry Pearl for myself with a Plantronics Voyager 510 headset.

I’ve been resisting getting a blackberry for a long time, but the new ones are really slick. It’s small, fast and has an easy UI. The apps on it are amazing. The Google Maps application alone makes it all worthwhile, but I’ve also installed Opera Mini, Google Talk, GMail. The new headset is awesome. My old headset was never loud enough for me, but this new headset has great audio quality. New toys rock!

Obligatory kid story. When I brush the kids teeth, I usually chat with them to keep their attention from wandering off. And in general, I like to ask them open-ended questions because I’ve found that this leads to the most interesting answsers. So last night while brushing their teeth:

Cole:

• Me: “If you could change one thing about your life, what would you change?”
• Cole: “I would be a big person and everybody else would be little”
• Me: “Why?”
• Cole: “Because then I could teach everybody!”

Ally:

• Me: “If you could change one thing about your life, what would you change?”
• Ally: “I would have another pink teddy bear because I lost my other one!”

The Halloween Witch came and went this year. Cole and Ally both did a great job of sharing their candy with the witch, who in turn rewarded them with some really fun books. All is well, except for Jen and I who are eating a little too much candy than is good for us. I didn’t get to go trick or treating with the kids because I was presenting at ZendCon 2006 (which went very well) but I did get back in time to get some nice pictures of our pumpkins all lit up.. The kids went trick or treating with Luke, Peter and Alice and we got a few good pictures of them also. Jen and I went to a fun parade at Cole’s school and a great little Halloween party at Ally’s (some of those photos were taken by Ally’s teachers, Stephanie and Debbie). The kids really love getting dressed up and marching around in their costumes.

I was talking to my coworkers on Friday about the Halloween Witch and my coworkers were very amused that we would perpetuate this hoax on our children. They were even more floored when I told them about the Dreamcatcher. I had to tell them the whole story.

Cole used to have really bad nightmares. He would be up in the middle of the night 2-3 times a week with dreams about bug-eyed monsters, etc and it was very hard to get him to go to sleep. So back in May when I was down in Santa Fe for a a conference at Los Alamos I bought him a Native American dreamcatcher. I brought it home and explained the whole mythology to him (except, I left out the part that it’s not real). I explained that the dreamcatcher is very powerful and it would keep all the bad dreams out and only let in the good ones. Cole, of course, was full of a million questions. How does it keep the bad dreams out? What if a bad dream sneaks in when the dreamcatcher isn’t looking? Can a bad dream trick the dreamcatcher? How does it tell good dreams from bad dreams? I gave him all the right answers and lo, he went to having about one bad dream a month. Huge difference.

So anyway the other night around 5:45 AM (I’ve asleep for about 2.5 hours at this point) Jen wakes me up. Cole has been having a rough night and he’s tired her out so she’s giving me a shot at calming him down. My conversation with him goes like this:

• Me: “What’s the matter?”
• Cole: “I’m having a bad dream”
• Me: “Hmm. But you have a dreamcatcher!”
• Cole: (wails) “It’s not working!!”
• Me: “The dreamcatcher never fails!”
• Cole: “But I’m having a bad dream!!”
• Me: (thinks) “If you were having a bad dream, the dreamcatcher would have caught it. So you must have been having a good dream, you just didn’t wait long enough for the good part!”
• Cole: (thinks) “but… Ok!”

Then he goes back to bed and sleeps the rest of the night. Here’s hoping that the sleep he gets will offset the amount of therapy he’s going to need when he finds out the truth.

Ally’s got her own special fairy coming along soon. We’re getting to the point where she’s going to have to give up her pacifier. We know it, she knows it. Instead of meeting this battle head on, we decided to tell her about the special Paccy Fairy. This fairy takes pacifiers from kids who have outgrown them, and gives them to kids who really need them. Ally is going to decorate a special box, put her pacifiers in it, address it and mail it off to the Paccy Fairy, who in turn might mail her back a special treat. She’s excited about this in principle, but I don’t think she’s quite ready to move on it. More on that later.

Finally, I’ve uploaded some photos from the end of last April in the Harkins album. I can’t believe the kids were so small! This one is my favorite of this latest bunch. I’ll keep adding photos slowly to this album until I’m caught back up again.

Halloween means that our house gets flooded with a ton of candy. We’ve been trying to avoid making candy a central fixation for the kids, so 2 years ago Jen came up with the brilliant plan of introducing the Halloween Witch. When the kids come home with their loot after trick-or-treating, we put two bowls in front of them. One bowl is for them, the other is for the Halloween Witch. They get to put their candy in the bowls of their choice, then they leave the bowls out. The next morning, the bowl for the Halloween Witch is empty and its contents have been traded for toys and books.

In 2004 when we first did it, Cole was 3 and Ally was 1 1/2, so Ally didn’t get to participate. Cole didn’t really understand what was going on, and wound up giving away a good chunk of his candy. In return he got a pretty cool floor puzzle that he played with for ages and we figured that all was well. But in 2005, almost a full year later and just 2 days before Halloween, without any prompting Cole proclaimed “this year I don’t want to give anything to the Halloween Witch!” Jen and I were floored. We hadn’t talked about the witch for a whole year but clearly the concept had made a big impression on Cole. So when it came time to divvy up the candy, Cole agonized about each and every piece of candy that he put into the witch’s bowl, ending up giving away about 1/3rd of his candy. Ally on the other hand wanted to give it all away. Cole was mortified. Their conversation went something like this:

• Cole: “Ally, do you really want to give away all your candy?”
• Ally: “Yes!”
• Cole: “But Ally, you know that tomorrow morning you’ll have no candy!!“
• Ally: “That’s ok!!”

Cole was totally baffled, and in the end we only let Ally give away about 2/3rds of her candy because we were afraid that the next morning she’d be really sad. But in the morning, Cole got 1 book from the Halloween Witch and Ally got 3 books and she was really happy. Cole didn’t seem to upset about it, and so we figured that was the end of it.

Now it’s 2006. Cole is 5, Ally is 3 1/2. So when we visited the pumpkin patch this year to gather up pumpkins to carve (and where incidentally the kids got to go on a very fun pony ride) we talked a little bit about the Halloween Witch. We expected it to be a repeat of last year, but to our surprise the kids did a complete flip-flop. Cole proudly announced his intention to give exactly half of his candy to the witch and Ally declared that she wouldn’t be giving any candy to the witch! So this year at the pumpkin patch, the conversation went like this:

• Cole: “Ally, you’re not going to give away any candy?”
• Ally: “No!”
• Cole: “But Ally, then you won’t get any toys!“
• Ally: “That’s ok!!”

Cole is destined to never understand his sister.

As I mentioned a while back, I’m starting the long slow process of publishing the last year’s worth of photos. It’s a long process partly because I don’t make much time for it, but also partly because Jen and I have to put our heads together and try to remember why we took some of these photos. Many of them are a whole story, and over a year later it’s hard to remember exactly what was going on at the time. Some of them are much easier to remember than others, though.

Before Cole had his tonsils removed (last March), he was a finicky eater. Hard to blame the guy, his tonsils were the size of a grapefruit and eating was painful. So after his tonsils came out we made a concerted effort to get him to be more adventurous with his diet. Usually this meant that we’d make something new for dinner and then spend about 20 minutes trying to convince him to eat it while he would wail “I’m too scaaaaared to eat it!!!”. Then he’d try it, like it and swear that he’d eat it next time. But the next time around, he’d have long forgotten about his promise. So one day after investing half an hour convincing Cole to try salmon, I recorded a little video of him saying how much he liked it and then every time we had it after that, I’d trot out my laptop with the video on it and show him that he really did like salmon. Worked like a charm!

There’s other great stuff in there like a video of Cole shooing away Ally’s bad dreams and a really classic picture of Ally: Queen of the World!

• Ally: “Cole, do you want to die?”
• Cole: “No”
• Ally: “Good. Eat your food and sleep and that makes you grow and turn into mommies and daddies”

10 days later, Cole’s birthday is still going strong. In our house, we have a rule where we open one present a day. This caused Cole no small amount of grief on the day of his birthday party when tons of kids and adults trooped in and deposited a gigantic pile of party colored presents. But we’ve been doing this for as long as he can remember so he regained his composure quickly and since then he’s been very happy about it. This means that every morning for the past week Cole bounces out of bed, runs over to his pile of presents and picks out a new present to open, then he plays with that new toy all day. Though this complicates the process of writing thank-you notes, it means that he really appreciates each individual present. The other night at the dinner table he was able to happily recite the list of all the toys he got, who he got them from and what he liked about each of them.

The most amusing thing that’s come out of the presents is still from the walkie talkies that he got from Jennifer on day 1. Lisa forwarded this on to Jen who sent it on to me. Cole took his new toys over to play with Luke and their first conversation went like this:

• Luke: “Hi Cole, this is Luke.”
• Cole: “Hi Cole, (laughs at his own mistake); excuse me, Hi, Luke, this is Cole.”
• Cole: “Luke, I really love you.”
• Luke: “I really love you, too. Over.”

Luke then used it to talk to the first grader from across the street (name changed to protect the innocent):

• Luke: “Hi XXX. Can you hear me?”
• XXX: “You are stupid. I’m going to pee on your butt.”

Ahhh. This what we have to look forward to in first grade