I know I’ve been kind of absent lately. Part of it was traveling to Michigan to see my mother, brother, and cousin. Good times. We flew this time, and I was worried that it would be awful. Last time the three of us flew through DTW, Northworst took six hours there and four hours back for what should be a two-hour flight. That’s a lot of time in a plane on the tarmac trying to keep a three-year-old entertained with the few things you can carry on. The last time I went through DTW myself, I found that they’d scheduled a dozen flights at exactly 6am on a Sunday morning, leading to a huge security-theatre backup and to me missing my flight. I ended up getting routed through a very busy O’Hare – which I’d just left – before finally getting back to Boston. Considering all that, and that there was an “incident” there not too long ago, I thought it would be crazy, but in fact it all went smoothly.
The other reason I’ve been quiet here is that I’ve been busy doing actual work. I’ve been writing lots of actual code for my way-cool GlusterFS translator, for one. I’ve reached the point where I can run actual tests and see how well it works, which I’m pleased to say is very well. Now I just have to slog through all of the entry points I haven’t bothered with yet, figuring out the GlusterFS object-lifecycle rules so I can make sure there are no memory leaks, making sure I return consistent error codes, and then running some real functional tests like fsx, etc. More about that later, I’m sure.
The other thing I’ve been busy with is techno-evangelism. I’ve already mentioned the podcast, plus I gave a half-hour presentation about cloud storage at Red Hat’s Cloud Computing Forum yesterday. I’ll post a link to the archive when I get a public one myself (all I have is a private one that I’m not sure is usable by others); meanwhile you’ll have to read the The Register had to say about my talk and others.
I’m so happy that we got her started early on counting from zero instead of one. In a similar vein, a couple of weeks ago we visited her classroom for “Back to School Day” and one of the projects the kids had done was a drawing with an “I can” caption. I can run, I can swim, I can ride a bike.Amy’s said,
I can build a circuit.
Actually the spelling was a bit off (they’re not even trying to work on that yet), but you get the idea. She got a Snap Circuits set for her birthday – or was it Christmas? – and has had a lot of fun with it. I’m sure it won’t be long before her hardware abilities exceed my own.
P.S. Her drawing is really improving lately, too. I’ll have to remember to post some pictures of her art soon.
Photos from family camp are posted on Facebook. Here’s a sample.
There’s also a video of Amy telling knock-knock jokes at the talent show. The quality’s poor, but the content makes it worthwhile.
Part One: at Santino’s, a quite good Italian restaurant in Winchendon, Cindy commented on how blue Amy’s eyes look. That being the only physical feature she seems to share with me, the comment led to a comparison of Amy’s eye color with mine. Then we asked Amy what color Cindy’s eyes are. It’s kind of a trick question, since Cindy’s eyes are a hard-to-describe kind of blue/green/brown, but Amy was up to the task. She immediately replied that Cindy’s eyes are “basil” which you have to sound out to realize is a cross between blue and hazel. Perfect.
Part Two:
Amy (quoting from her pajama shirt): I’m Mommy’s Little Dreamer. me (what I actually said): You’re Daddy’s little dreamer too. me (what I think Amy heard): Daddy’s a little dreamer too. Amy: No, Daddy’s a big dreamer.
This weekend Cindy, Amy and I went camping – Amy’s first time. The venue was Lake Dennison, a state park I’d never heard of in Winchendon MA. That’s only about an hour away, but it feels much further. I had to keep reminding myself that we were not in New Hampshire but Massachusetts, and not even western Massachusetts at that. It’s nice to know that there are such places so close to home. Anyway, we got rained on a couple of times and bitten a lot, but had a great time nonetheless. Amy kept saying that she wanted to stay until they closed, i.e. until fall, which does a lot to dispel fears that she’d hate camping and never want to do it again. Enjoy the pictures.
Amy was sad to discover that some of her favorite YouTube videos won’t play on my iPod Touch. Don’t ask how she knows about YouTube or iPods in the first place. Anyway, she came up with a solution:
Daddy, can you bring up the letter thing [the search box] and type “fix” for me?
The back float was new, and Amy was a toy-collecting machine. I think she collected more than everyone else in the class put together, some from all the way across the pool.
I’m not sure I’m remembering this 100% correctly, but the gist is there. When we were shopping for a new dining-room table weekend before last, we were looking at some Shaker stuff. This led to the following conversation between the salesperson and Amy:
Salesperson: Are you a Shaker?
Amy: No, I’m a goofball.
In a similar vein, a couple of weeks ago we visited her classroom for “Back to School Day” and one of the projects the kids had done was a drawing with an “I can” caption. I can run, I can swim, I can ride a bike.Amy’s said,