-jjp

Work, home, bike, kids, dog, cats, music, collaboration, programming...

Nov 5

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

When I was a kid, I remember coming home from a summer vacation. We had loaded up the camper and driven down to Florida and come home up the eastern seaboard.

On the trip, I remember staying at the Kon Tiki campground, body surfing in the Atlantic and getting incredibly sunburned.

On the trip home, our northbound trip seemed to be paralleling a hurricane. We managed to avoid it until we got to Washington DC where our paths collided. The campground flooded, we visited all the memorials - which were almost empty, well, because of the HURRICANE. Fortunately, Washington didn’t close in those days - so we had a great adventure and had most of the tour guides to ourselves.

The rain followed us most of the way back to Tecumseh, where coming in to town we were greeted by police cars. It turns out that the rain from the hurricane had swollen the Mill Pond and threatened to flood the River Raisen. The sun was shining, though, so I don’t remember it being too big of a deal.

Once we got home, we all unloaded out of the wagon. When I got out, I spied something “unusual.” There was some kid I’d never seen riding Phil Wanzek’s bike down our front sidewalk! I promptly charged him and knocked him off the bike accusing him of stealing the bike.

It turns out that a family had moved into the neighborhood while we were on our trip. Joe Royal and Phil had made friends while we were gone and were sharing the bike.

It was the first change that I’d ever seen happen to our neighborhood and it took me by surprise.

Years of pickup kickball games, block wide hide and seek games, weekend camping trips with the Royals, Wanzeks, Getzs, Durkees, Hamiltons, Fosbenders and Beardsleys defined my childhood.

After the Royals moved in, for the life of me, I can’t recall anyone else moving in or out of the little neighborhood bounded by the Union, the Boulevard, Patterson school and the creek.


Sprig Health Promotes Portland Providers

Sprig Health is getting into the movies, we’re promoting a few Providers and Women’s Wellness Services using videos. Check out Kimberley Brandt from Pearl Health Center. You can get 30% off if you book an appointment using this discount code, Sprig66 !


Oct 10
“Street pro­test­ers’ de­mands work best when they’re sim­ple enough to fit in a short de­clar­a­tive sen­tence, for ex­am­ple “Mubarak must go”. In this case the ap­pro­pri­ate courses of cor­rec­tive ac­tion aren’t like that, in­volv­ing things like a fi­nan­cial-trans­ac­tion tax, sep­a­ra­tion-of-con­cerns reg­u­la­tion, and elim­i­nat­ing in­sti­tu­tions which are “too big to fail”. So, it isn’t OWS’ job to make the pro­pos­als, any­how; that’s what pro­fes­sional politi­cians are for. Their job is to ex­press pop­u­lar anger in a way that con­vinces the pros that tak­ing im­me­di­ate strong ac­tion is in their own best in­ter­ests. Looks like they’ve made a good start.”

ongoing by Tim Bray · Occupying Wall Street

I’m liking Tim Bray again.


Feb 6

Jan 7

Jun 10

Dec 7
Brrrrrrrr

Brutal cold this weekend, well, brutal for Portland.  Even colder this morning.  Crazy blue, pink and white sky as well.  Time to break out the wool hat for my morning commute.

Busy Weekend

I spent a good deal of Saturday working to sort out the Sunday morning release details with Eric Mosberger from our SCM team.  Many moving parts, and we lost the support of his teammate since he went over his already agreed to cap on hours.

Saturday night found us chauffeuring boys around to social engagements.  Good side of this was MA and I found time for a dinner out alone.  Went to Tabla in barely NE Portland.  Nice time, okay dinner, overall uninteresting place though.  Way too many people looking busy but not quite working for our tastes.  Bit too spendy as well.  Especially the drinks in our opinion.

After dinner, I found myself having to drive Joe from party A in Milwaukie to party B in Tigard.  Went to see The Informant while he did whatever teenagers do at parties these days.  Pretty boring movie.  Odd.

Sunday morning started off with the maintenance deployment at work.  Ended up being fairly complicated and taking up almost the whole day.  Seven thirty until about one in the afternoon for the whole thing.  Spent a big chunk after that wondering about ways to clean things up to make them smoother.  Laundry list follows.

Better application tool for Engine Menus.  I want to write a Menu editor, export/import, compare tool in Django/Jython for this
Better application logging - we need to come up with some consistent way to log request successes as well as errors.  That way we can use logs to tell us when things are working properly
Better hooks to validate whether a deployed version actually is running properly on all nodes.  Often times we can’t tell whether something is up or not on all nodes.
Saner place to look for all application check out procedures in our team wiki.
Saner place to capture what our online monitoring tools are actually monitoring so we can tell what’s really not working when it sets of the klaxon bells.
Retrospectives after deploys with the SCM team.

Brrrrrrrr

Brutal cold this weekend, well, brutal for Portland. Even colder this morning. Crazy blue, pink and white sky as well. Time to break out the wool hat for my morning commute.

Busy Weekend

I spent a good deal of Saturday working to sort out the Sunday morning release details with Eric Mosberger from our SCM team. Many moving parts, and we lost the support of his teammate since he went over his already agreed to cap on hours.

Saturday night found us chauffeuring boys around to social engagements. Good side of this was MA and I found time for a dinner out alone. Went to Tabla in barely NE Portland. Nice time, okay dinner, overall uninteresting place though. Way too many people looking busy but not quite working for our tastes. Bit too spendy as well. Especially the drinks in our opinion.

After dinner, I found myself having to drive Joe from party A in Milwaukie to party B in Tigard. Went to see The Informant while he did whatever teenagers do at parties these days. Pretty boring movie. Odd.

Sunday morning started off with the maintenance deployment at work. Ended up being fairly complicated and taking up almost the whole day. Seven thirty until about one in the afternoon for the whole thing. Spent a big chunk after that wondering about ways to clean things up to make them smoother. Laundry list follows.

  • Better application tool for Engine Menus. I want to write a Menu editor, export/import, compare tool in Django/Jython for this
  • Better application logging - we need to come up with some consistent way to log request successes as well as errors. That way we can use logs to tell us when things are working properly
  • Better hooks to validate whether a deployed version actually is running properly on all nodes. Often times we can’t tell whether something is up or not on all nodes.
  • Saner place to look for all application check out procedures in our team wiki.
  • Saner place to capture what our online monitoring tools are actually monitoring so we can tell what’s really not working when it sets of the klaxon bells.
  • Retrospectives after deploys with the SCM team.

May 15
Not quite Hecky’s, but a pretty good pulled pork sandwhich from Mississippi Delta food cart today.

Nice to enjoy a lunch outside after such a long cold spell.

Not quite Hecky’s, but a pretty good pulled pork sandwhich from Mississippi Delta food cart today.

Nice to enjoy a lunch outside after such a long cold spell.


“The word “service” certainly gets some exercise. ITIL v3 says “A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve, but without the ownership of specific costs and risks.” This impenetrable bit of consultant-babble does not help those who are trying to grasp the fundamental concept.” Never mind what ITIL says. What is a service? | The IT Skeptic

Apr 29

I’m in the movies!

Commuting by bike in Portland really is spectacular, especially in inner Southeast.


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