I ran into a problem while uploading an image earlier. Bascially I bumped into the default upload size limit of 2M for PHP. My host provider is Hostmonster so I set about figuring out how to change it. It turned out to be fairly straightforward in the end.
We got about 2 inches last night. Nothing to fantastic, but it made for a decent pic.
This game is going about like I expected. ‘Bama is playing with the right combination of emotion and discipline. They look like they expect to win the game while the Gators look like they thought they’d win the game. Big difference.
Tebow will look very human before this one is over. He’s had a fantastic college career- but let’s be honest, he’s had some of the best talent in the country to play with. He’s not a very good passing quarterback and if ‘Bama can continue to take away the running game or limit it’s effectiveness they’ll win convincingly. His Heisman hopes will be done after today.
That said, the way the game is going I still see a chance for Florida to compete in this game. If that’s going to happen, then it won’t be until after the half and the coaches have a chance to settle them down.
UPDATE: Hmmm. Tebow showed a little something there prior to the half. Could end up being a thriller yet. Count me as pleasantly surprised.
UPDATE 2: Looks like the Tide is starting to roll… 26-13 and driving.
LAST UPDATE: This game is done. It’s 32-13 with 13 minutes to play. Tebow can’t pass them back into this one. He’s not that kind of QB.
After the boy was born, the first piece of advice I remember getting from Dad was “Do as I say, not as I do.”
What he actually meant was he had observed that kids tend to mimic parents actual actions, rather than act like their parents tell them. If the two are one and the same, everything is hunky-dory. It’s when the parent acts a different way than their stated policy that things get dicey.
Being self-observant is difficult because it requires being honest with yourself. Let’s face it, we don’t WANT to think that we’re doing something wrong as a parent and it’s pretty easy to just assume that the child understands that parents get to do certain things and kids do other things, end of story. Applying it to a kid makes it tricky because you have to be able to imagine how the child is processing what they are seeing and hearing. Applying the knowledge is the most difficult step, because it requires the parent to change their own behavior patterns.
My right knee has fluid in it. Been that way since racquetball started up. As a result, my right calf is sore all the time.
The nerve bundle in my left elbow is swollen so I can’t fully extend my arm- maybe about 95%. If it does straighten out, like when a child decides to use it as a vine to swing on, the pain is excruciating.
My neck gets sore when I’m working at a desk or over a computer too long.
My lower back stiffens up if I sit too long.
My left shoulder has a stabbing pain in it if I try to lift the kids. That one’s new- don’t know if it’s here for the long haul or not.
I remember not feeling like this after football games.
I remember playing racquetball for hours at a time, night after night without needing a break.
I remember throwing a discus on a sprained ankle.
I remember riding 65 miles on bikes training for bike racing, then doing uphill sprints the next day.
I remember endless weeks of weight training 4 days a week and then competing on the weekends.
I remember.
When my armoire project was still in the planning stages, I knew that it would have drawers. I just hadn’t settled on the size of the drawers. As luck would have it I found some exceptionally nice looking cherry boards that were planed on both sides and still close to a full 4/4 thick and a little over 8″ wide. It didn’t take me long to decide to use those boards as the drawer fronts. They also solved my drawer sizing problems. I planned to make the drawer’s a full 8″ deep, thus using as much of the boards as possible.
Because I haven’t had enough experience making drawer runners, or slides, using all wood I decided to go with the Blum slides. Everything I read about them indicated they were top notch. The only drawback I came across was that the drawers had to be made to fairly rigourous specifications in order to work with the slides.
I really underestimated the meaning of ‘rigorous specifications.’
I’m writing the blog client in python. I had spent some time learning Perl a while back and I liked it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything to keep me working at it and I forgot a lot of the syntax. For Perl, in particular, that’s a killer. Some of the code that I go back and look at is real difficult to figure out. My only saving grace is that I never got to a point of proficiency with the Perl idioms, so I don’t have any super dense code to decode.
I had tinkered with python and liked it. It seemed to be a better implementation of a programming language than Perl. In particular, the language syntax itself is compact, making it easy to put together useful programs quickly. The ability to have quick success with a programming language can’t be understated. Further, the more powerful and useful forms of the language are accessible without all kinds of little idiosyncracies or exceptions (funny characters, unusual punctuation, those sorts of things).
I’m not particularly qualified to assess the language to any great degree, so I won’t waste the time. The topic has been given adequate attention by more accomplished programmers than I. For me, the bottom line is it’s possible to write useful, maintainable, programs quickly in python. Further, if my blog client is any indicator, it seems to scale well when used in larger programs.
For posterity’s sake, I thought I’d put the first “pythonic” idiom I concocted myself. It actually did exactly what I wanted it to the first time I coded it:
n = max(map(lambda x: len(self.__ast[x]), self.__ast.keys()))
It sure beat ‘for’ loops and ‘if’ statements. The only help I’ll offer is that ‘__ast’ is a dict of lists. Actually, that’s probably all the help needed.
The lass was looking at my forearms today and asked me “What are all those things on your arms Dad?”
“What things?”
“These liney things. Where did you get those?” she said and she traced her fingers over the veins in my forearm.
I said “Those are veins. You have them in your forearms too…”
“I don’t have 4 arms!!! Silly Dad.”
Yes, silly Dad.
The latest DirectTV commercial has to be one of the best. I can’t help but laugh everytime that guy gets up out of his chair declaring “It’s ME!!! Goin’ to Barbados folks…”
And it’s the little things that make it work: the subtle sideways glancing of everyone as they try to figure out who won’t be there next week, the high-five he gets once he gets up from his chair, the incredulous look on the CEO’s face when the guy gets up, even the rest of his parting line as he leaves stating “Good luck with that DirectTV thing. Sounds hard.”
Most amazingly, at least for recent commercials, is I remember who the ad is for.
For the boy, today probably actually started yesterday.
I took him with my to my racquetball match. We played early so I figured it was a good opportunity to give him a different experience and still get him home at decent hour. I play at an Italian men’s club with two courts. They only play doubles and most of the guys have been playing there for years. Like 20 and more. I haven’t yet reached 10. But if I want to play some decent racquetball and have a good laugh with the guys, this is pretty much the only game in town.
He knew we had to leave shortly after he got home from school. He had a smile on his face when he got off the bus and his feet barely touched the ground as he ran down the driveway. He asked me all kinds of questions on the drive out. After we arrived and I introduced him, one of the guys brought him to the bar and bought him chips and soda. They all cracked jokes and had him bug me with setup “inside-joke” questions while I was playing.
I played well, but we lost a close match. We finally got home a little after his bedtime so he sat with Mom and unwound for awhile. He finally stopped smiling when he fell asleep.
The dearth of posting is related to my blog client project. I had it running and then decided it needed a fairly significant overhaul. Naturally, that broke it again. It seems to be limping along again now.
I do have some posts on stale topics, timewise that is, to come now that I can use it again. But not now. The Lass is tired of waiting for me to get off of the “pyooooter.”
Back later.
The kids woke up and immediately went to check out the Elf- who was NOT in his spot!
So began the great Elf hunt. Where was he? Why wasn’t he back from visiting Santa? Is he coming back? What will happen if he doesn’t come back? OK, maybe it wasn’t SO great since it only lasted about 20 minutes.
Eventually he was spotted when I asked the lass to check out the temperature outside. There he was, perched up on the shelf above the thermometer, carefully noting all that was going on in the house. The kids stared at him for a few moments, assessing the unexpected revelation that Sparky was not where he had been left last night.
How come he changed positions? Why is he over there? Can he talk to us now? I want to ask him about Santa! Can I ask him for more toys?
Thanks Sis.
The dearth of posting over the past couple of days was due largley to a visit with the family over the weekend. We got there late Thursday night and got back home late Sunday evening. Among other niceties, I finally got to watch some college football- and they were good games as well.
As it happens, Santa had his elves make an early visit to my parent’s home since somehow he knew the kids were going to be there. The boy and the lass were both trying to reconcile that. How’d he know they were going to be there?
They’ll just have to keep wondering.
We just started a new family Christmas tradition. The Sister actually clued us into this particular piece of magic. One of her friends has been doing it with her kids for a couple of years and they’ve enjoyed it. The sister plans on starting it with her kids in a year or so.
I am speaking of the Shelf Elf.
Checking how timestamping works.
UPDATE: Interesting, putting NO timestamp info in the post object sent to the XML RPC results in the post being published immediately. This means the logical thing to do is not include timestamping unless someone wants to schedule a post for publishing.
If the program works, then this is my first published post using a python program I’m working on and, for now, call blogtools. Now that I’ve been posting for awhile, I’ve got a decent idea for what I need in a blog client- not that much. The fact is that I don’t do a lot of fancy visual stuff ’round these parts. Every now and again, I include a piece of code, or a quote, and use some “pre” tags to do that. Even more infrequently, I put some pictures in a post.
So an honest appraisal is that all I really need is a text editor for writing a post and a way to get the post to the blog. Well, we’ve got xmlrpc for the latter. For the former, if there’s one thing that Linux accels at, it is providing ways to write text files: vim, emacs, nano, ed to name a few.
Both kids at school.
Both dogs at the kennel.
One wife at work.
Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh…
We have our first parent-teacher tonight for the Boy. Apparently he is keenly aware of this fact based on the following exchange we had:
“Dad, do you know when you’re supposed to go to my school?”
“Ummm, what do you mean?”
“You know, when you’re going to meet with my teacher so she can tell you how good I’ve been.”
Could he really have figured out the the whole thing at such a shockingly early age?
I went to the Y with the Boy the morning. Played some racquetball with him before I brought him up to the child-watch so I could practice a little and then do some other conditioning work before heading home. On the way in, he asked if he could swipe the card at the front desk. Naturally, I let him.
Of course, if the Lass had been there she would have demanded that she be the one to get to swipe the card. I’m guessing that most parents of more than 2 kids who are of comparable age and ability run into this phenomena. Pick any relatively trivial task and assign it to child A. Child B will, shortly thereafter, decide that they’d like to give it a try. Child A will defend their turf viciously- asking if they can do said task up to days in advance (if possible) so they can maintain an edge over their sibling.
The sucker punch of the situation is to play Solomon and let them alternate doing the task.
This seemingly reasonable approach opens up the “He did it last time, I get to do it this time!” wars. Woe be to the parent that forgets whose turn it is. The child, who can barely remember to brush their teeth after breakfast, will retain a detailed history of who did what and when. The ultimate mistake here is to brush off the “turn” thing with “Well, you did this other thing today, so we’ll let your brother/ sister do this now.” There is no bartering in the world of entitlements.
Ironically, the only sane path through all of this ridiculousness is to take the task away from them both. This approach consistently causes no fits, tears, silent treatment. It’s almost like they never really wanted to do it in the first place. Shame on you for trying to give them something different to do.
I didn’t see the end of the game- stopped watching in the 3rd quarter. So I missed the fireworks in the 4th quarter. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I’ve been able to read up on the game and I’ve decided that Belichik made a defensible call. If Manning hangs 17 points on your defense in the 4th quarter, including a near 80-yard drive in 1:47, then I think as a coach you have to be thinking that whether Manning gets it at his 30 or your 30, he’s going to drive for a touchdown. Conversely, a 2-yard conversion for an offense that’s rolled up 450 yards looks like real makeable.
Not a conventional call, but a defensible one.
UPDATE: Having read more opinions, plus listening to a nearly apoplectic Ted Johnson on the radio, I’ve come to the conclusion that this was right call. Understand, I’m not a Belichik apparatchik nor am I a Pats fan of any note.
Listening to all the callers and opinions, it seems to be nearly unanimous that had the Pats punted the outcome would be a done deal. Apparently Pats’ fans had forgotten the AFC championship game from a few years back, or other games where Manning had victimized them in quick strike fashion (I can think of another game where the Colts marched down and it took a goal line stand for the Pats to preserve the win.) Let alone the two previous 4th quarter touchdown drives from the game. Giving Manning the ball with almost 2 minutes to go, probably on his 30 with a timeout in hand are not odds you want to bet against. Much as he is reviled, Manning knows how to work in that situation and he has long since cast off his Pat’s hex.
I think Belichik made the call because it was his best chance to win. They had racked up over 450 yards of offense to that point. They’ve made 4th down conversions all year long. Indeed, they have one of the best offenses in the league. They had scored 34 points. Moving the ball was not an issue. Pressure was not an issue. The calculus was simple- he was confident they could get two yards, when they needed it, against anyone. Why give the ball back to Manning when they don’t have to? If (when in Belichik’s mind) they make, the game is over.
This move was the ultimate “aggressive” play calling move. Really, in that situation putting his defense back on the field is playing “not-to-lose” instead of for the win. He bucked conventional wisdom here, but his doing so doesn’t show lack of confidence in his defense or arrogance regarding his own play calling ablilities. It was a decision to give his team the best chance to win a game. That’s what good coaches do.