After we went fishing, we met Dave and Andrew, Dave and I went to Sammon's in Temple to play some golf.  I've shared some golf stories before, and it is well-known that I suck.  I've done some crazy things like accidentally throwing a club into the water, and now I have another one to add...

I hit Dave with a golf ball.  It was a total accident. I was lining up a 9-iron shot while Dave was searching in the stream for his ball.  A 9-iron is supposed to give you a really high arch, but mine went like a drive...straight at Dave.  I hollered, Andrew hollered, but to no avail.  Lots of thoughts went through my head like:

• He'll be killed, and I'll get life in prison
• It'll hit him in the eye and he'll be blinded
• Maybe he'll pull a Matrix maneuver and avoid it completely.  The ball will continue and go right in the hole.

Nope.  It hit him right in the front side of his elbow.  He's doing fine now, and it looks much better.  I felt really bad.  He had to play trombone at church the next day.  I thought his career might be over, but it's fine.  I even found out he was bragging that he had been hit.

Anyway, I had some nice shots, like a 45-foot putt, and a drive on a par 4 that put me inches from the green (which then took me another 5 strokes to get it in the hole).  It was a blast.

I've been really busy, but I want to get most of my activities up here, cause we had alot of fun.  I'll get them up one-by-one.

Saturday morning, I got up early to take my car in to the shop to get the windshield replaced.  It had a huge crack in it, right at eye level.  While it was in, we decided to go fishing, so my dad, brother (Andrew), and I hooked up the boat and went to the lake.

Now this boat is pretty small, and really old, and it's had its share of problems.  It used to belong to my grandfather “Papa” who loved to hunt and fish and everything outdoors.  I got alot of my love of the outdoors from him.  He headed out to a nice cove near the northeast corner of the lake.  I'm working on being able to generate maps from my GPS data, but I'm not there yet.

We fished for a while until we spotted a pretty cool cave.  Andrew didn't want to go in because of the spiders, and, to his credit, there were some pretty large scary-looking spiders in there.  I got in there and killed them with an oar.  It was pretty cool.  It's hard to see what it was like from the pictures, but it went way back. If I had had a flashlight, I might have gone in further, but no way without one.

We trolled around some more, and witnessed a kid getting hooked in the ear across the cove from us.  It was really quite, and all of a sudden, everyone in their boat was screaming and yelling. The kid was pulling away, which was setting the hook deeper, the mom was yelling, “Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-“ and the dad was yelling “Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-“. It was crazy.

When we tried to start the motor to go elsewhere, we realized it wouldn't go into gear. Perhaps it was the stump we hit on the way into the cove.  We tried to open it up and fix it, but the linkages were fine, it must have been something in the vertical-to-horizontal transfer case, which we couldn't fix.

We made an effort to get back using the tolling motor, but the winds were pretty high, and the GPS was indicating it would take almost 2 hours to get back at that rate.

We flagged down another boat, which happened to be the boat that we witness the hook-in-the-ear earlier.  The boat “The Emperor of China” towed us back to Temple Lake Park and we got the boat out of the water without too much trouble.  We were happy to have gotten back.

It's the first day of my Memorial Weekend 2004 vacation, and I did so much.  Here's the short version of what I did today:

1. Took car in to get windshield replaced (had a crack)
2. Went to the lake to fish with my dad and my brother.
   1. Fished
   2. Climbed in a cave with big spiders
   3. Broke the boat
   4. Got towed back to shore by the Emperor of China (or at least a boat of that same name)
3. Picked up my car
4. Went golfing with Andrew (my brother) and Dave
   1. Sunk a 45 foot put
   2. Almost chipped one in
   3. Hit an awesome drive when some people were watching
   4. Otherwise stunk up the joint. (we almost ran out of balls)
5. Ate at El Chico's

I hope to break these stories down a bit and include some pictures, but I'm exhausted.  So I'll give that a try tomorrow sometime.

I guess they've got the air conditioner on summer duty here at work.  It is freaking cold.  I just mentioned to some co-workers that I was suffering from Frozen Mouse Hand Syndrome and it got a laugh, so I thought I'd write about it real quick.

For those who don't understand what I'm talking about, the hand you use your computer mouse with stays exposed on the keyboard or mouse much more than the other one (at least from my personal experience).  Mine gets really cold before I realize it, and I have to sit on it for a few minutes to warm it back up.

I just got a call from Becky who was doing some shopping at the I-35/Parmer Target.  They are opening a new Freebirds in that shopping center!  Location is no longer an issue in the great Freebirds vs. Chipotle debate.  This one is about the same drive time from our house as the nearest Chipotle.

The website says it's opening on June 7th! whoo hoo!  Of course, it will be mobbed for the first month.

I got my installation kit for voice over IP for my home phone last night.  It's pretty awesome.  My home phone number doesn't get switched over until Friday, so I can only make out-going calls.  All incoming calls still go through the old system.

The hardware they sent is just a D-Link 1120M that's specialized for the service.  It's basically a single-port NAT firewall that you put between your cable/DSL-modem and the rest of your LAN infrastructure.  If you're serving external service like a web site (like this one) then you have to delve into the configuration (which sucks compared to my Linksys router) to allow incoming traffic to successfully traverse the “double-NAT”.  If the D-link had a DMZ option, it would be perfect, but it doesn't, so you have to forward ports on both routers. I plugged in an old phone and made a couple of calls last night, and there was absolutely no perceivable difference in operation between it and a regular phone line.  Not thinking, I rebooted the router while I was talking to my dad, which of course ended our conversation.  That was pretty funny.  It just completely slipped my mind that I was not on a regular phone line.

The service lets you do awesome stuff like:

• Unlimited long-distance
• Have your voice mail sent to you in an email, or check it via the web, or send alert emails to let you know you have voice mail
• Forward your calls to multiple locations and have them ring all at once, or in sequence
• Schedule “do not disturb time“ when your phone will not ring (with an exception process for emergencies)
• plus lots more I can't think of

And it costs much less than we've been paying for our home phone service.  This is starting to sound like a commercial, but I'm just excited about it.  If you're paying more than $40 for your home phone service, let me know and I'll send you a referral so we can both reap the rewards.

I just got an email from Adobe touting the new features of Premiere Pro 1.5.  One of the features I'm really excited about is native support for my Panasonic DVX100's 24p and 24pa modes.  If done correctly, it would really reduce the number of steps in my 24p editing pipeline.  It's got a pretty compelling upgrade price of $99.  I haven't decided to get it.  I'd like to line up a specific project to use it on before I spring for it.

I haven't had the opportunity to try out Vegas Video, but one of the selling points there was the 24p support.  This may turn the tide a bit.

That sounds like a good band name.

After several people asked about the size of the turtle in a previous post, I realized that the small lens of my camera phone tends to exaggerate the perspective of things.  The turtle picture almost makes it look like a Galapagos tortoise in scale.  If you're interested in getting the actual size of the turtle, Jen's got a picture of Becky holding it in one of her posts, so you can see the size.  Her picture was taken with a “real” camera and has some nice detail.  She also does some interesting post-processing on her pictures that give them a very cool look.

Dave made his Barnes Family patented homemade pizza for us this evening.  It was delicious.  I have captured the process to share with you, but I've left out some key steps so you can't reproduce it.  Kind of like MacGuyver.

Delicious!  If you notice from the pictures, Dave has a pizza stone, which makes the crust come out extra perfect.

We went with Jen and Dave to see Shrek II this afternoon, and now we're hanging out waitin for dave to make some of his excellent pizza.  Shrek II was very enjoyable.  Antonio Banderas is absolutely hilarious. 

On the way to the theater, we saw a turtle on the sidewalk, so we moved it to a less dangerous location.

Stay tuned for pizza pictures!!!

The other day, I griped about phone numbers and suggested a DNS-mapping for phone numbers. Looks like this is underway on several fronts.  Here's a slashdot story that points to several of these projects.

I've had my laptop for several months now, and in that time I thought I had exhausted the features and full explorered their possibilities.  I was wrong.  In an article I was reading (I can't remember why I was reading an article about a laptop I already own), someone mentioned that it had a SPDIF/out jack (optical digital audio output).

I knew this had to be a mistake, I don't have one of those...or do I.  I gave it another close inspection and realized that the headphone jack had two labels, one with a little picture resembling headphones, the other was a smal circle with a lightning bolt through it. So, either this was where The Flash plugged in, or it was trying to tell me something.  I removed the speaker cable and inserted an optical cable adapter. (that I just happened to have lying around)  Voila!  Beautiful, red laser light came streaming forth.

You can see it in the picture (taken with my phone).  It's the bright spot coming out of the leftmost of the three jacks on the front.  The middle is occupied by the mic, the far right is an S-Video jack disguised as an 1/8“ stereo jack.

I finally took some time today to explore NMock with a collegue.  We wanted to unit test a .NET component that was consuming some COM interfaces.  This is difficult, since the instances we are dealing with are created by another process, and they are not createable outside that environment. “Mocking” allows us to create an object that looks and behaves like the desired component for a specific condition, as well as provide an indication if the object under test behaved in the expected way.

NMock provides a full framework for mocking, and works well with NUnit, a top-notch unit testing framework.  While seeing a great potential for usefulness and making unit testing less painful, I was sad to see that there are some issues that kept it from working in our case:

1. Practically zero documentation - No official documentation, some ambiguous samples here and there.  You can use the jMock documentation to learn concepts, but NMock is hardly a transparent port to the CLR.
2. Some issues with mocking interfaces - It doesn't seem to recognize inherited members.
3. Some issues with COMInterop - This was what made #2 a show stopper.  It was trying to instantiate a COM object when all we wanted was to mock it.

We'll screw with it some more in the next week or so before giving up.  There seems to be much more recent code in SourceForge than is released.  Maybe some of the issues are fixed.

I've been re-reading more of Martin Fowler's content. Tonight was “The New Methodology”, kind of an overview of the Agile Development movement.  Some of the quotes that really hit home:

There's a refrain I've heard on every problem project I've run into. The developers come to me and say "the problem with this project is that the requirements are always changing". The thing I find surprising about this situation is that anyone is surprised by it. In building business software requirements changes are the norm, the question is what we do about it.

I'm always complaining about moving requirements.  I guess what I should be complaining about is that I am not empowered to deal with them.

(On people as replaceable parts of the development cycle):

This creates a strong positive feedback effect. If you expect all your developers to be plug compatible programming units, you don't try to treat them as individuals. This lowers morale (and productivity). The good people look for a better place to be, and you end up with what you desire: plug compatible programming units.

I see this every day.

I've just had 2 experiences with telephone-related upgrades/moves and I have decided telephone numbers suck. First, I will relate to you the circumstances of my experiences, and then rant about the numbers.

First, Becky and I switched from Nextel to ATTWireless for our mobile phones.  Working for Motorola (now Freescale) finally paid off and I got a substantial discount on a V600, by far the best, and most full-featured phone I had seen come out of Motorola ever.  Everything just works.  Nothing is stupid.  I used to be pretty skeptical of Bluetooth, but I'm a believer now.  I've got a wireless Bluetooth headset, and it just works.  You open it up, and the phone goes into “headset mode” relaying all noises to the headset and receiving all input from the headset mic.  I can write J2ME programs and just transfer them over Bluetooth to the phone.  I'm currently making my own implementation of an Ambient Orb using the event light of the phone.  I just can't figure out how to handle SMS messages from my own code.  Anyway, this paragraph is already too long, so I'll stop.

I got Becky a T721, it's way better than my top of the line Nextel phone, which I gave to Andrew. (which was a cool success story in itself.  I just swapped the SIM cards and it worked)  To make a long story short, we're getting a much better deal with ATTWireless.

I also just signed up for a VoIP (Voice over IP) solution for our home phone, which I will blog about later when I have it set up and can reap the benefits of refering friends and getting paid for it.

In both situations, I was transferring my phone number to another service provider.  After thinking about it, that is just stupid.  Why am I, a person who can move all over the world,  tied to a number that is tied to a certain location?  Most people have trouble remembering numbers.  Let's take a prominent example... You're hungry for some pizza (and who isn't).  You like Dominos, and you're a web savvy guy or girl and want to order online.  Do you grab the “internet book“ and look up the IP address for dominos? Have you ordered online so often that you know the ip address by memory? NO! You type www.dominos.com?  We (Al Gore and I) built the “internet book” into the internet when we invented it.

Why don't we have a solution for phone numbers?  You might argue that that's what the phone book in your phone is for, or speed dial, or the operator, but those are either not universal, or not fast enough.  I suppose the #1 reason is that phones have numbers on them.  We've had to invent ingenious text entry mechanisms like T9 and iTAP (which my V600 has and is awesome!  much better than T9, which my i90c had) to be able to enter text.

Why don't we extend the DNS namespace with a .phone suffix and have them resolve to phone numbers through some system?  DNS servers could resolve them to VoIP gateways. Now, I agree I haven't thought through this all the way, and there's bound to be some kinks, and I'm not so naive to think I'm the first to propose this, but come on, let's get started! I call marklio.phone!

OK, it's been a while since I had a good nerd post.  Here goes.

I subscribe to Martin Fowler's updates RSS, meaning I get notified when he adds or updates new content.  He doesn't do it often, but when he does, it's always interesting reading to me?  He thinks like I want to think...about software anyway.

His latest update is to a relatively old paper looking at the way software design is evolving and how thinks like Extreme Programming (or XP, not to be confused with Windows XP), refactoring, and Design Patterns have driven that change.  He asks the question, “Is Software Design Dead?”  Of course he answers it as well...No it's not.  As I looked at the updated sections, I couldn't recall the rest of the article, so I read it again.

It's an excellent read for any interested in the realm of software design.  I've found it to be particularly true for me in the past few months.  I can bang out code with what seems to be very little “design”, when in reality I'm just moving design inline with the coding.  The code designs itself as it evolves. Anyway, I know one or two of my readers that may find it enlightening.

Evidently, some UT student is under terrorism investigation after requesting blueprints to the rumored UT underground tunnel system.  Ordinarily, this would not be a big deal to me.  The reason it IS of interest is that his name is Mark Miller.  Not just Mark Miller, but Mark A. Miller (that's also my name for those of you keeping score at home)! Check out his blog.  I like my online identity MUCH better than what he came up with.

Needless to say, I've gotten several concerned calls, emails, and face-to-face conversations with people wondering what I'm up to.  It's not me folks!  I keep my activities much more secret than him ...OR DO I? ...what?

Also, you guys who think I'm a nerd should check out this guy.  He makes me look like a rock star.

I'm in the lobby outside of Bates recital hall at UT, waiting for Becky's Wind Ensemble concert to begin.  Jen and Dave just messaged me with some links to some crazy images from this presumably Japanese guy.  Check them out!

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/saishin-e.html

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/saishin2e.html

I really appreciate UT's wireless network.  Very easy to use.  I also wish I had a camera phone.  There are always such interesting people here.

I didn't want to directly rip off Peter's post, but he did remind me of something I've been meaning to write about for a while.  A few months ago, when I filmed the Three Nails Short CD release party, they did a cover of a Switchfoot song, “Dare you to Move”.  At that point, I hadn't heard of Switchfoot. (and I couldn't figure out all the words and was forced to fill in my own about brands of condensed milk and my pet dog)

Anyway, I then had one of those experiences where you've never heard of something one day, and the next you see or hear about it all the time.  I finally got their latest CD, and I really like it.

I've been using GMail for almost a week now.  Enough time to use most of the features.  I don't have quite enough messages in it yet to need the search features, but I have played with them.

The Good:

• Very slick and easy to use. the interface is very simple and VERY responsive.
• The whole thing is driven with javascript.  In fact, if you attempt to view the source, you pretty much get nothing except javascript.  Very impressive.
• They appear to be using a webservices type architecture to download data in the background as needed.  Very rarely do you get a full refresh.
• The way it shows your messages as conversation threads really helps you see the conversation.  It shows your own replies as part of the conversation.
• If anyone is worries about it being more limited than something like Outlook because it's web-based, don't be.  the Outlook developers could learn a thing or two here.
• The keyboard shortcuts are very impressive.  I haven't seen a web interface make such good use of shortcuts.  I'm not sure how they've implemented it.  You can do all kinds of crap with them.  pretty much everything.
• The ads do not get in the way at all.  In fact, if you're looking for them, you'll have a hard time finding them.
• I find the concept of “labeling“ instead of filing to be very natural.  Items can have more than 1 label.  They're alot like categories.

The Bad:

• No signature support.  I don't really ever use them, but this sure seems like it's missing considering the thought they've put into other aspects.
• No HTML support in message composing.  I've got a very rich interface for formatting and styling for my blog entries, why not for creating gmail?
• Poor HTML mail rendering.  I've received a couple of messages that didn't render correctly.
• What am I supposed to do offline?  Of course you could argue this is a different model, but I'll have to continue pulling my mail in Outlook to have offline content.  I'm just not used to the model yet.
• When you create filters to “label“ messages (there aren't folders), you can't execute them on items currently in your inbox.  You can “test“ the filter by allowing it to show you what items match your criteria, but you can't seem to apply them.
• The view cannot be sorted.  It's stuck on newest to oldest.  I suppose the argument is that the searching and labeling removes the need for this.
• The search doesn't work on partial words.  Maybe I don't know what I'm doing, but if I search for wood, it will not match woods.  This seems pretty limiting.

Maybe I'll think of some more later.  If you have some, or have suggestions on working around the bad, leave a comment.

Back in February, I blogged about the snow we had on Valentine's Day.  In that post, I misspelled the word ugly.  About a week later, I started getting search engine traffic for the phrase “ungly people”.  I fixed my spelling, but search engines are lazy and I still get alot of traffic for people looking for “ungly people”.  Not that I mind getting more traffic, as is evident by my prolific use of the word “ungly” in this post.  I'm hoping someone can tell me if there is some meaning for that word that I am unaware of.  None of my dictionary resources show it as a word.  Are other people simply making the same spelling mistake I did?  And if so, why are they so interested in seeing ugly people?  Are they themselves not attractive, and they seek to boost their self esteem by viewing others who are less attractive?  Believe me, you will not find them here!

Can anyone shed some light on this? Or give me your theories of what's going on?

I woke up this morning feeling really crappy.  Our weird weather and allergies have combined to form some kind of health void for me.  Hope to be over this soon.