Role Players

Due to some personal issues that his Mom faced while he was growing up. my Dad was basically raised for a significant portion of his childhood by his Aunt Jean and Uncle Jimmy.  They were very good to my Dad and Mom - and to all of us as well.

In an email exchange earlier this year, my sister Joan was reminiscing how Uncle Jimmy would provide transportation frequently for the kids while Dad was at work – Mom didn’t drive. In an earlier post, I also briefly touched on the good times that we all shared at Aunt Jean and Uncle Jimmy’s small cottage on the Juniata River in the town of Ardenheim outside of Huntingdon.

Dinner Is Served

Back around Thanksgiving, I had a nice piece of ham laying around and threw it in the crock pot with some lima beans, water, and seasonings. 8 hours later, I had a simple, hearty meal on a very frigid day.

Growing up, my Mom’s lima beans and ham was one of the meals that I didn’t like – at all. But somehow, by the time I had reached adulthood, I had acquired a taste for it. Comfort food. Easy to make – even someone lacking the most elementary culinary chops like me couldn’t screw that up.

However, just like me, none of my kids cared for it – again, at all – while they were growing up. So it was more than a little surprising that all three of them voluntarily partook of this stuff during the latest Thanksgiving break.

Repeating Of Course

As described in my last post, I occasionally try to find some moment at work in which I can interject some subtle humor or sarcasm to break up the monotony. In my case, these efforts typically fall flat on their face due to my material or my delivery or both.  But that doesn’t deter me from trying. Obviously, you can’t force it or overdo it or you end up looking lame, so timing is pretty critical.

Earlier this year, I thought I had a perfect opening and attempted to capitalize.

Back in 2006, there was a viral video unleashed that I thought was hilarious. ”Leeroy Jenkins” highlighted a play-by-play account of an online multi-player game of World of Warcraft where one of the players, Leroy, goes off the grid and does his own freelance thing - much to the chagrin of his teammates, who are painstakingly planning an elaborate attack.

Am I Really That Boring?

I am very grateful that I am able to make a decent living developing software. On the good days, it can be very satisfying and the time flies. Even on the bad days, software development is still better than about 99% of the other jobs that I could imagine myself doing.

But the actual type of software I work on (systems management software) isn’t exactly the sexiest stuff in the industry when compared to, say, consumer applications that the entire world uses (smart phone apps, browsers, etc). It is very specialized, has incredibly long deployment cycles, and typically requires services engagements so the function can be tailored for the individual customers.

As is typical with any product development area, there are the assorted status and team meetings to attend, reviews with various stakeholders, and the normal elements of a large corporate bureaucracy with which one must fight. So lightening up the work environment with some humor would seem to be a welcome respite from the mundane aspects of the job. I have had some spectacular failures in this respect over the last couple of years. The failures were spectacular not in that the humor was in poor taste or offensive – rather that simply nobody got the humor!

I Ate the Cheese!

Tuesday night was my Dad’s Bowling Night at the Knights of Columbus on 12th Ave in downtown Altoona. After rolling, the team members would often retire to the club for drinks and card games.

Bowling was my Dad’s one recreational activity. He didn’t hunt or fish or play golf, but he really did enjoy  bowling. The K was his main social club and I can only imagine the outlet it provided for him from the mundane, working class, physically-demanding job that he performed his entire life.

In addition to the weekly Tuesday night out during Bowling Season, Dad would also frequent The K to tend bar, to sub for another team, or just to have a couple pops and play cards with the guys. Friday night was by far the predominant night out at The K. Of course, if the light was on and he was in the mood, then it didn’t have to be Bowling Night or Friday night.

Depending on how long the game or evening’s festivities ran, Dad would get back home fairly late for a work night. Dad’s shift at the railroad would vary, but he would usually be out of the house by between 5:30 or 6:00 AM. Very, very, infrequently, a half-day of work might be missed because the previous evening’s fun and games got a little too crazy or the arrival back home was a little too late.

The Light Is On In The K

My father had this habit, when driving past the Knights of Columbus (aka The K or The Club) on 12th Ave in downtown Altoona, of peering through the front door windows to see if the light in the lobby was on. I believe this check was part of an internal planning process.

Duke vs. Army – September 25

I think there should be a constitutional amendment that bans college football games from being scheduled in daytime hours in the Southeast in the month of September. I guess I can dream, but fat chance of that happening as TV basically dictates to these institutions of higher learning when they will play. So we had the absurdity of this game (kickoff at 3:00 PM) being played in Durham, NC under sunny skies and 96 degrees Fahrenheit. Great football weather! All because ESPN-U decided to televise this thing.

Guilty Internet Pleasures – DontEvenReply.com

“There are 5,000 great people for every jerk on Usenet.  But that still is a lot of jerks.  Proceed with caution and eyes wide open.”  - Don Rittner

Dictionary.com defines the word authenticate as a verb meaning “to establish as valid or genuine”. Back in the old days of the Web in the mid 90s, the mechanisms for authentication were pretty crude and easy to compromise. With so much money to be made though in e-commerce, it was only a matter of time before those issues were solved.

So it wasn’t long before protocols like Secure Sockets and technologies such as public key-private key encryption were embedded in Web Clients and Web Servers. Nowadays, one doesn’t think twice about logging into a bank’s web application, assured that the https in the front of that URL means that the other end of that connection really is one’s bank and not some scam artist.

Yahtzee

Memory is a weird thing. A couple of months ago, I had (yet another) senior moment. I went grocery shopping for some ingredients for a pasta meal. While in the store, I definitively recall picking up and examining a loaf of garlic bread, before deciding on a loaf of Italian bread.

That night, I prepared the pasta and partook of that Italian bread. So far, so good. The next evening, I didn’t feel like cooking again, so I was going to do the leftover deal. Inexplicably, I went looking for the garlic bread, even going so far as to ask Joe, Jr whether I had maybe left it in the trunk of the car. WTF? “Dad, we had Italian bread last night and the rest of it is currently in the bread box.” Oh yeah - shit!

On the other hand, I have no problem recalling vividly details from events and experiences that occurred 35 years ago. Prompted by some spam email that I received regarding online board games, I thought back to the old days playing the dice game of Yahtzee.

Duke vs. Alabama – September 18

This was a really big deal for Duke with (then) #1 coming to town. We all expected to get shellacked (particularly after the defensive performance at Wake) and we weren’t disappointed. It was truly a men-against-boys deal. One of those games where the disparity in athleticism is just so great that you just hope nobody gets seriously injured. Alabama could have named the score in the 62-13 rout.

I was quite proud of the picture I took to the right, showing one of the Tide offensive lineman in a blatant hold  (as if they needed any help from the officials). Every once in a blue moon,I get lucky with a nice shot.

Public parking lots were open 6 1/2 hours before kickoff rather than the normal 4 hours to accommodate the throng of Alabama fans attending the game. We arrived at about 9:10 AM for the 3:30 kick and the Chemistry Lot was already 2/3 fill. Kind of interesting to tailgate for that long. Definitely want to pace yourself and I was able to cook two full courses of chicken, hot dogs, and burgers.

Maybe We Should Try Something a Little Simpler?

Watching the trick play (which I blogged about here) that the Texas middle school football team pulled off led me to recall an episode at one of our Thanksgiving day touch football games held at my brother Rich’s house in Virginia in the late-1990s.

My family has spent a number of Thanksgiving holidays as guests at Rich and Lora’s place. If they ever call in the tab on all the free food and drink I have consumed over the years, I am thinking that I might need to obtain a second mortgage.

Trickeration

This video was captured at a middle school football game in Corpus Christi, TX. Pretty interesting concept. Certainly has the surprise element covered. Hopefully Driscoll saved this play for a really critical juncture in a really big game, because chances are their future opponents won’t fall for it. Hell, since it went viral, I doubt any team anywhere falls for this again.

Couple of observations upon a more detailed viewing:

• The quarterback for Driscoll is really stout, but looks surprisingly quick. Wonder if JaMarcus Russell looked like that in middle school?
• I love the way the quarterback and the Driscoll head coach play up the confusion factor before the snap. Look at the opposing linebackers relax.
• The center (#76) for Driscoll is huge. I can’t believe that kid is in middle school. He looks to be 225 or  250 pounds (at least).
• Props to that little cornerback (#19) on the opposing team who was playing through the whistle (unlike the rest of his teammates).
• But no good deed goes unpunished. Check out the stiff-arm that the hefty quarterback gives #19 at around the 11 yard line. Get off of me!
• Then #19 puts on a good show and dives at the quarterback when he is already seven yards into the end zone. Good hustle!
• The obligatory chest bump with #81 leads to Lil JaMarcus on his ass. It is all about leverage.
• The Driscoll center finally arrives in the end zone for the celebration – better late than never.
• That is one very nicely maintained field for a middle school.

Calling Nick Saban's Wife

In this post, I relayed a story told to me from an Alabama fan regarding quality  control that Nick Saban’s wife Terry had undertaken on statues produced honoring her husband.

I am thinking that the University at Texas in Austin is wishing they had a Terry Saban right about now. Seems that UT contracted an Asian company to produce a series of statues honoring Longhorn greats in all sports. The results are comically bad. It is almost a textbook parody on racial stereotypes, poor craftsmanship, and cheap production. For an example, refer to the statue of Vince Young (or Al Jolson in black face) to the right.

To get the full breadth of the Longhorn fan base’s disgust at these products, I encourage you to read this entire thread from ShaggyBevo.com. This is the funniest thread on a sports message board that I have ever encountered.

Of course the inevitable Photoshop geeks kick it in and take it to a whole other level. Check out these Photoshop renditions of the terrified Colt McCoy statue. Awesome.

I especially enjoyed the posts discussing plans around destruction of these blights:

Let's give it a few weeks/months for the hoopla to die down, then get 4-5 guys with huge pickups with brush guards and go to town. I can get at least 2 pickups down there, along with some sledgehammers. I'm thinking 5-10 minutes tops.

Finally, just to keep everything in perspective, this post:

Top 3 Worst People in the World:

1. Pontius Pilate
2. Whoever approved these motherf***ing statues
3. Hitler

Guilty Internet Pleasures – Awkward Family Photos

"The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it." - William Gibson

You may already be aware of Awkward Family Photos. This website provides a collection of awkward, weird, and/or disturbing family photographs sent in from contributors, with comment threads for each photograph. The website owners sort through the contributions and publish the interesting ones. The concept is simple but so universal and that is why it works – very well.
Most everyone has at least a couple of embarrassing and awkward photos in their personal legacy. Prior to the advent of digital photography and scanners as well as the power of the internets, these could be safely tucked away in the old shoebox – available to only close family members. Now with the potent combination of technology and the apparently insatiable desire for folks to attain attention whoredom, those photographs get thrown out in front of the world for all to see. Is the Internet great or what?

Fall 2010 Foliage

October is such a refreshing month in the North Carolina Piedmont. From June to mid September, it is just so hot and humid (average high temperature in July is 89 degrees). In addition to the soup though is this depressing overcast haze that frequents the late afternoon, often accompanied by thunderstorms or the threat of them.  Think DC in August. Yuck.

In October, the average high temperature drops 10 degrees from September to 71, which is just about perfect. October is also the driest month of the year. It reminds me of late August and September back in Pennsylvania.

Property Values in the Hood

This story in the online edition of the Altoona Mirror describes a conflict between the Blair County  Commissioners and the Altoona Area School District over the commissioner's plan to sell 10 dilapidated properties at below market value. Addresses for all 10 properties aren’t provided but at least several of the properties were in my old neighborhood of Fairview. Pretty depressing stuff.

One property in particular, 1523 10th Street, was right across the alley from my house growing up. The valuation of this property is currently $360! (I didn’t miss any zeros there). A bid of $200 was made for that property.

The Market Has Spoken – Sort Of

In one of my earlier posts on my Baseball Trip 2010, I described the noise level associated with the fairly recent packaging that Frito-Lay has introduced for Sun Chips. This packaging is bio-degradable and compostable but is quite rigid and, frankly, loud as hell.

Well Frito-Lay has apparently received lots of feedback on the packaging and will stop using this cacophonous packaging on 5 of its 6 Sun Chips flavors. It will retain the strident packaging on its Sun Chips Original product, which is the best-selling of the 6 offerings.

Which is kind of weird. Our customers have told us that they don’t like the packaging. Since we are market-driven and aim to provide the highest customer satisfaction possible, we have elected to fix this defect in all but the most popular version of our product. Say what?

Is There a Hidden Meaning in There Somewhere?

For several months now, our mini-kitchen area at work has featured a poster next to the trash receptacle entitled “Data Security Starts With You” or something like that. It is a friendly reminder to the worker bees about how we need to protect all of the various valuable data and information assets that we deal with at Big Blue.

The picture features five clean-cut and professionally-dressed IBMers in increasing levels of depth and decreasing levels of sharpness. The first two folks, a black woman and white woman #1, are in sharp focus. Then there is white boy #1 who is a bit blurry, white women #2 who is even blurrier, and finally white boy #2, whose features are barely distinguishable. (What the hell happened to the brother?)

(A picture is worth a thousand words. I would have taken a picture of this poster for my blog, but digital cameras are not permitted to be used in IBM development labs. That would be different – violating IBM security policies by blogging about an IBM security poster.)

I have read the text of the poster closely and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out if there is some data security-related significance to the gradual blurriness of the five folks or if it is just some shitty photography.

The poster reminds me of a scene in the classic Cameron Crowe flick Almost Famous when boxes containing the promotional tee-shirts for the band Stillwater arrive in the dressing room of the band. In the photo on the shirt, all the band members except lead guitarist Russell Hammond are blurred out in the background which prompts a big back-stage fight between Russell and other band members.

Russell Hammond: Can we just skip the vibe, and go straight to us laughing about this? 
Jeff Bebe: Yeah, okay. 
Russell Hammond: Because I can see by your face you want to get into it. 
Jeff Bebe: How can you tell? I'm just one of the out-of-focus guys.

Duke vs. Wake – September 11

For the first time since 1998, we did a road trip to Winston-Salem to watch the Duke – Wake Forest game on September 11 at BB&T Field. In addition to Chris and Tony, Chris’ roommate David also joined us.

Though Winston is only about 80 miles from Hillsborough, I got a little nervous the day before when Duke put out some travel advisories for fans making the trip because of some construction that closed portions of I-40 in Greensboro and because of the Winston-Salem Air Show show that was scheduled to run concurrent with the game at nearby Smith Reynolds Airport. So the guys worked out an alternate route where we could pickup I-40 after the construction closure. It was smooth sailing the whole way. Got up to Greensboro by around 7:35 AM and we pulled into the parking lot at around 8:10 for the 12:10 kick.

Duke vs. Elon – September 4

(I have a bunch of posts that I have been tardy in getting published. What do they say about too busy living life to write about it? Anyways, weekends during the entire month of September were spent tailgating, drinking, and enjoying college football. In other words, a pretty freaking awesome month!)

There was a death in the family in August. My tried-and-true Thermos 4656110 Grill-2-Go Gas Grill bit the dust after 8 years of faithful service. The Grill-2-Go was a fine grill, but had been showing its' age in recent years.

It started with the ignition failing, requiring manual lighting. No big deal on that one. Then, the grease receptacle started melting away at the inlet where the grease flowed from the grilling surface. As a result, the hot grease would periodically trickle down onto the plastic legs. This made cleanup a pain and started tearing away at a joint connecting the supporting leg with the rest of the unit.

Guess Who Wears The Pants in That Family?

A couple of hours into our tailgate at the Duke-Alabama game on September 18, an Alabama fan named Harold ambled over to our tent to chat with me. Harold had traveled to Durham from his home in Florence, Alabama. He hadn’t missed a Tide home game since the mid-70s and was a very friendly guy. That is Harold to the far right of the picture below, wearing white baseball cap and red shirt, getting ready to toss the bag in corn hole.

The only problem with Harold was that he was a bit of a close talker. Chris, who was throwing the football during our extended conversation, was busting my chops about that after Harold returned to his corn hole game. That was a bit awkward – he sort of had me pinned between my tailgate canopy and the Civic.

Lost Opportunity

You may have heard about an unfortunate situation that fell upon Chad Ochosinco recently. The controversial Bengals’ receiver and reality TV star has a new cereal out - Ochosinco’s – Honey Nut Toasted Oats in an O-shape. Now I am not a big Ocho fan, but the proceeds from his cereal are funneled toward a really good cause - Feed The Children.

Unfortunately, on the cereal box, there is a misprint of the Feed The Children telephone number. Rather than directing consumers to the number where they can find out more information about the charity, the number is actually associated with a phone sex service. Talk about awkward.

(I have to admit that when I first heard this story, I briefly considered that maybe this was done intentionally. After all, there is no such thing as bad publicity for attention whores like Chad or TO. But even someone as jaded as me is going to give Chad the benefit of the doubt on this one.)

Ochosinco’s misfortune reminded me of a lighter episode that occurred at one of our defect meetings held at work in the spring of 2007.

It Tested So Well in Idaho

So this Arian Foster cat from the Texans came back to earth yesterday against the Redskins after going off against Indianapolis in Week 1 with 231 yards rushing. I watched most of that entertaining game between the Texans and Redskins. If this undrafted free agent keeps on doing work (150 yards per game), he is definitely going to need his own fan club. How does The Arian Nation or The Arian Brotherhood sound?

Baseball Trip - August 20 - Minneapolis to Milwaukee

On Friday, August 19, 2010, we drove back across Wisconsin from Minneapolis to Milwaukee where we watched the Brewers beat the San Diego Padres 10-6 at Miller Park.

The Trip. Given the mileage we had been rolling up, this one felt like a trip to the grocery store. While for most of the trip we had cloudy and overcast conditions in which to travel, this day we experienced some fairly severe thunderstorms on I-94 between Madison and Milwaukee in the late afternoon. RVs have an extremely large mass and surface area, so you can imagine that, like any vehicle with that size and profile, they are susceptible to high winds. We were getting pounded with some severe wind and rain (the kind that bends the trees toward a 60 degree angle).

Baseball Trip - August 19 – Utica to Minneapolis

On August 19, 2010, we drove from Utica, Illinois across Wisconsin to Minneapolis, Minnesota where we watched the Chicago White Sox beat the Minnesota Twins 11-0 at brand new Target Field.

The Back-Story. All three games we saw on this trip involved at least one team in pennant races, but this one had the best back-story.  Minnesota and Chicago have been battling most of the season in a pretty decent division race. This was the third game in a high profile, three game series. Minnesota won the first two games to stretch their division lead to 5 games. Minnesota was hot, having the best record in baseball since the All Star Game.

Baseball Trip – August 18 – St. Louis to Utica

Since our next game was Thursday night in Minneapolis (which is over 560 miles from St. Louis), we drove after the Cardinal game from St. Louis north through the state of Illinois to Utica. This was a trek of roughly 230 miles, which made for a more manageable journey the next day before the Twins game.

Baseball Trip - August 18 - Terre Haute to St. Louis

We drove from Terre Haute, Indiana to St. Louis, Missouri on Wednesday, August 18 and watched the Milwaukee Brewers defeat the St. Louis Cardinals 3-2 at the new Busch Stadium.

Crossing over from Indiana into Illinois, the drive on I-70 was pretty much the same as the day before – lots of cornfields. I-70 runs directly into St. Louis. We did pass the town of Effingham. (What is Effingham? Its what you eat on f’n Easter. Sorry.)

At a gas station just after crossing into Illinois, some guy chatted up Steve while he was filling the tank. When Steve remarked where we were coming from (Terre Haute), this dude started trash talking Terre Haute (or Terrible Haute as he called it), going on about its terrible odor resulting from a waste water treatment facility and a paper plant and some other plant. Kind of weird to get that unsolicited from someone.

Baseball Trip – August 17 - Zanesville to Terre Haute

Day Two of Baseball Trip 2010 was also a travel day as we drove across I-70 through Ohio and Indiana where we camped Tuesday night in Terre Haute, IN.

We left Joni’s house mid-morning and made a brief stopover in Columbus to see Ohio Stadium. For some reason, I never realized that the Shoe and the OSU campus were in such an urban setting (guess I assumed that all the large land grant institutions of the Big Ten were located in pastoral campuses with huge open areas for tailgating). Somehow OSU (sorry tOSU) seems to recruit OK with such a campus located in an urban area. Would be interesting to see how 102,000 get in and out of that location on Fall Saturdays. The stadium itself is pretty impressive architecturally (at least from the external view). They have still preserved the horseshoe configuration – the permanent seating in the one endzone added earlier in the decade is not attached to the rest of the structure.

Parking Wars

I guess this is progress. Apparently winning a couple of ACC games has generated significant increase in interest in Duke football, prompting yet another tweak to the Public Parking options for football games this fall, the second one in two years. New parking map is here. Here is a trip down memory lane – an inventory of parking lots over the last twenty years we have used.

Baseball Trip – August 16 - Hillsborough to Zanesville

While my boys and I have taken a number of minor league baseball trips over the years, this year, for the first time ever, I joined my older brothers Rich and Steve for a whirlwind tour that included major league games in St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee. Rich and Steve have been doing this gig pretty consistently since Steve retired from the Air Force and moved back to Altoona in 1992, but this was the first time I had joined them.

The trip started on Monday, August 16, which was a travel day (no ballgame planned). I left my house in Hillsborough around 6:15 AM and drove up to Rich’s home in Manassas and then we left from there for Zanesville, OH where my sister Joni and brother-in-law Phil graciously allowed us to spend the night.

I Thought You Had It!

Retrosheet is a pretty awesome site. The mission of this non-profit organization is to collect and digitize play-by-play accounts of all major league baseball games into a database. The format of the record structure in the database is published and they make the raw data from the database available for download in three different formats. This permits other developers to develop applications to leverage this goldmine of data.

They have implemented a basic, no-frills website to surf through all of this data. Talk about an easy way to kill 3 or 4 hours! Addictive stuff. For a future blog post, I have started compiling a list of all the major league games I have attended, with references to the Retrosheet box score and some personal recollections of those games.  

Sunk Costs and a Can of Deodorant

While I was getting ready to head to Greensboro last Saturday afternoon. I had a little issue with my new can of deodorant. As I yanked it off the bathroom closet shelf where my other toiletries reside, I accidentally slammed the nozzle off the wood trim on the door to the closet, completely ripping the nozzle off of the can.

I had just bought that can Friday night. ($3.99 at Food Lion).

Rather than just writing off that money as sunk costs and moving on, I was determined to see if I could still salvage it. So for the next 5 minutes, I messed around trying to see if I could perfectly align the notch on the broken nozzle with the rest of the valve system. My persistence paid off and I was able to actually dispense the product. Same thing on Sunday, but this time it only took me a couple of minutes. Kind of a pain, but it works.

On Monday morning, I wasn’t quite as lucky. I was getting a bit impatient, unable to align the broken nozzle, when I must have applied too much pressure to the valve system. As a result, the seal in the valve assembly apparently got stuck in an open state and the pressurized gas inside the can was going to town.

The first blast hit me in the right eye (didn’t yet have my contacts in). Foolishly, I spent a couple of seconds trying to replace the nozzle to stem the leakage. In hindsight that was pretty retarded (sorry Sarah, I can’t think of a better word at the moment). Then, I covered the leak with my thumb, but the crap was still oozing all over the place. At this point, I am starting to feel like those poor schmucks at British Petroleum.

So I book it down the stairs and out the front door and hurl this can of weezing and spewing propellants onto my yard. Standing there and watching this thing spin around and around for minutes, I felt like some sort of reverse eco-terrorist or an angry Tea Partier giving Al Gore the big middle finger.

Mea Culpa

After bragging about the new commenting system I added to the blog, wouldn't you know there was an issue that was prohibiting the comments from displaying correctly?

I was able to see the comments (thanks Rich and Chris), but no one else was. I have patched that issue up now - I had to change timestamps though on some of the comments. Hopefully these technical difficulties have been addressed for good. Be sure to let me know if you make a comment and it doesn't appear in the blog.

Grasshoppers Vs. Suns – July 31

Minor League Baseball certainly provides good value for your entertainment dollar. Ticket prices and parking are very reasonable and while concessions seem to steadily increase in price every year (especially for beer), the overall expense is worth it (especially if you enjoy baseball).

The quality of the play of course depends on the classification and one of the better gauges of that is the quality of the defense played. Having attended probably 50-60 AAA games at the DBAP, it is my experience that it is almost impossible (for me at least) to distinguish between the quality of defense played in AAA and in the Major Leagues – they are that good. In the game I attended in July, there were 5 or 6 superb plays that were made to look almost too easy.

New Blog Commenting System

You may have noticed that I recently incorporated a new commenting system into my blog. The built-in commenting system from blogger.com is pretty basic, so I thought I’d spruce it up by incorporating the code to use the Disqus Commenting System.

I have received many kind words and compliments from family on my blog for which I am very appreciative. The comments have come in a variety of forms. Some have been posted to my Facebook profile or sent directly to email or just dispatched using the tried and true interface of face-to-face. I did want to mention that comments can be made directly in each blog posting as well.

Glutton for Punishment

On the Fourth of July, while channel surfing ESPN, you might have stumbled across the controversy at the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest in Coney Island. In the competition, Joey Chestnut (San Jose, CA) won his 4th straight Nathan’s title, consuming 54 hot dogs with buns in 10 minutes. Chestnut has won that title every year since he dethroned the famed Japanese eater Takeru Kobayashi in 2007.

The controversy centered around the absence from the competition of Kobayashi, who had won the Nathan’s from 2001 through 2006, but was unable to compete in this year’s event because of a contract dispute with Major League Eating. Kobayashi was arrested for trespassing after storming the award’s ceremony and wrestling with some NYPD.

Wiffle Ball: 2-on-2 Game Play – The Purest Form

This post is the second in a series about growing up playing Wiffle Ball in our Alley. In the first chapter in this series, I described three varieties of Wiffle Balls used in our Alley games and their associated strengths, weaknesses, and impact on game play. In this post, I will focus on the predominant style of game that we played, 2-on-2.

Though we would play with many different permutations of players in our Wiffle Ball games, the purest and most pleasing form of game play had to be 2-on-2. It was a perfect coupling between the athletic ability of the players and the physical properties of the main Alley Field. While well-played 2-on-2 games had scoring that mirrored the games our major league heroes were playing in, the single biggest strength of 2-on-2 play was action:

• When your team was batting, with only two hitters in the order, you were generally either on base or at bat.
• When the other team was batting, you were either pitching (initiating play on every pitch) or covering the entire field on defense.

Along with the idiosyncratic ground rules of the main Alley Field (to be covered in a future post) and the normal Wiffle Ball rules, 2-on-2 games carried a handful of special rules that evolved over time. These rules weren’t haphazardly applied. They were extracted out of a natural selection process that was several hundred games in the making. Two of the more important ones follow:

Dark and Mysterious

The blogging platform I use is Blogger.com. Over the last couple of months, they have come out with a new Template Designer tool and some new templates that allow bloggers to tailor the look of their blogs. So I thought I would ditch the old boring template I had been using and, in the words of George Costanza,  just do the opposite.

So I have moved from a lighter neutral color style to a darker style. The template I am using is called Awesome Inc. The new Template Designer is quite nice and is worlds better than the old one that Blogger.com had been featuring.

I was also playing around with a third party template from Templates Block called Copper Dust, which I thought looked great. But that template exploits PNG image transparency and I found a couple of issues with that:

• It made it hard to to read the text of the posts. My writings are difficult enough to digest without introducing additional burdens on my dozen or so readers.
• I also had to do unnatural acts in the CSS and HTML of the template to get things to look decent under Internet Explorer 6, which doesn’t support PNG transparency.

Too much of a hassle, so Copper Dust bit the dust. 

For actually composing the content of my blog, I have moved on to a tool from Microsoft called Windows Live Writer. I find this tool more pleasing to use than the default post editor that Blogger.com uses. I always struggled like hell to get paragraph breaks to behave consistently in the post editor from Blogger.com – you have may have noticed that in some of my posts. WLW has a nice plug-in architecture where third-party developers can augment the base functions in WLW with additional custom functions. So there are a better selection of plug-ins for adding video, audio, and pictures to the blog. Two thumbs up for this tool.

Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?

One of the components in our product, (let’s just call it DW for this discussion), is basically the fruits of one man’s labor. It was designed and developed and has been extended and maintained by one developer, my colleague Pierre.

This is an anomaly. Most non-trivial components in commercial software development are built by a team of developers. The composition of the team usually evolves over releases of the component This is good for the company and for the developers as well.

For the company, you always want to have multiple engineers that are capable of working on a component. This gives project leadership more flexibility in developing the project plans and in responding to unforeseen plan challenges and changes. Above all, it provides some redundancy in case that one-man-gang elects to leave the company.

Bobbleheads Part Deux - Destruction

As the first of Cody and Joan Nedimyer’s grandchildren, Paula Jo certainly held a special place in their hearts, of course. But this fondness was only intensified because of the lack of opportunities that my parents had to be around Paula, due to my brother Steve’s career in the USAF.

Make no mistake about it – when Steve, Kathy, and Paula came into Altoona for a visit, it was a very big deal. Time stood still in our little neck of the woods.

My mom’s love and devotion of Paula was almost over the top. On one visit around 1976 or so Mom was wearing this Bishop Guilfoyle sweat shirt – must have been a hand-me-down from Rich. Thing was old and tattered -purple letters on white fabric – the kind of ratty old shirt that you keep around to dust with during heavy duty spring cleaning or to wash a car with.

Did She Just Say What I Think She Said?

After working on my birthday this week, I came home and discovered 4 six packs of IC Light bottles in the refrigerator, courtesy of Joe, Jr. Nice touch and very much appreciated.

Helped myself to a couple of those cold ones and then I grabbed a bite to eat with Chris and Tony at Champps Americana at Southpointe Mall in Durham.

After being seated and perusing the draft beer selections and appetizers on the menu, our waitress, a young woman named Patricia, stopped and asked us if we would like something to drink.

NC Pro Am League – July 6

The period between the end of the NBA/NHL seasons and the start of college football is such a dead sports period for me. (I have forgotten what it is like to have a competitive baseball team to cheer for in the dog days of summer.)

Fortunately, for a basketball junkie like me, we have the NBA Summer League games to watch, and, in basketball crazy North Carolina, we have the North Carolina Pro Am League.

The NC Pro Am is a yearly NCAA sanctioned league that runs for several weeks in June and July and features many of the players from Duke, UNC, NC State as well as mid-majors like UNCG and NCCU. The league also pulls in stud local high school players as well as the occasional NBA player with ties to the state of North Carolina.

The league is sponsored by Kinston, NC native Jerry Stackhouse, who went on to UNC and a long career in the NBA. Games are played on the campus of North Carolina Central University at the McLendon-McDougald Gymnasium (which seats about 3000). The arena namesake, John McLendon, is a historic figure in the sport of basketball.

Don’t Worry, I Am On It

(A little context for this post. My niece Paula’s husband, Matt, is a Distribution Center Manager at PepsiCo.)

In our mini-kitchen area on the first floor at work (the one with the Flavia Coffee Machine that I discussed here), we have, side-by-side, two vending machines that dispense Pepsi and Coca Cola products. I came into work on Monday, July 12, and noticed that a sheet of paper was taped to the Pepsi vending machine. It had the classic 8-bar blue logo (so it must be official) and stated:

Due to slow sales, this machine will be removed the week of July 14th. Please use the Pepsi machine on the 2nd floor.

No such notification was affixed to the Coca Cola vending machine a foot away.

This doesn’t pass the smell test. I could understand if overall consumption of both Pepsi and Coca Cola products across the first floor population of my building had declined. Maybe the economy is at play or software engineers in our building are starting to wean ourselves off our addiction to high-caffeine beverages (yeah, right).

In any event,why would the reduction in consumption (assuming there is one) be affecting only the PepsiCo products?

I’d also like to highlight that the phrase “week of July 14th” is fishy? Weeks don’t start on Wednesday and that day has special significance for Your Faithful Servant.

The mother ship has all sorts of channels for me to leverage in the pursuit of truth in this matter. Starting with my next bi-monthly meeting with my manager where, rest assured, this will be item 1 on the agenda.

In the words of Matt Drudge: Developing!

Haven't Seen It Spelled Like That Before

The company produces these publications called Redbooks which supplement the official user manuals shipped with a product. They are produced by a group of 4-8 team members working in a residency over 60-90 days. They install and use pre-release drivers of the software (not yet generally available) and document implementation experiences, usage scenarios, and detailed step-by-step how-tos.

They work closely with the developers of the products in the lab (like me). A team in India is producing the Redbook for the next release of our product. They published an early draft of the Redbook and distributed it for review. In a section where they were thanking team members for their contributions they spelled my name as Joseph Niedemeyer :-)

That is only a couple of letters away from the spelling used by cadet commander Doug Neidermeyer in Animal House. Wonder if that movie is big over in India?

Pimping My Blog

Relatively speaking of course. 

I have added some new gadgets and features to my boring blog. Hope it is a little less boring and that you (all 10 or so of you that follow it) find the new features useful. 
(If you haven't already figured it out by now, basically, I was really bored on a Sunday afternoon. Who knows, I might even get adventurous and radically change the color scheme and background images.)

Actually, I just needed an excuse to include a picture of A Pimp Named Slickback from Aaron McGruder's excellent Boondocks cartoon in my blog. I understand that by admitting I am a Boondocks fan, there is an outstanding chance that I will be labeled a Socialist, or whatever term Conservatives are calling Liberals these days. Have they advanced to using the term Communist yet? Or is that being reserved for the big push in 2012?)

1. I've started labeling my posts with keywords so that you can use the Labels gadget on the right side of the page to search only posts that apply to certain labels. So, for example, clicking on growing up link in the Labels cloud would list the posts about my experiences growing up in Altoona.
2. Related to this, at the end of each post, you will see a You Might Also Like... section that lists other posts that have the same labels as the post you are reading.
3. I have integrated a Facebook Like gadget that allows you to register your approval of a particular post - just like on Facebook.
4. On the right hand side of the page, there is now a Recent Posts list.
5. After each post, there are a set of Share Buttons that allow you to send one of my blogs posts to a variety of targets. For example, there are buttons for emailing a blog post or for  posting a blog post to your Facebook Profile. There are some other Share Buttons for sharing my posts to Google Buzz and Twitter.
6. Check out that digital signature - talk about eye-candy! Obviously that isn't my handwriting since it is legible.

Bulls vs Braves - July 3

Took in a Bulls game over the 4th of July weekend. Since I was a little tardy in getting tickets, we ended up in the Diamond View seats in right field. Right field in the Durham Bulls Athletic Park is a sun field, so it was a bit of a challenge battling the sun for the first three innings or so. But the weather was beautiful - cool and in the upper 70s/low 80s.


Last year the new Diamond View 2 building opened in left field and, this year, they have opened up the walkway (previously closed) between center field and the Blue Monster in left. As a result, the DBAP is now a 360 degree ballpark (for the first time in its 15 year history). 


There is a now a brand new Tobacco Road Sports Cafe on the first floor of Diamond View 2 building. The cafe is accessible from inside and outside the ball park. The Bulls have also set up some nice seating options on top of the Blue Monster. Along with the many options for pre-game and post-game drinks and eats in the American Tobacco Complex adjacent to the ball park, the DBAP gets better and better. What a superb venue to take in a game. Have been to a ton of minor league parks, but Durham Bulls Athletic Park is at the top.

Why Did It Have to Be Hawaiian Punch?

As Thanksgiving Holidays go, I have had better than the one I experienced in 1976. 

I was a freshman at BGHS that fall, struggling through a very long year on the basketball team. I was floating between slots 8 and 12 on the depth chart of a 16-man roster, not seeing much playing time, but working really hard and sticking with it. I ended up starting one or two games at the end of the year, but I was strictly a role player.

It is silly to carry that many players on a team - 10-11 is the ideal number - enough so you can scrimmage with an occasional sub in, and everybody gets adequate reps in the drills. 16 players and, unbelievably, only 15 uniforms - so to close out every practice the day before a game, there would be a 1-on-1 game between the poor souls sitting at slots 15 and 16 on the depth chart to see who got to suit up. It was such a wonderful morale builder. 

You'd think with all the hush money the Catholic Church was throwing around those days to abuse victims, they could have ponied up some coin for a complete set of decent uniforms. The ones we were wearing looked like they were in use when my Mom graduated from Altoona Catholic High in 1944.

So at the end of practice on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Coach said that the next practice would be on Monday evening, with an outside chance of a practice on Saturday. 

The holiday started off well enough. Rich came in from DC on Wednesday, which was always a big deal at our house, and Mom prepared her usual turkey feast. 

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out!

Several times over the last 3 or 4 weeks, I have moved my leisurely 3 mile jog (2-3 times a week) from the climate-controlled treadmill outside to the mid-90 degree soup on the little loop around our development. The loop is a much more challenging course, with lots of hills, which, combined with the heat and humidity, usually forces me to wimp out after running 2 miles or so and finish the remainder in a walk-a-little-then-run-a-little pattern.

(Have to chuckle a little about the folks up north belly-aching about their recent heat wave. Though we did have a wonderful break of cooler weather the last week in June, 90 degrees with high humidity is pretty much the norm down in the mid-South it seems.)

With this heat (yesterday it was 93 at 6:45 PM when I ran), there are not many folks out and about, so I had the road to myself. Our development hardly has any children and is mostly older and, in many cases, retired folks. You'll see the occasional folks out walking the dog in good weather, but nobody generally ventures out in the evening heat.

The more upscale development across the street, Grand Oaks Estate, does have a more traditional suburban mix of families with kids and often times, you will see them extend their walks into my neighborhood.

That is Some Form of Inspection, I Guess

In the summer of 1979, my Mom and Dad took a trip out to Tucson to visit Steve, Kathy, and Paula Jo. Steve was stationed at Davis-Monthan AFB in those days. Mom was diagnosed with cancer in January, 1979, so this was a nice break from her chemo. Though they both were looking forward to the trip, they were also pretty nervous about flying. Those anxieties weren't helped when 6 weeks before or so, the deadliest airliner accident in US history occurred. Poor Dad and Mom couldn't catch a break.

(I hope this history is accurate, but will gladly correct it if not. I believe Steve spent time in at least the following locations: Dover, Alconbury in England, Nebraska, Johnston Islands in the Pacific, Spain, and Tucson. For some reason, I think that this trip was to Tucson.)

They got out there and back safely though and had a great time. They both brought back a ton of stories about Paula from the trip. One that stands out in my mind, and that Dad must have told hundreds of times, involved precocious Paula at a local zoo. (Dad loved to tell this story too, particularly after a couple of cold ones - "Cold ones are in the back, Rich").

They walked up to the elephant exhibit and peered into the cage where a large elephant and a smaller one were positioned. Apparently, right around the time they all reached the elephant exhibit, mother nature made a call to the big elephant, who promptly dumped a massive #2. (Isn't it great when a plan comes together.)

No big deal - when you got to go, you got to go. But then the smaller elephant, for reasons I don't even want to know, lowers its trunk (a quite versatile appendage), and scoops up one of the massive dung boulders deposited by the big dog, examines it, and then gently drops it down.

Pregnant pause while the adults try to come to grips with what they just saw. Paula, nonchalantly, nets it out for everybody:

Mommy and Daddy....The little elephant is the poopy inspector.

Often Wrong - Never In Doubt

Sometimes you come across some writings or a research paper that perfectly crystallizes (and in many cases, validates) some thoughts that you have always internally harbored, but could never quite tie together in a coherent fashion. 

I have always had a suspicion that there are a large set of folks whose confidence level has way outstripped their chops. It always amazes me how these folks could be so damn sure about something, when they really don't have any right to be. 

Did I Read That Correctly?

So I was struggling at work one day in May, battling a psychological affliction whose clinical name is, I believe, the black ass. 

You've all probably been there. Events, out of your control, seem to be conspiring and collaborating against you. Annoying little roadblocks get thrown in the way of the simplest activities, slowing progress and increasing internal frustrations. Personality quirks of colleagues and managers, which usually roll off of you like water on a duck, stick in your craw (like the piece of food that got stuck in Garrett Jone's throat). Then things start to mentally snowball and you find yourself facing one of the most destructive emotions in the human condition: self-pity. Not a good place to be.

(The stimulus for this condition, in my case, is that I was given an assignment that I really didn't relish - fix this mess of a project called CMS.)

My personal self-help plan (free of charge) when attacking this condition is to basically sack up and remind (scold) myself of one or more of the following:

• This crap that I am worrying about is comically inconsequential when compared to the really important things like the health, well-being, and happiness of my children, family, and friends.
• The Frozen Snowball Theory. 
• As an American living in the year 2010, I have it better than %99.999999 of the people that have lived on Earth. Ever. Is my life really that bad?

Well, the old self-help deal wasn't really doing the trick for me this time, but relief came from the most unlikely of places for me - our Test Team.

As in any product development organization (software or otherwise), there is a natural and healthy tension between the Development Team (me) and the Test Team (them). The job of the Test Team is to find defects in my work product. Their effectiveness is judged by the number of problems they can flush out of the product before the product gets to the field. Bugs that escape to the field are much more expensive to fix for the company than those found internally before the product ships. 

As a result of this dynamic, very rarely do you hear compliments from the Test Team. When they do come. it is usually in a begrudging fashion with a caveat or two attached. That's just the way it is.

The day that I was batting the black ass, I was poring over my email, rummaging through one of the 50 or 60 that come through my in-box daily. One that caught my attention was blind-copied to me concerning a component called PSI from my colleague in test, Gary.

What PSI does or doesn't do is not pertinent here. What is pertinent is that I lived and breathed PSI from July, 2005 to September, 2009. It was my baby - I designed it and developed it and drove its adoption into about 12 or so shipping products. Gary was the lead tester for PSI. From that relationship, we both gained a lot of respect for each other - Gary was one of the most thorough testers I have ever worked with.

The email thread in question was a discussion where the Test Team (Gary and Amy) were trying to convince Development to use PSI for some feature that was being developed. This, in and of itself, was heartening - Test obviously appreciated the value of the software that I had developed had for our paying customers. 

But it gets better. Buried deep in the email thread was the comment was Amy:

I can't imagine anything being easier for a customer to use than PSI.

Now Amy has a well-earned reputation as a very hard-to-please tester. I knew of her since she had been on our Test Team for quite awhile. But she had tested other components in our product. I hadn't had much direct interaction with her - I wasn't even aware that she had ever used PSI in her testing. So this remark came out of the blue. 

I made a decision back in 1986 or so, that, for better or worse, I wasn't going to sacrifice job satisfaction for money. At that point in time, I was faced with the decision between continuing on with a career in Systems Engineering or jumping into Software Engineering. 

From my perspective, there is nothing quite as satisfying as receiving compliments on my software design or implementation from other peers.

The black ass cloud was instantly lifted - for a little while anyways.

Pirates vs Nationals - Nationals Park - June 10

I took a drive up to my brother Rich's place in Manassas on June 10 to join some family members and attend the Pirates-Nationals game at Nationals Park.

We had a good sized group and it was great to see everybody. In addition to Rich and Lora, we were joined by brother Steve and his girlfriend Deena as well as niece Paula and her two adorable daughters. (Unfortunately, Matt couldn't make it.) On the way to Nationals Park, we picked up my brother-in-law Brian in Woodbridge and said hi to Laurey and the girls - Megan was still in Finals, so Laurey had to hold down the fort and unfortunately couldn't join us. Then at the ballpark, nephew Sam and his girlfriend Molina joined us.

The drive from Hillsborough was uneventful - is there any stretch of road more boring than the 57 miles between South Hill and Petersburg on I-85? - and I rolled in around 1:30 or so, just right after Paula, Deena, and the girls had arrived from Carlisle. Ample time before we left at 5:00 PM to visit and partake of some brews from Rich's home bar (recently upgraded to a beautiful 2 tap tower).

There was lots of traffic on I-395 heading to the ballpark - traffic in DC, I kid you not - but Rich handled it expertly (with plenty of navigation support from Lora and Brian) and kept contact with Paula (driving behind us with Steve, Deena, and the girls). We parked in the same lot on M Street that we used last year ($10.00). It is actually not a bad deal and makes for a pleasant walk to the park.

I again was very impressed with Nationals Park. It was a beautiful and surprisingly comfortable evening with a nice breeze blowing and a good pace to the game.



The next time I take in a game there, I'd like to maybe do the Red Loft Bar in center field. (Sam remarked that while buying rounds at an earlier game in the Red Loft Bar, one of his friends had bought a round of $12 margaritas.  Must have been one hell of a margarita.) I also was meaning to get to Ben's Chili Bowl inside the ballpark.

No sense dwelling on the actual game. Another Pirate loss. Loss 5 of what would be a 12 game tailspin, part of a stretch of 5-22 from May 26 through June 26. Sandwiched between the historic Steven Strassburg debut two night earlier and what might be the saddest week in the franchise's storied history.

I won't bum everyone out and go into the gory details here. If you are really into the masochism deal, just read Bob Smizek's excellent daily blog at the the PG. As Lester Bangs told budding rock journalist William Miller in Almost Famous, "Be honest and unmerciful." Smizek has the unmerciful part down. My friend Bob reminded me of the time Smizek commented on the trade of Marvel Wynne in the mid 80s by remarking "If ever there was a case of addition by subtraction....".

Fortunately I was able to take my mind off of the Pirates woes and enjoy my niece Paula's beautiful daughters, Megan and Emma. Even though they had taken a long car trip from home and were in unfamiliar surroundings, they were so pleasant and well-behaved.

They kept close by Paula, Steve, and Deena during the game, so after the game I decided to make my move. Shamelessly, I am not above name dropping to get an inside edge. As we gathered on the concourse waiting for some folks to complete their bathroom duties, I gathered the girls together. As they warily sized me up,  I confided in them: "You know Grandpap? He is my brother."

That was all it took. I had instant credibility and was now in the club. I asked the girls to pose for a couple of shots. Check this awesome one out:

Both girls' expressions reveal the look of contentment and happiness that comes from a realization that they have loving, caring, and patient parents and the world's best grandfather (I understand the latter is a subjective judgement and I am a bit biased.) In Emma's case, I am also struck by this air of quiet confidence that says "I may be the younger one, but underestimate me at your own risk!".

As we started walking back, still on the concourse, Megan, unsolicited, grabbed my hand for the entire walk back to the parking lot. About a third of the way there, Rich grabbed the other hand and Megan decided to get in some long jump practice. This was a process where she would lift both feet off the ground, suspended by me and Rich, dragging her along for longer and longer distances. Let's just say that Bob Beamon had nothing on Megan''s takeoff form. While this was going on, Emma was riding close by on Steve's shoulders, dodging low hanging branches and keeping an eye on her older sister. Highlight of my trip.

The next morning, Rich and Lora fed us an awesome breakfast. Emma was a little down in the dumps as she lost out to her older sister in the sweepstakes for a particular mini-box of cereal that both girls coveted. But again, Steve came to the rescue. Propping Emma on his lap and feeding her eggs, bacon, and killer strawberries, Steve made everything OK again in Emma's world. Something tells me that this is a pretty regular occurrence.