This is just disgusting. Comcast is being investigated by the FCC for blocking some internet traffic. To prevent critics from attending an open hearing, they bused in a bunch of seat warmers. You can read about it here.

This weekend I’m misssing my favorite event: SXSWi. I start looking forward to the next one the day the current one ends and I usually have more fun during those four or five days than I do when Karina and I go on vacation.

But I’m missing it for a very good reason: Karina is due any day now and it turns out there are a (very) few things that are more important than south-by.

To all of our friends who are in town: we both want to say ‘hi’. Even though we probably won’t see any of you, we will think of all of you with envy for the next four days. Enjoy south-by and send us the cliff notes! (If you have my cell or email, drop me a line — I am hoping to make it downtown for an hour or two tomorrow if we’re not in the hospital.)

James sent this to me this afternoon and I liked it so much I wanted to pass it along.

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured hat greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new hatched sin, will not think that they invented it.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; not two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blow-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only when do the frustrations fall away. In this
a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand.”

I’m not a big believer in religion but sometimes I do feel tested. We’re now eight weeks away from our estimated due date. Last week my laptop–the one I do all my work on–died. It died once before and I’m not sure if I’m going to try to get it fixed this time around. The rub is that I can’t afford to replace it and I can’t afford to be without it.

My car has been on its last leg for a long time now. We’ve only been using it when we absolutely had to, which we absolutely had to on Friday night when my wife was driving home from work in the freezing rain and her car broke down. Turns out the transmission is shot on hers, which is not great news two weeks after we fixed the A/C, power steering, and a CV joint.

We ended up putting a large sum on the credit card to repair my Hyundai Accent (somehow that car always gets a reprieve). The list of things done to it was a page long. I had been avoiding those repairs in the hopes that we could trade it in for a new car at some point, but I had to bite the bullet. We live 25 miles from Austin and we have to have at least one working car.

Saturday was spent going back and forth with the repair shop. I spent several hours there but I managed to get both cars to them, get both diagnosed, and worked out what work was going to be done to them. Getting the one with the broken transmission home today was the real challenge (that’s not going to be fixed anytime soon). At five miles an hour it takes a very long time to drive the ten miles from the repair shop to my house. I did it though and I have no idea what to do with the car now that I have it home. Maybe CraigsList.

Things have been tight for a while, but this is the first time they’ve been scary.

To the six people who read this: sorry I haven’t posted in a long time. There never seems to be enough time these days.

This is about a friend of mine named Marc. This morning Marc talked to his dad on the phone before going to work. After the phone call his dad went about his daily routine, including taking a bath. While he was in the bath, he died. A blood clot that had formed in his legs had travelled to his lungs, causing a seizure and killing him.

I don’t know how to deal with these things.

Marc and I worked together for two years and when we bought houses, we bought them in the same neighborhood. We’re one street over and we can see each other’s houses by looking out a window. So when he found out and came home, he came over to talk to me. Being guys, and not the 21st century metrosexual kind of guys, he didn’t come over for a shoulder to cry on. He wanted to let me know in a matter of fact tone what had happened, that he was going to be away for a while, and could I look after his dogs while he was gone?

Of course I can look after the dogs. We’ll probably bring the five of them over and keep them in the backyard with our two. The weather is just cooling down enough that that should work out well. Since he’s going to be gone for a while and I don’t know how long, and since I’ve been playing soccer with shoes that don’t fit and he has a pair that do fit me (but not him), I asked him if I could borrow the shoes before he left. I’m such an asshole.

I don’t know how to deal with these things.

I apologized for asking but Marc is probably the one person with less of a sense of propriety than me and he didn’t understand how being asked for soccer shoes five minutes after telling me his dad had died was in any way odd. He’s a good guy.

We went over to his house for the shoes and I talked with him for a bit while he was packing. He couldn’t figure out what to take. He was having a hard time thinking clearly. I tried to talk to his wife but she seemed to be taking things worse than him. She’s six months pregnant, due in December. That has nothing to do with anything and I don’t know why I’m bringing it up. Maybe it’s the whole cycle of life thing. As one passes another comes to pass. By Christmas everything will be better again, except that their baby won’t get the chance to know its grandfather.

My dad died when I was ten. The funeral was in Iowa and we lived in Texas. My mom and brothers flew up for it but I didn’t. It was my choice and I was scared. About ten years ago a friend’s father died and I took her to the wake. It was open casket. That was the only time I’ve ever seen a dead person before. I couldn’t then, and I can’t now, grasp the concept that the lifeless body that was before me was once a walking, talking, breathing person capable of thought and ideas. I kept waiting for him to open his eyes. April Fools! Of course that didn’t happen.

I’m 32 years old. My brothers are ten and eleven years older than me. My mom is in her sixties. My grandparents are all close to their nineties. Sooner or later people that I love are going to start dying and I still don’t know how to deal with these things.

Little Lethal Weapon 4 homage there.

If the title didn’t give it away: we’re pregnant! Technically, it’s just Karina, but I have a feeling I’m going to do some suffering alongside her. At least that’s what every other dad has been telling me. We’re 15 weeks in and the due date is March 14th. So if you were looking forward to seeing us at SXSW, we might have to disappoint you. We’re still buying our tickets just in case the baby is late!

Sometime in the near future I’ll get around to scanning in the ultrasounds that we have. We’re also going to to do the 3D ultrasound, which’ll be really cool. I think that’s in five weeks, which is also when we’ll find out if we’re having a boy or a girl. Come on boy! I’m terrified by the thought of raising a girl, mostly because I know what goes on in the minds of boys. I’m not nervous … yet. But when I start flipping through those baby books that Karina has been buying, I start getting anxious.

We’ll try to keep everybody posted here but it’s pretty obvious I’ve been pretty lax about posting lately. Look for a baby gift list, coming soon though!

I’ve been working on a largish website project and I’ve been falling steadily behind schedule. The reasons for the delays fall into two categories: data conversion and code conversion. Both turned out to be more complicated than I expected.

Data Conversion (Filemaker to MySQL)

Filemaker is a weird sort of database. Instead of tables you have “layouts” that show certain fields but all fields exist in the same bucket. The database is the table. In this case the Filemaker database had hundreds of fields in it that were spread across 16 layouts and all of it needed to be converted to MySQL. Unfortunately this was not an a => b scenario for several reasons:

- A lot of calculations and data manipulation are taking place in Filemaker
- The LDML code made extensive use of lists built into Filemaker
- A lot of data had to be translated
- Certain restrictions were placed on the MySQL databases (see below)

The data conversion is part of the larger conversion from Filemaker/LDML to MySQL/PHP. On the PHP side the client already has a database structure and code built out for several of the portions of the site being converted. In those cases some data has to be split across multiple tables, so data has to be converted to new formats, and various other tweaks had to be performed.

This is a longer term project (four months). Because the data conversion will have to be done several times, I chose to write a script to handle it. Again, because it will have to be run over and over again, it first starts by emptying the existing tables and resetting all of the auto_increment counters to 1. When the site has been fully converted and is ready to relaunch, we’ll be able to run the script again and at the push of a button grab the most recent data from the previous site. Whenever data turns out to need more “massaging” during the code translation process (i.e. something turns out to be wrong) I can make the changes and re-run the script without having to perform a lot of manual labor.

I’ll outline the conversion script another day — it’s about 800 lines of code. It took about a week to write and get right and since this project is ongoing it will almost certainly require more tweaks as the project moves forward. That’s a lot more than the one day I had estimated for the conversion.

Code Conversion

Once I had the data poured into 19 MySQL tables I could start setting up the website. First thing was converting the new layout into XHTML and CSS. No problemo. The second step was to setup the new navigation structure. A little bit more work and planning here but again, no problemo. The third step was to create pages for all of the static content. This was the easiest step in the process. The fourth step was, and is, where I get my hands dirty and start mucking around with the site code.

Now, it seemed easiest to start with the pre-existing PHP modules from the client and get those up and running. Unfortunately, this is where I ran headfirst into one of my own great shortcomings. I have a hard enough time reading my own well-formatted and well-documented code. In this case I’m reading someone else’s code with functions and classes that are spread across 25 different files. Everything is being generated or manipulated by something else. Coming into this from the outside it’s very hard to figure out what is going on. For me this has led to a lot of confusion, a lot of delays, and a lot of sleepless nights.

Finally, this weekend I decided that something had to give. I was trying to take the short route and fumble through things. Define a task, tackle it, and when it doesn’t work try to trace the code back through the various files to find out why. Fix, try again, run into another problem, trace it back through, etc.

For most people this would actually work. They can just learn from doing something hands on. For me that doesn’t work. I have to first read a manual, then get hands on and refer back to the manual as I’m going along. It’s not enough for me to know how something works, I have to understand why it works.

I determined that I needed to write a manual. In doing so I would develop a deep understanding of how everything in the various files worked.

Yesterday I spent the day printing out most of a ream (500 pages) of code. I got a binder and a bunch of tabbed inserts. I created tabs for each document, hole punched everything and assembled my book. Then I started the two day process of reading the book. For each file I created an outline of each class and function. I also outlined the structure for each include. This is my table of contents and is in the front of the book.

Now I have a much greater understanding of what is going on because I’ve read through everything once. I also now have a quick reference to any section of code without having to open five different files to track function calls. At a glance I can see what is going on and if I’m passing data to a function in the correct format or using a function in the correct way. This took two days and it could have saved me weeks of sleepless nights.

Planning and organization are incredibly important when working on projects. It may seem like wasted time but in the end it saves more time than it consumes.

gen•tri•fi•ca•tion n. - The restoration and upgrading of deteriorated urban property by middle-class or affluent people, often resulting in displacement of lower-income people.

This process has started happening just east of IH35 in downtown Austin. My wife doesn’t want to move there because she thinks it’s horrible. I desperately want to move there because the new developments going up are mostly mixed-use with condos upstairs and office space downstairs. They are also being largely occupied by artists and other creative industry people.

The lower income people, some of whom have lived there for years, are being displaced. The property values are going up and they can’t afford the rents or taxes that go with the increased property value. Some of them really don’t want to go.

I don’t want to be insensitive but we don’t always get what we want. I read an article the other day about a “distressed” neighborhood downtown. The residents were afraid to come out of their houses, there were needles lying in the street, and the area had an incredibly high crime rate. This is what happens in “distressed” neighborhoods and it affects the surrounding neighborhoods as well.

So it is inevitable that, when population density reaches a certain point, areas only a few blocks from the heart of a city will become prime real estate for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is location. The opportunity to reduce the crime rate, increase tax revenue, and create more usable public spaces are all strong reasons too.

The people who are renting in these neighborhoods will almost certainly have to move further away from the center of the city and lose out. People who own residences in these neighborhoods stand to gain quite a bit. In many cases they will be able to sell their property at a price that will let them move to a much better neighborhood with less crime and less fear. It seems to me the old owners win, the new owners win, and the city wins.

Maybe I’m just niave. Or maybe I really want to move downtown and I can’t afford anything West of IH35. But with every article I read about “distressed” neighborhoods, I feel more confident that gentrification is simply more good than it is bad.

June was “vacation month” for us. We went back to the Bahamas to visit friends and to take some friends with us. The trip was a mixed bag for us: we got to see friends, the beach, and go boating and I got to play poker but we once again didn’t make it to any of the family islands, we only spent a few hours at the beach, and Karina never got her massage — which I now owe her.

When we got back my brother Keith and his wife Cindy visited. It was the first time my wife has met them, which was nice.

After that we had a week to catch up on work before heading down to Brownsville and South Padre Island for Karina’s 10 year high school reunion. That meant I had to spend some time working on the reunion website and then be a human accessory (like a handbag!) to all of the events. It was actually more fun than I thought it would be going in. She has some cool classmates. Going into it I just remembered my own high school experience and I was not looking forward to something like that.

Now we’re home and still trying to catch up on work. I guess what I’m trying to say is: I haven’t had time, ability, access to post much for the last month. There have been lots of things I’ve wanted to talk about or mention though and I’m constantly coming across cool things both online and offline. Maybe I’ll share some soon…

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