Thedwick

I’ll tell you right now that this post is going to be pretty whiny.

One thing I always love reading is profiles and biographies of successful people. But lately I’ve come across several that describe people with lives that sound as busy as mine, but manage to do more with them. How do they do it? I read something like “six days after his third child was born, Larry decided it was time to quit his 6-figure paying job in finance to start his own online shoe vending site” and feel totally deflated. There’s got to be something wrong there.

One of the few blogs I keep up on pretty consistently is Tim Bray’s. He just had his second kid around the same time I had my second kid. And he seems like a nice guy (I’ve never met him, though). And he actually keeps up with his blog, stays dialed into various open source communities, travels to conferences, takes vacations, and has a full-time job at Sun. How does he do it? All the other profiles I read at least leave me enough room to assume that they must beat their wives, or neglect their kids, or have mountains of credit card debt, but his story resists even those assumptions.

Anyhow, the kid front is starting to slow down, so I’m hoping to get back to this blog. I’m going to make a couple of changes, though. First, I’m not going to keep strictly to programming stuff and instead will let it range a little more freely. But I still plan to have plenty of tech content.

So my posting has slowed a bit lately which requires some explanation: I just had a new baby girl!

She and mom are doing great and her older brother is starting to acknowledge her existence, so things are great. But for the next few weeks at least, most of what you’re going to see here is links and that’s about it. But I’ll be back with some real posts soon, not to worry.

So I recently bought some canned salmon and was really excited about it because I love salmon and because it seemed like it would make a great alternative to mercury-laden tuna for my 2 year old son.

It was awful.

But not because of the taste, which I didn’t even get to, but because when I opened the can I was greeted by hundreds of bones (including some entire vertebra) and large sections of skin. I wouldn’t even feed the stuff to my cat.

I have to assume that this was not what they intended to sell and that it was a mistake and a failure in their quality control process somewhere. Ordinarily, like most people, I wouldn’t bother informing the company, but would re-tell the experience to hundreds of my friends. A cautionary tale to any company that doesn’t think quality matters or that thinks it can react to bad quality quickly enough to cover it up.

But I really, really wanted the idea of canned salmon to work and wanted the company to be successful. After all, they did have a really pretty and edgy label design.

So I wrote them an email. I used the link on the front page of their website under “contact us”–a reasonable sounding approach.

Below is the transcript of the email. I guess they’ll never know my dissatisfaction after all. If it’s a problem with some cannery they outsourced to, they’ll never know it. If their quality control guy is worthless, they’ll never know it. They’ll just slowly lose business and always wonder why, perhaps, sadly, thinking the whole canned salmon thing isn’t such a great idea after all when in fact it’s a great idea:


Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

--Tim


So one of the original Gang of Four has taken on as a project nothing less than cataloging all common software architectures in one place. So far it looks like an early work in progress, but I think it could be very interesting if he succeeds.

So we’ve set up a new blog for family stuff and I’m planning to keep this blog to professional (read: geek) stuff. One of these days I’ll migrate all the personal stuff on here to the new family blog.

In a word, it was beautiful. We had a fantastic time, especially on the island of Vis. I’ll have to come back to this post later to describe some more…

…ok, I’m back. So my impression of Croatia is almost entirely limited to the island of Vis on the “Dalmatian Coast”, but as I said it was absolutely beautiful. Everything was so clear and warm and inviting. The buildings had real history to them. I mean 1000+ year history, not the wimpy 100 year history we have here in California. The people who live there were all friendly and beautiful and helpful.

One day we rented scooters and scooted to the opposite side of the island. The center of the island is all vineyards, just as it had been for hundreds of years. We scooted through that and out to the other side where we had great pizza in smallish village and then scooted back, stopping at a little beach to swim on the way back.

We also spent some time in Split, the center of which is a 1000 year old castle/palace/walled city. Everything there is stone; stone that’s worn in just the right amount that it has a soft, lived-in feeling but not so much that it all looks like it’s crumbling down.

One of the nicest things might have been the general lack of Americans (except those who came for the wedding we also went for). I love Americans, but it does feel that much more like a vacation if I’m not surrounded by my fellow countrymen. That’s not to say the place wasn’t bulging with tourists, it’s just that they were all German, Italian, other Croatians, and a smattering of Brits.

We’re going to Croatia today for a week. I have absolutely no idea what to expect but I’m sure I’ll have something to post when I get back…

So I grew up loving the Babar the Elephant stories. We just checked Babar the King out of the library for our son and he loves it, too. The thing is, as I was reading it I was struck by how subtly it sounded like Marxist propaganda: all about the workers and a celebration of collective labor, overseen by a benevolent dictator and an intellectual ‘old lady’…

I suppose it would make sense. The story was written in 1933, during the first serious stirrings of what would become communism. I figured I couldn’t possibly be the first person to have this impression, so I hit Google trying to find others who have had the same impression and came up with…nothing! That’s the first time that’s happened.

The best I could do was the book Should we Burn Babar?
that actually has the opposite opinion saying Babar was a colonialist and actually arguing that the Babar books are the opposite of leftist, and in fact are evidence that there needs to be more of a leftist bent to children’s literature. The closest I came was a user review of that book on Amazon saying basically that Kohl (the author) had it all wrong.

Humph. So there you go I guess. Finally I’m the first on the Internet to have an opinion about something.

So I took a different position in my same company today that will mean me going back to development instead of managing people. It’s on a system that’s going to see a lot more growth and is closer to a business group (trading) and is planning to completely re-architect itself over the next couple of years. I’m really excited about it.

I feel like if I’d gone 6 more months in a management job, my skills would be so rusty I’d have no hope of going back. As it is, I’m a little afraid they’re pretty rusty now. My hope is that I can find my way through one way or another until I actually know what I’m doing again .

First, I need to go back to relearning how EJBs work….

Miles,

I have a confession to make. Today, when you saw me eating chocolate chips and wanted me to share them with you, I tricked you into thinking they were Cherrios instead and gave you those. I’m not proud of it, but I think future-you will understand. What was I going to do? Give a 2 year old chocolate chips? Stop eating chocolate chips myself? You seemed perfectly happy eating the Cherrios. I think you just wanted to be eating what I was eating; you’ve never in your life eaten a chocolate chip so you didn’t know the difference….

Love,

Dad.