In the middle of moving from an old debian install to ubuntu. This is my first ubuntu experience. So far it's nice.

Magnetics word to the wise: I think this (long overdue) move was finally motivated by the fact that while re-arranging our living room I moved our server around, quite near the large-magnet speakers. Keep those hard drives away from the magnets, friends. They're not kind to your files.

I have been unable to work up any kind of momentum to return to the two or three academic projects that I have outstanding like Hogwallop, or my Brother Brigham paper. Summer laziness has hit hard. So, Friday night I started soldering the ol' Rockmite in earnest, while Melissa was finishing up a book for her class. I'm about a third of the way done with the Rockmite. Maybe a quarter. I got a little (read very) obsessive compulsive about lead contamination due to the solder (solder is often made of a high percentage of lead, despite what this wikipedia page says). This means that I laid down cardboard over top of the kitchen table I was soldering on, used disposable rubber gloves and treated them as contaminated during and afterwards. This proceeded to freak Melissa out. I think one of the main sources of this freak out was that I don't want Caleb to have some kind of lead poisoning problem and end up learning disabled or something because of a dumb hobby. Afterwards, I googled "soldering kitchen table" and found this article in which somebody repeatedly emphasizes that soldering can only cause lead problems if you actually ingest the solder. That made me feel much better. Isn't it great what a random internet site can do for you, even though I have no idea who "ranger/- Warren" is or if he knows whereof he speaks?

On Saturday, I went for my second 8+ mile run in two weeks. Last week I went for my first run longer than 3 miles ever. It was relatively intense, and I had to stop after 4 miles and then start again a 20-ish minutes later. This last week, though we took a couple of breaks while waiting for red lights and such, I ran the whole time without any large walking stretches. 8.27 miles in 1 hour and 26 minutes. It felt great. Hopefully I'll be able to continue to do the occasional long run.

This week we released a feature at work on which I've worked my tail off. Sourceforge just became an OpenId relying party. Essentially what that means, dear friends and family, is that you can take your livejournal account and use it to log into the website I work on. Or your Blogger account, or your AIM account, or your... You probably have a lot of openid's and didn't know it yet.

We did it using some code that is part of an open source project, but the open source project didn't really fully implement the whole thing, so I got to dig into the nitty gritty encryption parts of the protocol and stuff. It was pretty fun, and we did the whole thing in under a month. Which was awesome for our team, since we've been kind of stagnant for a loooong time. So, that was an excellent good thing.

The rest of this week has essentially been spent playing Mario Kart Wii and recovering from the ol' windy city where I went for a big work meetup last week. It was quite windy and rainy, actually. I haven't gotten the project which I intended to this week (revamping Hogwallop so it's in python and more readable) but I got some work done on that tonight, though I skipped out on doing the dishes to do it (sorry, sweets!).

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty good. Work is going well. School is good. I got an A in my phonology class, though I did sort of whine to the professor about grades right before the semester ended, but an A is an A, whining or no whining, I suppose, and I did also work my tail off on my final phonology paper. (Neapolitan consonant gemination FTW!!!). And on that note I'm off to bed.

Well, the family connections paid off this week, and we were able to obtain a Wii. A good use of my christmas money, even though I didn't quite make it last the whole year this year.

I like the fact that when we play, everybody kinda gets involved, at least, that's the case with the couple of games that came with it, Wii Play and

Wii Sports. I know there are other "hard core gamer" type games that are available for it, but I'm not sure those would go over well with Caleb and/or Melissa, so I may wait to try'em out/rent'em etc.

The only thing I wish is that it were slightly more hackable, i.e. if Nintendo would open up the platform a bit more. I'd _love_ to hack up some WiiWare, but I don't think they'll make that available ever, which is kinda sad. Think of the cool things that would flourish if they did!

Got hit from behind today, while driving home from taking Melissa to school. Kinda sad. The guy fed a fake name and no license to the cops so he got arrested when they figured out he was lying to them and he had a bench warrant out for his arrest. I felt bad because when I rear ended somebody the other people didn't want to call the cops (maybe they had bench warrants out, too?) and so I didn't get a ticket.

I finally fixed a bug that I've been working on in some library code we're trying to use after like a week of banging my head against a wall. It was like the absolute most annoying problem of all. The rest of my team at work has been writing code on top of the bug I've been working on, assuming it'll get fixed, and I think it finally has gotten fixed, which is nice. It was crypto code (more in the near future, hopefully, on the nature of the code), though incredibly lightweight, but being php and all, it's kind of a pain with the ol' arbitrary precision integers. Anyway, it's nice to have that done and over with. The rest of today has kind of been a decompress day, with the accident providing a bit of stress in the morning, and the bug fix finally getting pushed out to the team around 4:00pm my time.

The semester is about to end. It's kind of going out with... a fizzle. My class has gotten really easy over the last couple of weeks, probably because the professor is trying to keep up with his grading and doesn't think he can read our rough drafts before we finish, though it's entirely possible he can, since I'm pretty sure several people in the class gave him crap drafts.

I'm really starting to feel engaged at work again, which is a nice feeling. I feel like we're finally making some real progress, and we're doing decent, fun stuff. So it's nice. Really nice. I have to travel a ton in the next few months for work, which is less than nice, but at least it'll feel like productive time while travelling, unlike the last trip which I took for work, which was nearly a complete waste of time and money.

I've been finishing off Angel, though I've got one season left, and I have to say... In some ways it's really cheesy, but in other ways I really like it. I think it's kind of nice to have a "show to watch" as it were, but watching shows that have already completed their runs is both good and bad, since you can watch the whole thing without having to wait for "next week's episode" but then when the show is over, you're done. There's nothing left. No anticipation about whether or not there's going to be another season. No nothing. It's kind of a let-down.

Okay, that's the end of this entirely too-long update/ramble. I bid you good night.

Just had a classic Paul Huff moment.

I'm taking Phonology this semester. It's my only class. You'd think that would mean that I'd be able to spend all kinds of time on it and just do really well at it.

You'd be wrong.

Phonology, it turns out, is really dumb. At least, the parts of it that we're studying now are incredibly poorly thought out. We're studying generative phonology right now, which apparently has been, at least in some circles, superceded by optimality theory, for which I really am holding my breath. The guys that came up with the stuff we're reading right now make all these assumptions about the way that phonological processes must work in the brain that are basically completely unfounded. And then they base their whole life's work around those principles. It's kinda scary.

It's also intensely unmotivating. That's why it took me approximately six gazillion hours to get up the gumption to spend the 6ish hours that I spent all-told over the last couple of days on my weekly homework assignment that was due today at 4:00pm. In addition to tons of reading, we're essentially asked to write a short 4+ page paper each week. Which, honestly, under normal operating conditions for a linguistics class would even be kinda cool. The option to write a short paper on an aspect of the class, I mean. In this case, it's intensely unmotivating because you know that even the teacher doesn't believe the arguments that you're making in your 4 page paper, but you have to make them, because that's the way generative phonology works.

So, I spend all this time writing my paper, stay up late last night, get up this morning and spend a couple of more hours on it. I go to class today, and ask the professor about a couple of nitpicky, but semi-important details in the way that I wrote things out in the paper. Then I go home. As I walk in the door, I think to myself, "I'm going to e-mail that paper to the professor right now."

Do I actually e-mail the professor my paper? No. I spend all this time working on this paper that I then proceed to not turn in. I remember this at 6:30pm, while finishing the dishes and send an hurried e-mail to the professor with my paper attached. I have a timestamp on the paper showing that I haven't touched it since 9:45am this morning. Do I think the professor will actually accept my paper? I have no idea, but I'm leaning towards no, because I think he's one of those "show no mercy to the student" types. Which is fine. I can accept that. It's just kind of annoying to have put forth all this effort to do my tiny lame paper and then forget to actually turn it in.

It is, of course, all my fault. And there's the Paul Huff moment: doing a bunch of work to get something half-decent, and then, quite absent-mindedly, not caring enough to go the rest of the way.

Alas.

1. Melissa found a random old Border's gift card left over from last Christmas that had $36.00 on it. I went and bought Stoa by Nik Bärtsch's Ronin. Let me remind you that I was thinking about buying this album a long time ago. Let me hereby publicly prostrate myself in front of Jeremy Tilton and say that I'm sorry I ever doubted his musical tastes or suggestions. This album is freaking awesome.

2. I haven't forgotten about the contest winners. Josh, I'll need to consult with you online sometime, Caren, I'll need your address, and Ben and I have been in constant consultation. I also owe another contest or two in the next little bit here. As soon as I crawl out under work and school stuff I'll be hitting the contest scene pretty hard.

3. I'm semi-excited about my final project for my class. More to come.

4. To everybody who's asked: My Amazon wish list can be found here. It's prioritized, though sort of half-heartedly, so pretty much anything on there would be neat-o for Christmas. Books and CDs are great used, so if you're short on cash, or you want extra bang for your christmas buck for me, I'd love to have two used books for the price of one new one, or CDs or whatever else :) Other things that would be nice as Christmas presents include:

• Nice looking articles of clothing



• Morse code/Ham Radio apparatuses



• Fancy hot chocolate



• Chocolate cookbooks (don't know which ones are good, so I haven't added any to the list)



• Subscriptions to Make, Cook's illustrated or QST (which would just be membership in the ARRL).



• Board games (Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne expansions besides "Cathedrals and Inns")



• Other fun digital widgets (Arduino stuff, Chumby-like stuff), though nnone of those are necessarily things that I want, they might be cool.)

And anything else you think might be cool.

Okay, folks.

Here are the winners:

jsweed, carenbobaren and my brother-in-law Ben, get handi-crafted goodness from me.

Even though half the people who entered said they wouldn't do their own contest, I decided to enter them anyway. They can feel free to do a good turn to Pay It Forward, or they can just simply abstain from paying it forward. I'm cool with that.

Stay tuned in the next week or so for my digital handi-craft contest.

Well, Contest #1 is well under-way with a record 9 entrants. Remember, you've got until tomorrow night at midnight to leave a comment on that post if you'd like to be entered in the non-digitial handicraft contest. The digital handicraft contest will follow shortly thereafter.

So, today, was a mixed bag of a day, as my title suggests. I've actually got some decent momentum at work lately, making some decent sized changes throughout the course of my days at work, which feels nice. Better than it has for a while. Certain circumstances over the last week or so have caused me to realize just how cool it is that I get to work from home doing something that I like reasonably well. Working from home really is a _big_ benefit. I certainly hope it is the wave of the future, because even just this last year at home watching Caleb grow up has been truly amazing. I can't imagine what it would be like to miss out on all his shenanigans and the little bits of him growing up. I think it would be awful.

However, today was one of those days where I wanted to be coding on a million different side projects rather than what I'm assigned to do at work. I think it'd be fun to try and write an app for Google's new cell phone system, so I was thinking about that, and investigating the possibilities. I've always thought it would be fun to write a game (and may still do so for the second part of the contest), so I have been looking into game frameworks for python, my language du jour. I've always thought it would be fun to write a guitar tuner, so I've been reading about audio processing this evening.

On the surface, I would say that days like today push me towards academia, with the freedom to be at home more than a traditional job, but also to be able to pick whatever the heck I want to research into on a particular day. However, that thought is wrong: I have 2-3 open, half-baked academic projects sitting, waiting to be programmed on/worked on/written up and that's on top of the project for school which is mildly amusing that I should be working on. Was I dreaming of any of those things today? No.

I was thinking about Morse code speaking cell phones and tuning my guitar with my laptop.

Maybe there's no place for me. Or, maybe I should just pull my head out of the clouds and get to work.

I won this contest and this contest. So this means I get two handicrafts. Which will be totally awesome.

This is how these contests work. It's like a meme. Win a contest, make your own contest. So, I have to have two contests on my blog now, for things hand crafted by me. I've decided to do two different contests. The first one, this one, will be one in which I make a traditional handicraft. Enter by by leaving a comment. You have, let's say, until Tuesday night at midnight to enter.

The second contest will be a digital handicraft. I will write you a little program of some sort. That one will start after the first one ends. You can enter both or neither or just one. You can win both or neither or just one. Winners will be selected randomly.

So, comment away. Have fun. Thank you, and I'll see you in a little bit.

Dear creators of Bionic Woman,

Your show's okay. I like it okay. The whole Jake 2.0 angle isn't being played up too much, and that show was kind of a knock-off of your original anyway. However, the "Bionic Noises" have _got_ to go. We, the viewers, can tell when the Bionic Woman is using her bionic powers. We can figure it out. We don't need a ridiculous outside-of-the-narrative-frame audible cue everytime it happens. Or ever. Just tell the sound guy to get rid of it.

Ever yours,

Paul Huff

---

Dear maintainers of Livejournal,

Nobody likes those hover-over-popup-previews. At least, nobody with sense does. Even if they've got a clever name that somebody in marketing somewhere came up with like "Snap". They're over intrusive, you can't hover over them without totally distracting yourself from what you're reading, and they're, quite simply, ugly. Not only should you not have turned them on by default for everybody, you shouldn't have ever coded up that feature in the first place. If your focus groups told you that people liked them, then think New Coke before making a similar change in the future.

Your humble servant,

Paul Huff

---

Dear J.K. Rowling,

If you wanted Dumbledore to be gay, you should have said so in your books. (Heaven knows they were long enough that no editor ever looked at them anyway, so it's obvious the so-called editors didn't keep it out.) Now that you've finished writing the books, you don't really have much of a say anymore. See Eco's The Limits of Interpretation for more on this topic. Basically, you can't re-write the book unless you actually re-write the book.

Your ever-devoted reader,

Paul Huff

So, lately Caleb and I have been doing a little ditty I like to call, "The Surreal Old McDonald."*. It's not surreal as in involving lame, old-school B-list celebrities but surreal as in surrealism. Like the art movement.

Let me tell you how it goes: I start singing, "Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-o. And on that farm he had a ___" and I wait. This is the part where Caleb chimes in. When we first started singing our little chantey together, at this point Caleb would always say, "duck." No matter how many times we'd sung the song with his participation substituting animals in, he loved to put the duck in there. He was, apparently, enamored with Old McDonald's ducks. So the song went a little something like this:

Me (singing): Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-o. And on that farm he had a....
Caleb: Guh [Caleb's word for duck]
Me (singing): Ee-i-ee-i-o.
Me (not singing): What does a duck say?
Caleb: Gah Gah Gah! [Caleb's word for quack quack quack]
Me (singing): With a quack quack here, and a quack quack there, ....

You get the idea. Pretty standard stuff. Eventually we convinced him to start substituting in cow, or doggy, or whatever. Not too shabby, I thought. Our son is participating in singing!

Lately, however, Caleb's true artistic genius has come out. Tired of that old standby the duck, or even its slightly more edgy successor, the cow, Caleb has begun a bold new Old McDonald movement. This is an example of how the song now goes:

Me (singing): Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-o. And on that farm he had a....
Caleb: Ba ba dra ba. [Not Caleb's word for anything.]
Me (singing): Ee-i-ee-i-o.
Me (not singing): What does a "Ba ba dra ba" say?
Caleb (exhaling quickly, with his lips pressed together tightly): Ffff.
Me (singing): With a ffff ffff here, and a ffff ffff there, ....

Other examples of animals of whom Caleb thinks Old McDonald is an expert caretaker include: Ssssss (which sometimes says "ffff" also, but often says a shortened version of it's own name, just an "ss"), ghra, also likes to make some of those fricative noises, apparently, and the loveable and incredibly huggable, (guttural h, here) hah, which is a big fan of making another guttural noise as it's primary means of intra-species communication.

How many animal names does Caleb know, you ask? More than 5. How many animal noises does Caleb know, you ask? More than 10. (Pandas say, "Bamboo, please." Bet you didn't know that, now, did you?) However, Caleb doesn't choose any of these, because, well, folks, that would be, well, too realistic for such an artiste.

*(I only have called it "The Surreal Old McDonald" in my head up until now, but I've been doing that for a few days now....)

Tonight, Melissa (mhuff) and I got to go on an honest to goodness date. To the movies! By ourselves! Late at night! With no child in tow! It was a blessed event brought to us by Melissa's mom and dad, with whom we're staying this weekend for car fixin' and various other reasons.

The movie we saw is called The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. It's based on a book called

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. I kind of wanted to see this movie because I loved the books so much. I was quite disheartened because it departed so much from the story in the books, even the general feeling of the movie was different than the books. Quotes on the wikipedia page linked to above say that the writer, director and actors didn't really pay too much attention to the books. Which is lame and stupid of them.

Several things which I didn't like: they added in 10 overly cliched and oddly complicating elements to the plot which dragged the story down. They failed to write well enough to sustain some of the themes they added into the story (namely the teacher-student sort of relationship they tried to ham up between Merriman and Will). It felt like there was almost an attempt to stay true to the magical elements of the original book, which were nice because they were incredibly low-key, and un-PZ4-like. The book is much less like Fantastic Four the movie and much more like, say, the first X-Men movie. Fantastic Four has the people's powers be the concentration. The first X-Men movie treats the powers as a tool in telling a story, and the powers seem to be slightly more... natural? Less comic-booky? In the end, the magic felt lame and over-wrought, which is always the danger in a movie like this. They added random fist-fights, a component that I don't remember at all in the original story. They made the story much more a piece of young adult literature than it was originally, I think. It's been a while since I read the book, but now I want to go back and read it again.

Anyway, bottom line, don't go see this movie hoping to find something similar to the book, except essentially in name only. If you do, you'll be disappointed.

It was, however, an excellent date. I love Melissa! She's hot!

While I was up in the middle of the night for a couple of hours for no apparent reason, a piece of music started playing on repeat through my mind. This happens to me a lot, not just at 3:00 a.m., and I'm not entirely sure why, but I'll have a couple of bars of a nice piece of music, or jazz recording, or some other pop song go through my head repeatedly. The game always becomes, "What is this two bar (or, sometimes, as little as two chord) phrase from?" Sometimes it takes me a day or two to figure it out, sometimes a lot less. Totally random.

The nice part was that at 3:00 a.m. last night my brain started playing a nice little phrase that I couldn't place for a little bit. I thought about it, and thought about it and suddenly it dawned on me: it was a phrase of music that I'd heard for the first time on Friday night, as I played it with Jeremy and Chris Hough who it turns out is a really nice (as a person) and good (as a musician) guitarist in Salt Lake. It was a song that I'd never played before (which seems to be my musical performance theme of the summer), and it was nice.

It was a pleasant 3:00 a.m. surprise.

I get to play again with Jeremy tomorrow night, for the first time in like... years. This is going to be the first time that I play with a real bass player in years, too. Like 2 years, at least. It makes me nervous. Mostly because I want Jeremy to like my playing.

At some point, Jeremy got better than me. It's kind of funny, because for a while I think I was as good or better than him, mostly our freshman year. Then our first year back after our missions, I think we were about on the same level. Then, something happened. Maybe I started spending too much time in front of the computer, or just spent my time on other things, while Jeremy spent his time on his bass. Maybe that's the case... I just don't remember him practicing too much. Maybe it happened one of those summers he went down to Vegas to work, and came back at the end of the summer. At any rate, at some point he got better than me, and started playing with other drummers, and ever since then, I've really wanted him to like my playing, but my playing has essentially gotten worse since then. :) Due to lots of factors, but mostly lack of playing and practicing.

It's hard to practice drums, consistently, when it's not your livelihood. Setting up and taking down the drums is costly, time-wise (only 5-10 minutes, but still... it's more than just picking up a guitar or a trumpet and wailing away, you know?). And, honestly, who wants to hear somebody, a neighbor, practicing the drums all by themselves? I know I would hate it if our neighbors suddenly took up drumming... Anyway, all that aside, I get to play tomorrow. Playing alone should be treat enough, but I want to play well. I want to make beautiful music. I like that feeling.

Please excuse my PZ4-ness.

It's season/series premiere week on NBC. I've never liked CBS (old people shows, when I was growing up, anyway), and ABC, while they've done Alias (only really liked the first season or so) and Grey's Anatomy (liked it kind of a lot) of late, haven't particularly caught my interest. NBC always has great concepts, many of which often fail to take off. Which stinks.

Watched the Heroes second season premiere online today. It was... okay. Not perfect, not great, but not bad. I found myself wondering today why the show had taken such an extra comic-book turn instead of being more gritty and less flashy. I think that was the sort of feeling I originally really liked about the show: it was about superpowers, yes, but not so much superpowers as about the interesting interplay between the characters. Now, thinking back across all of last season's arc and this season's premiere, I'm thinking maybe it might be getting too lost in comic book land.

I was not impressed with the last 15 minutes of Bionic Woman tonight, which was all I caught. Nano-technology invading the body? Again? Jake 2.0 did that (and did it in a more interesting way), and probably lots of other things did. Seemed like they were trying too hard during the last 15 minutes, anyway. Perhaps I was just too colored by the negative review in the New York Times Maybe I'll see if I can catch it on the website tomorrow.

I did like Life, which is a detective show (apparently I like detective stuff lately. Kinda weird.) and about a detective who gets sentenced to life in prison, is exonerated, and then goes back to work as part of his settlement. Cool premise, pretty well scripted. Slightly weird and cheesy/silly in parts, but not too bad to totally turn me off... I think I'll give Bionic Woman one more shot, watch heroes for the rest of the season, and try and watch the whole first season of Life. I just hope they're all on the website, because I can't commit to watching TV when they come on...

That is all...

Got back from a camporee earlier today. What is a camporee you ask? According to wikipedia, "[a] camporee is a gathering of Scouting units for a period of camping and common activities." That period of camping is one Friday night, in my vast scouting experience.

The eleven year-old scouts are good. I like them. There at a place where things that are relatively dorky and annoying to the rest of us are still fresh and new. They're at an age where they still mostly respect adults, but they have their own thinking to do, which keeps things interesting.

Some thoughts about scouts based on the campout: I never realized this before but there is a distinct, quite pungent smell which accompanies all scouting expeditions everywhere, worldwide and gets stuck in vehicles which scouts ride in. That smell is, to be blunt, the smell of farts. Not particularly nice-smelling farts, either. Nasty ones. I smelled it today in the van on the way home and suddenly realized what this smell is that I'd been smelling since I was eleven. The perma-fart. The scouting perma-fart. Yuck. (The smell is currently stuck in my nostrils. Nasty.)

Last night, one of the life-long scoutmaster types gave a little talking-to to the scouts. He talked about how the purpose of scouts was to help boys to have good role models and help them learn good skills and have good, constructive lives. He compared this with some boys that he works at a the local juvie, who's lives, he said, were essentially stuck in the eternal cyclic loop of crime sort of lifestyle. They didn't good guidance.

This made me feel, somewhat unexpectedly, a bit sappy and nostalgic and positive towards scouts. Today, I watched the other scoutmaster that was with the 11 year-olds tend and hang out with and watch over a group of 3 latino kids from our area. These are boys that this man would rarely, if ever, interact with if it weren't for their mutual association with scouting. He treated them kindly, and gently and helped them learn to do things, like how to cook for one another, how to put up a tent, and how to tie knots (listed in order of everyday relevance :) ), and re-taught them how to do them if they forgot and was just kind and generous and benevolent towards them. "This is a place," I thought, "where scouting does good: it brings together people that otherwise wouldn't be able to rely on each other." It was pretty heart-warming and made me at least appreciate how scouting could help people out.

But then, of course, there's the whole smell thing...

So, this semester is shaping up to be one in which I'll be able to pick up all the loose ends from research I've done over the past couple of semesters and maybe get things ready to submit for publication. That'd be good, but what I've done a. isn't terribly impressive, b. isn't terribly noteworthy and c. isn't terribly long, so I'm wondering how publication worthy any of these couple of papers will be. We shall see, we shall see.
My class is quite lightweight, which makes it slightly easier to skate by while watching Caleb, and working.

( Work semi-lament. )

Other things going on? Scouts. There's a camp-out this weekend. Last I checked, I wasn't quite in charge enough to be in charge of finding people to drive, but we needed like 3 more cars to drive up with us to some remote part of the Utah mountains. Hopefully it should be good, but I've got my worries. Mostly, I think it'll just be a big, semi-poorly planned time sink. Here's hoping. May the 11 year-olds not try and prank me.

You may have seen this clip recently:



Kinda funny. What you may not know is that she's going to this university:



I'm not knocking higher education, pageants or Appalachian State, necessarily. :)