It’s been a while since I visited my parents in Connecticut, so this year I made the trip to see them at the old homestead. The house and the town have some family history and I’m always reminded of it when I return home.

One of the reasons I haven’t blogged that much is the fact that WordPress is just so frustrating to use. I recently learned about Octopress from a few different sources and decided I’d give it a try.

I was able to also bring over an archive of an earlier version of the blog from around 2004 and import those entries as well. Take a look at the blog archives to see what my earlier writing was like.

Enjoy!

When Steve stepped down as CEO, I wrote to let him know what effect he and his company had on a ten year old kid:

Steve,

When I was in the fourth grade my parents bought an Apple ][+ when 48K was a lot of RAM and disk drives were uncommon. I discovered in that computer a world which I could play in, learn in, and experiment in. I was ten years old and I’d found something incredible in the machine you’d helped create.

My parents kept a book - in each grade, I’d write what I wanted to be when I grew up and many years I had the usual astronaut dreams. When I was in the sixth grade and having learned to program a bit, I wrote that I wanted to work at Apple.

I played and worked with computers of one sort or another for the next twenty years. I learned to program the Macintosh and NeXT machines when I was in college. I studied computer science. I contracted and wrote software to help people do things with computers in a better way than they could do those things without computers.

I watched as Apple bought NeXT and you turned a beleaguered company once again into something which inspired dreams. Twenty years after that first Apple ][, I started working at Apple. I’ve been here for ten years.

I’m proud to have been a part of Apple’s resurgence working first on Mac OS X and then on iOS. There are times every day when the giddy ten year old in me is amazed at his good fortune in helping to create products that people want to use rather than have to use.

Your leadership enabled me to live a childhood dream, but even more than that it’s taught me how to reach for something more; to improve myself and everything around me and to follow what I passionately believe in. I hope that something I’ve worked on in my time here will help inspire another ten year old to experiment and ask “What if…?”

It’s completely inadequate, but it’s the only thing I can say:

Thank you.

.chris

Those of us working at Apple have inherited a dream. It’s a dream we already believed in, but now it’s completely ours to realize.

Watch us.

It’s that time of year again; crunch time for WWDC preparations.

It’s the time of year which reminds me how much I enjoy teaching, and how much work teaching effectively really is.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been wrestling with everything from Xcode and my demo through Keynote not launching for no apparent reason. Murphy doesn’t just look over your shoulder while you’re on stage presenting a demo, sometimes he’s there for the entire process leading up to the big day.

It’s totally worth it, though. I have such a great time at WWDC that I always make a point of presenting every year.

When we lived in a rented house in a different neighborhood in Mountain View, we had fantastic neighbors on each side of us.

On the north side was an older man named Ev. He grew beautiful roses in his front yard. He would stand on the other side of the fence and talk about gardening with Kat, or he would tell us stories about the huge oak tree in his back yard, and stories about the neighborhood and how it developed.

He was always pleased to see you and always had something interesting to talk about. He knew a lot about the different neighborhoods in Mountain View. When we told him we we had bought a house and where we were moving, he mentioned that he’d known a lady who lived “over that way.” In fact, whenever he talked about a neighborhood in Mountain View he knew a lady “over that way.”

When he was well enough, he would fire up his old pickup truck and run an errand. I always imagined he was visiting a lady friend in another neighborhood.

While we were excited to have bought a house, we were heartbroken to be leaving behind such wonderful people like Ev. We always said he should come by and see Katherine’s roses. We had heard from friends that he’d been receiving home care for a little while. He went into the hospital last week. He passed away on Sunday.

He never got to come and see Kat’s roses and tell us more about our neighborhood and which lady he knew “over our way.” Somehow life got away from us and we never got around to having him visit. We’re both upset about having not made the time to see him.

It’s easy to leave something and imagine that it will always be the way you left it; your hometown, a school, a neighborhood, a person. Time has a way of reminding you otherwise.

I know everyone’s just dying to catch up on what I had for lunch or what the contractor is doing right now. If you want that, you should pop on over to my Twitter feed.

I’m working on a few programming posts which I’m hoping to have up in the next few weeks - maybe one a week or so.

I’m also tinkering around with trying to customize the look of the the website a bit more. Never having done any Wordpress hacking, I’m liable to really screw things up. If something goes south, please bear with me.

The dog eats his dinner in about a minute and forty-five seconds (yes, we’ve timed it). Sometimes, he doesn’t get it all.

Just me and the dog again, this time through Monday morning.

This morning went well - he didn’t wake me up ‘til 7:30. The five laps around the block were pretty cold on the bike, though.

Ireland pictures are up here. I tried to pick the best bits from each day. Some of the descriptions may need editing; I was messing around in iPhoto and I think I did something wrong.

This was an incredible trip. I can’t say enough good things about it - we had a great time with wonderful friends. I’d go back in a heartbeat.

Buddy and I are in Bachelor Officers Quarters until Sunday while Kat is in North Carolina on vacation eating Chick-Fil-A and I am not jealous at all about this. Really.

This apparently means the dog wakes up at 5:10 AM regardless of what we’ve been doing for the last, oh, 8 weeks. The morning routine is pretty straightforward:

1. Dog wakes up at some unknown time in the morning.
2. Dog waits for what seems to him an interminable amount of time (5.2 seconds) before finding exposed skin and licking incessantly.
3. I wake up wondering what the heck is happening.
4. Oh it’s the dog (about a minute - I’m slow in the morning).
5. Go to the kitchen.
6. Feed the dog (1/3 cup food + 1/3 cup brown rice - about a minute and a half).
7. Let the dog out.
8. Take the dog to the park for a rousing game of Fetch and Chase Stuff (30-45 minutes, depending on what other dogs are around).
9. Walk home.
10. Play a rousing game of Sit On The Couch And Sigh Occasionally.
11. Prepare a Kong bone with treats inside for the dog.
12. Put dog in crate and go to work.

The lunch routine is the same thing, just start at step 7 above. Sometimes we skip step 8 depending on how much time I have to spend at lunch.

Dinner is just steps 7 to 10.

I kind of enjoy the structure to my day. The break in the middle to let the dog out is a great way to get out of the office.