by ctp on 1 February 2010
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.
Tagged as:
personal
by ctp on 5 November 2009
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.
by ctp on 30 October 2009
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.
by ctp on 29 October 2009
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:
- Dog wakes up at some unknown time in the morning.
- Dog waits for what seems to him an interminable amount of time (5.2 seconds) before finding exposed skin and licking incessantly.
- I wake up wondering what the heck is happening.
- Oh it’s the dog (about a minute – I’m slow in the morning).
- Go to the kitchen.
- Feed the dog (1/3 cup food + 1/3 cup brown rice – about a minute and a half).
- Let the dog out.
- 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).
- Walk home.
- Play a rousing game of Sit On The Couch And Sigh Occasionally.
- Prepare a Kong bone with treats inside for the dog.
- 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.
Finally fixed a bug that’s been bothering me for a day. I’m amazed at how much different the programming is “up here.”
In many ways interacting with the operating system is a fairly straightforward thing: There are some system calls, they return some errors. In CoreFoundation and Foundation, we layer more sophisticated behaviors around those calls to make them easier to use, or to provide new facilities.
As soon as a user gets involved, things get infinitely more complicated. Interaction must be taken in to account. Designing the user experience takes time and effort, and designing and writing APIs to support a user experience or interface take a lot of time and effort.
Still, I’m having fun. I miss the low-level stuff, but I’m getting immersed in the things that I’m working on now. It helps.
Tagged as:
programming,
work
Yup. Still not a big fan of the gym, but on Sunday I went to the 9:30 AM spin class because I noticed during the ski weekend that while I’m a better skier, Katherine’s in much better shape than I am. This is a shocker, I know.
I made it through the whole class, but I was definitely thoroughly worked over at the end of the session. I suspect despite my aversion to the gym, I’ll be going back next Sunday.
Tagged as:
exercise
…for a bank robbery in San Francisco:
A Toyota Prius with a KQED bumper sticker.
…and it’s already pretty interesting.
The first day was spent doing the usual getting set up. The second day was trying to get my mind around the sources and straighten out some problems with the version control server.
Today was actually fixing a couple of bugs and doing a code review. I’m excited that I’ve been able to hit the ground running and participate as much as I have already.
I have to admit, I was extremely nervous about changing groups but I’m feeling much better about this whole thing after today.
Tagged as:
work
