We were hoping that we’d get to relax this weekend and maybe have a nice dinner out for my birthday. Unfortunately, it didn’t really happen because Lucas was really cranky. This was the first time that he’s gotten fussy without any real reason. For the past couple of days he wants to be held almost all the time while he’s awake. Tracy had to take a day off of work to take care of him.

Being a parent is hard and we only have one child. I think we could handle 2 or maybe even 3, but 4 is just unthinkable.

Tracy’s got a friend who’s going to be on a reality dating show. It’s called “How to Get the Guy” and it’s going to premiere June 12 on ABC at 8pm I think. Tracy worked with Michelle at one of her old firms. I’ve already seen a couple different ads for it, one where Michelle is labeled “The Perfectionist” and another one where she’s labeled “The Career Girl”. I think it’s a 6 episode series. If you’re bored Tivo it and tell me what you think.

It looks like 5-6 girls all competing for one guy. I always found it odd for dating shows to try and get people to compete against each other to date one person. I suppose it makes for exciting drama with the cat fights and all, but it seems tough to get a lasting relationship out of the whole thing(I am guessing the success rate for long term relationships is pretty low). Not that the studios should/would care about that, although I guess they could cash in if there was a wedding.

Anyways, if anyone needs a date, Michelle might still be available.

It’s my birthday too, yea. 34 and still working for The Man.

Not much going on. Lucas is really close to being able to roll over from his back to his stomach. Tracy’s starting to experiment with shooting mini-videos from the camera. I’ll try and put them up in the gallery, because unfortunately Shutterfly doesn’t support uploading videos yet.

Work is going well, pretty busy.

I’m really really slacking on exercise. I doubt I can run 3 miles.

It’s all ok, because I’m going to retire this year right after I win the WSOP. Full Tilt Poker is having an amusing promotion where if you win a seat from their site and then you win the whole WSOP they’ll give you an additional 10 million dollars on top of your prize money. It’s really more like a 10 year contract for 1 million/year, but it’s still good. I won a freeroll entry into another freeroll. Placing in the top 10 of 1000 of this next freeroll gives me an entry into the next freeroll which pays out 20 WSOP spots from 1800 entrants. Then from there I just have to win the WSOP against 8000 of the best players in the world. So if you add it up, I’ve got like a 10/1000 + 20/1800 + 1/8000 chance of winning that’s like 1/50. So I’m pretty much set.

To quote Dr. McNinja, Bad math proves a point.

Google has been talking about computing power as a function of power consumption for a while now, and it’s good to see that other companies are recognizing it too. I went to our new data center a week ago and I was impressed with the heating and cooling capabilities of it. It takes a lot of power to run a data center like ours.

Running massive arrays of less expensive CPUs or storage devices is in vogue these days, partially because Google does it. The tricky thing about doing it is that your application really needs to be distributed and scalable for arrays to work. And distributed and multithreaded applications are inherently harder to write than single threaded ones. The other problem is that systems management becomes much trickier.

I have several different brokerage accounts. The other day I got a letter from one of them that didn’t look like my normal statement, it’s an account that is has been idle for a several years and probably has less than $50 in securities in it. Curious, I opened it up and looked at it. Someone had executed a sell trade for a stock I’ve never heard of or owned for $130,000. Very alarmed, I called my broker this morning, and asked for an explanation. The broker said he made a single character typo in the account number and had put in my account number instead of the correct one. He said he had immediately recognized his mistake and the transaction had already been cancelled.

This begs a couple of questions:
1: WTF?
2: I am sure I’ve never authorized options trading in that account, would I need to authorize short positions like this?
3: WTF?
4: I know I could leverage the securities in that account to take some risky positions, but you’d think there’d be some controls in place to prevent that big a mistake.
5: WTF?

For Tracy’s first Mother’s day, we didn’t do a whole lot, went to Patxi’s and I got her a gift certificate to a spa. And we just sort of hung out around the house. It was good because I haven’t had much time to spend at home with her and Lucas lately. Lucas is growing up pretty quickly, he’s got much better motor control and he’s been rolling over some. We went out for a walk and I got bit by mosquitos 3 times. That was unfortunate, I have no idea why, but I’m some sort of mosquito magnet, I will always get more bites than anyone else.

Talked to my mom. Not too much up with her. They are going to do some international protesting to try and get Taiwan recognized by the WHO. Though it’s not clear to me exactly what good that is going to do, it’s not like it’s the UN or anything.

I’ve been looking at the Mac product line and I don’t see a roadmap to 64-bit machines anywhere. Moving Macs from PowerPC to Intel was a step backwards for applications that require lots of memory. There were 64-bit PowerPC Macs, but nowhere do I see any plans for the new Intel Macs to address anything other than 32 bits and that’s actually pretty troublesome to me. As far as I know, they are going to kill off all PowerPCs, both 32 and 64 bit. Mid-range PCs these days have 1GB of memory, so very shortly high end Macs are going to have problems addressing more than 4GB of memory. This seems like a pretty serious flaw in their product strategy. Maybe there’s something I’m missing… I know that there are Intel extensions which allow their 32 bit chips to address more than 4GB of real memory with some virtualization(they call them Physical Address Extensions) but that’s already kind of hacky. PAE generally limits each process to 4GB of memory, which is pretty annoying if you just want one big process with a huge chunk of memory. I’ll do some more digging to see where the Mac is going, but it does seem like a problem for high end Mac users in the short term.

We had a Cinco de Mayo party this weekend. Just the usual crowd. Tracy cooked of course. It was a Mexican theme, so she made a taco/burrito bar which is actually pretty easy. Just dice up a bunch of veggies and throw some chicken and pork in the crock pot. She also tried a couple new recipies, a flan which was a little bit thicker and richer than what I’m used to because it was made with cream cheese and a corn tomalio which was supposed to be like the sweet corn meal side dish they serve at Chevy’s. The tomalio worked out pretty well I think, the flan wasn’t bad, just different. Only a couple people drank and a bunch of people brought drinks, so we ended up net positive on the alcohol.

I’ve watched an odd collection of DVDs lately. At any given time, my selection of movies is one of the three things that Tracy has from Netflix. She watches all the movies we get, but I don’t have as much time, so I’ve only seen about 1/4th of them. Among the selection of recent movies are Pride and Prejudice, Brokeback Mountain, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, none of which I’ve been really impressed with. After having seen Best Picture nominees Crash and Brokeback, I have to say I’m surprised Brokeback received all the critcal acclaim that it did. It was kind of boring, while I found Crash compelling and well written. In my mind, the best picture won.

Not being a person who is into industrial design, I rarely notice these things, but the Graco baby seat system that we have is really a well designed component system. It’s a baby seat with a nice handle and it snaps into the car seat and the stroller we have. When I use it I’m impressed with how well everything snaps into place and how easy it is to separate the seat from the car base or the stroller, even from awkward positions. Things click into place so you know when baby is locked in safe and snug. All the parts feel solid. Everything is well balanced and the carrying handle will swing around(but not with free motion because that’d be too unpredictable). It cost a couple of hundred bucks, but you can tell they put a good amount of work into designing it so that even idiots like me can put it together without screwing it up.