Christmas wasn’t too exciting, just the usual sorts of things. Tracy’s family was in town so we hung out, played with the baby, opened gifts and ate. Good family fun. For New Years we aren’t doing anything, but we’ll be watching the Rose Bowl at our house on New Years Day.

Work has been a bit easier the past week or so, there’s a big rush right before Christmas, but afterwards its not too bad.

By popular demand, here are three short video clips of Lucas.

• Lucas Walking 1
• Lucas Walking 2
• Lucas Walking 3

I ought to put them up on youtube because they have better bandwidth and the interface is better, but I’m too lazy. If I start doing a more video I will.

We’re pretty excited that Lucas has started to walk around. He still has some balance issues and if he needs to go really fast he still crawls, but most of the time he gets around on two feet.

You may have already heard about the award I won. I’m pretty psyched because I’ve been named Time’s Person of the Year.

So browsing Digg as I usually do, I come across a story about a new service that allows people to chat while browsing Digg called gabbly.com. So being a bit curious, I click through and of course the first chat I see is:

gabber95: see my sister naked xxx.net

Great. This is what we get for trusting user generated content.

One of the benefits of working in the operations division as opposed to software development which I’ve usually done is that because operations makes a lot of the purchasing decisions we get a lot of free stuff from vendors. It’s interesting how much end of year, thank you schwag we get from different vendors. One company that we spent just a few thousand on sent a full box of several t-shirts, hats, and a nice jacket and backpack. Another vendor that we’ve spent hundreds of thousands with sent only a small box of chocolates. There ought to be some simple formula for everyone which says something like: for every dollar in profit I’ve made off of you, I will send you gifts worth 1-2 cents for the holidays.

I went paintballing for the first time this week. It was an indoor facility in what was probably just a warehouse with a few obstacles laid out on a astroturf. The field was relatively open and not more than 80-100 yards long.

It’s an interesting experience, it took a long time to get comfortable. For one thing the masks that you have to wear get covered in an oily and hard to wipe off paint. The mask also fogs easily from the inside. There were times I couldn’t see more than 20 or 30 feet, so visibility was a significant problem.

I was also holding the gun wrong as I later learned. The gun is pretty heavy and not well balanced for the way I was holding it. This caused a lot more fatigue than I should have experienced. A good player can shoot with either hand, but as a beginner I just stuck to my right hand.

I wore just sweats and a t-shirt, and I didn’t get hurt. None of the hits I took were that painful, a couple stung for a couple minutes, but I didn’t really notice while the adrenaline was running.

There weren’t really any scenarios it was all just elimination. Most of the other players were beginners too so it was pretty even. I got a couple kills but not many. I was being a bit too conservative I think. Other people were unloading a ton of ammo.

Conclusions: I’d do it again. I’m not very good. It’s fun. It’s hard . It’s messy.

A couple weeks ago I had dinner with my old friend from high school Rick Roe. He’s an ophthalmologist and he’s been living in San Francisco for a few months now, and we hadn’t gotten together in forever, so Tracy, Lucas and I went up to see his place. He and his wife Lisa live about 35 minutes away and she teaches music to young children. They’ve been married a couple of years(I was invited to the wedding, but couldn’t make it) and they have no kids. They cooked a nice meal and we hung out for a few hours talking about the good ‘ol days. Nothing too exciting really. His sister Yvonne has lived in Italy for quite a few years and is married with two kids and sells her own custom designed handbags. Not much news from the rest of the CWA crowd.

A co-worker pointed out a pretty cool QA tool called Selenium. It’s a browser plugin which allows you to issue a series of commands and essentially program the browser to make certain clicks and perform certain actions. This makes for a really good way to test web applications like a real world user, but in an automated manner.

It feels like in the NFL teams don’t try the two point conversion enough. I saw a site which said that in college, there’s a 40% conversion rate. There’s two ways of trying it, there’s the obvious attempt and then there’s the fake point after. I’m curious what the respective conversion ratios for those two types of conversions are. If the fake has even a close to %40 ratio then there must be value in trying it much more frequently, at the very least it gets them to pay attention. If on the other hand, it’s much much harder to convert a fake than an obvious 2 point attempt, then you should still be trying the obvious 2 point sometimes too. It’s especially good early on if you score a touchdown and you want to put pressure on a worse offense than yours. I think a team like the Colts with a high powered offense should go for 2 almost every time. I wonder if NFL teams have done a detailed game theory analysis to show what they are doing is right, because my gut feeling is that their actual decisions on 2 point conversions are frequently incorrect.