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28 June 2008
	Today is Pink Triangle day. For years now we've helped drape Twin Peaks in a huge memorial to man's inhumanity to man. It's a big community effort. The kids really look forward to it, putting a countdown on the calendar, ... This is how the thing gets assembled. Isaac helped with the cornerstone, the bottom piece. Today is Lila's first swim meet. She's waiting in our garden for me to catch up. All the swimmers arrive in their robes, ready to go. (Back in the day we'd change in the - wait for it - changing room. Kids nowadays.) Luckily I got Lila's first competitive effort: this is the dive as the race starts. Lila is pretty pleased with her performance, as she gives me a blow-by-blow of the race. She's really good with those kick-turns, which I never learned, despite years on the swim team.
27 June 2008
	My daughter is a clotheshorse; she loves window-shopping, buying, and switching outfits. It's a blast to see. Here's her latest acquisition:
24 June 2008
	Emily, one of my co-workers, is heading out to MIT this autumn. I've organized a series of brown-bag lunches to capture some of her know-how. (Obviously we'll be losing the services of the very pregrant Shereen for a while :-)
22 June 2008
	Whoa! We're at CCSF, at the all-day folk dancing participation event. Friends have joined us, and the kids are having a grand time, between dancing, watching other kids sing, and the many arts and crafts they're doing. Later that evening Isaac petitions for some Papa time, which works out well as Lila has plans. He picks Krispy Kreme, to watch the conveyor system.
21 June 2008
	I don't know why, but today was evidently the day that both kids demanded that we clean the car. Lots of soapy scrubbing later it's proclaimed ready for a cruise. Perhaps it's the great weather we're having... The kids plea for soba at Mifune, in Japantown. Dziadziu joins us. The top comes down, the engine started, and we drive across town under blue skies and fluffy clouds. We pass our house and wind our way high above San Francisco to Twin Peaks. The sun is setting, and it's a beautiful place to be prancing about. The tourists flow in and out of the busses, some locals bring up visitors and family, and the first touches of fog start cooling things down. Now the sun is almost completely set, and the warm air loses what heat it held over the last half-hour. We head back to the car for a blanket; nobody wants to leave!
19 June 2008
	Last year the public transit agencies offered free rides on about a dozen Spare the Air Days. They were surprised that people took them up on it. (They were expecting only commuters, but everyone wanted an excuse to ride the rails around the Bay Area, ourselves included.) The solution was to offer free rides until noon, weeding out children and others we need to expose to the joy of mass trasit. Mission accomplished.
17 June 2008
	Today was a long day with Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud service. It turns out that things in /mnt, the largest partition on the virtual machine, aren't saved when bundling things up for future use. D'oh! That might have been documented somewhere. Rose and the kids walk downhill into the Mission to have dinner with me; restaurants near BART are a nice bonus, and the walk to and from home are even better. Lila, Isaac, & Rose at Pancho Villa in the Mission, San Francisco. I walk past here every day on my commute to work and today the family drove on down to meet with me. After dinner we headed out to the near-by playground, where there's always fun kids with which to play.
16 June 2008
	There's some E. Coli making the rounds of some tomatoes, so they're being pulled of the shelves and menus. This is the first time I've personally seen any reaction. This is at the Aroma Café, Oakland.
15 June 2008
	A truly splendid Father's Day at Safari West with several branches of our family tree.
14 June 2008
13 June 2008
	One of my co-workers, Anirudh, and his wife and newborn treat us all to a pizza lunch. Good food, good conversation, and as "Rudy" says, good times.
12 June 2008
	The nice thing about having shared digital cameras is the surprises: who desired the Nutella bread, and who pulled it off, and why don't I know about it?
11 June 2008
	Today's been an infrastructure day. Got my boss into our instant messaging crowd. Got our development XServe to have a static IP address, kind of vital for a server :-) Finished the day trying to make the XAMPP package automatically start up on boot. So far, no luck. We're moving ever so slowly forward on renovations. Sarah, an architect and neighbor, is over taking measurements for the structural engineer.
11 June 2008
	Isaac still ill. Lila has a mild sore throat but opted to head out to school. Work and WWDC for me.
10 June 2008
	My coworkers head over to the San Francisco ferry building for lunch after our intranet crashed. No 'net, no work. We luxuriate out of doors, in the warm sun, with food from Provençe; lamb, roasted potatoes, polenta, and a cabarnet. Then I headed over to the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) at the near-by Moscone Convention Center. Not much to share, as everything is under non-disclosure, except some landscape shots. The free, limitless lattes on the third floor made my afternoon. Isaac has a cold, sadly during the last week of school. This was always my favorite time of the year. Same thing happened last year. I'm hoping he'll make it back for a bit of the festivities.
8 June 2008
	No photos of today's goings-on, because that's the Rangemaster's rule. Some of the Black Rock Rangers, members of the bangstix email list, headed over to the Chabot Gun Club for an afternoon of shooting. It was great seeing my bretheren, some of whom I've not seen since Burning Man 2007. I shot a 9mm Glock 17C, the compensated version. It's a pleasant gun to fire. I can't say I'm wild about how it fits into my hand, but it's okay. And I wasn't too bad. We were told to ignore the bullseye and concentrate on sending rounds up and down the centerline. Perhaps I'll photograph the results.
5 June 2008
	A glimpse into the train yard from BART. After so much time at the GGMRC I'm amazed at how realistic the real yard looks :-)
4 June 2008
	About a block from the office is the summertime Wednesdays Oakland City Center lunchtime concert. This evening, as we're walking into the GGMRC, Isaac spots a hawk in a near-by tree. We spend a few minutes watching it, hoping to catch a glimpse of the babies in the nest. No such luck. Good eyes, train man.
3 June 2008
	We're preparing family breakfast, which we try to do every morning, even through the summer. My darling wife, Rose, is on about the Turkish coffee - with our without cardamom?