Twelve years ago today, Emma and I met face-to-face for the first time. We had been talking on the phone for about three weeks after I had answered her personals ad in The Stranger. We might have met a little sooner, but she was busy meeting the other guys who had responded, and I was undergoing the IIS 4 deathmarch at Microsoft.

We were both nervous and we each responded char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly. Emma babbled; I said very little. She told me later that she thought that she had scared me off. She hadn’t, though. We had already talked several times on the phone and she had been less nervous. I liked her and I …continue.

I’m fairly confident that Referendum 71 will be approved. It was leading by 51% this morning and by 51.8% this evening, and leading 2:1 in King County, the most populous, most liberal county in Washington state.

Ballots merely have to be postmarked by Election Day to be valid, and hundreds of thousands of them have not yet been received by the vote counters.

I attended the Election Night party last night and helped the tech team with some behind-the-scenes arrange­ments. In the photo, Joe Mirabella (lead blogger) and Josh Cohen (tech lead) are being thanked by Anne Levinson (campaign chair) and Josh Friedes (campaign manager).

The mood was cautiously optimistic about Referendum 71 passing, tempered …continue.

Sonchai Jit­pleecheep is a devout Buddhist, half Thai and half American, and one of the few Bangkok cops who is not on the take. An American marine is murdered grotesque­ly in a manner that ac­ci­den­tal­ly kills Sonchai’s partner and soul brother. Sonchai must help the FBI in­ves­ti­gate and seek his own revenge. The trail takes them through the foulest gutters and the palaces of the wealthy. We encounter pros­ti­tutes, monks, shemales, jade collectors, and gangsters in a tour of the Thailand that most Westerners barely glimpse.

When we moved to Beacon Hill in 2000, we were totally dumb­found­ed by the number of kids who came trick-or-treating to our door. In the prior two years, we had been renting a house in Walling­ford, and we had only had one set of kids each year.

We had about 100 kids that first year. We were not expecting the onslaught and ran out of candy, which led to Emma being berated by some pre­sump­tu­ous mother. We live in a relatively affluent block and kids are brought quite a distance to partake of the goodies. One small boy peered up at Emma once and asked her, “Are you rich?”

And so it’s been …continue.

I saw Greenstage’s production of Titus Andronicus on Sunday night. Normally, this is Shake­speare’s bloodiest tragedy, but Greenstage chose to play it as a dark comedy. It’s still bloody, extremely bloody, blood everywhere, spurting from severed wrists, spraying from cut throats, shooting over the stage (and some of the audience).

The first twenty minutes were very confusing. The actors spoke their lines very quickly and I had a hard time tuning in to what they were saying and what was happening. Then either they slowed down or I tuned in, but it started making sense, inasmuch as Titus Andronicus can ever make sense.

I’ve seen Greenstage do comedies and straight tragedies. Here they hammed it up, putting a …continue.

I spent last Wednesday at Benaroya Hall, attending the Seattle edition of Stack­Over­flow’s traveling DevDays conference. It was well worth $99.

Joel Spolsky, owner of FogCreek Software and co-founder of Stack­Over­flow, opened the conference with a keynote about the dichotomy of power and simplicity. People are happier when not over­whelmed with choices. Many of the choices that software forces users to make are es­sen­tial­ly mean­ing­less to the users. However, even though people want simplicity, they also want features and different people use different features. Powerful software sells more copies.

He argues that developers and designers should put in the extra work to make good choices on behalf of the users: don’t make users feel bad …continue.

As part of my personal conversion to Git, I read Swicegood’s Git book. It’s a decent in­tro­duc­tion to Git and you learn how to do all the basic tasks as well as some more advanced topics. The examples are clear and well-paced.

I would have liked to see more about col­lab­o­ra­tion and workflow in a DVCS world, perhaps a few case studies: how is Git used in the Linux kernel de­vel­op­ment process; how a small, dis­trib­uted team uses Git and GitHub; how a collocated team migrates from more …continue.

In Football, dog­fight­ing, and brain damage, Malcolm Gladwell writes of the rather startling findings concerning brain damage that American foot­ballers sustain over their careers.

The constant butting of heads leads to an enormously high rate of chronic traumatic en­cephalopa­thy (C.T.E.), which has symptoms like Alzheimer’s. It’s not just the con­cus­sions that cause it, but all the sub­con­cus­sive contact. It’s almost as dangerous to one’s long-term health as boxing.

I grew up hating rugby and trans­ferred that hatred to American football. I have no time for the game, which I find violent and repellent, nor for the jock culture that surrounds it.

Regardless of my feelings about football, Gladwell’s article (as so many New Yorker pieces do) …continue.

Over the last few weeks, I built a PHP ap­pli­ca­tion that overlays Approve 71 banners on profile pictures. The actual ap­pli­ca­tion is hosted in an iframe and lives on a server in a different domain, eq.dm, than the main server at ap­proveref­er­en­dum71.org.

This works fine in most browsers. Then we started getting reports that it wasn’t working in IE8 on Win7 RC1. The iframe content was blank.

Poking around, I found the problem with the Fiddler proxy. The landing page on eq.dm was supposed to stick some in­for­ma­tion into the PHP session, then redirect to a second page at the same site. The second page was in an endless loop, redi­rect­ing to …continue.

Third in a series, but the first that I’ve read.

Prince Roger and his Marine bodyguard have been marooned on an alien planet for six months. With local allies, they fight their way halfway around the world to the spaceport. And then the trouble really starts.

Well-done military SF: plausible, hard-bitten char­ac­ter­s; good plotting; and exciting battle scenes.