davemclain.com

Just took virtual earth (VE) for a quick test drive in the four cities that have been my homes from time to time. I started out testing them in Firefox then realized that some of the features that a few blogs were talking about yesterday (when msn put the servers public to test) weren’t active in Firefox. Not exactly surprised that a microsoft product works better with microsoft products, but the strategy of interlocking software seems like it makes them vulnerable to any killer app in a competitors product. And i just realized i could go off on a whole other tangent with that. But of course the comparison of the map apps really is in many ways a comparison of two differing philosophies between the open source, “don’t be evil” mantra of Google and the proprietary world of Microsoft. For example, if you go to maps.google (GM) you’ll notice that the local still declares that the app is beta. So’s gmail.

Google ascribes to the “release early, release often” mantra that has worked so well for open source and is so well suited to web applications in general. Microsoft probably would have been better served to have released virtual earth as soon as they had the ability to scroll a map using the mouse. But Microsoft is an application company, betas are what devs use internally and you wait until you find all the obvious bugs before you release, cuz even if you have the best patch technology in the world, all your users are going to experience the problem and you end up with version skew (Windows XP’s and Office XP’s biggest competitors are Windows 2000 and Office ‘97 respectively). Anyway back to the maps.

I started in Seattle, zoomed in as far as i could on the Pacific Medical Center which is where i work (it’s even labeled amazon.com neat!). That’s a whole lot closer in than Google’s offering but if you scroll a bit northwest in both maps and look at how Google renders I-5, it can only be described as almost eerily accurate. So for Seattle, MSFT wins the “I can read my license place” award and Google wins the “Did you map every lane by hand?” award.

Sacramento - Local Search Tests I zoomed into my hometown and searched for restaurant in VE and GM Microsoft strictly limited the search to the screen and found me a whole 4 restaurants, the closest of which is Burger King (to be fair there’s only 2 food places striclty closer, Steve’s Pizza and Cold Stone). Google found me 10 items including basically every food place in the two strip malls that were also on VE’s map. But VE has an ace up it’s sleeve, when i zoom out, it dynamically updates all the searches, this is freaking cool. So Google got me a larger, more relevant search set faster, but Microsoft lets me update it on the fly which lends itself better to social planning. VE’s other secret weapon comes out when i search for groceries: VE displays multiple searches in different colors on the same map, sweet. I predict duplication of this feature by GM by the end of the week, cuz it’s a killer.

South Bay. Let’s pretend for a second that it’s next spring and i’ve somehow landed a Google internship and i’m renting a room from my grandma. I do a search for Google in Mountain view and i find the old SGI campus (which is where indeed they are) then i scroll around to find my Grandma’s house and she’s just barely over the edge into a black and white zone. Ooh, major lossage for style. These pictures are so old that 85 is just a right of way, not built at all, i seem to recall that it was built in my lifetime, but still. I then start looking for how to get directions from one location to the other. At first i think there’s just a really bad UI bug, but it’s worse than that VE doesn’t do directions. It just punts back to msn maps. I may as well stop here, VE LOSES. You simply can’t have a map application that can’t do directions. I don’t care how many cool auto-updating results you give me, you don’t tell my how to get there. GM is very happy to tell me to take Grant til it turns into 237, to 87, to 101 and so on. Even allowing me to bring up a mini map of each turn. GM wins hands down, they do directions quite well, though their algorithm sometimes chooses a shorter path over a faster path. But that’s still better than VE’s algorithm of “eyeball it”.

And the final bonus round- Austin. Downtown Austin is black and white in VE. The pictures are at least 5 years old as ACES hasn’t been built yet. Nor has my old apt complex. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. But since i’ve made a web app in the austin area using GM’s API, i guess it would be logical to compare the two here. VE doesn’t have one. Ok, to be fair, ViaVirtualEarth exists. It’s in the same state as the hacker community was in with GMaps standalone mode. Basically hacking around Microsoft’s JavaScript. Sorry guys.

The final wrap up. VE has a long way to go, this offering would have been a contender if they had released it within a month of GM. But with no directions, no API, inadequate photo coverage, and less usability with non-IE platforms, there’s simply no reason to switch. Auto-update is very cool, multiple searches is a killer feature, the scratchpad looks real useful and being able to zoom in further is awesome, but i would be astounded if GM doesn’t have 2 out of those 4 within a few weeks (or the end of this week). Though by the time that happens, VE might at least have directions. If GM hadn’t released hybrid mode last week, the labels on the satelite pictures would have impressed me, but i salivated last week, and next to GM’s ability to map the half dozen lanes of I-5 in MSFT’s front yard, VE looks immature, and it is.

Better luck in China, MSFT…..oh wait Google stole your VP for their new China campus.

It took Jacob a long time to get his act together. From his youth he was a sleazy trickster. He tricked his brother out of his inheritance for a bowl of soup, and completed the deed by lying to his dying father. Rather than sticking around and facing up to his actions he fled the country. He managed to get himself two wives and only loved one of them. Even after his wrestling match with God he still placed his children and his wives between him and Esau, who jacob expected to be in a murderous mood still, effectively using them as a barrier to allow his escape.

Despite his less than noble life, Jacob frequently pursued and was pursued by God. Frequently Jacob’s reaction to God is as a deal-broker, when God appears to him at Bethel, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father’s house, then the LORD will be my God and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and of all that you give me I will give you a tenth” Gen 28:20-22. If God gives me the hookup, i’ll give him back a tenth of my stuff. Even if it was a less than perfect response it was still a response. As time went on Jacob became Israel because of an increasing openness to the will of God.

Following God has a price, and for Jacob the price was a very tangible hip injury. The ‘man’ that Jacob was wrestling was unable to overcome Jacob without injuring him, Jacob was too stubborn to realize that he ought to submit, and so his submission was forced. For some, it’s not until ‘rock bottom’ is reached before they can see Truth, whether because it’s too hard to give up pride, or idleness, or intellectualism or any of the other myriad barriers between us and God. Jacob was able to begin to overcome his barriers because he was at least participating in the wrestling match. Jacob wanted to be the master of God, but at least he wanted God.

God has a way of finally bringing people around who deny him, people who are serious about their beliefs occassionally bump into realities that are simply incompatible with non-Christian beliefs. I can picture God chuckling in heaven at a serious atheist setting out to disprove the existance of God, knowing that CS Lewis started on that path. But for many religion has been rendered “irrelevant” by modern life, and i think that’s a great tragedy that is harder to overcome than any of the major world religions, atheism or new age pseudo-spirituality. Just as bad as passive agnosticism “i don’t care or not if there is a God” is passive theism “i don’t care that there is a God”. And for much the same reason, there can’t be any growth where there isn’t any time spent. For Jacob, God was a reality because he wrestled with him and demanded a blessing, for us God is irrelevant because we’d rather wrestle with science or a career or the lottery before wrestling with God.

Brad Cauley preached about a courageous faith, where we’re not afraid to sacrifice for our faith. And he talks about how the two ways to be encouraged in authentic faith is pursuit of God until you get it and being encouraged be fellow believers. We spend so much time insulated from anything that might cause us to re-evaluate what we think that we’re never getting the first. Movies, sit-coms, radio, the internet, all are perfectly tailored to us so that we can spend a maximum amount of time in a comforting coccoon where we’re never exposed to anything that might make us think. As a side effect we spend less and less time together, i’m tired of needing an excuse to hang out. Some of the best nights i’ve had are the ones where a group of friends got together with some semblance of a plan and it completely fell through and so we ended up just spending time together. And of the best nights, the best of the best were the ones where we actually talked about God. In a polite conversation the two subjects you’re canonically not supposed to talk about are politics and religion. That’s a load of crap, they ought to be at the top of the list because they’re the ones where conversation is the most likely to result in productive conclusions or at least interesting thought.

And that’s all i have to say about that

I think I’m gonna stay home
Have myself a home life
Sitting in the slow-mo
And listening to the daylight
I am not a nomad
I am not a rocket man
I was born a house cat
By the slight of my mother’s hand

I was watching Catch Me If You Can, a great movie to be sure, but one not destined to be remmebered as such. Good visuals, interesting characters involved in an interesting plot. And what can i say, i’m a Tom Hanks fan. And as Frank was leaving to get on an airplane towards the end of the movie, after he’s working with the FBI, i saw the old repeated image of man as adventure seeker. Never to be caged in.

It was then that it hit me that i haven’t felt that much recently. I used to occassionablly feel wanderlust, the desire to just drop everything, get in my car and drive in a direction. I always characterize it as itchy feet. It’s only ever really ended in anything when John and i headed down to San Antonio that one night. I wonder how strong that desire for adventure is in men, in Wild at Heart it’s posited that it’s central to our very identity, and as i read that book, there was something inside me that kept pumping it’s fist and saying “Yeah” with increasing volume (i like to refer to that voice as my inner-Telschow). I think a large amount of my thirst for adventure is slaked mentally, and this is going to sound amazingly nerdy, but when i’m tackling a hard problem whether it be in code, or in problem solving or in math or whatever, i get a little adrenaline rush. That’s why i’m so tired at the end of days when i’m really in the zone, i’ve been strung out on a chemical high all day, and by the time the bus stops and i fall through the door i’ve crashed.

Yesterday, at noon, a service that i rely on was down on our development farm, so i basically was unable to develop for the last 6 hours of the day (at some point i started getting to work around 9:40 and leaving on the 6:40 shuttle) and it was worse than boredom, i felt kinda trapped. Trapped with an amazing view, a great environment and the entire internet at my fingertips to play with. The biggest mockery of all is that there’s only 3 walls and no door. I was a prisoner with no barrier to escape. But i guess i’m not the first person ever to feel more defined when hemmed in by boundaries than when free.

When i started writing this, my intention was to discuss my increasing desire for a more domestic lifestyle, maybe somehow bringing into it the fact that i haven’t lived with my family in our house for a whole week since last summer. I think that’s why Leslie Peck’s wonderful chicken dinner was so wonderful, not because it was the most food i had eaten in a month, but because it was the first homecooked meal i had had in so long i couldn’t remember. Glancing back over what i’ve written to this point makes me scratch my head since i see at work two distinct, if not opposed desires. The desire to settle down and the desire to adventure. But less extreme than that: the desire for home and the desire to overcome obstacles.

Anyway, my thoughts are becoming more and more fuzzy as i type so i think i’ll just hit submit here pretty soon before heading off to bead. Looking over this, reflecting and distilling my thoughts down to their essense: all i really want is to get paid to do tech support in baked goods. And that’s happened at least twice, and i’m owed an apple crisp by a certain vegetarian.

So call me crazy, but it’s kinda strange to look over at the next table in the cafeteria to see somebody worth over 4 billion dollars. With a b. I think i’ve got an ok grasp of the concept of a thousand dollars (a month’s budget), ten thousand dollars is starting to push it (a car, i guess), a hundred thousand is into the category of “really big number”, but i think that someday i’ll understand what that amount of money is. Jeff Bezos gains and loses orders of magnitude more in a day depending on the tick of AMZN on some stock exchange. According to finance.yahoo Jeff owns a little over 100 million shares of amazon (a little over = 1,289,966 so at the current market value of $37.19 means there’s a rounding error of $47,973,835.54) so since the stock price has risen 68 cents today, his net worth increased by 68 million dollars plus some change. Amounts of money that my brain doesn’t fully grasp in any meaningful way are practically lost in the noise of his net worth. I wonder what that’s like.

I basically have more cell phone minutes than i know what to do with (something like 700 anytime between now and the 22nd). I’m about to become a permanent resident on the long distance lines from Seattle to Texas and Sacramento, so if you want to be on the other end, please indicate this to me in any way you feel is appropriate. See the links at the top of this page. If you’re one of those 4 people living at 5246 and you want to talk to me just dial, wait for the ring and then hang up, when i see the missed call i’ll hit y’all back up so you don’t get charged long distance.

In other news, i think i may have accidentally exploited an edge case in T-mobile’s rather poorly designed website and gotten my phone for free. I opted to do their new phone every 12 months deal and then like 10 minutes later upgraded my plan, so i authorized back to back contract extensions. This was at the beginning of the summer and the bill for the new phone still hasn’t shown up anywhere.

Alright here goes the story of my weekend back in Austin.

Seattle to Dallas flight wasn’t a big deal except for the loss of 2 hours and my excessive caffeination. Dallas to Austin was delayed by about an hour, most of which was spent on the plane waiting for connecting passengers. There was a family of four that was completing the last leg of their trip back from India (husband, wife, 2 young boys) and they were getting split up, luckily my seat was next to two of them, so the mother was able to sit with the two boys while dad got a nice rest alone. Anyway, made it back to Austin finally and merely being in the airport had a big old grin on my face which only got better after meeting up with Murk and Tyson. At the risk of sounding emasculated, this was the first time i got a hug in 7 weeks, and that’s something i didn’t realize i had missed. Bryan got there shortly afterwards, Hoover couldn’t make it since he’s in Southeast Asia, but it would have completed the John Murchison discipleship group. Since i had eaten only a tortilla and enough caffeine to choke a horse we stopped at Taco C on the way back. Ah Taco C.

The next morning, John lent me his Explorer (thanks so much!) so that i could go eat breakfast with Michelle before her final, Kirbey Lane still burns their ham, but the chocolate chip pancakes were pretty good. Chilled at TJ/Murk/Mark’s place for a bit before heading to Rudy’s BBQ (my stomach is grumbling just thinking about the brisket) A few more hours of chillaxin/planning websites/serious talks/not so serious talks and it was time to get spiffy and go to the wedding. I’m still wondering if i can pull of the green tie i was wearing. The only feedback i got with it was Travis telling me “You look Catholic”, i’m not even sure what that would mean.

So this was my first wedding (except for my aunt’s wedding when i was young) so i was basically completely clueless about what i was supposed to be doing, and so Bryan and i ended up sitting on the bride’s side and then switching over to the groom’s side after realizing what was up. Oh wow, it was like a mini-BYX reunion: BPK, Sam, JB, Travis, David Paige, and others. The pastor was the same guy who had spoken at BYX a while back, he has the coolest Scottish accent (think Sean Connery) I don’t really know what else to sayabout the ceremony. On to the reception.

The ride out was fun, you can’t have 20 BYX/Phi Lambs driving from one place to another without there being fun. The dependency chains of C is following B is following A who barely made a stoplight, so now B has no clue how to get there, but C doesn’t know that. I was B, and somehow Jason Chandrapal got between me and C (Summer and Val) at a stoplight and despite me sticking practically my entire upper half of my body out the window only managed to get Summer’s attention who of course was thoroughly confused by my behavior.

The reception itself was even better, catching up with friends, great food at a table that included Rory, Marcoux, JB, and Sam. Best part of the night was the great dancing. I think the DJ should maybe have thought through the song selection a little more in the context of a wedding (Outkast’s Hey Ya!? “They say nothing lasts forever. So what makes love the exception”) but the company was what made the night awesome.

Post reception, Bryan, Travis and i went back to David Paige’s place and hung out, Travis and i smoked a cigar. Thus ended a fantastic saturday in Austin.

Sunday: First order of business was waking up to see The Mark Telschow looking into the living room to see if we were awake. Headed out to Freebirds to eat with Ross, who showed up late due to a conflict, got to chill with him back at his place before heading back north to Murk’s. Finally headed down to Stone and managed to catch the first 30 minutes or so of service, running into almost everybody. Sam picked me up and took me back to the airport.

Breezed through security, there was NOBODY in line. This of course killed me since i was now an hour early for an 8 o’clock flight while missing out on Stone. Landed in Dallas and sprinted twenty or so gates because my sister Carolyn was supposed ot be at the tail end of a 3 hour layover for her flight from DC to Sacramaneto. She wasn’t there due to catching a flight two hours earlier. On my way back to my gate, i noticed to my right a flight to Seattle that was boarding, and i thought about trying to go on standby for it, make it home 40 minutes early, but decided against it since then i wouldn’t get my luggage. Oh how i wish i had taken that flight. I got to my gate to see a mass of humanity sitting around it. Apparently my flight had been delayed by an hour and a half, which gave me plenty of time to make some phone calls. Gradually the monitors showing outbound flights sunk to 4 monitors (out of like 8), then 3, 2, 1. Finally there were 3 flights left and the Seattle-Tacoma flight was slated to take off last. I was there so late that they put up the next morning’s flights. Anyway, finally made it back to Seattle at 2am, just thankful that i would be in bed soon. But it was not meant to be, as the luggage carrousel stopped i still didn’t have my garment bag. Finally, at 3:15, i managed to leave Sea-Tac with a slip of paper promising me my bags the next day, the second time that American has lost my luggage and stolen hours of my life. I had already told myself i would never fly American again, and only made an exception because they were cheapest at the time by about 30 bucks. Southwest had a cheaper deal a couple weeks later. Never again.

I can’t wait to make it back there again. Where the cicadas are “crying cuz it’s so hot” according to Dan Brown. Where the feeder roads make life easy. Where sticking out your pointer and your pinky doesn’t mean you’re metal. And most importantly where barbecue doesn’t mean grilling.

My schedule is pretty ridiculous. 4 classes on TTH plus a discussion section for the MWF on T. And none of the classes are blow offs at all. (CS345-Computer Languages, MIS325 Data Management, MAN336-Organizational Behavior, FIN357-Business Finance, CS337-Theory in Programming Practice) So i’m thinking i don’t want to have 7 hours of class on Tuesday (11-8 with 30 minutes at 12:30 and 1.5 hours at 5) and that maybe i should have another class next to the 3-4 MWF lest my attendance be *cough* sub-par on Fridays. Also the 5:30-8pm Computer Languages class has great potential to completely jack up my ability to do ACM/Austin Stone freshman ministry. So, i’ve done a quick survey of classes either 2-3 or 4-5 MWF and the pickings for ones that contribute to my graduation are slim. So without further ado here are the classes i’m looking at:

The contenders:
• SOC 321K - Globalization (does nothing for degree plan, but it sounds cool and has a pretty good GPA history)
• PHY 341 - Pseudoscience (this just sounds WAY too cool, plus the pre-reqs make it sound like this is a way for people with arty majors to get some upper div science, unfortunately, it too does nothing for me walking across the stages)
• M 341 - Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory (this class would kill my upper div math requirement, i’m afraid it might also kill me)
• PSY 309 - Personality (sounds pretty fun, too bad it also does nothing for my degrees. It’s only pre-requisite is PSY 301 which i’ve taken, hopefully it won’t require knowledge of the last third of the semester of that class since i…uh……..)

So, yeah, after writing it out, it looks like M 341 ought to be my choice, but i’m democratic so i figure i’d see if any of the people who are stalking me online have an opinion.

I should probably write something about the weekend i spent in Austin, but it warrants more than i have time to write right now. So i’m just going to wish the newly married Boyds a happy life.

Boo to X not responding, and concole input not working. When everything goes to crap, it’s time for a hard boot, even if it’s still responding to some stuff like ssh. I quess that’s one nice thing about not having a large number of important services running. And looks like the problem was that my faulty KVM finally died the death. I guess a hard boot isn’t the solution to everything.

Fantastic 4 is pretty decent. Amazon invited a bunch of it’s employees to a special screening cuz we’ve apparently been doing a bunch of publicity for Fox. Eh.

I’m currently abusing my body/building up an addiction with a mixture that consists of half coffee, half hot water and 2 packets of cocoa. hopefully i’ll be able to wean away the cocoa before i get diabetes. You’d think i’d be less sensitive to taste since my father chews aspirin, drinks black cofee and sucked lemons as a child, guess it’s Mom’s fault ;-). It always shocks me how tired i feel whenever i stop working, you’d think sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day would hardly result in being tired, but now that i’m actually writing code (and having to modify old C masquerading as C++) it’s real draining.

It’s weird to think it’s already Thusday, i guess that’s just cuz it’s a short week, but still. This is week 7, 5 more to go.

Streaming country radio is a wonderful thing

CRAP!!!

I had this blog post that had something like 12 links in it all typed up and everything, and i do all my blog posting in raw html through phpMyAdmin which is onerous, but i just havent gotten around to building a frontend that i want to use and securing it.

Anyway, what prompted this whole process was an unfortunate call of make clean, whcih for thsoe of you not in the know remove all the previously compiled files from a project. (Compiling is the process of taking raw ’source’ code and changing it into that lovely string of ones and zeros that are a computers bread and butter). When i was a child wandering the carpet covered halls of Trimble Navigation where my mother worked as an electrical engineer/software developer, i remember loving the various Dilbert comics that were pinned up all over the place. One sticks out in my mind: Dilbert was caught playing Solitaire and explained that he was only doing it while his code compiled. And i didn’t get the joke, but i thought it was funny to see the PHB back at his desk looking at his computer with a thought bubble “I wonder if my software ever compiles”. I continued to not get really get it through my first three years as a CS student, because every project you write in those years is never larger than say 10,000 lines of code spread across a dozen different files, so compilation is like a 5 second process on a halfway decent computer. When i installed the source based Gentoo Linux i learned what a long compile was, but still i just wrote it off as installation time. But after this particular make clean that i mentioned back at the top of the paragraph, i noticed that my developer machine’s copy of the feedback service wasn’t there anymore. This sucker takes at least 45 minutes to compile on my 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 with 2 GB of high quality ram and SATA hard drives (not RAIDed but still good). So now i have time to blog.

While writing that pargraph i kinda wanted to write a combination of markup, javascript and CSS that would allow somebody viewing this site to choose their technical level so that my friends who know the difference between polymorphism and multiple inheritance can choose to not have the explanation of what a compile is, and my friends who think that the man command sounds pretty sexist don’t have to read about my love affair with my really fast dev desktop.

Fourth of July: Went to Gasworks park with some MSFT interns and Austin, the fireworks were pretty awesome, they were done to music, but the timing wasn’t particualrly great. We were in the third row from the water, but between us and the lake were 2 transvestites and 3 lesbians. Welcome to Seattle.

I might be mildly convinced of the merits of Hungarian Style by this article. Which is pretty interesting since i get feelings that can only be described as homicidal rage when writing lines of code like TotalWorkerPayDecimal = WorkerPayRateDecimal * WorkerNumberOfHoursWorkedInteger in MIS. For comparison, in CS that’s workerPay = wageRate * hours; unless of course it’s being written in Java when it becomes Worker.getPay() to the user of the class and something like
public double getPay(){
return this.wageRate * this.getHoursWorked();
}
and of course getHoursWorked has some arcane implementation elsewhere as well. Bah!

That rant didn’t make it into the post that i accidentally deleted with the reset form button. Anyway, i’m lovin’ the short week and looking forward to the weekend.

A week ago i noticed a crack where the base meets the crossbar on my Kairos cross, and when i woke up this morning it was hanging on by a thread, and sitting here i grabbed it subconsciously during a compile (so i’m fidgety) and it broke. Of course this is the third one i’ve gone through 2 of them have broken the other was lost, but somehow this feels like the end of something. I had already contemplated getting a different cross after starting my discipleship with John since i feel like i’m at a different stage in my life and my walk than i was when i received the first kairos cross. I’m probably making too big a deal of this, it’s just that for the past 20 months or so i’ve worn it every day and for the past 12 the only time it’s come off was during ultimate frisbee (sucker is sharp when it bangs into your face). It’s probably going o be weird to look in the mirror and not see that familiar shape over my heart. I do have a loaner though, so i guess i’ll be alright until i find a more permanent solution.