Had the 20w ultrasound today.

It's a girl.

Bernoulli process FTW.

10 days ago, on April 13th, I started a simple goal:

"Run 3 miles a day, no excuses"

Yesterday I finished day 10, which means I've run 30 miles.

What have I noticed:

Although I'm not measuring, my pace has begun to improve. On the first day, I was jogging very slowly the entire time. Now, I'm able to sustain small sprints, and maintain a decent pace. I've been listening to an album on my iPod shuffle, and am finishing before the last song.

My weight has not changed, it has only been 10 days and so I'm building muscle. This in combination with other eating habits explains the relative plateau in weight. I'm not gaining weight. According to my half-marathon training data, this is expected. I hovered around 205 for the first month.

3 miles is just enough to get a good sweat, without injury. When training for my half-marathon I was constantly stepping up the mileage, which resulted in some mild injury.

I will post again when I hit 60 miles.

I have plants again, and in addition an automated watering system. With much help from Aaron Lint four plants can now receive water from the command line. I've got a camera setup on one of the heavily pruned plants. Maybe new videos soon?

Cheers,

Joe

Want to sleep, but can't.

It was a game night tonight. My neighbor and I went to the convenient store in search of beverages. He wanted an energy drink, which made me think this was a good idea. I started to go for red bull, and then though no, for this game night I should have a monster energy drink. Now these jolts of productivity have been quintessential to the successful delivery of many, many features at Arxan. I can attest to the fact that these do make one more alert and jumpy. While browsing the cooler, we happened upon the BFC. As if 16oz of caffeine loaded liquid weren't enough, how bout 32oz in a convenient form factor. Why not? So at 8:30pm we cracked them open. I consumed mine in two hours, and my neighbor made it halfway before suffering a headache.

Nonetheless, I'm still awake.

Still alert.

With the economy in rapid recession, one of the most noticeable signs (if you are a gamer) is the prevalence of Wii systems at retailers. I went to Wal-Mart and Target today and saw the systems actually in the store. Launched on November 19, 2006, the Wii rapidly sold out anytime a retailer received a shipment.

TODO: post pictures of Wiis in stock.

There's really nothing quite like waking up at 3am with a solution to a problem. Even better is when you test the solution and it is correct.

I woke up at 3am this morning and realized that I wasn't incrementing my section header pointer and that I was copying the same section multiple times. At first, I didn't want to get up... it was 3am! By 3:15a I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I got up, started the VPN, remote desktopped to my machine, typed in:

sh++;

compiled, and executed the program. By 3:20a it was properly iterating over the sections copying the data I needed. Waking up with the solution was hard to believe.

I fell back asleep, and got to sleep in a bit (Thanks Kristen!). When I got to work in the morning sure enough it had really happened. Usually I wake up with the solution and fall back asleep and forget about it by morning. But this morning was different, and the solution remained. Has this ever happened to you?

One of my favorite bands Ladytron will be touring with The Faint. I'd not heard of The Faint until recently. I bought their album Fasciination, and the track "Machine in the Ghost" stands out to me. Here's the lyrics:

there's no ghost in this machine
i make my own mistakes
we seem like skeletons with bone head beliefs
history's been crucified
humans supernaturalized
we hope we're not alone
exploded stars and space debris
taught itself to make some things like us
was that all?
what was there before the bang?
how did nothing come to end at once?

let's ask the atheists, the astronauts,
the mystics of the amazon,
the priests, the cults, the witches, the pope,
the crystal ball, the fear of god,
the tarot cards, the dowsing rod
theologians, alchemists, black magicians, physicists say, know,
say, "we don't know"

cults arise from ego
sick with poltergeists and demons

tune your TV to the snow
watch the first thing ever known - it's always on
when nothing's over what was there?
how did nothing come to end at once?
let's ask the atheists
let's ask the astronauts
let's ask the priests, the cults, the witches, the pope,
dice, the monks, shamen, the nuns,
buddha, the holy ghost, satanists, the philosophes,
meditators, pyramids, mathematicians, acid heads,
theologians, alchemists, black magicians, physicists say, know,
say, "we don't know"

cults arise from egos
sick with poltergeists and demons


Just so you know there are approximately 98182656 primes between 2147483648 and 4294967295, or 0x5DA2600 primes between 0x80000001 and 0xFFFFFFFF. You have a 4.5% chance of randomly picking a prime number, between 2 and 4 billion. I've been trying to find this number all morning and calculated it brute force using a Miller Rabin primality test. I say approximately since Miller Rabin is "probabilistic". I test each prime 5 times which means there's a 1 in 2^40 chance of a false positive. That's 1 in 1099511627776, or 1.1 * 10^12, which means you are 128 times more likely to be killed by lightning today than have this test fail.

Have a day.

Edit Feb 18, 2009: Found a flaw in PrimeSearch. I was testing each prime once with Miller Rabin. Revised the search to test 5 times.

Life got remarkably busy in August, and just kept being busy. I spent most of my time working trying to get a deliverable out the door. In October/November, there were significant restructuring changes to the company. In late November early December, there was a major customer to support. And over the holidays, I had a very nice three week vacation, from NC to SC to the Caribbean. Anyway, things are still busy with my wife entering the workforce and my boys in daycare. Maybe I'll find some spare time for an interesting project to blog about. Maybe.

After many months of waiting, the flowers appear to be pollinating and there are several peppers growing. There are two peppers that are approximately two inches in length, and at least three more that are just starting. Looks like we'll be able to cook some incredibly uncomfortably boiling lava hot food.

I'll post some pictures soon of the mammoth plants and their brood.



#include <stdio.h>

class RichOldGuy
{
public:
RichOldGuy() { printf("I'm a Rich Old Guy\n");}
~RichOldGuy() { ExecuteWill();}
virtual void ExecuteWill() const {printf("I leave my money to my family\n");}


};

class GoldDigger : public RichOldGuy
{
public:
GoldDigger() {printf("I'm in it for the money\n");}
~GoldDigger() {printf("Finally after two weeks of marriage\n");}
void ExecuteWill() {printf("I ain't messin' with a broke bloke\n");}
};

int main(void)
{
RichOldGuy * theOldGuy = new GoldDigger();

theOldGuy -> ExecuteWill();

return 0;
}




Who gets the money?

What has happened?

May 1st: Water Softener inlet plumbing breaks spraying water in utility room causing water damage. Repair people are called and they tear up the floor.

May 7th - 14th: NC trip to visit over Mother's Day weekend. Saw Kristen's parents, sister and family; my folks, brother and fiance; my old college buddies; and Clay Suddreth a friend of mine for 15 years. While on vacation the repair people tore up the rest of the floor leaving bare concrete.

May 17th - 19th: Put in new laminate floors. The 18th was a 24 hour workday starting with running, church, flooring until midnight and then plumbing until 6:00a on the 19th. Floor looks great.

May 27th: Theology on Tap

So our evening was winding to a close. As Kristen was brushing her teeth and I was browsing the internet, she was fumbling with something. She says "Am I reading this right?", and I say "Reading what?" That's when I turn and the something she was fumbling with was a pregnancy test. We have some dialogue, and I come to get a closer look as I'm taken aback. The test clearly indicated pregnancy. I'm a bit overwhelmed at the thought of the fourth Abbey, but realize that we can handle the new one and it is such a blessing. We embrace and then she says:

"Happy April Fool's Day".

After the move back in February, I haven't found the time to setup a webcam on the peppers... Please hold.

The plants have recently shown an affinity for gravity. The leaves are drooping, although they have sufficient water. After examining the base of the stems, I noticed a white buildup. I thought it was fungal but it feels more like a calcium buildup. I'm going to go back to feeding the plants filtered water, but I'm afraid it might be too late for the plant that is bearing fruit.

If anyone knows about fungal buildup, or if calcium can clog plant, or even better how to resolve the situation, that would be of great help!

Here's a more complete look at the current life of Batch 3:

I'm actively working on a video of the first Naga Jolokia, but of course it will take time.

I walked in to the office this morning to find Jim in a surprisingly good mood. One of the flowers that he pollinated appears to be producing fruit. Now it seems it is just a matter of time before we've grown one of the world's hottest peppers.

We've got quite a few blossoms now, but seem to be suffering blossom drop. There's really not enough pollen to use a q-tip for fertilization, so I decided to pluck one of the blossoms for direct pollination. Hopefully one of the flowers will take.

The first bud has bloomed with blue stamen. This is definitely a Naga Jolokia.

Jim has purchased the new pots for the next round of Naga Jolokias. The pepper farm is bigger!

Oh and our pepper guardian has returned.

The first Naga Jolokia is continuing to show good progress. There are quite a few buds getting ready to bloom. Probably within a week we should seem some blooms.

We're getting more and more convinced that this is a Naga Jolokia. The flowers should be fairly definitive... not to mention the fruit.

On the Nth day of Sprint M my company gave to me:

12 failing testsuites
11 bugs to fix
10 different platforms
9 scrummers scrumming
8 devs a' devving
7 QAs testing
6 cups of coffee
5 hour builds
4 perforce timeouts
3 syntax errors
2 bleeding ulcers
and a task that could be done by monkeys.

Get back to work.