You have to admire someone who is older than you are, and can still go out and beat guys half his age in baseball.

Trevor Hoffman earned his record breaking 479th save this evening to become Baseball's Save Leader. Wow. Anyone who can go out and do something 479 times (when people are actively trying to keep you from accomplishing your goal) deserves some recognition. Argue as you'd like that baseball players make too much. When a 39 year old guy sets a record like this, that is darned impressive. Add to that that he's a personable guy, a leader, a family guy, and community guy. He's actually a good role model.... Truly a rarity in this day and age.

Congratulations Trevor!

In my friend Fourth Breakfast's blog entry http://fourthbreakfast.blogspot.com/2006/09/tagged.html, I have been asked to "Tell us the 5th through 8th sentences on page 123 of the book nearest you."

To be honest, the first book nearest to me at the time I read this contained company proprietary information. Couldn't do that.

Went back to my home office, grabbed the nearest book, and to comply, here is the text:

"Then *pfa[] is a recognized as a dcl (sic), so (*pfa[]) is a direct-dcl. Then (*pfa[])() is a direct-dcl and thus a dcl. We can also illustrate the parse with a parse tree like this (where direct-dcl has been abbreviated to dir-dcl): [Image in book omitted] The heart of the dcl program is a pair of functions, dcl and dirdcl, that parse a declaration according to this grammar."

The source is "The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition (ANSI C)" by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. Copyright 1988, Prentice Hall Publishers.

No real programmer would ever risk *not* having this be the closest book on their desk. It is, after all, the C Programming Language Bible.

docrpm, you're it.

Tags: Blog Tag

This past week, a co-worker and I were discussing how engineers always seem to want to optimize everything. Trying to calculate if buying gas at the gas station down the street because it's $.01/gallon cheaper is worth it based on miles per gallon consumed by the car and mileage to the gas station. Placing something at the bottom of the stairs so as not to waste the energy in making an exclusive trip upstairs but waiting until you had another reason as well. Trying to plan a route that combines 18 different errands in the shortest possible distance while minimizing traffic lights and left turns across busy streets. Stuff like that.

Every once in a while, that optimization comes back to bite you.

So we bought a second car seat to install into my wife's car last week. I left it in the garage right next to her car. After all, why waste the energy to carry it into the house when you're going to install it into the other car in the garage, right?

Well, I kept forgetting to bring out a box cutter, or some other excuse and the result was not getting it installed before I left on my California trip this week.

So I went out this morning to install it, and it was gone. And I instantly realized what had happened.

I had placed the box next to my wife's car. It was also next to the bins we put our recyclables into. My wife and our nanny, thinking I had taken the car seat out already, had assumed the box was empty and put it out with the recycling.

ooops.

We bought a replacement today. It's already in use. No procrastination this time....

Wonder how many gallons of gas it will take to compensate for this...

Someone pointed out this interesting fact to my wife recently...have you ever stopped to think about how many Disney movies have characters who are missing a parent?

This came about as we were watching "The Wild" this weekend with Andrew. No mother lion in this move.

Think about Cinderella - no dad.

Think about Finding Nemo - no mom.

Beauty and the Beast? No mom. Pocahontas? Treasure Planet?

Now granted, this isn't universally true. The Incredibles have both parents. So does Lion King (for at least the first third). Toy Story didn't have either parent (but then, they were toys and toys don't, well, you know....or do they?). Maybe this is just coincidence? But it does make you wonder....

No, I don't have amnesia. No, I didn't lose my badge today at work.

However, I've come to realize that in the last few weeks, I have lost an identity that I associated myself with. I've lost the unique identity of my group at work.

Almost 6 years ago, I joined a group at Sun called HES-CTE. "High End Services - Corporate Technical Escalations". I considered this organization to be like an elite strike team. We knew the complicated servers we supported as well or better than the engineering teams that designed them. We flew around the world on a moment's notice to fix the unfixable, to put our flaming customer issues at customer sites, to do whatever it took to get a customer running and save the business.

Since then we've been reorganized countless times, and with each successive organization change we lost a little bit of that "elite" status. But with this reorganization, the organization we had become, PTS (Product Technical Support), was finally buried along with whatever uniqueness we had left, and all ties with the past.

Our new Senior Director sent a memo out. To paraphrase, "We no longer escalate to PTS. There is no more PTS. There is no more call center. There is just TSC (Technical Service Center)." TSC is our new organization name.

While I think it's great we've broken down a lot of artificial barriers that used to exist between different groups, the fact that there is no real distinction between me who is a product specialist and the folks who answer the phones is a little sad from a personal point of view. It's like a step backwards. It's like losing something special, and the HES-CTE group I joined *was* special. Way back when. I think we took a lot of pride in what we did, because we knew we were the best and that our company depended on us as "The Last Line of Defense" (remember the movie "True Lies" and Arnie's character's organization?).

Tonight, I lift my glass to the memory of Sun's HES-CTE. To those who answered the call. To those of us who continue to try to carry its principles forward. Cheers.

A friend of mine recently sent me this:



Pre-school children were asked the following question:

"In which direction is the bus pictured above traveling?"

Look carefully at the picture. Do you know the answer? The only possible answers are "left" or "right."

The pre-schoolers all answered "left." When asked, "Why do you think the bus is traveling to the left?" they answered, "Because you can't see the door."

How did you do?

Steve Jobs yesterday introduce movies at the iTunes store. I am happy to say I *just* beat that trend by downloading my first movie to my new Video iPod last week. I figured out how to download a copy of a movie on my shelf to it late one night last week, after taking delivery of my refurbished 30GB Black Video iPod. I originally bought it as a giant portable photo album - as my wallet is too crammed with junk to carry decent family pictures.

It's interesting watching a move when your screen is only 320 pixels wide. But the quality is good and it sure is easier to hold than my 15" PowerBook.

Next - download multiple episodes of "Little Einsteins" so Andrew can watch them on the plane.