Funny, charming, old school fun.
I live less than 30 minutes away from the Knoxville Zoo, which is home to one of the pre-eminent red panda breeding programs in the world. Today, finally, I took my daughter to see the new red panda pavilion that hadn’t been finished yet last time we were there. It’s a beautiful facility, and you can get a first-class, front-row look at the same little beauties that the Firefox Live live stream shows.
This one little guy was fascinated with Sophie. He followed her as she moved back and forth in front of the window.
Then you had these other cuties:
I have more pictures and some video as well, but this was the best stuff. How can you not love creatures this precious?
Oct 122011
My story isn’t as inspiring as some you’re likely to read. A lot of my colleagues at Mozilla are die-hard open-source folks and long-time Mozilla contributors who eventually got jobs at Mozilla, or continued to be excellent contributors without being employed by the big “M.”
I, on the other hand, had always been rather skeptical of open source. Indeed, back in 2005, I was working quite happily at PalmSource (the company that produced the operating system for the Palm PDAs and Treo smartphones), writing developer documentation there, and my experiences with open source products had been almost universally negative.
Then, right around the time my daughter was born, I got laid off, one of the many casualties of PalmSource’s long decline and death throes. I quickly got a contract job writing game software, which turned into a full-time job, but that didn’t pan out for reasons that don’t really matter here. What does matter is that in early 2006, I was in need of a job.
Dave Miller (justdave), a long-time friend of mine, had been involved with Mozilla for years by this point, and he mentioned that they were in need of Mac programmers, so I sent along a resume, and he put in a good word for me. I was brought in and interviewed, where I followed the non-traditional course of basically saying that I thought open source was a good idea but so far had been unimpressed, and that I didn’t like Firefox because it was really ugly on the Mac.
Apparently this didn’t put off Shaver, Asa, Chris Beard, and the others I spoke to — or perhaps they were willing to overlook it once they discovered I had almost ten years of experience doing heavy-duty developer technical writing — because I wound up getting offered a tech writing job. I started on April 3, 2006, and never looked back.
I’ve enjoyed nearly everything about my time with Mozilla so far and don’t see much chance that will change in the near future. There are challenges and occasional frustrations, but the rewards have been fabulous.
I still look upon open source software with a great deal of skepticism, but I don’t automatically assume the worst anymore like I used to. If more open source projects were administrated with even half the adroitness as the Mozilla project, the technology world would be a better place.
Oct 102011
The last week has been complicated for me, and the next few will be as well, although hopefully less so. Let me explain.
Last weekend, my wife and daughter went on vacation with my sister in law, mother in law, and my nieces. While they were away, my daughter, Sophie, started having balance problems, and these gradually worsened. In addition, her speech became halting and slurred. By Sunday night, she was in the emergency room in Hilton Head, South Carolina. After a CT scan showed nothing, they decided she needed testing they couldn’t do since they had no pediatric neurologists on staff, and she was loaded in an ambulance and sent to a children’s hospital in Savannah, Georgia.
Once there, an MRI was done on her head, along with other tests, and we received a preliminary diagnosis of acute cerebellar ataxia. By this point, the loss of equilibrium was causing nausea, and she couldn’t eat or drink without getting sick.
After a couple of nights in the hospital in Savannah, they went back to Hilton Head for a couple of nights, then made the 8-hour drive home. By the time they got home on Thursday night, Sophie was completely listless and not speaking at all, so we moved her from my mother in law’s car to my car and went straight to the children’s hospital in Knoxville.
There, she got more testing done, including a spinal tap and spinal MRI, and the end result was a confirmation of the original acute cerebellar ataxia diagnosis. She was in the hospital there for two days, and got home, finally, on Saturday afternoon.
Her speech has been improving, and although it’s still slow, it’s no longer halting, and it’s not slurred anymore. She can’t walk without assistance, but stood up without help for the first time this morning.
The doctors’ opinion is that Sophie had a very minor viral infection a couple of weeks ago — so minor that we didn’t notice it — and her immune system overreacted to it. With nothing better to do, it decided, incorrectly, to attack her cerebellum, impacting her movement center.
She will be out of school for at least a week, more likely two, and will need near constant attention for at least a few days. Because of all of this, my schedule and availability are likely to be complicated for a while. Hopefully this won’t be too big a problem for folks, but I have to do what I have to do…
On top of all that, I’m in the process of moving into a new office. My stuff is all in place, and my Internet service has been moved, but I need to get some painting done before I can start really setting up.
Oct 052011
Don’t really have words for how I feel about Steve Jobs’s passing. This has been a hard week (and it’s only Wednesday), and I just don’t have anything in me to say at this point. I’ll just sum it up like this:
Aug 072011
This morning, Sarah woke me up as I was in the middle of an interesting dream. Every now and then, I have a dream in which the action of the dream is actually a movie that I’m watching, rather than it being happening to me. That’s what this one was like.
This dream was sort of a science fiction suspense film, somewhat along the lines of Alien. It was even from about that same time period of sci-fi filmmaking; the story took place on one of those ’70s-style glossy white space stations, and the star was, of all people, Kris Kristofferson. The movie started out by setting the scene, people going about their work on the space station. It was a huge place with gently curved corridors that clearly implied that it was one of those huge spinning wheel in orbit type of stations, with roughly Earth-level artificial gravity.
After a while, the strange things started to happen; people vanishing or dying inexplicably.
Eventually, there’s a scene in a small dining hall or mess hall in which some scientists and other personnel are having a meal and talking about the strange things gong on. As this is going on, one middle-aged scientist is talking about something, being pretty nonchalant about it, and the camera is slowly moving in on him. Then, from out of nowhere, this small floating object, which looked sort of like a helium balloon in the shape of a pair of chromosomes, but yellow and slightly fuzzy, drifted into view from nowhere. Everyone grows quiet and watches it, except the one guy who keeps talking, even after noticing it.
He doesn’t seem overly concerned about it, which I thought was strange, and he didn’t really react until it wrapped itself around his face and began to eat him. Then the camera cuts away to introduce the story’s hero, played by Kristofferson, as he enters his quarters from a corridor, somewhat bent out of shape over something related to his workday. He’s unaware of the goings-on.
This is a younger Kristofferson (harkening back to my sense that this was a ’70s-era sci-fi story), with longish dark hair and scraggly beard. He tosses the stuff he’s carrying onto the bed, and is getting ready to do something (I’m not sure what; make a meal, take a shower, whatever), when the station PA system announces an alert and orders a stationwide evacuation.
The hero throws on a (white, of course) jacket and bolts from his quarters into the corridor, which is strangely empty given the ongoing evacuation.
And that’s where Sarah woke me up. So I have no idea what happens next.
To my surprise, too short.
Apr 252011
A good friend of mine, Ryan Suenaga, died tragically yesterday. He was enjoying a hike in the mountains of Oahu with friends when he fell during a particularly tricky part of the trail. I don’t have a lot of details yet, despite news stories about the incident, because nobody saw it happen. He had become separated from the others in his group.
This, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks.
Ryan was among my best friends. He was a groomsman in my wedding party fifteen years ago. He was a colleague in writing about Apple II computers and their continued use in this modern era. He was a programmer (he might say “aspiring programmer”). And he was a pediatric social worker. He helped kids put their lives together after other families’ own tragedies.
In every way, Ryan was among the best people I’ve ever known — or known of. He would insist that he was selfish or useless or lazy, but none of that was true. He was the most giving, caring, helpful person in the world. Making others’ lives better was what he lived to do, and he succeeded by every measure I can imagine. The world is a darker, sadder place for his loss, whether you knew him or not.
Aloha, Ryan. I miss you.
Exciting war movie with aliens!
Feb 142011
Over the past few years, I’ve been visiting my doctor on and off for assorted weird and frustrating issues, from emotional issues (anxiety and mild depression, fatigue, and difficulty sleeping) to physical ones, including near-constant pain in my head, neck, jaw, shoulders, upper and lower back, knees, shins, ankles, and the tops of my feet (WTF, really? Yes.). I always brought up these problems one at a time, because at any given time, only one of them was generally so bad that I couldn’t deal with it on my own.
We always assumed these were related to my weight, and expected them to more or less go away when I had my gastric bypass surgery just over three years ago. To everyone’s surprise, it didn’t get better, and, in fact, continued to get worse.
Over time, I’ve wound up on a number of medications trying to control these symptoms, without us ever figuring out what the deal is. I’ve had CAT scans, X-rays, been poked by rheumatologists and orthodontists, and wandered from medication to medication, trying to find something that works. At best, we’ve managed to make things a little bit better.
Since late last year, the pain has been steadily worsening, to the point where I can’t ignore it anymore like I had gotten used to doing, and finally last week I made an appointment to see my doctor and brought along a list of all my symptoms, instead of just complaining about one thing. He looked at the list, and the list of things we’d tried, and the list of things we’d ruled out, and decided we’d start treating me for fibromyalgia.
The medication I’m going to be taking for this, however, conflicts with pretty much all the medications I’m currently on to try to individually treat the symptoms, so I’m in the process of weaning myself off those medications in order to begin taking the new stuff.
Net result: I’m sort of a mess at the moment. Between coming off my anxiety medication and the stuff I was taking to try to stave off the head and leg pain, I feel kind of lousy these days. Hopefully once I start taking the new meds in a couple of weeks I’ll start improving, but in the meantime, don’t be surprised if my throughput is down a bit. I might also be a little crankier than usual. I apologize in advance.
The timing, from a Mozilla standpoint, is not awesome. From a personal standpoint, however, if this works, it’s been a long time coming, and for the first time in a while, I feel like I might just see the light at the end of the tunnel.
