truth n. Conformity to fact or actuality. In light of recent events I have grown increasingly sensitive to people creating new meaning for words. That people can listen to an explanation that does not conform to fact or actuality and be okay with it boggles my mind. Redifining the meaning of not raining (reality), or changing the definition of numbers (reality); words ought to matter, but (with some exceptions) sometimes it feels like people don’t seem to care when they don’t. Read More...
A redditor named tapirs_and_chariots recently shared a text interaction they had. In it a family member expressed love by claiming:
I love you. […] I refuse to lose you to the world.
They respond by recognizing that the message comes from a place of love, and then acknowledging that having a family member leave the church can be a painful, difficult experience. They know this because they also used to believe. Read More...
I’ve been trying to add variety to what the kids have for breakfast to the traditional rocks with honey and other sundry cereals.
They make exceptions for croissant breakfast sandwiches (eggs, cheese, bacon), but generally don’t like like the diversity.
One recent recipe that has worked alright has been spiced oatmeal. Generally I choose a fruit (bananas and apples work great), then add spices. Today specifically I prepared irish oats (water, oats, butter, spices (cinnamon, nutmet, cardamom). Read More...
A year ago today.
That’s when the LDS church’s Exclusion Policy was leaked. That’s when they set fire to the splintered halfs of my proverbial shelf.
Mine started as a fairly orthodox faith/belief/involvement in the Mormon tradition. I inherited the religion from my parents. I was baptised as a child, participated in every weekly activity, attended seminary, attended BYU for both of my degrees, went on mission, I consistently paid tithing, and honestly answered all temple recommend questions honestly every time I was asked (fond memories the time I answered “does it still count as sustaining the prophet if I think it’s wrong for us to build a mall with sacred funds? Read More...
Recently a nifty graph showed up on the official golang blog, reproduced here:
A friend of mine pointed out that the graph in the article is void of vertical units. I investigated a little bit and found that you can get some interesting graphs when you combine the golang search with others.
I feel bad pointing this out as I am a fairly avid go fan, but here are a few more searches of note: Read More...
Yay, today is such a cool day; My birthday is also generally the 256th day of the year making it also Programmer’s day.
Also, I am going to predict the world will end at 13:13:13 today, as it’s a Friday the 13th in 2013.
I prioritize birthday wishes in this fashion (n.b. most people don’t qualify for the higher two rungs):
Kids jumping on me in the morning (my kids are awesome) hugs/kisses (my wife is awesome) In-person or phone call chat text message email twitter facebook or google plus dentist office spam
Camlistore appears to be one of Brad Fitzpatrick’s 20% time projects. It seems to be an excellent solution to a very interesting problem. I watched one video this morning (while trying to wake up) and am honestly impressed with the project, and interested in setting it up and trying it out.
On feb 13th I joined the pyladies folks (along with a friend, @btanaka) to learn about how to make an irc bot.
There was no formal presentation, but it was a great opportunity to get together with friends and hack. The notes from the event can be found here, with relevant code found at this github repo.
I can understand why Rachel would have started with a repository that wouldn’t have required a single sudo or pip command: K. Read More...
This article is a great read about how the internet is helping people protect the internet.
A quote from that article that really resonated:
The political philosophy of the Internet, though still largely unformed, is by no means inarticulate. The aspirations of Internet users largely reflect the best features of the technology itself—open, meritocratic, non-proprietary and transparent. Its central belief is the power of innovation to make things better, and its major tenet is a ruthless economic principle that treats information as currency, and sees any obstacle to its free flow as inefficient friction to be engineered out of existence. Read More...
Sometimes I’m surprised how much influence my kids have on me. I have historically not been a fan of the color red; I prefer dark and muted colors (black, brown, blues, etc).
My son’s favorite color is Red. Actually, he has 3 favorite colors. I noticed that since he asserted that, I’ve started wearing a ton of red, selecting things that are red over other colors, etc. Today, for example, I’m wearing a beanie that Vanessa made for me (red/black), a red sweatshirt, red shoes, and a red lanyard (partially Vanessa’s doing). Read More...
I love buffers in vim. I’ve been less of a fan of buffer switching ever since I changed my vimrc to not require the initial like so:
nnoremap <c-j> <c-w>j nnoremap <c-k> <c-w>k nnoremap <c-h> <c-w>h nnoremap <c-l> <c-w>l I recently added this to speed up switching between buffers:
nnoremap <c-n> :bnext<cr> nnoremap <c-p> :bprev<cr> I figured the c-n and c-p were aliases for j and k, so there we go. Read More...
Turns out Stott’s decided to start preferring (rather strongly) his mother this weekend.
This time around, I’ll be trying to not take it as a personal insult, but rather as a game where the goal is to get him to prefer me again. Details forthcoming …
example:
vimdiff <(first command) <(second command) the <() makes a file descriptor (/proc/self/fd/12, as example) and reads from here are simply the stdout of the subshell command in the chicken head.
It’s kind of an inverse tee:
stream_of_output | tee >(command_1) >(command_2) there both command_1 and command_2 get the same stream of bits.
Just found out about pyflakes at work, and installed the pyflakes-vim vim plugin. Wow. I had no idea how sloppy I was coding!
I have been learning go lately, and one thing I love about their compiler is that they don’t let you write sloppy. Import something you forgot to use? It’ll tell you about it. Declared a variable you decided not to use? It won’t let you make an executable until you fix it. Read More...
I took Mardson and Pene to the BYU planetarium, and they showed a space video where you fly around and look at cool space things…
Me: “pene, did you like the planetarium”
Pene: “yes, they spaced us!!!”
we got spaced :)
So baby Stott rolled over all on his own, and then back onto his stomach two nights ago. I knew he was going to do it soon, so I’m not as excited as this piece of information:
I showed Mardson how to play portal a few nights ago. After 3 mins of showing him how to use the mouse and how to move forward(W)/backwards(S) and pick things up (E), he was clumsily walking around the first stage. Read More...
I asked Mardson this question this morning (showing him a picture of me as a young child) and he answered:
“Dad, it’s me”
with the aire of someone who’s been asked what color is the sky. It made me smile :)
I can’t recall what I was thinking when I made this placeholder blog entry on 2011-02-24, but I know it had to do with Pene and her telling me that at an unexpected time.
She’s gotten so much better lately about being really kind and doting to me. I absolutely love it :)
Husbands: I highly recommend you do your best to make little girls ;D
the BYU UUG recently had a conversation on their mailing list about the benefits of zsh over bash.
I switched completely about 2 days ago, and here are a few things I’ve noticed:
I really like the atuo correctnio functionality history completion, auto complete, among others just looks better (it doesn’t just keep dumping text, it replaces it) I like that they have distinct config files that get sourced at different times it was really simple (simpler than I remember in bash) to make PS1 look right
I was teaching Mardson about initials today.
We were on the “S” in Stephen, and I asked him:
me: “Mardson, what does Stephen start with”
Mardson: “S. Dad, what does S start with? E.”
Sound it out. It’s hilarious.
I punished Pene rather harshly the other day. She went to sleep directly afterwards, and I to work.
When I got home, I tried to talk to her a few times, and she just kept ignoring me. I wasn’t really sure if she was simply distracted, but she was totally ignoring me!
Later on that day, we went to the superpark, and when I helped her out of the car I told her that I was sorry. Read More...
The other day I was saying goodbye to everyone at home, and apparently Pene didn’t want to say goodbye and I left too abruptly thereafter for her tastes.
When I got into work, this was on my voicemail: (defunct)
.. TODO: find this:
While Pene and I were going upstairs, I told her we should be quiet and pinch Vanessa’s bum. Her response:
(whispering):” yeah, be snakey and pinch momma’s bum!”
When I really need Pene to love me, I just start meowing, and she drops her little game of “I don’t want you, dad” and says “Oh, there, there, daddy kitty” and then I can magically get her to do anything.
From what I’ve been able to gather, Mardson is pretty good friends with his Preschool teacher’s daughter, Brooke.
Today, I wanted to see how observant and descriptive he can be so I asked him the following question:
me: “Mardson, what does your friend Brooke look like?”
Mardson: “She has blonde hair. She also has beautiful eyes. Oh, and she has really girly clothes.”
Pene was being insufferable. Vanessa threatened to toss water in her face, which has been the most effective form of threat in our arsenal.
Mardson stops watching Tom and Jerry for long enough to yell back:
“Fire! Do it, MOM, DO IT!!!”
“this feels yucky, pene”
Yeah, I hear that, then ran to the bathroom and asked him what the heck was going on. He lied to me about it, but there was a stench in the air, and I finally got it out of him.
Blech …
Pene was running around the house chasing Mardson, and all of a sudden, she stops, grabs the cordless phone, hands it to me, and gives me this order:
“Dad, call untow mytow”
We usually use the cordless when we call him, and she was missing him!!
I was playing Mario with Mardson, and we went into a basement level and he says this …
“Dad, I hate this damn level”
I was all like, wait wut? And I thought it was really funny, but had to probe just to be sure …
“This down level. you know, when you go down in a level?”
Penelope wouldn’t go to sleep without “her book”.
Her book is my copy of Lord of the Rings. Nothing like the feel of 1000 pages of excellent reading to make you feel safe after a day of doctor’s visits and nebulizers.
Good girl :D
need more than facebook?
when you need to do real work,
don’t use an apple
So I upgraded my mac to ubuntu 10.10 a few days ago, and so far I’ve been amazed by the extent to which OS X can reduce hardware. My laptop screams now.
Pene woke up and needed someone to calm her down and put her back to bed. I went in and she did the usual thing and asked for her mom:
“NO! I just need my mom!”
But I just laid her on my shoulder and started singing to her:
“NO, dad! don’t sing!”
Anyhow, I was getting demotivated again and was about to just call Vanessa in to help, but thought I should stick to it: Read More...
My little girl is the cutest. She can’t quite say her L’s, even though she’s practically as fluent as most 3.5-year-olds, and that’s just cute.
This morning she woke up went down stairs, looked around and asked:
Pene: “where’s Mardson”
Vanessa: “he’s sleeping”
Pene: “Where’s Dad?”
Vanessa: “He’s sleeping”
Pene: “but I can go upstairs and jump on him and wake him up?”
Vanessa: “Daddy would love that!”
And I did. Read More...
I put Mardson down to sleep last night, and he obliged me saying a prayer for him. When I was done, he said:
“Dad, you said a really nice prayer; can you tell me a story now?”
It’s funny because he knows that he gets a story if and only if he says the prayer, and just funny enough to coerce me to tell him a Mario story :P
Today I rode by a clan of scooter riders, and one of them I rode by is the owner of The Scooter Lounge, Dave, who was riding with his son. Mardson loves to scoot around with me, and I came home excited to tell him about it.
me: Mardson, I just rode my scooter by a guy and his boy on a scooter!
Mardson: Awww! That’s so cute … but we are penguins! Read More...
At church yesterday, Pene had been playing at the stairs that lead up onto the podium at church. She was just playing with her little dinosaurs, and being cute, and we were in the front row, so we figured it was all fine.
Then, all of a sudden, my mischeif sensors went off. She was up on the stage, heading for the piano. I jumped up, and started for her, and as soon as she saw me, she knew she didn’t have much time. Read More...
Pene usually likes nursery. Pene also usually likes napping when our ward holds church. This tends to influence how happy she is to just be dropped off in nursery.
To make things more interesting she’s significantly older than the average kid in her nursery class, and today I though I’d take her into the older class.
Combining her lack of sleep with the new environment yielded an extremely loud, screaming little girl. Read More...
Mardson is very sensitive, especially when it comes to sounds. When he uses public restrooms, he will plug his ears when the toilet flushes.
The other day I noticed him preempting the toilet flush by walking into the stall, and immediately plugging his ears. He wasn’t doing this every time, and it took me a while to figure out what the trend was.
He has learned that when there’s the little black eye of the infrared toilet flushers, there’s no controlling when that thing will go off. Read More...
Remember when people used to warn you to stay in school so that you didn’t become a garbage man/woman? Well, I predict that in our day the career to jump into if you’ve not finished high school will be that of sign shaker.
A moment of silence for the shameless; we salute you!!!
Mardson loves dinosaurs. I mean, really, really loves them. He can even stomach each and every Land Before Time movie. It’s impressive.
He recently asked to watch “the dinosaurs that don’t say words” and I had no clue what he was talking about. I asked him, and he just ran upstairs, grabbed the Jurassic Park dvd, and his teddy bear.
I asked him what the teddy bear was for, and he said it was to help him not be afraid. Read More...
The same day that Mardson told me “welcome home”, I had told him that it was Pene’s birthday. a few hours later I asked him “hey, Mardson, what day is it today?”
His response: “It’s PENE DAY!!!”
So when I came back from Atlanta this last time, I was playing Mario Galaxy 2 with Mardson. I paused and told him how happy I was to be back playing with him, and he said “Welcome back, dad.” I have no idea how to write it up so that it can match how official it sounded, and how it made him seem years past his age, but it made me smile. Read More...
So my friend will got ffmpeg to dump out something that the other guys (google, apple) would be happy with in a browser:
ffmpeg -i input.avi -pass 1 -vcodec libx264 -vpre fastfirstpass -b 512k \ -bt 512k -threads 0 -f rawvideo -an -y /dev/null && ffmpeg -i input.avi \ -pass 2 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -b 512k \ -bt 512k -threads 0 output.mp4 This is what I use for my video site: Read More...
Coincidentally, sunday is valentine’s day, and i replaced Vanessa’s new iPod with a new iPod who is not lost. she was ecstatic.
On a related note, she got me a sansa fuze, since I noticed it sitting there (at half the price of comparable iPod, proudly displaying ‘flac’ and ‘ogg/vorbis’ on the side of the box) and she had told me minutes before that she didn’t know what she was going to get me :) Read More...
So I’ve known about xargs for a little while, but recently learned about one of its coolest features:
ls *.avi | xargs -n1 -P2 ffmpeg2theora -x Yes, if you run that, xargs will keep 2 cores of your machine happily chomping away at some theora encoding.
So I’m a super late bloomer to the html 5. It’s too bad, really. I’ve got plenty of charged opinion to go around on the subject.
So a few hours after having learned about the <video> tag, I wrote a django app for doing video content (there now is an app for that). I love that the gods of html have decided that video should be as easy to use as img. Read More...
okay, so I loathe in-n-out burger, and not just because their site has a really crappy flash intro. The Californians my freshman/sophomore years at BYU were far too vocal about how awesome the burgers there are: when I finally had one, I was seriously let down by comparison to how much they were talked up.
Today, my friend and I went to the grand opening of the orem (yes, orem) store. Read More...
One’s progress from extremist zealot to where I find myself currently on the spectrum of being pushy with Linux probably takes most people less time to figure out than what it’s taken me. Here’s a short musing about what I would’ve done differently.
It all started back when i was sick of throwing away the cpu cycles required to run the virus scanner software. How could I use a product that couldn’t fly of its own accord? Read More...
Mardson is a champ. He cried for a little longer than usual, but not as fiercely. Chatted briefley with Jason on the SINBAD radios. Writing this on my phone. KTHXBAI!!!1!
Edit (2017-02-02): I had gone camping with my friend Steve and his son. We drove through Capital Reef the next day, and even ate some (apples?) fruit from an orchard in Fruita. I still remember that Mardson took tiny little bites all over the apple, handed it to me, and it looked like a golf ball! Read More...
I finally got an email for my brother in Brazil (he’s going on a mission to Rio Norte). I’m proud to announce that my first letter to him was written in LOLSPEAK.
oh the shame :)
Update: He’s in the Vitoria mission, turns out.
I didn’t really think it should be done, I just wanted to see it be done. I wrote an init script for my rtorrent setup (which i should probably write about one of these days) entirely in python. I learned from my mistakes: I was forking just to get certain things to be executed as an unprivileged user, just so I could do future things as root, because i was using os. Read More...
so a a friend of mine from work and i passed our ham radio exams the same day last week, got radios between a day of eachother, and, for the first time, used two different repeaters to communicate with eachother. so cool!
at any rate, we tried simplex between the area around golds gym and 9th east in provo and spanish fork, but it didn’t quite seem to be working, so we switched over to the UARC repeater, and then tried to figure out the CTCSS on the BYU repeater … the CTCSS didn’t seem to make a difference, but, mayhaps i just didn’t configure it right … we’ll see. Read More...
so imagine that you accidentally purchased m4a files of an audiobook, but wanted to play them on your superawesome sansa clip (warning, clicking on this link leads to awesomeness)
here’s how you could do it:
for i in *.mp4 do ffmpeg -i $i -vn -f wav - | oggenc -o ${i%\.*}.ogg - done buuuuut, let’s say you wanted to have a single file (audiobook) where the clip could keep track of your location in the book … Read More...
okay, so optparse is definitely something that I should’ve run across ages ago, but for some dumb reason, I hadn’t yet. It’s so much better than getopts, that it hurts my brain.
it behaves much more like a getopt wrapper that i wrote a few weeks ago for work, and is just so freaking pythonic.
use this! use only this!!
update (Wed 24 Jul 2013 23:29:06 PDT): now use argparse
so my friend posted an article on his site about his experience with his dell mini 9. i am going to do a similar recap of my love/hate relationship with my machine (in no particular order):
Pros: - light and thin: this thing couldn’t possibly weigh less - super sharp display - quiet - reasonably sized keyboard. like will’s mini 9, my fingers are cramped, but they didn’t remove any keys. Read More...
so i had a portion of my last website that was dedicated to the storage of random information, usually some sort of linux-fu designed to keep me from running the google engine again for something i’d already learned, er, looked up.
since this blog is now pretty much officially just mine (nobody else really ever wrote on it, and Vanessa said that she wouldn’t be offended if i used it for strictly geeky purposes, with the occasional familial update) i’m going to just dump a few ssh gems for future reference. Read More...
I seriously can’t believe it’s already been five years! apparently life really goes by quickly.
Vanessa: thanks so much for the last 5 years of wonderful married life. You’re so sweet to put up with all my shortcomings and love me as much as you do. Our kids are awesome because of how great of a mom you are, and I love you so much!!!
response from Vanessa:
I love you so much too! Read More...
so both of our kids have whole number years associated with their ages. what does that mean? is it time for more? do i panic? the python says that i should :)
we got a kitten! we named him bowser, and he’s a cute little black and white kitten. we picked him up on monday night (family home evening activity; mardson knows that jesus made cats now :) ), he’s about 8 weeks old, and is doing a pretty good job acclimating to the new surroundings.
so i recently was introduced to a series of bbc vids that are worth checking out. it’s called ‘Look Around You’. It’s hilarious. This is what it’s about. here’s a funny one. Enjoy!!
Also, for the interested reader, the title of the post is how one does program during the introduction using bash :)
oh, and here’s a freebie:
import sys while True: sys.stdout.write(’LOOK AROUND YOU’) yup, same thing in python Read More...
So, for the past week (as of tomorrow), Mardson and I have been battling some crazy mean virus that attacks the throat mouth and lips. It’s painful and ugly and it really makes you happy to lounge and watch shows all day long. But it seems like we’re finally making some headway. Now that it’s almost been a week, we should be able to count on being out of this within the next week or so. Read More...
Mardson turned three a couple weeks ago and that meant I could enroll him in the ‘tiny tots’ class at gymnastics (he was in the parent taught class); hooray! The first week of being in this class (he’s in there without me, just the teacher and the other students) he came and got me about 3 times. The next week he only came for me once, and the past two weeks he’s been fine without me. Read More...
so two sundays ago mardson asks Vanessa to go on a ‘ride with dad in his new long car’. she thought he was being observant about the length of my car, but he literally wanted to go on a long drive.
we packed up and started out up diamond fork canyon to see how close to the hotpots we could go on the road. it turns out that the gate doubles the distance from car to hotspring; something that’s daunting, but not going to preventing me from trying to get there. Read More...
Ok, so this morning I woke up at a comfortable 8 am. Penelope is learning to sleep 8 hours at a time and Mardson is getting over his cold so he sleeps much better again too. This means I get 6 to 8 hour stretches and I should be well rested, right? Well, that’s what I was hoping. It turns out that going to gymnastics for Mardson in a parent-taught class cancels all that extra sleep out. Read More...
So, is there a minimum/maximum quota that ought to be filled concerning resolutions? I feel like there’s a lot to work with, but I don’t want to fall off the wagon, ya know? I’m hoping to start exercising, at all. And I’d like to be less critical of others, especially when I’m driving. Oh right, and I probably ought to add a few tid-bits to this more often than 3 or 4 times a year. Read More...
This is the Zelda sword that Stephen and Derek made for Mardson. I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that it’s HUGE! So for now it’s at Stephen’s office being appreciated by fellow gamers. We’ll bring it home for Halloween so both Mardson and Stephen can be Link from Zelda. We still need a new sword for Mardson…
update: i’ll have you know that i was up till 2am last night because Vanessa promised Mardson that he’d get his sword when he woke up. Read More...
Yesterday I took my cousin and her 7 month old daughter to a doctor check up in SLC (they had a bit of a scare when baby girl’s intestines turned in on themselves and surgery was needed. This check up was to make sure all was healing right a month after the surgery). We found that 3 carseats do, in fact, fit in the back seat of the Saturn with a bit of a nudge from each door. Read More...
so mardson’s been crazy about his little buzz lightyear sword for almost a year now. i want to say that he got it for christmas, but it may have been his birthday. here’s an example of the sword: (defunct)
well, we think he finally lost the little thing (it’s like 7-10 cm long; tiny). so i made him a new sword. check out some supercute pics (defunct).
oh, i forgot to mention that he is now absolutely crazy about zelda. Read More...
i’m sorry for ruining the plot of the last book in the twilight series, but, as it turns out, certain vampires have very special powers, like being able to look into the future, read minds, adjust emotions, etc.
while i was reading about these abilities, which tend to typically be super-refined/magnified abilities that the vampire had in their human life, i started thinking what sort of abilities my wife would have in her vampire life. Read More...
so i’ve been under a considerable bit of stress lately trying to start/workon/finish my thesis, work on side projects, help raise kids, work on work, etc. (play mario kart), and have been thinking about priorities, education, and accomplishment a whole bunch lately. this is what i’ve noticed:
1) i’m so sick of school (formal).
2) i can’t learn enough to satisfy my desire to learn stuff (informal)
3) you can apparently make enough money to feed a family and purchase real estate from the informal version of education Read More...
So, I’ve been a mother of two for a good 6 weeks now and I’m surprised at how much fun it is. I have to say that I was bracing myself for … I’m not sure what exactly, but this is way more fun than whatever it was for which I was buckling down. Mardson is such a good older brother. In the mornings he wakes up, lets himself out of his room (closing his door again behind him) and runs into our room to see us and to see ‘Baby Penny’, as he calls her. Read More...
Will it Blend :date: 2013-12-17 08:00:00 :tags: recipies :slug: the-breakfast-shake :author: Stephen McQuay :summary: We just got a blendtec
We got a blendtec <http://www.willitblend.com>_ a few weeks back, and we’ve officially caught smoothie fever. This morning I tried something that I will likely not try again, but here’s a recipie:
cuppa milk two eggs scrambled two eggos well done five slices of bacon, crispy frozen yogurt maple syrup Honestly the first sip was heavently, but by the end of the first cup I was done with it. Read More...