David Raynes Personal

Starting a new group blog

I just wanted to drop a quick note to say that a) I am still alive, just really busy and b) I have started a gaming group blog called The Plot Hooks.

That is all. Hopefully I'll start posting more in the not too distant future. I do have some things I want to talk about.

Posted by rayners at 12:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

I need a cameraphone

I've decided that I need to get myself a cameraphone. Either that or just start carrying my digital camera with me everywhere I go.

Continue reading "I need a cameraphone"

Posted by rayners at 10:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

My Wife is Beautiful

Go see for yourself...

Posted by rayners at 1:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Moving on to bigger and better things

My wife that is, not me. Yesterday, Jenn moved into her new home on ClubMom's MomBlogs. Now my server is back to hosting just little old me, so I can start doing crazy things with it again.

Posted by rayners at 11:50 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Swaddling

We spent yesterday evening at the "Baby Basics" class at the hospital where we learned what babies looked like back in the 70s, were told to change a diaper on a practice plastic baby, and were taught to swaddle. After watching this video that Jenn pointed me to a few weeks ago, I'm tempted to practice on the cats, though I don't know if any of them would be nearly as pliant.

Posted by rayners at 5:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Does fathering twins really make me "the man?"

More often than not, whenever somebody discovers that not only have we managed to get Jenn pregnant, but also with twins, they usually make some remark along the lines of "you're the man" or something similar. I suppose, in most circles, fathering twins is some kind of sign of potency and manhood. I have looked at the numbers with our IVF and I am not so sure.

Continue reading "Does fathering twins really make me "the man?""

Posted by rayners at 6:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Death awaits you all with nasty big pointy teeth

Reading Wil Wheaton's entry today about sharing Monty Python and the Holy Grail with his stepson just reminded me about how much I am looking forward to being a father; I cannot wait to share all of the things I enjoy and am passionate about with our children. It also reminded me of one of the reasons I married Jenn (hint: her cat's name is Tim for a reason).

Posted by rayners at 5:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Working on an about page

So, among the list of things I've been meaning to do with this site redesign, I am working on an about page. It would be easy enough to just go over the usual list of information nuggets that most people include, but I thought it might be more fun to open the floor up to questions.

Is there anything you'd like to know about me?

Posted by rayners at 8:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Wishlists and a tip jar

While I would like to think I'm not the type of guy to just go and ask for stuff, a couple folks have recently asked me if I had a general donation link/page/whatever. So, I figured, while I'm working on the site reorganization, I may as well toss in one of those too.

Now, in the top of the right column on the main page of my site (maybe I'll move it to the individual pages too), there is a tip jar form (via PayPal) and links to two different wishlists I have in Amazon, one for personal items (e.g. novels, DVDs, and so forth) and one for professional items (e.g. books on Perl, software engineering, web applications, and such).

Posted by rayners at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Can anybody help me come up with a quickie software development-ish presentation?

I know I don't often talk about work, but I need a few ideas. Help me out!

So, at work I managed to start this thing we're calling "group exercise." The team lead and I gave a joint presentation on program optimization last summer after we got back from OSCON 05 that seemed to go over well. We got some good feedback from the team about the content of the presentation itself, as well as the prospect of other ones.

It fizzled out a bit after that.

I finally took it upon myself to start this thing back up last December and, in January, I gave a presentation on unit testing with JUnit in Eclipse and Python's unittest module. Also got a lot of good feedback from that. I got some warm fuzzies when some of our team stopped by my desk later that day to ask about how to write test code for their particular projects. I sent out an email later that week asking for volunteers for the next few group exercises. We got one volunteer and another was beaten into submission/agreement.

The next scheduled date for a group exercise is this coming Thursday. And just today, after almost having to corner the fellow who was going to be demonstrating Rational Robot to the team, I find out (for various reasons that I won't go into) that he will be unable make his presentation this week.

So now I'm stuck. I don't want to cancel this week's presentation unless I absolutely have to, otherwise it will be harder to keep the momentum moving forward for this thing. Plenty of people get lots out of this and it's a good opportunity to get other team members who tend to stay back in the shadows up and talking in front of the group.

I was planning on doing a presentation on regular expressions next month. I could try and throw that together over the next few days, but both the lead and I agree that, with the little experience our team has with them and as important as they are, I need to spend more time getting that ready.

Originally, when I sent out the request for volunteers, I included a list of example topics, including things like functional programming/languages, perl, web development, any number of security topics (we've got another upcoming presentation on buffer overflows), dependency injection, and so on.

Basically, I'm hoping I can get some help coming up with ideas for a presentation I can throw together in a few hours over the next couple nights. Pointers to existing presentations I could borrow would be very much appreciated. I just don't know if I'll have the time to put together something to do justice to the topics I am currently considering (regular expressions or functional programming).

Posted by rayners at 10:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Fancy new cell phones

So I'm thinking about replacing my dinky old motorolla flip phone that Jenn and I both got about two and a half years ago. The front runners at the moment are the Sidekick II and the Treo 650, though it appears with the Treo we would have to jump ship to another provider (not that it's a huge deal, but one more thing to worry about). I think T-Mobile used to offer the Treo, but I can't find it on their site anymore. I suppose I could try and snag an unlocked one online somewhere, but I haven't a clue what type works with which service and so on. Plus it seems like the unlocked ones are significantly more expensive.

The big thing I'm looking for this time around is synchronizing with at least one calendar source. My work calendar is the most important, but if I can work in a personal calendar (possibly on another machine) that would be nice. Web browsing, instant messaging, ssh clients, and so forth are nice bonuses but they aren't have to haves.

The main pro for the Sidekick at the moment is that it is the cheapest option from what I have seen in my initial research. Since we are already T-Mobile customers, we can get the "upgrade" price for the Sidekick if we extend our contract another two years. And the monthly cost for the family plan plus the data service (unlimited, but that was the only option) is under $100. It's actually about the same as what we're paying right now (we're actually overpaying a bit on an older plan). Comparable plans with other providers were all over $100/month.

(And the fact that the SDK for the Sidekick seems to be easily available and Java-based, which is what I work with at my day job, might be fun if I have the time to tinker with it, like that will actually happen.)

Posted by rayners at 9:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

I'm still here, I swear

Life has been a little nutty lately. I somehow got the hairbrained idea I should take a winter semester class. I managed to survive that at least.

Oh, and if you don't already read her site, Jenn's pregnant.

Once I get back into the swing of things, I'm going to do some more site reorganization and try to finish up MultiBlog 2.0 and update some of my other plugins.

Posted by rayners at 8:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)