Less Than Me

My next project at work is going to be using a JavaScript framework called Dojo. I know nothing about Dojo, and I've barely ever done any JavaScript either! So all day today I've been reading books on the topic which has been really fun. One of the books had the below quote, and I thought it was spot on!

"Computer programming is tremendous fun. Like music, it is a skill that derives from an unknown blend of innate talent and constant practice. Like drawing, it can be shaped to a variety of ends - commercial, artistic, and pure entertainment. Programmers have a well-deserved reputation for working long hours but are rarely credited with being driven by creative fevers. Programmers talk about software development on weekends, vacations, and over meals not because they lack imagination, but because their imagination reveals worlds that others cannot see." -- Larry O'Brien and Bruce Eckel in Thinking in C#

Last weekend Steam was selling the X-Com pack for a measly two bucks, so I bought it! I used to play X-Com back in the day (the mid 90's) and have very fond memories of it. At $2, I figured I wouldn't be out much if it didn't live up to my memories...

Fortunately my two dollars were well spent because the game is as great as I remember! I actually can't believe how deep this 15 year old game is. It's a little difficult to get started, but I found some gameplay videos on youtube and a strategy guide that helped me get back up to speed. Last night I played for an hour or so before getting in bed to read... and then I got back up at midnight and played until 2am! It's been quite a while since a game caused me to lose track of time!

Kara is 18 weeks along now so her tummy is poking out quite a bit. Last night when I came to bed I put my hand on her belly and felt 5 good kicks. That was the first movement I've felt during this pregnancy! Then today we had an ultrasound done to find out the sex of the baby... and his junk was clearly on display! Seeing him squirm around in there was pretty cool.

So with this new evidence, I guess it's real, we're having another baby. Until last night, I kind of thought Kara was just getting fat. :p

Here's a pic of the little dude:

In June 2004 I decided to start tracking all of the books I read. Sometime since then, I decided to make my way through the list of Hugo and Nebula award winning sci-fi books (I track my progress here). So it comes as no surpise (to me at least) that 69 of the 101 books I've read since June 2004 have been sci-fi. Tonight I was thinking back on all of the great books I've read, and I decided to come up with a top 5 list. So, here are my top 5 favorite sci-fi books, ordered by original publication date:

Dune by Frank Herbert
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

Honorable mention goes to Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It's not traditional sci-fi, but an excellent fiction novel with an emphasis on science about the Allied codebreakers of WWII.

We found an apartment! No thanks to the woman that is "helping" us... I told her that we needed to find a place with no lease, and then she provided us with a list of apartments that all required a lease. We saw two of them yesterday, and then called ahead to the rest and cancelled our appointments when they told us they would not rent month-to-month.

When we got back to our place, I searched craigslist for month-to-month rentals and found a few. We ended up going to see a place in West Seattle and basically decided to take it on the spot. The bus commute is about 30 minutes and it's got a decent walk score, so that's nice. It's kind of dated inside, but we'll probably only be there for a few months, so it should be fine. The toilet, sink and tub are pink, so that's awesome!

Anyway, I figured this would be a good chance to try out West Seattle because we've considered buying a house over there. Here's where our place is, we'll be moving in by the end of the month, so come visit!

Kara was reading something on the internet and then she asked me "What does WRT stand for?" I didn't understand the context, so I asked "With respect to what?" Then I thought about what I had just said and laughed "There's your answer..."

Dave came over yesterday and we all (Me, Kara, Jessica, and Dave) went out to do some geocaching. Dave hadn't done it before, so we were showing him how it works. We ended up going to Noble Woods Park in Hillsboro where we found all 5 caches that we looked for.

Before we went, I told Dave that I bought a $10 iPhone app for geocaching, and we both agreed that it was rip-off-expensive. I showed him a limited free one that he could use, and he tried that out on his phone. At one point Dave's limited version stopped being useful, so we relied only on my phone... Until Dave happily announced "I'm useful again!" He had bought the $10 app, so I guess that means he likes it!

We went out two more times today to look for more caches. Both times we drove to nearby locations and searched for caches in a loop that brought us back to our car. We attempted to find 12 caches today, and successfully found 10. One cache was really cool, the hider had glued a canister to the end of a loose endcap of a metal park bench. When we pulled out the loose cap, the whole cache came out with it. Straight out of a spy novel. :) We're up to 13 finds in 2 days, I think we'll take a break from it tomorrow...

If anyone out there wants to try it, let me know and we'll schedule a time to go out! It's really fun!!

Kara and I were looking for something to do on Sunday morning, so I suggested we try geocaching. It's not something that either of us had done before, but I thought it was worth a shot since Kara likes to take walks with Jessica, and I like playing with my iPhone!

Geocaching is a hobby where people hide boxes of things in random places and then post the exact latitude and longitude of the boxes. The idea is that other people then try to find the box by using maps and GPS. If you want to take something from the box, you leave something else of equal value. And in the box is a little log book where people write their names and the date they found it.

I described the idea to Kara and she seemed mildly interested. Neither of us knew what to expect, but we bundled up Jessica and headed off to the closest cache from our apartment. It was a short 0.3 miles, but when we arrived we couldn't find the cache. We had no idea what size the box should be, or where to really look, and we eventually decided to give up and walk to the next closest cache.

This one went much better, we found the trail after a short amount of searching, and found the cache laying on the ground. The cache had a few toys in it, so we took a little plastic horse. We didn't leave anything because we didn't know about that rule yet!

When we got back to our apartment, we hopped in the car and headed off to my parents house for lunch. On the drive over, I was looking up reviews on iPhone apps for geocaching. There was a free trial version that showed nearby caches, so as we pulled up I launched it. There was a cache less than 300 feet from my parents' house! So when we got a few spare minutes, Kara and I hiked out to find it. This one had a clue which helped us find a teeny tiny tube that held a rolled up piece of paper. We had no idea that these caches could be so small, so we weren't surprised that we hadn't found the first cache we attempted.

On the drive home from my parents', I looked up caches in Washington Park to see if we wanted to try for another. There was one called the Little Girl Cache that had toys for girls in it. We decided to drive up there and try to locate it. This one took a while of wandering around, but Kara ventured into the bushes a bit and came back with a green box in her hand. We looked through it and found a sticker of a cat that we thought Jessica might like. We now knew about the 'take one, leave one' rule, so we left the plastic horse that we found earlier. With the cache found, we then turned our attention to our surroundings. We walked down to a giant play structure and Jessica and I played on a swing. The rose garden was in full bloom, so we walked over there and looked at tons of flowers. Then we headed back to the car because it was soon to be Jessica's dinner time.

So, geocaching was a hit! We attempted 4 and found 3 on our first day. We're talking about going out again on Monday to find more, and to try again for the one we couldn't find. It's surprising how many caches there are around, so if you want to give it a try, go to geocaching.com!

I called MS this morning and explained the whole thing. It took 30 minutes, but it was kind of fun because they asked me lots of questions and I had to tell them how it all went down. It was like an episode of CSI, but nerdier and with a bit less blood and guts!

The have locked my account for 10-14 days while they investigate. They said they'd reverse the charges and get my account back to normal.

Looks like I was wrong about the keylogger. Someone called Xbox customer support two days ago and convinced them that they were me and then asked to reset my password. Supposedly the person would have had to have all my details (name, address, phone number, last 4 of my credit card, etc) to get this done. At least that means my computer probably isn't compromised, which is nice because I wasn't looking forward to wiping it...