Look! Only two months worth of photos this time; I'm getting better!

Here's some things, events and pictures of Jocelyn:

http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/things/New+Fridge+and+Playground/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/trips/Raystown+2008/Logan+and+Jocelyn+...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/trips/Raystown+2008/Tiffany+and+Jocely...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Dads+Birthday+2008/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/4th+of+July+2008/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Ella+Jones+2nd+Birthday/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Baby2/Tiffany+at+30...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Jocelyn+on+...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Bubble+Bear...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/First+Facep...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Lounging+on...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Enjoying+Gr...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Caged/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Eating+pop-...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Computing+a...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Jocelyn+Swi...

Here's my OSCON trip so far:
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/OSCON+2008/Day+0+-+20080722/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/OSCON+2008/Day+1+-+20080723/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/OSCON+2008/Day+2+-+20080724/

For awhile now I've noticed that things in my home dir aren't setup optimally for my work flow. I've been trying to run with SELinux enabled and I run into development problems when I try to run web applications out of my home directory. Various parts of my home directory are version controlled separately due to the software projects they're part of, but not as a whole.

What I'd like is to setup some other place for "projects" (Mozdev code and docs, other software projects, RPM building, etc) and then version control my home dir.

The problem is I'm not sure how much this helps me. Things like IM clients still are going to want to log things to ~/.somedir/log which is evil. SELinux contexts for files in /home/myprojects is still going to be wrong; I'm not going to be able to run webapps out of there, either. Moving my docs out of my home dir might be a pain due to xdg-user-dirs needing to be setup correctly to point at the document dir

I'd really love to have a lean, mean homedir that is version controlled that I can port around between boxes. Have people attempted this before? What about the above problems?

I've been at Mozdev for a full year now. This was a big step for me personally as well as for Mozdev; there was lots of trepidation from both parties, for a number of reasons:

• I was Mozdev's first full-time employee (and without a formal office, all interviews were over the phone)
• This was my first time being a full-time contractor instead of salaried
• There were (and still are) lots of bugs; some old, some important, and they all needed reevaluated to better define their scope and meaning
• There was a large, pre-existing open-source community that I had no experience with. I didn't know how (or if) they would accept me or my work
• The features that were needed at Mozdev were rather large; mostly due to scaling them across many different projects

While the first few months were relatively scary for me while I learned the existing code base and environment (7 years of organic growth!), I was able to begin working on new features almost immediately. Most of what I worked on is on our roadmap, but I also spent a lot of time trying to setup new structures for maintaining code.

One of my biggest challenges this year wasn't developing features for Mozdev, though; it was integrating myself with the existing community. The community of developers and users at Mozdev is amazing and has an incredible breadth of knowledge and background, and I was an outsider coming in to change how they worked on their projects. I've tried hard to make sure changes and prototypes are announced ahead of time and get exposure as well as making myself available to Mozdev users who need support in order to help people get to know me a little better. Being on the front-line for support as well as new features is a new experience for me, and while it's had it's rough moments I think it helps people feel that we're listening to them and that we're here to help.

This past year I've mostly kept my head down trying to learn about the Mozdev community; this year I'd like to get my head up a little more and reach out to the larger Mozilla community so that we can all benefit. I'm sure the upcoming OSCON Conference and Firefox Summit will go a long way toward getting people together so we can brainstorm on how to improve Mozdev and make it a bigger participant in the Mozilla community.

It's been a great year, and I'm very glad that I took the chance on jumping into an environment I knew nothing about and that Mozdev chose to take a chance on me. I'm very thankful to be able to continue to help the Mozdev and Mozilla communities to grow and look forward to the next year and what it will bring.

Our recent trip to Lake Raystown:
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/trips/Raystown+2008/

Events:
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Jocelyns+1st+Birthday+Party/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Dougs+28th+Birthday+Party+at+Sh...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Easter+Egg+Hunt+at+South+Newton...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Easter+Presents+at+Warners/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Swimming+Lessons+with+Mom/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Pre-Fathers+Day/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Summertime+Playing+at+Warners/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/Swimming+at+Parents/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/2008+LAN+Party+at+Bitleap/

Hikes:
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/outdoor/Appalatian+Trail+Pivot+Rock/

Things:
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/things/motorized/Deer+Attacks+WRX/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/things/Argo-3+Dell+sc1425/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/things/Dads+Truck+Wheel+Hub+Cover/

Children:
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Pets/Sage+and+Tycho+snuggling+on+...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Baby2/Baby+2+W17/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Easter+Dres...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Bra+on+Head...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/First+day+o...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Eggs+in+Shi...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Lacross/
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Naked+Hiney...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Shinguards+...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Sleeping+on...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Ella+Jones+...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Mom+Reading...
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/life/Family-Photos/Jocelyn/Tiffany+and...

Today's the day I said I'd be ditching AIM, so now I'm doing it. If you'd like to IM me, catch me on IRC or XMPP/Jabber.

Jocelyn's definitely going to be a vi user; when she's done typing she immediately hits 'escape' and will pound 'escape' repeatedly when things aren't acting the way she thinks they should.

Scott and Kristin González received their new little girl, Mya Lynn González, yesterday.

She was 6 lb 11.6 oz and 18.5 inches long.

Congratulations Scott and Kristin!

Jocelyn's first birthday has come and gone. It was a blast to have all her family around on her birthday while she opened presents and ate cake. It's definitely been a very busy year and has flown by. I'm looking forward to spending many more years with Jocelyn.

The second bit of news is the arrival of our new peanut! It looks like our new baby will be coming along somewhere between Sept 27th and Oct 1st, 2008. We're both very excited to have another little one in the future.

Congratulations to Ben and Jen! Reproducing the details from their email:
Noelani Elizabeth Paxton
Born: 12:05AM Feb 11 2008
7lbs 12.2oz 18.25 inches

I hate sick days. Especially ones like this; I'm lucid enough to know that I should be being more productive, yet not lucid enough to trust anything I would do. Damn Dayquil(tm).

So this weekend (Friday, actually) I finally managed to get ahold of a Wii (damn those marketing people at Nintendo for making that sound dirty). The Wii Sports game it came with is a lot of fun. My sister and cousin Logan were up for the weekend so I took it along over to my parents' house Friday night and we had a good time bowling. I picked up Super Mario Galaxy on Sunday and it seems like it'll be a nice experience with the Wii's controls, but I'm not sure how strong of a game it really is. I'm looking forward to seeing what games 2008 can produce for the platform.

I got my taxes out of the way, and despite having to pay a small penalty for not paying quarterly estimated taxes for the past half-year, I made out pretty well. Well enough that I can seriously consider replacing my aging HP zt3000. I've upgrading the laptop in the past, but I'm not sure that it's worth the expense giving the performance gains would be minimal. My biggest grips right now are CPU speed and video card age. While I'm not an avid gamer anymore, I still can't play anything semi-recent like Team Fortress 2 that everyone on #cplug seems to rave about.

Front runners right now are the Lenovo Thinkpad T61 15.4" and the Dell Latitude D830. Considering the laptop is my primary desktop now, I need something with dock support so that I don't need to plug in power, video (external LCD), sound (external speakers), and USB devices (iPod, USB phone charger). That's just too many things to plug in all the time.

I would like something more portable than my current zt3000 - and neither the T61 or the D830 fall into that category. The 14.1" T61 is a bit more portable and so is the Dell D630; I guess I need to look at the HP offerings again just to make sure I didn't rule them out earlier. I really like my 1680x1050 WSXGA+ screen resolution, I could probably stand going to 1440x900 since I have a 20.1" 1680x1050 external LCD available for desktop use.

And that's it for my semi-lucid sick day blog (sad that it takes a sick day for me to have a real blog update).

Check out Jocelyn pushing herself along on a clothes basket at 7 months old! She's trying to grow up way too fast. Last night Tiff was putting clothes away while Jocelyn was playing in her crib and Tiff saw Jocelyn pull herself up to standing using the crib! I guess it's time to lower the mattress ;)

So a couple weeks ago I told you about some problems (I created) with our lawn mower. Unfortunately, things have gotten worse.

Well, I guess it didn't have far to go from "potentially dead" to "dead", so it's not too surprising.

My father-in-law was able to get the mower running last week after I broke it, so I was hopeful that I might get another year or two out of it. That hope was killed quickly when I started the mower up yesterday morning.

I started the mower, and a ton of smoke poured out - that was expected. What wasn't expected was the really bad knocking. I decided to try it out anyway and made about half a trip around the house when it suddenly stopped with a "klunk".

"Okay, I hit something," I thought. Pushed it back to the garage (the starter is was still being a pain) and took the starter of to shim it better, and "Oh - that's not fixable." I saw a nice crack in the block.

It wasn't leaking oil very badly, so my Dad and I pushed it into the shed to deal with it later while I push-mowed the yard. Came back to drain the oil and found that most had already drained out of a supposed crack in the bottom of the block.

So, the mower is definitely shot (despite my Dad suggesting that I could get it welded - I think I've had it with this mower for now).

I'm looking for a replacement, but I'm not sure what type of replacement. I wasn't really sold on getting a riding mower to begin with since I'm used to push-mowing about a half-acre and can do our 1/3-acre lot in a little over an hour -- the riding mower wasn't a very big time saver. I'm considering a larger and self-powered push-mower; does anyone have any experience with the newer models and how well they do? The biggest reason we got the riding mower was to make mowing easier for Tiff to do, so it would have to accomplish that (ie, it wouldn't be able to make her keep up with it if it were a self-propelled). Thoughts?

Following in the footsteps of others, I'll be moving exclusively to Jabber/XMPP starting May 19th, 2008 (Open Discussion Day).

If you aren't using Jabber/XMPP yet and want to start, it might be easier than you thought.

If you have a Gmail account, download their Google Talk client and you can message me.

There's a bunch of organizations participating in the IM Federation (as well as Pyxos.net). You can sign up for an account with many of the organizations' servers. If you would like an account at any of Pyxos' domains feel free to contact me.

Tiff and I bought a riding mower last summer. We both knew it was going to drastically reduce the amount of work we had to do to keep the lawn looking decent (it's not possible to make our lawn look nice).

Three weeks ago I was mowing the lawn and the mower shut off on me. This didn't surprise me too much at the time; we had just replaced the battery a couple weeks before that and I was kind-of suspecting that the alternator was bad. I assumed the battery had died and there wasn't any spark left. After a fun time pushing it to the shed, I put it on the charger and finished mowing with the push-mower.

The next week I tried to start it - no go. I took the cover off the starter and noticed the gear was fully engaged. I didn't have time to work on it then so I push-mowed the lawn again.

Last week my Dad came by and pulled the starter off. He cleaned it up, it seemed to work fine, but it still wouldn't crank the mower. He took it into town to have a guy look at it.

Got the starter back today (there weren't any problems with it) and put it on, and the mower still wouldn't turn. Hmm. Wouldn't turn. As in, the starter can't turn the flywheel.

I check the oil, and there's just a tad bit at the bottom.

So, the current assumption is that the engine is seized. That pretty much means that its shot. Not a great feeling.

Of course, everyone knows to check the oil. My only excuses (which don't help me feel much better) are:

1. I've had a super-cheap push-mower for 4 years and have never had to add any oil to it (yes, I actually check it).
2. This mower didn't give me any indication it was burning oil or that it was low on oil.
3. I've never owned a riding mower before.
4. I'm not the only one who uses it.

Like I said, not very good excuses.

So, I hear Briggs & Stratton engines are kinda tough...

South Park Mac vs. PC. Funny, true stuff.