What's Up?

Well, things have been real quiet around the blog lately because things are anything but quiet in life. Baseball and softball monopolize four out of the five work evenings, as well as Saturday. That leaves Friday night to collapse and Sunday afternoon to get done all the things that should have been done during the week.

However, it is fun watching and helping the kids play ball. The AA baseball team I am managing (the Raptors ) won our first game today, 10-9. We now have one win, one loss, and two ties (3-3 and 16-16!). Life is good.

The Launching Pad

The picture above is from Wednesday, December 21st, 2005. With the winter sun lower and to the southwest, I thought the back-lit take-off zone at Swami's was particularly beautiful. Watching the wave regularly jack up and over the reef is one of the more amazing sights on a large swell day. 

Swami's, Big Wednesday - Dec. 21, 2005

The day after I took the picture below (at D Street), the bulk of northwest swell slammed into North San Diego county. Swami's picks up these winter NW swells exceptionally well, and the reef can hold wave sizes of triple-overhead plus... as the picture above can attest!

D Street in December

December was very good to surfers in North San Diego county. The above picture was taken on December 20, 2005 at D street in Encinitas. An alternate title for the picture I like is, "A Shoulder to Cry For". 

It's Baseball Season Again

... and our brief period of no youth sport practices and games has come to an end. Between the end of soccer (November or so) and the beginning of baseball / softball (February), Theresa and I enjoy a couple of months when we don't need to be somewhere just about every day of the work week plus Saturdays.

But baseball season is now back, and our rest is over! I am managing my son's AA team this year - the Ogden Raptors (that would be the real team web site, not our team web site). Being a manager is a bit of a handful, especially when about half of my team has never played ball before. Ay carumba!

Still, it is my sincere hope that rushing around and keeping up with the kids helps to keep us young. If you have found this to be untrue, please keep it to yourself as it's what I'm going with for the time being.

My oldest (and only) daughter is playing softball again this year, and thankfully my youngest son is too young to play any sports yet. So, we have softball practices on Monday and Wednesday. Then there are the baseball practices on Tuesday and Thursday. Games will be held on Saturdays and at least one game during the week. Oh yeah!

In all seriousness, I really do believe it keeps us (my wife and I) active. We meet lots of new people, and get to know better those we already know. I love working with the kids, almost all of whom are out there just having a good time playing a team sport. And with the cutbacks in physical education I've seen at our elementary school just over the past 5 years, it is a good way to get the kids outside and off their butts.

"Take me out to the ball game.
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts..."

Well, I gotta get ready for practice now! :>

How to Salvage a Subversion Screw-Up

Yesterday, one of the developers at work attempted to add approximately 14,000 files to one of our subversion (aka svn) source control repositories. The svn server itself resides on a linux box, but the interface the developer used was TortoiseSVN, a Windows explorer based interface that is pretty slick.

Anyhow, the attempted addition of 14K files caused TortoiseSVN to choke. Futhermore, actually checking out the repository with all of these files added takes almost an eternity in developer time, and also causes TortoiseSVN to choke.

So, I knew what I had to do - remove the files added in the offending transaction. Now, how do I do that?

After a bit of googling about and reading through the administration chapters of the svn book, I realized that I would have to dump the repository (minus the offending transaction), and then rebuild a new one.

Looking over Trac (our project management app that integrates nicely with svn and provides bug/ticket tracking etc.), I found that revision 688 was the culprint. Thus, after a bit of trial and error, I finally zeroed in on the following comman (executed from the bash shell on the linux box) to dump the repository as desired:

svnadmin dump [repository path] --deltas --revision 1:687 | gzip > ~/dumpfile.gz

Next, I renamed the old repository directory to [repository path].old, and created a new repository to fill back up.

Finally, the step I was waiting for - loading the new repository up with the good transactions:

gunzip -c ~/dumpfile.gz | svnadmin load [repository path]

After a few minutes of churning away, svn finally notified me that revision 687 was committed, and I am now ready to go! Woo-hoo!

The Great Pink Eye Epidemic of 2006

Ah yes... the first major infectious epidemic of 2006 to ravage through our house seems to finally be contained. I am speaking of Pink Eye, clinically known as conjunctivitis. Like a trained fictional CSI agent, let us relive the infection by winding back time in CGI generated timeline goodness:

Dec. 26, 2005: A grand time is had by all while visiting with my relatives up in Orange County. My brother's newest child (almost 1 year of age) has pink eye, so we are all careful to wash our hands after holding him, letting him jab us in the eye, etc.

January 2, 2006 (aka I-day): It seems not all of us were as careful as needed. Peter, my youngest son of 3 years, now has pink eye. I simply can not tell you in words how much fun it is to try and get the eye drops actually in his eyes. Oh joy.

I-day + 3: Jasmine (my daughter) now in infected. She handles the eye drops with aplomb, and Peter is now getting used to them. Perhaps we will contain this strain to these two?

I-day + 6: My other son, Alan has fallen to the microscopic varmints. Curses! Who will fall next? I look at my wife knowingly and realize that it is just a matter of time... Perhaps if I were to go feral and live outside with the dog I could escape becoming a victim?

I-day + 9: Mother has fallen to the ranks of the eye-terrorists! On the other hand, Peter is done with his run of the medicine. At least that's a good thing.

I-day + 11: Peter is infected again. Man, does it get any better than this?

I-day + 13: I guess it does! Now we are all infected, but that means we are all also on medication.

I've been on my meds for almost four days now, and it looks as if the quarantine has been lifted on our residence by the CDC. Everyone but me has finished their run of eye drops, and it looks as if we will win this battle in the next few days. HOO-RA!

First Surf Report of 2006

subtitled, "It's About Damn Time"
The holidays have come and gone, and we are all still alive. That's always a good thing, I think you'll agree. I need to post up a few pictures from the holidays, but they are at home and I am at work, so those will have to wait for another update.

During the end of December and the beginning of January, I took 7 days off. During this time, I did many things having absolutely nothing to do with surfing. I got a lot of stuff done, saw a movie with my kids, and enjoyed sleeping in for those seven days - but I didn't surf one day.

So, when I came back to work last week and got back into the water with big surf, you can guess the consequences. As I get older, I find that taking time off from surfing will make me pay dearly when next I go in. And pay dearly indeed, I did.

On Thursday and Friday of last week, I paddled against the oncoming waves, duckdiving and paddling until my arms resembled wet vermicelli noodles. After 20 minutes of paddling both days, I consoled myself with this hollow platitude: "Well, at least I got some exercise".

Today (Monday) was the beginning of a new week. Over the weekend I performed minor ding repair surgery on my beautiful turbo canard quad fish (shaped by Gary Hanel), and decided to take her out for a spin today.

Victory at last! The smaller waves and increased endurance from my previous two outings allowed me to get out there and catch a few fun waves. My arms are now tired, but in a good tired kind of way, if you know what I mean. I'm not back to my pre-vacation form, but I can feel myself getting there!

Here's hoping you had a wonderful Christmas, and a safe and prosperous New Year to come.

Monday Surf Report - "Humbled"

I haven't posted to the blog in a while, since I've been extremely busy at work (getting ready for my vacation) and at home (getting ready for the holidays). Furthermore, a plague descended upon our family over the last week, infecting all but the strongest of our clan (my wife - mothers aren't allowed to get sick, I guess).

So feeling moderately better yesterday (Monday), which means I was spewing out a relatively smaller amount of chunky green phlegm balls, I decided to try and hit the water again and get a few waves under my wetsuit. Great idea - poor timing!

All this week we have some good sized swell coming to our coast, with some truly gargantuan waves forecasted for tomorrow (Wednesday). So, not being in the best paddling shape, I tried to paddle out through the crushing beach break. After 20 minutes of fighting against mother nature, my arms were spent. Humbled for the first time in I don't know how long, I paddled back into shore.

I'm getting ready to go and give it another shot today, before the monster swell arrives tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a picture day, I'm thinking...

Accessing Password Protected Remote Calendars with Evolution

You can access a password protected remote calendar from evolution by specifying a url in the following format:

webcal://username:password@servername.com/path to calendar/calendar.ics

Unfortunately, as of evolution 2.4, the remote calendars are still read-only. :<

Thanksgiving Day Play

We made it through another Thanksgiving at our house, which is always preceded by lots of cleaning up; and allows followed by another round of lots of cleaning up. In between those two bookends of frenzied sanitation goodness falls the cooking, the family, and the eating.

We didn't have as many people at our house this year, since two of my wife's siblings were out of town celebrating the holiday elsewhere this year. However, those who did come had a good time and enjoyed eachother's company - especially the kids.

After dinner, with a renewed source of energy, the kids went wild with a round of dodgeball in the kitchen, followed up with some wrestling (complete with Hulk Hands) in the living room.

It was exhausting, but well worth the effort (as these family gatherings always are). The day after Thanksgiving, we headed on over to my parents' house to celebrate Thanksgiving with them, as well as my brother's family (down from the bay area), my aunt, and my grandmother.

Tour of (Jury) Duty Over

A month or so ago, I received the dreaded jury summons in the mail. Last Thursday, my time was up and I went in to the Vista courthouse to do my civic duty. Apparently, that consists mainly of sitting around for long periods of time, doing nada.

As luck would have it, there were two people I knew who also were summoned for the same day - a neighbor and a friend whom I hadn't seen in quite some time. We three talked for most of the morning, sharing stories of our life, catching up with what had happened recently, etc. All in all, it was the best experience I've had in a jury lounge so far.

Shortly before lunch, they informed all of us that they had one other trial that needed a pool of potential jurors for the day, and that if our name was not on the list, then we were excused for the day. As a lack of luck would have it, my name was on the list, as was my friend's. My neighbor, on the other had, got a free pass to head back home. Lucky bastige!

So we went to lunch, then came back and waited some more in the jury lounge. I had hoped that they would get started right after lunch (1:30), but we were not seated in the court room until 3:30. Ug! I was potential juror number 45 out of 47, so I just listened to the judge and attorney while they focused on the first 20 jurors.

If you have never gone through the process, I will tell you that it is somewhat interesting. The potential jurors are asked general questions by the judge (usually involving answering some kind of questionnaire), followed up by questions from both attorneys. In general, these questions are asked to see if any of the people should be dismissed for cause. That is, dismissed because the person would not be able to provide an equal footing for both the prosecution and defense. Since this case involved the alleged molestation of a child, you can imagine that there were several people who fell in this category.

Thursday ended with only the first 20 people questioned, so court was adjourned for the day and we were told to report back on Monday (the Vista courthouse is closed on Fridays) for further selection.

So I went back Monday, and the process continued. After dismissals for cause, the prosecution and defense also have a set number of dismissals that they can use at their own discretion, for any reason whatsoever. Perhaps it's a gut feeling, or it has something to do with the answers given to the questions posed previously.

By the time they arrived at the back row (where I was seated) which held potential jurors 41 through 47, the 12 seats had been filled with only the two alternated juror seats remaining open. Then, I was finally questioned (with the others), and as expected - I was not selected. Have a sister who is a DDA in superior court downtown probably has something to do with it, plus my uncle who is a city attorney for Anaheim, and an aunt who is an ex-probation officer. That, and the fact that I have three young children probably doesn't endear me to the defense in the least.

Perhaps someday I'll be able to sit on a jury and see what the process is like in one of those twelve seats. Until then, I'll just keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting...

Kung Fu F-U

Two post in one day? Preposterous! This one will be quick - a humorous link to amuse you when you have a spare minute or two. I give you...

Kung Fu F-U

That is all.

Soccer Tournament Results

Saturday saw us at the soccer field once again, as my daughter's team was scheduled to play in the semi-finals for her division (girls under 10). The first game was at 2:45, and everyone showed up ready to play.

After a bit of warming up, and a quick pep-talk by yours truly, the girls took the field and dominated the game from start to finish. The final score was 2 - nil, shutting out the opposition for the fourth time in five games. Not too shabby!

Winning the semifinal game entitled us to play for the championship, under the lights at 6:00 that evening. We knew the final game was going to be very tough, as it was against a team which had gone through the season undefeated. During the regular season, we lost to them 5 - 2, and during the tournament the previous weekend, we lost to them 1 - nil.

As it turns out, the fewest goals this team scored during the season was five, and the most goals scored against them were two - by us. So we prepared as best we could, and the game began.

The girls played their hearts out. At halftime, we were knotted up at a scoreless tie, thinking that the championship might come down to penalty kicks. Unfortunately, during the second half the other team managed to score a goal when our goalie didn't see the ball coming due to so many people being in front of the box. The game ended with a score of 1 - nil.

After the game, we had our team party, and all of us coaches congratulated the girls on an amazing final game, as well as stupendous play over the entire tournament. As a relatively young team (the champions had five girls older than our oldest player), they showed a lot of skill, determination and drive. They were awesome!

And to crow a bit about my daughter - let's just say that she was a bulldog on defense. A damn quick bulldog at that. Several times she rode the other team's best player to the sidelines, and then took the ball away from her. A few times she streaked back to save a goal from across the field, saving at least two goals. Way to go Jazzy!


So the regular season is over, and now we have two weeks of all-star practices and an all-star tournament on the 19th of November.

Weekly Wrap Up with Weekend Preview

I've been busy this week, and have been neglecting updates here due to business at work and home I ask you, my humble readers, for forgiveness and hope that this simple missive is counted as a small token of my affection. Blah, blah, blah...

So, what've I been up to as of late?

1. I am finally upgrading the PCs at work. Last week, I spec'd out a nice system to replace our old AMD Athlon 800 boxes: AMD Athlon-64 3200; nforce 4 motherboard with build in sound, networking, video, sata2; 1 gigabyte of ram; a 250 GB western digital sata2 hard drive; a DVD-+R/RW drive; and a nice compact Antec case and power supply. I ordered all the stuff from newegg.com (a very good on-line place to order computer stuff - the deliver quickly and are good with returns as well).

The systems went together extremely easily, and I had no problems except for with one motherboard (bad on-board network controller - put in a spare PCI NIC that I had, and all was well). The real pain in the arse is getting the systems set up for the users.
I installed Windows XP on them, with OpenOffice.org (a great, free office suite), Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird (web browser and email client), Picasa (picture viewer), plus a few other useful tools.

On the boxes that the development team uses, I also had to install our development platform, which is somewhat time consuming. Since it is a newer version that we were using, it also is a bit nerve wracking as you need to migrate your projects to the new platform, which can either being extremely easy or entirely frustrating.

2. At home, we are wrapping up the soccer season this Saturday with my daughter's team seeded number two as we head into the semi-finals. The girls are excited, and if they make it to the finals, then they get to play at 6:00 pm under the lights that evening. W00t!

3. I have also been tasked by my boss to take a look into the J2EE platform, as we have a client which would like us to give them a quote on some J2EE work. I have limited experience with Java, and J2EE is a voluminous subject, so I am trying to put all the pieces together. Between which application server to use, to enterprise java beans (EJBs), to Java server pages (JSPs) - I have a whole lot of ground to cover in a relatively short period of time. Yeah, me! :S

Anyhow, that should wrap it up for today. Hope you all have a great weekend!

Soccer Season

Well, I've certainly been busy as of late. Not that it totally excuses the lack of updates here, but it is certainly a factor. Soccer season is winding down, with this Saturday holding the final regular season games for both of my children that play. My oldest daughter's team (Shockwave) has a playoff tournament the following Saturday, so we are gearing up for those games in practice now.


Between the two of them, we have soccer practice on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights, with two games on Saturday. What's going to happen when my youngest wants to play? Ack!


Anyhow, hope you enjoyed these pictures from the season.

Recipe: Amazingly Good Steaks at Home

It has been quite a while since I last posted anything, so in an effort to make it up to any and all visitors, I thought I'd give you my recipe for cooking great steaks at home.

What you'll need:

• A large skillet that can be placed in a very hot oven, as well as on the stove top. I prefer cast-iron as it holds heat incredibly well, and they are nigh indestructible. I have a few Lodge skillets, and use the big 12-inch one for most of my cooking.
• Some good steaks. For this method, I'd recommend the following types of steaks: New York strip, rib eye, filet. If you don't know much about buying meat, take a look here. You'll have difficulty finding prime (the best) grades of meat at the grocery store, but they will usually carry choice (good) for a it more than select (ok) grades. Boneless cuts will cook a bit more evenly than those with the bone in.
• Some kosher salt.
• Olive oil.
• Red wine (I usually use a cabernet).

Directions:

1. Remove steaks from their packaging one or two days ahead of time. Place them on a rack inside a dish with high sides, and cover with plastic wrap. Cut several holes in the plastic wrap to facilitate air flow. This will remove some of the excess water from the meat, concentrating the flavors a bit more. If you don't have the time (or just need a steak right now, you can skip this step).
   
2. Take the steaks out of the fridge, and place them on the counter.
3. Put your cast iron skillet in the over, and set the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
4. Take the steaks and sprinkle kosher salt over both sides. Pat the salt into the meat using your hands.
5. Rub some olive oil on both sides of each stake (not too much - maybe a teaspoon for each steak).
6. After the oven and fan have reached the temperature of a small fusion reaction, remove the pan from the oven (keeping the oven on at 500) and place the pan on your stove. Crank up the burner to full.
7. Carefully place your steaks in the pan, being careful to not move them once they have been placed in the pan. Set a time for two minutes.
8. When the timer goes off, flip the steaks over and set the time for one minute and 30 seconds. If the steaks stick a bit when you flip them over, don't worry about it.
9. After the timer goes off again, turn off the burner and slide the skillet with your steaks into the oven.
10. Set the timer as appropriate to the desired "doneness" of the meat, which will probably vary a bit from oven to oven, the thickness of the steaks, as well as the type of pan used. I generally use six minutes for one inch steaks, which gets the meat to a nice medium.
11. After the timer has gone off, turn the oven off and remove the pan from the oven, placing it back on the burner. Remove the steaks from the pan, and cover them lightly with aluminum foil.
12. Turn the burner under the pan on medium, and deglaze the pan with the red wine (use about 1 cup or so). Scrape the bottom of the pan off using a spatula, to ensure all the good meat bits get incorporated. This will produce a strongly flavored sauce which complements the meat nicely, in moderation. It also cleans out the cast iron skillet quite nicely.

After that, you are ready to eat. Serve with some steamed green beans, a baked potato, or fresh bread. A glass of cabernet will complement the meal nicely as well. I have found that using the above recipe with good cuts of meat will produce a great steak. Perhaps not as good as Ruth's Chris steakhouse (the pinacle, IMHO), but very close and better than most places which will charge you $25+ for the same steak.

Two Great Days of Surf

What a way to wrap up the week! Thursday and Friday saw some of the best waves I've ridden in quite a while roll into North San Diego county. I took an extended lunch yesterday and today, and rode some of the longest, biggest, and fastest waves on my new quad fish.

The new board performed extremely well, and I never felt under-gunned in the bigger surf, even though the board is only six feet. Today, I am sore in a way that is sooooo good.

Up in Newport Beach (which faces to the South more than the beaches here in Encinitas do), the surf was bigger and meaner. I can't wait to see some of the shots from the Wedge, which will probably be completely crazy tomorrow.

Worst Night's Sleep EVER!

About 11:30 pm last night, we had an unusual (for San Diego) display of mother nature's light and sound show, as thunder and lightning pounded us. Ace, our almost 10 year old black lab great dane mutt, was quite upsent with the racket and showed it by panting lightly, knocking over a bunch of stuff in the living room, etc.

The lightning came and went in about 3 waves, and I figure I may have gotten about three hours of sleep last night. Yippee-ki-yai-yai!

Hopefully I'll be able to sleep like a rock tonight, and that the thunder and lightning (while awesome), will only visit again during non-sleeping hours. Thanks you very much for you support and understanding...

Trip to Callaway Gardens

A few weeks ago, I went on a business trip down to Callaway Gardens, GA. I don't go on many business trips (thankfully), and this one was even more unusual as I was able to bring my wife along with me.

My wife and I haven't been away from our kids (together) for more than 12 hours, since our daughter was born about nine years ago. I knew it would be a great break for my wife, and we both thought they would have a good time being taken care of by my parents.

Walking off the plane into the air-condition free terminal (AC was broken), a wall of humid, sticky air nearly stopped us in our tracks. I haven't felt humidity like that since we were in the Florida keys after my college graduation.

The gardens themselves were gorgeous, with flora and fauna up the wazoo. Here in Southern California, we don't have many forests like the South and East does. Seeing the giant trees covered in kudzu vines, going on as far as the eye can see, is quite impressive. We also saw lots of beautiful butterflies (as the pictures illustrate), turtles, and even a doe grazing on the side of the freeway.

While it was beautiful down there, the extremely rural community next to the gardens was an eye opener as well. Downtown pine mountain consists mainly of a two block area. We went looking for a grocery store on Sunday, and were surprised to find the only one closed all day.

We had a nice time biking around the gardens, walking about downtown Pine Mountain, and just having time together. However, when our fourth and final day was up, we were more than ready to come back home. To see more of the pictures, please check out my Callaway Garden photo album.