Springsuit Surf Report

Ah yes, that wonderful time of the year has come when the water warms up enough to put away the 3mm/2mm wetsuit I've been wearing for the past several months, and get back out the springsuit! The water has warmed up significantly over the last several days, and if this trend continues, I'll be able to ditch the springsuit in no time as well!

Last week, the onshore winds were extremely strong in southern CA (10-15+ knots in the afternoon), which really kills the surf. Yesterday, I woke up and noticed that the wind wasn't blowing much, and took a Memorial Day jaunt down to Oceanside Harbor. The waves weren't great, but there was some fun short period wind swell with a few occasional set waves making a rare appearance. I surfed for almost 2 hours, and the overall weather conditions were amazing. I was wearing my wetsuit, and actually felt too hot as noon approached.

During lunch today, I broke out the springsuit and headed down to D street. Another beautiful day with playful surf, and the water just felt perfect. Of course, this means that the crowds will start to increase as well... ;<

2006 Fish Fry

Last Sunday was the annual Fish Fry - a gathering of surfers and shapers who enjoy surfing fish surfboards. A "fish" surfboard is usually shorter and wider than your usual shortboard, customarily with a swallowtail. A standard fish has two fins (or keels), although more modern designs are now popular as well, like the quad canard fins on my GH board.

As I was getting ready to paddle out, with a crowd-induced grimace on my face, Mike Miller of ppb-photos snapped a rare picture of me. Note to self - need to cut back a bit on the red trolley ale...

Thy Dungeonman 3

Ok, this post is brought to you by the fine folks at Homestarrunner.com. If you can remember the first generation graphical adventure games, then you will certainly get a kick out of Thy Dungeonman 3. While it is a parody of the old games, it is in fact a complete mini-adventure game, which I just finished in something under 10 minutes or so. Give it a spin, and relive ye olde monochrome graphics adventure.

And yes, I know that Zork I was not a graphical adventure. However, it sort of defines the genre (sans graphics, admittedly), so bugger off!

On Vacation

So, I decided that since I had to cut my Christmas / New Year's vacation one week short (due to work) that now seemed as good a time as any to take that week off. The weather has been improving (today was gorgeous, perfect Spring weather for San Diego), the kids are on break from school, and I could use the break from work.

Today I made a killer steak and eggs burrito breakfast, surfed and had fun with the kids at the beach, rested a bit at home, then tackled baseball practice in the afternoon. You know, I think I could seriously live like this, sans work, if you know what I mean! If only we didn't have those nagging monetary needs... ;>

So, I'll be out of the office for a few more days, and plan to enjoy all of it.

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.