I'm up in the City today. I wanted to take the train (and use iamcaltrain.com!), but, as my plans go until 7:30 and Kris freaked at the thought of my walking from 2nd and Howard to 4th and King, I drove.

I found myself moving very slowly this morning while I was trying to leave. Aside from the fact I was up until after midnight also with the trying, this time with finishing up a client project, I certainly realized (hard not to realize) that part of my moving slowly was from the fact I'm not prepared for this client meeting. I didn't finish the work that I really needed to do, and worse, while making the changes I was making, I realized my approach was wrong, and so I needed to scrap what I had done.

Fortunately, the client won't be billed for the time I spent on the wrong solution, but the project is still behind. Argh.

Given the disaster of the drive up, I really really should have taken the train. One accident, the wrong freeway, and the realization I had no money for parking all added up to my being late for the work day. Training up would have meant that I could worked all the way up, which would have been nice.

And, seriously, the walk from 4th and King to 2nd and Howard?

It's not that long.

Just don't walk it with Messina. He'll tell you, "It's just up here, a short walk." Yes, it's a short walk, but, no, it'll be longer than you expect it to be until you've walked it three times.

Which I have, now, done.

"Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'."

- Shawshank Redemption

Maeryn stopped by to visit us at the office last week. Being the lazy, helpless one she is, she allowed her father to do all the hard work, including the lifting, and carrying, and turning, all while she slept.

Well, sorta.

The poor kid had to endure being cuddled and cood by me for a while, as well as being half woken up when I felt her soft, soft, tiny fingers or when I shoved a camera up close to her face. I know of no other baby who smiles as much as Maeryn. I'm convinced she's either joy personified, or a miswired, confused, little baby who thinks the smiley face is a general expression of existence.

During her visit, Doyle and I started commenting on all the pregnant women in our circle of friends. Pretty much all the married women either are pregnant or have given birth recently (if "recently" is defined as within the last two or so years). The one exception is, yes, you guessed it, yours truly.

(I wanted to write "me" instead of "yours truly," but "me" is grammatically incorrect there. Since I recognize that it is incorrect, I'm sure it would annoy me. But, "I" just sounds wrong there, so "yours truly" it is.)

After realizing after, well, Lisa's retirement announcement (for at least nine months), followed by Wade's limerick announcement of Christina's pregnancy, that I am the only non-pregnant, non-mother, Doyle looked up and exclaimed, "Be strong, Kitt! Be strong!"

Yeah. Kids. Like I want the buggers.

I say that, but 100 million years of evolution really can't be denied. Hormones and society certainly exert their forces upon my psyche, too. As much as I'd like to think I have more male characteristics than most straight women, that I can hang with these guys on anything technical, and be just as indifferent to the idea of a family, I have to wonder at what I might be missing. And sometimes, just sometimes, like the quiet moments I spend watching Maeryn sleeping in her seat or snuggled up with Kate, or Gabby playing in the sand looking for shells and seeing everything as bright and shiny and new, I think, maybe... just maybe...

How bad could it be?

A little me running around.

Pigtails in her hair.

The world as an opportunity, all shiny and new.

A kid of my very own. Being able to teach her science and math. Teach her how to throw a frisbee. Maybe she'll enjoy tennis or volleyball or soccer. Teach her to program at age 3, as soon as she can read (yes, my little brother learned that young). Going on a hike with her little legs moving next to me. Pray she doesn't get migraines, lord, don't let that happen.

...

...

...

And then some other kid comes screaming along, throwing a tantrum, kicking or hollering or turning red from the cry, cry, crying.

And I'm snapped back to reality.

Helluva lot easier to resist them when they're being little turds.

I really need to get tags working on my site. I feel so 2003.

Well, that and move the site to the other, faster server.

Went to SuperHappyDevHouse as planned this weekend. I took along the various "prizes" we had planned for the event, which included three trophies: "Best Code EVAR", "Best Geek Pitch," and "Most Marketable Idea". I really should have taken pictures of those. I also took along a slew of cookies and cupcakes, which we decorated as baseballs and gave out as runner-up prizes (dang, if I didn't miss the name of the guy who helped me fros those puppies).

The feel of this SHDH was very corporate compared to SHDH4 in September. Yes, I know that the fundamental difference in my experience was the people I spent time with (or didn't, in the case of SHDH5), but even Tom, who drove me home at 3:30 in the morning (thanks, Tom!), commented on the different feel of the event. He attributed the difference to the lack of drunk women from the prior event.

Tall guy (who surely has a name) kept track of gas mileage, using RDF as a query engine. Ah! His name is Drew. He's 6'9" tall, and knocks his head on doorways all the time.

Freeman is working on, high bandwidth, high latency projects, to provide email, data transfer for remote areas that would normally not have any internet (of a sort) access. He spent a year in India, and reported on projects that provide drive-by wireless and cd-rom data-exchange sneaker-net work done locally there.

Clipclip demo (Chao Lam) aims to bring the model of newspaper clipping to the intarweb. 'Has "web 2.0" features like tagging!' his quote, not mine. Can post to group, for discussions, can subscribe to feeds with clips. Cal channels Ryan and suggests the use of microformats for data structure. Public? No.

Meetro developer version, paul, sam, and (maybe seth?) presenter displays people close and far. Profiles, etc..

And here's where my notes start to fade, as I wrote "10:00 and I'm already yawning."

Jeff and Adam did a demo of their AJAXWars, a AJAX based browser, resource limited game. The demo was very entertaining.

Jesse Andrews showed us "How to Duplicate Google Maps in 10 Minutes" using Dojo. It was really entertaining, my favorite part being, "... and dojo is an AJAX toolkit, talk to that man for details," pointing to Alex Russell. I was a little bummed there weren't more dojo presentations, but hey, they can steal only so much thunder, right?

I didn't see the Zimbra or Meebo demos.

Andy's talk "Getting Money and Chicks with Python" was absolutely hysterical, and the subject of much small talk for the rest of the evening. Highly recommended for any developer.

Messina presented his ideas about CivicForge was very high level, in a this-is-what-I-want, what-do-you-say? sort of way. It's basically the merging of a lot of tools that don't quite work the way non-programmers work, but the way that people actually interact together. In my mind, I was cursing him a little bit, because I'm inspired, and I don't need another project.

Messina.

There were other presentations, but I don't recall them at this point. A lot of people worked a lot, which was neat. In as much as I wasn't hanging out with my usual band of friends, I met a lot of new people, again. I thought there would be more duplication from the previous attendees, but there were a lot of new people (for me, anyway).

David, Jeff, Messina and I started planning SHDH6, currently scheduled for December 10th. The theme will be speed. We'll do presentations after 1:00 am for work that has been done earlier in the evening. Should be fun.

"Argh! I was two-outed!"

"What?"

"It's been a long time since I've been two-outed."

"What's two-outed?"

"When only two cards in the deck can beat your hand, and he gets one of them."

pause

"Well, I guess it's better than being one-outed."

"Heh. Marginally."

I missed the season finale of Ultimate Fighter last night, as I was at SuperHappyDevHouse 5. Fortunately, tivo is my friend (and yes, tivo is now a verb, so it has lost its CamelCaps spelling status and is no longer TiVo).

This season has been relatively blah compared to last year. The editing hasn't shown the fighters' mental anguish or victories, there have been no overwhelmingly (or even just whelmingly) dynamic personalities to capture the attention of the viewer, and there have been no huge rivalries, pranks or, yes indeed, big fat babies.

In short: no compelling reason to love or hate these guys.

Which makes for boring television. But, hey, it's ultimate fighting, so the season finale is surely worth watching, right?

Maybe.

The decor of the octagon at the Hard Rock Cafe is, well, the Hard Rock decor, which includes, in the background, a hit record, surrounded by radially placed guitars, all with a spotlight on it. And there are two of them.

So they look like breasts.

Lovely.

The season finale starts out with the cheesy shots of a gladitor putting on armor to Gregorian chanting and humming as a sound over. Cheeeeee-zeeeee! Cut to Luke and Joe talking smack. It works okay, but, eh, Luke seems too mellow to be an ultimate fighter. Good mental strength (omg good!), but, man, he's a small'un.

And then there's Rashad talking smack about Brad. Okay, yes, Rashad has fought two fights already. Yes, Rashad won both fights. But, dude, Brad is the 800 pound gorilla, you're an idiot.

To my surprise, shots of Diego and some other dude (Nick Imez) came on next. Diego! With long hair! We love Diego! He's the main event, with Kenny Florian, also from season 1 with Diego, fighting Kit Cope (note the one T - he's a boy). Who knew that Kenny could be good?

We just realized at this point that we missed the fight between Joe and Jason. Jason reminds me of Ariel Garza (like, Jason could be Ariel's cousin), so I wanted to see that fight. Oh, well.

Okay, so the announcers are introduced, blah, blah, blah, and they start to introduce the fighters. Somehow, who knows how, the fighters get to pick their nicknames. The announcers start with Joe "Daddy" Stevenson.

What the er...?

Daddy?

Daddy?!?

How fuckin' intimidating is the nickname "Daddy?" Clearly this fighter has been hit one too many times.

Luke and the others, thankfully, have no nicknames.

Ooooo, Diego and Nick have "bad blood" between and "these two hate each other." Might be a good fight. Ahhhhh, complete with words at the weigh-in.

Introducing the other fighters, we're still dumbfounded that Kenny is any good. He's actually fighting down a weight class from what he did on the show. Later, he was described as a "master of ju-jit-su, possessor of lethal elbows," which had both of us cracking up. Kenny landed a lucky shot on Leben in the semis last season to get the finals. And now, it's his seekrit weapon.

Someone tell me, what is he thinking? "Hey, this elbow has something! It worked for me the first time, let's keep it going!"

I so cannot listen to his smack talk. He says, "I'm the one who works hard for ..." and all I hear is, "I have lucky elbows! Whoo!"

Kit "the Havoc" Cope? The Havoc? Lord, someone rename these guys. Just because you're a four time Welterweight weenar doesn't mean you can give yourself a stupid name. Ooooo, he's a bare knuckle champion, too!

At least he has a good first name.

Blah blah blah, commercials, chest thumping, fight announcement. While being introduced, Kenny looked at the ground the whole introduction. I kept screaming, "Look up! Look up, you moron! You're being introduced, stop shuffling your feet. Look up!"

Kit weighs only 170 at 6'0". When I commented on it, Kris replied, "Look at his legs. He has chicken legs! Chick chick chicken legs!" Indeed. Kit's got nothing below the waist. Chicky!

Okay, yay, the fight started. Wow, lots of moving. One of the things that really cracks me up is the various positions these guys get in, and no one thinks anything of them. I mean, seriously interesting sexual positions if they weren't beating the crap out of each other.

Holy crap, Kenny managed an arm bar (a hyperextension of the elbow - "think of the arm as a lever, the elbow as the fulcrum, and pull") on Kit and the end of round bell sounded less than half a second before Kit tapped out! Kit stayed in for another round. Jeez! These fighters are clearly insane! He's lost the use of his right arm.

Okay, 35 seconds into the second round, Kit tapped out in a rear naked choke that was turning his face purple.

Oh, joy. Ring girls. Amber, if I really cared what your name was, I'd be downloading your photo from the UFC website. Oh, and that "mole" on your chin? Looks like a big zit. Lose the eyeliner.

Blah blah blah, human interest stories, blah blah blah, fight introduction, blah blah blah, CHUCK!. Cameo of Chuck Liddel, looking terribly stoned. Heh.

Joe against Luke. Before watching this, my money is totally on Joe. Luke, oh, Luke, do you really have a chance? Of course, "Joe Daddy" is a freaking retarded name, so style points to Luke. At some point, Joe's mother is put on camera. What is she thinking? "Good lord, what has my son gotten himself into? What the hell? He's going to get the crap beating out of him, and I have. to. watch? He's getting paid to do this?"

Luke, lose the retarded ski mask. You don't look like a ninja, you look like a kid playing dress up. Retarded dress up.

Oh, Luke, you have no chance.

Nice move, Joe. Go, Luke, go! Color me impressed with Luke's ability to escape Joe's takedown. Er, well, the first one anyway. Luke, Luke, Luke, keep the fight on your feet. Boxing good. Grappling bad. Sure, you can avoid the full submission, but it doesn't score well to have the bell save your ass two rounds in a row.

Yeargh! Kris! Tell me if this goes to the judges! "You have to watch." Boo! Boo to that!

"Oh, press that, Luke, I know you don't weigh for crap, but press with all your weight!"

Okay, so Luke lost, but the judges scores were close: 29-28, 30-27, 29-28.

The heavy weights. Rashad is annoying. My hope is that he loses, so let's watch... Daaaaaamn, big dude (Brad), get a move on, do more than just walk around and take a swing (and a miss!) or grab the neck and knee up. How about a jab jab jab? Stop getting that close! Ah well, Rashad won 29-28, 28-29, 29-28. Close.

Diego Sanchez versus Nick Diaz in the featured fight. Holy crap, what an amazing fight. Diaz is like another Diego, matching him move for move, countering each attack and returning them blow for blow. I can't imagine how tired these guys are going to be at the end of the fight. Oh, Diaz, don't land on your ass when you do a flying kick. Though, the dodging of the dropping punches from Diego is terribly impressive. Diaz! You almost had Diego's leg in a leg-bar! Man, oh, man! What a fight! Lots and lots of exclamation points! I might need to save this fight on tivo for a while. ARGH! What's with the crappy camera angles? If Diego is applying an arm-bar, let me freaking. see it! Well, looks like Diaz is going the distance with Diego, but if I were a judge, I'd have to call it for Diego, no question (and I'm right: 30-27, 30-27, 30-27).

WTF? Diego "the Nightmare" Sanchez? Good lord, what is up with these retarded names? How many times do I have to ask that?

Okay, end of Ultimate Fighter, season 2. I think the best part of this season just might be, "Hey, did you know that Ultimate Fighter Season 3 will air in spring 2006?"

Yeah.