It's all official now.

Mike and Kate are moving to the mountains. All of the financing and paperwork and rain dances and house ghoul banishments have been completed, and they are now the proud owners of a new home somewhere in the mountains south of Skyline and 9.

As always, I'm very excited for my friends. They're moving into a bigger house, with space for the kids, a built-in greenhouse, decks, three car garage, a playroom, lots of land and tighter-knit community; how could I not be thrilled for them? The house they're in now works well for two people, even two plus another little one, but not so well for two adults and two growing kids. It's the same size house as Kris' and mine: works for us, not so much for them.

The new place is fantastic and, as near as I can tell, perfect for them. The commute may be long, but that's more my suspicion than an opinion from either of them.

As happy as I am for them, I know I'm going to be sad when they move. Sad as I was when Ben and Lisa moved, though in a different way.

I like when Liza visits me unexpectedly. It's a nice warm feeling having this little person come over to talk, or to play, or to give me a drawing she made for me. I had hoped to make cookies with Liza as my Mom and I used to do with Andrea and Stephanie Gudis at Christmas time (though, Christmas in Arizona was never much different than any other December desert day).

I like when Mike just walks right into the house when he visits. It reminds me of walking over to the Klein's house when I was younger and just walking into the house. It's a feeling of comfort with certain friends that they know if the door is unlocked, they are welcome to walk right in, no knocking needed. Friends other than Mike seem to need my help opening the door, or express permission to walk in.

I'm going to miss them, in a selfish way of close friends becoming less conveniently close. Of losing the convenience of being able to borrow the shovel or sawz-all by walking four doors down the street, or catching a ride into work in the morning, or walking the dogs at night. It's losing the neighbors like my mom always seems to have when I was growing up: the ones that become good friends for a lifetime. I know they'll stay friends, but many close friendships stay close because of proximity.

I wonder if the the Bauers felt this way when we moved away when I was seven.

"Heh. I approve. Can I blog about it?"

"No, no, you can't. You've blogged about it enough. Farting is, like, its own category now."

"Is that really so bad?"

I made some comment to Kris recently about how I wish I had more formal computer science training. I took all of two programming classes in college, and learned the rest on my own. I believe I do okay, since programming is essentially solving one big logic problem, but every so often I solve a problem with brute force instead of creating an elegant solution.

Kris offered to help me out with the formal computer science education, and suggested we go through his Algorithms book. I agreed, figuring it would happen not before next year, given all of my copious free time.

When I was at Hackday yesterday, Kris pinged me and asked if PHP could handle recursion, which cracked me up (the answer being, uh, yes, of course). When I said yes, he asked me if I could write a recursive function that printed out a series of numbers, from one to the single function argument N. The two keys to this problem were recursion and single parameter.

Counting down from N to 1 was easy. I figure both are easy, but counting down is clearly the easier:

function kris($n = 1) {
  print "$n ";
  if ($n > 1) {
    kris($n - 1);
  }
}

Oddly enough, counting up was harder for me. I told Kris he couldn't offer any hints, and eventually I figured out a convoluted solution using a static variable. My solution clearly showed me my lack of CS education. Kris' solution was much simpler:

function kitt($n=1) { 
  if ($n>1) { 
    kitt($n-1);
  }
  print "$n ";
}

As Kris commented, people forget you can do the recursion first, and the action second, when writing recursive functions.

A candidate at Kris' work was unable to solve the problem, and he wanted to see if I could, especially since I was commenting on the CS education I didn't have. I did solve it, but not correctly.

Next time, I'll have the trick. This time? I felt like an idiot.

Lessons learned at Yahoo!'s Hackday '06

1. Geeks cannot give demos.

   Not quite completely true, but mostly. Granted, the focus on here is more for the technology, so presentation shouldn't be a top priority, but it's still an issue.

2. Geeks can develop some really cool shit.

   Completely true, but not necessarily everyone. Some of the projects were fairly lame, or not very exciting; others were entertaining; and some were fabulous. The presentation, however, affected my opinion of the project.

   My favorites so far are the useless color picker gadget, Ben's print posters selected from flickr photos tagged with keywords (the keyword typed into the printer's interface, and voila, pictures!), and Jordan's save-any-file-using-del.icio.us.

3. I need to think smaller when I work at these things

   My first idea was to create a new event finding utility for the UPA's Where to Play events page. I thought that would be uninteresting to most of the people here, so I opted instead to build a AJAX driven, Wordpress theme generator using the YUI CSS class.

   Anyone else see the problem with this project? If you said, "inexperience with all three of the technologies selected," you win a prize. I managed to get about 30% of the way done last night, working until about 3:30.

   When I arrived back here at Yahoo! this afternoon, I managed to get about 40% of the way done with the first project in the half hour I worked on the maps for the UPA.

   So, here I am with two unfinished projects, and no project to submit to the demo. I should have just gone with the one that was best for me. I really need to think smaller.

4. I need to watch my voice.

   I write as I think. What I read here tomorrow, next week, next month, next year is my voice of today. I can't say I particularly like what I'm reading these last few weeks. My voice seems harsh, even to me the day after I've written the words.

   I'm guessing it has to done with my general unhappiness with where I am in life right now, and my current inability to move beyond the blockers. Various health issues (my eye scar is itching, which isn't helping my general worry) are also becoming concerns. Good news with that, though, is that I managed to lose 2 pounds this month. Yay, me!

5. I need to be more outgoing.

   I'm convinced Kris is clueless when he says I'm a social butterfly. Maybe at ultimate, but not at places like here. I know various people, but for reasons unknown to me, I'm unable to meet new people recently. I suspect it has to do with the previous item.

I'm sure there are more lessons. There always are.

The day has been full of very interesting workshops. For the most part, they've been YahoO! centric, but not all of them have been completely so. My favorite events have been the hands-on workshops. The hands-on part hasn't been building anything huge, but it has been enough to kick start the use of the various APIs.

At the beginning of one of the hands-on workshops, one where the presenter provides files for the attendees to update and modify, following along with the presentation, a guy three or four people away from me asks the presenter to pause, he lost his wifi connection. The presenter immediately offered to copy files from his USB card to the attendees computer, if only he could find the fob. He started looking around, when the attendee offered to use his USB drive. The presenter said sure, and proceeded to plug in the device.

This exchange struck me as quite entertaining, mostly due to Windows viruses that can be transmitted via USB fobs, some more insiduous than others. The whole event smacked me as a clever social engineering hack attempt by the attendee to get access to the presenter's system.

Later in the day, during Cal's presenation, I noticed an artist drawing Cal. The picture itself was quite good, though the angle I had meant I couldn't really see if the likeness was strong. Later in the evening, after dinner, but before the Beck concert, the artist approached me and asked if he could draw me. Wow, I thought. Of all the people here he could draw, many of whom I think are more interesting than I, he chose to draw me. Cool!

A photographer took a picture over his shoulder of me, and then asked the artist his name and email. David Newman is his name, we'll see how the picture turns out. After looking at his website, I need to provide the disclaimer, I was fully clothed when he drew my picture, thinking, don't move, stay still, give him something real to draw. That, and don't stare back at him.

During the day, I saw Terry Chay, who I went to college with, wandering around. I've seen him here and at his presentation at OSCON last month. Vernon from VA Software (four years ago!) recognized me and said hello. He has an 18 month old boy, still lives in San Francisco.

I've been thrilled that there are more women here than most technical events. I suspect it's because there are actually women here at the company, making the number at the event greater. Not all of them are programmers, but that matters little to me: they're here, that matters.

Now, if only I could figure out a non-ultimate related hack.