Two days before his birthday, BJ came out to visit me. He came with a mission, and a task. There's a casting call for the tenth Amazing Race, and he wanted to apply for the show. Applying requires an application with enough information to completely steal an identity (including passport number and pictures), as well as a three minute personality video.

I have previously submitted an application (with Mark), and wasn't particularly looking forward to creating another video. I mean, if you can't get on the show by eating a raw egg (by which we mean eating the whole egg, including the shell, which Mark did), then I'm not sure what you need to do to get on that show.

We used a "BJ and the Bear" trucker theme for our video, complete with hayseed in the teeth, trucker hats and flannel shirts. We filmed together, but BJ did all the editing. I gave feedback, but for the most part, he did the work. It's pretty funny to me, though perhaps less so for him (or the show producers). We used Mike's camera, after buying a new firewire cable for it, so transferring the data to the laptop was incredibly easy. The editing took Beej a good five hours, so I'm glad I had him do it.

After the contestants are announced, if we don't make the next cut, we'll post the video online.

Maybe.

Last night, Kris and I journeyed north to the City to have dinner with Cal and Elina. The two of them have been hot for Ariel's family's tortilla recipe ever since they were over for communal dinner a couple months ago. Not that I blame them, they're tasty little things.

We showed up, and Kris was immediately as mesmerized with the view as I was the first time I went. Not that I blame him, it's still impressive.

The evening was awesome, as Elina and I made the tortillas, and the four of us talked about this and that and other things. I failed to follow my number one rule about teaching, though, and that's to let the person learning do all the work. I think Elina had enough hands on experience to do fine the next time she makes them. The goodies inside the tortillas were amazingly delicious and I'm hoping she'll send me that recipe back.

During dinner I had asked about Elina's first term at school, so after dinner, I asked if she had any work she could show-off to us. She did, and showed them to us on her really amazingly cool, really big monitor (one of those nice 30" Apple monitors that you just want to lick). When I said to Kris, "I want," he responded, "If you clean out the office, I'll get you one."

I turned to Elina and Cal, and replied, "You're my witnesses."

Kris is fairly confident he has a long while before he has to shell out the moolah. I can't say he isn't right.

An email came across the development list today (in the digest anyway), that, in a round about way, complained of the lack of instructions for some part of the system:

...
not only of external documention but of that oh-so-loved embedded in  
the code instructions for the image galleries settings --or should I  
say the NON-EXISTENT instructions.

There was another developer who started sending emails to the development list in a very aggressive manner, complaining that no one had instantly answered her questions, what kind of a support forum is this, she's not an idiot but she couldn't figure her problem out, why the hell isn't anyone answering questions, this product is crap.

Another organizer was at various developer meetups, talking about how great the project was, but it didn't have enough documentation. Someone needed to write documentation. Someone need to fix the bugs. Someone needed to help the new people. Someone should do it an do it now.

What is in common among the three of these people, aside from the fact they've complained about the project instead of (except for the first one) contributing to the project, is that they are all female. I'm not terribly sure why they're so aggressive in the community, it's entirely possible I'm just sensitive to the gender issue.

Personally, I find it annoying. I'm terribly less likely to help out someone who attacks what I'm working on as an introduction. I know I'm not the only one, either. A couple years ago at VA, when we were arranging desks and things, Mark commented to me he's more likely to seat Dom and Ariel in the good seats because they were very accomodating about seat preferences, versus some non-developers who were terribly insistent about where they "absolutely would not sit." I think Mark actually sat those people where they said they wouldn't sit. They sat there just fine.

Hey, so, check out my first contribution to the project. A better self-introduction to the development community than a rant or a you-should-do-this or a COMPLAINT about something being missing - do it yourself and stop complaining.

Sigh.

Nothing like listening to the nags of someone who doesn't have to do the upgrade to force one to do an upgrade without sufficient prep work, which is what I did tonight.

Flying by the seat of my pants, I upgraded four web servers, fingers crossed, data backed up, breath held and well, jumping up and down on one foot waving beagles disguised as chickens over my head.

Well, the upgrade didn't fly completely straight, and I had a good twenty minutes trying to figure out what Debian MySQL configuration file upgrades would have caused the problem. I eventually tracked the problem to an overly zealous bind-address setting, and now all is well.

This weekend will be a weekend of work, but at least the server update nags will stop.

If only I'd make the restaurant reservations...

Every since I had spent who-knows-how-long fighting with my original theme, I've been tempted to adjust my current theme regularly. I didn't until last month, and now I'm almost tempted to change them to match the upcoming holiday.

This one, for example, is so girly that I almost want to puke. Totally cracks me up! Ah, laughing about one's own website. The best!

Yay, CSS!

I'll probably leave this theme up until Valentine's Day, or until I actually do wretch from all the pink.

Pink! Mom tells me how, when I was a small person, I cried when she painted my room pink. I didn't want pink! Pink! PINK! PINK! The story cracks me up, because the first bedroom color I can be sure of is the white top, dark blue bottom colors of my room with the fan and the east facing window on Washington Street. Oooo! And the striped carpeting. And the Raggety Ann and Raggety Andy curtains!

I also slept in the front room at one point, but I can't tell you if the walls were green or grey or white or what.

Maybe if Mom logs in, she can tell me what colors those rooms were.