Category Archives: Personal

Elliot is 5

Happy Birthday Elliot! Elliot is five today. He is getting to be a very big boy now. Last Saturday I took him to Elitch Gardens. We spent a great six hours playing. You cannot go wrong with a day of sugar, video games and rides. He is big enough to ride quite a few rides there. […]

Audrey is 3

Happy third birthday Audrey! We had a great day today. First, we got up late – well, I did anyway, and Elliot and Audrey played together nicely while I caught a few extra Zs – and opened presents. The red headed Cabbage Patch doll is the favorite as of this evening, but the Lego were […]

Letting Her Die

At the pool the other day Audrey slipped off a ledge she was standing on and fell into the deep water. Her head went under water for maybe ten seconds before I was able to get to her. No sooner does she catch her breath than she says “You were going to let me dead1”, […]

Will code for …

I am no longer with Gnip. Which means that am available for other opportunities. I know a fair bit about REST, HTTP, web services, extensible system design and scalable architecture. I like agile (small a) processes, Behavior (or test) driven development and dynamic languages. I am also pretty good at designing data interchange formats in JSON and XML. […]

Sprinklers

I have been battling the sprinkler system in my front yard for a while now. I spend a good part of last weekend working on it only to have completion of the project ripped from my grasp by a burst pipe (and my lack of competence in sprinkler systems). Today, however, I am triumphant. Here is […]

My Brother Has a Blog (Finally)

Cat and I have been gently suggesting that my brother should get a blog for years. Now he has finally done it. I am not sure what the personality1 of his blog will turn out to be, but I am looking forward to finding out. He is smart – and a better photographer than I […]

I ♥ Spring

Winter is definitely over here in Denver. This is the scene that greeted me in the kitchen when I arrived home from work today. I created that arrangement this morning and didn’t even notice. The white bucket on a carafe is a cold brew coffee maker. It makes excellent iced coffee. It really screams summer […]

My (Soon to Be) New Gig

I recently started feeling a bit like Joey deVilla did before he changed jobs. I was way too comfortable and needed some real challenges to drive my career and personal development forward. That combined with my long standing1 envy of those lucky people involved in startups lead me to explore the startup scene in Boulder2. Now that […]

Elliot Climbs Trees

Today Elliot reached a huge milestone. He discovered tree climbing. This afternoon Elliot was playing in the back yard while I was busy preparing dinner. After being outside a while Elliot ran inside and said very excitedly, “I was sitting in the tree.” This is huge. I had wondered a few months ago — about the […]

What’s Average?

Today I said to Elliot, “on average …” (What I was talking about is not very interesting. Trust me.) Of course, Elliot immediately asked what average is. It turns out that describing average to a four year old is really hard. My first inclination was to describe the function that is used to calculate the arithmetic mean of […]