Thursday, 31 December 2009

My major accomplishment for the morning was getting up (after landing in Lincoln much later than I had planned) and eating breakfast. My major accomplishment for the afternoon was getting groceries. After breakfast, I recruited volunteers for meals and Yanthor solicited shopping lists from these volunteers before we set out in the cold for his nearby Hy-Vee. (It's a grocery store endemic in the American Midwest.) Lincoln was in the midst of a cold spell, with daytime highs barely creeping into the teens and piles of snow still on the ground from several weeks prior. We successfully navigated the snow-covered streets and icy parking lot and began trawling the aisles for fortifications.

I'm used to going grocery shopping with Kiesa, who has the layout of our local grocery stores memorized and sorts her shopping list in advance for optimal efficiency. Yanthor provided no such advantage, but we still managed to find the food we needed. (I also realized I had left my driver's license in my fleece, having used it to prove to the TSA that I wasn't a terrorist (because terrorists don't have state-issued photo identification) but not having identification didn't prove troublesome.)

Back at Yanthor's residence, I made coffee (having run out of coffee beans the day before) and set out to create my Dungeons and Dragons character. My brilliant idea was to hide the fact that I was an inexperienced roll-player by I creating a character who was inexperienced and impulsive. My rogue demon-hunter was loosely inspired by Wesley Windham-Pryce's first appearance in Angel. I created a noble-born third son who got bored with his position and decided to set out in search of adventure. He was impulsive and aggressive and not particularly perceptive.

Yanthor handed me a stack of D&D books and I figured out how to fill out my character sheet in the context of the game. My character became a level one human fighter with high intelligence and strength but low wisdom and charisma.

(Yanthor's stack of books were hardcover, and I stopped to wonder whether this was a cheap trick on the part of the publisher to extract more money from loyal fans for hardcover books, or whether it was a legitimate attempt to keep the books from falling apart under the stress of being stuffed into backpacks every week for years on end.)

As he was setting up his dungeon master paraphernalia, Yanthor realized he was forgetting one key thing: water-soluble markers for marking up his combat board so we knew where the walls and other terrain features were. I volunteered to find the markers he sought and headed out on the snow-covered streets in Yanthor's car. I visited Hy-Vee and Walgreens and failed to find suitable markers but did find them at the Super Walmart sitting in the middle of a field on the outskirts of town.

One thing I didn't anticipate was that Thax (my rogue demon-hunter; I couldn't come up with a better name on short notice) would become the leader of the band. Linknoid played a halfling and seemed to have even less of an idea what he was doing than I did. Humblik had far more role-playing experience but played a NPC-turned-player-character goblin who was more interested in mischief than adventure. Yanthor had the most role-playing experience but set out to be our dungeon-master. I tried to follow his guru lineage back to the source but it appeared that his guru had been playing D&D for decades.

Yanthor dungeon-masters at Megafest 8.2

We spent the remainder of the afternoon building our character sheets and set out to play after supper. Nemo arrived just in time to watch our modestly-multiplayer offline role-playing game. The adventure started slowly, as we settled into our roles and tried to figure out what we were supposed to be doing. As dungeon master, Yanthor wanted to do as much storytelling as combat but had the strange position of needing to shape the story to match what he had planned without constraining the players.

Humblik plays D&D at Megafest 8.2

The adventure finally came to our first fight as the clock crept inexorably towards midnight. Yanthor needed time to set up the combat, and there was a new year to count down to. (When the calendar on my desk runs out, I go buy a new one, rather than deciding the world is going to end.) I installed xdaliclock on Hobbes and watched the hypnotic numbers count down to midnight, central time.

Humblik and Amy at Megafest 8.2

(For the record, that's sparkling grape juice in the disposable plastic goblets, just in case anyone is wondering.)

With the new year properly welcomed, we turned back to the hard work of fighting the bandits haunting the road between two innocent communities enjoying an idealized version of medieval European life. Before entering combat, Linknoid's halfling set a trap on a path in an attempt to catch the bandits as they exited their camp. When they finally came into view (early morning, game time) my character awoke, drew his sword, and charged the bandits. Yanthor asked if my character was going to avoid the trap. I deadpanned, "The what-now?" And Thax entered his first in-game combat hanging up-side-down by his ankles from the nearest tree, perfectly in character.

We managed to vanquish the small band of bandits and take their leader captive, only to find out that he had further information to advance the plot, just in time to call the first segment of our adventure a success.

I still need to pick up my typhoid fever immunization pills and anti-malarial drugs, and get two more hepatitis A and B shots this month. (I originally scheduled the return visit next Monday, before I realized I'll be in San Diego for a brief two-day visit to the Mothership.) I still feel my tetanus shot two days later; I'm not optimistic that I'll be able to sleep on my left side tonight.

(In other vaccine-related news, yesterday The Lancet retracted a 1998 study linking the childhood MMR vaccine to autism due to a conflict of interest, lack of ethical approval, and misrepresentation. There's very little commentary I can add except to say that: (1) I'm an engineer, not a doctor or a celebrity; (2) in most if not all cases, I believe the available evidence unequivocally shows that the risk of contracting terrible diseases far outweighs the uncertain side effects; and (3) Calvin (and I) will be getting a full set of immunizations, even if I'm occasionally eight years late on my own tetanus booster. Please don't get me started on what I think about parents who choose not to vaccinate their children.)

Calvin topples the living room lamp

As Calvin became more mobile, he discovered the floor lamp in the living room and decided it would be a great post to use to pull himself up. Lacking a better way to illuminate the living room, and the time necessary to find an alternate lighting scheme, we left the lamp in place but tucked part of the base under the new entertainment cabinet, providing a bit of protection against Calvin pulling it down. At least, we thought it was keeping the lamp from falling over until Calvin pulled on the lamp enough to cause the base to crack. The lamp listed ominously for several days (barely propped up with the pack-and-play in the living room) until Saturday, when I pulled the lamp out to take a look and the base disintegrated. It looked like the base was built from an unreinforced concrete counterweight. I pulled a broken lamp out of the garage and managed to bolt its fully-functioning base onto the bottom of my otherwise-functioning lamp, then installed the lamp behind the couch where Calvin can't get to it. In general it works pretty well, but it doesn't provide quite enough light for our weekly videoconferences with Calvin's grandmothers.

On Sunday morning, Kiesa went to a baby shower, leaving me with Calvin. I had been thinking of trying to take Calvin on another hike (even though my last four attempts were less than spectacular), so as soon as Calvin woke up from his morning nap I strapped him into his carseat and headed to Rabbit Mountain. He was pretty happy at first but started fussing before I made it halfway to the Little Thompson Overlook. I pulled him out of the carrier, let him wiggle for a bit, and feed him a few cheerios (which he chewed and spat out; he did better with cheerios before he figured out he could push them out of his mouth after chewing on them) before putting him back in the carrier and pressing onward. This may not have been the right move; he started bawling by the time I'd covered half of the remaining distance. I thought my best option was to press on and try to feed him on the bench at the overlook. This proved far easier said than done; he drank only a few ounces of formula and continued bawling for fifteen minutes until a group of hikers with a dog arrived. Calvin was fascinated by the dog, distracting him from his suffering. (I quipped that Calvin wasn't enjoying hiking as much as I'd hoped, and the older woman in the group (whom I took to be the mother of the younger adult woman in the group) responded, "Give him twenty years.")

I wrapped Calvin in a blanket in hopes of providing a bit more protection against the cold and headed back to the trailhead. He fussed for a bit, then cheered up when I started bouncing him up and down, then fussed a bit more, and seemed to sleep for ten or fifteen minutes as I tried to hold him steady. He started fussing again when I put him back in his carseat but quieted down when I turned on the engine to head back home. (He was happy enough that I took a detour to wash Kiesa's car; he seemed sufficiently amused by the spectacle of being inside a car while it was being washed.)

Kiesa took Calvin for the rest of the afternoon, giving me the opportunity to finish the last half of the book club book, The Windup Girl. Overall I enjoyed the book, but I couldn't help but wonder if genetically-engineered megadonts would really be a better source of power than biofuels.

Kiesa gets up with Calvin every morning but Sunday, when I get up whenever Calvin decides it's time to get up, and Kiesa sleeps in. (He usually gets up between 06:00 and 07:00.) A month or two ago Calvin figured out how to take two-hour morning naps in his crib, and he'll often take an afternoon nap when he's at home. This gives Kiesa more time in the morning; she no longer takes Calvin to daycare before mid-day. (I still find that listening to the monitor keeps me slightly on edge; I'm still on call, noticing for any changes portending the end of Calvin's nap.) In the evening, Calvin gets a bath and a final bottle before going to bed by 19:00.

For most of the month of January, I felt like I was simply treading water, keeping pace but not really getting ahead with the things I wanted to be doing to keep myself grounded. It took me a week to decide that might be ok; Calvin gets easier to take care of every month, so if I'm keeping station now I might actually get traction next month, or the month after that. It doesn't help that I don't have a dominant winter sport; I hiked all three of Boulder's highest peaks in one day before Christmas, leaving little left to do in Boulder's mountain park. I can snowshoe, and I keep thinking about getting cross-country skis to let me cover a bit more ground. The snow that fell around Christmas never melted on the unpaved path I like to run on from work; it started as loose snow, then packed snow, and has now turned to ice. Elsewhere the dirt paths have turned to mud. On Tuesday I ran with my Yaktrax shoe chains, and today I abandoned running outside in favor of a treadmill.

Most of my available discretionary time is absorbed by my trip to India in five weeks. I'm working through a very long history of modern India (1947-present), and having actually purchased plane tickets, I need to start thinking about my actual schedule on the ground. I know I'm not going to make it through my reading list before departing, so I need to start triaging and picking out the more important books.

My day job continues to entertain, amuse, and occasionally frustrate me. I'm finally on the cusp of wrapping up a project I've spent a year on (an interim version is currently in use; I'll deploy the final version and hope I don't annoy too many stakeholders by the different design choices made in the final version). Today I spent much of the day looking at a strange bug that seemed to manifest itself as a heap corruption issue but turned out to be an uninitialized variable; the init function I was calling expected the variable to be zeroed, and my code didn't zero the variable first. (I knew it would be a stupid error but I wasn't quite sure where to find it.) The six-month review period officially ends tomorrow, so I spent some time today remembering what I did for the past six months and writing it all down in one place.

I'm never quite sure what each day will bring, and each week is an adventure, but the trend seems encouraging.

(Most countries I've traveled to never asked me to get a visa. My most complicated visa prior to India was Australia, where my corporate travel arranger applied online and e-mailed me something to stick in my passport. But no matter how complicated India is, it's nothing compared to the United States. I did not have to travel to the consulate, in person, for a face-to-face interview. Any further complaints I may have about the visa process are entirely hypocritical given my own government's xenophobic antagonism to visitors and immigration.)

(The more I learn about India the more I think I understand little bits and pieces of the country's reaction to the western world. India's colonial repression is still a recent memory, and India's stated goal of remaining non-aligned during the Cold War did not go over well with the "you're with us or you're against us" anti-Communist attitude permeating the United States. India wants to be a great power on its own terms, which means growing up and making its own mistakes without outside intervention. This means India doesn't care about whether I visit or not.)

I called Willy again on my Saturday night (his Sunday morning) and confirmed the dates. I had one more moving piece yet to nail down: whether I'd take a side trip to my employer's office in Hyderabad while I was in the neighborhood. (Where "in the neighborhood" means "on the same subcontinent", since the closest I'd get to Hyderabad would be Delhi.) This would confer one main advantage: If I could stretch my trip out through the next weekend, I could take advantage of the weekend-multiplier effect to get an additional two days to come home, rather than taking actual vacation days on the return flight. (I've also come to appreciate the benefits of visiting foreign offices to get a feeling for how people actually work on the ground, and seeing people face-to-face whom I would otherwise see only by e-mail is also useful.) The more I looked at my schedule and timing, the less this seemed like it would work, and I'd probably need to get a business visa. On Monday, I e-mailed my tech lead (to whom I had previously floated the possibility) my analysis and he agreed that it didn't look like it would work.

With everything resolved, I set out to look at flights on Monday evening. I had previously identified three direct flights from North America to India (on American Airlines, Continental, and Air India); most other possible flights involved a stop in Europe. For early March, the direct flights were the cheapest, and I had my pick of schedules at roughly the same price. American's polar flight from Chicago to Delhi looked like the best option for both schedule and price. I stared at the proposed flights for a few minutes while I contemplated my point of no return, then clicked "Go" and bought the ticket.

After buying the ticket, I had a bit of trouble navigating American Airlines' website to find my reservation info, and they didn't send me a confirmation e-mail, so I wasn't entirely sure I had a ticket. The credit card charge appeared by Tuesday morning, so I knew I hadn't totally lost the ticket, but I feared I'd need to call them to get the confirmation (as was Kiesa's experience with her concurrent airline reservation). I went back to the website on Tuesday evening and found the link I was looking for to find my reservation while logged into my brand-new frequent flyer account. (I finally got my e-mail confirmation late Tuesday night, twenty-four hours later.)

I have plenty of planning left to do on my trip to India (and plenty of reading to do); the tentative plan is to fly to Guwahati, swing by Willy's school in Meghalaya, and work my way back to Delhi via Kathmandu. I have less than six weeks before I fly halfway around the world, and it should be interesting.

Last Saturday I decided to label the forty-three unlabeled books in my collection, many of which joined my collection at Christmas. When I started printing LC labels, using 80-labels-per-sheet return address labels, I was so frustrated by OpenOffice.org's support for labels (especially my inability to import a long list of text to print on individual labels, or even copy-and-paste across multiple labels) that I set out on my own, using CSS to format my HTML to position text at the precise position on the printed page. This worked fine at first; I told my browser to suppress all headers and print at zero-inch margins and all was well. Last weekend it failed horribly; I couldn't get any of the browsers at my disposal to print zero-inch margins that were actual zero-inch margins, so I had to manually adjust the physical positions I gave in my CSS to match the arbitrary offsets given by my browser. This felt dirty but worked fine, but I knew I could do better.

Having rejected word processing systems for my label-printing needs (given the manual intervention required and the lack of accessible scriptability), I set out in search of something that I could generate from a Perl script and precisely control on-page formatting. I looked briefly at TeX, which seemed a bit overly-complicated for my needs, and realized I could do everything I needed to do in PostScript.

On evenings during the week, I downloaded and read PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook, then scanned PostScript Language Reference, third edition for specific information on picking page sizes and determining font metrics. (It's pretty cool that PostScript allows a single document to be reformatted to fit the media at hand, but my application requires prior knowledge of the page size.) I started banging out PostScript code, starting with a simple box and moving on to drawing a sequence of boxes outlining the labels on the page. (I don't want to outline the labels in practice, but it gives me a very useful way to see how well my printed output matches the sheet of labels.) I wrote a for loop in PostScript:

0 1 cols 1 sub {
  /x exch def
  0 1 rows 1 sub {
    /y exch def

    gsave
    left x hpitch mul add pageheight top sub y vpitch mul sub translate

    % Draw the bounding box
    newpath
    0 0 moveto
    width 0 rlineto
    0 height neg rlineto
    width neg 0 rlineto
    0 height rlineto
    closepath
    stroke

    grestore
  } for
} for

For those unfamiliar with PostScript, this may look like gibberish. PostScript is a stack-based language; each operation pops and pushes some values from and to the stack. The for loop takes a block of code, which it iterates through, leaving the value for the current iteration on top of the stack. Adapting to this way of thinking was an interesting exercise; I had to visualize what was on the stack at any given time, and I had the opportunity to write more complicated compound expressions than I might have otherwise attempted. (I'm also worried I ended up with under-documented write-only code; I haven't yet figured out the best way to format and document my code. Debugging was also tricky; I did find the operator to dump the current stack to the debugging console, which gave me enough information to figure out that I was drawing my box up from the current position rather than down as I had intended.)

To write the text, I added an array with the labels to print:

% Content to print on labels
/content [
(BL1130.A4 B472)
(DS406.B56 2009)
(DS406.B76 2008)
(DS407.G75 2008)
(DS436.T17 1999)

] def

Then added code inside my inner loop to index into the array, find the width of the string in the current font, and center the string horizontally and vertically inside the current box:

    % Write the text itself
    i content length lt {
      0 0 moveto
      content i get
      dup stringwidth pop
      width exch sub 2 div
      height fontsize add 2 neg div
      moveto
      show
    } if

    /i i 1 add def

That last line of code is the PostScript equivalent of "i++".

Those interested in reading my PostScript program for themselves may find my full code here: labels.ps. Further refinement is needed in the font selection, vertical centering, and automatic generation from the LibraryThing database, but I think it's a pretty impressive result for a few hours of work.

Wednesday, 30 December 2009

My day was dominated by my flight from Portland to Lincoln to begin Megafest 8.2, while Kiesa and Calvin stayed in Longview. After a leisurely breakfast (and my last hand-roasted coffee) at the Stone Estate in Longview, I managed to finish my packing. This involved a bit of negotiation and stuffing, since I wanted to pack exclusively carry-on luggage to save $45 in airline checked luggage fees.

The first leg of my flight to Lincoln was United flight 572, from Portland to Denver. (This time, it was mere coincidence that Denver happens to be my home airport; it was simply the most convenient way to get from Portland to Lincoln.) I ate supper and settled in to wait for my flight to Lincoln. I started out at the east end of Concourse B, then moved into the new regional jet terminal hanging off the south-east end of the concourse when my gate changed. We boarded quickly ahead of the 20:13 scheduled departure; the flight had only 22 people on board, giving us plenty of room to spread out across the CRJ-200. We taxied toward runway 8, then seemed to pull off to the side of the taxiway while other planes passed us. After a few minutes, the pilot came on the intercom to announce that an unspecified computer glitch was forcing us back to the gate for repairs.

I text-messaged Yanthor to let him know I would be delayed from my airport pickup as we headed back to the gate. We pulled up to a different gate than the one we left and stayed on the plane for a few minutes while maintainence arrived and started poking at the plane. They decided they needed more time, so around 20:45 we were ushered off the aircraft at gate B50 to wait for news on whether the plane could be repaired for our flight.

As we sat at the gate, United dispatch decided to update their flight schedule to show the flight as delayed, so their helpful automated system texted me updates on my flight delays. At least, the updates would have been helpful had they told me anything new; all I learned from the stream of text messages was that they didn't know anything either.

I charged my computer and had plenty of time to stretch while waiting for my flight. I thought about reading, but I had finished reading Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire as we returned to the gate and I wasn't really awake enough to parse very much text. The airport services closed down around us as the evening wore on. I contemplated my options; with Denver as my home airport, I had a car in the parking lot and I could drive home and come back the next morning, but the next flight to Lincoln was late in the morning and I didn't really want to go to the trouble unless they canceled my flight.

Maintainence took the aircraft out for a taxi to try to reproduce the original failure condition, but the results were inconclusive, so by 23:00, a new plan emerged: the flight crew would take the plane up for a quick spin around the neighborhood to see if the angry amber light reappeared, and if it didn't, they'd conclude it was safe to fly to Lincoln. (At one point, one of the pilots mentioned that he wouldn't time out until 05:00 the next morning, giving us plenty of time to get to Lincoln.) They left the gate and we continued waiting.

Around midnight, the airport started to look like a brightly-lit ghost town. All of the remaining United gate agents were clustered around our podium and looked busy, but it wasn't clear what they were doing. At 00:45 the news came in that we were going to fly to Lincoln after all. The plane returned, and after an orderly reboarding process we were off. Again.

Once we were in the air, we managed to avoid any further flight-related drama or delays. While landing in Lincoln, I saw the plane's shadow, cast by the light of the full moon, in the snow-covered fields.

We landed in Lincoln after 03:00 CST. I found Yanthor, who had fallen asleep waiting for me at the tiny airport, and waited for my gate-checked bag to make it through the luggage system. We headed to his house on the eastern edge of Lincoln, chatted for a bit, and went to bed. Kiesa's absence displaced me from my normally-scheduled basement guest bedroom; I ended up sleeping on the massive new couch encircling the entertainment center.

I didn't actually manage to call back until I was back at work last week. (Since we were out of town for Christmas and New Year's, we wouldn't have been able to accept delivery until last week anyway.) They had a Saturday delivery slot, which I accepted. Friday night I set out to clean out my old cabinet, consisting of a cabinet and a printer stand both picked up off the side of the road and a cheap Walmart bookshelf for storing DVDs.

The old entertainment cabinet

The new cabinet arrived Saturday morning just as I was sitting down for breakfast. One delivery guy noted how perfectly the cabinet fit in the space allocated for it, and the other delivery guy noted the straight shot into the house from the front door. I paid the balance on their hand-held point-of-sale terminal and wondered whether it was using a cellular network to verify my credit card.

(We configured the cabinet to match our existing living room furniture as much as possible, but once it was delivered I saw that the "wheat" stain was at least two shades lighter than the oak coffee table. In practice this shouldn't matter; the style is identical and it's close enough that it's hard to care.)

The newly-delivered entertainment cabinet

I set out to configure the cabinet, starting with the cable access ports. The salesguy told me the delivery guys would be able to cut my access ports, but I decided I'd rather do it myself once I had the opportunity to study the cabinet and how my A/V stack would fit in it. I visited my local hardware store to pick up a three-inch hole saw and returned home to modify my new cabinet. I cut one hole at the bottom of each cabinet and one additional hole in the middle of the left cabinet. I set up the printer in the right cabinet and the A/V stack (consisting only of my Mac Mini, a receiver, and a DVD player) in the left cabinet.

The new entertainment cabinet

I'm not totally satisfied with the placement of my speakers on the top of the cabinet (especially the subwoofer), but I'm not sure what my other options are. I was worried about the standing lamp, but it looks like there's enough clearance under the cabinet for the base of the lamp, and the cabinet may even keep Calvin from knocking the lamp over. I still need to tie the television onto the cabinet to keep it from falling over, though it's much harder for Calvin to reach in its current position.

I'm happy with the new cabinet. It raises the level of decorum in my living room and should serve us well for decades.

If you're already subscribed to my RSS feed, you shouldn't have to do anything for the new content to show up, though if your aggregator is caching old entries you won't see anything there. If you're not already subscribed to my feed, and you're into that sort of thing, look for the "RSS" links at the bottom of the page, or in whatever form your web browser displays the <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" /> tags. Readers already subscribed to my entry feed may be interested in the brand-new comment feed, allowing you to keep up with what passes for discussion on this site.

If you're logged in while reading this page, and you look carefully at the RSS urls, you'll see an arbitrary 128-bit hex-encoded cookie in the url. (In this sentence, I'm using "cookie" in the generic sense of an arbitrary token, not an HTTP cookie.) This cookie allows my RSS feed to identify you and show your aggregator articles that might not be otherwise available to the public at large. This has its downsides: Certain RSS aggregators are known to have funny (and by "funny" I mean "broken") ideas of what a "private" RSS feed is. I spend a fair amount of effort making sure my online writings are targeted at the right audience, and all of this effort goes to waste when an aggregator decides to make my feeds searchable. (I rarely say anything about my job in public entries, but I say more where I'm fairly confident Google can't find it.) As a result, only world-readable entries (those one could read by visiting my site without logging in at all) are visible in their entirety in the RSS feed. Articles restricted to all logged-in users have their first paragraph included "above the fold" in the feed (up to the first blank line, which seemed close enough in practice) with a link to my site to log in and read more. Articles restricted to a subset of logged-in users have only a link back to my site.

(The same applies to comments. My "above-the-fold" parser isn't smart enough to find paragraph tags, but it'll find the first blank line and snip there for logged-in-user-only comments.)

Let me know if you run into any trouble with my feed. I hope this will portend a brave new era of RSS-based content aggregation.

Sunday, 27 December

Calvin managed to sleep in a bit on Sunday morning, at my parents' house in Walla Walla. Kiesa got up with him when he woke up, giving me a bit more sleep before getting up myself. Kiesa wanted to leave early enough so that our drive coincided with Calvin's morning nap, which suggested a departure around 09:00. She also hoped to get to her parents' house in Longview by 14:00 for her family's Christmas celebration, which was scheduled in early afternoon to allow her grandparents to return to Portland before it got too dark. I wasn't quite sure about the merits of this plan, but I didn't have any better ideas.

We bid my family farewell and headed out in the early-morning fog. Our first task was locating coffee; I didn't want to take the time to make my own coffee and subsequently wash my coffee press. Both of the coffee shops we knew about in College Place were closed, so we headed into Walla Walla and found an open Starbucks. Kiesa got a doughnut to round out her breakfast. Finding our way out of Walla Walla seemed harder than it should have been, which I blame on inadequate signage.

We headed west and Calvin took his morning nap. On the outbound drive from Portland, I used the rental car stereo's auxiliary input jack to listen to podcasts from my iPod, but on the return journey I didn't want to disrupt Calvin's nap. The drive was uneventful until Calvin needed a diaper change around Hood River. Oregon's rest stop restrooms seem to be missing baby changing tables, but I did find a bench that worked fairly well.

We rendezvoused with Tristan and Jessica at PDX's cell phone waiting area, where we transferred our stuff into the vehicle they drove and returned our rental car. Calvin was fussy on the drive up to Longview; it was time for his afternoon nap but he didn't want to sleep.

We arrived in Longview at about 14:30 and found most of Kiesa's extended family waiting for us. Calvin perked up when he saw he had an audience but started getting fussy again after we started eating. He didn't want to take his afternoon nap, and even exciting new bath toys weren't enough to keep him entertained during his bath. He did calm down once it was bedtime, giving the rest of us the opportunity to open Christmas presents in relative peace. Kiesa and I opened Calvin's presents, which included two sets of Duplos for him to grow into. (Most of the pieces in one of the basic sets should be safe for him at the moment, but he's not going to be able to actually build anything just yet.)

Monday

Kiesa and I left Calvin with his grandmother and headed into Portland for our traditional Powells pilgrimage and to get away for an afternoon. I considered various options for getting into and parking in Portland and ultimately decided to park at the Lloyd Center and take MAX across the river into downtown Portland. We drove Kiesa's mother's new (though previously-loved) Prius, which was interesting. It took a bit of time to get used to some of the design choices, like the tiny gearshift lever and the pushbutton engine start. It felt a bit like a concept car with a lot of interesting features, most of them half-baked.

Our first stop in Portland was the Chinese Garden, occupying a city block that used to be a parking lot. We stopped by the Tower of Cosmic Reflections teahouse for tea and a snack, which proved how little I really know about tea. I picked an arbitrary green tea, and Kiesa picked a flavored black tea. (Somehow I had the impression that she didn't care for tea, but the reality is that she simply doesn't go out of her way to drink it, especially since caffeine doesn't actually affect her.) We continued our tour of the garden, which was a beautiful refuge in the middle of the city, though it was a bit crowded by the post-Christmas crowds. (At least half of the visitors seemed to be Asian, which seemed to be a higher density than the Portland norm.)

We walked to Powells, aided by the map on my phone. The weather was crisp and sunny; the sun seemed out of place for Portland in December, but I wasn't going to complain. Inside Powells, I headed to travel and looked at Nepali trekking guidebooks and picked up a map of north-eastern India. (The latest incarnation of my plan for visiting Willy in India suggests spending most of our time trekking from Kathmandu, though before buying too many more guidebooks I'd like to double-check some of the sundry transportation logistics. Among other things, most standard treks assume one has weeks to spend in Nepal, which probably makes sense in the general case (why go to the trouble of going all the way to Nepal if one isn't going to spend very much time there?) but breaks down in our case.) I thought about heading to science fiction but got sidetracked in Indian history; I spent the better part of an hour studying the collection and walked away with four books about modern Indian history, starting with independence in 1947 and going through 1991. Most were focused on Indira Gandhi, but one covered Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in 1991. One was titled Underground Literature during Indian Emergency, and reprinted political resistance literature during the "emergency", when Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution from 1975 to 1977. I wasn't sure I'd be able to understand very much of it, but it seemed too good to pass up.

I found Kiesa in science fiction and managed to avoid looking at the books at all, since I already had an armful of books. Kiesa declared herself done and we headed to checkout.

Our final stop in Portland was dinner at Thai Peacock, a few blocks from Powells. Dinner was good; I had pineapple curry and Kiesa had pumpkin curry.

We took the long way back to the MAX back to Lloyd Center, which involved taking the streetcar for one stop and catching a crowded MAX train across the river. A few stops after we boarded, a small group of tea party activists boarded the train, carrying protest signs, headed for the stadium (or convention center; I couldn't quite tell which). I tried to figure out why they were taking taxpayer-funded public transit, especially since we were within the Fareless Square, where light rail fares are entirely free.

The rest of our journey back to Longview was uneventful. Calvin was in bed by the time we got back. I played one game each of Dutch Blitz and Settlers of Catan with Tristan and Jessica and entered my haul of new books in LibraryThing.

Tuesday

I got up when Calvin woke up at a modestly early hour. Kiesa's mother was up and took care of him. I amused myself trying to catalog a few of the guidebooks that I couldn't copy-catalog. Based on my collection, I wanted to put the Indian guidebook next to the Indian cultural reference for travelers, and it made the most sense to put both of these books in the same general section as my Indian history books. (I found a corner case where Library of Congress numbers break down; there is no specific place where South Asian guidebooks are supposed to go, but there are two or three places where American guidebooks might go. (I also discovered that my copy of Jarhead is shelved in Iraqi History, which isn't really the right place for it.)) This forced me to assign my own numbers for these books, which was exciting. Kiesa pointed me in the right direction as she caught up on her work e-mail and we both kept an eye on Calvin crawling around the living room.

Kiesa's parents' living room has two steps going down from the entryway into the living room. Calvin found these steps early in our visit and proceeded to pull himself up on the first step and then tried to attack the second step. This proved somewhat more difficult, but with some practice he managed to climb both steps, though he kept trying to turn around and sit up before he was fully secure on the top step. We kept an eye on him as he climbed, but only rarely did we have to break his fall. He seemed to adapt well to the stairs.

In addition to his new toys, Calvin especially enjoyed being pushed around the living room while sitting on a wheeled toddler walking toy. He made some effort to stand and push the toy via the handle designed for that purpose, but was far more interested in being pushed while riding the toy.

We ended up with a vast oversupply of books and other materials that we needed to take back home. I segregated my books into those that I wanted to use in the next several days and those that I wouldn't mind shipping home. (Many of these were Christmas presents. Some were those I borrowed from my family, and some were those I acquired at Powells.) Kiesa threw in two audio cds and a boxed set of The Bible in Living Sound. This filled most of a modestly-sized book box from the garage but left enough room for a handful of music books. When Calvin woke from his afternoon nap, Kiesa, Calvin, and I headed into central Longview to mail the books to ourselves and to visit the library. It was snowing as we left, large wet flakes that quickly covered everything. I had seen the art deco facade of the Longview post office but I may have missed the subtle art deco interior in the two-story foyer. We ended up mailing 30 pounds of books and cds to ourselves and got to use "media mail", the twenty-first century version of book rate.

Our next stop was the Longview Public Library, sitting in a stately building with classical pretense across the circle from the post office. (As we climbed the stairs to the main stacks, I noted that nothing says classical pretense quite like travertine.) Kiesa sat Calvin down in front of the board books, and he amused himself looking through the books, playing with the age-appropriate toys, and pulling out the letters in the letter board I gave him.

Calvin seemed fussier than normal during his evening bath but went to bed without complaining. I packed for the third phase of my holiday (flying to Lincoln for Megafest 8.2) and stayed up late documenting the first phase of my Christmas holiday, and Kiesa stayed up slightly later finishing the paperback (Victorian paranormal romance?) she got at Powells.

North-east ridge of Mount Hood from N737JW

Calvin had only a short nap on the plane but managed to stay fairly happy throughout the rest of the flight. Kiesa let him sit and stand on her lap as long as the seatbelt sign was off.

North-west face of Mount Hood from N737JW

Portland was covered in fog; I didn't see the ground until a few hundred feet before the runway. Inside the airport, I posted the two changelogs I wrote on the flight. Kiesa's mother met us as we emerged from security, handed us the carseat base, and accompanied us to baggage claim and then to car rental. I attached the carseat base to the middle of the rear seat and we headed to The Olive Garden in eastern Portland, where we met Tristan and Jessica for lunch before heading east on I-84 to Walla Walla.

We arrived in Walla Walla at 18:30, after an uneventful drive up the Columbia River. My mother and Bethany were thrilled to see Calvin, though he was far past his bedtime and didn't really know what to do about traveling so far. We put him to bed, skipping his evening bath in favor of time.

Thursday

Kiesa wanted to trade morning Calvin duty, so she elbowed me awake when Calvin got up at some ungodly hour Thursday morning, before 05:00 PST. I fed him and kept him occupied for several hours, as the sky turned gradually from black to a depressing gray, until he was ready to go down for his morning nap. Now that he's figured out how to take morning naps in his own crib (rather than being carted around the neighborhood in a stroller), this gave me the opportunity to catch up on my own sleep. I woke up in time for my family's leisurely breakfast, sometime late morning.

In preparation for visiting family for Christmas, I picked up a hand-crank coffee grinder (with a ceramic burr grinder) and a coffee press to satisfy my caffeine habit. I had beta-tested the coffee press but not the grinder before leaving home, but I did have several backup bags of chai if all went wrong. I brought my last batch of micro-roasted Flying Five Coffee (which provided subscription coffee roasting in Longmont before closing earlier this month; their whole beans were the best-smelling beans I've ever encountered) and managed to produce a reasonable quadruple-serving of coffee.

In the afternoon, Kiesa and I bundled Calvin up into the cold (roughly freezing, but humid) and walked the several blocks to Swinyar and Heather's house in nearby College Place. Their level one human Geekling (mere weeks away from leveling up, er, her first birthday) Veronica was willing to share her toys with Calvin, and Ceri (whom I knew from the Commune Era at Union, a decade ago; I last saw her in 2002, but I've been stalking her blog) was hanging out. We swapped baby stories and Swinyar and I compared netbooks. (My Dell Mini 10v won, with its larger keyboard and touchpad, but both of our netbooks have standby power consumption issues that may be Linux-related.) We headed back to my parents' house to try to get Calvin to take his afternoon nap (which is a hit-or-miss affair) and successfully handed him off to my parents, who were just heading out on a walk. This gave Kiesa and I the opportunity to visit the Colville Street Patisserie in downtown Walla Walla with the Swinjarnyars and Ceri. It wasn't too cold out for gelati; I also had spiced cider but Kiesa's tea might have been a better choice.

We tried to put Calvin on a more normal schedule, shifted one hour to best coast time. This included an evening bath, which tends to calm him down and might get him ready for bed. (It's become something of his routine, so we're not sure we want to change it now.) Sometime in November he started being able to pull himself up in his infant/toddler tub, and seemed far more interested in standing up in the water than sitting and splashing and playing with bath toys, so Kiesa started accompanying him in the bath so she could provide a bit more support and keep him from falling.

I volunteered for bath duty and ran a small bath in my parents' bathtub. Their bathtub was a large jetted tub that would fit two adults with room to spare. Calvin didn't seem to mind the extra space until he slipped on the smooth floor, dunked his head, started choking as I pulled his head above water, and managed to spit up into the tub before breathing normally again. He survived unscathed, but the bath water was a bit worse for wear. We abandoned the tub, searched for alternate bath locations, and found my mother's laundry sink. Kiesa cleaned it and it made a perfect bath for Calvin: high enough that I could spot him without leaning over, and close enough to the kitchen that the rest of my family could drop by to visit Calvin, which everyone enjoyed.

Calvin went to bed without much more trouble and we ate my family's traditional Christmas Eve dinner: cheese fondue. After eating, we called Willy in India to wish him a merry Christmas and to hear about his travels to Varanasi, Delhi, and Kathmandu during his school year break. We talked about my plan to visit him sometime in the spring and tried to figure out what the next part of the plan was.

Christmas Day

Kiesa got up with Calvin on Christmas Day, letting me sleep in to a more modest hour. As is traditional for my family, I opened my stocking when I awoke, then we ate a large breakfast (while Calvin took his morning nap) and finally settled into the ceremonial opening of presents starting around noon, after Calvin woke up. He seemed less enthralled by the unwrapping of gifts than might have been hoped; he wasn't particularly interested in the wrapping paper or brightly-colored boxes, but did appreciate the toys he got once they were unwrapped. He got fussy after an hour, in time for his afternoon nap; we continued without him. I ended up with a handful of Indian tourbooks and proceeded to borrow several more from Willy's shelf to make sure I had all of my bases covered.

(While shopping for Christmas, I had a short anti-materialism moment in which I wondered about the merits of buying stuff for Christmas. I have sufficient means that I can go out and buy most of the stuff I really want, and the stuff that I can't immediately buy out of spending money is far too expensive for anyone else to consider buying for me. There's clearly benefit to buying things someone doesn't know they want, or things they might not have the time to research as extensively as they'd like, but I found it difficult to justify buying more stuff simply for the sake of having something to put under the tree.)

After the gift-exchanging ritual was complete, and the floor was littered with discarded wrapping paper, most my family took naps, leaving me sitting cross-legged in the living room in front of the coffee table hacking on my RSS feed. The results are not quite ready for prime-time yet, but my goal is to include the full text of my world-readable articles in the RSS feed itself, which should provide a more seamless reading experience in one's RSS reader.

Calvin got up from his nap, played with some of his new toys, and managed to amuse himself (and be amused) while most of the adults prepared Christmas dinner until his bedtime routine. He went to bed in time for Christmas dinner. After eating, my mother tried to show pictures from India but ran into trouble with sorting photos by date rather than alphabetically (which I couldn't convince my photo-viewing software to do), so she switched to her smaller-screened computer to complete the showing.

Boxing Day

I got up with Calvin when he woke up shortly after 06:00 on Boxing Day, which happened to be the day he turned nine months old. I went back to bed during his morning nap and got up again in the middle of the morning, after my parents had gone to church but before Bethany, Josh, and Kiesa had departed. I made coffee, ate breakfast, and studied the available flights between India and Nepal before heading to the University Church in time to hear the postlude. I found Kiesa and Calvin in the balcony mother's room and successfully rendezvoused with the rest of my family before heading back home. Dinner was a leisurely reprise of Christmas dinner, though it was early enough that I brewed some of the tea my father brought back from India. I spent much of the evening trying to ignore the lame Christmas movie playing on the television while I studied India-to-Nepal flights and ultimately concluded the goal of flying from northeast India into Kathmandu was going to be far more difficult than I had first thought. (Guwahati to Kathmandu is apparently a city pair that the airlines of India don't optimize for.) I went to bed late on my last night in Walla Walla before heading west for Christmas, part two.