I am Pacman!

I am Pacman.

I am an aggressive sort of personality, out to get what I can, when I can. I prefer to avoid confrontation, but sometimes when it's called for, I can be a powerful character. I tend to be afflicted with munchies constantly. What Video Game Character Are You?

It's not just a good idea, it's the claw!

This most excellent piece of graffiti has been gracing the entry road to the mall near our house ever since we moved to Washington:

It seems The Claw is somewhat of a Seattle phenomenon; I've seen this same modification on signs in Redmond, Capitol Hill and downtown Seattle. (Unfortunately I couldn't take my own picture of it because they seem to have cleaned up the Redmond one in the last couple weeks. Too bad... it used to make my day every time I drove by.)

Anyway, today I found a guy who claims he started the Claw phenomenon. He sounds possessive enough about it that he just might be for real. Has anyone else sighted The Claw lately?

Next year's birthday present

If you thought that the Flytech Dragonfly was awesome (and it is), then you'll love this. If you were a fan of the BattleTech Universe this will make you wet yourself. I had to share it.

Hey Josh, what's next year's birthday budget looking like for me :)

It's on its way

Whats on it's way? The grammar apocalypse, thats what. And if the egregious misuse of apostrophes in those sentences made you want to tear out your eyes, I want you on my side when the End comes.

Yes, as a linguist I've learned how prescriptivism is bogus and language is constantly evolving and that if we try to codify unbreakable rules we'll just end up like France, where the language spoken in the streets is practically unintelligible to anyone who learned "proper French" from a textbook. But all I'm asking (for now) is that we stop letting people graduate from high school until they can demonstrate the ability to correctly differentiate it's from its. This particular grammar faux pas (and il ne le faut absolument pas) has been driving me crazy lately. Once you start noticing it, it's everywhere. So here's the rule, people—repeat after me, memorize, tattoo this somewhere, whatever you need to do to remember:

If you could replace [it's] with [it is] in your sentence, then you need the apostrophe version (it's).
If your sentence stops making sense when you replace [its] with [it is], then you need the non-apostrophe version (its).

The former is a contraction meaning "it is", the latter indicates possession ("belonging to it"). Get it right or feel my wrath.

While we're at it, here are a few other gems you might want to avoid if you value the esteem of your grammar-sensitive friends:

• Irregardless
  At the behest of Merriam-Webster, I'll refrain from saying that 'irregardless' is not actually a word. However, you definitely meant to use 'regardless'. Princeton says that 'irregardless' makes you sound like a joke.
• Separating the wheat from the chafe
  Wheat and chafe? Sounds painful. While it's probably a good idea to separate wheat and chafing as often as possible, try "wheat and chaff" in your next metaphor.
• Shot across the bough
  Unless you're shooting at squirrels (a bough is a tree branch), you probably meant "shot across the bow". It's a naval expression. Think pirates. (Though I don't know if pirates give warning shots, come to think of it.)
• Bare with me, here!
  This one's my favourite. Are you seriously asking me to strip down? Together with you?? 'Cuz I'm a pretty patient person, and I'm willing to bear with a lot, but I only bare for a select few. (Yes, I know, damn those homophones.)

Please accept these suggestions as a token of my esteem for you, and my continued desire to read your writing without instinctively reaching for the Tipp-Ex.

The Best Birthday Present, Ever.

I got the best birthday present ever a week or so ago, the fact that my birthday is in April not withstanding. It's a Flytech Dragonfly my brother sent me.

It's a radio controlled ornithopter, which means that it flies by flapping its wings in response to me pressing buttons on the controller. And man is it fun to make it fly! I've heard that R/C helicopters are pretty hard to control, but this guy flies pretty smoothly.

Here you can see me flying this baby around the courtyard of our apartment complex. It flies pretty well as long as the wind isn't too fast. The instructions say you shouldn't fly it in winds over 4mph, and they're right. It's optimal when the air is dead. The controls get pretty wild when the wind picks up, so for best performance fly it near sunrise or sunset when the wind is the calmest. You'll be glad you did. My first flight was in the middle of the day with a pretty gusty breeze. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed at first. But when the wind finally died down it was a totally different experience.

Oh yeah, keep it away from roofs, trees, water hazards, and cars—parked or otherwise. Yes I ran it into this truck. Fortunately car and dragonfly were both unharmed. It has survived them all (except the water hazards) and lived to fly again. So it's pretty robust. Any damage is easily repaired by a little tape.

After visiting RoboCommunity, I made a small modification to my dragonfly. I found it a little difficult to control, so I added a bigger tail stabilizer. Specifically, I took a regular 3x5 index card and cut it into shape. All of the scrap went into the head as a counter balance. I find that now it flies very well, if a bit slower, even in light wind. It's really cool to watch it hover when flying into a light breeze now. If you're a DIY type person, you can find lots of other hacks and mods for the dragonfly. Seems as if people get pretty crazy about this stuff.

One of the disappointing parts of the dragonfly is its short battery life. It only takes about 20 minutes to charge it up, but then it'll only last for about seven minutes of flight. On the dragonfly forums they say the green dragonfly lasts longer than the blue. And one guy discovered a longer lasting battery for the dragonfly by looking up the manufacturer's code on the original battery—after taking the whole thing apart. This is not a mode for the amateur, squarely ruling me out. Oh well, good things come in short packages.

Thanks Josh.

Dinner (and work) with the Stars

...at least the somewhat-well-known-internet-personalities. In the last week I've had dinner with two internet-semi-celebrities: Rand Fish, CEO of SEOMoz, and Brian Aker, Director of Architecture at MySQL. So what's it like eating with the stars (depending on your context and your definition of star)? Read on to find out what I think of these people after having seen them eat...

Last week Susan and I had Rand and Mystery_Guest over to dinner. This is actually the second time I've met Rand, a strike against his stardom for me, but not for you! Rand is super nice. Just look at the picture in Mystery_Guest's profile. Seriously, go look. Aren't they cute? After we attended his engagement party he (actually it was Mystery_Guest) sent us a thank you note for eating their food and drinking their booze (don't worry guys, a cute thank you note is on the way for eating our food). And he's really knowledgeable about that interweb thing and especially SEO. Plus the SEO crew has an awesome blog: lots of great content, a nice design, and amazing seo tools. How can you not call him a star? And by the way, he brought us Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. That was just the coup de grâce. I'll forgive him for not liking Wikipedia. Oh yeah, he eats meat and is only alergic to—well, you'll have to ask him about that.

By the way, SEOMoz is hiring. Check out this comment. I almost agree:

Seriously, if I had a grunt level job at Microsoft I would jump at the opportunity trade in my MSFT for some MOZZ in a year.

I'm almost ready to jump all over some "MOZZ", so if you're interested you better hurry...

Last night I went to the MySQL Meetup in Seattle, where Brian Akers showed up. Or maybe he runs it? I was a Meetup virgin before last night. Only 3 other people showed up for this free (plus cost of food), public (everyone's welcome at the Elysian Brew Pub on Pike street) event. Does that dis-qualify Brian as a star? He's highly placed (director of architecture at MySQL, remember), pleasant to talk to, knowledgeable, generous with advice, and I've been reading his blog posts for quite some time. These are important factors in my book. One of the other guys who attended was interested in choosing a DBMS for his company. Brian asked a few questions (including asking importance of open source) and suggested MySQL (of course), but also Firebird. He also offered to follow up after the meetup, another important factor. I asked a bunch of questions about clustering, replication, and scale-out and Brian had a lot of general advice. Next time I'll have to come with more specific questions to better mine Brian's knowledge :) Don't worry, I'll share what I come up with.

Ok, so I didn't have much to say about how they eat. For goodness sake, it's eating. It's not like they've got extra mouths or something. Anyway, if you've met Rand or Brian—or better yet both!—leave a comment, and let us and our readers know.

Internet Radio is a Timemachine

Listening to Pandora Radio today, as I do every day, I was warped back in time to one of the first mp3s I ever "obtained" from a friend's Hotline server, "Peaches" by the Presidents of the United States. Pandora is awesome.

Speaking of how awesome Pandora (and internet radio is), did you know that internet radio is on its way to being shut off? Why don't you save internet radio? It's so easy!

I buy a lot of music I hear on the internet (especially Pandora). In fact, Pandora is my music shopping list. What about you? Post a comment and let me and our readers know.