Kyle Dickerson – Page 83 – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

Camping

June 13, 2015 8:29 pm

Heather has been asking to go camping for several weeks, but while I was still in class there was no way it was going to happen. So once that wrapped up I decided to stop putting it off and pick a date. So I took the afternoon off on Friday, and Heather and I packed up the car, and then sat in traffic… (Jess and Corinne stayed home.)

I wanted to get on the road by 1:00-1:30, but inevitably it took longer. We were driving by 2:30 which I thought would still be alright, but no. It was stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper traffic from Livermore out the other side of Stockton. That drive should normally take like 40 minutes, but it was over an hour and a half. Then we had another hour of driving to do on top of that. Heather fell asleep, which was good given the amount of sleep she was likely to get in the tent.

We drove out to Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park. I liked it when I was there last year–quiet, secluded, trees, and shade. Presumably there are comparable locations closer to home, but I couldn’t figure out how to find them.

We got to the campground, picked out a spot and got our stuff unpacked. Then we wandered about looking at the bark houses and grinding rocks. The high for the day was in the upper 90’s and we probably should have rescheduled, but that’s tough to do with a 3-year-old whose heart is set on the adventure. Once it cooled down a bit we got our fire going and roasted our hotdogs for dinner.

Once dinner was cleaned up it was time for s’mores. I had neglected to put the chocolate bars in the cooler. But it wasn’t a total loss, I bought the “fun size” chocolate bars which are still salvageable after becoming bags of liquid chocolate.

After Heather was asleep I played with the camera for a bit. Couldn’t get any usable pictures of the stars, but I got this really fun picture of one of the neighboring campsites:

I really like the light hitting the trees. And a picture of the fire:

In the morning we had breakfast of Silly Circles (off-brand Fruit Loops) at like 5:30 AM since that’s when Heather decided that it was too light out to sleep. Then we went for a hike and back to the bark houses and grinding rocks while it was still cool and shady. After that it was time to pack up and head home.

Heather fell asleep, but I woke her up for lunch at A&W. She was excited to discover they have mini corndogs and milk, her favorite meal. Then we stopped at the Ghirardelli chocolate outlet and ice-cream shop in Lathrop for an ice-cream sundae.

Heather declared it, “The best camping trip ever,” so I guess it was a success. I think we avoided sunburn and heatstroke with only mild sleep deprivation.

It occurred to me that I could set up the camera on the tripod to take pictures automatically so we’d have some pictures of the both of us camping. Then I thought about turning them into a little video. So enjoy the 4-minute abridged version of the trip with more music and less heat (sadly, I didn’t take the camera with us hiking or to the historical sites).

If your browser doesn’t want to play the video you can download it here: Camping June 12-13 2015 (small)

Audio credits, in order of use:
“The end of the last adventure” by soundtrackmusic.org – Creative Commons Licensed
“Chimney Fire” by reinsamba – Creative Commons Licensed
“Calm Sky” by [SMJ] Music – Creative Commons Licensed
“Ocarina – Sun’s Song” by ZREO – Creative Commons Licensed
“Call to Adventure” by KevinMacLeod – Creative Commons Licensed

Achievement Unlocked

June 10, 2015 4:56 pm

We had our little graduation ceremony today for the National Security Leadership Program that I’ve been participating in over the last year. The result is being awarded a Certificate in National Security Affairs.

We got to meet with the Lab’s Deputy Director for Science and Technology, Patricia Falcone, who handed out the certificates. She came to the Lab just a few months ago from the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. She knows Mike!

The certificate program consists of four graduate courses: Deterrence and Coercion (focusing on nuclear weapons), The Role of Intelligence in Security Affairs (focusing on intelligence agencies and operations), Terrorism in Today’s World, and National Security Policy (history, structure, application of U.S. national security organizations).

It was definitely a different way of looking at the world and a very different way of writing papers. A lot of time the papers I wrote I felt ended up being a bit hand-wavy, but then I’m used to writing papers where you have hard data with which to argue your point.

I have no idea what will come of my having participated in this program, but it was a good experience. I enjoyed being back in a class room setting to really focus on interesting topics and at the same time I’m really glad I’m not a full-time student anymore. It was really nice to be able to intelligently and maturely discuss controversial topics of national policy in a setting that doesn’t devolve into name calling or logically defunct arguments.

Having been through it, I kind of wish passing these courses was a minimum requirement for any politician elected to a national office.

Spammers ruin everything

June 8, 2015 4:18 pm

I’ve been forced to disable comments for older posts because there has been a spammer or spambot sitting on the site submitting garbage comments about every 10 minutes since Friday.

I’d prefer to not make you answer CAPTCHAs in order to post comments, but parasites like spammers ruin everything that isn’t locked down.

For now, older comments will be disabled (comments on current posts are still available though).

Software Wine-Tasting

2:14 pm

In the software world there is a term, “dogfooding,” (shortened from “eating your own dog food”) which describes the act of a team / company using the very software they build–usually as a critical part of their daily work.

That is, if you’re the GMail team and you want to produce the best GMail service you can, you want your software developers, designers, managers, etc. all using GMail on a daily basis. This will expose them to rough edges that need to be improved and the raw exposure will hasten the work to fix issues. It also serves to show confidence in the product. You might be suspicious of the quality of GMail if you heard that all the people that work on the product use something else.

This is all well and good for the kind of software that your own team can use on a daily basis. But what if your software isn’t an email client, or an instant messenger, or a music player? The software I spend my time building is not software that I have any reason to use. The customers/users are a specialized group of people.

I was having a technical discussion today with a group of software developers on this subject. We recognized that dogfooding our software didn’t make any sense in our environment, but it did make sense to sit down with our users and observe how they use the software and what seems to be confusing or slowing them down. I described this process as “wine-tasting.” We’re not consuming the product, we merely sample it in small quantities to try and understand it better.

So there you have it: if you can’t dogfood your software, you should at least by wine-tasting it.

Let’s Go Fly a Kite

May 25, 2015 8:16 pm

It was windy and cool today so we met up with some friends and went to the park for the evening. We picked up some dinner on the way to eat at the park and then play. This park is up on the side of a hill overlooking the valley near the municipal airport so we got to watch the vintage B-17 and B-24 bombers flying around (Part of the Wings of Freedom Tour).

We brought our turtle kite that we’ve only successfully flown once. But, there was plenty of good steady wind today and we had no trouble getting it up in the air. Heather thought it was amazing.

Enjoy some more pictures: