Ten Days?

Ten days without a post.  I feel like I owe someone an apology.

In my defense, it has been an exceptionally busy time.  My wife and I were fighting off the creeping crud for a bit.  This just happened to coincide with our preparation for our annual bonfire.  Meanwhile, I've been trying to keep up with my running, which has been more difficult as the days get shorter.

At work, we have deadlines to meet, as usual... on top of which, we moved our entire office into a new building, with all the stress that entails.  On the minus side, my commute is a little longer (at least until I find the back ways I can take to the new place); on the plus side, the new office is in a great location, much bigger than the place we formerly inhabited, and with lots of room for expansion.

Amidst all the running, planning, scrambling and hosting, the lovely Mrs. Robb and I did get to sneak off and go see the Piano Guys in concert.  Was it good?  Why, yes.  Yes it was.  It was a very small venue (about 300 people) and we were in the third row about 10 feet from Steven Sharp Nelson.  While their whole set was good (I particularly liked Jon Schmidt singing "The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow" to the tune of The Imperial March), what blew me away was that they finished it off by performing, live, their cover of "What Makes You Beautiful":

Yes, there were four guys bouncing around and making music with one piano.  It was great fun, and we got to meet everyone after the show, and after a couple of weeks worth of running to and fro, it was a very relaxing afternoon.

Anyways.  Sorry for running silent for so long.  I have a bunch of links saved up for yinz guys, and hope to get back to a semi-regular posting schedule Real Soon Now (TM).

Sloppy Is As Sloppy Does

The Weekly Standard reports:

Healthcare.gov, the federal government's Obamacare website, has been under heavy criticism from friend and foe alike during its first two weeks of open enrollment.  Repeated errors and delays have prevented many users from even establishing an account, and outside web designers have roundly panned the structure and coding of the site as amateurish and sloppy.  The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software.

Frankly, I'm not surprised.  This sort of thing can happen vera, vera easily, especially if you aren't explicitly paying attention to licensing requirements... and even if you are.  All it takes is for one person to check in a file (they are using source control, right?  Right?!?) with the copyright attribution stripped out, and you have a copyright violation.

Now, this is a relatively minor and easily corrected license violation: add the copyright headers back in. I suspect that the copyright holders would be happy with that and an apology.  It does raise the question, though: if someone "sanitized" the code they were using in this instance by removing the copyright attribution, are there any other places where contractors may have cut corners and violated open source or commercial software licenses?

Cool it, old man!

An old-ish (three years!) parody from Jim Treacher.

I am given to understand that this only touches on his vast prophetic powers.  Mr. Treacher is reportedly also able to predict - with 100% reliability, mind you - whether a rock tossed into the air will fall to the earth, and whether or not a person will become wet after immersing themselves in water!

It's just plan eerie, I tell you.

ITINIDKWI

If you liked the way I was doing posts for the year I was using IFTTT - lots of links, a little commentary, with the occasional meat and potatoes post - then you may find ITINIDKWI worth some attention.  It is the creation of an internet friend, a fairly prolific Facebook poster of interesting tidbits who tired of the social media format:

Trying to have a coherent, thought-through discussion (something that actually used to happen on blogs all the time, young folks… I know you won’t believe it) is mighty hard on social media, especially when you’re trying to do it in Facebook-sized bites (or Twitter-sized 140 character bursts.) 

Didn’t like some of the discussions I was reading, didn’t like some of the discussions I was having or trying to host, and wasn’t proud of how I myself was acting and reacting in some cases.  I’ve greatly curtailed my direct engagement with social media as a result. 

This blog is one way to capture (and share) the stories that catch my eye during the day.

Check it out.  More interesting than I am, for sure.

Oh, the name?

And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Ballad of Accounting

"So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God."

– Romans 14:12 

There is always an accounting.

Some come... sooner than others.

In the morning we built the city

In the afternoon walked through its streets

Evening saw us leaving

We wandered through our days as if they would never end

All of us imagined we had endless time to spend

We hardly saw the crossroads and small attention gave

To the landmarks on the journey from the cradle to the grave

Cradle to the grave, cradle to the grave

Did you learn to dream in the morning?

Abandon dreams in the afternoon?

Wait without a hope in the evening?

Did you stand there in the traces and let them feed you lies?

Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?

Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? Did you thank them for their scorn?

Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born?

Act of being born, act of being born

Did you alter the face of the city?

Make any change in the world you found?

Or did you observe all the warning?

Did you read the trespass notice? Did you keep off the grass?

Did you shuffle off the pavement just to let your betters pass?

Did you learn to keep your mouth shut? Were you seen and never heard?

Did you learn to be obedient and jump to at a word?

Jump to at a word, jump to at a word

And did you ever demand any answer?

The who and the what and the reason why

And did you ever question the setup?

And did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?

Did you let them skin the cream off and then give to you the rest?

Did you settle for the shoddy? And did you think it right

To let them rob you right and left and never make a fight?

And never make a fight, never make a fight

What did you learn in the morning?

How much did you know in the afternoon?

Were you content in the evening?

And did they teach you how to question when you were at the school?

Did the factory help you grow? Were you the maker or the tool?

Did the place where you were living enrich your life and then?

Did you mix among the standing of all your fellow men?

All your fellow men, all your fellow men, all your fellow men

Two Clicks, One Meal

I received an email from a gentleman at a local Pittsburgh Company called Oxford Solutions earlier today, asking me to "Like" their Facebook page.  I get this sort of thing from time to time, but this one caught my attention for two reasons...

1. It was a real email, from someone I've had contact with before - not a mass-mailing.
2. They were willing to give me something for the click.

Or, rather, they were willing to give someone something...

Oxford Solutions will donate the cost of 1 meal ($2.34) to Light of Life Rescue Mission for every new "like" we receive on Facebook through December 15, 2013 up to $10,000!

I've checked this out from multiple sources, and as far as I can tell, this is a legitimate campaign. Just two clicks (one to get to the Oxford Solutions Facebook page, and one to "Like" that page) and you can provide a meal for the Light of Life through Oxford Solutions.

Folks, that is less effort than it takes to even look at the latest gegaw being offered up on Indiegogo or Kickstarter, let alone fund it.  Two clicks, one meal.  That's it.

For those outside of Pittsburgh, The Light of Life Rescue Mission is a local homeless shelter and recovery program. A good friend of mine leads our church outreach ministry there. I have had the opportunity to preach to and minister to the men at the shelter many times, and Eldest Daughter has been part of the ministry for years.  So I have multiple points of reference when I tell you: they are good folks, doing good work on the North Side of Pittsburgh, and their efforts mean more than you can imagine for a lot of men who have nowhere else to go and nobody else to turn to.

Please, help 'em get hold of as much money as Oxford is willing to sling their way.

Missing object

Government is just a word for things we choose to do together...

... to you.

An Unexpected Consequence of the Government Shutdown

I appears that someone turned off the electric fence surrounding the Onion writer's pen, and some have escaped into the wild...

Before service in Afghanistan Lauren Kay Johnson, a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, said she was a fun-loving woman who would organize potluck and karaoke nights for friends.

But when she returned from her nine month-deployment in March 2010, the Seattle native struggled to get to grips with civilian life as the memories of war haunted her.

In the November issue of Glamour magazine, she details how 'long hours', 'drab meals of dry meat and soggy vegetables' and constant 'paranoia' that something could happen at any moment, gradually took a toll on her mental state during deployment.

She is (or was) a public affairs officer for the USAF.  Based on the existence of this article, and the inevitable and very predictable reactions it has caused, I can only assume that she absolutely sucked at her job.

You really are a bit of a whiner, aren't you, dear?

"I am a far-right moderate social libertarian"

Via Borepatch.

According to the poll, I am far more right than libertarian... which just seems off, to me.  I'm pretty sure that I am nowhere near as authoritarian as this makes me out to be. I will cop to being that far right, though I think I get there via the civilization/barbarism axis, as opposed to the common American political views of left vs. right.

My Political Views

I am a far-right moderate social libertarian

Right: 8.21, Libertarian: 1.74

  My Foreign Policy Views

Score: 0.71

My Culture War Stance

Score: 2.91

Political Spectrum Quiz

C25K: Finishing Week Four

Well, we had a bit of a delay in our running schedule.  Being on vacation took a toll, in a good way - it was hard to muster up the energy to run when we were exhausted from swimming all day.  We returned home rested and ready for week three, when I did something incredibly stupid (at least, in hindsight).

I bought some new inserts for my shoes.  Nice, cushy inserts with a wonderfully padded heel.

They felt wonderful when I was running.  The following day?  Not so much.  Both my knees were effectively immobile, and I felt like I had hot needles sitting just under inner portion of my knees.  A discussion with my boss at work (who's a marathon runner) about shoes gave me an inkling of an idea that the inserts might be a problem.  So when I got home, I took them out, and the pain in my knees diminished almost immediately.

Sigh.  OK, trash one set of inserts.

Even with that, the pain in my knees persisted - I treated them with Aleve and ice for several days before I felt like I would be able to run again.  At that point, I decided that while my current shoes were comfortable, they were pretty much too trashed to continue running in.  So my next step would be to find a pair of running shoes to that would let me run without further destroying my knees.

After soliciting recommendations from various runners, I found a store that would do a gait analysis, and tell me what kind of shoes I should be wearing.  Which is exactly what I wanted, since I was completely ignorant and unable to answer the questions that experienced runners asked me about my arch, roll, and what-have-you.  They managed to set me up with a nice pair of Nikes, which felt great.

At which point, halfway through week three, we all got sick.  Bleah.  This seems to be an inevitable consequence of the start of the school year.  There's a reason why the Lovely Mrs. Robb and I refer to kids as "cute little petri dishes".

Anyways - that knocked us back, yet again.  So doing Week 3 of the program actually ended taking up... um.  Two and a half weeks?  Closer to three weeks?  Something like that.  Eldest Daughter and I ended up repeating a day of the Week 3 program, just because it felt like we should.

We kept up with it as best we could, though, through bum knees, bad shoes and a bad cold.  The end result being that this was Week 4, and we're now running (well, jogging) for 5 minutes at a time.  I measured it - that's a whole half of a mile that I'm managing to blast through; not once, but twice during a session.

Woot!

We still have one more day of Week 4 to complete, then we get into Week 5... where we will be hitting what is (for me) a major milestone at the end of the week: ramping up each day until we are running for 20 minutes straight.  I will be very honest, and say that if I can manage that by the end of next week, I will be freaking amazed.  I suspect that it will take a couple of tried before I am able to reach that goal.

I am incredibly happy with the progress we've made, though.  To top it all off, I've also managed to loose about 10 pounds in the process - though I think that is more an result of making the effort to eat more salads and fewer french fries.  At 220 right now, I am hardly svelte, but frankly, this is the best shape that I have probably been in for two decades.

Which makes me quite happy!