brianca

Teve Torbes

2005-08-11T15:37:22Z

I picked up the newest Steve Forbes Flat Tax book the other day. it's a good read well worth the time of anyone interested in the subject. The only negative side effect is that it tends to make you even more pissed about the current situation.

as a side note, it's clear how Steve stays so rich considering the these couple of hundred page book was almost $30.00. A true capitalist if I ever saw one. ;)

free market

2005-08-01T17:04:20Z

Can anyone suggest some reading on how to maintain a free market economy in the face of what can be considered unfair competition from foreign players? I'm a pretty political creature, and I've been putting together my platform as an exercise to formalize where I stand on many issues that we face in the world these days. It's a purely politics geek exercise to see what my ideal party would believe.

I've been working on the marketplace and I'm running into trouble with how you can support a free market, which I do in principle, but still compensate for players who do not. When you have places that subsidize markets or devalue currency or simply maintain a low cost workforce through real or artificial means, it ruins the rules for our marketplace.

Do we artificially restrict free trade in order to maintain what may be too high a lifestyle to be supported by a free marketplace, or do we allow our wages to drop as others raise to find some kind of equilibrium?

the more I play with the answers, the more confused I get and the more I see why game theory developed largely out of economics.

any suggestions for reading would be appreciated.

Who's your daddy.

2005-07-29T16:55:45Z

Almost three weeks now as a daddy.

Presley Hana Alexander was born on 7/12/2005 at 1:56PM

She was 7 lbs and 18.5 inches. 12 hours of labor followed by a C-Section that was damn cool from where I was standing, but not so much for Dawn.

Everyone is doing great now, and we're just starting the adventure. Lots of good times ahead I'm sure.

I've been meaning to pop something on here since then, but time seems awful short right now. In fact it took me until yesterday to finish the new Harry Potter. ;)

Plenty of pics here: http://www.brianca.com/gallery/album03

Grr, baby, Grr.

2005-05-09T14:53:59Z

I finally got around to the Tiger upgrade this weekend. Except for more or less completely borking my mail.app, it looks pretty good. The spotlight is pretty cool. I already had Konfab, so the wigets aren't anything new. So far so good.

I just need to figure out what to do about the mail app. It'll still check mail, but it won't view any of the messages that it finds. When I try and open one, it crashes the mail app. I'm using thunderbird for now until I spend the time to figure out what's going on or decide what other mail app I should be using. I was never particularly smitten with mail.app, but it made it easy to switch between SMTP server based on what network I was on. I never figured out how to make thunderbird as nice doing that, but maybe I'll look at it again now that I'm using it for my home mail.

The search for a new mail client begins, I guess.

I'm going to hold off on the tiger upgrade on the wife's business computer until I work out all the kinks on the powerbook, and decide if it's worth it. So far, but much difference. I need to review the change notes and see what these 200 new things are.

Fun with DirecTV

2005-04-08T15:25:46Z

I'm in the process of switching back to directv from cable. It's been a nightmare so far, and customer service has been horrific. I was adding two tivo units to my service last night and kept getting bounced from person to person to try and resolve my issues. Each one needed the full information on my tivos including serial numbers so I was spending most of my time reading of series of letters and numbers over the phone. As the night went on, My phonetic alphabet started containing more and more profanity until I was trying to only use only profanity for every letter. I was surprisingly adept at this and inordinately entertained at the response, or lack thereof, on the other end of the line.

Not very creative and pretty immature, but good times for all, and it made me feel better.

An app I could use...

2005-04-05T21:23:16Z

there seem to be a hundred web sites out there that list tons of baby names to help you pick, but I need one that will take info about a first and last name and give you a list of middle names that sound good with them. There must be some loose rules about number of syllables in first and last name and end sound of first name and start sound of last name that could define a good middle name.

I'm just not sure I'm willing to take the time to come up with what those rules are. I was hoping someone else had already done it for me, but I haven't found it yet.

Updates

2005-03-31T20:11:40Z

Ok. Quick updates. hi everyone. Good to see you all again. hope all is well with you all. I've been watching the UD web site and forums and see that all seems to be going pretty well still. That's great for those of you still there. Hurry up and sell the company to IBM, so I can cash in some of my stock.

here's a new pick of the peanut, which we now know is a little girl:

She's due on July 27th, and we've been pretty busy buying baby stuff and trying to turn a room into a baby's room. 9 months goes by pretty quickly when there's a lot to do. It's been pretty fun overall. We've had the 3d ultrasound that made the pic, and should have another later on. We also rented a fetal doppler online that let's us listen to her heartbeat at home. We've been piping music into mama's belly for her and all that new parent jazz. Good times.

On the Plano Fire: As you could see from the pics, most of the damage in the house was from smoke and the water the fire department put on it. That let us save quite a bit of stuff. Electronics were lost and some fabric that soaked up too much smoke couldn't be saved. in the end, insurance paid off for everything that was lost in the house including the stuff that dawn and I had with us for our visit. Much shopping ensued to replace stuff. One of the tract builders in Plano tracked down my folks and offered them cash for the lot as it was after the fire, and he planned to do all the cleanup and use whatever he could of the house to rebuild and sell. Between that cash and the insurance settlement for the losses, they came out ahead of where they would have been if they had just sold the house. They took it as a sign and sold everything and moved back to tennessee. Dad is full time telecommuting and mom is fixing up her parents old house where they are now living. We're driving out to visit next month and check out the new digs before we're trapped at home with the new baby.

Good times had by all. Work is work. Nothing to really say about that.

Does NTN still exist?

SCOTUS mp3s

2005-03-29T19:52:44Z

For anyone who follows the supreme court at all, Oyez has started putting some oral arguments on mp3 as well as the streams they've had all along. There aren't many there yet, but there are some pretty good ones. I much prefer these to music when in the gym for some reason, so I keep an ipod list full of these to take along.

the streams are great listening for work, but it's nice to have the mp3s for workouts.

Check them out here:
http://www.oyez.org/oyez/frontpage

it's also cool to listen to how the court has changed over the years as far as the frequency of the justices interrupting the lawyers.

I'll get online this week with a pregnancy update as well. I've just been swamped with other stuff lately and haven't been looking at journaling at all.

cheers.

brianca @ 2004-12-27T21:07:00

2004-12-28T03:07:45Z

For those that haven't heard from other sources:

How I spent my summer vacation

2004-06-30T05:13:07Z

So every summer my eight year old niece flys into dallas from seattle to visit with my parents for a few weeks. When this happens, Dawn and I try and go up for at least a week to hang out with everyone, go to six flags, and do other dallas things.

This years trip started last weekend. Dawn and I went up to catch the Fleetwood Mac concert on the 16th and E came in that weekend. We just decompressed and hung out around the house on Sunday to let E get over her flight. We hit the ground running on monday and went to a new water park that opened down the road from my folks place. We spent the early afternoon there and decided to drive back to the house for lunch and to wait out a storm that appeared to be brewing.

We were home for around an hour when the upstairs smoke alarm went off. We were all downstairs, but the alarm was in plain sight at the top of the stairs, and we could see that there was no smoke up there. I walked into the kitchen to see if something in the oven was burning. When I walked into the kitchen, I immediately say that one of the AC vents over the kitchen table was blowing an amazing stream of jet black smoke into the kitchen. This was bad. At about the same time, my mom was looking out the front door and saw that there was also smoke coming out of the soffets of the house. This was getting worse.

My mom started forcing people out of the house starting with my niece and the dog. When she got into the driveway she found that her phone wasn't working, so I headed back in to grab my cell that was in our upstairs bedroom. I really didn't think it was too big a deal at this point.

I hit the upstairs bedroom and grabbed the phone. On the way out, I noticed that there was also smoke coming out of the phone and power outlets in that room. That's when it hit me how serious this fire was. I grabbed my laptop and Dawn's computer and took them out to the car. I went back in for a few more things, and by the time I left this time the smoke was filling the house and the fire department was on the way.

When the fire department arrived, there was still just smoke pouring out of the eaves of the house and little else, so I started thinking all was well again. Before long though, most of the roof was gone and what was left was soaked with water from the firemen. It was a total loss.

I spent the next few days digging through the rubble trying to make a complete inventory of the contents of the house for the insurance company who need to have the item name and model #, where you bought it, how much you paid, and how long you've had it for each and every item in there. It was quite a handful.

There's a ton more to tell, but I need to get for a sec. I'll wrap up tomorrow.

here's some pics for the curious:

http://www.brianca.com/gallery/album11

brianca @ 2004-05-29T03:38:00

2004-05-29T08:38:34Z

Today's lesson learned:

Grilling tofu is more art than science......

Commercial Annoyance

2004-05-09T06:03:44Z

There is no reasonable way that 'You and Us' equals two people.

National Exposure

2004-05-04T23:05:38Z

So my wife has been running a video production business for a few years with a friend. They started out doing video photo albums and some live events like weddings and school plays. That was going ok for them until three years ago when Dawn's business partner had her first child. The baby, Lili, was born with Down's Syndrome and obviously took up a lot of her, and all of our, time. The business took a pretty deep back seat to getting Lili healthy and home safe.
It took several months to make it there, but eventually all of her medical issues were under control and she was allowed to go home. Even at that point, everything was focused about helping Lili in her development and happiness. We learned that one common issue with down's children is that they are very verbally delayed. That can cause a lot of issues because everyone if frustrated about her not being able to communicate her needs. It was suggested that sign language might be a good thing to look into.
Much research was done, and Dawn and Nora, Lili's mom, found that there was no good resource out there for teaching sign to very small children. The video business was fired back up and several months later Say it With a Sign was born. A very cool video in the Baby Einstein vein to teach sign language to children.
The video has been selling pretty well up to now for not having had any real publicity. A few local station stories and a little coverage in some educational publications. A large goal was reached a few weeks ago when it was finally listed on Amazon .
Then out of the blue last week Nora got a call from the CBS Early show asking if it would be ok to send a crew out to Lili's third birthday party on May 2nd. They are doing a story on Downs and through a long strange process had come across Lili and wanted to use her as the human interest part lead in to that story. Everyone agreed and a producer flew in from New York to meet with Nora and her husband and Lili. The followed everyone around for the day and did a few interviews with all us us involved and then came to the actual party which was around 50 friends in a local park.
They are putting everything together this week and the spot will air on the Early Show next monday, May 10th. They are flying Nora, Frank, and Lili out for the show to do some live chat on set. Should be pretty exciting.
The story isn't about the video, but it's such a part of their lives, that I can't help but come out and get mentioned to around 3 million people. Could be a big break for the video. We'll see what happens. It's at least exciting enough that I actually plan to get up early enough on Monday to watch the show, and that's saying a lot.

If you get the chance to see the story and they happen to roll footage of me singing 'the itsy-bitsy spider', please feel free to disregard that portion of the package. It might be best to have a thumb on the mute button just in case. ;)

kinda dumb movie thing

2004-04-19T04:42:38Z

Kinda dumb but fun movie list from one of the movie forums I visit.

Favorite movies for each letter of the alphabet. I was a little interesting to see how much the movies grouped up on certain letters making it hard to chose. Some of the letters that I didn't think would be hard gave me a little trouble. A few films made it in there because I couldn't think of anything else for that spot. I'll have to think about it a little more, because I'd like to see a couple of them gone.

I also think I'll start a thread on the best films by letter. I've been thinking about how different my list would be if that was the question. Very few of these would make that one.

Apocalypse Now
Big Lebowski
Clue
Dr. Strangelove
Elephant Man
Fargo
Glory
Hairdresser's Husband
Ikiru
Jaws
Last Dragon
Le Femme Nikita
Manchurian Candidate
Natural Born Killers
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Platoon
Quick and the Dead
The Right Stuff
Simple Men
Three O'Clock High
Unforgiven
Vanilla Sky
Wings of Desire
X2
Yojimbo
Zero Effect

client tryout

2004-03-16T08:16:33Z

Just continuing my day of accomplishment by finally getting around to trying out a few livejournal clients. I haven't used one since I moved to the powerbook.

Anyone have a recommendation for the best OSX client?

brianca @ 2004-03-16T01:52:00

2004-03-16T07:59:55Z

Major progress on the bronco today. I finally managed to get everything working properly for long enough to drive over to the firestone by my house and pass inspection. That also allowed me to tool into downtown round rock and finally transfer the title into my name since texas requires the inspection first. After paying a mere 10% of what i paid for the truck in licensing fees and taxes, I now have a street legal truck in texas. There was a brief discussion about if they were going to fail me on inspection because I had the doors off at the time, but in the end I got my sticker. Yea me!!

This is a good time to mention how much I love living in round rock. I went to the tax accessors office at lunch time and I was the only one there. it took me all of 5 minutes to turn in the paperwork and walk out with my new tags. The exact same thing happened last time I got a ticket and had to go turn in my defensive driving cert. Round Rock isn't so small that there are no stores or restauraunts, but it's small enough that the city services are nice and quick. I even had jury duty a couple of weeks ago and only spent around 30 minutes at the court house.

brianca @ 2004-03-07T23:15:00

2004-03-08T05:27:50Z

Fink is one great tool for OSX. While I have no particular aversion to installing apps from source, it's nice to fire off and install and have something chase down dependencies and config options for my machine and create a working app for me by the time I come back to my machine.

I've finally lived with the mac enough that my comfort level has me poking around and making random changes along with installing a bunch of apps that I need for work. I'd guess that I've now crossed the line to were I'm using more X windows apps than OSX ones at this point. It's a hell of a machine.

We had a small computer failure here at the house this weekend, and my wife's box threw a drive. We had most of what we needed to get it back online, but it would have been a terrible pain in the ass. Plus, since it's her primary work machine where she does most of here video editing we just went and picked up a powermac for her.

It was a piece of cake to set up, and now she's online with final cut instead of premier, and I get to have my powerbook back since she's been hogging it to use final cut anyway.

Fink is plowing away in the background right now getting the gimp going, and this box will be far better at that point than the one she was using yesterday. I'm eager to see what happens to her progress at this point.

The only drawback to using the mac at this point is the fanatics in the mac community that you have to deal with if you need help. Blind allegiance is a scary thing, and annoying to boot.

brianca @ 2004-02-27T15:56:00

2004-02-27T21:59:42Z

I've been noticing lately that most of the car commercials I see on TV include cars that appear to have valid license plates, but they are painted over in the color of the car. I don't get why you'd even have a plate there if you're going to do that. I wonder if we're so used to seeing cars with plates on them that it would be too odd to see one without it, but they don't want a big white patch distracting viewers, so they cover them. Just having it there might fill the need we have for one to be there regardless of if we can see it or not.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this...

Bandwidth sure is getting cheaper and cheaper. I'm looking at full DS3s with local loop for around 5k a month now. What a bargin.

brianca @ 2004-02-19T00:20:00

2004-02-20T05:38:49Z

Just finished watching 'Capturing the Friedmans' and wondered what others who saw it thought about it. Were they guilty?

brianca @ 2004-02-18T06:44:00

2004-02-19T08:17:23Z

Is there any greater joy than leaving a job you don't like? I can't think of any right this second. Maybe having good timing in your exit helps.

Now I get to spend more cash on infrastructure in the next month than I was allowed to spend in 4 years at the old job. It's going to be fun to get back into the design phase again. That's always the fun part anyway, and this is a completely ground up design on a hosting facility.

The crap part is that is looks like it's going to be downtown. Luckily it's still a make your own hours as long as you get shit done position. The upside is that I'll actually be a tiny bit of an owner in the company so my foutunes will rise and fall with the company in an even more real way than just holding a bunch of stock.

It's also cool to talk comp with a startup who is willing to be a little creative in the overall package and grant a lot of perks to make everyone happy.

There are a few pics of the datacenter here: http://www.brianca.com/gallery/downtown

I'll be down there again on friday trying to close the deal on the space so I can start putting equipment in it.

Next step is putting together a staff. I see lots of interviews in my future.

In the meantime I'm getting a lot of writing done and starting some major body work on the truck.

Life is good.

brianca @ 2004-01-24T06:42:00

2004-01-25T05:12:25Z

Finally. I just drove the bronco around the block. All seems well. There might be a couple of leaks that I need to track down here and there, but at least the tranny seems to work.

brianca @ 2004-01-18T00:44:00

2004-01-19T03:31:40Z

If you like anime at all, I strongly suggest you check out Lain. I just finshed the first DVD of episodes, and I'm hooked.

One of the best I've seen.

brianca @ 2003-12-12T12:46:00

2003-12-12T18:56:59Z

The tranny is finally almost ready to go into the truck. here's a pic of the status as of last night.

http://www.brianca.com/gallery/album02/P1010047

It's pretty cool to spin the input shaft and watch everything work at this point. It's very clocklike in its gearing. The only part that still eludes me as to functionality is the inner workings of the valve body. I'm going to pull it apart one more time and clean it all up again before I put it back in, so maybe it'll become a little more clear after another teardown. It should be all set to go back on the truck this weekend. If I can get the radio and speakers wired up and the undercoating sprayed on, it might be back on the road in a couple of weeks.

I also finally started migrating some of my writing to the new powerbook last night. There is quite a bit of debate out there about what the best word processor is for OSX. There seems to be several third party apps that run on it, but they all have shortcomings that bother different people to different degrees. I downloaded Mariner Write and Mellel last night and will probably go ahead and retype the first couple of chapters into each to see which one I prefer. Retyping everything seems like a good chance to edit on the fly as well and clean a few things up.

I guess as a long time windows user it seems a little odd to have choices about what software to use. ;) I assume I'll get used to it as time goes on, and come to expect it even at some point.

I'm also starting to find the effects of the lack of market share on the mac, the obvious lack of software titles aside, there is also a shortage of web plugins which have made some of my work stuff challenging at the very least. I still depend on a terminal services session to a windows box for some things. I hope most of this is just my lack of familiarity with the mac and what's available for it, but I fear that this is not the case.

brianca @ 2003-12-01T16:09:00

2003-12-01T22:45:50Z

So this livejournal thing is a strange beast. If you get a little behind on it, you just keep falling deeper and deeper in the hole of not updating. I keep thinking I've got so much to update on here that I can't possibly do it all right now, and then more will happen and make it even worse. Such is life, what with stuff happening all the time and whatnot.

Here's a couple of things to get out so I don't feel so far behind. I should put up a trip report and some info on the truck at some point, but who knows if that'll happen.

1) The strangest thing I noticed about rome was that the handrails on the escalators move slightly faster than the stairs. Not so much that you'd really notice, but just enough that if you keep a tight grip on the handrail you'll have to take a step or fall over before you reach the top.

2) I'll qualify this by saying that I'm only halfway done, but the mystery surrounding working on or rebuilding an automatic transmission seems to be blown way out of proportion. If you take your time and keep up with everything, it doesn't seem bad at all. And this is from someone who is not the most mechanically gifted in the world. Then again when it drops out from under the truck at 70mph on the highway a week after I put is back in , I'll be singing a different song.

3) So far Mac OS X is the shiznit.

More to come.

brianca @ 2003-10-16T23:59:00

2003-10-17T05:09:00Z

Ok. So I more or less accidentally became a vegetarian a couple of months ago. I was just thinking about the arbitrary selection process we have as to which animals are considered eatable, and the various ideas about this topic around the world. That led to me thinking about a few of the pigs that I've known in my life. Yes, I am, in fact, from Tennessee. It's said pretty often, and it's true, that pigs are at least as smart as dogs. I've known a few that knew tricks that you'd expect a dog to know, and even on that thought he was a dog. I'll try and find a newspaper link about that one, because he was kind of famous around memphis. Anyway, that got me started thinking about eating my dog, which was a very disturbing thought to say the least. Eventually my thoughts wandered to the conditions that most animals bred for food are raised in and that was it. My stomach was turned. I assumed it would last a few days, but here it is a couple of months later and I still have no desire to eat meat.

The great thing about it is that I am finding all kinds of great meals that I never would have tried without this new diet. I've found that it's not hard at all to find things at most any resturaunt, and much of the food is much more flavorful than what I would have normally ordered.

I assume that at some point I'll go back to at least eating seafood, or maybe free range chicken that I can convince myself had a better life before they were slaughtered, but I've definitely expanded my horizons in a very suprising way. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to shake things up a little.