Ashby has been participating in the Little Rascalz multi-sport class on Tuesdays at Pioneer Park in Mission Hills. This has been wonderful for her. Thus far she has played La Crosse, Baseball, Soccer, Tennis and Field Hockey. 

The above photo is from her last class. Prior to this class starting her and I were participating in our own Greco-Roman wrestling session on the grass. After we had paused, Ashby stumbled into the top of my head when I was looking down. She busted her lip wide open. Blood was everywhere. The other parents didn’t know we had stopped wrestling and it was caused by her stumbling. They only saw her bloody face and tears and had been witness to our shenanigans for the previous 15 minutes. Needless to say, their looks were telling. I felt like a total ass.

Anyway, I got the blooding down to a trickle and offered her to go home. She wasn’t having it. She immediately got out on the field as soon as the coaches started and got down to some field hockey.

Today, when she saw the above photo she said: “I’m holding my lip like that because it still hurt.” She’s such a bad ass. 🙂 And yes, I do recommend Little Rascalz.They have eleven locations in San Diego county.

I lucked into a ticket to Gogol Bordello last week. The show was fantastic.

As previously blogged I recently attended the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit. The day before the event I had noticed the Pogues are playing at the House of Blues in San Diego on October 19.

I am a big Pogues fan and it has been over a year since I’ve been to any concert. When I looked at ticket prices I learned they are selling for $85 a ticket! I don’t think I have ever spent more than $50 on a concert ticket. Tara encouraged me to go to the show, but there is no way I can bring myself to spend that much for a concert. Especially not for a concert at the House of Blues—the Applebee’s of concert venues.

After deciding not to attend the Pogues show I was pondering how long it has been since I went to a show and how I really wanted to see Gogol Bordello live. In the event you are not familiar with this band, think: Gypsy Punk Rock. Sounds awesome, right? It is.

The next day, while at the aforementioned conference, I bumped into Eric Marcoullier. Eric is one of the guys who built and sold MyBlogLog to Yahoo!. I’m not sure how we first met, but Chad Dickerson, formerly the lead of Yahoo! Developer and the current CTO of Etsy.com, is a mutual friend and I believe Chad introduced us a couple years ago or perhaps Chad just said we should meet. I’m not sure.

Eric and I suffer from what I call: cyber familiarity dissonance (CFD). This is when the familiarity with a given person is disproportional online than the familiarity afforded via meat space interactions. Basically, you barely know them, but thanks to social networking and social media tools you feel like you know each other fairly well. It seems my relationships in meat space increasingly suffer from CFD.

While talking, Eric mentioned he was attending Gogol later that night. Having just been thinking the night before about Gogol it seemed a peculiar coincidence. Alas, the event was sold out. 5 minutes after speaking with Eric he returned to inform me he had a ticket. $35. I was in. If I were

The show was fantastic. It was the highest energy concert and best pit I’ve been in for years. I was left of center stage and surging between 3-8 people back. The pit was friendly, but there were plenty of elbows flying, body surfing (which means you have to watch or be kicked in the head) and I experienced a few head-butts. Good times.

Maybe it’s the nature of Gogol or perhaps the changing times, I’m not sure, but there were a surprising number of women in the pit. Is this typical these days?

in closing, if ever you have a chance to attend a Gogol Bordello show you really should jump at the opportunity. 

I was at the superlative ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit earlier this week. I saw a fellow sketching cartoons on a tablet while I was there. Evidently this was Rob Cottingham who was cartoon-blogging the event.

So much was different about this conference. By different I mean positively different. Including the excellent Indian food that was served for lunch. I’m looking forward to the next ReadWriteWeb conference.

Tonight Thunderbird 3b4 spontaneously informed me:

Awww…shucks, thanks guys for looking out.

I’ve been using Thunderbird 3 beta since August. It’s fantastic. Use it. Also, be sure to follow @davidascher and provide him with cheerleading.

Follow @Shaver too while you’re at it. He has a post about this security problem at his blog.

Now that I migrated my self-hosted blog to hosting at WordPress.com I have complaints.

When I was self-hosting I used the excellent Twitter Tools plug-in from Alex King for posting a weekly digest of my tweets to my blog. It is important to me that my blog be a journal for my kids and family. Twitter is part of this journal. My tweets commonly overlap with my blog posts. Missing twitter at my blog is missing, at least, half my journal. I’m bummed. Suggestions please?

When I was self-hosting I was running Google Analytics. I would refer to the WordPress analytics for my personal blog on occasion and the two were never identical. The WordPress stats were always higher. Why? I have no idea. Since moving to WordPress.com I’m unable to use Google Analytics. Why? I have no idea. We allow users of MindTouch Express to modify several HTML areas. With this users can run their own Google Analytics script. Why doesn’t WordPress.com allow this? Yes, there is additional overhead in loading the page, but I don’t care.

In my sidebars on my self-hosted blog I had a few widgets that were scripts or embeds. For some reason WordPress.com disallows this too. I most miss my FriendFeed widget. Again, you can do this at MindTouch Express. What’s the problem WordPress.com?

None of the comments that previously were threaded with replies in IntenseDebate migrated correctly.

Lastly, I’ll mention the fact that you are disallowed form using WordPress plugins. Ok, this one I understand. This is a big challenge. However, there are ways to achieve even this. Check out Ning.

Bubbles are fun to photograph. Children with bubbles is even better.

We attended a birthday party at Mission Bay Park. I haven’t been to that playground in over a year. I remember taking Ashby here as a very small child. Time flies by so fast.

I was recently on TWiT.tv: FLOSS Weekly with Randal Schwartz, Jono Bacon, and Leo Laporte. Download MP3 file | Shownotes

All three of these people (and Dane) are wonderful people I thoroughly enjoy speaking (and drinking) with. 🙂

Visit the FLOSS Weekly Episode 89 show page to stream the episode in a click. You may also subscribe to the show in your preferred podcast or RSS client, which you should because it’s an awesome show.

I really enjoy podcasting. I’d like to participate regularly in a podcast(s). If any readers have a podcast that you think I would find relevant to my areas of expertise please let me know. Or if you have an idea of a podcast you would like to start, ping me about this too. I wouldn’t mind starting a new podcast if 1. it were on topics I’m interested in and 2. I didn’t have to worry about any of the infrastructure for supporting it.

MindTouchers Steve and Arne have a fantastic podcast on concurrency called: ‘Concurrent Podcast’. Here is their schedule:

Topic	Status
Lock vs. Lock-Free The good, bad and ugly of locks; how to avoid them; and when lock-free data structures might just be the ticket.	published
Why Async matters Why should you care about asynchronous programming patterns in your daily programming?	published
Coroutines in C# How to write asynchronous code in a synchronous style.  Benefits and dangers of using the iterator pattern for async methods.	published
Grand Central Dispatch Apples introduced a new paradigm for concurrent programming in OS X Snow Leopard.  Join us in this podcast to learn what it is, how it works, and how it compares to other implementations.

I encourage you to subscribe and listen to it.

Last night I migrated my blog from a self-hosted WordPress install at Dreamhost to one hosted at WordPress.com. I had hoped to move my blog to Google’s Blogger, but I could not find a way to import the WordPress WXR (WordPress archive file) Blogger.

Why? Well, to start with I wanted to use Blogger for the following reasons. It’s free. You can easily add Google Gadgets and there are many many gadgets. Google is clearly building a distributed social network framework that Blogger will surely add to nicely. I’m referring to profiles and other social networking features add-ons that are similar to what Ringside Networks was trying to achieve. This concept of a distributed social network I find very interesting. I was advocating this concept as far back as 2006 when Steve Bjorg and I were thinking and talking about the Open Web Initiative. I expect to see some very interesting things from Google in this space over the next two years. Alas, migrating to Blogger was painful and I couldn’t find a single tool that allowed me to do so without data loss.

Why did I move to WordPress.com? I’m tired of maintaining my own blog. Also, the server at Dreamhost my blog was running on is really slooooow. Lastly, I wanted a service that would continue to host my blog even after I’m dead. This statement could be received poorly by some. You may think it’s morbid. It is. You may think it’s arrogant. It’s not. I have kids. Enough said.

Yes, I know about Archive.org. This doesn’t do a sufficiently good job of archiving for me. Specifically, you can’t really navigate a site using Archive.org and I want a journal my kids, grandkids, etc… can browse and read after I’m gone.

I tried Squarespace. Deepak Singh just migrated his blog (http://mndoci.com) here. Sqaurespace must be the nicest blogging service online. Were it not so expensive ($14/month with a custom domain) I may have considered it. I would have paid as much as $8/month, but $14 is just too steep for blogging, no matter how good it is. Also, Squarespace failed my: “what if I die” test. If I stopped payment, which presumably I would after death, they would nuke my blog. They should just remove user access and leave the blog there.

You have likely noticed I change the domain from www.oblogn.com to AaronFulkerson.com. I have been blogging at O (b LOG N) since 2004. It has changed domains a couple times in this period. This blog started out as a friend blog with some fellows I went to UNC with. There are still many of their posts. However, when I performed the migration from my self-hosted WordPress to WordPress.com I mapped their author names on their posts to my author name. This was an oversight on my part.  I hope some of Konrad Rezka’s racier posts do not later get me into trouble. 🙂

This became a personal blog sometime in 2005; so, I have been meaning to change the domain for a while now. I couldn’t get Fulkerson.com, which would be awesome because then I could host at aaron.fulkerson.com. Nor could I get Roebot.com. Hence the new domain: aaronfulkerson.com

Now, you may be asking: What the hell is O (b LOG N)? It’s a pun on the run time complexity of algorithms. O(logn)…get it? waka waka….

Ashby is really into Princesses. Personally, I’m not fond of Disney or Disney Princesses. Especially older Disney, which depicts women as submissive and is often quite scary to children. If Disney being scary surprises you then you haven’t watched Disney as an adult. Nonetheless, when I saw there was Disney’s Princesses on Ice in town I was excited to take Ashby. I knew she would have a fantastic time. I was right and so too did Tara and me.

Prior to the event, Tara and I took Ashby to the new Corvette Diner at Liberty Station in Loma Portal. We had been to the old location in Hillcrest, but I wasn’t fond of it because it just felt dirty. I really like this new location though.

After dinner we drove to Sports Arena for the show. Once in the venue we loaded up Ashby with a new wand and snacks. Our seats were amazing. We were on the ice, front row. Indeed these were the best seats I have ever had at any event. I could have picked a Princess’ nose every minute were I inclined. The actors would occasionally step off the ice and interact with the audience. Ashby was too shy to engage them, but this made it even more fun and exciting.

Here are my two favorite princesses of the evening:

Cinderella wasn’t bad either, yowza…. 😉

Ashby was mesmerized by the show. I suppose we all were. The skating was amazing and the costumes were equally impressive. The best part of the show was witnessing the awe in Ashby’s face and in those of the children around us. We had a fantastic time.

Thank you Sarah for watching Roesevelt for us so we could go.

This is awesome. 🙂 How many times have I heard this when crashing VIP parties at conferences? If I had a nickel….

www.explodingdog.com