Shot on my way to work.

I know. I haven’t posted in a while. All is quite well. I leave you with this.

I have seen many many dolphins during the years l lived in the Florida Keys. Dolphins are always playful and social. They would tag along with us when I worked the crab trap line or fished the gulf stream.  Moreover, whenever I visit my father’s place in Port Orange I always see a few in his back yard. He lives on the Halifax River, which is part of the Atlantic Waterway. In fact, I saw a few dolphins last week while I was at my dad’s. However, I have never seen anything like the stampede shown in this video.

This video was shot in the Sea of Cortez between Isla la Guardia and Bajia de los Angeles. While fishing we ran through a pod of several hundred dolphins. This is part of what we saw.

I had no idea this kind of thing happened. Wow! So much for fishing…. 😉

Ashby (my 3.5 year old daughter) is amazing. Of course, if you read my blog, you already know this. One aspiration I have for my daughter is that she grow up with compassion for her fellow *man. After some thought, I’ve determined one way to achieve this is by spending time with her engaged in community work.

To this end, Ashby and I will be attending the September 5th La Jolla Shores beach cleanup that is organized by the Surfrider Foundation.

Participants should meet by the main lifeguard tower. The cleanup takes place from 9am until 11am.

All volunteers are welcome to participate and must sign a liability waiver, but volunteers under 18 MUST have a parent or guardian sign the waiver before the minor can participate. (Please note the NEW waiver as of August 2009)
Click Here for the beach cleanup Waiver Form.

 

The world we live in is amazing. Life is amazing. Everything is amazing. We all should be amazed. Take the time to let yourself be amazed.

Last week I flew with my family to Florida to spend the week on the beach and visit my father and mother. We safely flew at 39,000 feet. I listened to several “How Stuff Works” podcasts on my iPod and I read a book on my Amazon Kindle 2 while holding my 6 month old son. My wife sat beside me and played with our 3.5 year old daughter Ashby. Ashby watched two movie rentals on my iPhone. We ate lunch together flying safely through the air. We flew from one coast to the other in under seven hours.

We have spent nearly every day on the beach in Daytona with my brother who drove 500 miles with his family from North Carolina. His daughters played games collaboratively on their Nintendo DS handhelds during their seven hour drive.

Every morning for the last week The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have been delivered automatically to my Kindle 2 from outer space for me to enjoy over coffee as I sit gazing at the river and watching the occasional dolphin swim by.  I’m writing this blog post using a Verizon MiFi card from my father’s couch as I upload photos to my Flickr account.

So much to be awed by. The current pace and obvious acceleration in technological innovation ensures that in only two years I’ll read this post and be marveled by how archaic some of these technologies are. Another thing is certain. I’ll also look back at this post and reminisce about how fantastic this time is and how lucky I am to have such a wonderful family.

Steve has been on a two week vacation. The other day I was on a phone call at his desk. You see, the sales and marketing team has grown rapidly in the last 6 months and we are packed like cord wood in our side of the office. Whereas, the product team is in an expansive and windowed side of the office. Bastard devs. 😉 In short, while Steve has been gone I’ve discovered Steve’s desk is far more comfortable than mine when I’m on calls. Also, I think I can smell him…LOL, just kidding. 

Digression aside. While on the phone I left Steve the following doodle:

It reads: “Steve is gone. 😦 Come back from Iceland….”

With our new California state budget our state parks are being cut significantly and many will be closed.

Green Ribbon – SOS Parks! – "Save Our State Parks Weekend – Thank you for your support of California’s State Parks! Visit your favorite state park and show your support by taking a picture while you are there of you and your friends wearing a green ribbon, wearing green or holding a sign! "

In general, these twitter ribbon campaigns have seemed useless to me, but I am a proponent of state parks and I felt compelled to participate in this campaign. I do not think it will have any positive impact on the park system. However, I have an idea that would.

Instead of closing parks to shore up the California budget California could have a positive and immediate impact on the budget by changing the drug laws. More than half of the California state budget is allocated to prisons and the criminal justice system. More than half of the inmates in our state prisons are non-violent drug offenders. Do the math.

Legalize it – don’t criticize it

                                                         – Peter Tosh

Disclaimer: I will not advertise it and it probably is not good for the flu, asthma tuberculosis or even umara composis as Peter Tosh tells us in his song, but it surely would be good for our tax base as well as our budget. Moreover, legalization would negatively impact the drug gangs in Mexico, which again would have a positive and immediate impact on our budget.

I am not a hippie pot head, but I am a pragmatist and the current drug laws are an artifact of the Reagan administration’s fear politicking that is the single largest contributing factor to the bankrupting of our state. It is clear the current drug laws are as absurd as prohibition in the 1920s.

#justsayin

I’m reading a book on web analytics and I have determined my employer should be using heat map analysis of our corporate website. In fact, it’s ridiculous we haven’t been benefiting form this already. For some reason the Google Analytics overlay feature isn’t working at our corporate website. It must have something to do with how JavaScript heavy the site is. So last night I checked out www.crazyegg.com and www.clickdensity.com. This morning I attempted to login to ClickDensity and inadvertently included a comma. In return I received the following exception:

Wow, that is shoddy engineering. If the service can not provide a reasonable user experience for even the most basic boundary cases how can I trust them with anything else? What else have they ‘missed’?

Currently I’m leaning toward CrazyEgg.

If ever there was a web video ripe for a mashup it’s the following video of our friend’s three year old son:

Yo gabba gabba? Please. This boy deserves his own show. Here are Xander and Ashby when they were young and his parents were our neighbors in Little Italy San Diego.

This was before Mitch and Magda took Xander away from us to Philadelphia where they work on cancer research. Cha!… like THAT’S going anywhere. Post-doc researchers are so into themselves…whatever.

We can’t wait to see you guys in Florida next week. 🙂