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. 🙂

Damien and I biked along with Critical Mass San Diego again last Friday. This was my third outing and Damien’s second. This was a large Mass. My guess is that there were 1,000 cyclists the route took us just over 30 miles. Our route:

08/03/2009 Route
Find more Runs in San Diego, California

I’m often asked the same questions about Critical Mass. Who determines the route? Is there a prescribed route? Whoever is in the front determines the route and no there is not a prescribed route. In fact, this last Critical Mass Damien and I led it for the last eight miles out of Pacific Beach and up to Mission Hills. We were ready to go home. 🙂

Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway
We’re the best of friends
Insisting that the world be turnin’ our way

Tara and I took the family on the road to San Jose for an open source software conference where I was speaking and my employer was exhibiting.

We took highway 5 North to my hometown Morgan Hill. From San Diego it took 6 hours and 45 minutes. Not bad. We spent most of the week at my sister’s place. Ashby was ecstatic to see her cousins Skyler and Owen. Who also were pleased to have Ashby there to paint with make up and play with.

Because my employer was making a product announcement I was very much heads-down on work items through the week and then busy during the conference. Friday morning we headed South again, but we took Pacific Coast Highway 1 this time.

We stopped in Monterey and visited the aquarium. I have many fond childhood memories of Monterey Bay and the aquarium. We had a wonderful time. We only managed to take in about a third of the aquarium in the nearly two hours we spent there. The place is huge and it has gown significantly since I was last there over fifteen years ago.   

In Monterey there is also one of the most amazing children’s playgrounds that I have ever visited. This is on the North side of the city and is well worth stopping by if you have little ones.

After Monterey we stopped at Carmel by the Sea. Tara had never been and we took lunch there. Yelp led us to Hog’s Breath Inn, which was once owned by Clint Eastwood. Over lunch Tara used the retro Bluetooth handset I won by answering a trivia question correctly at the Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards party the previous evening. Needless to say Tara got some curious looks. The trivia question: what are the most commonly used colors in flags? I’ll provide the answer at the bottom of this post.

The above photo of Tara talking on the aforementioned Bluetooth handset was taken from my iPhone while she speaking on my iPhone using the handset. Isn’t technology wonderful?

After Carmel we spent a night in Big Sur. Big Sur has it all: giant redwoods, mountains, the pacific ocean, beach, waterfalls and a fantastic trail system. Alas, with two little ones we did little more than hole up in a modest cabin. It was a bit too cold to camp with Roesevelt as we had intended. 

The next day we headed further south to Morro Bay. Yet another town that indelibly charmed my psyche during my adolescence.

Unfortunately, we returned home the following day. Tara and I both ached for another week of vacation road trip. In a couple of weeks from now we fly to Florida to visit my family. This will have to do. I’m most excited about being able to get back on my father’s 1700 cc Victory (that’s a big ass motorcycle). Some day perhaps I’ll own my own motorcycle and sidecar for the kids. 🙂

The complete photo set of our road trip can be found at Flickr. So too can the OSCON (open source conference) photos set.

The trivia question: what are the most commonly used colors in flags? Red, white and blue.

I have no idea where Steve found this drawing. He used it at the MindTouch developer blog and I love it.