Finally Made it to Fenway

The best seats are still from the Edge.

Seven Fifty Beer

Seven fifty beer I can deal with. Seven eighty offer I got last week I
can neither deal with nor respect. I wonder how much beer is at Fenway?

A Note to Dad Lost and Found

My wife's dear grandmother Margret VanBenthuysen Newton passed away just a couple of years ago. In her last years she moved from her home in Lakewood New Jersey to be closer to Tara's parents in Hamilton where they could care for her. I recall the day we all helped her move out of Leisure Village. There was nothing remaining in the dusty one car garage but rubbage - a few boxes of books which nobody wanted to claim. I love dusty boxes of long forgotten stuff from garages, attics and basements. I may just find mildewy cooking books - but I might find momentum too.

That sultry evening in our dusty garage in Malvern we spent hours and hours going through the boxes and tattered bags. What we found was a portrait of Marget's life detailed by books on gardening, stitchery and clockmaking ... the dated newsprint that wrapped items all the way back to the 1940s ... the endless array of notes and remarkable items which were stowed in the pages of the books.

While Tara put supper out for the kids and eventually tucked them into bed I carried precious finds into our kitchen where Tara poured over them. We found my father in law's Bible, dozens of beautiful hardback books on from obscure authors such as Henry Charlton Beck (The Jersey Midlands), D. W. Hering (The Lure of the Clock), and Katharine Morrison McClinton (Collecting American Glass). We found love notes to Alfred and from Alfred (great grandfather James Alfred. We found annotated magazine clippings. We found small things at the bottom of the boxes and bags that Marge and Al probably thought were lost. Some boxes seemed to be packed during prior moves all the way back to Piscataway.

In the pages of one book, we found a manually typed document folded once, the author unknown.

A NOTE TO DAD:
This was written about the greatest boy in the world --- YOUR SON. We think you will enjoy reading; maybe you will even want to save it to read someday when the boy has grown to be a man like you.

"Between the innocence of babyhood and the dignity of manhood we find a delightful creature called a boy. Boys come in assorted sizes, weights, and colors, but all boys have the same creed: To enjoy every second of every minute of every
hour of every day and to protest with noise (their only weapon) when their last minute is finished and the adult males pack them off to bed at night.

Boys are found everywhere --- on top of, underneath, inside of, climbing on, swinging from, running around, or jumping to. Mothers love them, little girls hate them, older sisters and brothers toerate them, adults ignore them, and Heaven protects them. A boy is Truth with dirt on its face, Beauty with a cut on its finger, Wisdom with buddle gum in its hair, and Hope of the future with a frog in its pocket.

When you are busy, a boy is an inconsiderate, bothersome, intruding jangle of noise. When you want him to make a good impression, his brain turns to jelly or else he becomes a savage sadistic, jungle creature bent on destroying the world and himself with it.

A boy is a composite --- he has the appetite of a horse, the digestion of a sowrd swallower, the energy of a pocket-sized atomic bomb, the curiosity of a cat, the lungs of a dictator, the imagination of a Paul Bunyan, the shyness of a violet, the audacity of a steel trap, the enthusiasm of a fire cracker, and when he makes something he has five thumbs on each hand.

He likes ice cream, knives, saws, Christmas, comic books, the boy across the street, woods, water (in its natural habitat), large animals, Dad, trains, Saturday mornings, and fire engines. He is not much for Sunday School, company, schools, books without pictures, music lessons, neckties, barbers, girls, overcoats, adults, or bedtime.

Nobody else is so early to rise, or so late to supper. Nobody else gets so much fun out of trees, dogs and breezes. Nobody else can cram into one pocket a rusty knife, a half-eaten apple, 3 feet of string, an empty Bull Durham sack, 2 gum drops, 6 cents, a sling shot, a chunk of unknown substance, and a genuine super-sonic code ring with a secret compartment.

A boy is a magical creature --- you can lock him out of your workshop, but you can't lock him out of your heart. You can get him out of your study, but you can't get him out of your mind. Might as well give up --- he is your captor, your jailer, your boss, and your master --- a freckled-face, pint-sized, cat-chasing, bundle of noise. But when you come home at night with only the shattered pieces of your hopes and dreams, he can mend them like new with the two magic words --- "Hi Dad!"

I don't ever want to find the author. I will never Google these idioms. I like to think that this is about Tara's father and grandfather, or about my father and me, or about my sons ... or about me ... or you.

Lego Factory Downtown

I have yet to spend a day or evening working from home. I planned to
do so a couple of weeks ago but just went downtown in the end. It is
far more distracting working in an office. What I miss the most about
the home office are the kids working quietly in the Lego Factory.

Today Jack spent the whole day with me. We took the 8:04AM R5 from
Daylesford. We got a Dunkin Donut and registered at the Comcast
Center. SpongeBob and Jimmy Neutron replaced news on my TV and Jack
met some other children in CIMcity, played PingPong and RockBand and
raided the kitchen for some candy. We managed to get the Xbox360
running.

In the end, what Jack spent hours doing was building a Lego kit on the
floor of my office. I put some news on, dug into some email, and it
was like being back in the Lego Factory even though we were really
downtown.

R5 Paoli Local Never Smelled So Good

It doesn't matter how old and dismal a SEPTA regional rail car is,
when you are riding out on the platform between cars because it's
beyond standing room only there is plenty of fresh air. This morning
the trains were late and screwd up. I heard on KYW 1060 that it was
due to dew on the rails and wet leaves. All I know is that a few
commuters starting at Daylesford were surprised (and unsafely stunned
standing close to the tracks) when the late train from Paoli raced by
and skipped our platform. This evening platform 4B at Suburban station
was jam-packed. The 6:09 Thorndale express was way behind and the 6:12
Malvern local was at least 15 minutes late. THE LAST Phillies World
Series game was coming on soon and everyone wanted to get home. It's
7:20PM and I am halfway home. I left Comcast Center at 6:04PM.

I was almost the last person on the train boarding at Suburban. We
squeezed onto the platform cab. I felt bad for about one second for
the ton of folks at 30th Street Station who didn't stand a chance. One
tenacious lady budged in - she must have been from New York.

At Overbrook, the conductor insisted on dropping the hatch to the
stairs and we had to squeeze in further and then ridevin the air.
After a couple stops the capacity reduced enough to get folks off the
platform cab. And I grabbed a seat and took this shot over my head.

This commute is really going to get old this winter. Lesson learned
though. In this economy you either get a warm seat on SEPTA or you
get cool fresh air - never both.

7:36 ...

That MLB.com iPhone application may earn it's keep yet ...

Day in the Life Washington Metro Style

When I get a chance to tag this entry it will be not far from the truth. Right off the early Amtrak into Union Station, I tried to move swiftly through the Metro station. I was heading over to the
Marriott Metro Center to attend Splunk Live! I purchased a One Day Metro Pass with a credit card which immediately f'd me in the turnstyle - "see station manager". Apparently, the "one day pass" only works after 09:30. WTF kind of day epoch is that? Actually, I will need another tag ...

I bought a second $2 Fare Card and finally got along.

How ironic that on my way to a Splunk technology briefing, , on my way to talk with experts who understand time epochs better than most, that a mis-apportioned time epoch screws me out of
eight bucks and 10 minutes.

(if you know what a log file is and you do not know about Splunk it is time to stop using grep and download Splunk - spend some more time with your kids)

There was a day, when I literally wore a bat belt for iPlanet (i.e. two SkyTel text pagers), that I was fed up with the virtual ( ha ha ) slap in the face of operational awareness by the Java VM engineers. If the paucity of information in the GC logging was bad enough, there was no time stamp in the GC log messages. If you system traced the VM more time() system calls would fly by than you could shake a stick at and these guys weren't generous enough to drop a LONG into a printf().

I asked for a timestamp. I bitched for a time stamp. About as much time went by as there were VMs signaled SIGQUIT. One day on my way to gaining weight

"hissss...would you like any fries with that timestamp?...click"

I left the Java DriveThru with my

-XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps

and ... Huh? WTF? These guys don't print a UTC time stamp, they don't print a formatted time value. They print an unconventional duration since the epoch of the VM/GC runtime start. I guess if you live in a virtual world the epoch of the VM start means something (look everyone! The VM ran for 87,000 seconds!). In the real world it is almost worthless. When the rest of the real world treats time as a standard you might as well live in The Black Sun if you devise
your own time epochs.

Tape n Scissors

One gauge of our systems is to track web resources (URLs) over the
time domain measuring cache hits, origin hits, response codes,
response time, total hits and total bytes. it all comes from
telemetry. Telemetry represents change in state over change in time.
In simple terms telemetry indicates events. Logs provide telemetry
because logs record an event - the state of a component at a point in
time. A web server access log record HTTP response message
exchange events - the final state of a dispatched HTTP request. At any layer
from browser to data source, telemetry from the logs anchor the
complexity of our architecture in the simplicity of time and
uniformity of web resources identifiers.

I am working on cGauge but took some time today to try and get more
eyes on the data.

There is something more powerful than web server access logs. Try adding an event for the initial state of a dispatched HTTP request!