Aku Aku

Uriah Duffy and Whitesnake

I just found out that a friend I haven't caught up with in a few years is now in Whitesnake. Yes. That Whitesnake.

Uriah

Tesla Vocabulary Roundup

I actually wrote this while Mie and Tesla were in Japan for a week but hadn't posted it yet. When they came back Tesla's ability and/or willingness to repeat new words had increased significantly so there are actually more words now. I'll post it as originally written though.

Tesla isn't really talking in the general sense yet. I've heard that toddlers being raised bilingually take a bit longer to  start talking, and it seems to be the case. She has a limited vocabulary though, here's a round up:

Japanese

word (english meaning): tesla pronunciation

moto (more): toto
hana (nose): nana
ashi (foot): ashi
teh (hand): teh
meh (eye): meh
kuchi (mouth): kuchi
zousan (elephant): zousan
uma (horse) uma
shu shu (going to the bathroom): shu shu
wau wau (doggie) wau wau
tori (bird): tori
gomi (trash [man]): gomi
shu shu (use the bathroom): shu shu
arigato (thank you) - gato
chodai (give me that) - dodai
isu (chair) - isu
ringo (apple) - lingo

English

no: no
uh oh: uh oh
Sofia: fia
banana: nana
apple: bapple
wash you hands: wash wash
water: wawa
meow meow (cat): mrau mrau
quack quack (duck): quack quack
Schnappi: bappi
pig: big
frog: fuk
book: book
flower: fower
chair: chehr
shirt: shoot
shoes: shoooooz
diaper: daipah
all done: all done!
door: door
juice: juice
thank you (but she uses it when she wants to give you something): tankoo

Tesla-ese

milk: gotsche
blankie: daiki
pillow: ba

She understands more words in both Japanese and English, but these are the ones she uses.

6 Month Netflix Holding Pattern

I've had a movie in the top ten or so of my queue for about six months now. It's called Russian Ark:

A visually hypnotizing cinematic feat, Russian Ark is Alexsandr Sokurov's spellbinding ode to St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum. As the photography floats and careens through the lavish corridors of the museum, examining its architectural details while following a dreamlike plot, a cast of 867 actors supplies the action -- including The Marquis (Sergey Dreiden), an aged European who acts as the film's charismatic guide.

Every time it would get to the top two or three I would bump something up and displace it. I expect it's an artsy movie, probably slow paced, and I guess I kept feeling not in the mood for it, but I never had the heart to remove it. It finally made it to the top today and got shipped. I feel like we should have a little party in honor of its tenacity.

Netflix russian ark

35 of 52: Rhino

Tesla likes this video The Rhino Song so I made her a Rhino out of sculpey.

34 of 52: Figure Drawing

When I flew into Portland for RailsConf I walked down to Dante's to get some pizza and beer right after checking into my hotel. When I walked into the mostly empty early evening bar I noticed a spotlight on a mannequin holding a hula hoop. While waiting for my pizza slice I realized it wasn't a mannequin, it was a semi nude model surround by a handful of artists with sketch pads. Turned out that they were selling pads and pencils at the door for $5. Since I had a few hours to kill and had never tried figure drawing before I decided to give it a shot.

The first one is really crappy, but after 90 minutes (and a few beers) I think I showed a lot of improvement. Yes, still not good, but come on, look at that first one! I think that's they key with people who are good sketchers: it's not that there is necessarily some natural talent that one either has or doesn't have, it's that they do it all the time and just get better and better at it.

By the way, those are feathers on her pasties, not tassels (some folks I showed these to were confused by that).

Pivotal Big Guns Ride Into Twitter Town

The news has broken that Pivotal Labs has taken on the task of fixing Twitter's notorious performance problems, or as the VentureBeat article described it "Twitter brings in big guns from Pivotal Labs to help rebuild its troubled infrastructure". I think this is a smart move for Twitter. During my two years at Pivotal I was constantly impressed by the level of engineering excellence exhibited there. It was by far the smartest group of software engineers I had ever worked with and the highest quality of code I've ever had a hand in producing. I truly believe they are the best Ruby on Rails shop you can find anywhere. That's why now that I've left Pivotal to lead the engineering effort of a web startup, I'm back at Pivotal as a client. I know where to go for excellence, and apparently so does Twitter. I'm really looking forward to seeing this team crush the Twitter issue.

Note, depiction is not necessarily the actual Twitter team at Pivotal, but they are some of my favorite Big Guns there :)

History Meme

History meme.

[dav:~] $ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
128 ruby
75 cd
57 ls
35 rm
25 sudo
13 rake
10 vi
10 ssh
9 ping
8 cat