Shelter

Tech, philosophy and random musings

by

Misc updates and twigs

A number of smaller updates ;

  • My daughter Grace (7) today won 3rd place in the Australian Eisteddfod singing competition (8 and under, musical) with a clever rendition of “Castle on a cloud” from Les Miserables. Clever girl. Update: She also won 70m and came 3rd in 100m running in the “8 and under” category for the whole of Belconnen (district of Canberra) athletics carnival two weeks ago (how’s that for an “update”), which means she’s off to the state / territory games in November. Exciting stuff.
  • Some of my Flickr pictures were selected for the Schmap Canberra Guides;
  • Happy Rhodes just released a new album, her first in almost 10 years!! A MySpace website has been put up with samples. I love this stuff!
  • Stuff I’m committed to these days ;
    • An article (or essay) about user-centered design in the software life-cycle, including testing (user testing, application testing, functional testing, user-acceptance testing, and variations of these) before, during and after critical decisions and how to manage the implications.
    • Release the latest version of xSiteable (huh? That thing still exists? Apparently.) which is more like a clever XSLT templating system than a Topic Maps engine by itself.
    • Update my website, including better synchronizing between website and blogs. Yeah, should have done it ages ago.
  • Do you know I have actual plans for how to win the 20 million USD Google “get first to the Moon” competition? 🙂
  • I’m currently laying pavers in our backyard these days, and in two months I’ll start building my very own house-centric recyclable low-energy air-condition system. Being a software engineer can do that to people.

by

Kids growing up so fast

In the next few weeks I’ll be writing a bit about what’s going on at work, with Service Oriented Architecture, web service semantics, different layers of organisational constructs to support both business and development ideals, and project management and expecations handling.

But that’s not this post. This post is about my daughter Grace who’s six and a half. Before christmas we inherited an old computer from my wife’s sisters family, an old beaten thing we were going to give to the kids for educational games and homework and such things, and in no time I whipped it clean and hooked it into our network.

While I was at work last week I got this in my inbox ;

A secret story
a long time ago a daddy,mummy sat
soon thay found out that thay wer having
a BABY.

For those still not in the know, me and Julie are expecting our third child in July (every evening julie spends trying to find good names), and Grace is as excited as we are and decided to write me the above wonderful email, from her Gmail account no less. Not bad for a seven year old. She’ll be blogging in no time.

While I was writing this blog post I’ve been chatting with her on Gmail talk, and she says the most wonderful things. I need to spend more time with her when neither one of us is grumpy in the evening after a long day. 🙂 Tomorrow is Australia Day, a holiday, so I’m already looking forward to it. I feel so blessed with my wonderful little family.

Update: Yes, Alia, you’re right; Grace is indeed seven, not six (fixed). It seems she was growing even faster than I first thought. 🙂