Last week my Grandmother died and we had her funeral today. The pastor suggested that we discuss the things about her life that shaped us. During the reception I really didn’t get a chance to do that but I have put some thought into it and I’ve come up with 3 things I’ve learned because of her.

I’m excited to share that I’m changing jobs at Canonical. I’ve been working as the Ubuntu.com webmaster for four years. I’ll be changing to a web developer on a different team. More specifically, I’ll be kind of a front-end web developer working on theming and the likes.

When I started at Canonical there was under 50 employees and the webmaster job description was quite broad. Over time as the company has grown and more people came on to help in various aspects my role became more of a marketing job, making content changes and running web reports. I was spending less of my time doing tasks where I excelled.

It’s kind of a lateral move. I’ll be switching to the team of developers responsible for managing our internal apps. I’ll continue to work on the Ubuntu.com infrastructure including Drupal, WordPress and Moin Moin as before. However this job is explicitly about developing custom application solutions. Someone else will be hired to take on the roles of managing the content and reporting for the website.

For those of you who are my colleagues in the Ubuntu community (i.e. not Canonical staff) our relationship will not change – I’m still the contact. As a matter of fact, there is a lot about my job that isn’t changing. I mostly get to focus on the parts I love.

This suits my tastes perfectly. I’m much more comfortable thinking about HTTP headers, reducing code duplication, CSS and the likes than I am hunting for typos, ensuring headlines are sentence case and keeping on top of web reports.

There will be a job post to fill the role of webmaster. If you’re interested in it, let me know and I’ll send you the details when they’re finalized by management. If you know me you know how to contact me privately and I think that would be the best method to express interest in the job.

For a while I’ve been re-evaluating wordpress and have come to the conclusion that for common blogging tasks, it’s better than Drupal. It’s taken a while but I’ve migrated my site to back to WordPress (I’m using v3) from Drupal 5. It’s not perfect, but in the spirit of open source’s mantra, “release early, release often,” here it is. Expect to see some changes as I customize it and tweak it.

“Share What You Wear” is a program organized through my church that distributes countless thousands of clothing and basic houseware items *free* to needy people in Des Moines. Semi-trucks full of items are being unloaded at [Grace Church](http://www.gracehome.com) now and starting Thursday, scads of people, hundreds at least, maybe thousands (I have no clue how many) will come through the building and get good quality used clothes for themselves and their kids.

The details are:

Good clean clothing for the entire family! Men’s work clothes, boots, shoes, winter clothes, hats, gloves, ladies’ and children’s clothing, and more (all sizes). Plus bedding, blankets, baby items, toys, and other misc. household items.

**Shopping Hours**

Thursday and Friday, November 20th and 21st

* 8:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
* 12:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
* 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Saturday, November 22nd

* 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

You can get to the church by taking bus route #7 Ft. Des Moines – Walker which stops right at the church’s parking lot entrance at [4200 E 25th Street Des Moines IA 50317](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=4200+E+25th+Street+Des+Moines+IA+50317&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=33.160552,60.732422&ie=UTF8&ll=41.639533,-93.569655&spn=0.007633,0.014827&t=h&z=16&g=4200+E+25th+Street+Des+Moines+IA+50317&layer=c&cbll=41.636778,-93.569467&panoid=qMhCAEn-j1x5lBBd6TtPvw). (It’s the big green-roofed church you see on i235 north of the Euclid exit – link above is a google map you can use to get directions)

Please pray that many needy people will be helped to get what they need (materially speaking), pray also that hoarders will be kept at bay (a perennial problem) and lastly pray that those who are [spiritually needy will also find what they're searching for](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%204:10-15;&version=51;).

In an effort to save money I decided to shave my cat rather than take him to the groomer to be shaved.

I don’t think I’ll do that again. Some things are worth paying for. Fortunately he’s very forgiving. Sorry Snickers.

On ebay, a “snipe” is when someone bids on an auction at the very last second. Maybe you’ve experienced this when you bid on something and thought it was in the bag and then refreshed the auction page expecting to see a “Congratulations, you won” message but instead saw, “This auction has ended, sorry, you didn’t win.” It’s frustrating and disappointing and your first response is, “I hate it when that happens!” But really, snipping isn’t a bad thing.

My rule of thumb when bidding is to decide how much I’m willing to pay for an item and don’t pay a penny more than that. I saw a cell phone that you can buy new for $140 go for more than that recently because of last minute bidding. How foolish! You see, as the auction nears its end, people start getting emotional and will start increasing their bid, in many cases paying more than they should. The sellers love this, there’s nothing more exciting as a seller than seeing a last-minute bidding war for your item.

As a consumer you should not get emotional or you’ll spend too much money. If we all followed this rule then snipping would be useless. We’d all just decide how much we want to spend and bid the appropriate amount and the auction would end with the highest bidder getting the item. So if you want to pay $60 for that item, bid $60 initially, if you want to bid $70, decide it up front and bid it. If you don’t win, oh well, _there will be another one_ in a day or two.

But we don’t do that… ebay (and auctions in general) trick us. It looks like we were outbid by only $1 so we increase our bid by a bit, then the other person’s bid increases by $1 more than ours, so we think, ok, its not much, just one more time… so you bid a little bit more and now you’re the winner. The other person then goes through this same process and it repeats itself a couple times and the end result is we pay too much.

So assuming that your initial bid is truly what you wanted to pay, then a sniper will come in and bid at the last second, circumventing the bidding war. Either the sniper will bid more than you and win, or less than you and lose. Both buyers come out ahead because no one has time to make emotionally motivated bids.

If I spoke every language but did not love others, my words would be like noisy clanging. If I saw the future, memorized all of wikipedia and had an inner resolve strong enough to move mountains but did not love others my gains would be worthless. If I gave everything I had to the poor and even died for a good cause I might have something to boast about, but without love I would be nothing.

What is love? It is patient and kind, never bragging or jealous or rude. It never demands its own way nor keeps track of the times it has been let down. It does not enjoy getting away with what is wrong – it celebrates when justice prevails. Love never gives up, always has hope and can last through every circumstance.

Everything else known to mankind will become useless in time except love – it is precious forever. As an adult, we remember the actions of our youth and understand that we saw life as if we were looking through a foggy mirror. Right now our understanding of the universe is similarly incomplete, but when we achieve full understanding we’ll look back and be ashamed of how we’ve behaved.

Three things will last forever – faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love.

_- a paraphrase of [1 Corinthians 13](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20cor%2013&version=51)_

Last week, around May 2nd or 3rd, my daughter learned to crawl. It’s been a week so now she’s officially at that stage referred to as, “no really, don’t take your eyes off of her!”

So now I’ve got this challenge that so many people before me have faced. How to get her to be stationary for a little bit. This is my brief and whimsical diary of a few experiments.

Attempt one
I’ll call this one, immobilize, I stumbled on it by accident and it worked for a good 30 or 40 seconds. It gave me the inspiration to do this investigation and try to find a technique that would work, possibly for even longer!

As you can see this technique is quite simple because all you have to do is entangle the legs. Unfortunately it is simple but ineffective after the first time. You’ll notice the picture above is a bit blurry… I forgot to flip up the flash on the camera so it chose a slow shutter speed. Quicker than I was able to pop the flash and snap another picture she had escape the entanglement.

Attempt two
Best called distraction, this technique works quite well in certain circumstances. Basically you lay cheerios on the floor in a path that leads nowhere.

Unfortunately there are numerous ways this can go wrong. Also this technique means you will be vacuuming the floor more often than you will be washing your hair.

Attempt three
This attempt was a miserable failure. Nothing more needs to be said – except that I had no idea a 10 month old could lift up a laptop.

Attempt four
The tried and true technique.

It never fails.

__Cats and Toilets__

I think I’ve figured out why cats drink from the toilet. You see, when you feed a dog, he’ll clean the dish. Therefore you must feed him proper portions. Cats tend to be thrifty by nature. If you feed a cat, he’ll eat when he wants to, and just enough to satisfy himself. Therefore I’ve surmised that cats, being thrifty, drink from the toilet because they see it as a bountiful supply of water and are merely rationing their water bowl for that day that the toilet runs out. Quite brilliant.

I’m not sure why dogs drink from the toilet. It probably has something to do with either their highly personable nature or their poor cognitive ability.

__Dishes__

On another psychology related note, there appears to be no difference in my wife’s reaction when she sees the sink full of dishes either stacked neatly, in order from largest (at the bottom) to smallest and when she sees the sink full of dishes haphazardly tossed in.

I have two theories on why there is no visible difference in her reaction.

* __Theory 1:__ She knows that a sink of stacked dishes holds more than a sink filled haphazardly. Therefore she’s doing a quick mental calculation on the number of dishes and observing stacked = more dishes, which is naturally disheartening, or messy = chaos, which is also naturally disheartening.
* __Theory 2:__ My wife simply doesn’t like seeing dishes in the sink.

If I were to set the rules, I would emphatically say that there should be no _entropy_ in the sink. I can handle having dishes in the sink, but they should be orderly. In this regard though, I don’t set the rules and therefore I submit to, “there should be _nothing_ in the sink.”

OK, so I’ve been walking often, not every day, but most. When I walk its at least 1 mile, but I’ve been walking some days 2.5. Plus, I went to the Iowa State Fair twice, each day involving quite a bit more than 2 miles of walking. Unfortunately, the healthy walking was offset significantly by the unhealthy fair food.

After my last appointment, my Dr asked me to have blood drawn. She said she’d send a letter if there’s nothing of concern, or call if there was a concern. I got a call on Wednesday at 5:15 – Apparently my [tryglycerides][1] are way too high. In my defense, I did eat at [Long John Silvers][2] the night before, which I do only rarely. In hindsight, I probably should have waited an extra day to have my blood drawn.

The Dr. said I needed to make it a high priority to get into her office to discuss treatment. So, today I will go in and discuss that.

![Fair Tickets][3]

[1]: http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4778
[2]: http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-C00001-01c229c.html
[3]: http://www.bearfruit.org/files/FairTickets.jpg