In and not in my head
One of the things I find especially challenging is pushing things from the world inside my mind to the world outside (the so-called 'real world'). I grapple with understanding the factors that affect the difficulty of enacting that transition (I'm guessing most people are always dealing with that one way or another, if not always so explicitly). The, for want of a better word, size of something is sometimes an issue, but at other times seems to be irrelevant. In some instances it feels easy to build, enact, enable, do for long duration and at large scale to make whatever is in my mind exist outside of it. In other cases simply writing or speaking even a single sentence is insurmountable, and not due to any particular content of the sentence - it's just that the energy, or whatever, required to breach reality's barrier is beyond what I can achieve.

One of the reasons that I like working with / on computers is that (for me) at times they make that process at least a bit easier, though certainly not always nor for everything. I also find talking and working with people can be similar for me in this respect - in addition to new insights, viewpoints, skills, load-sharing, etc. that other people bring, the active presence of and interaction with other people makes it easier for me to make things 'real'. The word 'real' is in quotes there because it's not quite the word I want, but I can't find any closer one. Whatever-it-is is already real in my mind. All that making it 'really real' does is allow others (people or things, sentient or otherwise) to experience/use/understand/interact-with it as well.

There are many directions this sort of thinking can go: communication is/as action/creation and vice versa, the observer-influenced/determined nature of reality, the limits and conditions of transitions, the relation between stories and art and math, energy gradients and tunneling, memes and the noosphere, mind-body duality as a limited view on a line that goes further in both directions, the characteristics and 'cardinalities' of multiverses, and so on ...but hauling more of it out and/or in any kind of detail is more than I can do right now). My questions / discussion points for the moment are: why is it sometimes so easy and sometimes so hard, and what can I (or, more to the point, anyone) do change/control that?

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Kickstarter for Mogul!
I've finally launched my kickstarter to get Mogul published!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/747414366/mogul-boardgame-purple-valley-games-first-publicat

Please check it out, back it if it sounds like a game you'd enjoy, and spread the word!

I'd be happy to run a demo for any local folk, and I'll be doing a demo at the New England Gaming Convention at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, MA tomorrow evening (5/10).

Weeeee!

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Parenting is frustrating these days
Yes, it will get better, but right now it sucks.

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New Year's Social-ness and Visiting Hours
We're all a bit tired much of the time these days and so we may be scarce at the festivities this year. We'll probably show up for a bit at E&D's thing on the 1st, and I'll probably be around for a little while at E&R's on the 31st. However, we'd be happy to receive drop-in visitors any day between noon and 4 pm as long as you're prepared to wash your hands on arrival. Also, if you have any kind of ick, we love you, but please stay away - we'd really like to avoid giving any of the standard new year's illnesses to the new baby (not to mention the new parents).

In general, Christmas was lovely and things are going well.

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Week 1+ of Parenting
Our son was born 10 days ago, and it's been quite the life conversion. Of course, that comes as no surprise. One thing all parents agree is that having a child radically changes one's life. What I find so interesting is the ways it does so. Lack of sleep is certainly a part of it, but though dramatic it's not the real shift. Responsibility is certainly a part of it, but I got my responsible adult certificate many years ago when I first voluntarily went to the dentist. Having a kid is definitely a larger degree of responsibility, but not necessarily a different kind - it's all about taking care of what needs to be done, and prioritizing long term over short term. Obligation is also a component, but having previously bought a house, acquired a cat, and married my wonderful wife I'm very familiar and comfortable with the idea. The biggest change for me is more in the day to day processes of life. I've long felt constrained for time on the long scale - there's so much more I want to do in my life than I could possibly fit (and now even more gets crammed in). However, my daily activities usually happened at a pretty relaxed pace.

Parenting changes all that. I find myself looking for ways to trim 30 seconds off this or that process, and multi-tasking in a way I've never had to before. Everything is constantly being balanced against everything else and I operate just at the edge of chaotic confusion. I imagine new-parenting alone would do that to me, and it's intensified by working on finishing our new house at the same time. In some ways I find it akin to the vibrancy (not to mention insanity) of working in a start-up, and I guess in some senses it is a start-up. Here are a few more thoughts and observations from life as a new parent:

• I'm a huge fan of automation - my favorite appliances are the dishwasher, clothes washer, and, more recently, roomba. Each time I use one of them it's like I gain that much more time in my life. This holds true even more so now. Some of the more marginal time-savers, e.g. using a stand mixer instead of mixing or kneading by hand, which I had previously considered largely optional now feel very important.
• Operational planning is key, on a small scale as well as a large one. There three main aspects to this. First is look-ahead. In addition to whatever I'm doing at the moment I'm also thinking about what comes after that, and after that, and so on. Playing lots of board games over the years has been good training for that kind of thinking. Second is task clustering. I try to do as many tasks as possible for the given location, time, and kind activity: never grab one thing from the fridge when you could grab two more at the same time and save multiple door openings and item searches, when washing the feeding supplementer also was a couple of other things in the sink, when putting away groceries in the pantry grab a couple of items from the dishwasher to put there as well, and so on. Third is pipe-lining, and more generally task over-lapping. In a basic sense, this covers things like starting the next load of wash while the first one is drying so there will be a new load ready for the dryer as soon as the first load is done. On a finer scale it means things like putting away a dozen pieces of silverware while the tap water heats up, or putting away one cereal box while getting out another with the other hand. Basically, whenever possible be doing multiple things at once.
• I need to have a hierarchy of default behaviors that take minimal mental involvement (I learned this from our cat, which starts washing herself whenever distracted from whatever she was doing). Prior to parenting, if I got distracted or forgot what I was doing when I walked into a room I would just spend some time to try to remember what it was. Now whenever that happens I do other things (cleaning, folding, putting away, and general basic maintenance stuff) while I figure out what it was I was supposed to be doing. Partly this is a matter of efficiency and self defense - I'm so distracted so often from juggling so many things that I'd otherwise spend most of my time just figuring things out and not actually doing anything (thrashing). The other part is adaptability - parenting is an extremely reactive process at this point and whatever plan I have may fall apart at any moment. I need to be able to do something useful with my time while I regroup.
• Doing customer service and contract work was good preparation for parenting. Babies have all kinds of needs they don't know about, and all kinds of demands they can't articulate. Some problems need solving, some merely placating, and some will solve themselves if ignored for a little while.
• I've never been a real baby person before (though I really like kids once they get to a more interactive stage). I've appreciated and admired them from afar, but never been one that wants to hold the child of whomever we're visiting. That's definitely changed for our own kid - I get a real kick out of holding him and playing with him.

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A quick work recap - debugging a web problem
We're trying to track down a problem with a website at work. We suspect it may be related to intermittent nonce timeouts causing occasional session refresh redirection. Or possibly the problem is elves. We could bring in brownies to clean up after the elves. However, brownies eventually turn into girl scouts, which can quickly overload the cookie handling capability of our local system. One could install a cookie monster to deal with that, but even there the contextual self-documentation suggestions unpredictable behavior is to be expected in the later versions of the package.

In short, we don't know what the duck is going on.

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There was a baby shower for us this past weekend, and one of the many great gifts we received is that someone else hosted it so we didn't have to worry about prepping beforehand or cleaning after. A giant thank you to all involved! In addition the baby shower itself, we took almost an entire day off from working on the house. We were up there for a bit, but just to show it off to visiting family.

House construction proceeds apace. The move-in date is in sight, just a couple of weeks away! There's still a bunch to do (and much more to do after we move in), but it's all doable. At least, I'm confident we'll get done the stuff we have planned to do. I'm a bit nervous about our contractor pulling his weight.

My computer game of choice these days is Minecraft. I'd probably be playing Civ5, but my computer won't run it. I'd like to spend more time and energy on board game design, but I'm usually too fried for that lately. Perhaps after Thanksgiving...

Generally, things are going well, if very stressful.

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friends and family are great, house work proceeds apace
Went to a local strawberry festival this morning and had real strawberry short cake (strawberries, biscuit, and sweet whipped cream and that's it) for breakfast, with a truly immoderate amount of strawberries. We've finally hit the time of year when the fresh fruit and produce is rolling in. We met some folks there by plan (shideem and M&S&S&L, and others there by happenstance (winterborne and P&S and P's mom, and galagan and E). Partly small town effect, and partly, well, strawberry festival - where else would one be? So, a  lovely morning.

Then we headed up to the house to put in some work. My parents came up to help, then yaoobruni showed up to help also, with kassrachel & D, sigerson, and calibayu to visit. Then not too much later shideem and shgb appeared to pitch in, and shortly after that minyan arrived as well. It was quite the crowd, and we all worked hard. We put up insulation (in interior walls, for sound dampening), drywall (with nary a clean lay up - pretty much every piece required cutting, though most only a single cut), corner beading, tape, and lots of joint compound. Our friend and family are amazing.

Then we came home for some take-out pizza and chilling and keeping the cat from dying of sheer loneliness (after all, we hadn't seen her since a bit before noon :)

Over all the house is coming along well, and although there's a lot left for us to do, it feels like we're pretty much on schedule. Pics to be posted when I remember to upload them.

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meme - it's kind of like a real update
You know what today needs? It needs more love.

Via kouredios et al, a love meme: Reply to this post and I'll tell you one reason why I like you. Then put this in your own journal and spread the love.

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The Principles of a System of Identification
cross posted from ficial.wordpress.com

The most common tool for identification is the binary key. A person starts out with an unknown thing, the key presents a question about the thing, one answer leads to one later questions, the other answer to another, until the thing has been uniquely identified. This sort of key has a lot going for it - when it works it's accurate and precise and reliable, it's easy and intuitive to use and to understand, it teaches a user what to observe, and it's easily printed on paper. However, it has many problems as well, and I think that with computers we can do much better. Here are the points that I think especially need addressing:

1. An ID system should work with whatever traits the user can observe - binary keys specify what traits must be examined, and if the desired determination cannot be made then further progress is difficult to impossible.
   1. Corollary - An ID system should let the user specify what kinds of traits to care about - e.g. a binary key may require a hand lens or a chemical test when all the user has is their naked eye.
   2. Corollary - An ID system should take advantage of whatever observations a user is able to provide - e.g. even though growth substrate may be a good indicator for a match, a binary key cannot rely on a user having that information and so can't include that in it's tree (or else does include it in the tree, which makes that question a dead end if the user doesn't have that information).
2. An ID system should indicate partial matches and liklihoods - if one only gets 2/3 of the way through a binary key it is very hard to tell how far and to what the pool of potential matches has been narrowed, nor does it indicate which of those matches is most likely based on what is so far known.
3. An ID system should handle inconsistent trait values - if a specimen is often yellow, sometimes orange, and rarely red, a binary key has a hard time making use of color as a determining factor.
4. An ID system should make it easy to differentiate between two potential matches, or else clearly indicate that no further differentiation is possible - if a binary key gets you to two plausible matches it does not tell you the best way to determine which is the correct one.
5. An ID system should be easily extensible - it is extremely difficult to merge two binary keys, or even just to add a few items to a given key; adding to a binary key often entails re-doing large sections of the key. Among other things, this makes it very hard for more than a small group to contribute directly to a given key.

It's worth noting that any new system must also be at least as good as binary keys in these areas:

1. Accurate - when a positive identification is made it should be correct 100% of the time
2. Precise - the system should identify a single positive match, or as small a set as possible
3. Reliable - the same specimen should give the same match results over multiple iterations by multiple users
4. Useable - the system should lend itself to some straight-forward, simple, and sensible interface
5. Understandable - the system should not be so complicated that users treat it as a complete black box; even if users don't fully understand all the details of the system they should grasp the general concept
6. Instructive - when a user makes an identification the process should teach them general skills of observation, something about that particular specimen, and something about other specimens in the same general category.

I am explicitly abandoning the need to have the system translate well to paper - the whole point of this exercise is to consider how things might be different in the context of the computer.

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General life update
Things are slowly moving along on our house. After many iterations working with the timber-frame-kit builder we finally settled on a floor plan (and made a few larger changes in the process). We're at the point where we're just waiting for final plans from him to take to the bank for a loan and the town for a permit. Related to that, we're beginning the Great Clean Up that's necessary before we try to sell our current place. If you know anyone who's looking for a reasonably priced house in this area, send them our way...

Work is going reasonably well. I'm often frustrated at the Moodle code base, but items are slowly getting crossed off the to-do list, and we're at a point where seem to be adding new items only about as fast as we're finishing existing ones. Of course, our summer intern program will start soon, which will slow down all other work. On the plus side, I really enjoy working with our interns.

It's been a cold spring. We're about 2-3 weeks behind when we've planted out our seedlings the last several years. Our apples are having a good year so far, and we even some fruit set on the Macoun this time - the first year for it. Recently the daytime weather has generally been nice for outside work and play, even if the nights are still pretty cool. I went on a fun and tough bike ride today, the most serious one I've done in probably 5 years. It's good to be getting back into it.

I have two non-work programming projects up in the air right now. One is a Ruby-on-Rails site exploring/implementing some ideas I've had about ID keys / expert systems. The other one is a PHP app to display energy data. woobat is mainly doing it, but I'm figuring out a bit of the DB stuff. It's fun to collaborate!

In case I might have any free time, I'm still drumming every 2-3 weeks, occasionally trying to play some RPGs, doing game group every (OK, most) Thursday, and just finished up another pottery session (pics later). I've decided to take a break from pottery for the summer.

Two pairs of friends are getting married in just a couple of weeks, on the same day, at the same time, 5 hours away from each other. Sad that I can only make it to one, but lucky to have such problems. Then at the end of the summer my brother is getting married. Woo!!! It'll be a fun party.

So, life is busy and good and busy.

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We got out on a nice hike today, and since the time was about right and since we had some rain recently, we decided to head to an area where we thought there might be some morels. Amazingly enough, we actually found some! We got 5 large ones (fist/hand sized) 2 medium ones, and 3 small ones - for us, a giant haul! For dinner we had seitan satay, salad, and sauteed morels on fresh home-made bread toast. It was luxurious, and possibly even decadent. Yum!

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Last weekend we planted 7 fruit trees at our new(ish) land, and yesterday put in three more. In all, we put in 5 apples, three pears, and 3 peaches. Hard work, but fun and gratifying. Among other things, it feels like we're actually beginning the process of moving up there (even though we don't have the house built yet).

My folks came up to visit yesterday and left this morning. Yesterday afternoon we got to given them a tour of the land. They hadn't seen it since we first bought it, and it looks significantly different now that our building area is cleared.

Friday evening we saw the Star Trek movie. As someone who generally dislikes the Star Trek franchise and universe, I actually found it quite enjoyable.

And now, possibly some yard work.

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and they called me MAD! Bwhahahahahahahaaaaa!
Candied Ginger Chocolate Candied Ginger Chunk Chocolate Chip Ice Cream.

That is all.

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Systema Contranaturae
In honor of the recent make-a-monster birthday party for shideem (documented at http://danielbeck.net/photos/archive/), I present to you

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An afternoon in the woods
Took the afternoon off to do a bit of work up at the land. Happily, the work was much less than I'd thought it would be, so I got to spend about 2 hours wandering through the woods. Spring clearly still has not sprung, but it's trying hard. Various of the very early things have sprouts up, and while it wasn't exactly warm, it was no-jacket weather. I like being outside!

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Me Day - what I do for fun these days
As is usual for me, I gave myself a day of vacation for my birthday. I ran a few errands this morning, and then spent the rest of the day working on my keying tool. It's still in pre-pre-pre-alpha, but there's enough there now to give a general idea of how it works, if you're interested in such things: http://whatisit.christopherswarren.com/. If you do check it out and you're on windows, I'd recommend using Firefox to do so - IE is being a pain about some JS events. If you're on a mac I'd be happy to hear how it behaves in Safari. There's not very much data behind it right now, and doing a search with nothing chosen will give you a list of all (four) possible results.

The SQL behind the search turned out to be a huge pain in the butt, spent about 6 hours on it today. I finally just brute-forced it with a bunch of IN sub-select and EXISTS sub-select - ugly as sin, but it works. I knew it was going to be one of the more complicated parts of this project, but I didn't expect it to be that bad. It may be an indication that I have to re-work some of my underlying data structures.

Next steps are prettifying the search results, then developing a refinement matrix. After that comes the big challenge of figuring out the organizational structures and tools that would let the data behind this kind of tool be maintained in a widely collaborative way. Plus all the little fussy things like cross-browser compatibility, and, oh yeah, a decent look and feel.

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Birthday fun
Had a fantastic brunch, with many great people and way too much tasty food. Then got out for a bit of a walk in the woods before the sun got too low. Now just hanging out after cleaning up. This is a really good way to spend a birthday.

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Hell is other people's code
The best so far today, barely beating out a wide field of contenders, is a variable named $string. While perhaps accurate, it's pretty lacking in the precision department. First runner up is a function called print_header that, some times, prints more than the header, and other times not.

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Took the afternoon off from work today, and after doing a few chores headed off to stomp around the woods for a while. It was my first hike of the year, and it was beautiful. This time of spring is always fascinating. Everything is dormant, but showing tiny signs of waking up. There was almost no snow even fairly high up - a bit in crevices and deep valleys, but clear ground besides that. The streams are with snow-melt, and I had to head about 1/2 mile upstream before finding a decent crossing point. Then I just wandered through the woods for about an hour. Though I love the vibrancy of the greener parts of the year, the open woods of early spring offer amazing accessibility and visibility. The well-used paths are almost completely irrelevant, and the sunlight floods the forest floor.

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