Client: "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be difficult."

Me: "Oh, no, no, it's okay. You haven't done this before, so it's understandable. Don't worry about it. Okay, so, here's how you do it..."

A few minutes later, I hang up the phone.

Doyle: "You should say, 'Call me again, and I will kill you.'"

Me: "What?"

Doyle: "You haven't called me about this before, so it's okay. Call me about this again, and I will kill you."

pause

"BTW, I should be allowed to interface with the clients more."

I'm up in the City today. I wanted to take the train (and use iamcaltrain.com!), but, as my plans go until 7:30 and Kris freaked at the thought of my walking from 2nd and Howard to 4th and King, I drove.

I found myself moving very slowly this morning while I was trying to leave. Aside from the fact I was up until after midnight also with the trying, this time with finishing up a client project, I certainly realized (hard not to realize) that part of my moving slowly was from the fact I'm not prepared for this client meeting. I didn't finish the work that I really needed to do, and worse, while making the changes I was making, I realized my approach was wrong, and so I needed to scrap what I had done.

Fortunately, the client won't be billed for the time I spent on the wrong solution, but the project is still behind. Argh.

Given the disaster of the drive up, I really really should have taken the train. One accident, the wrong freeway, and the realization I had no money for parking all added up to my being late for the work day. Training up would have meant that I could worked all the way up, which would have been nice.

And, seriously, the walk from 4th and King to 2nd and Howard?

It's not that long.

Just don't walk it with Messina. He'll tell you, "It's just up here, a short walk." Yes, it's a short walk, but, no, it'll be longer than you expect it to be until you've walked it three times.

Which I have, now, done.

"Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'."

- Shawshank Redemption

Maeryn stopped by to visit us at the office last week. Being the lazy, helpless one she is, she allowed her father to do all the hard work, including the lifting, and carrying, and turning, all while she slept.

Well, sorta.

The poor kid had to endure being cuddled and cood by me for a while, as well as being half woken up when I felt her soft, soft, tiny fingers or when I shoved a camera up close to her face. I know of no other baby who smiles as much as Maeryn. I'm convinced she's either joy personified, or a miswired, confused, little baby who thinks the smiley face is a general expression of existence.

During her visit, Doyle and I started commenting on all the pregnant women in our circle of friends. Pretty much all the married women either are pregnant or have given birth recently (if "recently" is defined as within the last two or so years). The one exception is, yes, you guessed it, yours truly.

(I wanted to write "me" instead of "yours truly," but "me" is grammatically incorrect there. Since I recognize that it is incorrect, I'm sure it would annoy me. But, "I" just sounds wrong there, so "yours truly" it is.)

After realizing after, well, Lisa's retirement announcement (for at least nine months), followed by Wade's limerick announcement of Christina's pregnancy, that I am the only non-pregnant, non-mother, Doyle looked up and exclaimed, "Be strong, Kitt! Be strong!"

Yeah. Kids. Like I want the buggers.

I say that, but 100 million years of evolution really can't be denied. Hormones and society certainly exert their forces upon my psyche, too. As much as I'd like to think I have more male characteristics than most straight women, that I can hang with these guys on anything technical, and be just as indifferent to the idea of a family, I have to wonder at what I might be missing. And sometimes, just sometimes, like the quiet moments I spend watching Maeryn sleeping in her seat or snuggled up with Kate, or Gabby playing in the sand looking for shells and seeing everything as bright and shiny and new, I think, maybe... just maybe...

How bad could it be?

A little me running around.

Pigtails in her hair.

The world as an opportunity, all shiny and new.

A kid of my very own. Being able to teach her science and math. Teach her how to throw a frisbee. Maybe she'll enjoy tennis or volleyball or soccer. Teach her to program at age 3, as soon as she can read (yes, my little brother learned that young). Going on a hike with her little legs moving next to me. Pray she doesn't get migraines, lord, don't let that happen.

...

...

...

And then some other kid comes screaming along, throwing a tantrum, kicking or hollering or turning red from the cry, cry, crying.

And I'm snapped back to reality.

Helluva lot easier to resist them when they're being little turds.

I really need to get tags working on my site. I feel so 2003.

Well, that and move the site to the other, faster server.

Went to SuperHappyDevHouse as planned this weekend. I took along the various "prizes" we had planned for the event, which included three trophies: "Best Code EVAR", "Best Geek Pitch," and "Most Marketable Idea". I really should have taken pictures of those. I also took along a slew of cookies and cupcakes, which we decorated as baseballs and gave out as runner-up prizes (dang, if I didn't miss the name of the guy who helped me fros those puppies).

The feel of this SHDH was very corporate compared to SHDH4 in September. Yes, I know that the fundamental difference in my experience was the people I spent time with (or didn't, in the case of SHDH5), but even Tom, who drove me home at 3:30 in the morning (thanks, Tom!), commented on the different feel of the event. He attributed the difference to the lack of drunk women from the prior event.

Tall guy (who surely has a name) kept track of gas mileage, using RDF as a query engine. Ah! His name is Drew. He's 6'9" tall, and knocks his head on doorways all the time.

Freeman is working on, high bandwidth, high latency projects, to provide email, data transfer for remote areas that would normally not have any internet (of a sort) access. He spent a year in India, and reported on projects that provide drive-by wireless and cd-rom data-exchange sneaker-net work done locally there.

Clipclip demo (Chao Lam) aims to bring the model of newspaper clipping to the intarweb. 'Has "web 2.0" features like tagging!' his quote, not mine. Can post to group, for discussions, can subscribe to feeds with clips. Cal channels Ryan and suggests the use of microformats for data structure. Public? No.

Meetro developer version, paul, sam, and (maybe seth?) presenter displays people close and far. Profiles, etc..

And here's where my notes start to fade, as I wrote "10:00 and I'm already yawning."

Jeff and Adam did a demo of their AJAXWars, a AJAX based browser, resource limited game. The demo was very entertaining.

Jesse Andrews showed us "How to Duplicate Google Maps in 10 Minutes" using Dojo. It was really entertaining, my favorite part being, "... and dojo is an AJAX toolkit, talk to that man for details," pointing to Alex Russell. I was a little bummed there weren't more dojo presentations, but hey, they can steal only so much thunder, right?

I didn't see the Zimbra or Meebo demos.

Andy's talk "Getting Money and Chicks with Python" was absolutely hysterical, and the subject of much small talk for the rest of the evening. Highly recommended for any developer.

Messina presented his ideas about CivicForge was very high level, in a this-is-what-I-want, what-do-you-say? sort of way. It's basically the merging of a lot of tools that don't quite work the way non-programmers work, but the way that people actually interact together. In my mind, I was cursing him a little bit, because I'm inspired, and I don't need another project.

Messina.

There were other presentations, but I don't recall them at this point. A lot of people worked a lot, which was neat. In as much as I wasn't hanging out with my usual band of friends, I met a lot of new people, again. I thought there would be more duplication from the previous attendees, but there were a lot of new people (for me, anyway).

David, Jeff, Messina and I started planning SHDH6, currently scheduled for December 10th. The theme will be speed. We'll do presentations after 1:00 am for work that has been done earlier in the evening. Should be fun.

"Argh! I was two-outed!"

"What?"

"It's been a long time since I've been two-outed."

"What's two-outed?"

"When only two cards in the deck can beat your hand, and he gets one of them."

pause

"Well, I guess it's better than being one-outed."

"Heh. Marginally."