Feel free to confirm my status in the Hall of Dorks – I’m perfectly comfortable with that status and you’ll certainly be entitled in a moment.

Carrie and I are huge fans of the TV show The Amazing Race, an interest that has been fueled lately by old season reruns that our TiVo gobbles up for our back to back viewing pleasure. We do a lot of analysis of the people on the show, and mostly pick at the weak points in people’s behaviors towards their racing partner.

We say things like “we’d totally not freak out and break down over that” or “we’re far more patient”.

So, here comes the entry into the Hall of Dorks. During this little road trip we’ve been on we’ve been pretending we’re on the Amazing Race. Not fully, but just a lot of the time. I mean we’re not racing to the pit stop or opening fake clues or anything, we’re just assuming that through whatever little uncomfortable patch we’re going through, it’s for the greater good – whether that’s driving for hours or holding your toddler in the air in the middle of your truck as the other changes the poopiest diaper possible in the middle of a hail storm. That’s the kind of stuff that happens on The Amazing Race, and so it makes us happy.

So, to prove our Amazing Racingness, this is what we’ve done in the past five days:

Day 1
Decide at 10:00am to drive to Utah, a 12 hour trip which we’ll break up by staying at Erik’s house in Boise. With two kids under the age of three.

Day 2
Leave Boise, drive to Salt Lake City area. Plenty of DVDs for the kids. Jump on trampoline.

Day 3
Hike several miles and perhaps a few thousand feet up to a cave. Go to Snowbird and partake of all the summer goodness, which includes alpine slides, bouncing rubber band like things, zip lines, gondolas to 11,000 feet. Jump on trampoline.

Day 4
Drive three hours south to visit great grand parents. Pick up several dozen pounds of produce. Drive another three hours getting lost in the middle of nowhere, change diaper in hail storm, eat great food at some middle of nowhere home cookin’ cafe.

Arrive at campsite. Youngest begins eating sand, as usual. Oldest strips naked, walks in the lake collecting moss. Digs hole to pee in, buries with stick.

Carrie and I drive (pilot?) the Sea-Doo around the lake. I pick mayflies out of my teeth.

I wake board for the first time, stand up on second or third try, have a good old time as the sunset begins to build.

Roast marshmallows around the fire, leave to go sleep at the great grandparents nearby ranch (our kids don’t generally sleep well at new places, especially when camping).

Day 5
Drive back to SLC area. Meet Heather, Jon, and Leta for lunch. Leta and Jonas bond while eating playground sand. Drive back to grandparents house and collapse from exhaustion. Watch Leah jump on the trampoline. Reluctantly (and sorely) jump with her and wait for the stars to come out.

Tomorrow we’re going to relax and then drive the entire 12 hours back to Portland on Tuesday.

The entire time we’ll be pretending that we’re on the Amazing Race, because it totally makes everything easier and hundreds of times more fun. No arguing, no stress, it’s all fun.

We’re on the road, traveling with the kids to Utah to pay a surprise visit on family (they were indeed surprised) so blog entries will be sparse. I’ve played laser tag with a handful of kids and adults (verdict: fun, but not worth $7.00). I’ve jumped on the trampoline (required by Utah state law) a few times a day, and stood in the middle of a massive toddler pirate sword fight. Today we’re going to try and kill ourselves on some alpine slides, and tomorrow – water skiing on a reservoir with cousins (one of which pegged me as a Panguitch boy the first time he saw me). If we avoid collapsing from exhaustion within the next several days it will be a miracle.

I had to make some changes to a ColdFusion project the other day, and as I was digging through the code, it struck me that it would be interesting to see a direct comparison of code. I’ll try to be objective, but I admit a bias right up front – I prefer writing Ruby code lately, both for the clean and uncluttered code and because my text editor came with a bunch of powerful code snippet tools (which are a good thing for lazy typists like myself).

My streak of blogging nearly everyday for the month of August (a personal unspoken goal I had) was broken this weekend as Cameron and I headed up to visit the Robot Coop in Seattle.

On Sunday afternoon Cameron and I hit bumper to bumper traffic essentially from the Washington/Oregon border all the way to Seattle. A three hour trip turned into a nearly five hour trip, but the conversation was lively and worth it.

After meeting Erik at his house we went to a Mexican place for dinner. While waiting for a seat, Erik told the story about how he saw a man drop dead while walking down the sidewalk. I can’t remember if it was before or after Erik’s story, but as we were waiting on the sidewalk a woman carrying takeout home tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and crashed to the ground so hard I felt the cement shudder underneath me. She wasn’t injured but walked away from the scene shaking the pain out of her limbs and probably feeling a bit embarrassed and grateful for not having ruined her dinner at the same time.

Afterwards, Cameron told a story about a fight starting between two strangers over one of the men’s desires to walk backwards, and another one of the men’s desires to yell “Don’t walk backwards!”. While telling the story, Cameron stepped backwards a bit and threw his hands up to give us a visual interpretation of the event and (he doesn’t know this, I don’t think) nearly slapped a woman in the face. Her boyfriend looked as if it wouldn’t take much provocation to start a fight. A fight over a story about a fight that started from a man yelling “Don’t walk backwards”. I had fantasies of a huge sidewalk brawl starting over Cameron’s enthusiasm, and how if it had happened there’d be an epic story of bravery and physical combat prowess (on my part) to tell for years. We’d recount the moment in the battle when I climbed a tree for a strategic impression of the melee and then proceeded to use flanking formations to keep the enemy (those who didn’t like Cameron’s story of people getting in brawls over walking backwards) at bay. We’d be victorious, and they’d call our name at the Mexican restaurant where we’d eat Enchilada’s Rancheras while comparing our wounds. It could have been glorious.

The rest of the trip had similar near glorious and truly glorious moments that will remain mysterious to the reader. I’m paying for the weekend/beginning today as I count up the total hours of sleep had between Sunday night and last night and realize it’s in the single digits. In the end though the exhaustion was worth it. That kind of fun can only be had in the company of others, and while the Internet didn’t hurt in forming and maintaining these relationships, it can’t hold a candle to being able to share experiences in the same physical space.

A couple people have commented and emailed me, asking “So, how’d you go from ColdFusion to Ruby on Rails? Can you talk about that some more, maybe give some tips?”

So, without delay and from my own personal perspective – my reasons for taking the plunge with some tips for newcomers as well. It’s verbose, and isn’t comprehensive, but it’s a start. I’d rather share now, and then share more later, than simply wait for later.

I started something new today – check out the the “Chatter” section on the right (or follow the new feed). I’ve wanted to do a link blog for a long time, but knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep it up unless I could very quickly and easily post to the link blog.

So during lunch today I set up Phil Fiberger’s Bloggerbot on my local machine and had it talk to my Movable Type blog rather than Blogger, and can immediately update the link blog by sending messages to the bot. It’s a super fast, super easy way for me to send small bits to my blog, and so far I’m really happy with it.

I finally found a reason to really like Apple’s new Automator program. When developing applications on a remote server I often need to work on files locally and then upload them to the development server. This kind of interaction can happen a lot as I make changes and test them, and in my current environment, I have to do it either through a secure VPN or over SSH.

Now, with Automator, I have a workflow that starts with Transmit synchronizing my files and then, when finished, loading my web application in Safari. I save the workflow as an application, and now, with Quicksilver, I simply execute a trigger for immediate file uploads complete with Safari opening as verification. It’s not instant, but a lot more agreeable then having to fire off all the commands separately with all the clicking and waiting.

The only thing wrong is that the “Display Webpages” action in Automator opens a new window, rather than load the site in an already open Safari window. Even with “Open links from other applications in the current window” setting in Safari, Automator still opens a new window.

Disclaimer: I’m notoriously bad at simple math. Keep that in mind, but also, note that I think I’m pretty safe to stand on the forthcoming soapbox regardless of the math.

I don’t watch my traffic levels or where people are coming from typically, so I find it weird when old blog entries start getting legitimate comments after years of sitting dormant. Today’s entry: Violence and Video Games, a bit I wrote nearly 2 years ago.

I thought I’d see where the traffic was coming from – maybe I’d shown up higher in some Google listings or something. While searching, I found this article from the same year that’s so full of holes I couldn’t help but pick at it a bit. (And sorry Mom, I know it’s from your alma mater, but for perhaps that reason alone, it should adhere to a higher level of accuracy than your general run of the mill institution).

The article, Research links violence to video games, throws out some important numbers: “An estimated 145 million Americans, or 60 percent, play video games on a regular basis.”

That’s a lot of people right? I mean, seriously, over half of America is playing video games on a regular basis. The article goes on to state that “80 percent of the best selling video games contain violent content”, a figure that, along with the amount of American’s playing, has surely gone up since 2003. It’s at least clear that violent videos games are nearly ubiquitous.

Now, take the number of big time recent media events where a child or a teen shot up a school (the article lists the well known ones towards the end), or sniped at people, or hurt bunnies (sorry, these aren’t trivial things, but I’m sort of working up to a froth here) then compare it to the total amount of people playing violent video games. Consider that in 2000, there were something like 72 million kids under the age of 18, and assume that 60% of them play video games (though the number is probably a lot higher). That leaves you with about 43 million kids. Out of 43 million kids, what percentage of them are shooting up schools or performing abnormal violent behavior (and I’m making a distinction between abnormal and normal violent behavior – society has always had knuckle heads that pick on kids and do stupid violent things, whether their entertainment of choice was Mortal Kombat or throwing rocks at eachother)? Even if I put the estimates at a high 1000 abnormal violent incidents, the percentage is so low it’s hard to comprehend (about 0.0023%).

Now, let’s consider some other things from the US Census that are worth chewing on:
Amount of teen pregnancies: 425,000+ in 2002 alone¹
High school dropouts: 367,000+ in 2002

Where’s the media fervor over teen drug use, high school dropouts, and teen pregnancies? Combined, those problems plague 1.8% of all 72 million kids under 18, a number that is 500x greater than my guess at 1000 incidents of abnormal violence. Even if my number of 1000 is off, the real number is no where near 1.8% of all kids under 18.

The only real conclusion that can be made from any of the data being collected and presented lately surrounding video games and violence: video games and violence are like summer and sharks for traditional sensationalistic news outlets.

¹ I have a theory about why teen pregnancies were down for 2002, but I’ll leave the reader to draw their own conclusions. Hint: video games are surely to thank.

Are you familiar with the story/song about the old lady who swallowed a fly? We have a wonderfully illustrated book by Simms Taback that tells the classic tale of a lady who ends up dying after eating a fly, which is followed by a spider, and eventually a horse. It’s on Leah’s list of preferred books.

Rather than hide the issue of death from her, we tell the story verbatim. She’s beginning to get the idea of what “dead” means, as we discuss dead insects and dead plants. Her explanations of motionless flies in windowsills have transitioned from “He’s taking a long rest” to “It’s dead!”

Last night we took a hike through a tree farm near our house with the kids in the backpacks. We spent a good portion of our hike brushing flies away from our face. At one point, Carrie inhaled a fly, and went through all the appropriate reactions, including coughing and producing a scene that was no doubt both fascinating and alarming to Leah at the same time.

On the drive home, Leah couldn’t stop asking about the fly. “Can I see it, is it in your tummy?” was said at least a dozen times on the short drive. Leah was suddenly obsessed, no doubt assuming that her Mom was now going to have to swallow a whole host of animals and then finally a horse, which would kill her of course.

Leah then offered up the perfect solution to the problem and was content from that point on. “Momma swallowed a fly, so when we get home she can lay down and rest. Then she’ll fart and the fly will fly out the window.”

Hey! Go read this blog entry about Cameron and Damien and help them get casted on the Amazing Race TV show by doing whatever you can. I’m a big fan of the show and I know Cameron, and I think he’d probably be good at the race, as well as entertaining. I’m also a fan of using weblogs, and the sort of loose networks they can often create to influence decisions outside of the blogosphere.