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I’ve men­tioned this before — on Jan 4th, I ended up clos­ing on my first house. The pri­mary dri­ving force of course being my now nearly seven month old daugh­ter, the sec­ondary dri­ving force is well — own­ing a house.

Both my wife and I were excited, ecsta­tic even. I mean, it’s not a pala­tial man­sion by any stretch — but it was ours.

Then, things went side­ways. After clos­ing, after we start paint­ing — we find a prob­lem. A big, glar­ing prob­lem. That prob­lem hap­pens to be a leak­ing toi­let — that has appar­ently been leak­ing for some time (mea­sured in poten­tially years) into the sub floor­ing. This means all the wood beneath the tile floor under the toi­let it rot­ten and moldy, and that damp­ness and mold may have spread to the rest of the floor­ing and areas.

We found this pulling the toi­let to put in a new one — now, instead of a cheap plop-in-a-new-toilet, we’re star­ing down the bar­rel of a much larger “strip to the walls due to rot and mold” deal. We can’t move in, and we didn’t even imag­ine this would happen.

Rot­ten wood, mold. The works. And no, it’s not cov­ered, and it is no ones respon­si­bil­ity (or rather, no one is liable). Nope, we just get left hold­ing the bag. The inspec­tor found a tan­gen­tal issue: but not the pri­mary issue, so no one was tech­ni­cally the wiser.

Stu­pid toi­lets. From now on I’m only buy­ing houses with­out run­ning water, in non-flood plains in areas with no ter­mites. Also the house will be made of stone.

I’ve men­tioned this before — on Jan 4th, I ended up clos­ing on my first house. The pri­mary dri­ving force of course being my now nearly seven month old daugh­ter,...

Man. 2008 is already going side­ways, in a good way. In this case — I knew it was com­ing, which is a good thing. Last Fri­day, I spent a chunk of time sign­ing more paper­work than I’ve ever had to in my life, but walked away with the keys to my very own home.

Other peo­ple have goals like “punch a camel” or “jump off a bridge” — one of my long­stand­ing goals has been to “sim­ply” get a house. Some­thing is rather off-putting about pay­ing some­one else’s salary/mortgage and rais­ing a child whilst renting.

Munchkin will now have her own large yard in which to run, although my idea of putting a run­ning line up and get­ting her a har­ness so we could just let her run back and forth were sum­mar­ily dismissed.

I’ve already bought paint, been to Lowes a few times, and bought myself actual tools for “work­ing around the house”. Once the next month of “omg gogogogo” wears off, all should be happy.

If you really want to see pic­tures, I put some up.

Now, to jug­gle the out­stand­ing python stuff, a tight work sched­ule, a six month old and moving.

Man. 2008 is already going side­ways, in a good way. In this case — I knew it was com­ing, which is a good thing. Last Fri­day, I spent a chunk...

It’s that quiet, reflec­tive time in the morn­ing in between the “run around and get ready for the day” and “wake up the baby and prep for day­care”. It’s a new type of time allot­ment I’m not quite used to yet — maybe it’s reflec­tion time on how crazy things have been this year.

New stuff at work, the baby — this year is offi­cially one of the most “inter­est­ing” years to date. The com­pany I work for being bought ear­lier this year — the birth of my lit­tle girl, adjust­ing to being a Dad, tak­ing a step back at work and learn­ing some Java-Fu, then cycling off to “yet another thing” (throw in a prod­uct release or two for good measure).

To throw more gas on the fire — my wife and I are in the process of buy­ing our first house. We’re on the post-inspection-wtf stage right now. I guess I just thought there wasn’t enough going on in my life, so I needed to throw in more costs, lawyers and other stress.

It’s been one crazy year. I think next year I’m going to try to calm things down a bit, although I’m already draft­ing plans to rebuild the exist­ing deck.

It’s that quiet, reflec­tive time in the morn­ing in between the “run around and get ready for the day” and “wake up the baby and prep for day­care”. It’s a...

This post is not about pro­gram­ming — so skip it if you want. It’s about this week­end — or more par­tic­u­larly, about one of the — if not the most fright­en­ing moments of my adult life.

As any­one who reads my stuff knows — I have a beau­ti­ful almost four month old baby girl named Abi­gail. Since she’s come into this world, I’ve found my hear grow a mil­lion times the size of what it was before, I’ve re-evaluated so much in my life — sim­ply put, my life sim­ply isn’t the same.

And I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

On sat­ur­day, as I was com­ing down the stairs from chang­ing yet another atom-bomb of a dia­per, one of our three cats was asleep on the stairs and I didn’t see her. I stepped on the cat and imme­di­ately lost my bal­ance — and my grip on Abby. Abby fell about four or five feet to the hard­wood floor below me. She landed on her back/shoulders and head. Luck­ily, she started cry­ing the exact sec­ond she hit her head and I picked her up within mil­lisec­onds it seems.

She was crying/moving/kicking — which up until I heard her cry this was the most fright­en­ing moment. The sec­ond she started cry­ing, it was the best moment in my life. I wouldn’t let her go — I just gripped her as tight as I could as she cried and my wife dialed 911.

Well, after 24 hours in infant ICU and her first MRI, Cat-Scan and X-Rays, we finally got to bring her back home on Sun­day late-afternoon. It’s funny — once every­thing calmed down in the hos­pi­tal, she was already act­ing if noth­ing had hap­pened, she was kick­ing and smil­ing and charm­ing every­one in the unit. See­ing her strapped to a board, with a small infant-size neck brace around her neck — tubes and IVs and mon­i­tors all stuck in/on her was awful, but she smiled and kicked through it all (with a healthy dose of cry­ing, but that’s cause no one would let her eat).

At the end of it all — she got out of this with a small skull frac­ture, which should be noth­ing to worry about and a bump on the nog­gin. Her and Daddy now share some­thing — head trauma. She’s back to her old self, but I can hon­estly say I am not — I’m still ner­vous and overly care­ful. We’ve banned the feline occu­pants from the stair­case and we’ve stayed home an extra day (per doc­tors orders) to spend more time with Abby.

Every­one kept telling me how these things hap­pen — and that babies and chil­dren are resilient things. Think­ing about it — I know they’re right, given what I put my par­ents through and the num­ber of ER vis­its we had to make when I was grow­ing up.

Becom­ing a Dad — and now hav­ing her first real hurt come from my actions — really changes the way you see the world and how you mea­sure what’s impor­tant in life. Don’t let any­one ever tell you different.

This post is not about pro­gram­ming — so skip it if you want. It’s about this week­end — or more par­tic­u­larly, about one of the — if not the most...

Just crossed Red­dit, it’s right here — I don’t think poor Titus will ever live down the quote from the last pycon:

“I don’t do test dri­ven devel­op­ment. I do stu­pid­ity dri­ven test­ing… I wait until I do some­thing stu­pid, and then write tests to avoid doing it again.” — Titus Brown

There’s a lot of django-testing infor­ma­tion in the slides. Also, new­forms is cov­ered. I’m still try­ing to wrap my head around new­forms for a knowl­edge base sys­tem I am try­ing to write on my free time in django.

Take a look at the pre­sen­ta­tion. I <3 django.

Just crossed Red­dit, it’s right here — I don’t think poor Titus will ever live down the quote from the last pycon: “I don’t do test dri­ven devel­op­ment. I do stu­pid­ity...

It doth seem that per the main python.org site, Python 3.0 (aka Python 3000, aka “WHERE IS REDUCE?”, aka “There’s a GIL?”) is out and avail­able! Hoorah!

If you want to know what’s going on hit up the newly for­mat­ted “What’s New?” docs (they use the new-style docs) and read up.

For code con­ver­sion — you’re going to need the 2to3 tool from sub­ver­sion linked off the py3k page.

Test, test and re-test! File bugs! This is an alpha — the final is slated for August 2008 (per the page) so remem­ber, no war­ranty is implied here.

It doth seem that per the main python.org site, Python 3.0 (aka Python 3000, aka “WHERE IS REDUCE?”, aka “There’s a GIL?”) is out and avail­able! Hoorah! If you want...

Before I give the links to the videos, I want to give the typ­i­cal disclaimer:

Dis­claimer: The opin­ions expressed here are my per­sonal opin­ions, views, dis­cus­sions, etc. Con­tent pub­lished here is not read or approved in advance by HDS, my wife or any­one else for that mat­ter and does not — in any way — reflect the views and opin­ions, positions/etc of my employer. This is my per­sonal, largely python-related blog. Not my employers.

That being said: A few months ago, I dis­cov­ered (much by acci­dent) that HDS (Hitachi Data Sys­tems) has started a viral mar­ket­ing com­paign involv­ing Mr. T — yes, the man from the A-Team (whose face graced my lunch­box as a child). Note that mas­sive “lulz” were attained when watch­ing these.

With­out pass­ing judge­ment or in any way stat­ing a direct opin­ion, here are the videos, in order of creation:

• Mr. T: The “T” in I.T.
• Mr. T: “T The Trucker“
• T3: MR. T — BATTLE FOR THE SMB

For addi­tional amuse­ment, I will direct you to the Archivas (before we were bought by HDS) viral/spoof/etc video that made it to youtube, here.

Before I give the links to the videos, I want to give the typ­i­cal disclaimer: Dis­claimer: The opin­ions expressed here are my per­sonal opin­ions, views, dis­cus­sions, etc. Con­tent pub­lished here...

Ear­lier this week I was hav­ing a small dis­cus­sion with Doug Hell­mann — I had read his announce­ment about the PyMotw being picked up by OnLamp guys, and saw the LinkedIn link in his blog, we con­nected and started chatting.

A few months ago, Grig had made a sim­il­iar post to this — talk­ing about Python-People con­nect­ing on Linked in, and I’ve slowly been con­nect­ing to peo­ple within the com­mu­nity since then.I men­tioned to Doug that I think python peo­ple con­nect­ing is a good move — many of us don’t have “python” jobs — instead, we use Python at a decid­edly “not python” job, where Python is one skill of many.

Net­work­ing in this fash­ion can help other python-community peo­ple find con­tacts and jobs and the like.There is a Python-Wiki LinkedIn page — and there was some dis­cus­sion around mak­ing a Python group, which is a good idea.If you’re a Pythonista/Pythoneer and want to con­nect, see my pro­file hereI’m also on Face­book thanks to James Tauber — but I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out how to use that.

Update to add some more: Ten­nessee Leeuwen­burg adds some thoughts: PyLinkedIn - his point has merit, and should be con­sid­ered when adding connections.

Ear­lier this week I was hav­ing a small dis­cus­sion with Doug Hell­mann — I had read his announce­ment about the PyMotw being picked up by OnLamp guys, and saw the...

I saw over the week­end (in my lim­ited time in front of my lonely Mac­Book) that Doug Hell­mann had done another Python Mod­ule of the week — this time on the shelve mod­ule, a pretty cool mod­ule (that I didn’t know about). To quote:

The shelve mod­ule can be used as a sim­ple per­sis­tent stor­age option for Python objects when a rela­tional data­base is overkill. The shelf is accessed by keys, just as with a dic­tio­nary. The val­ues are pick­led and writ­ten to a data­base cre­ated and man­aged by anydbm.

Of course, shelve is used in the other project he announced — Feed­Cache, a cachine mech­a­nism he uses to cache Atom/RSS feeds.And then, a com­ment on both posts linked to a dif­fer­ent cheese­shop mod­ule: Shove. Shove is like Shelve/Pickle/Object stor­age on steroids. It sup­ports 15 stor­age back ends for object stor­age, and 9 dif­fer­ent back­ends for caching.I have some need to be using a mod­ule like Shove for some data/object caching/sharing, so when I get a chance I’ll post a trip report. 
Update: A com­ment pushed me over to Mul­ti­shove. Hot. 

I saw over the week­end (in my lim­ited time in front of my lonely Mac­Book) that Doug Hell­mann had done another Python Mod­ule of the week — this time on...

Yay! An RSS feed for PEPs! Hoorah! Go Here:Spyced: PEP rss feed is live

I tried writ­ing a Beau­ti­ful­Soup scraper -> RSS maker, but things (babies, work) got in the way.

(Via unof­fi­cial planet python.)

Yay! An RSS feed for PEPs! Hoorah! Go Here:Spyced: PEP rss feed is live I tried writ­ing a Beau­ti­ful­Soup scraper -&gt; RSS maker, but things (babies, work) got in the way. (Via...