Megan has moved beyond walking just a few steps, to walking as a preferred mode of travel. She still falls down when encountering any small obstacle, but she’s getting better everyday. She had her first peanut-butter and jelly sandwich today. While she’s always been cute, she is getting more fun as she discovers how to do more things. She’ll climb into her toy box, or figure out how to put one toy into another and carry them around.

In the nostalgia department, I visited the house in Orlando where I lived when I was four years old. I don’t remember much about that house and I had a fair bit of trouble finding it. (The name of the street has changed from North Bay Road to Main Street) The roads were still the same dusty gravel. The current owners were the same ones that bought the house from my parents 27 years ago, and in fact, still had a toy ("park-n-play") that I recognized. (They offered to show me the toy as long as I promised not to claim it.) The lake (Lake Butler) was the same. Most of the oaks are gone, victim of one hurricane or another.

I’m thinking about building a Wiki engine for work and home. I’ll do it in mod_perl, of course. There is at least one Wiki engine already (MiniWiki) that’s built for mod_perl, and I’ll examine that for use as a base. Feature wise, I need something that’s Public Key Enabled (PKE), to provide for easy identity management for DoD users, and provides a basic level of authorization. Also, I’d like to have an associated discussion thread for each WikiNode, that does not use the Wiki editing metaphor. I can’t stand the clutter of using a Wiki as a discussion board. Wikipedia does this well, I think. I also have a vision of having a easy-to-use upload and link/embed mechanism using a "clipboard frame" on the side. (But first-things-first, I have to get the basics working.) Embedding Kupu would be a nice feature also. And I saw a neat javascript drawing tool too. Hmm.

I’ve gone over 1000km on my scooter, which means it’s due for a check-up. I’ve really enjoyed having the scooter and commuting on it, but it’s starting to get significantly cold, and I need to have a better mechanism for staying warm while riding.

Suzette is pregnant again!

I saw Megan walk yesterday at the airport in Providence, RI. It was pretty neat.

s/walk/toddle/g

Megan started walking yesterday, while I was at work. Unfortunately, we were hosting some big meeting in the conference room, and I had to both attend and escort, so I couldn’t come home to see it until late, and I missed it. This morning she won’t walk again. Sigh.

I’m thinking that I should start writing daily blog entries about what I do at work.  Then I can publish that sort of information to my boss and co-workers. This will require some enhancement of the blog-engine, since I don’t want my "personal" blog entries to interfere with my "work" entries and vice-versa.  So I need to add a "category" field to the database, and to the management screens.

Today I downloaded the NCES SDKs (which is just the security and service discovery services, so far) and read through the FAQ’s and User Guides for them.  They’re java implementations, and I don’t have a working Java IDE for my work computer (which is temporary anyway), or for home.  (I did once, but it’s bit-rotted.) 

It’s annoying to not have the comforting tools of my own machine (i.e. my linux-server) here at work.  Sure, it’s just a network connection away, but my DSL line is kinda slow.  I also installed Cygwin on my work machine, which makes it passingly more useful to me.

I updated the Kupu editor last night for the Blog engine to version 1.1, because 1.0.3 was not working well with the stupid IE version here at work.  It’s working, but the title property isn’t updating.  Grr.  Hmm. I do have netscape 4.7 installed… I wonder if that would work.  I suppose I could just install Mozilla for win32. 

Oh, I also read some about FCS today – the DARPA C2 Experiment 4 Phase 2 report.  It’s passingly interesting.

I chaired a meeting of the OSD Desktop Engineering IPT, too.  Attendance was poor (5 people), but progress was good.  I tasked a bunch of stuff to Quintin; all of which is pretty easy but should have big returns, such as setting up the central repository, etc.

Hmm.  Gotta remember to talk to Ki tomorrow.

Last week I started a new job with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Networks and Information Integration). My new office isn’t in the Pentagon anymore, (Huzzah!) it’s in Crystal City. The down side of this is that I’m slightly farther away from home in the new space, but the up side is that I’ve used this as an excuse to buy a motor scooter.

In Virginia, like many places in the US, vehicles with less than 50cc displacement engine are technically described in the law as "mopeds", and are regulated pretty much like bicycles. In other words, you don’t need a motorcycle license, nor does the vehicle require license plates or registration. Most important for this area, it’s perfectly legal to park them anywhere you would park a bicycle. (Parking in Crystal City currently costs about $110 USD per month.) Plus, it’s fun to ride!

So, the letter I "discovered" turns out to be known as the "Lateral voiceless alveolar fricative". My wife gets credit for finding this obscure information. It turns out to be used in Welsh.

The link above, by the way, is to Wikipedia, which is a worldwide, collaboratively developed, free encyclopedia. I find this concept to be fascinating, and it’s sort of a fun hobby to help write an encyclopedia.

She walks, she talks, she crawls on her belly like a reptile! *

Well, that’s not a very flattering description of my daughter, and not particularly accurate either, since she doesn’t really walk yet. But this past week she both started crawling and talking. She’d been big with the "AAAAH!" previously, but she never really had any consonants. Now she can say, "Da da da da da da da."

It’s not a big vocabulary, but it’s still exciting.

* For those who don’t understand the reference, the Coasters recorded a song called "Little Egypt" that included this line.

I’m resurrecting my older computer (affectionately named ‘Dustpuppy’), to be an audio server for the bedroom. (And any other tasks I can think of to offload to it.) Including serving as a wireless access point via the HostAP drivers.

I’m using the opportunity to experiment with Gentoo Linux. Wish me luck. At first glance Gentoo seems neat, but builing everything from source (which I used to do as a matter of pride) now seems merely time consuming.

I’d really like to make the thing into some sort of appliance, like I did when I developed PictureFrame Linux. If the filesystem were read-only, and served out as a network file from the server, there’d be less to get outdated and possibly break or serve as a vulnerability.

A few days ago I discovered a new letter through symmetry. I was reflecting on the stereotype that native Japanese speakers cannot distinguish between the ‘L’ sound and the ‘R’ sound. So I was reflecting on these sounds, and noted that the difference between the two is that while making the ‘L’ sound, the speaker’s tongue touches the roof of his (or her) mouth.

‘L’ and ‘R’ are voiced sounds, meaning that the vocal cords vibrate as the sound is articulated. Some sounds are voiced, others are unvoiced. Unvoiced sounds the vocal cords do not vibrate, and the sound is generated only by the acoustics and aerodynamics of the mouth. Examples of parallel voiced and unvoiced sounds are ‘F’ and ‘V’, or ‘P’ and ‘B’. Some languages even have ‘prevoiced’ sounds, meaning that the vocal cords are vibrated just before the consonant sound. The canonical prevoiced sound is a prevoiced equivalent of ‘B’, and is scribed in the roman alphabet as ‘mb’, such as Mbeki. (Name of an African politician.)

So if ‘R’ and ‘L’ are similar voiced sounds that differ in that that the tongue touches (or does not touch) the roof of the mouth, I wondered what other sounds are similar to these, but unvoiced? To me it seemed that ‘S’ (or perhaps ‘H’) is quite similar to an unvoiced ‘R’, in terms of mouth position. But what would the unvoiced equivalent of ‘L’ be? Well, there isn’t one. It’s an interesting sound, and an interesting intellectual effort to practice making it and trying to build words around the sound. It resembles an ‘HL’ sound.

Why is this useful? It’s not. It just amused me at the time.