Anthony's 4.5-month-old cousin Josh was here yesterday. My sister Marci came to pick over the stuff in our Cupertino house that we're not bringing back to Japan (which is most of the stuff -- ugh, lots to get rid of).

When looking at the copious pictures I took, I was struck by the perspective of the shot above. It was taken with an 18mm lens, which means that the size of something close to the lens becomes exaggeratedly large. In this shot, Anthony is about two feet closer to the lens than Josh (4 feet away instead of [...]

What a fun day I had today.

I first went up to San Francisco for a small O'Reilly event at LinuxWorld, and in doing so I got to meet my book's editor, Andy Oram, in person for the first time in perhaps four years. I was so shocked at how good he looked, having trimmed down from the decidedly chubbier Andy I knew from before, that I almost didn't recognize him.

He has two musically-gifted children (aged 5 and 9 when I last met them, now aged 17 and 21). Although they got their gift from God, [...]
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Coming home from our trip to Portland today I was happy to find a box of books from my publisher, O'Reilly. It seems that they were able to get my book out earlier than expected. (Yikes, I don't have the web site updated yet!)

The timing is good, because I'll be at O'Reilly's booth at LinuxWorld tomorrow for a bit (Tuesday, from 12:30 pm) to sign books, and now I'll be able to do so with the new edition.

We just got back from a weekend trip to Portland, Oregon. We went for no special reason – we just wanted to give it a try. The trip included a drive out to near Mt. Hood. I took this picture of Fumie while in a rowboat on Lost Lake.

The peak of the mountain is 10 miles (16.2 km) behind her, rising 2,462 meters (one and a half miles) above the lake.

We spent an hour and a half out in the boat, and had a very pleasant time.

The image is geoencoded, so you can [...]

Anthony and I were kicking a ball around in the backyard when the sprinklers came on. I ran to get my camera and he ran around.