Calvin's Blog

Running Again

2011-08-26T11:54:00.003-06:00

A couple of months ago I pulled a muscle in my left calf and haven't been able to really run. I decided to stay off it for a couple of weeks and rely on biking, swimming, and other activities. Earlier this week I went for a light 5 mile run and it felt really good. This morning I did a normal 5 mile run and it still felt great. I'm quite happy to have running back in my rotation. Here is my run this morning.

Returning to Health

2011-08-21T20:50:00.006-06:00

It's been 9 weeks since we started the "Biggest Loser" contest at work and I weighed in at 263.4 lbs. This weekend I weighed less than 225 lbs. That's 38 lbs lost in 9 weeks. A lot of people are asking me what I'm doing so I thought I would share it here along with some interesting health information.

While the weight loss is a big part of this, I was very encouraged to find other aspects of my health have improved as well. The last blood test I had done before starting 9 weeks ago had the following results:

(normal ranges)

Cholesterol 267 (140-199)

HDL Cholesterol 52 (35-80)

LDL Cholesterol 165 (0-129)

Triglycerides 248 (0-150)

As you can see I was in pretty bad shape. Not only was I very overweight, I was at risk for a number of other serious problems. On July 22 (only one month into my new routine) I had more blood work done and these were the results:

Cholesterol 164

HDL Cholesterol 60

LDL Cholesterol 93

Triglycerides 53

I was thrilled to see such an improvement and it was all done by changing my diet, exercise, and sleep. Those three items are critical (IMHO) to weight loss and good health. I thought I would share what a typical week is like for me now so you know what I am doing to make such a turn around in my life.

Diet (what I eat)

I'm putting this under diet although I wouldn't say I'm on a diet. If anything, I feel like I eat more food and eat it more often than before. I follow "The Man Diet" but I thought I would get more specific about what a typical day's food is for me.

Breakfast is typically two packages of Quaker Instant Oatmeal (I like raisins and spice). I eat that after I exercise and many times not until I'm already at work at my desk (around 8:30am). I typically bring into work a lot of snacks to eat throughout the day. On a typical day I bring in a banana, grapes (Costco grapes are awesome) about as many as you could hold in two hands, blueberries - about as many as you can hold piled high in one hand, a small handful of almonds, two apples (medium sized), and sometimes I'll have some melon too. I normally have my fist snack at 9:30am and another at 11:00am. It varies depending on how busy I get.

Lunch is typically a salad or a sandwich. Wendy's makes a pretty good Cobb type salad but I only use half of one of their salad dressings on it. I also like the Turkey-Bacon-Avacado (6 inch) at Subway with no cheese and no mayo, but lots of mustard and all of the veggies. My other favorite is the Voodoo Chicken Salad at Rumbi Grill (and I use ALL of the dressing on that one). In the afternoon I polish off the rest of my snacks at my normal 1 1/2 to 2 hour interval.

Dinner is whatever the family is having but my wife is awesome at preparing healthy meals that won't interfere with the man diet. I typically try to eat dinner before 7pm, after that it's only water. I find it's easier to get up and work out if I don't eat much after 7pm.

On top of that I am drinking nearly 100oz of water every day (or more). I have a 20oz Rubbermaid water bottles that can be washed in the dish washer. I drink two in the morning, two in the afternoon, and one or two at night after work. Yes, I go to the bathroom A LOT!

Exercise

Having lost a lot of weight before I was already aware of what it took. For me there is no substitute to long sustained workouts. When I say long I mean at least 1 hour. This is a typical week for me (and I had to work up to this but it didn't take long). I work out 6 days a week if I can. I try to rotate through different types of workouts so my body doesn't get accustomed to what I'm doing. A typical week would be 22 mile bike rides Mon, Wed, Fri and a 5 mile jog Tues and Thursday. Saturday I reserve for longer adventures like losing myself on single track Mt. Bike trails for 4 hours. It's not typical but I've been on rides for 4 1/2 hours and burned around 3500 calories. Most of my work outs take place early in the morning. I get up at 5:45am to make sure I'm done in time to get to work. I find morning work outs are more difficult to get used to, but they are also most effective. My morning work out generally molds my day and keeps me eating what is good for me. After riding for 22 miles nothing sounds good but some fruit and oatmeal. Any greasy fast food would probably make me sick. I've tried to also introduce swimming but I HATE swimming. It's incredibly effective but just as boring. Still, I try to go swimming at night on occasion in hopes I'll somehow find a way to like it. When I say I go swimming that's one hour of swimming laps doing freestyle and breast stroke.

Sleep

Finally I must talk about sleep. I cannot stress how important sleep is. I'm typically in bed by 10:30pm and some nights earlier. My body doesn't function well on a routine like this with less than 7 hours and most nights I need 8. If you stay up late you are doing to eat junk to stay awake (I know because I've done it a lot).

I will just add a few other thoughts. The first two weeks of this was not easy. The first few mornings I got up I wondered how long I would last. It got a lot easier after a few days and I was used to it after week. Now I crave the morning workout and always look forward to them.

I hope that was informative and not too boring.

Road Biking at Bear Lake

2011-07-28T15:36:00.004-06:00

This morning I went on a bike ride with Joe Morton and Scott Peterson. They were on road bikes and I was on my mountain bike. I was able to keep up with a lot of drafting behind Joe and Scott. It made me really want a road bike.

Monster Bike Ride

2011-07-16T11:45:00.003-06:00

This morning I wanted to ride up south fork to Trefoil Camp and check out the trail off the park on the way back down. It turned out to be a very long and fun ride.

Biggest Loser Contest at work

2011-06-29T10:29:00.005-06:00

Abe approached me last Tuesday about "The Man Diet" and we decided to start a biggest loser contest at Appigo. Since starting Appigo I've put all of my free time into the company and stopped my regular work outs. That all changed last Tuesday.

Beginning the Man Diet and a regular work out routine is always a good excuse to buy a gadget. My Garmin Forerunner 305 died a quick death and the 310XT I replaced it with wasn't working so I got myself a 610. A while back I also went to replace my Brooks DYAD running shoes and they didn't have my size. I decide to get something else and when I started running last week my left foot really got sore. I had to eventually go up to Wasatch Running in Sandy to get my DYADs but I have a new pair and they are awesome! If you are a larger sized person and want to jog for workouts, I highly recommend these shoes!

Anyway, it's been going well and I look forward to losing my "Appigo" weight. Here are the garmin 610 results from my last two workouts:

Todo for Mac

2011-05-03T01:27:00.002-06:00

Today Appigo announced Todo for Mac. It's nice to finally let the cat out of the bag.

Hawaii Five-0-mercial

2010-11-21T21:54:00.002-07:00

I was watching the new Hawaii Five-0 show tonight and realized how commercialized TV has become. Like in most shows there is a major sponsor, in this case it's Chevrolet. They tell you that when the show begins, ends, and on every commercial break. Every car used in the show (practically) is a Chevrolet. I've seen it in most shows so this was not surprising. What really got me was when Microsoft had one of their new Windows 7 phone ads on a commercial break. The show resumed and the detectives are in some museum of modern art. One of the detectives makes a statement about some art and the other detective doesn't believe him. He says "Bing it and you'll see". Uh... what? The detective then pulls out her brand new Windows 7 phone. She is holding it at the same angle and flashes the exact same screen that was just shown on the commercial. She then switches to some other app (I guess you can't do it all on that main screen after all) and searches using Microsoft's Bing. She of course finds the information flawlessly and immediately at the top of the search list and is amazed the other investigator was right. Basically they extended the Microsoft commercial for an extra 45 seconds into the show because there is no way any normal human would ever use the term "Bing it".

Todo icon in an iPhone TV Commercial

2009-04-09T12:18:00.005-06:00

Last night I was watching "Lost" and there were several iPhone commercials on. I always pause the Tivo to see if by some off chance any Appigo apps are in the commercial or at least on the iPhone. They only ran the "Office" commercial but I noticed a lot of the icons were the same icons used in the Apple Store promotions where Appigo's icons are used.

Todo in iPhone TV commercial

I went out to their website and watched the other new commercials and found that the "Student" commerial has Todo's icon in it! Below is the shot of the icons that flip around. Todo was probably chosen because it looks good with that group of icons.

Appigo at Macworld 2009

2009-01-08T23:00:00.009-07:00

AccuFuel in the Apple Booth

At Macworld this year, Apple had a very large wall in their booth with a number of applications from the App Store. If you look right above the head of the guy in the photo above, you'll see the AccuFuel icon. Boyd and I were quite surprised to see AccuFuel featured on their huge iPhone display.

The Appigo Booth

We had a small booth that was in a fairly good spot in the North Hall of the Moscone Center. It was interesting that as the days went on, we got more and more traffic at our booth. There were a lot of people bringing their friends back to our booth to check out our software. Thanks to everyone that stopped by.

Appigo software on display

In our booth we had a table with four iPod touches running all of our software. The iPod touches were secured in PED3 stands. We had a lot of other exhibitors come by and ask what the stands were that we were using. We also had a lot of other iPod stand makers come by to see what we were using. Funny, we just saw the stands on the web and thought they would work well for the display (which they have). They certainly made displaying the our software easier.

We also handed out stickers of the icons used for Todo, Notebook, and AccuFuel.

With all of this marketing and promotional work, Boyd and I are learning lessons all the time. It turns out 40,000 stickers was way too many.

Appigo Stickers

We'll be giving out these stickers for years to come. I guess the app icons aren't going to change any time soon!

Overall Macworld 2009 has been positive for Appigo. It was a lot of work to prepare and have a booth at the show but it's been great to meet everyone and see how excited and passionate they are about our software!

Community Rocks

2008-03-23T19:31:00.008-06:00

Boyd and I were so focused on our Brainshare presentation we went off the grid for a day and ignored everything... that was a mistake! On Thursday Guillaume Beland posted his first GNOME Do plugin which happend to be for Tasque.

Had I paid attention to the community on Thursday I would have seen this and shown it as part of our demo on Friday. The plugin is awesome and if you can't tell, I love GNOME Do. Now it's even better!

Potato heads at Brainshare

Tasque at Brainshare '08

2008-03-21T23:48:00.002-06:00

In the Friday keynote of Novell's Brainshare this year they did a highlight on some of the Hackweek v2 projects. Zonker recently joined Novell and did a great job introducing all of the projects. Boyd and I did a demo of Tasque and a bit more.

As we were practicing for our demo on Wednesday, Boyd and I thought it would be sweet to integrate Tasque with Giver so we could drag tasks to people in Giver to share them. The Brainshare staff wanted our presentation before we had written a line of this code so we added Giver integration to the presentation thinking it would be easier to pull it out if we couldn't get it working in time.

In the dry run, Boyd and I decided to pretend as if we had Giver running with Tasque integration so we could get our timing right. The machine I was pretending to do things on was a vanilla openSUSE 10.3 desktop with no Tasque, no updated Tomboy, and no Giver. Nothing was happening on the machine (I wasn't even touching it) as we explained this great integration between Tasque and Giver. We got through the "fake" part of the demo and several people watching in the audience started to clap and cheer. Troy Mooney (from Novell's Marketing... he's over the keynote) ran up right after looking very confused and saying that he could sort of get what we were saying but didn't see anything happening on the machines. We laughed and assured him we'd have it all up and going by Friday.

Thursday between stage rehearsals, Boyd and I hacked all day back stage. By the 5:00pm rehearsal on Thursday, we had everything working and Troy was happy to see things happening on the screen that matched what we were saying.

The demo introduced Tasque and showed how it works online against Remember The Milk. We then showed how you can highlight text in Tomboy and enable a button to create a task in Tasque. Finally we showed our Thursday afternoon hack and dragged a task to a target in Giver and sent the task over to another machine on the network.

On my way out Friday morning I grabbed a couple of Razors so Boyd and I could ride them across the stage to where we had our machines (the stage was HUGE!). It was very fun and perhaps the best Brainshare I've ever participated in. Everyone that was part of the keynote hung around and cheered backstage as each team came off the stage. A lot of these people are from teams that don't necessarily work together and it was cool to see them all united cheering each other on. Roger Levy hung around backstage to chat with everyone and congratulate them as they finished. I asked him if he was going out on stage and he said no. He said he was here to be a part of what was going on. Very cool!

The photos are all of Friday's keynote and were taken by Eric Ward.

Naming Tasky

2008-02-29T09:06:00.003-07:00

Boyd and I created Tasky for Novell's Hackweek v2 and hacked as fast and furious as we could to get it running during the week. We didn't think much about the name and as it turns out, there are already a couple of projects named Tasky out there.

We're looking for a new name and hope you can help. Feel free to contact either of us directly or post your suggestions to the Tasky google group. There is a $100 reward for the winning name (compliments of Novell).

Is your sidewalk accessible?

2008-02-25T13:23:00.002-07:00

Calvin points out an accessible sidewalk in Beijing

When visiting Beijing last week I noticed that many of the sidewalks have a strip down the side that has a specific pattern. I started noticing it everywhere and finally asked "why the strip?". I was told it was to assist blind people. With my recent interest in accessibility I started paying attention and found that not only do they have the strip, when the sidewalk changes or when it comes to an intersection, the strip changes from raised dashes to dots.

Dashes to Dots

I began to notice the strip everywhere and feel rather silly that I didn't notice it earlier and that I had not recognized it's purpose. Perhaps this is a common thing and I've never noticed it in other cities, but I was really pleasantly surprised by it.

Accessibility strip in the subway

As a side note, I also found that each bill of their paper money could be distinguished by it's size, something the U.S. could use some work on.

Novell Hackweek v2

2008-02-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

It finally stopped snowing

I finally escaped a lot of manager type work and was able to hack a little. The initial UI Automation bits of code (UIAutomationProvider and UIAutomationTypes) have been checked into mono's svn in trunk/olive/class. It's minimal but it's a start to the new accessibility work going on at Novell.

Next week is Novell's Hackweek v2. For the second time Novell has allocated a full week of hacking to be done on whatever projects are of interest to their engineers. You can check out a lot of the projects on the openSUSE Idea website. It should be a good week of full on hacking and productivity!

I thought I would post a better picture out my office window. I haven't seen the sun since leaving Orlando and it's quite beautiful outside today. As you can see from the photo, my office window is most definitely north facing.

Accessible Business Cards

2008-02-05T10:55:00.000-07:00

Here is a quick test for you, in the photo above there are two business cards. Can you tell who the cards are from and how to contact them? You're doing well if you can figure out that the top card is from someone at Humanware and the bottom card is from someone at Novell.

Now let's flip the cards over.

Can you tell who the cards are from and how to contact them now? The top card is from Kevin Hughes at Humanware. On the back of his card is printed in very large print his name and contact number (I smeared his extension because I didn't get his permission). His card also has his contact information in braille. My card is blank. The front of my card is printed in an impossibly tiny font and the back is blank. To a good number of people, my card provides no information without some form of assistance.

I need new cards.

ATIA Conference

2008-02-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

Saturday in the Sun

Last week I had the privilege to attend the 2007 ATIA Leadership Forum on Accessibility in Orlando Florida. I can't remember the last conference I attended when I felt under dressed. I was wearing a blue polo and jeans and all around me were people in business suits. I was glad I didn't show up in a Firefox t-shirt and wore a button long sleeve shirt the next day. I'm also used to being in conferences with tech-heads and hackers. While there were a few attending, the majority of the people were from Schools, Human Resource Departments, Banks, Manufacturing, Shipping, and Retail Stores (and many others, sorry if I've left you out).

Accessibility has always been an after thought in the industry and something that was done for those with disabilities like blindness, deafness, etc. I never considered that my understanding of accessibility was extremely limited until until I heard Frances W. West from IBM speak on expanding the discussion from "disabilities" to "human ability". She had some statistics (with references which I'm not going to add) in her presentation that stunned me. To quote some:

16% of the the world population has some type of disability

vision, hearing, mobility, cognative

20% of the average working age population has a disability

United States

21% of working age population has a disability
60% of people with disabilities of working age are non-working

Europe

14% of working age population has a disability
50% of people with disabilities of working age are non-working

Japan

65% of people with disabilities of working age are non-working

India

21.9 million people with disabilities

Australia

18% of working age population has a disabilitiy

Rob Sinclair from Microsoft also presented information on how the workforce is changing. He had some statistics (again with refs) that showed the trend of people continuing to work later in their lives:

More than 23% of people ages 65-74 were in the labor force in 2006 (19.6% in 2000)
Number of "Boomers" will grow to 113 million by 2017 while the 18-to-49 demographic will increase less than 1% to 136 million.

He also pointed out that accessibility is not limited to people with disabilities but represents the ability for anyone to use technology. From his presentation:

Accessibility <-> Ageing <-> Better Usability

This theme seemed to ring true throughout the conference. I heard story after story of companies rolling out two interfaces for their employee websites; one that was "modern" and used all the latest trends, and one that was accessible. In the end, the accessible sites were used more often because people could find thing easier. And to think I had always thought of myself as someone with some human factor experience.

There were a lot of other topics covered but I was mostly impacted by the discussions that made me change my approach to accessibility. I've worked with a lot of older people using computers (which now includes my parents) and I wonder how much they could benefit from improvements in accessibility. I have to think, how long before I'm going to benefit from them?

On a lighter note, the weather in Orlando was fantastic. It was quite a shock to come home to more snow than I've seen in Utah for a long time!

Monday in the Cold

Facing North

2008-01-28T14:03:00.001-07:00

Calvin's New Digs

We moved offices a couple of weeks ago and for the first time I have an office on the north side of building H at Novell. Building H at Novell's Provo UT campus runs east to west and the offices along the south side get the sun beating in them all day. The north side offices can have the blinds open all the way and get no sun glare all year long (not that you can tell in that photo).

Another plug for some openings we have on the accessibility team. We are looking for a Project Manager, a couple of QA Engineers, and some packaging/build engineers. Check out the openings here. Contact me if you are interested!

Cambridge, MA

2008-01-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

Back to normal

Every time I have visited Cambridge, it's been wet and cloudy. I was surprised when I arrived on Tuesday to find it was quite warm and sunny. People were shedding their coats and the ice had completely melted off the river by Thursday. This morning I was returned to reality because the Cambridge weather returned to the way I remember it.

Lounge area in Novell Cambridge offices

I've been in Cambridge meeting some very talented people interested in joining Novell to become a part of the new Accessibility team. We still have openings so please contact me if you are interested. Cambridge is always a fun and productive visit and there seems to be an air of creativity in the people and surroundings that is infectious and inspiring. A large part of the team will be located here so I look forward to visiting more often.

Nat was also in town and we spent some time talking about Barack Obama (and Nat's fundraising campaign). I haven't made up my mind yet who I'll be voting for, but I know I do not want Clinton in office so I contributed.

Playing in the mud

2007-12-18T08:59:00.001-07:00

The moment before Eric got dirty

A couple of weeks ago the desktop team at Novell had some managers visiting from out of the country. We decided to take them up the hill and show them the true meaning of playing in the mud. The excellent photo above was taken by Eric Ward who shortly after this moment was covered by muddy water . Here is Eric's flickr collection of the activity.

Calvin and Jared playing

Here is another set of photos from the event from Boyd Timothy. I alway underestimate how much time is required to clean up a vehicle after doing this. I wonder how much time Eric spent cleaning up his camera.

Accessibility work at Novell

2007-12-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

Michael Meeks posted a couple of weeks back about some new work Novell is doing in the area of accessibility. Things have progressed to the point we need some talented GNOME and Mono hackers, i.e., we have some job openings.

Part of the team will be focused on implementing the UI Automation spec for the Mono WinForms and Moonlight projects which will include building interfaces for both the client and provider sides of the spec. The other part will be focused on helping the current efforts going on in the ATK/AT-SPI worlds. There is already some great work going on there and we want to dedicate some resources to help out (like DBUS AT-SPI!). See Michael's blog for a diagram of what this might look like when we're well into it.

Contact me if you are interested or know anyone that is or should be interested. I'm throwing together some wiki pages to outline the effort if you would like to take a look (subject to being relocated to a better location). We have brand new work that needs to be done, and we have work that needs to be done on existing projects so depending on the type of work you like to do, we've got it!

The best part is you'll continue to be involved in the GNOME community and get paid for doing it!

Gnome logout

2007-08-18T22:24:00.001-06:00

Opensuse 10.3 logout

I just finished updating the gnome logout UI for Opensuse 10.3. The new dialog comes from some usability research that was done at Novell for the SLED 10 SP1 update.

Banter 0.1.10 Released

2007-08-10T15:34:00.000-06:00

Banter Group Window

Banter is now approaching our first stable release. We've removed some functionality for this first release that was causing some stability problems (evolution integration and gecko based widgets). The notification badges now work (although they need a little more love) so when someone tries to chat with you and you are away, you'll know. If you click on the badge, it will open a chat window and show you what you missed.

Text,audio, and video chats are still in and much more stable. The audio works to chat with devices like the Nokia n800 and also with the Google Chat client on Windows.

Banter Chat Window

Smashed Garmin

2007-08-08T21:25:00.002-06:00

Smashed Garmin

I was mountain biking today at the mouth of Slate Canyon and decided to open up my rear shock after I had started down the hill. I only made it several yards one handed when I hit a rock, locked my front brake (while trying to hold on) and went over the front. I bruised my hand but other than that I rolled nicely out of it. My bike survived as well because it landed on my Garmin Forerunner 305.

Garmin Training Center

The most amazing part is I connected it to the base and synced it to the Garmin Training Center and it uploaded my ride until the moment of the crash. I can only guess that had I turned the Forerunner back on, it would have recorded the rest of the ride.

Hackweek Day One

2007-06-26T07:54:00.000-06:00

It's hackweek at Novell. The entire OPS (Open Platform Services) division at Novell is hacking on whatever they want to this week. I'm hacking Giver. It's something I've wanted to build for a long time but now it's going to get done.

Yesterday I got it running to the point where you can discover other machines and send the basic information about the file or files you want to "give" to the other machine. Today I'll wrap up the basic file send and from then on it's all about adding bling.

Video Chat on Linux

2007-06-08T14:59:00.000-06:00

Banter Video Chat

Brady and I stayed up until 2:00am last night hacking Banter. Our main goal was to get video and audio chats working but we also managed to clean up the chat window and integrate all three types of chat (text/audio/video) into the main chat window. After we got it working we just kept going making things run smoother as the night went on. Finally around 2:00am we decided we better get some sleep so we released Banter 0.1.6. I of course had the time of my system messed up due to a temporary boot into Ubuntu (thanks by the way) so I had to turn around and release an updated 0.1.7 without the time skew.

Check out more Banter goodness here

Banter Contact Resizing

2007-05-23T10:37:00.000-06:00

I hacked on the banter contact resizing yesterday and got the first iteration with resizing done. It's a little rough but you get the basic idea. We're having some problems using the gtkmozembed widget with resizing and general use. Our contact widgets and chat windows are all HTML/CSS/Javascript based to support themes. Hopefully we can either hack gtkmozembed to get it working or switch over to Apple's WebKit.

If any HTML/CSS/Javascript experts are reading this, the banter project could use some help working out our ContactStyles (themes) and building several of them.

I love my Jeep

2007-05-22T17:59:00.001-06:00

Calvin in his Jeep

Boyd took this shot yesterday when we went for a short dig up at the base of Slate Canyon. Boyd took his newly purchased Jeep Liberty and I think is already planning out how he is going to add lockers to it. He tried to climb a hill I went up and found out he is "lockerless larry".

Banter

2007-05-07T16:17:00.000-06:00

"...to speak to or address in a witty and teasing manner"

Several weeks ago at Novell we started the project named Banter. It's being called the next generation collaboration client. Think of it as software that combines all of your online "Web 2.0" services along with chat, video, and voice into your contact management system.

Unlike other projects I've worked on at Novell, this project is being done in the open from the very beginning. In fact, if you want to see what we are doing, you can visit the Banter wiki at http://banter-project.org.

West Mountain Digging

2007-04-28T23:09:00.000-06:00

This first video shows the importance of lockers. The climb was so easy we really didn't need them but without them a couple of parts were tricky.

Nothing looks difficult from a distance. This video shows the same hill being climbed; first of me in my Rubicon from a distance, then inside Brady's FJ. The climbs always look different from inside!

I had to cut out a lot of video to come up with these five, even then there was this 8 minute section that isn't as fun as the others. If you like The Who, the audio is "Don't Get Fooled Again"... the whole thing! Brady kicks his FJ and heads down the mountain... not because he can't keep up, he had to go get more Fuel and wasn't happy about it.

This was the funnest part of the day. This little hill wasn't difficult, but it was steep and seriously felt like a roller coaster.

We went back to the mountain taking a different road and it had a lot of loose rock. I went up to investigate why the road didn't make it to the summit... I found out! It's hard to see from a distance but my tires kept digging down and I just couldn't go any further no matter what I tried. The last attempt I actually smelled the rubber on my tires burning as I spun out on the rocks.

Boyd also has some great pictures from this and other digging adventures we have done here.

Digging in the mud

2007-03-28T14:32:00.000-06:00

Calvin's Rubicon Animation

Jared's FJ Cruiser Animation

Jared showed up to work today with a brand new Toyota FJ Cruiser. The new snow this morning was a perfect fit to make it a little more fun! Click the image below to see all of the photos.

Boyd's Flickr Set of the event

My favorite cartoon

2007-02-09T10:39:00.000-07:00

The other night when searching for music for my son I came across some videos on YouTube that I had forgotten about. I love this Tom and Jerry cartoon for two reasons.

1. If I were to sit my two boys down and tell them I wanted them to listen to Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. by Franz Liszt they would probably really listen for about 15 seconds and then lose interest. They can't get enough of this cartoon and run around the house humming the entire thing now. The same thing happened to me as a kid.

2. It's hilarious!

Tom and Jerry - The Cat Concerto (1946)

This doesn't have anything to do with cartoons but since we were searching for music, I also found a bunch of Heifetz videos. My father is a violinist and was always very fond of Heifetz (he still is). I was surprised to find such great videos of him playing.

Rondo by Mozart

Paganini Caprice No. 24

Hora Staccato

Back at Novell

2006-12-04T09:08:00.000-07:00

Rob and Calvin on Calvin's last day

Last Friday was my last day working for the FCH (Family and Church History) department of The LDS Church. Back in June, I was contacted by the FCH department wondering if I was interested in starting an open source successor for PAF. It was an amazing opportunity and an exciting open source project to be working on. My current position at Novell was being done away with so I left what had been a great experience at Novell to start this new project.

I worked my tail off getting the data and information needed to start the successor to PAF. Rob Lyon joined me and we built up story boards of what this new project would look like. After a month and a half of work we presented it and it was received very well. We were both very excited although there was a strange and unexpected comment at the end of our presentation. One of the product managers made the comment: "I know what you guys are capable of building and after seeing this, I'm worried that it's going to hurt our partners to put this out for free as an open source project". Afterwards, Rob and I talked about how strange that comment was and how of all the responses we could think of, that was not one of them.

Two weeks later the development manager of our team announced to us that product management had told him to halt all development on the client. "We are not going to produce a client" were the words he said they used. I was a little more than stunned. Leaving Novell was not an easy decision and now the only reason I had left was being cancelled? Even worse than that, for the next two months, there was nothing for me to do. I would meet with my development manager and when he would ask how things are going I would tell him I had nothing to do, that I came in to work every day and had no clue was I was supposed to be doing. He told me he knew and that he was working on it. I eventually wrote some client code to help flush out some web services that were being developed.

Calvin in his office at Novell

Several weeks after I left Novell I learned that most of my old team was transitioned to work on SLED. I contacted Jared Allen and he said he had an opening on the the SLED team. I interviewed and was a fit for the job. I'm thrilled to be back at Novell and a part of this team. I enjoy working on gui applications and there are opportunities for that kind of work all over the desktop.

...must be November

2006-11-16T15:20:00.001-07:00

New Track Layout

On Saturday the boys remembered that when November comes, the race track is supposed to be set up. That's about all the hint I need that it's time and the track goes up. I wanted a track with a section of long straight track. Because I don't have a lot of track, a long straight section is tough but we pulled it off! This new layout has been more fun than the previous tracks.

Ninco Porsche 911 SC

We also got a new car, the Ninco Porsche 911 SC. Everyone wants to race this car. It's fast, it's smooth, and personally I love the look of the older 911 Porsches.

I've got some major changes coming my way so I'm going to enjoy this weekend and start it now! I think I'll go race...

This doesn't suck

2006-10-15T21:35:00.000-06:00

Provo, UT on my Treo 700p

Google released their Google Maps for the Palm Treo on Friday. I just downloaded it and combined with my EvDO network access, it works so well and so fast that I had to post a picture. This makes me like my Treo 700p even more.

Winterizing the Jeep

2006-10-14T13:58:00.000-06:00

About this time of year it gets cold enough that having a soft top on a Jeep is of no advantage. This morning I removed the soft top and replaced it with the hard top. It's not a trivial process so I took pictures...

Jeep with the soft top on

Windows are removed

Top is folded down

The soft top and door frames removed

Hard Top stored in the garage

Jeep under the hard top

Hard Top lowered on to the Jeep

Winterized Jeep with Hard Top

The Jeep actually looks smaller in person with the hard top on probably because it's a little shorter. The bars have to stick up a little on the soft top to tighten the material. The process took about 45 minutes from start to end. Luckily I only do this twice a year!

Wiring my house

2006-10-09T12:54:00.000-06:00

The Finished Project

This weekend I re-wired my house. The house had some old CAT5 cable that connected up several of the rooms.

Old Wiring

Return air duct

There were a lot of problems with the old wires but here are the main ones:
#1- The old wiring was quick and dirty. There were no faceplates or jacks installed, the cables just hung out of the wall. This room used to be the computer room and all of that was behind a desk so it was fine. Now this room is the guest bedroom and it's NOT fine.
#2- Ironically the new computer room is not wired into this room so most of the other rooms are connected via wire but the computer room is connected using wireless. When one person is streaming video from TiVo or downloading from the internet, that wireless gateway gets saturated quickly!
#3- The guest bedroom (former computer room) is the only room with a live phone jack so the DSL modem is there and the base for the wireless phones. Not a good place for anything when guests are staying with you!
#4- The cables for the downstairs got there using the return air vent. For two or three cables that may be ok but I was going to pull a lot more than two or three.

The plan was to run 2" flexible conduit from the attic to the basement furnace room. The only place I could run the conduit was through the flume space. My house has a rectangle flume that runs from the attic to the basement and has the furnace vent, return air, and air ducts running through it. There is plenty of space there for a 2" conduit. The furnace vent is shielded and doesn't get hotter than what you can touch so the conduit will be safe there.

Location for 2" flexible conduit

The attic

Conduit location

Originally I had wanted to run the conduit through the walls. You can see in the picture above a spot where I cleared away the insulation. I drilled a hole through what I thought was the drywall nailer and it turned out to not be that! The top of the wall I wanted to use was under the support structure of the roof and I was not about to drill a 2" hole through that! I ended up cutting a hole in the tin covering the open ducting space in my house.

My son's bedroom

In order to feed the conduit through two floors, I was going to need access not only to feed it but to cut another hold in the tin plates that hold the ducts in place. I chose my son's bedroom because it was behind a door. My other choice would have been the dining room and I think my wife would not have liked that. Did I mention that my wife didn't know I was doing this because she was out of town?

Now that I knew where I was going to run everything I was ready to start cutting holes.

Finding a stud

Marking and starting the hole

Finished hole

There are two reasons that hole is that large. I needed room to pull the conduit and I wanted to cut clean between two studs to make the patch easier. To patch this I cut another 2x4 the width of the hole and screwed it to the two studs. That created a nice board to mount my drywall to when I was done. I forgot to take pictures of the 2x4 I installed but below you can see the patched wall. I also found an old Pepsi can that was left in there when the house was built.

Hole for conduit

Looking up space to the attic

The conduit was a pain to install. I actually had to do it twice. My brother stopped by and helped me pull it once and after he left I found that the conduit had looped in the flume space. Not only would it be a pain to pull wires through (if even possible), the conduit was resting against the flume. I didn't like either of those problems so I pulled it out. With the help of my 7 year old son (he helped quite a bit on this project) we re-installed the conduit.

Conduit installed from the attic to the basement

The next step was to pull the wire. The conduit came with some very nice pull string in it but it all fell out the first time we installed it. I had to use fishtape to get the first wire installed. A very wise man told me to pull a string with each cable I pull so I would be ready for the next pull. The first cable was easy to pull.

The first cable pulled from the basement to the new computer room

I also had to locate the wall in the computer room and drill a hole in the attic to fish the cables down the wall. I only used conduit for the big pull to the basement. Out of the conduit the cables run in the attic to the wall and down the wall to the hole I cut out. Because it's low voltage, I used these nice "mudder frames" rather than electrical boxes. They are much easier to work with and your cables don't get all bent up in a box.

Two cable pull

I also ran one coax cable to each room. Pulling the coax was much more difficult. The cable is heavier and has to come off a spool rather than out of a box. I pulled 5 CAT5e cables and one coax cable to the computer room. I have two servers, my computer, and a switch that I wanted home runs for. The fifth CAT5e cable is for phone.

Finished job in the computer room

The old computer room had the only working phone line in the house. I ran new CAT5e cable to the source of the phone line and then ran a home run to the basement for phone. That allowed me to remove the old phone lines from the walls and replace the old jacks with a modular system that has phone, Ethernet, and cable all in one jack. I forgot to get a blank faceplate so I put the old phone jack faceplate over the old cable hole in the guest bedroom.

Wires pulled and jacks punched down

Finished guest bedroom

Finally the job is done. Eventually I will purchase a wall mount rack to hold punchdown blocks and a patch board to connect everything. For now I just put connectors on the cables and ran them to my switch. It feels good to have my house wired correctly with the ability to pull more cables any time I need.

The attic

The rough patched wall

This winter I'll paint my son's room and do some finish work on that patch. With some sanding, texture work, and paint, you won't be able to tell there was a hole there.

Parking Lot Damage

2006-09-27T16:40:00.000-06:00

Damage to our Honda Odyssey

My wife's minivan was hit today in the parking lot of the Orem Super Target store and nobody owned up to it. It's obvious from the photos that the person knew they hit us because they stopped and backed away. If you can't see it... notice how the damage eases in from the right side until it ubruptly stops. They must have felt the hit and then backed away because the damage doesn't continue to ease off to the left.

AC/DC

2006-09-27T10:06:00.000-06:00

Better than drugs

Since I left Novell I have managed to put on 20 lbs! I fell into the trap of "I can eat this... I ran 5 miles today". Well, bad habits come back quickly and since I'm really a recovering fat man, bad things happened.

This morning I was running and really needing something to help me keep moving. I ran through my iPod play lists and right at the top was AC/DC Live. I fired it up and when Angus started in on Thunderstruck it was like I was on speed (not that I really know what that feels like). Finishing a 6 mile run was easy after that!

I'm back on The Man Diet and plan on sticking to it. My goal is to make it back down under 200 lbs before my birthday in November.

Calvin's New Digs

2006-07-18T15:32:00.000-06:00

Calvin's Cubicle

It's only been three weeks and I've already moved. Monday we started working in Orem, Utah. For some reason this post was sitting in draft mode and I never published it... well, here it is!

First week at the Family History Department

2006-06-30T21:25:00.000-06:00

Calvin in front of Utah Capital Building

I've only been gone from Novell a week and it feels like much longer. The first week working in the Family History Department has been amazing. Having never worked for an organization this big, my first day was overwhelming. I always felt like Novell was a large organization (which it is) but I believe there are more employees that work in the The Church Office Building than all of Novell. Monday morning there was a sea of people flowing into the building and I had to quickly move to one side of the flow to get oriented and figure out where to go. The human resources department deals with thousands and thousands of employees so there is a lot of process to everything.

View of Downtown from The Church Office Building

Today I had a break at lunch so I walked over to The Church Office Building to pick up my badge (yes, it took 4 days to get it). Since I now had clearance, I decided to go up to the 26th floor and check out the view. I only had my Treo with me so the resolution on the photos isn't that great. Having grown up in Salt Lake City, it's pretty sad that this was the my first trip to the top of that building!

Joseph Smith Memorial Building Lobby

My office is in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. That building used to be the old Hotel Utah. In fact, when I was a senior in High School, I had my senior dance in the Hotel Utah. I don't remember much about the building back then other than it always looked run down. The Church did a lot of restoration on the building and it looks fantastic now. One of the strangest things about working there is it's a public building. There is always a flood of people (mostly tourists) walking through the lobby and taking the elevators to the top floor for lunch (there are two fantastic places to eat on the top floor; The Garden and The Roof). Yesterday Kevin Ward and I got on the elevator and right after us a bride and groom got on with their photographer. We had to squeeze to the edges of the elevator because the bride's dress filled the elevator. It was very funny. We got off on the fourth floor and they went on to the top. I had been to the building before working there and when people got off on any floor besides the top and lobby I always wondered what they did there... now I know.

The project I am working on is not public so I won't go into the details. I will say that it's a lot of fun. I've been involved in a lot of projects in the early stages but I really enjoy it when I'm involved from the very beginning... the blank sheet of paper stage. The intent is to open source the project and run it as an open source project so I'll be able to share more details about it later.

One other note for those that have made it this far, I really miss the iFolder3 server at Novell! When I first started, people started wanting to give me documents and I had several I had created. We kept mailing them back and forth and I was frustrated with such a primitive method of collaboration. At Novell we just threw everything into the team's metaverse iFolder and we all had access to the latest versions of the documents. It was perfect! Finally I discovered a department Wiki server that I've been able to use for creating and sharing data. In the end the Wiki will work better because I want all of these documents to be public when we go open with it. Still, I had my moments of frustration without iFolder!

Last Day at Novell

2006-06-23T22:38:00.001-06:00

Brady and Calvin in the iFolder Lounge

Today was my last day at Novell. There is no question I am going to miss working day to day with the iFolder team. It's too bad Brady and I were not able to pull off one more crazy trip somewhere before it all had to end. I was going to write a long story about the first Cambridge trip we took when I passed out on the plane, but I'll tell that some other time. Leaving Novell was different from what I expected. I couldn't be more thrilled with the opportunity I have, but Novell is a great place to work. I wish Novell and the people I've worked with at Novell all the success they deserve.

Hobble Creek Canyon

2006-06-19T00:42:00.001-06:00

Driving up to camp in Hobble Creek Canyon

Apple figured out how they could renew my .mac account. My credit card information was incorrect in their system and they informed me multiple times that my account was going to be canceled. I didn't fix it but several days after my account was canceled they figured out a way to charge me and renew my account. I noticed all of my blog photos were back so I quickly copied all of my photos off their site (which I thought I had lost) and updated my blog to point to the new location. I think I'll call Apple to cancel my .mac account this time.

We went up the right fork of Hobble Creek Canyon and camped Friday night. It was a blast!

( .mac | !.mac )

2006-06-14T20:01:00.001-06:00

Today my .mac account expired and I lost all of the images that were hosted for my blog (don't even say it Boyd). I don't think I'm going to renew that account so I'm assuming the pictures will all be deleted eventually. The worst part is that some of the pictures were only stored there. I've begun the process of relocating the pictures I have to a different and more permanant solution but you might find some of my blog entries having missing pictures... I'm not sure I'm going to fix them all.

All good things...

2006-06-13T21:56:00.000-06:00

Last thursday I put in my official resignation from Novell. I am leaving Novell to work for the LDS Church on their Family Search software. They are starting an open source project to build a cross platform genealogy client to front their Family Search site. I'll be the engineering lead and architect of that project. The work is facinating, its significance is deep, and its relevance is enormous. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity and I'm humbled to be a part of it.

My last day at Novell will be June 23rd. I've been there since 1992 and have worked with a lot of people on a lot of projects. I am going to miss the great people I have worked with on the iFolder team and the other people I have worked with previously at Novell.

Better than a Treo 650

2006-06-11T19:54:00.001-06:00

Certain events in my life have forced me to switch my phone plan. After Brady Anderson showed me his EvDO access through Sprint I decided to look into it. At the same time I realized I could get the new Palm Treo 700p (yes that's p for Palm OS).

Palm Treo 700p

I've only had the device for a couple of days but so far it appears to be a very nice upgrade from the Palm Treo 650. The other day I went to look up showtimes for the movie "Cars". I went to Fandango to look up the times and the network access speed was so blazing fast it felt like all of the data was local on my Palm. I am very impressed.

Calvin's Quest

2006-06-07T04:02:00.001-06:00

In my continuing quest to find the perfect gadget to meet all of my needs, I have gone back to my previous device and feel as if I have come home.

Palm Treo 650: The best device I've ever used

Several months ago I began a personal project to port some software from the Palm OS to Microsoft's WinCE OS (now labeled by Microsoft as Windows Mobile). I had a large number of requests for the software to be ported and calculated that the number of people asking for it justified the cost of porting it. In doing so I decided I would once again try to make the switch from a Palm OS based device to a WinCE based device. This was not an easy thing for me to do, the Treo 650 is by far the best device I have ever used. I naively wanted the software to look and feel like other software on the device so I figured I should switch and get used to the device. After using a Treo 650, I couldn't imagine having both a phone and a PDA (actually I could and tried it but that's another story) so I wanted a PocketPC based phone. My wireless service is with Cingular so I selected the Cingular 8125. After using the 8125 now for several months, I can no longer endure the frustrations of the device.

The problems of the 8125 (and other HTC based devices) are mostly in the software. Microsoft has been through at least five if not six full releases of it's WinCE operating system and it still suffers from the same design flaws it has always had. Microsoft's apps on the Windows CE devices are designed for users that live in Microsoft Outlook. If you do not live in Microsoft Outlook (or some other system like GroupWise) and want to use your device as the primary source of data (both input and output), you (IMHO) will not be happy. The number of steps it takes and the number of dialogs and prompts you must pass through to perform simple tasks is mind boggling. Let's examine two basic everyday tasks that you might encounter on these devices and compare them.

Task 1: Changing a todo item's due date
On the Palm I click on the current due date and I am given a menu with 10 choices that includes today, the next six days, 1 week from now, no date, or "Choose Date". If I pick one of those days I am done with the task in two clicks. Most of the time, I don't move my tasks more than seven days out so most of the time I can move a task in two clicks. If not I can click "Choose Date" and a calendar is shown with the current due date selected and I can pick a new date. That would require three clicks. This can also all be done using the thumb pad so I don't actually have to use the stylus on the screen.
On the WinCE device I have to click the task at which point I am taken to the details of the task which shows me less information about the task than the task list showed. I have to click the double arrows on the details screen to show me the details. To make a change to the task I have to select the edit menu. I am taken to the task edit screen where I can now see all of the details of the task and edit them. If I click on the Due: field, I am finally given a calendar with the current due date selected and I can select a new due date. After I select the new due date I am taken back to the edit screen and I have to select OK to save the changes.

Task 2: Creating a new appointment
Now there are a lot of types of appointments but let's go with the one that happens most often when I am not sitting in front of a computer and cannot enter it using Outlook (or GroupWise). I want to invite my wife (or some other person) to lunch.
On the Palm I click on the time slot in which to make a new appointment and it visibly changes with a cursor letting me know it's ready to enter the appointment information. I enter "Lunch with Wife". Task completed.
On the WinCE device when I click the free time slot it only selects it even though there is nothing there. I have to either select Menu and then select Edit or I can "click and hold" and wait for a little timer to count of some time before then showing me a context menu that has "New Appointment" in it. If I select "New Appointment" I am taken to the calendar edit screen where the Subject field is selected and I can enter text. I of course have no way to enter text because I need to also select the keyboard from the menu bar so I can actually enter text. I enter the text "Lunch with Wife" (ignoring a bunch of popup text suggestions which are all wrong until I have completed the full word) and click ok to save the event. I admit that I could have used the built in keyboard on the device and avoided the step of clicking on the keyboard from the menu bar. In that case I would have had to slide the keyboard out and then wait for Windows CE to realize the screen needed to rotate and redraw the screen in the rotated state. Most of the time that is very quick but it always seems like when I NEED it to be quick, it takes up to five seconds. Once the screen is redrawn, the Subject: field is no longer selected and has the text "No subject" in it and I have to click the subject to then use the keyboard and enter the text. I then click OK and I am returned to the calendar. I then close the keyboard and wait for the screen to rotate and redraw (with the same unpredictable speed).

I could continue with many other examples but this is only a blog entry and you are probably wondering when it will end. Here are some quick summaries of other problems I had in Windows CE and don't have on my Treo 650:

- When the phone rings I expect the device to instantly switch to some kind of phone answer screen and allow me to answer or ignore the call. On the 8125 I would often get an hourglass while it was preparing to switch to the answer dialog. I would frantically press the answer button but because the device was not quite ready, the button would activate whatever app was previously using the button and jump to some other function while I would miss the call. I felt like an idiot explaining to people that I couldn't get my phone to answer their call when I called them back.

- When I set an alarm I expect it to go off at the time I set it. On the 8125 I would often wake up (late) and turn on the device only to suddenly get an alarm for something that was supposed go off several hours earlier.

- If I don't make a single phone call all day, I would not expect my phone battery to be mostly used at the end of the day. My Treo will last two days easily with moderate use. The 8125 is lucky to make it 15 hours with no use at all.

- I expect a handheld device to work like a flashlight. When I need to see in the dark, I don't have to wait for the light to hit the wall, it's instant. When I am at some service desk and they ask me for some obscure information that I can't remember and need to look it up in my device, I want don't want to stand there looking like an idiot that doesn't know how to use my device while I wait for apps to load, screens to draw, menus to appear, and hourglasses to go away. I want the information NOW! The response time of the 8125 is never consistent and is always slow when I need it to be fast. My Treo is consistently fast.

- I want to turn the phone on and off using a hardware button, not a menu. There are times I want the PDA to stay on but the phone radio to be disabled. On my Treo I can hold down the red phone button (like every other mobile phone ever created on this earth) and it will turn off the phone portion of the device. On the 8125, to turn off the phone radio, I have to select the radio indicator in the menu bar to pop open a menu that let's menu turn on "flight mode"... that makes sense doesn't it?

- I want to turn off my phone's volume by reaching in my pocket and flipping the "sound off" button. On the 8125 I have to turn on the device, select the speaker icon from the menu bar which pops open a menu and let's me choose on, vibrate, or off".

Finally, I have to add one more story to this blog entry. When I turned on my 8125 to get the exact steps needed for the tasks above, I had it completely turned off so I needed to wait for it to "boot". I have had the device off for several days and as it booted it began to sound alarms for every event I had set since I turned it off. At the same time the alarm clock was letting me know it's time to "wake up" since it couldn't do that this morning. I had to sit and endure about 45 seconds of alarms and noises going off because I had no way of responding to them while the system was booting up. The only thing I could do was squeeze my hands over the speakers to mute the mix of alarms, notifications, and "wake up" music.

Ogden Half Marathon

2006-05-07T08:58:00.004-06:00

The first race I've ever run

Yesterday I finished the first race I have ever entered. The Ogden Half Marathon starts in Eden,UT near the Pineview Reservoir and ends 13.1 miles later in downtown Ogden, UT. The route is mostly downhill which makes the race very fast. I was worried that all of that downhill would be difficult on my knees and ankles but turned out just fine. There were only a couple of steeper grades and even those weren't that bad.

I was very anxious about the race the night before and didn't end up with a good rest. We had to be up at 4:30am to catch the buses that take the runners up to the start of the race. Randy Cook and I got on a bus at about 5:00am and arrived at the starting area around 6:00am. It was very cold and we had to wait for over an hour to start. They had a full first aid station there (it's the halfway mark for the full marathon) with fruit, water, and PowerBars. They also had fires going to keep the runners warm. Most of the race runs down the Ogden canyon and they had half of the road closed off for the race. I was surprised at how well organized the event was and how many volunteers they had. Every mile they had first aid stations filled with people screaming out words of encouragement and holding out cups of water, Powerade (I only had water), PowerBars, fruit, and some of that sports GU stuff (I didn't have any of that either).

You can click the above map to see the race results from my Garmin 305. I forgot to turn it off as I passed the finish line so the numbers aren't exact. I pushed my body harder in this race than I've ever pushed it before. I must have been full of adrenalin because I ran for over an hour in zone 4 of my heart rate (80%-90% of max) and 23 minutes in zone 5 (90%-100% of max). I ran the first mile and a half at a very slow pace. This being my first race, I was nervous and didn't know what to expect. I felt very good after that and stepped it up a bit. I mentally divided the race up into 5 mile blocks (that's how far I run each morning) and was surprised how fast it passed and how soon I was at my last 3 miles.

My goal was to finish the race under two hours and after ten miles I changed that goal to be under 1:45. I started to push and decided I could run the last three miles with a heart rate between 160 and 170 bpm. I turned the last corner in Ogden and could see the finish line with only a half mile to go. I was already at 170 and decided there was just a little more I could push. The last block of the race I broke out in a sprint... well, it felt like a sprint but I'm sure it was little more than a fast jog. There were a lot of people screaming as we came in but just as I broke out in my "sprint" some guy on the side screamed out "yeah dude, go for it" and kept screaming it as he ran along the side of the race at my pace. I'm not sure if his intention was to mock me or encourage me but I have to thank him for it because it gave me a rush of adrenaline that kept me running full speed until the end. I could see I wasn't going to make it under 1:45 but I thought if I pushed as hard as I could, I would still make it under 1:50. I ended up crossing at 1:49:59.9. My net time (from the time I crossed the start line to finish was 1:49:09.9. It took me 50 seconds to cross the start line from the race start (there were a lot of people).

When I crossed the finish line there was a sea of people in yellow shirts (volunteers) helping the racers and I was very disoriented because I had to suddenly stop running (there was no room to continue even if I wanted to). Two volunteers came rushing up to me to stop me. The girl volunteer said she needed my timing chip (it was on my left ankle) and the the guy stood there like he was going to catch me when I collapsed. I can't remember a time in my life when I have wanted air in my lungs as much as I wanted it then and for the first time I think I caught a glimpse of what it is like to have asthma. My lungs felt thick and I could not get air in and out no matter how hard I tried. I could only imagine a thick swelling in all of my airways that was slowing everything down. After about 30 seconds of that I recovered and could breathe deep full breaths and finally recovered.

My family was there to watch me cross the finish line despite the delayed start in the race. They were very supportive and it was great to have them there. My oldest boy (6 years old) told me that next year he wanted me to run the "big" race (meaning the full marathon). My good friend Randy Cook who invited me to run the race made sure that at registration I was entered in the "clydesdale" category. That's a special class for people over 200 lbs. He said it would help my race results to be in that class. It turns out he was right. I ended up taking first place in my class. I checked and according to the race stats, I would have taken 10th place had I been in the normal Male 35-39 class. I hope to be in that class next year so I better work on my time.

My first race ended up being a very positive experience and I look forward to having many more!

Accidents will happen

2006-04-28T09:54:00.002-06:00

I can't believe they cut my jersey

On Wednesday April 26th, the iFolder bike team went out for our normal lunchtime training ride. It just happened to be the first day I had my Garmin Forerunner so I have all of the details of the ride. After 17.9 miles we were on our way back and Brady had just pulled off to the back of the pace line (I was in front of him). We came to some railroad tracks and I crossed them faster than normal and heard a hard smash and thought "Wow, Brady went over that track harder than I have ever heard". I then heard Brady yell so I looked back and only saw his wheels. I stopped and ran back and Brady was not getting up.

I'll spare you the details of everything after that, but as you can see, Brady was taken to the hospital and it turns out he broke his collar bone. I was paniced I had done something to cause his fall (being the new rider) but he assures me he was about ten feet off my wheel when it happened.

If you click on the map of the ride, you can import the ride data into Google Earth and see right where the tracks are and the abrupt end to our lunch training ride. Brady is still at home recovering and we all wish him well. I went over to his house yesterday and helped him take care of some very important business... I got him all signed up for the 2006 LOTOJA Classic! He is doing well and knowing Brady, he will be hacking and back on his bike soon.

Get well Brady, we need your hacking skills on iFolder, your legs on our rides, and we miss you here at work!

Fitness and Training

2006-04-28T09:26:00.003-06:00

Map of my run this morning

In the past month I have drastically modified my excercise routine. I had a routine that worked very well for me and I've been able to loose 55 lbs using it. Since then, members of the iFolder team at Novell (Brady, Mike, and Russ) convinced me to go out biking with them. We're talking road biking where you ride in a pace line and draft off one another. I've been going with them for just over three weeks and of course like the sucker that I have become for physical activity, I signed up to ride the 2006 LOTOJA with them in September. For those that chose not to follow that link, LOTOJA is a 206 mile race from Logan, UT to Jackson Hole, WY and it's done in one day. We are not even going to do the relay, we are doing the full 206 miles together.

I should mention that at the same time I've started biking with them, I am also maintaining my running. Another friend of mine, Randy Cook, asked me to go and run the Ogden Half Marathon with him on May 6th. This will be the first race I have ever run in my life. To get ready for all of this activity, I do what I always do, I purchased a new gadget! I've upgraded my Polar F11 heart rate monitor to the Garmin Forerunner 305.

My new training "toy"

I've only used it three times and I like it more each time I use it. The Motion Based website has a web service to upload the data from the 305 and analyze the data. You can see the data from my run this morning by clicking on the map above.

iFolder Server hosts multiple domains

2006-04-25T15:09:00.000-06:00

Lion Camp at San Diego Wild Animal Park

I'm back from vacation (which was awesome) and put some serious thought into the multi-domain support with the iFolder Server. It's checked in and builds are posted (and a full three days earlier than I told Eric it would be done). Basically you can now host more than one iFolder Server (by domain name or IP address) behind a single instance of Apache. It works using Apache's Virtual Host configuration and specifies a different SimiasDataDir for each Virtual Host you configure. You'll need to get the iFolder server build 20060427 or newer.

Eric has also taken the time to write up instructions on how you can configure your own server here.

iFolder Enterprise Server

2006-03-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

Seven days before the date we said it would happen, packages have been posted for the open source iFolder Enterprise Server (I checked and Victor's whiteboard has "7 Days" up on it). It's not ready to roll out in production, but this new server is pretty sweet! Right now we don't have SSL enabled (any creative hack can do that to apache) but we'll be fixing that up soon. I took a little time to add some screen shots of the new Web Access Client and Administration console. And is that... calvin rubs his eyes... do I see file change history on that sharing view? You can check it out for yourself here.

Web Client iFolders view

Web Client file view

Web Client sharing view

Admin Console user view

Admin Console user details

Admin Console ifolder details

OSCON 2006 and iFolder

2006-03-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

"Ready to present"

I just received news that the session we submitted for the OSCON 2006 was accepted! Brady and I will be heading up to Portland, Oregon to present "File Sharing and Backup using iFolder" at the O'Reilly event. By the time we present (July 24-28) the Enterprise Server will have had much attention as an open source project. It should be a fun event and a good way to get the word out about the iFolder project.

Speaking of upcoming events, I signed up to run the Ogden Half Marathon on the 6th of May. This will be the first race I have ever run outside highschool gym. I certainly don't plan on breaking any records, but I do look forward to the race. A good friend of mine Randy Cook and I are running it together. It's funny that Randy is the person I would run my first race with. Many years ago we came up with "Cook's Theorum". It states "FAT + SUGAR = TASTE". We would quote it and laugh every day as we went to our favorite fried food joint to eat lunch. That was then... the last time we went to lunch, both of us ordered the wood grilled salmon with steamed veggies.

Brainshare 2006

2006-03-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

"Brainshare used iFolder to sync the presentations"

When I first arrived at Brainshare this year my first thought was that Novell scaled back the conference. Now that it is over, I think they actually scaled it up a little. The keynotes seemed bigger, there seemed to be more sessions, and they reported more people attending than ever. iFolder certainly had a good Brainshare. What a difference it is to have a product that is shipping. Last year there were a lot of people that were planning on looking into iFolder. This year there were even more people that had iFolder 3 rolled out in production. Novell even used iFolder (see photo above) to sync all of the presentations to the computers in the rooms. The picture shows Victor Billings standing next to the screen which shows the presentations iFolder on the desktop. If a presenter had an update to a presentation, they could just drop it in that iFolder in any presentation room and it would sync around for everyone. The Brainshare folks would take the presentations out of that iFolder and update them for people attending the conference. It was easy and nice to see iFolder used to help the conference!

"Slotcars at the Developer Den"

A lot of Brainshare attendies don't know about the Developer Den, but it's one of my favorite places at BrainShare. They show movies all day and usually have some crazy competition. This year it was slot car racing. Due to my previous posts it should be obvious why I was excited for this. I raced against Jared and Brady... they didn't stand a chance. Brady commented afterwards that it would have been pretty sad had I not been able to beat them. My boasting was not at all hindered by the fact that I also posted the fasted time on the track. Being an employee of course I can't officially win anything. The track, controllers, and cars were all ditigally controlled. My setup is all analog so I was excited to try the digital setup. In the end, I was dissapointed. It was sluggish to respond and made for an "out of control" feel to the race. That being said, it was very cool to race three cars on only two lanes. Maybe the sluggish controls were due to power issues more than the digital setup.

Preparing for Novell BrainShare

2006-03-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

"The Brain Drain"

Today was the first day of BrainShare 2006. I spent a good part of the day in Salt Lake City at the Salt Palace getting things set up for the show. Everything shut down at around 6:30 and they had a "party" called "The Brain Drain" or something like that. It was a typical tradeshow event but the decor was a lot like what you would expect to find in Rome (as Brady pointed out). There were also strangely dressed women walking around. Some were dressed in these white tube things that flared out at the top and bottom and had their heads covered like a sock doing some kind of very strange dances. There were also scantily dressed pirate women walking around handing out spiffs. The entertainment was pretty good, especially when they had this girl suspended by two white curtains doing all kinds of acrobatics with nothing but the curtains (see the photo). The room was very dark except for the bright lights on her and the curtains... the effect was stunning.

iFolder Lounge

2006-03-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

The completed iFolder Lounge

Yesterday my new phone arrived. It's a Windows Mobile based cingular phone (8125). The team was taking bets on how long I would last this time on Windows Mobile. I've been a Palm user since I purchased and started writing software for my Pilot 5000. I've tried several times to switch to a Windows CE based device and have always ended up frustrated resulting in me switching back to a Palm OS device. I called my wife and told her my new phone had arrived. She asked how long it was going to last this time. I told her the team was taking bets on how long it would last and she said she wanted in on that! We'll see. The photo above was taken on the new 8125.

I really like the device right now, but the "new gadget" phase hasn't worn off. I'll try to post more later on what I like and dislike about the device.

White T-Shirts

2006-02-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

I was going through some old boxes of stuff and found a bunch of those white T-Shirts that every tech company gives away at trade shows. I thought I would post some pictures of some of the older Novell shirts I have.

Novell/NetWare Application Launcher/Manager

Novell Balls

Novell Human Factors

UnixWare (from Univel)

UnixWare (from Univel)

This last photo is not of a shirt but it's old and it seems to fit.

Novell DOS

iFolder team has moved... mostly.

2006-02-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

The future iFolder Lounge Area

The iFolder team moved office locations. We are in the same building but instead of being on the third floor in H311 we are now on the seventh floor in H744. The future iFolder Lounge area above used to be a lab full of very loud machines. They are all gone now and it is nice a quiet. We are having the pillars removed and a large table added. This will become our lounge area for "hack fests", lunch, team meetings, darts, basketball, and whatever else we feel like doing in there. Those machines in the corner are the build machines but I'm reducing them down to three machines and they'll be relocated in our lab.

Calvin's new office

Brady's new office

Calvin and Brady's offices at the end of the hall

Brady and I were "assigned" offices at the end of the hall. This is actually around a corner so people walking down the normal hallway don't pass by our offices. The only people coming here are people that want to talk to us... or Jared... or are just lost. That door at the end of the hall is a storage closet where we can store more crap!

I say that the iFolder team has mostly moved because everyone has moved except Jared and our lab. Those moves will happen sometime in the next month I guess. Until then, Jared comes up from the third floor to visit the team every couple of hours.

My Tweaked Slinky

2006-01-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

Calvin's Desk Toys

I have some things I keep on my desk so when people come into my office they have something to play with when they are discussing things. It seems to relax people a little. One of these things is a metal Slinky. The Slinky sits on top of a coaster I got at BrainShare a couple of years go. I don't drink but it was used as a ticket to get into the Novell Open Source Bar. Brady and I went for fun.

The Slinky Pad

The interesting thing about the slinky on my desk is that it's tweaked. There are several coils in the middle that got damaged years ago and no longer stay together except when sitting vertically.

Tweaked Slinky Coils

Most people that come into my office pick up the slinky and play with it. Almost every engineer that comes in notices right away that the coils are tweaked and is instantly conviced that they can fix it. The worst offender is my boss Jared. I have been in 30 minute conversations with him where the entire conversation, he is bending and twisting the slinky convinced that he can make it right. It can't be done...I know from experience!

"The Man Diet"

2006-01-18T16:49:00.001-07:00

(I lost a lot of photos from my blog but this is close to what I had here although several months later) The daily workout

A lot of people have been asking me what I have been doing to lose so much weight. I thought I would post it here since I can’t think of a better way to explain it.

About six months ago I decided I was going to loose the overweight programmer look and attempt to get back in shape. I started working out by running on a treadmill each day for about an hour. After two months of consistent working out I had nothing to show for it. I had lost no weight, I was not any smaller, and I was getting sick and tired of working out.

At a family gathering, my brother-in-law gave me what I now call “The Man Diet”. I call it that because Men do not want to read long books about what you can and can’t eat. Men don’t want complicated diet programs that require you to measure points. Men want a very simple set of rules to follow and he gave me only three.

1. Don’t eat anything that starts with the letter “C” (except Fruit, Veggies, and Meat)
2. Don’t eat anything white (except Fruit, Veggies, and Meat)
3. Only drink water

Don’t ask a lot of questions, just follow the simple rules.

At the same time I got this advice, Brady Anderson (from the iFolder team) mentioned that he measured his heart rate using a monitor like those made by Polar. I purchased a Polar F11.

On November 8th, 2005 I started on my new “Man Diet” and my Polar exercise program. I work out six times a week and my exercises vary in length and difficulty each day. I’m not going to attempt to explain heart rate zones here, visit Polar or some other fitness site on the web and read up on it. Basically I have four 45 minute workouts in the 60-80% zone, one 35 minute workout in the 80-90% zone, and one hour and 10 minute workout in the 60-70% zone. My exercises consist of riding a stationary bike (in photo), running on a treadmill, running outside, swimming laps, and using an elliptical machine. Each session consists of only one of those activities and I do it solid for the duration of the exercise. The Polar monitor lets me know if I am going too hard or not hard enough. The surprising thing about starting to monitor my heart is I was actually working too hard previously. I had to slow down and get my heart rate into the correct zones.

I have been following “The Man Diet” and working out as I described since November 8th and as of January 8th 2006, I have lost 35 lbs. The new pants I purchases last week are three sizes smaller than when I started.

I hope that story helps anyone else that is attempting to do the same. I was as shocked as anyone when the lbs started coming off. I feel better and younger than I have in many years.

iFolder Usability Testing

2006-01-12T16:44:00.001-07:00

Calvin being "tested"

Anna Marie Dirks has set up a usability test lab that is amazing. We had five people come through yesterday and test the new Linux UI. Boyd is making changes between sessions and we are having new people come through today to run through the tests with the updated UI.

If you haven’t visited it, you should visit betterdesktop.org and check out some of the usability videos for iFolder, Linux, Open Office, and other open source projects.

iFolder translation work

2005-12-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

Eric's OneNet Vision

Jorge Mauricio is doing some awesome work on translating our Wiki! If you speak spanish, go check out our HowTos. Thanks Jorge!

Simias and log4net

2005-12-13T20:02:00.000-07:00

Down the iFolder hallway at Novell

I have managed to remove the need for the pre-built assembly of log4net in the Simias project. Anyone that wants to build Simias from SVN trunk (and soon the iFolder_3_4 branch) will need to install the log4net rpm which I have packaged up. It's available on the downloads page. You can also get the src.rpm from here if you want to rebuild it for you distro.

Packages for log4net

2005-11-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

Jared attempting to bluetooth another picture before he pukes. He was sick most of this trip.

I have posted packages for log4net. These were built on SUSE 10 but should work on other distros. I will be making changes to Simias to depend on the log4net package instead of including the pre-built assembly in our source tree. The rpm and src rpm can be download here:

log4net-1.2.9-1.i586.rpm
log4net-1.2.9-1.i586.src.rpm

A more competitive track

2005-11-20T20:59:00.001-07:00

November 2005, The re-designed track.

We got tired of the simple track we had designed and built so we re-designed and built this new layout. Now all four lanes have an advantage in certain spots of the track. The stretch of curves is particularly fun to race through against other cars. One car is always knocked off the track.

Holidays mean racing cars

2005-11-20T11:05:00.002-07:00

The holidays are upon us once again and in the Gaisford household that means racing. When I was a kid, my Father purchased a Marklin Sprint race set. It was a 1/32 scale slot car set that was made in Germany by the well known model train company Marklin. Since then, Marklin has discontinued the product but I have managed to purchase enough (on eBay) to build a small track for my own family. Here are shots of recent tracks:

Dec. 2002 4 lane track

Dec. 2003 "the family" track. This is the track my Father still keeps for when the extended family gets together to race.

January 2004, a simple track my boys can race and stay on the track

March 2005, another simple track that included the small play table

November 2005, our current track. The boys prefer the simple tracks because they can race better on them. Last night my oldest boy beat me for the first time. He was quite happy as you can imagine.

These are the "old school" cars. They are all Marklin Sprint cars and have not been made for over 20 years. They are slower than the new cars but still a lot of fun to race because they have no magnets and make a lot of noise.

There are several companies that make cars today (as well as track). I prefer Ninco cars, they seem to be built the best and most of their models look good.

New Images Location

2005-11-17T15:24:00.000-07:00

I've moved the location where I place images to my .mac account. They should show on planet.ifolder.com now.

My Boss

2005-11-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

This is Jared my boss. He likes to take pictures of me and send them to random bluetooth devices he discovers with his Treo 650. Here you can see he is deeply engaged in a discussion.

Planet Parameters updated

2005-11-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

In order to add a bit more color to the place, I changed the parameters of the Planet so it will pick up all blog entries, not just the entries with the keyword "iFolder" in them.

Two notes of interest

2005-09-16T09:20:00.000-06:00

I finished up the iFolder project roadmap. It still needs work and constant updating, but at least we have one now!

Novell has a new homepage. If you look under Developers, you'll see that the iFolder Project made the front page. Very Cool!

iFolder 3 Featured in Novell Connection Magazine

2005-09-15T11:14:00.000-06:00

Novell's Connection Magazine has an article about migrating to Linux. In the article they have the following sections

Deploying Linux OES as a Standalone iFolder 3.1 Server
Preparing to Install iFolder 3.1 on Open Enterprise Server for Linux
Installing iFolder 3.1 on Open Enterprise Server for Linux
After Installing iFolder 3.1 on Open Enterprise Server for Linux

I particularly like the names of the iFolders they used!

iFolder Wiki in Spanish

2005-09-15T09:03:00.000-06:00

Jorge Mauricio has begun his work of translating the iFolder Wiki to Spanish...Awesome! Jorge suggested we build a separate Wiki for the Spanish version but I'm not sure we can't have it all in the same Wiki yet. I'll probably be proved wrong once we have a lot of content. Check out the first document in Spanish here.

iFolder Wiki transition is complete

2005-09-14T14:30:00.000-06:00

Our transition to the Wiki based iFolder site is complete. All of the documents we had posted on Novell's forge site have been moved and converted to Wiki documents. I'm hoping the transition and ability to easily add content will motivate people to contribute. Our site still lacks many documents, some of which I know are in the process of being added.

Thanks to everyone who helped!

iFolder 3.1 clients released

2005-09-09T17:02:00.000-06:00

It's 5:00 on a Friday afternoon and we finally got the iFolder 3.1 clients posted to the new site. You can get to them by hitting the iFolder Download page. I'm spent and I'm going home to enjoy the weekend!