Counting down…

Not much blogging recently, in part because things have been very busy. With some help from Chris last week, I’ve been doing several household projects, ranging from replacing kitchen cabinet hardware, to installing new blinds in all of the basement and second floor windows, to upgrading bathroom fittings. I’ve also been sorting out what I’m taking to Seattle, what I’m leaving here, and what should be chucked out. (The third category is usually the largest.) Rather than using a moving company, I’m just packing up in boxes from the local UPS store.
We’ve also arranged numerous meetings with our financial advisor, accountant, and people from the bank, as we sort out the implications of my becoming a Washington resident. For those of you outside the US, every state is fiercely independent when it comes to taxation. Most (including Massachusetts) have a state income tax, but Washington is one of those that doesn’t. With me in Washington and Merry in Massachusetts, our tax returns are going to be complicated. (The challenge is to make sure that they don’t become “interesting”!)
So the countdown looks like this:

  • Thursday: Pick up Tommy for another overnight visit. (Kate and Mark are going to see the Red Sox.) Continue packing.
  • Friday: Finish packing. Take Tommy home, then meet friends for farewell drinks. [5pm, “Naked Fish” in Bedford]
  • Saturday: A Fellowship day. Haul the boxes over to the UPS store and ship them for delivery in Seattle next Thursday. Lunch, then a movie. (Film not yet chosen – “Scanner Darkly” or “Prairie Home Companion”, perhaps.)
  • Sunday: Cleaning up after the packing. Dinner with friends.
  • Monday: Meet with accountant. Last-minute stuff.
  • Tuesday: Fly to Seattle.
  • Monday 14th: Start at Amazon!

Whew!

Three more photo albums

These are mostly for friends and family.

  • Chris has been visiting from California for the last few days. Here are a few characteristic shots….
  • Tommy stayed overnight last Friday while his father celebrated his 30th birthday. We took a few pictures of him playing, reading, bathing, etcetera. (Tommy, that is – not Mark…!)
  • On Monday, Chris, Merry and I visited the Saugus Iron Works, a National Park in which one of the first wrought iron plants in North America has been painstakingly recreated. All those waterwheels, and the machinery that they drive, are in working condition. Here are some still photos; I also captured some video clips which I may upload later.

Enjoy!

Upgraded to WP2.0.4

I’ve just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.0.4. If you notice any oddities, please let me know via a comment to this entry.
(I’ve also heard of people who are having trouble with the new three-column layout: their browser displays the left column, then the middle, and finally the right, straight down the left side of the screen. If you encounter this, please tell me your browser version and screen layout.)

Derek's memorial service

The memorial service for Derek Maxwell (“DIM” to his friends) will take place this Thursday at 8 pm. Derek MaxwellIt will be at the Dumont-Sullivan Funeral Home, 50 Ferry Street, Hudson, NH. (There’ll be a closed-casket “viewing” from 5-8 pm.)
I know that a number of DIM’s friends and colleagues read this blog. If any of you have stories, anecdotes, memories or tributes that you’d like to contribute, please add them as comments to this posting, or email me. I’ll pull them all together and share them with Derek’s family. I know they’d appreciate it.
UPDATE: If you’re inside the Sun firewall, you can find more material here.

The day after I arrive in Seattle…..

It’s destiny. Or a delightful coincidence:

Seattle soccer fans who missed the chance to see perhaps the world’s most famous athlete, David Beckham, in the summer of 2003 have a second chance.
Beckham and his teammates from Real Madrid, one of the globe’s most popular soccer teams, are headed to Seattle for a friendly against Major League Soccer’s D.C. United and its 17-year-old phenom, Freddy Adu.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow…
UPDATE: Section CLB238, seat J 18. See you there! 🙂

Evolving locomotion

This is another “What I love about the web” moment.
I was reading Pharyngula (as I do so often), and his piece “Evolutionists get all the fun” led me to Mark’s ruthless debunking of yet another piece of creationist rubbish by Granville Sewell, who seems to be holding up the left-hand end of the bell curve of IQ in math professors. But that’s not what this all about. At the top of PZ’s post was a picture:
breve image
And I recognized this picture: it looked as if it came from a video clip that Dan Dennett had shown to us in class last spring. Clicking through the link in Mark’s piece took me to the breve home page:

What is breve?
breve is a free, open-source software package which makes it easy to build 3D simulations of decentralized systems and artificial life. Users define the behaviors of agents in a 3D world and observe how they interact. breve includes physical simulation and collision detection so you can simulate realistic creatures, and an OpenGL display engine so you can visualize your simulated worlds.
breve is available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows in the download section.

Wonderful – but life is hectic right now, I don’t have time to play with this. Not to worry: if you’re running on a Mac, there’s a breveCreatures screensaver which repeatedly runs 20 trials and evolves the most successful “creatures”. In this case the fitness function is “distance travelled from origin”. So now I can go about my day, checking in occasionally to see how evolution is going.
I have to say, though, that PZ falls into a classic trap in his posting. He writes:

One thing I noted right away in the simplest demo (“Walker.tz”) is that there’s no symmetry imposed on the systems, so the poor creatures are afflicted with four limbs that may each have completely different properties, making them particularly thrashworthy. There really ought to be something in the code to require the two upper forelimbs, for instance, to have identical controls, with some kind of central regulatory circuitry that could impose phase differences. Are there no structuralists and developmental biologists among the coders at breve?

No, no, no, PZ! Symmetry is a consequence of evolution, not a constraint. Suppose the most efficient walker turns out to be asymmetrical?! I’m reminded of Dawkins’ “The Extended Phenotype”, where in Chapter One he quotes Fisher: “No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes; yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two?”
Anyway, all Mac users are encouraged to grab breve and indulge in a little desktop evolution.

"Freedom is on the march"

You can’t make stuff like this up:

AFGHANISTAN’S notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was set up by the Taliban to enforce bans on women doing anything from working to wearing nail varnish or laughing out loud, is to be re-created by the government in Kabul.
The decision has provoked an outcry among women and human rights activists who fear a return to the days when religious police patrolled the streets, beating or arresting any woman who was not properly covered by a burqa or accompanied by a male relative.

Spreading freedom and democracy, eh?
[Hat tip to the General.]

Blog style

Those of you reading this blog over the last 24 hours must have been thoroughly confused. I’ve been playing with different themes (about a dozen of them, in fact). I’ve decided that I’m going to stick with the current one (code-named “treacle”) for a couple of days, adding back in some of the elements from the theme I’ve been using for the last few months. Please let me know if you encounter any issues.

Derek Maxwell, RIP [updated]

I just learned that a former colleague of mine, Derek Maxwell, died yesterday. He and I worked together from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s: he was the go-to guy in product marketing for our PC networking products such as PC-NFS. Soon after he arrived, the so-called “planets” re-org saw our entire group restructured and renamed as an independent business unit, SunSelect. The potential for chaos and duplication was high, and much credit goes to Derek for sustaining the relationships with the product teams in the other Sun business units. Eventually our group was folded into SunSoft, and for a while Derek worked for me when I was acting director of PCN.
Derek and I had a number of interests in common, including motor racing, and we often found ourselves comparing notes on the strange gestalt of being an expat Brit in America. Unfortunately we drifted apart after I joined SunLabs, and Derek moved into various marketing roles in the OS and storage organizations, although we often exchanged non-work email.
Speaking of email, Derek’s always ended with the signature:

“Tha fhagail fhein aig gach neach !” – “Everyone has their own particular destiny”

Sadly, his own came too soon, in the form of a massive heart attack at the age of 49. Farewell, Derek. We’ll miss you.
Here’s the internal announcement from Sun (and yes, it’s OK to redistribute it):

It is with great sadness that we pass on the news that our friend and colleague, Derek Maxwell, passed away last night from a massive coronary.
A 17-year Sun veteran, Derek was well-known not only to the Storage Group, but throughout Sun. In his earlier years he worked in a variety of Sun organizations and projects including Sun-MC (Management Console), a program for managing and diagnosing problems on SPARC-based Solaris systems. He’s been part of Sun Storage since its inception, dedicating his expertise and passion to Storage Management over the last few years and most recently working as a Product Definitions Manager for SAM-FS/QFS.
Long-time friends and colleagues of Derek describe him as a man with a true generous spirit, who reached out to others and always had an easy smile for all who crossed his path. He maintained a tremendous passion for his work and was often known by his work team as the Sun “go-to” guy, because of his breadth of knowledge and Sun expertise.
Derek leaves behind his wife, Sandra, a son and a daughter. Our thoughts and prayers are with them as they work through this difficult loss.
[…]
Due to the many years that Derek spent at Sun, it is impossible to reach out to all those who knew and worked with Derek. Therefore, we appreciate if you can forward this message as appropriate to those who have not received the news.
Thank you for your support.
Nigel Dessau and Nancy Hurley