Kool Aid Served Daily

This year Little League is asking local leagues to consider implementing pitch counts. You can find out more about the pilot program here. We had our BOD meeting tonight and voted to implement it for 12 and under. This means majors, minors, Big 10, Big 9, and Major 10.

Our plan is to get some idea of how we are going to administratively manage this new nightmare. I.e., who does the counting? The scorekeeper?

We also feel that sooner or later, this will become a reality.

I guess our main goal in adopting it for just the 12 and under is that we start teaching the coaches about pitch count.

The new logo for Connecthathon 2006 is available:

If you head over to SolarisInternals you would see that Jim and Richard are working on a second edition of their book. I almost bought the 1st edition off of Amazon, until I saw the 2nd was coming out.

Even better, Richard asked internally at Sun if people could serve as reviewers. So, I've been reading it in my free time.

Right now I'm working my way through the DTrace examples in Chapter 2. The nice thing is that I'm actually kinda getting paid to do it. I.e., my manager would love for me to know DTrace, mdb, etc, to be able to work on our bug backlog.

I haven't paid this much attention to detail on someone else's work since I was a reviewer for Morrison's Understanding Quantum Physics: A User's Manual. I actually sweated through 2 semesters of Quantum Mechanics first.

Anyway, the DTrace chapter is a breeze to go through - I like how they plan to walk you through observability tools before diving straight into the kernel. I must be too academic today, I keep on thinking of exercises they could add to help the reader really get a feel for DTrace's power.

LinkedIn.com is a site where you can track colleagues and also find business opportunites. The premise is that you enter some resume like entries and start finding people who worked at the same companies. You send out invitations for them to join your network. As your network expands, you are able to find contacts at other companies.

For example, my friend Peter has a friend at RedHat. I need to contact someone there, so I can ask Peter to introduce me to his friend. Or perhaps I see that his friend is Paul, whom I know and I happen to already know their email address (LinkedIn hides contact info from you). I can directly ask them to join my network.

In grad school during the 1990s, LinkedIn.com would have been the basis for a degree. It might have even made you rich. As an AI application, i.e., finding relationships between colleagues and other data mining, it is quite an interesting area of study.

A colleague of mine, when I asked him to join, commented on that this was very much mult-level marketing.

I suspect most people would use this for finding a job or business leads. I actually use it as an offsite backup of my contacts. I was able to use it to find someone I had lost contact with years ago.

NetApp stock jumped a couple of dollars today and I sold off my remaining stock options. I went 5 years at NetApp with the stock underwater. But they were still Golden Handcuffs. I didn't make the millions I was slated to before Dot Bomb, but I finally got some reward for all of the hard work I poured into that company.

Sun has a policy, which I'm sure most companies also do, that you can't have a major investment in another company. Especially one which can be viewed as a competitor. They do have an escape clause for prior options, but I am glad to be rid of any appearance of conflict. It won't change how I view either company. Neither will it change how I interact with NetApp or their employees.

Now I just have to learn to watch Sun's stock and make sure I contribute to making it rise.

The 2006 Connectathon presentations have been listed at talks.

Note that there may be some minor shuffling to accomodate schedules, but the content appears set in stone.

Update:Note that unlike previous years, the talks are not free. I'm going to work on making sure they are free again next year.

So one of the things I've been doing since I started blogging is seeing if I'm popular on Google. I'm now the second entry for Tom Haynes in the web search. I don't think I was even on the page a month ago. I'm still on the first page for the pictures. I don't fare too well for Thomas Haynes in any category.

If I throw in some additional keywords, I'm sure I'll rise higher.

Amazingly, the match for Tom Haynes goes to my really old page at loghyr.com.

What I really found that was interesting was a link to Interaction-Design.org. The page was created '28 Apr 2000'. And this is the first I've seen of it. My bet is that someone found some bibtex entries of mine from back in the research days and created a page. Ahh, I published some case-based learning in predator-prey games back in 1998 in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.

So I added a picture and a link back here. What I really find interesting, and which I'm going to steal for here, is a little search table:

By the way, I would be remiss to not cite the copyright notice put up there by Interaction-Design.org at copyright.