I know where this week is going:

• Monday Night: Meeting with Yutaka.
• Tuesday Night: Dinner with W at Outback Steakhouse up in San Mateo.
• Wednesday Night: Macintalkers weekly meeting at Apple, with Officer dinner at BJs afterwards.
• Thursday: Dinner with InfoGain.
• Friday: Someone will think of Something.

The big question I have is: where did last week go? Sunday after SuperHappyAmyHouse I think I built up a head of steam. I guess the call and offer of an interesting project from Yutaka early in the week distracted me from 11-05 Challenge.

I should be able to knock that Applet work out within 2 weeks and return to the 11-05 Challenge.

There is no "should:" there is only "crush."

I hope Joel reads this and it lulls him into a false sense of supremely confident security.

In other news:

• I enjoyed the "Borrow Some Arrows" story told in the John Woo movie "Red Cliff" recommended to me by Sam.
• The Jeep hit 100k miles… Guess its time for an oil change.
• Saturday morning I did a 2 hour bike ride before 9AM and it didn't totally ruin my day. I wonder if that's possible to do during the work week?
• ScrumMastering at LiveOps is verging on becoming MicroManaging. Must avoid this pitfall. Awareness is key.
• The red t-shirt from W went over big. More comments than "Vote for Pedro." Seriously!

Before I close, allow me to restate my goals to shame myself into completing them:

• New User/Club creation.
• User/Club listing.

Okay, see you next week. I'll come bearing gifts and swallowed frogs.

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Status update for this week:

Got Five Dysfunctions of a Team finished. Most interesting dysfunction (at least as it applies to current environment): lack of accountability. We need more ownership!

The other books mentioned in my last update have been successfully returned to the library. I guess that's one definition of "finished" as far as the Finish What You Start book goes. Anyway, its off my coffee table and I can move on.

The tomato plants are going well: there are about 10 baby tomatoes and a lot of flowers. Rejiggered the non-topsy-turvey tomato plant with a overflow reservoir so the downstairs neighbors won't be notified Chinese Water Torture Style when I overwater it. Other than that, no more than 2 minutes a day of attention.

TV has not been consistently disconnected, but for the most part it only goes on at the end of the day and then it gets disconnected pretty quickly.

I wasn't making good progress on the Competition and on Saturday I went to meet my nemesis on his home turf. There we exchanged status updates and, between:

• A trip to the Concord Fry's;
• Managing the creation of some awesome homemade icecream;
• Consuming Pizza;
• A visit to a nice used book store (picked up AD&D Players Handbook, Dungeon Master Guide, and Monster Manual);
• An awesome dungeon crawl where we killed a viper, turned 7 skeletons, and let "Zero" the Wizard off with a warning.

I managed to steal all of Joel's runtime environment, his code, and he gave me a good understanding of the PHP ORM solution he's using: Doctrine. I feel like such a Slugworth to his Wonka... But all is fair in War!

Following the Super Happy Amy House, I spent Sunday morning getting the 'hello world' website a few steps farther. I cloned a few files, made a few modifications, and got my own Doctrine setup by walking in Joel's footsteps. By the end of the day I had:

• Got my own database going with just one table (user).
• Got PHP and Smarty and Context and a basic MVC framework going.
• Turned on mod_rewrite in Apache2 to get my restful URLs going through a common dispatcher.
• Sketched out the basic requirements for a 'functional site' that I think my customers will find useful enough to, if not pay for, at least try out.

Coded until 5PM and then went on a bike ride -- where, oddly enough, I encountered a tiny snake. Just missed running him over by accident... Was going to go back and check him out but didn't want to get Crocodile Hunter'ed. Might've been a viper!

Challenge goals for next week:

• Above all: maintain momentum.
• New user account creation.
• New club creation.
• User list.
• Club list.
• Clarify milestone 1 release criteria.

Thanks to Joel for making it a little easier to crush him in about 4 and 1/2 months! You're going to have to roll more than a few natural 20's if you're going to win this Challenge!

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Around a month ago a challenge was extended to Joel. We'd both work on independent projects for 6 months and, at the end of the challenge, the project with the most revenue "wins."

A month has passed and I've done a good job of cleaning up the apartment, trying to stay on the ball at work, planting tomato plants, upgrading the Operating Systems on old computers, jailbreaking smartphones, and reorganizing the refrigerator: basically anything other than tackling this project.

It's the old "swallow the frog first" problem. If there's barely enough time to do all the little things: how can you tackle the big things? (Answer: start with the big things).

Bay Area Consultant Joel seems to have trucked along fine over the last month and posted a blog update yesterday where he describes his successes and forward momentum.

That's great. However, I must crush him.

So, I'm going to take this week to get things moving in the right direction. Hopefully next week I won't have to use an analogy involving bowels to describe how things moved.

This week my tasks are:

• Finish reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I'm on page 175 or so of 225... Better have that done tonight.
• Finish reading Finish What You Start. I must finish that book: it has sat on my coffee table (unfinished) for the past 2 months. What a black fly in my Chardonnay, don'tcha think?
• If 'Finish What You Start' is interesting enough, create an outline for next Toastmaster's speech.
• Return both these books to San Mateo library on Saturday, along with that Effective Meeting book I never read.
• Keep the TV disconnected.
• Get the BBQ off our old neighbor's porch in San Mateo.
• Do not pay attention to the tomato plants except for two minutes of watering twice per day. The plants are doing fine: giving them any more attention is just a self-indulgent waste of time.

If, err, When I get those tasks done, will my plate be clear to start the project that will run Joel's ClikClock revenue figures into the ground? Hope so. Time's ticking.

So here I go... Into the future. If all goes well, I'll have a gameplan for success posted by Sunday.

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So I upgraded to Leopard last night (only 2 days until Snow Leopard comes out, figured I better get with the times).

This morning I had a problem accessing files across a Samba share.

At work, I mount my work environment over Samba using something along the lines of:

mount_smbfs -N //mccreavy:PASSWORD@servername.liveops.com/mccreavy ~/servername

And then get to my workfiles using Carbon Emacs through the "~/servername" link.

After upgrading to Leopard, it broke. It seemed like the samba mount was working (I could navigate fine in the Console app through the ~/servername mount), but in emacs, I wasn't able to get to my files.

Turned out the problem was something to do with symlinks. In my environment:

~/servername/src

is a symlink on the server. My client-side Emacs wasn't seeing it as something I could navigate through. Tab completion from ~/servername/s wasn't expanding to "src" -- weird.

After some investigation, I found this discussion and added:

unix extensions = no

to the /etc/smb.conf on my server and restarted Samba (sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb restart) and then remounted the samba share on my client.

Now I can navigate through samba mounted symbolic links using Carbon Emacs!

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So there were a lot of weaponry in India... The coolest showcase being the "Arms" room in the City Palace in Jaipur... Tons of old guns, knives, and gun-enabled knives. Unfortunately, that place didn't allow pictures (and who knows what the guards were packing...).

At the big sites (like India Gate, the Red Forts, and Parliament) there were soldiers with automatic weapons.

Even Infogain had armed guards stationed at the company's main gate.

My favorite gun sighting was during a morning commute where I caught some guy on the back of a motorcycle armed with a shotgun:

I guess that's one way of assuring yourself right-of-way!

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I dropped my Canon Powershot SD750 in India on a marble floor and thought I broke a bulb in it... But I was able to fix it when I got access to proper tools (really tiny screwdriver, a magnifying glass, and a soldering iron) at home.

The switch must've taken the brunt of the fall because a little (and when I say little I mean incomprehensibly tiny) contact came loose. Pushing the contact closed caused the screen to light up... So a little solder put it all back together again:

So now I have two cameras (and thus the technology to get all Hofstadter and take a (blurry) picture of my camera)!

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