It’s been a while since I’ve posted my last entry. To get myself back in the groove of things, I thought that it might be nice to post something lighthearted and entertaining that your average tech weenie would enjoy. Now I don’t know if you follow the gurus of the technology world but my research has turned up a set of long lost brothers amongst the talking (or blogging) heads. Check out the two pictures below. The one on the left is Bruce Schneier, cryptography and computer security wunderkind and designer of several cryptographic algorithms, including Blowfish and Twofish. The one on the right is Martin Fowler, refactoring, pattern, and agile god.

I couldn’t believe it myself when I first saw this but a side-by-side of these two gentlemen makes things perfectly clear. There’s got to be some common lineage here. It’s crazy to think about what our world might have been blessed with were these two great minds not separated at birth. Agile cryptography? Algorithmic refactoring?

With two little girls running around the house, I have plenty of material to fuel my zeal to experiment with online audio and video. I uploaded a cut of Anna using her own utensils for the first time.

Aside from the family and sentimental value, I learned a couple of things for a first timer:

• Use firewire and not USB for video transfer. This makes all the difference in the world.
• Don’t use the WMV format. I uploaded WMV instead of AVI at the recommended screen size and after the conversion to Flash, there’s quite a bit of residual fuzz.
• YouTube is slow in the evening (8:00 – 11:00 EDT). Video playback drags quite a bit. This will impact willingness to leverage YouTube video content externally.
• There doesn’t appear to be the ability to download YouTube video. I believe this option is provided on Google Video. Once again, this impacts ability to integrate into other applications.

All-in-all, YouTube makes uploading and sharing video an easy process. I can’t say that I understand their revenue model but someone is paying the one million dollar network costs they ring up monthly with their content distribution network and, at least for now, it’s not me.

We had quite a harrowing experience this weekend with what was previously to us an unknown ailment – nursemaid’s elbow. This partial dislocation of the elbow is caused by lifting the child (Anna, in this case) by her arms. Anna screamed like we’ve never heard her scream before and was inconsolable. This resulted in our first child-related ER visit, putting an early damper on what promised to be a very busy christening weekend (Mia’s, in this case).

The ER staff made a precise diagnosis and immediately performed a “reduction”. Anna gained back control of her arm and was using it at 50% strength by the time she went down for bed 2 hours later. When she woke up the next morning very stiff and with similar symptoms, I became worried about a misdiagnosis, incomplete reduction, or other oversight. I did a bit of research and reaffirmed (in my mind) the diagnosis. I’m happy to report that, 2 days later, Anna has regained 90% of mobility and strength in the affected hand. This seems to contradict the reports of a full 100% recovery within 24 hours that I found in my research. However, Suzanne and I are elated to have our Anna back and functioning near peak. A couple more days Children’s Tylenol and pampering and she should be completely back to normal.