has been spawned. here are pics. Of my son, Christian Peter Byrne. :)

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Last night I went to the Sharks game with Kelly and Caitlin, and during the 2nd period Caitie started to get really tired, and whiny, and talking to Kelly, we decided to leave. What? Leave before the 3rd period starts? Yes. Would I have liked to stay? Of course. I didn’t buy tickets to only watch 2/3 of the game. But Caitlin was tired, she had to get up early, didn’t have a long nap, and it wasn’t fair to her. So I made the ‘responsible’ choice, to take her home before she melted down. Then, as I arrived home and carried her sleeping into her bedroom and laid her down, I realized that I felt really good about it. I felt good for making the right decision. I did the responsible thing, and didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. Weird eh?

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I’m a programmer, a code monkey, and most of my day is spent scrambling up and down the code tree. Today though I had a really good day. I found a bug yesterday before I left and didn’t think much of it, even though it was crashing the application that I was using *and* the IDE. I transistioned to using my Mac laptop for development last week because my wife is due any day now, and I need to be able to do real development from my house for the next month or so. Anyways, I upgraded to the newest version of the IDE that we use in house, it’s called IntelliJ and it’s quite good, as far as IDE’s go, and to the latest JDK from Apple. Then I tried to perform some basic functions with our application and.. Boom. it crashed. Then I tried to trace it a bit, and the debugger not only couldn’t catch the exception, but my whole IDE application crashed. So I went back and tried to attack it from a different way. Slowly I worked around it until I could find where the problem was. It appeared to be coming from inside some of the java files provided by Apple. This makes it very difficult because while Sun provides the source for it’s java files, Apple does not. So I had to take the files one at a time, move them over to my old windows machine, de-compile them, reverse engineer their code to find out what it was doing. One file, track it. Make a change. Run. Crash. Decompile another file. Look for problems. 5 hours of this. Finally I found the problem, cleverly concealed. Then I reproduced it, made a little test program that illustrated it and sent it off to a friend at apple. Hopefully they’ll fix it. but I feel.. invincible.

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I’m trying something new.. ten words to inspire? It’s called Unconcious Mutterings.

=> Read more!

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This weekend I was driving in SF, I had gone up to get some books from a guy off of craigslist and I was turning onto Oak St to head back to the freeway home. I’m waiting at the red light to turn left, and there was a car that was going down oak st that had tried to turn into a gas station, and hit a bicyclist. I didn’t see the accident, but it looked just like that, an accident. There was a young couple in the car, a beat up Toyota, and the lady on the bike was dressed in expensive clothing, riding a custom bike. Two things happened then, and both of them stuck out at me. The first one was that another car, heading down Oak street had the gall to lay on the horn because the Toyota was blocking the traffic lane. Understand the situation, the bike is still wedged under the front bumper, and the bicyclist is still lying on the ground, and this asshole has the nerve to be upset that someone is holding up traffic. I was appalled. The couple climbs out of their car, slowly, since they can’t see if the door will hit the bicycle or not, and the driver, a man in his late 20’s rushes over to help the woman off the ground, and immediately gives her a hug. An immediate display of love and concern for a person. That struck me and stuck in my mind very very clearly. The man’s companion was standing right next to them, talking and making sure the cyclist had no major injuries. I read Metagrrrl frequently and she often talks about how much she enjoys living in the Castro. Her writings about people she encounters in her daily routines often convey the same feeling to me that this encounter did. That people are not all jerks. That there are some people in the world who still understand that love is an acceptable way to deal with people on a regular basis. There’s a platform I’d like to see on a presidential ballot – to treat others with mercy, love, and kindness.

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