Tag Archives: me

day 3277: (finally!) building and enjoying the deck on The World’s Most Awesome Treehouse(s)!

June 23, 2013 snowdeal 2 Comments

after a 7 week delay, since i was able to pick up the black locust decking ( undeterred by horrid weather ) for The World’s Most Awesome Treehouse(s), it was time to get building again!

and nobody is always more willing to help than odin. he helped carry and hoist all thirty two of the fourteen foot very heavy boards from the garage to the ladder without a single complaint.

of course, the promise of finally getting to stand on the deck is a great motivator 🙂

two hours later after carrying board after board and waiting for me to straighten them on the deck, odin finally got to stand on the deck! a mere two years after hatching the original very crazy plan. then, i just had an idea with absolutely no idea how would build a deck around two trees 12 feet up in the air. it’s a really awesome feeling to finally get to stand up there with odin and feel the trees gently swaying and listen to the birds chirping.

it took awhile to figure it all out, but having fun building it with odin is the real goal so it really doesn’t matter how long it takes us.

while futzing with the spacing between the planks i decided to lay under the deck to get a look at how it looked and it occurred to me that i’m really, really, really glad i decided to hang the supports on solid lengths of 3/4″ threaded rod that go all the way through the tree. there’s a lot of wood up there and the black locust is astonishingly heavy. there might be over 3,000 pounds of materials up there that i want to stay up there. the good news is that it seems very solid and yet it’s still designed to move with the trees.

of course, after all that hard work we have to drag up some camp chairs and talk about how awesome it’s going to be to pitch a tent on the deck after the posts and guard rails go up. we’ll get some camping in while we design the treehouse that’s going to get built on top of the deck!

how do you make being with your son up in the trees any more awesome? run an electrical cord up there and start using POWER TOOLS!

this just keeps getting better and better. stay tuned…

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The Greatest Father’s Day Gift.

June 16, 2013 snowdeal Leave a comment

odin handed me the father’s day gift he made with a big smile after breakfast.

hmmmm. a jar simply labelled “dad 2013” with twenty or so slips of paper inside. what could it be?

each slip of paper had a statement of something he loves about me.

“i love that you make me laugh.”

“i love that we go on long bike rides.”

“i love that you read to me.”

“i love that we make stuff together.”

“i love that your [sic] building me a treehouse.”

and on and on. i started to get a little teary reading them all. such a fabulously thoughtful and wonderful gift from a fabulously thoughtful and wonderful boy.

i will cherish it always.

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remembering infosleuth and the battle between good and evil agents in The Cloud.

June 8, 2013 snowdeal Leave a comment

with all the talk about the PRISM surveillance program, i recalled that somewhere i probably still had an interesting t-shirt buried in a box from my days around 1998-2000 when i worked for a large technology company that happened to be a member of something known as the microelectronics and computer technology corporation (mcc) which was as wikipedia correctly states, “the first, and – at one time – one of the largest, computer industry research and development consortia in the United States.”

mcc developed a variety of “precompetitive” intellectual property and technologies for consortium members who would then take them “in house” for commercialization. one of the technologies developed by mcc was known as the infosleuth agent system which was meant to “provides a unifying framework for selectively and dynamically leveraging and combining fuctionality provided by disparate classes of systems”.

three guesses who would be interested in that. the first two don’t count.

sure enough one project members was working on a large-scale distributed traffic monitoring system that “was couched as a massive distributed subscription & notification problem”.

i was always amusingly fascinated by the similarity between the infosleuth agent icon and the logo for the seminal german industrial band einstürzende neubauten.

i was in austin in 2000 when mcc disbanded and the various consortium members heard final project updates. the infosleuth folks made these delightfully creepy t-shirts that gave away the champions of much of the precompetitive infosleuth work.

“there is always a battle between good and evil agents.”

remarkablly prescient, choosing distributed network agents -in a cloud!

that was a long time ago, and i’m sure there been lots of work done since then ( e.g. see this ) but the infosleuth page is still up on a site for a wholly owned subsidiary for telcordia ( formerly bell communications research ) which has changed hands a few times over the years but was a mcc member and certainly is no stranger to developing information systems for very special government sponsors. it makes me wonder if there’s some small piece of infosleuth living on in PRISM.

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Scenes from The Best Birthday. or how to have a great time in madison wisconsin.

May 25, 2013 snowdeal Leave a comment

after the race it was time to head off for a fun birthday day in madison, wisconsin. we started at the awesome dane county farmer’s market which is on the capitol square so we got to peruse the approximately 300 vendors and go in the capitol and hit the observation deck which offers an excellent view of the city.

the perfect time for a gratuitous ( and rare ) family portrait!

as you can see i was wearing an organic valley coat so i got lots of questions about the fire at organic valley headquarters from concerned folks. lots of love and support in madison!

the rotunda in the capitol building is pretty awesome. odin thought it was mighty impressive. i wish i could have figured out a way to take a better picture. i tried to take a panorama of the entire thing but it wouldn’t stitch together nicely, so you only get to see a small bit 🙂

i’d be lying if i said at this point odin wasn’t really ready to head out and see something other than statues and elaborate rotundas. see that smile? it’s a carefully crafted fake 🙂

so, off to the madison children’s museum we went because while i might be getting old, i’m not too old to hang out with odin at a children’s museum where they have fun stuff like a giant hampster wheel that generates electricity for lights!

and some sort of crazy facial real time facial recognition exhibit…

and pinball, which take a lot of concentration especially when your poppi is taking pictures from funny angles…

and a green rooftop with a chicken coop with a great quote from frank lloyd wright that i might have to steal and put on our own chicken coop for The Girls…

they even had little chicks to pet. of course, odin has lots of practice calming baby chickens and grown hens thanks to tending to The Girls…

the baby chick was so content it eventually fell asleep in odin’s hands! the museum staff ladies were super impressed with his Chicken Calming Powers.

then, alas, it was time to go and we headed to a photography exhibit at madison museum of contemporary art but there was no cameras allowed. at a photography exhibit! boo!

after the exhibit we went to pizza brutta for some of the best pizza in madison. i had the prosciutto with asiago cheese and arugula. highly recommended! kris and odin are more traditional in their pizza tastes and had pepperoni. odin said it was the best pizza he’d ever had which is very high praise indeed.

for some reason, i felt compelled to take a picture of the table sign instead of the food because i liked the colors, fonts, shadows and lines?!

and to cap off The Best Birthday, we went to chocolate shoppe ice cream for a scoop of butter pecan ice cream before heading home very full and very content.

’twas a fine day. odin said it was the best birthday he’d been to even though it wasn’t his birthday 🙂

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on still kicking 30 year old me’s ass.

May 25, 2013 snowdeal Leave a comment

in addition to getting me some clams to celebrate my first birthday after running over 2,400 miles and losing 110 pounds ( i lost 4 more since writing that post ), kris organized a surprise trip to madison so i could run in the 10K “bratfest” which is the first race i’ve ran since running in the chicago marathon last october.

i’ve slowed down running over the past few months and have “only” been averaging 10-20 miles a week so i thought i’d take it easy and enjoy myself. the way i see it, it’s a “personal best” just to get up at 6:30a.m. on my birthday to make sure i register for the race on time and i didn’t need to go and try to break any personal records. but, hey, the best laid plans and all that. i felt so good running that it almost didn’t feel like i was pushing very hard to run a faster 10K than i’ve ever run before.

What an awesome way to start my birthday.Crushed personal record & ran 8’45” miles. Could have run faster.Next up,madison farmer’s market!

— Eric C. Snowdeal III (@snowdeal) May 25, 2013

i ran the first 5K at around 9 minute miles which is, in and of itself, a record setting pace for my former clydesdale self. but when it became clear that i was going to have plenty of gas in the tank i picked up the pace and ran the second 5K at an 8’30” pace to finish with an 8’45” average time per mile. i probably could have even pushed it a bit and harder if i paced myself better over the entire race and hit just over 8 minute miles. and the great part? i felt awesome at the end. i’m pretty sure i could have kept an 8’30” pace through a half marathon.

i couldn’t be happier that after a year i’m still kicking 30 year old me’s ass ( and running almost 2 minutes per mile faster than i was just a year ago when i wrote that post ).

it’ll be interesting a year from now to see if i can shave another minute off my times and get close to a 7’30” per mile pace which is about a 3 hour and 16 minute marathon pace and close to what i’d need to run for a boston marathon qualifying time. i’m not saying i’m going to be able to keep that pace through a marathon but who knows!

i do think running a race on or very close to my birthday is going to be a new tradition. next year i might give the spring madison half marathon a whirl.

the super bestest part was having kris and odin standing right by the finish line so odin could give me a high-five before i crossed the line 🙂

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after the fire, a good samaritan rescued the only truly priceless object from my desk at organic valley!

May 17, 2013 snowdeal Leave a comment

the day after the fire at organic valley headquarters some emplyees who had work areas that weren’t destroyed or in structurally unsound areas were let back into the building for a few minutes to gather “critical” documents.

not wanting to be in the building for too long since there was a line of people waiting to get in after me, i gathered a few things that i needed for work and left a lot of other stuff thinking that i’d get another chance to get it. that chance never came since later that day officials announced that employees were not allowed back into the building and i was really bummed out because i left a painting that odin made for me when he was six that’s been hanging near my desk for several years.

i am so thankful that good samaritan who was allowed into the building grabbed the painting from my desk a day later!

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Tag Archives: me

day 3277: (finally!) building and enjoying the deck on The World’s Most Awesome Treehouse(s)!

The Greatest Father’s Day Gift.

remembering infosleuth and the battle between good and evil agents in The Cloud.

Scenes from The Best Birthday. or how to have a great time in madison wisconsin.

on still kicking 30 year old me’s ass.

after the fire, a good samaritan rescued the only truly priceless object from my desk at organic valley!

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