Amber and I took a little trip to Morehead, NC to do some Atlantic wreck diving with Olympus Dive Center. It was time to try out Amber's new housing for real. We also took the Coolpix 5400 and its housing, so we could both be photogs. The shots came out pretty well.

More pics on our Flickr pages.

I got Amber an Ikelite housing for our D200 for her birthday. We plan on taking a lot more and better photos on our dive vacations. We waited until our insurance policy was accepted before taking the plunge to test it.

I think I somehow managed to still end up with schmutz on the sensor, as the blobs visible in these shots are also visible with another lens. Good thing I got a kit with multiple swabs and Eclipse.

This weekend, Amber and I decided to bike the 30 miles or so to Pocahontas State Park and camp overnight. We planned on making extensive use of their pool facility, though events conspired against us.

We managed to get everything we wanted onto both bikes, without requiring additional backpacks or trailers. Tent, two fleece sleeping bags, change of clothes, toiletries, food, and water. I brought my Garmin eTrex Vista Cx to give us the directions I snarfed using gmap-pedometer and GMapToGPX, loaded onto the eTrex via LoadMyTracks.

I tried to choose a route that would keep us to less-used byways, but I obviously don't know Richmond half as well as I thought I did. River Road (becoming Hugeonot Road) is a major road, heavily trafficked, and with extremely narrow shoulders. Amber was anxious at several points, and we ended up walking the bikes a good deal along this leg.

Bufort and Providence Roads were a bit more bucolic, though still with narrow shoulders.

It wasn't until we came upon Courthouse Road that things got very comfortable. Wide bike lanes almost the entire way to Pocahontas. We ended up deviating from our planned route which would have us skirt the entire eastern side of the park, to come to the entrance along Beach Road on the south, and instead came down an access fire road that fed directly into the park's trails, bringing us out into the main park area by the pool. We still had to bike a few miles to the camp office to check in and find a site, but a few extra miles on forest path beats a few extra miles on paved road, any day.

While we were there, the Richmond Symphony Orchestra were performing a free concert at the Heritage Amphitheater in the park. Once we got the camp set up (remarkably simple as light as we'd packed), we walked down some trails to get to the concert, taking the camera and a light dinner with us.

We got back to camp around 9 o'clock and were preparing for a decent snooze. Not to be had. In efforts to pare down, we chose not to bring camp mats or a thicker sleeping bag. The provided tent pads at the site were shallow beds of pea gravel, convenient for making a smooth place to pitch the tent, but not so convenient for sleeping on. Ow. Furthermore, while it was nearly impossible to sleep with the ruckus of families nearby, once the rain started, the white noise put us right to sleep. The next morning, it showed no signs of letting up.

While discretion might be the better part of valor, a cell phone is the better part of being stranded 30 miles from home in the rain. We waited until a respectable hour, and called our neighbor David to come fetch us in the Pathfinder. A humble end to a new experience, but one I'd do again.

Checked our online banking this morning.

This could turn into a real series. My office chair went a little kerplooie. It's an old wooden office chair with casters. The casters are new, but one of the caster sockets had been chewed away by an errant collar. We've got two other similar office chairs around the house. It's a sickness, I admit: bags, pens, gadgets, chairs. All three were in need of some loving.

The mechanism underneath the chair is so simple, and rock solid. I really feel sadness at all the plasticky knobs and levers in a modern chair. Steel and wood for me. So, I set up my workspace down in the basement (yes, it's sitting on top of an empty keg).

I used a two-part polyurethane epoxy to fill in the entire space and belt-sanded it close to flush. A detail sander brought it flush and took care of the overfill around the edges.

I reused the collar, bending each of the teeth back out to better grip the polyurethane, and I forced a tight fit by adding a sliver of bamboo to each socket. I used a mallet and a piece of scrap wood to drive each of the casters in place, and all are very firmly attached, but turn effortlessly.

Back in the office, none the worse for wear.

We were tidying up the downstairs office yesterday (wow, two offices), and I stumbled upon this gem, straight from my childhood: An Apsco Giant. Just sitting there in a drawer! Unused!

So many memories of school. The familiar buzz and whir of metal on metal. The smell of graphite and wood shavings. The tidy bouquet of sharpened pencils.

Now, it's mounted neatly on the wall next to my desk, forever at hand to refine a supreme writing instrument.

So, I attended C4 over the weekend. Many congrats to Wolf Rentzsch for organizing. Well done.

Friday night Wolf and John Gruber presented. Wolf spoke about the progression from MacHack through ADHOC, the parallel formation and longevity of PSIG, all culminating in C4: The Code Culture Community Conspiracy. He showed off his playful, inquisitive nature by trying to deconstruct an old Jobsian demo, BombApp.app, and recreate it in 0 lines of code.

John Gruber presented on the death of the HIG. Is the HIG no longer a living document? It would seem so given the relative paucity of guidance regarding new UI constucts. Unified source lists, toolbars, "plus" buttons, and gear menus all have to be recreated, developer-by-developer, with no help from Apple. Apple, meanwhile, introduces apps like iTunes 7 with no less than half-dozen different button styles. He related an incident with Apple's Radar system where a bug was submitted with accompanying reference from Apple's HIG over the presence of the Equalizer control being resident in the View menu, instead of under the Window menu where it belongs. The response was short and uninformative: "Works as intended."

He noted as well, that successful apps are also feeling more free to explore new UI territory. A migration to "cinematic" user experience design. The Frence auteur theory applied to desktop apps. When Disco is running, and smoke starts pouring out of the window, responding to mouse movement, that flash is giving user's a more tangible, real, immersive experience. Delicious Library could have been a book, CD, and DVD table-bound library app, but they took it a step further and represented it as a books on a bookshelf, with rich colors and textured windows. These are the kinds of lengths developers have to go to now to stay competitive. Key to it all is a sense of internal consistency instead of conforming to a system-wide aesthetic.

That evening, we went to Jak's Taphouse for some really tasty beer sodas. The rest of the evening (and much of the following morning's wee hours) were a complete blur. What happens at C4 stays at C4.

Brent Simmons talked about integrating Web Services with Desktop apps. Summary: REST is good, SOAP is bad, WebServicesCore.framework is sad. He also spoke about some of the pitfalls of feature requests, tech support, and when to say when. "I never intended to become Mr. Syncing."

Aaron Hillegass cajoled developers to try and solve "real problems". At first, I was excited about the premise. I felt he was going to talk about helping out with my Liberal Guilt bias of what constitutes "real problems". Instead, it seems, real problems are helping orthodontists keep their schedules in order. He admits, it's not the most prestigious work, nor even the most altruistic. Orthodontists simply have technicall problems that can be modeled in software, and for which they are willing to pay through the nose (or teeth). Solving "real" problems becomes solving "profitable" problems. Not exactly an unworthy cause, but it's not Global Warming or getting the Republicans out of the administration.

He did make an interesting observation: When you look at the three big traditional Mac markets (user apps, professional creative apps, and office productivity apps), they're dominated by Apple itself. iLife, Final Cut Pro, Aperture, iWork. And if not by Apple, then by the other big fish: Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, Intuit Quicken and Quickbooks. When you look at the rest of the software world, those are only three tiny markets. There's a whole realm of untapped potential for enterprising Mac developers that might just keep them from becoming the next Dan Woods.

Gus Mueller showed how to extend applications with embeddable scripting languages. In particular, he showed off a custom build of TextEdit with Lua plugins to give over to the users the power to extend applications in directions he never even considered. "Give them the tools to do what they want, and they'll take your application to a whole new level."

Steve Dekorte offered up a unique look at concurrency problems that are bound to start hitting developers now that 2 and 4 cores are quickly becoming the norm. He described Actors as an alternative to OS-level threads.

Brian Fitzpatrick presented on Subversion, and not necessarily for the Mac. He talked about some of the future design goals and some of the oft-requested, but unlikely (at least Not Definitely Agreed-upon) features.

Drunken Batman ended the festivities with a panel discussion with the presenters (minus John Gruber, plus Paul Kafasis). They discussed what they'd like to see from Apple in terms of help, documentation, and openness. DRM was argued. And argued. And argued. "I can't stand DRM. It doesn't work." "Do you use serial numbers?" "Of course." "That's DRM." "Uh." Bridges into the Objective-C runtime were advocated and shot down. Applescript was decried as a read-only language. Hackles were raised, teeth were bared, fur flew.

Afterwards we all bussed over to Gino's East for some tasty Chicago-style pizza and beer. Rifts were mended over tasty beverages and spicy tomato sauce.

Sunday's trip to the Adler Planetarium was a small, intimate affair. Most of the 60-odd reservations went unfulfilled. Bad, bad non-attendees! Shame. After the 3D show, Thom Brooks gave us a tour of the Cyberlab, and the dusty network closet. A piercing look into the minds of management: "Yeah, it'd be really keen if you guys could move the entire network rack over about three feet. It's just cluttering up the room where it is right now. Can it be done overnight? KTHX."

Wow. Three months since my last post! Crapola. Honestly, work is consuming almost all my time. In a good way. We're making huge leaps in terms of our usability and feature set. I've been out to California to see the office staff and hang out with some really cool coworkers, and I just got back from C4 in Chicago, which I'm writing about later.

A quick update for people who are interested in the software side of what goes on here: Thumbscrew is alive and well. Well, not well, actually. Many of you already know that it doesn't run on Mac OS X on Intel. This is because of the shortcuts I took with Apple's CoreGraphics bindings. A better, more long-term-stable solution is underway. I haven't forgotten the people who like Thumbscrew. Heck, I (want to) use Thumbscrew every day. Got a brand new camera and everything.