But enough about you

Someone just canceled a 90-minute meeting. so I have an unexpected chunk of free time. Since I don't seem to make time to post here under normal circumstances, I'll take advantage of this boon by posting now.

Life has generally been really good lately.

Work: I've been at Google a little over a year now and I'm still thoroughly enjoying it. I'm continuing to learn at a rapid clip and I'm a lot more useful to my team with each passing quarter. I can't do justice to describing what a paradise it is for an engineer to work at Google - not because of all the nice perks, as welcome as yesterday's massage was - but because of the incredible infrastructure and tools we have available to help us do our jobs. Google gives you a fulcrum and a really big lever and then asks you to move the world - and you do!

I usually get to work between 8:30 and 9:30am, and leave at about 5:30pm. I eat breakfast and lunch at work. So with the time at work and the 15-minute commute, there goes 45 hours of my week. I'm really happy when I'm at work. If the rest of my life were less interesting, I'd spend more time here.

Family: Jon and I are doing really well. I don't like to use my blog as a platform for dissecting partner relationships, so I'm not going to go into any details about what's working and what isn't, but it's mostly working and we're pretty happy. Jon is obsessed with playing go and spends one night a week at the Go Center, as well as playing lunchtime games at work and playing online with people around the world.

Elliott is three and a half and getting to be a pretty interesting little person. He finished his first year of preschool and will go to preschool for two more years before starting kindergarten. We're thinking he'll probably go to private school but that's not decided yet. He's reading lots of books, playing lots of "soccer" in the back yard with Jon, taking swimming lessons with Laura, going to summer camp, getting skinned knees, refusing to eat 80% of the foods he meets (but eating the other 20% voraciously), forgetting to ask nicely, building forts, requesting extra snuggles, considering stopping sucking his thumb, playing computer games, and making really dumb jokes over and over again. He's a good kid. I have a bunch of pictures stacked up that I keep not posting to elliottcook.com - I'll try to get to that soon.

My Dad is biking a lot, trying not to spend too much time at work, and enjoying the hot summer days. My Mom is recovering from a long-term vision problem and doing some genealogy research.

Myself: I don't have a ton of free time during the week. I come home, make dinner, hang out with Elliott and put him to bed, and by then it's 8:30pm and Jon wants to play go. :) Sometimes we do that or watch a TV show on DVD. I'm trying to read more this year than I did last year, so some evenings I do that. I've recently taken up beadwork again and I'll be going to a wire wrapping class at a local bead store next week. I've played too much Eschalon (a single-player RPG with a Mac version) lately. I'm still slogging through paperwork associated with my divorce, which is not quite complete yet. And of course, I like to hang out with friends, when I get a chance, which is not often enough.

So that's why I never update this blog any more.

And what about you, dear readers? What are you up to lately?

I meant to write this up sooner: Elliott, Jon, and I discovered the best weekend activity ever for nerds of all ages. Weekend before last, we went to Robothon at the Seattle Center and it was great fun. Robothon is an annual event put on by the Seattle Robotics Society. They have vendors and demos and competitions and it runs all weekend.

Elliott's been obsessing about robots for at least a few months now, so it was an easy sell when I told him we were going to get in the car to go and see some REAL LIVE ROBOTS. I think he thought they would be 16 feet tall and have laser guns for arms, but he seemed to be satisfied with the small, peace-loving gadgets we found when we got there.

On the way in, we walked past the International Fountain, a rather odd-looking Seattle landmark especially popular on hot summer days:



This was a gray drizzly day, so I told Elliott that it was the spaceship the robots had used to come to earth. He was very enthusiastic about that story.

At the event itself, there was plenty to look at, but my favorite part was the MicroMouse competition. Here's an example of a MicroMouse maze (not the one I saw, just a random one from the web):



Each robot had ten minutes to explore the maze and make runs from the start corner to the center of the maze. The fastest run within that ten minutes would be the final time.

There was a big variety in the robots that ran the race. One was built from stock, off-the-shelf Lego Mindstorms components; another was almost completely hand-crafted from specialized components and circuit boards. Strategies varied a lot too. The Lego robot just followed walls, but the fancy circuit board robot mapped the entire maze with four downward-pointing "eyes," charted an optimal route, and then made speed runs to the center.

It was a great event for all of us and I hope we manage to attend again next year. Maybe one of these years I'll build a robot and bring it along, too -- or if all else fails, I'll check at the International Fountain and see if any robots newly arrived from space want to join forces with me.

Elliott: Jon, can you sit in the black chair?
Jon: I don't know, can I?
Elliott: Jon, can you sit in the black chair right here?
Jon: Can you ask me nicely?
Elliott: Jon, sit in this black chair that is right here that it will be fun if you sit in the black chair, Jon!
Jon, laughing: Yes, or you could cajole me.
Elliott: OK! I will control you! (Waving imaginary remote control)