Well, we're back in Brisbane, for good. Now starts the long and involved process of bootstrapping a new life for myself. Fortunately it's slightly more familiar territory than starting up in the US was. The tenants in my Hawthorne apartment have agreed to terminate their lease early, and I should get the keys tomorrow. The lease on my Woolloongabba apartment ends on Friday I think, and all of our stuff is scheduled to be delivered there next Monday. My primary goal is to get my apartment habitable for Zoe and I as soon as possible. That means beds and a fridge, and Zoe's going to need some way of being kept entertained while I'm running around like a chook with its head cut off, which is most likely going to mean a TV and a DVD player. This week is going to be spent doing a lot of running around. I need to get a car, get a Queensland driver's licence, get the electricity on, get the ADSL on, buy appliances, furnish Zoe's room, furnish my room, heck, furnish the whole apartment, really. It's going to be very full on busy. I don't want to race out and buy anything today, even though the shops seem to be open, because I want to measure up my apartment first. The day's sole purchase was an electric screwdriver from Bunnings. There will be much Ikea assembly in my future.

Ever since I saw some videos from a team offsite somewhere on the East Coast, I've wanted to go zip lining. I have vague memories of riding what we call in Australia a "flying fox" in Scouts as a kid, and this looked even more fun than that. I found the Mount Hermon Adventures Redwood Canopy Tours nearby in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and so I booked it for yesterday. Eric was the only one of my friends who ended up being able to join me. It was good fun. It took about 2 hours all up, but that included gearing up and getting the safety training. I think there were 7 lines in total, of varying lengths and speeds and heights. I rented a helmet with a GoPro to capture the experience for posterity, and I'm currently in the process of uploading the videos here.

I'll soon be disposing of the Nissan Leaf that we leased a few months ago, so I thought it a useful exercise to write about my experiences with it. I am not a car man. I am a gadget man. For me, driving is a means to an end, and I'm much more interested in what I call the "cabin" experience, than the "driving" experience, so this is going to slanted much more that way. That said, I found the Nissan Leaf a fun car to drive, from my limited experiences of having fun driving cars. I liked how responsive it was when you put your foot down. It has two modes of operation, "D" and "Eco". I've actually taken to driving it in "Eco" mode most of the time, as it squeezes more range out of the batteries, but occasionally I'll pop it back into "D" to have a bit of fun. The main difference between the two modes, from a driving perspective, is it seems to limit the responsiveness of the accelerator. In "Eco" mode it feels more like you're driving in molasses, whereas in "D" mode, when you put your foot down, it responses instantly. "D" is great for dragging people off at the lights. It's a very zippy little car in "D" mode. It feels lighter. I've noticed that it has a bit of a penchant for over steering. Or maybe that's just my driving. If I have floored it a bit to take a right turn into oncoming traffic, I've noticed slight over steering. That's about all the driving type "real car stuff" I'll talk about. Now to the driver's "cabin experience". It's absolutely fabulous. I love sitting in the driver's seat of this car. Firstly, the seat itself is heated (in fact all of them are). As is the steering wheel. Nissan has gone to great lengths to allow you to avoid needing to run the car's heating system to heat the car, as doing so immediately drops at least 10 miles off the range. Unfortunately I found the windscreen had a tendency to fog up in the winter rainy periods, so I'd have to intermittently fire up the air conditioning to defog the windscreen. Of course, in the summer months, you're going to want to run the AC to cool down, so the range hit in that situation is unavoidable. I've only had this car from late Autumn until late Winter so far, so that hasn't been an issue I've had to contend with. The dashboard is all digital, and looks relatively high tech, which appeals to my inner geek. It's a dashboard. It tells you stuff. The stuff you'd expect it to tell you. Enough said. The audio system is nice. It supports Bluetooth audio, so one can be streaming Pandora from one's phone, through the sound system, for example. Or listening to audio from the phone. There's also a USB port, and it will play various audio files from USB storage. I found the way it chose to sort the files on a USB stick to be slightly surprising though. I haven't invested the time to figure out how I should be naming files so that they play in the order I expect them to play. The ability to play from USB storage compensates nicely for the fact that it only has a single CD player. (We have a 6 disc stacker in our 2006 Prius). The car also came with a 3 month free trial of Sirius XM satellite radio. This was fun. The only dance music FM station in the Bay Area has a weak signal in Mountain View, and I hate dance music with static, whereas there was an excellent electronic music station that I could listen to in glorious high definition. As long as I wasn't driving under a bridge. There's no way I'd pay money for satellite radio, but it was a fun gimmick to try out. The navigation system is really, really good. I haven't bothered using Google Maps on my phone at all. It gives such good spoken directions, that you don't even need to have the map on the screen. It names all the streets. I couldn't figure out a way to get distances in metric. The telematics service, Carwings, is probably my favourite feature. This is what really makes it feel like a car of the future. Through the companion Android application, I can view the charging status (if it's plugged in) or just check the available range (if it's not plugged in). From a web browser, I can plan a route, and push the route to the vehicle's navigation system. If the car is plugged in, I can also remotely turn on the vehicle's climate control system, pre-warming or cooling the car. It's a little thing, but the door unlocking annoyed me a little bit. I'm used to the Prius, where if you unlock the boot (that's trunk, Americans), or the front passenger door, all the doors unlocked. This was a convenient way of unlocking the car for multiple people as you approached it. With the Leaf, unlocking the boot only unlocks the boot. Unlocking the front passenger door only unlocks that door. It requires a second unlock action to unlock all the doors. I've found this to be slightly cumbersome when trying to unlock the car for everyone all at once, quickly (like when it's raining). Another minor annoyance is the headlights. I've gotten into the habit of driving with the headlights on all the time, because I believe it's safer. In the Prius, one could just leave the headlights switched to the "on" position, and they'd turn off whenever the driver's door was opened after the car was switched off. If you try that in the Leaf, the car beeps at you to warn you you've left the headlights on. It has an "auto" mode, where the car will choose when to turn the headlights on, based on ambient light conditions. In that case, when you turn the car off, it'll leave the headlights on for a configurable period of time and then turn them off. This is actually slightly unsettling, because it makes you think you've left your headlights on. The default timeout was quite long as well, something like 60 seconds. The way multiple Bluetooth phones are handled is just as annoying in the Leaf as it is in the Prius, which disappoints me, given 6 years have passed. The way I'd like to see multiple phones handled is the car chooses to pair with whichever phone is in range, or if multiple phones are in range, it asks or uses the last one it paired with. In reality, it tries to pair with whatever it paired with last time, and one has to press far too many buttons to switch it to one of the other phones it knows about. Range anxiety is definitely something of a concern. It can be managed by using the GPS navigation for long or otherwise anxiety-inducing trips, and then one can compare the "miles remaining" on the GPS with the "miles remaining" on the battery range, and reassure oneself that they will indeed make it to where they're trying to go. The worst case I had was getting to within 5 miles of empty. The car started complaining at me. The charging infrastructure in the Bay Area is pretty good. There are plenty of charging stations in San Francisco and San Jose. I'm spoiled in that I have free charging available at work (including a building at the end of my street, so I never bothered with getting a home charger installed). I've almost never had to pay for charging, so it's been great while gas prices have been on the rise. The car's navigation system knows about some charging stations, so you can plan a route with the charging stations it knows about in mind. The only problem is it doesn't know if the charging stations are in use. If you use the ChargePoint Android app, you can see if the charging stations are in use, but then you have to do this cumbersome dance to find an available charging station and plug the address into the vehicle's navigation system. Of course, what can then happen is in the time you're driving to the charging station, someone else starts using it. I actually got bitten by this yesterday. Would I buy a Leaf again? Not as my sole car. It makes a perfect second/commuter car, but as a primary vehicle, it's too limited by its range. They're also ridiculously expensive in Australia, and Brisbane has absolutely no charging infrastructure.

As my time in the US is rapidly drawing to a close, I thought I should capture the final count of US states that I've visited in the 7 years I've been here. I didn't realise it's been so long since I last did this. 22 states. Not too bad. I'd have liked to have visited Hawaii and Florida. Maybe in my next life. Update: I omitted Illinois.

As my time in the US is rapidly drawing to a close, I thought I should capture the final count of US states that I've visited in the 7 years I've been here. I didn't realise it's been so long since I last did this. 21 states. Not too bad. I'd have liked to have visited Hawaii and Florida. Maybe in my next life.

And we're all going to be back in Brisbane soon enough. April 1st is the date I'd like to be back by. Movers are scheduled to come on the 14th and pack up all our stuff, and as soon as the house sells, we're good to go. The last seven years have been an experience. I've loved living in this country, and this isn't the way I wanted to be leaving it, but sometimes (as I know well enough from painful experience) life doesn't always give you what you want. I am looking forward to building a new life for myself with Zoe in Brisbane.

So, after just having run 10K, I'm going to sit on a train for 20 hours and completely seize up. I've got me some stretching to do! I'm getting away to Portland for a few days. I'm taking the Coastal Starlight train up and back, and staying with Nigel and his family. I'm looking forward to having some time to myself on the train, I'm looking forward to the trip, because some mutual friends did it, and I've wanted to do it ever since. I'm also looking forward to catching up with Nigel, because I've barely spoken to him since he left Google, and he's a friend and fellow countryman who I really enjoyed working with. I'd also like to check out this barber shop, because I'm weird and like the idea of someone attacking my face with a cutthroat razor. And of course, you can't go to Portland without visiting Powell's City of Books. I'm probably spending as much time on the train as I am in Portland (I head back on Sunday), but I want to be back for Zoe's first dentist appointment on Tuesday.

Sarah, Zoe and I ran in the 10K Applied Materials Silicon Valley Turkey Trot this morning. Apparently it's a bit of a Silicon Valley institution (people get dressed up, particularly as turkeys), so I guess it's up there with the Bay to Breakers. This is the first time I've ever run a 10K fun run and actually run the whole way, so I'm feeling pretty happy with my fitness. In fact, I think I'm the fittest and lightest I've ever been. I'm actually a couple of kilograms under my target weight, and really pleased with myself for being able to run a 10K training run on Tuesday as well as the race today. I managed to run it in a respectable 1:05. I think I'll set a goal for myself to be able to run 10K in under an hour. No idea if that's realistic or not, but it's a goal with a nice round number. Sarah did her run in 1:06, which is impressive considering she was pushing Zoe in the jogging stroller. Zoe also did well putting up with being in the jogging stroller for that long. I think it helped having lots of things for her to look at, as well as a steady supply of food to graze on. She was having a great time running on the closed streets as we headed back to where we parked the car. We might have to make this a Thanksgiving family tradition. It'll be nice when Zoe's big enough to run in the kid's fun run as well.

Last year (I think for my birthday) Sarah backed the Twine project on Kickstarter. Well, to say the project experienced some delays would be a bit of an understatement, but in yesterday's mail, it finally arrived. I'm planning on using it to replace the cat water bowl sensor that never got reinstated when we moved house.

I'm going to spare everyone all the gory details at this time, but I guess it's time to acknowledge the facts. Sarah has left me. This has all come to a head extremely quickly (for me), but Sarah has been sitting on a horrible pile of emotions for months, so it's probably been an eternity for her. I still love Sarah and I'm desperately trying to reconcile, but Sarah just wants to move on. Throw a child in the mix and the fact that we're married in Australia but most of our on-paper shared property is in California, and I just don't want to think about it. I ask that our mutual friends not take sides (which I realise is difficult) and to please give Sarah all the support you can. This can't have been an easy decision for her. Of course, I'll also take any support you want to send my way. I start my sabbatical from work on Thursday (I don't return to work until January), and my parents have a prearranged visit for pretty much all of December. I had all this planned before this came out of left field. I'd debated telling my parents not to come, so I could use the time off work to try and repair things, but Zoe needs time with her grandparents, and I can probably do with having them around.

Circumstances have required us to become a two-car family, and I've been very keen on the Nissan Leaf for some time. It's an excellent little car. A friend had leased one, and had positive things to say about the whole leasing process, so on Saturday we leased one ourselves. Now that we've been through the process, I'm not sure why you'd ever buy a car instead of lease. We paid $4,628 as a "down payment" (of which we'll get a $2,500 rebate) and it's going to cost I think $257 a month. Maintenance for the 3 years is included in those monthly payments as is any damage to the vehicle at the end of the lease. After the 3 years you hand the car back or pay out the residual. We plan on handing the car back. We get 12,000 miles a year, after which it's 15 cents a mile. There's no way in the world we'll do 12,000 miles a year in it. The last three cars I've owned I've just paid for in cash, because I generally don't like debt and like to minimise my monthly outlays, but in the case of cars, I also don't like forking out a large wad of cash for something that instantly loses value the moment it drives off the lot. I also think that given the pace of innovation in the electric vehicle space, the new hotness in three years time will be even more awesome than the Leaf is today. It gets delivered tomorrow.

It appears that a recent incident at a different campus of the "preschool" (I call it day care) that Zoe goes to has gotten the attention of the Free-Range Kids blog. Firstly, I need to say that on the parenting spectrum, I definitely self-identify closer to the free-range end than the helicopter end. I'm not sure that I'd let an 8 year old ride the New York subway on their own, but Zoe's not 8 yet, so I really can't say. Sarah and I received the same email that is reprinted on the blog, on Friday night, and we were both (very) mildly alarmed at the situation, but not particularly concerned, mostly because it wasn't the facility that Zoe goes to. I'm not sure I'd be that much more concerned if it was, to be honest. I did like the statistics that the parent quoted in response. I thought that that put things into perspective, but didn't really take abductions by estranged parents into consideration. My one reaction to reading the email was, "why did they wait until after the incident to escalate it?" but then, from my own experiences in dropping off or picking up Zoe, I could totally understand not all the staff knowing on sight all the parents or guardians that do pickups and drop offs. This does lead to one asking how they know who to buzz in, but that's another can of worms. Anyway, I read the 50 or so varyingly indignant comments on the Free Range Kids blog, and since they were talking about the company that I give a not inconsequential amount of money to, I feel the need to write a response.

• it's a day care centre "chain". They have kids ranging from infant to pre-K (if I'm getting my grade terminology correct). It's not what I'd call a "school", hence they call themselves a "preschool"
• having actually been to one of the facilities, I can understand the request to not mingle in the lobby. It's tiny, and it blocks the view of the doors from the front office, where an employee is usually buzzing people in from
• I can totally understand the desire by the staff to not hold the door open for other people, even if we "know" them, because of possible changes in family circumstances. I would say that there's a difference between knowing someone by sight, because they're always dropping off or picking up their kid at the same time as you are, and knowing their name, where they live, etc. Having done pickups and drop offs, there are parents in both categories. I'll still hold the door open for a parent that we socialise with outside of "school", but I'll think twice now before doing it for someone who only looks familiar but I don't really know. I don't want to be the one who facilitates a future incident
• I think a lot of the conservative position the day care management has stems from liability. I have no problem with that. If the shoe was on the other foot, and an estranged parent had walked in and taken their child, and the centre had a "locked door" policy, there'd be some uncomfortable questions to answer. I'm paying them a boatload of money, they say they operate under a "locked door" policy, I expect them to keep my kid safe

The whole episode raises the question: who was this person and what were they doing there? Some of the commentators hypothesize that they were casing the joint for a future incident, or just giving themselves an impromptu tour before placing their child there (Zoe and I toured before we signed up, but that was an official, prearranged thing). It really is unfortunate that the staff didn't challenge this person, but as I said, they probably all had to review the video surveillance footage together to ascertain that none of them knew who the person was. I consider this a bit of a deficiency itself, but I don't really expect them to all have photographic memory, especially if one parent mostly does drop off and pick up. The other (expensive) option would be to issue each authorized person with an electronically revocable proximity card, so they can let themselves in, but I feel that that's taking things to the extreme. They staff all carry portable radios. If they don't have a discreet "code" they can call when one of them sees a person they don't know, I'm sure they will have after this incident. I personally found the majority of the comments on the Free Range Kids blog to be on the extreme overreaction side of things. As much as I'm a believer in Free Range parenting, I think the day care provider has mostly reacted appropriately. Do I agree with their "locked facility" policy? It's my first experience with a commercial day care facility, so I don't have anything to compare it with. As I said earlier, I can totally understand where they're coming from in terms of limiting their liability. Previously, Zoe was in a "home day care" facility, without any locks, and I for one wasn't constantly worrying about someone wandering into that provider's home and abducting my daughter, so I guess the whole "locked facility" thing is on the more extreme end of the scale for me in the first place, but like I said, I'm uncalibrated for commercial day care centres. I'd certainly like to see the primary school environment that Zoe goes to not be such a locked down affair.

According to my Amazon purchase history, it was Sunday, October 11, 2009, that we were lazing around with our friends Dan and Sue and we decided we'd just hang out and watch the first season of Dollhouse. I bought the whole thing on Amazon's Video on Demand, and we started watching episodes. It got close to dinner time, and Dan was going through a home made pizza phase at the time, and we thought about making some pizzas. I wasn't sure if we had all the ingredients in the house, but it went something like this:

Dan: Got flour? Me: Yes Dan: Yeast? Me: Yes Me: Oh, and we've got a big bag of grated mozzarella from Costco. And we have a pizza stone and a peel, and a bunch of random stuff we can throw on a pizza.

So we totally ninja-ed up some pizzas from stuff we had lying around the house. It was awesome because it was totally spontaneous. You couldn't have planned it better, and we pulled it off brilliantly without having the leave the house. Anyway, Dan had to calculate the ratios of water, flour, salt and sugar, and he wrote them all down on the magnetic whiteboard we kept on our fridge. Fast forward almost 3 years later, and we've moved to our new home, and have a stainless steel fridge that we haven't been able to put this whiteboard on, so it got stashed away in a cupboard. The pizza dough recipe is still written on it, though. So with Sarah away, Bill and Victoria are coming around for dinner tonight to hang out, and I thought trying to make pizza again might be a fun experiment. So I dug out the whiteboard with the trusty recipe, and Zoe and I made some dough this morning, and it's currently proofing in the oven. Unfortunately the whiteboard only had the quantities and not the method on it, and from perusing other recipes on the Internet, I may not have mixed things properly (I just kind of threw things together and made it into a ball), so this first batch might be a total disaster. I might go and make a second batch while Zoe's napping. Here's the contents of the whiteboard, for posterity (I'm hoping it says 10g of salt and not 18g, not that I think it'll affect the outcome too much):

Sarah is back in Australia attending the graduation ceremony for her Bachelor of Business degree, at the University of Southern Queensland, an Australia University that specialises in distance education. To say I'm immensely proud of her achievement is putting it lightly. Consider for a moment all of the challenges she has had to face in the past 6 years since she started it:

• studying remotely
• working full time (for a bit)
• losing a baby
• having major heart surgery (with a staph infection complication)
• getting her sternal wires removed (with another staph infection complication)
• having a baby
• looking after a baby at home while continuing to study

Me, I'd fail at "studying remotely". Heck, I've had two stabs at a Bachelor of Information Technology on campus, and what do I have to show for it? No, I'm so very very proud of her for sticking at it, and doing so very well (she twice received the Dean's Award for having a high GPA for the semester). She decided to embark on a business degree after having a really hard time finding meaningful work when we moved to the US. She had been working in business project management for the Australian Federal Government (and really enjoying the work) before we moved, and couldn't find any project management that wasn't high-tech, which wasn't really her thing, and everything wanted a degree. She briefly contracted at VMWare, in a marketing position, and Google, in a Security Vulnerability Management role, but neither of these were really up her alley, so to speak. So she went "bugger it" and enrolled in the degree. Ironically, mid-way through the course, she decided that nursing was more what she wanted to do, so she has also gone out and done short courses in health care. She has been licensed as a Certified Nurse Assistant and also a Phlebotomist, but never worked as either. She's just started an Emergency Medical Technician course at Mission College, and is keen to try and work in that field for a little while before starting on a post-graduate Nursing degree in Australia. Sarah had indicated to me that she'd really love to go back for the on-campus graduation ceremony, since she's barely set foot on campus in the six years she's been studying at the university. I thought that was an excellent idea, so I sprang for a Business Class flight back for just her, and am staying behind to look after Zoe. It's only a flying visit. She departed Wednesday night, returns on Monday. As I write, she's probably at the ceremony right now. Normally it would take 6 years to complete a degree externally, assuming two subjects a semester for 12 semesters. She's obviously had to take a few semesters off here and there because of some of the aforementioned challenges. To still finish the degree in 6 years, she's had to plow through the "summer" break (I say "summer" because it's during the Northern Hemisphere winter) and use the accelerated "summer semester", also known as "semester 3" to do an additional subject. That's meant that summers over here have been her shorter winter break. This summer has been the first summer where she hasn't had to worry about studying, and it's been really wonderful to be a whole family again for an extended period of time, and we've had a jam packed summer as a result. We bought a tent and did a small amount of camping. We've had weekends away with friends. We've been to Raging Waters. We've been to Disneyland (granted that was in between final exams). It's been go go go. So now that summer is almost over, I'm looking forward to the pace slowing down a bit more and things returning to "normal" (well the new "normal" is Sarah doing her EMT class a couple of nights a week until December). She's only just started, but she's really loving the on-campus aspect of it. I'm also looking forward to getting a bit more "me" time. Since Zoe was born, I have sacrificed my personal time to facilitate Sarah's study. I haven't had much time to tinker and I've barely had time for Debian. I'm looking forward to trying to carve out a few hours a week for some of both, plus a bit of reading.

I can't remember exactly when, it was either pre-Zoe heart-related diagnostic imaging or during her pregnancy with Zoe, that it became apparent that Sarah had gall stones. Apparently it's not uncommon for women to develop them after pregnancy, and it turns out that Sarah is slightly more genetically predisposed to getting them to boot. So it wasn't terribly surprising when she started having some pain recently. She had another ultrasound to confirm it, and went off to see a surgeon. Apparently they care more about the symptoms than the number of stones in the gallbladder, and they don't bother removing the stones and keeping the gallbladder, so she was booked in for a cholecystectomy last Thursday. It was a pretty straightforward procedure, she was out of the operating room in just under an hour, and awake a bit over an hour after that. I've had a few friends need to have a cholecystectomy, and the photos on Wikipedia have always fascinated me, particularly this one. It seems so freaky to have a gallbladder full of that much gravel. It can't be comfortable. We're going to be able to pick up Sarah's stones on Monday, so it'll be interesting to see what they look like. Sarah's recovering now. It's one of the few surgeries she's had under general anaesthesia where she hasn't been sick afterwards, so that was a good start. The procedure was done laparoscopically, using four incisions, and to give themselves room to work, they inflate the body with carbon dioxide gas, which then has to work its way out of her body over the following days. So she's dealing with some bloating, bruising and swelling at the moment, but not doing too badly. Apparently if you're vertical for too long, the gas can work its way up to your diaphragm, which causes some shoulder pain, so the trick has been to walk around a bit, then lie down for a bit, and then rinse and repeat. She's not allowed to lift Zoe for 3-4 weeks, which presents a few challenges for us, but nothing insurmountable (hopefully). We converted Zoe's crib to a toddler bed a week before the surgery, and Zoe thought that was just the best thing ever, and has taken to it really well. I'm around at home for breakfast and dinner, so I can take care of the lifting into and out of the high chair for those meals, and Zoe can eat lunch at her little table. Zoe's also pretty good about getting into and out of the car by herself (not that Sarah can drive until she's off the painkillers) and she's normally in daycare two days a week. She's in daycare again on Monday, so Sarah won't have to deal with Zoe on her own until Tuesday, and we have backup daycare arrangements we can fall back on if need be. Zoe's been very good about Sarah not being able to pick her up, and been very gentle. It helped with the explanation that Sarah could show her all of her "owwies". The surgeon was saying that only 1 in 400 people need to alter their diet after removing their gallbladder, so we're hopeful that Sarah will do just fine without it. She'll certainly be more comfortable in the long run.

Various security folks at work have been keen on a newer version of audit be in Ubuntu (preferably 12.04), but unfortunately the Debian maintainer has been too busy to package it for Debian, so I finally carved out some time recently to do an upload to experimental, with his permission. It would have been really nice to land it in unstable before Wheezy froze, but as it involved a library transition, and I didn't get a chance to talk to the release team about it until very close to the freeze, they said it was too late. That meant the grand plan of getting it into Ubuntu 12.10 and then trying to get it into precise-backports went up in smoke as well. Oh well. It was a fair bit of work to package. A lot of the patches were no longer relevant, and the remaining ones all needed to be refitted. It was also my first attempt at touching a library package where a SONAME bump was involved. I think I did everything correctly.

Continuing in my better running through technology phase that I'm currently going through, I got all excited when I discovered that Polar make a Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitor chest strap. Prior to this, I'd be lamenting how there wasn't a large choice of ANT+ enabled Android phones (to my knowledge there's just something Sony makes) So I got all excited and ordered a strap and it arrived today. This is my initial review (I haven't gone running with it yet, I've just had a tinker) I'll start with the bad first

the battery cover is a bit dicky

I took the battery cover off to confirm it came with a battery and then had a whale of a time getting it back on. I haven't managed to get it on as flush with the back as before I took it off. This appears to be a common complaint in the Amazon product reviews also.

hard to tell what its auto off timeout is, whether it's on, etc

Basically there's a large lack of feedback as to what's going on. Is it on or off? Is it wet enough to turn itself on? Is it reading a heart rate, or is the Bluetooth pairing just not working? The most accurate way I've found to determine if it's "working" or not is to unpair it and then repair it again. If you get a PIN prompt it's talking. By accident, I've found indications that it will turn itself off after not reading a heart rate for 10 minutes, and to reset it, you detach it and wait 30 seconds and reattach it. This would have been good information to include in the manual

Now for the good

reasonable Android app support

Heart Rate Monitor for Polar claims to support it, but I haven't managed to get it to do anything useful yet. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that My Tracks has support for it. Noom CardioTrainer is one that I was already trying out alongside Strava Run (which doesn't have support for it). There's also Sports Tracker and Endomondo. The UI for both of these also show the battery level. I've found that trying to have multiple apps reading the heart rate monitor simultaneously seems to be an exercise in fail, and that the Sports Tracker app seems to start a background service which subsequently causes all sorts of problems for any of the other apps started after it has started.

And the ugly Looking back at all the Amazon product reviews, they're pretty much split equally between 5 stars and 1 stars. The product seems to either work flawlessly or absolutely dreadfully. I was beginning to think I was in the latter group and that I'd bought a white elephant, but now that I've gotten to the bottom of the idiosyncrasies of talking to it from Android, it seems to be behaving fairly reliably. Talking to it from Linux, and the reason behind the title of this post One of the first things I tried doing after Android was being initially flaky for me, was to try and talk to it from a Linux laptop. This proved fairly straightforward using rfcomm. I didn't get anything human readable out of it though. Being curious as to how these Android apps were able to decode the data, I went looking for some API documentation, and a Google search led me to this sad forum discussion. So the API information is not freely available, and their CEO personally signs off on who gets access to it. How ludicrous. Do they want to sell product or not? That said, I did also find this blog post which, courtesy of the aforementioned Open Source My Tracks Android app, lays it all out for you. So them being all anti-development with their information is kind of pointless. Polar's website doesn't mention anything about their management, so I have no idea who their CEO even is. Wikipedia is also none the wiser. I'm looking forward to going for a run tomorrow and seeing how this thing pans out.

Sarah and I are running in the 5K Packard Summer Scamper on Saturday. Sarah's been working on her fitness for a few months now, and I belatedly started working on mine about a 6 weeks ago. (Sarah's fund raising, so if you'd like to sponsor her, her page is here) I've been using the Couch to 5K program to get my fitness up, but I haven't managed to stick to it exactly, due to a combination of injury and wet weather. I have still managed to get myself to the point where I can run for 28 minutes solidly, which is close to 5K (I'm doing my last training run tomorrow, so I'll see what the distance comes out to). I've been doing up to three runs a week at lunchtime around the Shoreline Amphitheatre area, using my Galaxy Nexus and some Bluetooth headphones, and I've got a pretty nice little setup. I'm using Pandora for some music to listen to, C25K Pro for the actual running intervals. It has voice prompts that tell me when to run, or to start a walk interval. Finally, I'm using Strava Run for recording the run and getting some additional statistics during the run (kilometre markers, split times and time elapsed). These also come through as voice prompts. I'm not currently wearing a watch, and I want to keep track of the wall time, so I've also found Audio Clock, which verbally announces the time (I've set it to do it every 15 minutes that a Bluetooth headset is connected). What I really like about all of this is that I get spoken voice prompts and information, seamlessly mixed in with the music from Pandora, all while I'm running. I've got my phone strapped to my arm, and I don't have to look at it during the run, and there's no wires. I'm a huge personal metrics junkie, and that was why I previously eschewed running outdoors. I wanted that information on the treadmill display so I could push myself that little bit further. Sure, I'm not getting the constant information as much as if I had a treadmill display in front of me the whole time, but I'll settle for running in the great outdoors and getting some feedback every kilometre (if I get really desperate, Strava will do it every half kilometre). Not to diss optical augmented reality efforts too much, but I'd rather go for a combination of discreet audio announcements through a Bluetooth earpiece, perhaps complemented with something I choose to look at like a Pebble watch, than an in-your-face pair of glasses. My Bluetooth headphones are the around the back of the head variety that aren't going to bounce off during a run. I've really enjoyed doing the runs during the week, and when I was doing the full 3 runs a week of a given week of the Couch to 5K program, I'd really notice a difference by run number 3. I'm currently planning on sticking with doing a 5K run hopefully at least twice a week after this weekend. It's certainly done wonders for my waistline.

I've received two separate emails now about a spammy looking tweet from Sarah's Twitter account, so I thought I'd attempt to head off any more. Yes, it appears her account got hacked (weak password), but surprisingly the password didn't get changed. Sarah has changed her password to a stronger one and deleted the offending tweet. All is right with the world.

The Maker Faire is one of those awesome Bay Area things that always fills me with excitement and gets my imagination going. Zoe and I went again this year to check it out, as best we could within the time constraints we had to work within (opening time and her nap time, minus travel time). She definitely enjoyed herself. We took the Caltrain, because historically driving and parking has been a bit of a nightmare. The optimal train to get to get there before it opened (at 10am) was the 9:19 train from Mountain View, which was scheduled to get in at Hayward Park a little before 10am. It just so happened that there was a Giants game on in San Francisco today as well, and the train was absolutely packed. We only got a seat because one kind gentleman was getting off and explicitly gave his seat to us. One lesson learned: don't try and take the BOB stroller on the train. Even when collapsed, it's way too bulky. For future Caltrain outings, I'll take our City Mini stroller instead, as it folds much flatter. I also took our macpac Possum child carrier backpack, and Zoe was pretty happy to just sit in it for the bulk of the time. I think it had novelty value for her, as we haven't used it for a while. I probably could have gotten away without taking a stroller at all. I was very glad I took the backpack, as it gave her a much better vantage point for everything that was going on than she would have gotten from sitting in the stroller. There was supposed to be a free shuttle from the Hayward Park station to the Maker Faire, but there was a huge crowd waiting for it, so I decided to just walk. It didn't take too long. For the return trip, I think I exited from the wrong side of the fairgrounds, and couldn't figure out the shuttles, so I just walked to Hillsdale station. At least the return train wasn't crowded. Overall, using Caltrain to get in and out was successful. Zoe was very well behaved for the ~30 minute train ride each way. The Faire was quite a bit bigger this year, and has spilled out into the parking lot on one side. I'd heard stories that O'Reilly had quadrupled booth prices as well. Trying to abide by the program was too difficult, so we mostly just wandered through the main Expo hall and looked at various booths. I just did a full read through the website of all the exhibitors to see what I missed out on. Here's some of the stuff I saw in person, or discovered via the website:

• there was a really excellent looking Dalek running around (way better than the photo on the page linked to here). I also learned that there's a whole Dalek-making website. Awesome.
• RAFT (Resource Area For Teaching) had lots of really simple, low cost projects for demonstrating various concepts in physics and science.
• Linux for makers was represented
• This Arduino-controlled automatic fish feeder looked cool. I didn't get to see it in person, I discovered it while I was trawling through the list of exhibitors.
• Shop-in-a-box. I'd have liked to have checked this out.
• Build a bug habitat. I'd have liked to check this out out as well.
• Solar bike trailer. My Dad would have liked this, as he has an electric bike. I imagine this wouldn't be all that hard to make. The trailer looked pretty long from the photo though, but hey, no pedaling.
• The water causeway. Now this looks interesting. I would have loved to have seen this one in person. I love clean tech. There's a whole bunch of videos linked off the page for this.
• Wave energy capture model. Another clean tech thing I'd have liked to have checked out.
• Roominate looks really cool. Something for Zoe when she's a bit bigger.
• There was a table extolling the virtues of growing your own algae for consumption (as spirulina) and bio-fuel. I'm interested in finding out more about the latter.
• I saw some HEXBUG-related stuff near the Geekdad table. This looked like a dressed up version of the "take a toothbrush head and glue an electric toothbrush motor on the back" type project. I'm curious to see how expensive the kits are, as they looked like a lot of fun.
• Ratduino sounds intriguing, but I can't find out much about it.
• Urban scale wind turbines. One that I needed to have seen in person. Unfortunately I missed it.
• GlueMotor looks cool.
• Low-cost push-button clicker. I'd have liked to have found out more about this. If it's what I imagine it is, this could be quite revolutionary in the classroom.
• Hardware Startup Showcase. I have ideas. I'd like to see them get out of my head and into existence. Turns out there's even a MeetUp group.
• Kits by Kids. I'll have to check this out to see what sort of stuff I can do with Zoe when she's a bit older.

Kickstarter is really becoming huge in the maker community. There were heaps of exhibitors there with (mostly robotics) projects that were past the initial prototyping phase and were seeking funding on Kickstarter to go into mass production. Some of the talks I'd have liked to have seen:

• Every Child a Maker
• "Kickstarters," Equity and the New Maker Pro
• Making Professional Makers - Career Tech Ed Instructors Talk Shop
• Manufacturing Open Source Hardware - Get Your Stuff Made!

Zoe was really well behaved for the entire expedition. I don't think she really gave me any grief at all. There was a brief period where she wanted me to carry her, but I managed to negotiate her back into the stroller after not long. I think her favourite was ArcBotics, which had a robot insect that would dance and wave at her. She kept asking for it to do more dancing.