After ~1.5 years in the making, IBM Tivoli Identity Manager 5.1 was released today! This version adds support for role hierarchy, enforcing separation of duties policies, endpoint group management, and user recertification. Performance-wise we addressed some minor defects and made better out-of-the-box indexes for use on Oracle and MS SQL databases.

My big post-release todo is to finish updating the Performance Tuning Guide and get it released by the end of July. With luck I'll have it done by mid-month.

World of Goo is an amazing puzzle game available for on Wii, Windows, Mac and Linux. The game play is inventive, the physics are well done, the sign painter is wonderfully snarky, the puzzles are challenging but achievable, and the music is original. Amazingly original. Oddly catchy even.

Today I stumbled upon the World of Goo Soundtrack -- free for download in all it's 85MB 256kbps MP3 glory! 2d boy, you rock!

IBM is offering a voluntary pilot program called TakeTime this summer. The concept is rather simple: with management approval you can take between 10 and 20 days inclusive off in the months of June, July, and August and get paid 1/3 of your pay for the days you take off.

The days need not be taken contiguously and the money is taken out of your September paychecks in equal amounts allowing for folks to plan their cash flow. The days off are separate and distinct from your vacation. During the time you take off you're still a considered a full-time employee without any change in your insurance coverage, vacation accrual, etc.

IMHO this is a very exciting program because IBM is a stickler about vacation: you can't roll unused vacation over and you can't buy back vacation days -- what you have based on your tenure is it. For me that means 3 weeks of vacation which have been eaten up by travelling back to Texas for holidays the past two years.

Originally I wanted to take the full 20 days off but that didn't cash-flow well with travel expenses we'll have over the next few months and the tuition for Benjamin's summer classes. Instead I opted for the minimum 10 days. I'll be taking them every Friday in the months of July and August (8 as July the 3rd is a site holiday and I have off anyway) and 2 floating dates that I can use whenever in July or August.

What will I be doing with my Fridays off? Some of those will be spent visiting friends during some of our travel. Others will be spent doing some coding for PGDP. And yet others may be spent reading a book by the pool :)

Monday, June 1st was my 6th-year anniversary with Benjamin. We met 6 years ago on a blind date set up by a mutual friend to see Miss Saigon. We celebrated it by recreating our second date: we had dinner at Schlotzsky's and then proceeded to see the movie Up which was amazing. Well, technically our second date was dinner at Schlotzsky's and then dancing lessons at RCC so it wasn't a total recreation -- but neither were we 6 years younger either :) Benjamin did seem to enjoy his dozen + 5 roses.

Tuesday, June 2nd was our 3-year marriage anniversary. To celebrate that we're seeing Rent next week and staying in a hotel downtown.

Today, June 5th, is my 9-year anniversary at IBM. When I was hired at the peak of the dot-com boom I never thought I'd be at IBM for 5 years, much less 9. During my second performance evaluation roughly 18 months after I started I was told that I was getting a raise, not just because of my good performance but because if they didn't new hires would be making more than I did. It was then that I discovered that the hiring managers didn't consider me a strong candidate and weren't going to offer me the job until one manager stepped in and said he thought I'd be a good fit and would vouch for me. I never did end up working for him though. Thus I was hired at the lowest salary they could offer a college graduate (which was sadly the highest offer I received by far during my job search). Since then I've proceeded to impress folks -- at least according to my performance evaluations. Here I am 9 years later a well-respected Senior Software Engineer (band 9) and a performance subject-matter expert on all things ITIM, including the IBM LDAP server and DB2 database. It's been a fun ride! I'm looking forward to an extra week of vacation next year and seeing where IBM's headed from here.

Why is it that we say the phrase "last night" when referring to events that happened the previous night, but we don't say things like "last afternoon". Instead it's always "yesterday morning" and "yesterday afternoon" and "yesterday evening" but never "yesterday night". Similarly it's always "last night" not "last morning", "last afternoon", or "last evening".

Is it some uniqueness about the term "night" spanning a timeframe set over two days (say 9pm to 4am)? [An aside: are there commonly-accepted timeframes for those periods? 4am-noon = morning, noon-6pm = afternoon, 6pm-9pm = evening?]. Or is it that "night" doesn't belong at all in the set of [morning, afternoon, evening] but instead belongs in the set [night, day] which somehow spans the first set? The latter seems to make more sense which is why "yesterday night" sounds to totally foreign. Perhaps "yesternight" is more a more appropriate term.

After being out here in Raleigh, NC and running around Lake Johnson whose greenway trail goes right through the surrounding woods I've decided that individuals who have grown up on the Great Plains have no concept that woods can be "dark and deep".

On the plains the highest tree is, at most 10 feet tall and its nearest neighbor is a good 15 feet away. There's no dense woods, no blocking of the sun, so thus it's impossible to get lost among them and thus there's nothing even remotely menacing about them. This explains why growing up I could never grok stories of people getting lost in the woods or really comprehend what's so scary about a mystery set in the woods. Even down in the Texas hill country the trees are neither overly tall or particularly dense. After being here and seeing the amazingly tall trees so tightly packed together I have a much better appreciation for both their beauty and their potential to sow confusion for an unprepared soul.

Given this, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the ghost stories told at camps held on the plains are significantly different and possibly less menacing than those held in the woods of North Carolina.

And because you know you want to go read it now that it's stuck in your head, here's a link to the Robert Frost poem: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Due to my lactose intolerance, I attempted to go gluten-free the last week of April and the first week of May. I opted out of anything containing gluten (wheat, rye, barley) but was unable to rid my diet of oats. Oats themselves do not contain gluten but they are often cross-contaminated with wheat.

Overall the experience wasn't that bad. Eating at home was of course the easiest. Instead of pastas we focused on rices. I had granola cereal for breakfast instead of my whole-wheat-based fiber-rich mix. Instead of a bread sandwich I'd have the meat and cheese in a lettuce wrap.

Eating out wasn't even all that challenging if you picked the right places. Mexican restaurants are your friend -- corn tortilla chips are a-ok as are enchiladas and other items made with corn, but not flour, tortillas. Italian restaurants are your enemy -- pastas, breads, even potato gnocchi, all contain wheat flour which contains gluten. On the plus side risotto is gluten free as are most salads so even dinner at Macaroni Grill was doable. Sandwich, pizza places, and other fast-food restaurants are right out.

During those two weeks I felt good, but not so good as to indicate that it was the gluten as compared to the wonderful spring weather that finally descended upon Denver.

My trip to Raleigh this week proved to be the end of the experiment. It's nigh impossible to maintain a gluten-free diet as well as make a good first social impression on your coworkers without looking like a food freak. I'm sure it would have been different were I to know for sure that I can't have gluten but it's quite another to say "sorry, we can't go to a pizza place, or a sandwich place, or a fast-food place for lunch because I'm doing an experiment to see if I'm allergic to gluten". So Monday at lunch broke my gluten-free streak. I've tried to keep the gluten to a minimum but I've certainly been unable to avoid it altogether (a sandwich on Monday for lunch, pizza Tuesday for lunch, sandwich on Wednesday for lunch, pizza today for lunch (and no, there's not a planned pattern here)).

So how do I feel? Overall I feel fine. Unlike the previous two weeks I did have some gastrointestinal challenges on Tuesday morning after my bowl of cereal but I didn't have any problems on Monday, Wednesday, or today after the same bowl of cereal. No problems post-pizza on Tuesday or today. Unfortunately I think the experiment was inconclusive. The scientist in me is concerned about there being too many variables, not a good sample size, and the lack of a control group to conclude anything else -- particularly given the lack of any dramatic result.

So from here on out I'll probably continue to lean toward gluten-free or gluten-minimal options (there's really more than you realize, yay for Mexican food!) but not avoid them altogether.

Yet again I was rejected for the IBM Corporate Service Corps. Frustratingly they don't tell you "focus on X, Y, and Z and apply again". Drat².

Humans are the only animal that continue to drink milk beyond their infancy (they're also the only animal that regularly drink milk produced from another animal too, but that's out of scope of this post). The ability for humans to do this is courtesy of a genetic mutation that has evolved in different herding communities (Europeans, East Africans, and Saudi Arabians) throughput history. Contrary to popular American belief, lactose tolerance is the exception, not the rule, around the world. [See: From Atoms to Traits, Scientific American, January 2009, pg 52; and Evolution of Evolution].

I, however, am of mostly European descent and that the rest of my immediate family retains their lactose tolerance suggests that I too should have retained mine outside of infancy. My lactose tolerance was going strong up until about four or five years ago. Since then I've been able to handle milk products in small amounts (milk on my cereal, small glass with cookies, moderate amounts of cheeses) but larger amounts (any amount of ice cream and heaven forbid a bite or two of cheesecake) results in extreme agony unless I pop a lactase (the enzyme needed to break down lactose) pill prior to the consumption.

This inconvenience is just that, an inconvenience. With adequate forethought and preparedness I'm still able to have that scoop of Rocky Road ice cream for dessert.

What's puzzled me though is why the onset of lactose intolerance occurred at all. It is true that lactose tolerance can dwindle as one ages due to the body's declining production of lactase -- or in other words I'm just getting old. The onset of lactose intolerance after a time when one had a tolerance is also a result of celiac disease - which is an intolerance for gluten: the body's reaction to gluten results in an inability to break down lactose. Because of this outside possibility I've been on a gluten-free diet for the past 1.5 weeks to give it a go.

More details on my gluten-free experience will be forthcoming (the details were originally destined for this post but I kept backtracking to give enough background that we got stuck on lactose instead :).

I stumbled upon a reference to the Park Hill Community Bookstore in a neighborhood rag we get once a month. The Bookstore is a non-profit organization that has been around for over 30 years. They have only one paid employee (the manager), the rest of their staff are volunteers.

Benjamin and I dropped by over the weekend to check it out. It's only 3 miles from our house in the cozy neighborhood of Park Hill. They have a wide selection of used books, enough to keep me busy for a while. The best part: used paperbacks are only $2 and hardbacks are $4! Moreover, this month they are having a 2-for-1 sale on their Science Fiction/Fantasy and Mysteries. You can't buy a new paperback these days for less than $6-8, much less 6 or 8 books for the same price!

Unfortunately while checking out with my 4 new gently-used jewels I discovered that I had only $2 in cash and that their minimum credit card purchase was $10 (a fact I totally understand given the credit card merchant fees). Rather than going and finding another 6 books to take home I opted to purchase a family membership for $20. With a membership you get an additional 7.72% off your purchases plus some other goodies. Also with a membership you get "book credits" -- which after being explained to me make the membership essentially free.

For each dollar you purchase for a membership, you get half a book credit good for a $2 book (ie: a single trade paperback). So for our $20 family membership we received 10 book credits, two of which went to pay for the 4 books (2-for-1 remember). I can walk back in at any time and spend the remaining 8 book credits without pulling out my wallet -- a very good thing considering how little cash I carry. You can also drop off your used books and instead of cash they give you book credits.

After learning how good the bookstore is for the purchaser - I can't believe they're still in business, much less for 30 years! Rest assured I'm going to be telling everyone I know about this little gem!

Park Hill Community Bookstore
4620 E. 23rd Ave
Denver CO 80207

Benjamin and I are joining a couple of friends at Texas de Brazil tonight. The only way we can afford to eat at that restaurant is from the coupons they sometimes send out.

Benjamin sent me an email from his iPhone last night to remind me to pick up the coupon from my desk. Something went horribly wrong between Benjamin's hastily-written email and the iPhone's autocorrection software. This is what I received (emphasis mine):

Subject: Texas de Brazil Coupon

Please grab it from your desk and put it in your walker or something :)

I had to read that line three times before realizing he meant wallet. We both got a good chuckle out of that this morning!

Yesterday Benjamin and I spent the afternoon in our back yard doing some spring cleaning and some prep work for some new planting. We went to Home Depot and purchased some flowers for around the aspen tree in our back yard, a couple of mini evergreens for two larger planters on our porch (Benjamin was so excited about these), and a couple of other small plants for the planters on the fence -- all for $100.06. It started raining late afternoon before we could get the flowers planted around the aspen so we left them sitting above where they were to be planted...

...only to wake up this morning with it snowing rather hard. The high today is 49 degrees and the high on Wednesday is 72. We're crossing our fingers that the plants survive.

Update: I just brought all portable plants inside and they're now defrosting. Drat this icky mess.

The purchase of Sun by Oracle just a couple of days ago was a shocker to just about everyone. Sun employees were a bit shocked (according to a friend who works there) as were IBM employees who were assuming there were backroom discussions still going on between Sun and IBM.

The buyout is going to make things interesting in the Identity Management space -- which means it's going to make things interesting for me. Just in case you've been living under a rock, the product I work on is called IBM Tivoli Identity Manager and is considered one of the top 5 identity management solutions according to Burton Group. The other four major players in the space are Novell, CA, Oracle, and Sun.

The possibility of IBM buying Sun was creating mini clouds of doubt in my mind given that it was virtually impossible they would keep both ITIM and Sun's product, one of them was getting the axe. Thankfully I don't have to worry about that anymore.

Instead we get a nice jumble of confusion in the marketplace if Oracle's product or Sun's product is going to get the axe. Good news for ITIM, however you slice it.

Most of the day yesterday it rained off and on. Last night before going to bed it had turned into microsleet or frozen snow, one or the other. We woke up to it snowing. It proceeded to snow off and on until just before noon. Then it started raining - hard. Now it's snowing in huge clumps.

If "April showers bring may flowers", what does rain, microsleet, and snow bring?

ClayWays is a wonderful teaching pottery studio in the heart of Austin (right on Burnet near 2222). Before moving from Austin I took several wheel classes there and fell in love, not only with pottery but with the camaraderie that a teaching studio offers. In addition to a teaching studio, ClayWays has a gallery full of pottery created by local potters available for purchase.

Like many small businesses, ClayWays is having a bit of a rough time and could use any help it can get -- both from new students as well as purchases from their gallery.

On Saturday, April 25th they are having a Show and Sale called "Small Wonders" from 5pm-9pm including pottery demonstrations from 5pm-7pm. From their website:

In response to drought, many cultures hold a rain dance. This show and sale is our response to the economic drought. In good times or bad we deliberately go to pot ever day - we are your community potters.

We are also your friends and neighbors and we need your help to create a ground swell of mindful local shopping to keep us in business. Come to our show and let's get to know each other.

If you're looking gifts to give, please consider attending and supporting a local business. Who knows, you might find a new hobby along the way!

ClayWays is at 5442 Burnet Road, Austin TX 78756.

Benjamin flew down to Houston this weekend to visit his best friend and with him to see the Britney Spears concert. Because we're flying out tomorrow I thought I'd wash the clothes that he took on the trip so they would be clean if he opted to take them with us this weekend. Not knowing what all was clean or dirty I washed everything in his suitcase.

I just washed 15 shirts. Not undershirts, shirts. He was gone for a total of 5 nights and thus needed to pack at least 5 shirts. I know he had a shirt on when I took him from the airport so at a minimum I would have expected to wash 6 shirts but 15? 2.5 times the minimum number? No wonder the man had to check a bag for 5-night trip to Houston. When I went to San Jose last month I took one carry-on bag for an 8-night stay.

To give him the benefit of the doubt I wouldn't be surprised if he bought a couple of shirts while he was in Houston, so that might account for 2 or 3 of them, but not the entire 9 extras.

And while I didn't bother counting them this time around, he usually packs more pairs of shoes than he does the days he'll be somewhere.

My husband officially wins the title for the worst trip-packer ever.

Correction: The above was written after only putting away the load of colors. After putting up the load of whites I must add 5 more to the total, bring it up from 15 to 20.

Disclaimer: I'm not a big fan of Britney Spears -- that job falls to my lovely husband. That in no way negates the awesomeness of the interpretation of the songs.

I came across these two videos today on YouTube of an ASL interpreter doing an amazing "music video" of two of Britney Spears' songs Womanizer and Kill the Lights. I thought he did a really great job on both songs. I like some of his conceptual signs on Womanizer, signs that made me go "ohh, that's a great way to interpret that". He used a couple of signs that I'm not familiar with that I'll be asking Tracy about on Saturday. I kept nodding when he interprets the chrous to Kill the Lights as I saw myself interpreting that very similarly.

Through a couple of events, including a few intense discussions, Benjamin and I came to the conclusion that we need to take the Hermit Prevention Program to a new level.

We determined that due to me working from home and my very small social circle I'm becoming more and more dependent upon Benjamin for human interaction. This isn't fair to Benjamin: he's continuing to make friends and be highly involved in school functions, both academic and social in nature, placing him away from the house more and more. The collision of me being more socially clingy to him and he being less accessible to be clung upon has reached critical mass in our household. Things are only going to get worse over the next 12ish months as Benjamin is taking 5 classes for all future trimesters instead of just 4 and stepping up to be president of JHOP (a student organization) instead of just a board member -- I'll be lucky to see him an hour or two a day at best.

I've decided to take a two-prong approach to solve the issue. The two may seem to be contradictory at first but I think they both have their place:

Strategic long-term solution
The strategic solution is to build up my social network here in Denver, something I've been trying to work on the past 1.5 years with little success.

In Austin I had tons of friends, almost all of them I met either at work or through people I worked with. I've already become quite close with the dust bunnies living under my desk but haven't formed a good social bond -- I'm going to need to venture further abroad than my immediate work environment.

IBM has started groups called Other Than Traditional Office (OTTO) to encourage folks who don't work in a normal IBM office but that live in the same neighbourhood to get together. Despite acting as the OTTO group coordinator and scheduling lunch meetings every other week, few of the local OTTOers who have expressed interest have ever showed up for a lunch function. I'm going to need to look way outside IBM then for some social connections.

I've tried to use social network sites like Connexion and Facebook to meet new people, but I'm at a loss for how to best use those tools for this purposes. The former is more of a hookup site than anything else (not interested, thankyouverymuch) and the latter is geared towards connecting people who already know each other -- not meeting new people.

Meeting people at church is challenging and hanging out with people you do meet is almost impossible. The challenging part is that the church is huge -- they have 2 services on Saturday nights and 3 services on Sunday mornings, services that are held in a warehouse-sized building. There's a lot of people there. If you do meet someone they could live virtually anywhere as it draws people in from wherever. Just getting to the church is challenging given that it's in Lafayette (30 minute drive away without traffic) and we only have one car. I've been able to make some great acquaintances via the Deaf ministry but while the ladies are wonderful we're at very different places in our lives. The church does have a craigslist-like website to encourage people to build community by letting people with common interest or in the same location to get together. I started a Stapleton church community and we've been holding them once a month but folks never rarely come back after the first time -- we're obviously either scaring them away or we're just not meeting whatever need they're wanting to get out of it.

Between the church Stapleton group and the IBM OTTO group, I'm getting rather depressed that maybe I'm just a scary and/or boring person!

The strategic approach is the right one but it doesn't seem to be getting any better despite trying and "giving it time".

Tactical short-term solution
The tactical approach is to say "screw you people in Denver, I'm going to hang out with my existing friends". This solution involves me taking advantage of my work-from-home status and change "home" to be wherever my friends are -- friends I can mooch off of for a week or two. Benjamin is ok with the idea as he has plenty of school work to keep him busy and we're only a phone call apart. The past 7 days I've been staying with Meg in San Jose, CA working during the day and hanging out at night and over the weekend. It's been great!

My goal is to take one or two weeks once a month and stay with friends along the way. Next month we're already travelling the first two weekends of the month to go back to Texas, so April is out -- we can only afford so much plane travel. In May I'm going to be staying with my good friend John M. in Raleigh. This trip is going to be extra special as the bulk of my team is in the IBM lab in Research Triangle Park (RTP). While I'm staying with John I'll drive into RTP every day and sit in an office near my coworkers -- most of whom I've never met in person despite working with them for 2 or more years. I'll be able to attend team meetings with my team (what a novel thought!) instead of via conference call.

That gets us through Benjamin's Spring trimester and into the summer. He'll be taking a couple of summer classes at a local community college but via the internet (we think). Pending schedules we might take this opportunity to travel together to some place for a week or so at a time, he working on school work and me working on IBM work. If that isn't possible my stay-with-friends may be placed on hold over the summer and pick back up in September.

Either way, I'm hoping to mooch off of Jeff and Jonobie in Seattle, Renee and Robert in the DC area, and maybe back out to San Jose to visit Meg later in the year. There's also Jenny and John in NJ, Jodi in Germany, Jim in London, and even my family in Austin. [Don't be surprised if you get an email or phone call in the next few weeks gang :) ]

The tactical solution is very much short-term and gets me no closer to the strategic solution of having friends in Denver -- but it may retain my sanity.

Once again I've applied to the IBM Corporate Service Corps. I'm under the impression that the number of people applying (roughly 5k) keep going up so I'm not sure my odds are getting any better each time around. Oh well, there's no harm in trying!

According to an article in the Guardian, American's taste for toilet paper is worse for the environment than driving hummers.

( If you really want to know how this effects me... )