Tom Drapeau

I just returned from a great trip @ShayWade and I took to Las Vegas. We took the trip primarily so I could participate in the 2010 BCAPL National 8-Ball Championships, held at the Riviera Hotel & Casino. The trip also happened to take place in between jobs for me, so I wanted to see if we could see some of the sights along the way.

This was the first time I’ve ever played a tournament on a bar sized table. I’m used to playing on 4 1/2 by 9 foot tables, and these were a good deal smaller. To compensate for this, the tournament bar tables (provided by Diamond) had narrow pockets and unforgiving rails, which made pocketing balls more of a challenge. The tournament format was also new to me. Matches consist of up to 25 games, where the winner is the first to 13 games. Each team puts up a 5 player roster, and each player (unless they are substituted out for a different player) plays each one of the other team’s 5 players, one game each.

The format makes every game crucially important to win, and to make things even more difficult, I’m used to playing 9-ball, which has its own nuances and strategies. None of those strategies, as it turns out, helps to win 8-ball games. The competition was fierce, and luckily for my team (KBZ, or Kneel Before Zod), we had Steve and Jude, two players who have played this tournament many times before and who are massively talented 8-ball players. Plus, we had Chris, who is an expert in all pool games.

Wednesday morning, before the pool action started, a few of us took a helicopter ride over the Hoover Dam and into the Grand Canyon, thanks to Serenity Helicopters. It was my first time seeing the canyon and it was a terrific time! A few pics from the trip:

A view of the Hoover Dam from the air (shot by @ShayWade):

@ShayWade, guest pilot:

Our very own postcard from the Grand Canyon:

Wednesday afternoon the action started. At 2:00pm we played and beat a team called Selinsgrove Moose from Pennsylvania 13-4. From there we played a team Dublins Hot Shots from Alberta, Canada. We squeaked through that match 13-11, which matched us up against a team Pocket Protectors from Napa Valley, CA. We beat that team 13-10, which meant we got all of Thursday off from the tournament.

One great thing about the tournament format is that the winner of the 13th game, the winning game, gets the satisfaction of knowing s/he won the match. Sure, everyone contributes, but the 13th game winner closed it out. The aforementioned massively talented Steve won the 13th game in our first match, and our expert Chris closed out the second and third matches for us. Steve is also so good at 8-ball that he has attained the rank of “Grand Master”, which can’t hurt with the ladies.

Our Thursday was spent mainly basking in the glow of our victories and hanging out by the pool. We had a great dinner at a Teppanyaki style restaurant in Caesar’s Palace called Hyakumi. We had a great time watching our chef Kevin cook our food right in front of us, with Las Vegas flair. The food and service were top notch. After dinner we went to see the Bellagio fountains, which were well worth the crowding, and then @ShayWade and I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s “O”. O was an absolutely amazing show, a visual feast. Relaxing back at the hotel with a cigar and a nightcap, we reflected on a great day off.

We started play again on Friday at noon, and beat a team from Northridge called Nobody CA. We won 12-7, Steve won the 13th game, and it was our best team match of the tournament. From there we ran into a roadblock in the form of a team from Wisconsin called Flanagans. The match was close, but we ended up on the short end of a 13-11 scoreline. The loss put us on the B side, which is not where you want to be midway through a tournament of this size.

Fresh off the loss to Flanagans, we played and beat a team Fargo Billiards from Fargo, ND 13-11, and I won the 13th game! What a thrill. Beating Fargo moved us on to playing a team from Calgary, AB called Mojo. And that, unfortunately, is where the mojo ended for the KBZ team. We lost 13-9, and the 13th game was won against me after a controversial ruling that opened the door for Mojo to take the win. After so many positive experiences and sightseeing on the strip, the Grand Canyon and the Bellagio, it was hard to be mad at how things ended. We had a nice team dinner and reflected on finishing tied for 49th place out of 674 teams, winning enough prize money to pay for our tournament entry and other costs.

As @ShayWade and I got back to McCarran airport to head back to JFK, I realized that I hadn’t gambled at all on the trip. So I rectified that in resounding fashion, and can now say that I am a Big Casino Winner. A parting shot:

I’ve been blogging off and on for a few years now. My friend CK suggested I try it out, and I posted about my trip to Europe after leaving Yahoo! and my and my lovely wife‘s babymoon to Italy. Since then, I’ve ridden the wave after the early adopter wave and had a good time with Twitter, a clash with the pervasively open Web 2.0.x with regards to publishing my son’s name (we netted out with “KidWonder”), YouTube video embeds, Obama ’08 and tons of gadgets.

Sometimes I would try talking about the issues of the day, but never as quickly or as deeply as others. As a rule, I refrained from talking about my work projects (wanted to keep that separate from a personal blog). I also don’t like having my updates from one service auto-update other services, which cuts down on my social output. I decided to try blogging partly because my job at the time was so connected to blogs and I wanted to improve my blogging vocabulary. My blog output was sporadic, as I could never really tell which events in my life were candidates to blog about.

Over the past year, I’ve come to enjoy Twitter over the other social services. My Twitter network isn’t as personal as Facebook, and isn’t as curated as LinkedIn. I wish Twitter would replace my need for RSS (it doesn’t quite yet) and I wish there were better clients aimed at people with a limited time per day to read (currently Twitterrific on the iPad is my favorite). However, the 140 character limit for a Tweet has been enormously helpful in framing how to share what I see in the world around me. We don’t suffer for lack of tools–for the most part, we suffer for lack of structure on the web. 140 characters is an arbitrary bit of structure for the user, but it has proven helpful in my production and consumption of it.

Which isn’t to say that I’ve mastered consistency on Twitter either. However, it is where I’ll be waxing philosophic for now. I’m bothered that Twitter isn’t keeping more of my history around for easy access (and don’t believe the Library of Congress would serve it up so readily), but long term data storage and retrieval is a flaw in most of the social systems on the web. So I won’t solely blame Twitter for it, and I’ll be hoping better solutions arise soon.

This is my last WordPress post for now. I’ll most likely continue being active on Twitter and I hope to see you there. I’m also contemplating what should be at my root domain tdrapeau.com.

My family and I sent my Dad to go see the STS-130 launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor. The germ of the idea came from a day I sat down with the lovely @ShayWade around Christmastime and asked a simple question, “Instead of just buying stuff, what if we enabled a family member to do something they have always wanted to do?”

My Dad is a no nonsense guy who places his family above himself and is one of the most selfless guys I’ve ever known. He would drop everything and help the rest of us out with anything we needed, not asking for anything in return. In fact, his modesty and selflessness make it pretty hard to figure out what to get him for Christmas. My sister and I often say that the ideal gift for Dad is something he really wants, and can’t possibly return.

He loves things that fly. He spends his free time, such as it is, looking at birds and airplanes outside and on the Discovery and History Channels. We have tried tapping into his love for flight before, but he wasn’t too excited about hang gliding or pilot’s lessons. So this time, we thought we would explore a trip for Dad that involved flight without involving him piloting himself.

I have 2 friends in Alex and Gavin who I met through work and will become actors in this story. My wife and I started to consider a trip involving the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), so I instinctively contacted Alex, who lives with his wife near KSC. Alex told me about the different types of activities KSC offers, and Gavin inspired me over lunch talking about his recent shuttle viewing experience. After those conversations, I was locked in. This was it. My Dad was going to see a shuttle launch.

The logistics weren’t very friendly to shuttle launch hopefuls coming in from out of town. Alex and the KSC information desk warned me repeatedly about the likelihood of a scheduled launch being scrubbed and postponed, sometimes for weeks or months. Some of the other KSC offerings, such as the Astronaut Training Experience (ATX) and the Lunch with an Astronaut, seemed like better bets than putting all of our eggs in the shuttle launch basket.

And that was assuming we could even get tickets. There are 2 classes of tickets: obstructed view from the KSC Visitor’s Complex, and unobstructed Causeway view. I counted down the days until the next shuttle launch: STS-130 and the Space Shuttle Endeavor. The plan was always to tell my Dad about this on Christmas, which happened to fall before the tickets went on sale. We decided to go ahead on faith and tell him on Christmas.

“Son of a bitch!” is not something I ever expected to hear from my Dad, who is mellowing with age. And yet, it was the best son of a bitch I’ve ever heard. He was truly excited, and he never gets excited about a present! This was getting good–now it HAD to happen. I dreamed dreams of shuttle launches for the next 2 weeks, waiting for the day the launch view tickets went on sale to the public. On a brisk Wednesday morning, Sharon and I sat faithfully by our terminals, fingers poised on the “Purchase” button… and watched helplessly as the launch view tickets sold out in 2 minutes. All the wind went out of my sails. This couldn’t be.

Enter Alex, stage left. Alex has friends in high places, and with a single stroke got my Dad a Causeway launch ticket and restored my faith in humanity. Without his knowledge, my Dad had gone from not going to going in a matter of one day, and received an invitation packet (courteously requesting his presence at the launch) directly from NASA!

In the midst of my mental celebration, Alex reminded me about the possibility of launch postponements. Sharon and I busied ourselves getting Dad’s flight, hotel and car arranged, and booked him Saturday, Sunday and Monday night for an early morning Sunday launch. We gave him as much time as his wife and job would allow, so now it was up to the fates.

Dad arrived with a look of anticipation, dropping my Mom off to stay with us while he went to fulfill one of his lifelong dreams. The snow held off in our area, we got him off OK and he called from sunny Orlando several hours later, ready to see the last night launch of the NASA Space Shuttle program. The weather appeared to hold, but the launch was postponed due to low cloud cover.

Meanwhile (back at the Hall of Justice), I couldn’t sleep, checking the KSC Twitter feed looking for news about the launch. My Dad, still as optimistic as ever, took a nap and spent Sunday at the Visitor’s Complex. Sunday night the air of anticipation began again, as the postponement put the new launch schedule on for ~4am Monday morning. I fell asleep hoping that the clouds would clear, and woke up at 5:35am to see this picture:

Overjoyed, I text my Dad “Blast off!” and get an immediate call back from a guy who sounded like a kid, so excited to have seen the launch. That moment for me has to rank in the top 5 of my lifetime moments. My Dad has done a lot for me, and I am happy I could do something for him.

He topped off the stay by having lunch with retired astronaut John Fabian and touring the Visitor’s Complex. He got back to our home, spent an afternoon telling us all about it (and showing us photos and souvenirs!) before heading back home to Massachusetts, barely missing another snowstorm.

It was a magical time all around, and even though this was a personal thing, I hope by publishing this that some other son or daughter out there will think to do something nice for their parents. It is worth it. And thanks to everyone who helped make it happen!

Here is a launch video from the Kennedy Space Center YouTube account. Beautiful.

A small sector of the internet is abuzz this weekend surrounding @ThatKevinSmith and his being asked to get off a Southwest Airlines flight due to being TFTF (Too Fat To Fly). To hear Kevin’s side of the story, you can check out his Smodcast.

I am not a thin person. I have been thinner at various points in my life, and that is my struggle to deal with. I have not yet been asked to get off a flight for being TFTF, as I fit in the seat, don’t need a seatbelt extender, and can pull down the armrest. Which, incidentally, Kevin can also do.

In response to his blog post/podcast/Tweets, the web has aggregated a delicious array of self righteousness by people posing as thin (Slashdot, PopEater, Consumerist), and I thought I might share my humble opinion on what the airlines might consider.

Instead of publicly outing passengers in front of a seated audience telling them they are too fat, if there are concerns about a passenger’s size, why not have that checked during the check-in/security process? Then it could be a bit more humane.

The argument that people get what they pay for with coach seats falls a bit flat, as I would gladly pay more for a more comfortable flying experience. Looking at flights from JFK-LAX for example, rates fluctuate from $218-$404, with many of the $404 flights being on the same airlines as the $218 flights.

Are there no more comfortable coach seats because people are choosing cheaper flights over comfort? Or are people choosing cheaper flights because there is no more comfort with the more expensive ones? I believe it to be the latter. Even using the popular flight finding services i.e. Travelocity and the like, there isn’t even a place to specify comfort options. I did notice that Virgin America offers not only roomier main cabin seats but a “Main Cabin Select” seat class, which is great, but it isn’t something that is offered across the board with all airlines.

As for the argument that bigger people should just automatically buy 2 seats or upgrade to first class, that adds anywhere from a 100% to 1000% markup to the cost of flying (the Virgin Main Cabin Select looks to be in the 500% markup range). I would think that there should be another option that is a bit more in line with adding a bit extra comfort. A 1000% markup? That’s like telling the guy who’s renting a car from Hertz that since he can’t fit into the Corolla that he has to rent a Lamborghini.

Besides, the rich folk in first class (anyone who would pay that kind of markup for a service *has* to be considered an extravagant spender) don’t want to spend their hard inherited fortunes to be seated next to a commoner, do they? And they are part of the reason that a poor schlub can fly from NYC to LAX for $129.

These are not truly logical arguments being made here. For me this is not a matter of weight, or girth, or coach vs. first class. Its a matter of how bigger people are treated. If people want to stop being childish and have a real discussion about this, my suggestions would be:

1. Have a more private area available in the check-in/security checkpoint process where you can pull people aside and see how they fit in the seat. Give people the options on how to proceed if they don’t. Part of the reason why these situations suck is that they are being treated subjectively–let’s make it objective. If you don’t fit, you don’t fit, and here are your options. (Along those lines, let’s skip the safety brochure reading at the beginning of flights and not allow anyone on the plane who needs assistance figuring out how the seatbelts work.)

2. Offer a more roomier seat selection at 50%-100% markup. No extra services other than a better seat. Allow coach seats to upgrade into it a la business class, minus the macadamia nut cookie.

3. Treat someone like a human for once and not like cattle. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been reminded by flight attendants that they are going out of their way to bring me a glass of water.

I can’t wait to see if the US can finally pull off high-speed train travel. I’d stop flying to areas the train system covers in a heartbeat.

P.S. Looks like Kevin is not the only one to have this sort of situation.

P.P.S. Southwest has issued a reasonable response. That’s nice to see.

P.P.P.S. The Chicago Sun-Times editorializes against Kevin’s position, and the readers let them have it.

As a kid I watched 80′s movies… I loved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Vacation and Better Off Dead. In high school I watched boy movies like Scarface, Bloodsport and the Godfather. I did take one film class, but wasn’t really focused, and as a result can’t name any of the movies I saw.

Then I fell in love with a film maker in @ShayWade, had a wonderful son KidWonder, and am now a big homebody. About 9 months ago we decided we wanted to watch some good movies, and looked around for some. So there’s many Top 100 lists: the American Film Institute has a 100 years, 100 films list published in 1998, revised in 2007. Its a pretty politically correct list and some people think it sucks. There’s the Netflix Top 100. There’s the IMDB Top 250. We decided we would borrow from each of these lists, and allow ourselves to watch other movies as they came up. Here’s what we’ve seen so far:

Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Murder on the Orient Express, Cool Hand Luke, Lawrence of Arabia, North by Northwest, The Graduate, Gone With the Wind, On the Waterfront, 7 Samurai, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, The Searchers, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Inglorious Basterds, Shaft, The Mack, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Apocalypse Now Redux, The Deer Hunter, Dirty Harry, Live and Let Die, Dark Knight, Guys and Dolls, Singin’ in the Rain, Witness, Heathers, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Munich, Slumdog Millionaire, Network, Taken, The Notebook, Sideways, Lost in Translation, Blade Runner, Tyson, Witness, There Will Be Blood, Iron Man, El Mariachi, Desperado, Land of the Lost, Let the Right On In, The Big Sleep, Charade, Born Yesterday, How to Marry a Millionaire, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Big Lebowski, Sunshine Cleaning, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pulp Fiction, Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Yes, a mouthful. So, what do I think about these movies? They are awesome. Pretty much all of them. Every time I think I like one genre over another, I see a new movie and realize that I’m attracted to passionate characters and stories that answer the big questions they pose, not a particular genre. The scenes don’t have to have a chronological order (I love Memento, Pulp Fiction), but the story should fit together at the end. I like twists, and I end up talking to the screen to try to work out how the twist will unfold. I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything I’ve seen by Tarantino, Kubrick and Hitchcock.

I find that I normally side with Roger Ebert’s reviews in terms of the emotional impact films have on me, and BTW, if you aren’t following him here and here and you like movies, you should. I’m no movie buff–I’m not the guy you want to talk camera angles and equipment terminology with.

I love the stories, and love to talk movie trivia. I’m fascinated now with just how much control movie studios and agents had on movies in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Thanks to the the IMDB iPhone app (iTunes link), which has an easy to find “Trivia” button, I can read movie gossip 60 years later.

I’m also absolutely loving the Netflix Instant Streaming service. At our house, we use a PS3 and the Netflix instant stream disc and our existing WiFi network and can watch (normally) an uninterrupted, high quality video stream, as well as playing Blu-Ray discs sent to us by Netflix.

I guess that’s it for now. We have a few movies at home right now to choose from: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Spirit, and 300. To all movie buffs out there–what is the one movie we should see?

If you are thinking about being a programmer, pick any interview from this book and read it. If, after reading it, you aren’t excited about programming, then just stop. This is the best book I’ve ever read that gets inside the mind of a great programmer. True greats, the pioneers of computer science and industry achievement.

The interviewer, Peter Siebel, does a remarkable job hanging with these giants of programming. Siebel is able to inject himself to probe when necessary, able to ask a few stock questions without it feeling overly rehearsed, and then get out of the way to let these folks talk.

I learned things about programming that I had previously under appreciated, such as the usefulness of monads and closures. I found the interviewees to be extremely candid, with profound answers to such questions as “do you think programming is a young person’s game” (with a variety of answers) and “do you think of yourself as a craftsman, engineer, scientist or artist?”

A few attitudes shared by most if not all interviewed:

• C++ is not a good choice of language
• There is no silver bullet for debugging or reading code written by others
• Using puzzles in technical interviews is not the best way to determine who to hire
• Don Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Science” is tough to get through (even for Don himself!)
• Get something easy working first before you optimize it

I really enjoyed reading Doug Crockford (of Atari, Lucasfilm, Yahoo and JSON fame) talk about JavaScript. I enjoyed hearing Dan Ingalls (implementer of several versions of Smalltalk) talk about teaching a new programmer by tapping into their inner passions, vs. teaching programming for its own sake. I particularly enjoyed reading the Guy Steele interview. Guy, co-creator of Common Lisp and Scheme, talks about magic and programming (pp360-361):

“I think it’s not an accident that we often use the imagery of magic to describe programming. We speak of computing wizards and we think of things happening by magic or automagically. And I think that’s because being able to get a machine to do what you want is the closest thing we’ve got in technology to adolescent wish-fulfillment.”

Reading this book helped to recreate the magic of programming for me. I would recommend it to any programmer, old or new. You don’t have to read it all straight through either… feel free to pick and choose, without fear of losing context. You can read the introductions to each interview here.

First off, I’ve been a pretty loyal Apple consumer since 2001. I used the Apple IIC machines in school, Windows then Linux machines through the 90′s, then came back to the light. I’ve purchased a PowerMac, a Mac Pro, 3 iMacs (one for me), several iPods, an iPhone and now an iPhone 3GS. You could say I’ve drunk the Koolaid–I prefer cherry with lots of sugar.

However, the service I’m seeing these days in the Apple retail stores is not what I would call exemplary. I think there are some good eggs in the Genius bar (one guy did a decent job on a HD problem my wife was having), however that goodness is eventually canceled out.

Here are three things I saw today during a trip to my local Apple store that you shouldn’t do when in retail:

1. Have no discernible cash register, then flub the process once someone miraculously finds it: I ended up behind a service customer, then was offered to make my purchase of an iPhone cover while standing in line behind the person, which was then mixed up, and confusion then ensued with it being unclear whether or not I was being double charged. All magically while still being aloof about the process. Note to Apple: Some of us have worked retail before and can manage to charge someone for something without passing out. You are over thinking the problem!

2. Irrational computer advice: I happened to be standing behind someone who advised a woman with a MacBook that to protect her laptop’s HD she shouldn’t move around with the computer while it is on. O RLY? Don’t move around with your laptop on? This was definitely a case that reminded me of CompUSA (R.I.P.), where salesmen would talk about “drive heads” and “platters” of the hard disk so that customers wouldn’t ask any actual questions. Reminds me of the time that I could not get a single person at CompUSA to confirm if they had ANY Linux-compatible modems. Note to Apple: We get it, you are smart. Don’t try make us feel dumb, especially when you are just spewing BS.

3. Making fun of customers: I must have missed the part in retail training where insulting customers makes them buy more product. I saw a sales rep tell a teenage boy that the computer he was considering buying was “for girls”. “Oh yeah”, he said, “I’ve seen a bunch of girls come in and buy this model”. Brilliant.

To sum up: I like Apple products. I like Apple’s online store. I’ve even signed up to be a part of Apple’s iPhone Developer Program (and my wallet is now lighter thanks to that). However, I don’t like your Apple retail stores. Everything costs more, and your “Geniuses” aren’t hitting the bar. Or maybe they should? It might knock them down a peg, closer to earth.

I love apple picking. It was a yearly tradition growing up in central Massachusetts–picking, drinking of mulled cider, pumpkin carving and merriment. I just had the privilege of living that feeling vicariously through KidWonder last weekend, while visiting family. We went to Doe Orchards in Harvard, MA, my childhood haunt. Here are some pics, and don’t miss the video toward the bottom!

The trees:

The tools:

The catch:

Enjoying the fruits of his labor:

Here is KidWonder in action:

And finally, walking off, stage left, with his Pa: