Happy birthday, Gavin, from an old geek to a new one

My oldest son, Gavin, loves science and technology. His love is not just at a "video games are cool" or "I want an iPod because everyone else has one" level. It's much deeper, almost like just needing to know how the world works — by what rules does the Universe play, and how can we use our creativity to bend them? While his overactive imagination can sometimes be a source of conflict in the home (or in the restaurant, or church, or public restroom, or …), his mother and I do recognize the beauty of it.

Gavin turns eight years old in … well, in about two hours from now, technically. I was trying to think of something special I could do for him, when it occurred to me to use one of his favorite toys/tools — Lego® blocks — to create a portrait of him. At a design level, this isn't really so challenging. I mean, it only took moments to load up a recent photo of him into the GIMP, shrink it, posterize it, replace its palette with one based around primary colors, etc.

The result was a blocky image with Lego-ish colors whose aspect ratio had been adjusted to account for the fact that a 1x1 Lego block isn't square, but instead roughly 3:4:

No, the difficult part was in actually building the thing! Okay, not difficult so much as tedious. And of course, I failed to inventory my available blocks before starting, so it was on a wing and a prayer that the hours-long activity began. But in the end, every piece planned was in place (minus some black shadow blocks on the bottom I decided to omit), and the work was complete. I had a roughly 14" x 18" image of my son, made out of plastic, to present to him tomorrow as a surprise.

In our home, soccer is a staple (or, "Seeing God even when it hurts")

[WARNING: Images that some might find disturbing follow.]

I had a great time last week in Berlin for Elego's Subversion Day event. I really like that city anyway, but to be able to hang out and code with so many of my fellow Subversion developers was just plain fun. Of course, the best part about any trip I take away from my family is when the trip is over. Well before my plane landed in Charlotte on Friday afternoon, I was already looking ahead: Saturday would bring my youngest son's soccer match as well as my own; Sunday held church and a church-wide picnic at a local park; and Monday was my oldest son's piano recital.

The first of those events was far more enjoyable than I even foresaw. My 5- and 6-year-old Comets played better than ever! Every last one of them was hungry for the ball, and it showed. They won their match 2-0, with my son scoring the first of the two goals. We had some time between that match and my own, so we celebrated with my friend and assistant coach Paul and his family at an area Japanese steakhouse. (Paul's son scored the other of the goals!) We've tried and failed to get together with this family several times recently, so it was nice to finally align schedules and enjoy the shared meal.

Now, my match was scheduled to begin at 8:30pm. Ordinarily, my wife and kids would not attend such a late match, as waking everyone up for church on Sunday morning is quite hard enough without us having the kids out at such late hours! But Paul's family was interested in taking in the match themselves, so my family opted to join them. It's always more enjoyable to play a sport when you have friends and family cheering for you, so this was a pleasant development. But it was at this point that the weekend took a turn for the unpleasant.

I play a central defender role for my team, and was more or less responsible for our opponents getting on the scoreboard first when I failed to intercept their striker's approach and ultimate shot. But then, a few minutes before half-time, it all got worse. Much worse. We conceded a corner kick to the other team, and when the kick came in, it came directly to me. I knew what was required: I had to head the ball away from frame and protect the goal. I did my job quite well this time. But unfortunately, our opponent's striker also went up for the header from behind me, and his eyebrow smashed into the back of my head. I didn't realize I was even injured. Someone said they saw blood, and I assumed it was that of the other guy. But as I turned to look, I felt that nasty warmth pouring down my face.

My team acted quickly to supply gauze and ice packs and even an unused jersey to mop up the mess that was pouring from my head. I wasn't lightheaded or suffering from a concussion — just gushing blood. The local urgent care centers were already closed for the night, so a half-hour later, I was in the emergency room. My wife Amy was with me, as was Paul, since neither Amy nor I was in any sort of shape to drive. My sons were with Paul's wife until Amy's parents could pick them up. Finally, four hours after the incident, I emerged with new hardware: six staples in the head.

Some would look at this event and see tragedy. My oldest son saw something worse: I had asked him to pray for my safety before the match, and he'd forgotten to do so. And I confess that there are times when a bit of anger at the other team's striker wells up inside me. But even as it was all unfolding, I have no choice but to see God's protection and an opportunity to give Him glory. My wife should have been home with our sleeping children, but she wasn't — she was with me. Paul should have been elsewhere (after all, he'd never been able to come to any other of my matches), but he wasn't — he was with me. Statistically speaking, you should have been reading some other web page instead of this blog post, but you aren't — you figure it out.

Oh! As for the rest of the weekend: I gratefully helped to lead worship at church as usual (on just a few hours of rest), the picnic was a ton of fun (minus one admittedly frightening moment when a wooden boomerang managed to find its misguided way into my shoulder blades), and I look forward to my son's recital less than two hours from now.

As for me and soccer? Well, we're going to have to slow our relationship down a bit over the next few weeks. But I look forward to stepping out onto the pitch again for the Fall season.

UPDATE (2011/05/24): My oldest son's piano recital went great! Both of my sons are goal-achieving winners!

Soccer logos for the big kids

In the past several months, I've been given the opportunity to whip up another pair of logos for area soccer folk.

The first was for the adult football club-in-the-large in my town (Harrisburg, NC, USA). I was tasked with putting something together that was stylistically similar to the logo for the popular Premiere League team Arsenal, but with green and gold colors. Originally, I was asked to incorporate a train image into the design (symbolic of our town's history as a stop along an old railroad route), but that didn't work out too well. I was able to salvage from those efforts the shield backdrop, but decided to replace the train with the somewhat-popular player-in-action silhouette (modeled after some stock photo shots of real players doing cool stuff). The result was accepted by those who commissioned it:

You might wonder about the white star on the design. As it turns out, Cabarrus County (in which Harrisburg sits) is roughly triangular in shape. So I added the star to represent Harrisburg's general location in that triangle, using the "swoosh" of the ball and the shield edges to form the triangle itself in the logo. Oooh... mysterious...

The second logo was for the adult soccer team I play on, the Orange Crush. I really had no ideas on where to take this one, so the team captain whipped out some rough sketches of what he had in mind when he asked for the design:

I implemented the ideas, with some minor modifications, and we were good to go:

It simply wouldn't do to not thank Israel Curiel, Rachael Curiel, and David Karpey for their creative input into these designs. So, thanks, guys!

DiscipleNow 2011

This past weekend, our church (Providence Baptist Church) hosted DiscipleNow, the Youth Ministry's annual "retreat you don't leave town for", and the biggest event in their calendar. Each year, a bunch of teenagers get divvied up by gender and age and spend the weekend sleeping in host homes (typically, the homes of other church members), sharing in small group studies with college leaders, and then worshiping all together back in the church's youth building. There's a guest speaker, a guest worship band, member-provided meals — everything you'd expect from a youth retreat, minus the long drive in a cramped van that smells like teenagers.

Like last year, I was asked to help design event T-shirts. I met with Minister to Students Paul Batson over hamburgers to brainstorm ideas. The theme for the event was to be "Pause", covering how life can get so busy with all the activities that consume our days and nights that often we fail to notice and acknowledge God. Sometimes, we just need to pause a bit and focus on the Eternal rather than merely on the immediate.

Now, I'm big on the idea of making shirts that are conversation points. In my experience, you don't get much conversation by wearing a giant "I'm a Christian" banner across your back. Oh, people will be talking, all right, but just about you, not so much to you. Still, we wanted to include something in the shirt that illustrated not just the noise of life and need to pause, but also the "punchline" of the event's theme. Paul brought to the table the idea of using the universal pause symbol — two side-by-side vertical bars — with perhaps some words scattered around them to represent those distracting activities. And we had a stylized text "Pause" logo to work with, provided by the publishers of the study. But we were still trying to find a way to make the God connection in the design.

Then, inspiration hit. I was thinking about slowing down, pausing, relaxing, growing silent, blocking out noise … these things led me to picture turning off the lights and just enjoying the stillness of a perfect night. And in that stillness, that's where we see God. And that was the a-ha moment! See, I use Contagious Graphics for my screen printing, and every October they start pushing their glow-in-the-dark ink. I'd never used that ink for a shirt project before, but here was the perfect chance to do so. What if we could design a shirt that showed God — literally — when the lights were off?

The result was a design printed on cardinal red shirts, with a constant stream of "distraction words" broken up only so that the negative space could reveal the pause symbol:

But what you don't see in the light is that certain of the letters of those "distraction words" are printed with glow-in-the-dark ink, so that when the lights go out, God is revealed:

The final product turned out great! And better yet, Paul didn't tell the teenagers that the shirt had this feature until Sunday morning when many of them were standing at the front of the church serving as an adhoc choir. It was fun to watch the wave of surprise wash over them when this little detail was revealed!

Here are some photos (taken by Chuck Shoupe) of folks wearing the shirts on DiscipleNow 2011 Sunday:

Adhoc Youth choir

Amy sings out, with Carson on the bass (Paul's the bald fellow on the right)

Mike and Nick play guitar

NOTE: The stylized "PAUSE" text in the shirt design was modeled after the logo of the Orange XP3 "Pause" curriculum used for the event, with permission (obtained by Paul) from the publishers. Thanks, Orange!

Out of a job. Kinda. (And thankful!)

In 2006, CollabNet, Inc. helped the committership of the Subversion open source project organize and incorporate for the purposes of having a legal entity tasked with protecting that software, its intellectual property, the solidity of its brand, and its general well-being. I was elected as one of the first Directors of the newly formed Subversion Corporation, and served as its Treasurer for the entirety of the Corporation's existence. Today, I can speak in the past tense about that existence because…

Subversion Corporation is dead!

Now that Subversion — I mean, Apache™ Subversion® — is wrapped up in the loving and protective arms of the Apache Software Foundation, there was nothing for the Subversion Corporation to do anyway. So the membership voted to dissolve the corporation, and for the past ten months I've been working with my fellow Directors and the fine lawyerly folks at the Software Freedom Law Center to do exactly that.

So, I guess I'm out of a job now. Or, at least, that job. I'm grateful that the Subversion developer community trusted me with the position I uniquely held for the past four years. But honestly, if the opportunity to do it again came 'round, I think I'd have to decline. I'd much rather be coding.

Long live Subversion! Long live the Apache Software Foundation!

"Sita Sings the Blues" comes to Cabarrus County

I was pleasantly surprised when I read the latest edition of In & Around Harrisburg (Issue No. 15, Jan. 13-27, 2011) and spotted a listing for an upcoming showing of Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues at the Davis Theatre in Concord, NC.

Why "pleasantly surprised"? It's not simply that this film is beautifully done, with all the bright colors of Indian culture vividly parading across the screen at a dazzling pace. It's not even just the hilarious, almost Monty-Python-esque narrators' dialogue. Nor is it the incredible soundtrack of Annette Hanshaw's 1920's-era tunes. Let's forget for a second that the story itself is a lovely one and is told here in a lovely way. I'm intrigued by the story behind the story.

Now, you can read for yourself the film's crazy history at the film's official website, http://sitasingstheblues.com. But the synopsis runs something like this: girl has cool, creative film vision; girl creates film to match her vision; girl runs smack dab into the ugly copyright culture's prohibitive approach to … everything; girl goes into more debt to get legally upright; girl then does something completely unorthodox — she gives her work away for free. Oh, and girl and film are arguably more popular now than they likely ever would have been under traditional distribution models.

As someone who makes his living writing (for the most part) free software — that is, software which itself costs nothing and for which the original source can be readily acquired and used and modified and redistributed by anyone who wants it — I constantly see the benefits of this permissive, sharing-oriented mindset. But it's been interesting to learn of Paley's own growing awareness, ultimate adoption, and now outright evangelism around the same permissive distribution model as applied to audiovisual works of art.

So if you find yourself looking for entertainment that's both fun and culturally educational (Sita… is a retelling of the epic Indian Ramayana tale), consider checking out this free showing of the film on January 20. For details, see the official showing information page at http://cabarrusartscouncil.org/news/?p=355. [Parents: It's been a few months since I saw the film, but I seem to recall that it had some elements that, in my family, at least, would earn it a PG-13 rating.]

Merry Christmas, CollabNet

This holiday season, with so much reduced staffing, reduced scheduling, and outright unemployment in the workplace, I find myself especially thankful to have a job. And not just any job, but a job I genuinely enjoy. (Who wouldn't enjoy a job where you get to work — from home, even — on awesome free software such as Subversion?!) I've made some of my dearest friends and experienced some of my favorite moments through this job. That's just cool.

But as I reflect on the season — on the birth of Christ, on goodwill and peace on earth, and so on — I'm especially thankful for a job at a company that doesn't embarrass me. I don't find myself wrestling with my own conscience as I accept that paycheck. Sure, there have been times when I questioned certain methods or approaches, but (as I told my immediate supervisor this morning, actually) I've always been permitted to do so freely, always found my management chain very receptive to my input, and always found that — at least in the interactions I've been privy to — behaving honorably was the desired goal even when doing so might cost us a sales lead or a nice press release opportunity. As society ages and the almighty dollar continues to amass worshipers, I suspect that it is becoming increasingly more difficult for employees to say nice things about their employers (with a straight face, at least).

So thank you, CollabNet, for providing me the luxury of not just a great job, but one which doesn't force me to make ethical compromises. I don't know what the future holds for our relationship, but my family and I are grateful for the ride thus far.