Jen and I quickly changed and got ready for a night out on the town. Most things in Doha are closed till 6 because of ramadan, so we had some time to plan. We decided on Dean and Deluca and then off to a movie. Jen and I shared a goat cheese and pear panini sandwich and we each had a salad (very weight watcher friendly I might add) I had an americano and she had her tea.

Dinner was great. reasonable service, good conversation, great food. for those who are wondering, Villagio has awesome bathrooms too. hey… it’s important.

following dinner we went over to the cinema and watched the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie – Inception. Everybody and their brother have already seen it so the cinema was fairly empty. all in all, a great night.

Oh. one more thing, the kids are out again tonight! a prearranged sleep over means they are out 2 nights in a row and we are like teenagers again… Just waiting for the restaurants to open and we are taking in a sushi feast!

World Of Technology: Complicated Mechanisms Explained in simple animations.

One of the coolest things was the release of baby hawksbill sea turtles.

We went up to one of the beaches north of Doha where the government is organizing turtle protection activities for the state of Qatar.  Apparently the project is very successful and they are finding the transmitters that have been attached to the turtles in places from Cairo to Indonesia. Quite the swim if you ask me.

anyways, the pics.

Daniel is showing off his little dude.

And Thomas doing the same

Bit of a closeup

Thomas loved watching them go into the water, he was a big helper

Just after this was taken, Daniel jumped cause if you look closely you can see a turtle crawling over daniels foot… Scared the big man…

Jen and I planned a super cool birthday for our little man. Thomas has always loved Dinosaurs, animals and trucks. Anything bigger than Mom and Dad is cool. For his 5th birthday this year, we rented a stretched hummer and picked up all his friends and took them for a little tour of Doha.  I will get the video uploaded and post it separately. Take a look:

K. I really like this one:

We woke Daniel up at 430 this morning to take him fishing… “This is the best day EVER!!!”  he said!

They didn’t catch anything, but the guy beside them catch a stingray and Daniel had to use his net to help him “bring it in”.

Awesome start to a birthday I’d say.

-jen

UPDATE

Daniel had a great dinner of – his choice- wieners and beans. the boys and I played basketball- soccer outside and opened presents before crashing after a long day at 7:30.

Thanks to everyone who called and to all the well wishers.

Happy birthday big man.

To: 0xdeadbeef@petting-zoo.net
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email.
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 14:57:40 -0800

Here’s a problem that *sounded* impossible… I almost regret posting
the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over
drinks at a conference. The story is slightly altered in order to
protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and
generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago
when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. “Come again?”

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated.
“A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”

“Um… Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,” I said, trying
to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn’t display panic when
speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished
department like statistics. “What makes you think you can’t send mail
more than 500 miles?”

“It’s not what I *think*,” the chairman replied testily. “You see,
when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago–”

“You waited a few DAYS?” I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice.
“And you couldn’t send email this whole time?”

“We could send email. Just not more than–”

“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that. But why didn’t
you call earlier?”

“Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now.” Right. This is the chairman of
*statistics*. “Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look
into it–”

“Geostatisticians…”

“–yes, and she’s produced a map showing the radius within which we
can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number
of destinations within that radius that we can’t reach, either, or
reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius.”

“I see,” I said, and put my head in my hands. “When did this start?
A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at
that time?”

“Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it.
But I called him, and he said he didn’t touch the mail system.”

“Okay, let me take a look, and I’ll call you back,” I said, scarcely
believing that I was playing along. It wasn’t April Fool’s Day. I
tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.

I logged into their department’s server, and sent a few test mails.
This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail
to my own account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent
to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400
miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed.
Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and
started trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but
Providence (580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a
friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle.
Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the
geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I
would have broken down in tears.

Having established that — unbelievably — the problem as reported was
true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file. It
looked fairly normal. In fact, it looked familiar.

I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory. It hadn’t
been altered — it was a sendmail.cf I had written. And I was fairly
certain I hadn’t enabled the “FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES” option. At a
loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port. The server happily responded
with a SunOS sendmail banner.

Wait a minute… a SunOS sendmail banner? At the time, Sun was still
shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8
was fairly mature. Being a good system administrator, I had
standardized on Sendmail 8. And also being a good system
administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf that used the nice long
self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8
rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in
Sendmail 5.

The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the
dregs of my now-cold latte. When the consultant had “patched the
server,” he had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so
doing *downgraded* Sendmail. The upgrade helpfully left the
sendmail.cf alone, even though it was now the wrong version.

It so happens that Sendmail 5 — at least, the version that Sun
shipped, which had some tweaks — could deal with the Sendmail 8
sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained
unaltered. But the new long configuration options — those it saw as
junk, and skipped. And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled
in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the
sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to
the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this
particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a
connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
switched. An outgoing packet wouldn’t incur a router delay until
hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to
connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would
actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the
destination rather than by incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
* 558.84719
/ 0.0017893979

“500 miles, or a little bit more.”

Trey Harris

• When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.
• Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride.
• Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.
• Take naps.
• Stretch before rising.
• Run, romp, and play daily.
• Thrive on attention and let people touch you.
• Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.
• On warm days, stop to lie on your back on the grass.
• On hot days, drink lots of water and lie under a shady tree.
• When you’re happy, dance around and wag your entire body.
• Delight in the simple joy of a long walk.
• Be loyal.
• Never pretend to be something you’re not.
• If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.
• When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by, and nuzzle them gently.

Thanks for forwarding mom….

Daniel and Thomas got their report cards from the school yesterday. Thomas did fantastic and got a letter of congratulations from the school for his work. Daniel did great, but is struggling with some reading and organization. organization… apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Tomorrow we are going to Qatar Foundations weekend spring extravaganza. it will be the highlight of the slow weekend. bouncing around a soccer(foot ball) field with 4000 others. I’ll take pictures tomorrow to share.

thats all for now!

-r

we are celebrating Easter on Saturday this year. The day started with a big Easter egg hunt and will finish off with a giant Dinner. Jen is making 2 turkeys, some blunt nosed deer and all the trimmings to go with. As is usual, we invited a small army to help us process all this food. We asked people to bring something that is traditional from their families celebrations. This year we have South Africa, Newcastle, London, Ethiopia, south western USA, North eastern USA, and Canada present. It’s always interesting to see what shows up at the table.

For starters, Here’s how our morning started:

The Boys showing off their Easter Bunny Bags

The Easter Bunny Came!

The Egg Hunt Continues

Thomas, Grab that one!

Mom mentally prepares herself for the day

Thomas mentally prepares himself for the day.

Little bit of Arts and Crafts!

Perhaps a few too many photos?

This is as close to smiling as she gets.

and this time with bettter lighting!

Of course you need the camel pack when you are out for a 10 minute ride in the rain.  It’s important to keep hydrated when you live in the desert!!!

love

-jen

He didn’t take the mouth piece out of his mouth the whole time

Had to tie the straps up so he wouldn’t get then caught in the chain

Goof

Lovin’ the splashes.  Look at the speed….<grin>

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now,
from up and down, and still somehow,
it’s clouds illusions I recal.
I really don’t know clouds…at all.

Moons and Junes and ferris wheels, the dizzy dancing way you feel
as every fairy tale comes real; I’ve looked at love that way.
But now it’s just another show. You leave ‘em laughing when you go
and if you care, don’t let them know, don’t give yourself away.

I’ve looked at love from both sides now,
from give and take, and still somehow
it’s love’s illusions I recall.
I really don’t know love at all.

Tears and fears and feeling proud, to say “I love you” right out loud,
dreams and schemes and circus crowds, I’ve looked at life that way.
But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads,
they say I’ve changed.
Something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day.

I’ve looked at life from both sides now,
from win and lose, and still somehow
it’s life’s illusions I recall.
I really don’t know life at all.

Really quite beautiful lyrics.

Jen will get upset for me posting geeky things on here… but this is just TOO COOL!

At the rear, the machine carries the milk-dispensing equipment as well as a built-in flyswatter and insect repeller. The central portion houses a hydro- chemical-conversion unit. Briefly, this consists of four fermentation and storage tanks connected in series by an intricate network of flexible plumbing. This assembly also contains the central heating plant complete with automatic temperature controls, pumping station and main ventilating system. The waste disposal apparatus is located to the rear of this central section.

Cows are available fully assembled in an assortment of sizes and colors. Production output ranges from 2 to 20 tons of milk per year. In brief, the main external visible features of the cow are: two lookers, two hookers, four stander-uppers, four hanger-downers, and a swishy-wishy.

First we were playing around in the bushes

Then we dared venture towards the animals.

Thomas, as you can see, was a little afraid. Ryan was NOT

Come on… He’s cute.

Ryan didn’t actually loose his arm.

Daniel takes a turn

And the baby… cause babies are cute.

It was a great afternoon. Thanks to Cam for showing us the way, and Doug for a few extra kids and some great geeky conversation!

Not much.

But from the bottom

and as you descend …

The boys were making sand angels.

Isn’t Jen Purdy?

it’s pretty cool!

Cheeseburgers.

The year, 1993. The place, Bracebridge Ontario. The setting, a small cottage town full of tourists and city people trying to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Ryan has always been a big eater. When he was 15 he would regularly eat through an entire pack of 12 hotdogs for lunch. It was during his summer job working at Bangor lodge that he set his sights on the Guinness book for world records. Ryan heard that the world record for cheeseburger eating was 32 standard McDonalds cheeseburgers. Armed with an empty stomach and 100 dollars, he bravely marched into the local Golden arches. After a brief discussion with the manager, Ryan and he agreed that as a test, Ryan would pay for 10 cheeseburgers, and the restaurant would keep making more for free until Ryan stopped eating. We got through 10. Then ate 15. Then passed the 20 mark. Ryan was so full… 21, then 22, 23 cheese burgers were packed away…. 24, couldn’t go on any more. But only 8 away. 25, 26. Only 6 more. Cant do it. Too full… 27.

Ryan ate 28 cheeseburgers in a sitting. He didn’t hit the mark, but for years after, when he went into that store, he was welcomed with “Hey, aren’t you the cheeseburger guy?”

The Kite:

Daniel learned to walk very quickly. He was 14 months old when he started to run. Mom and Dad wanted to encourage him to spend time outside so we went to the store and bought him a new Kite. Daniel’s eyes widened when he saw his beautiful new shark kite. It was shiny and black, with a long tail, and a special handle to unwind the string. We went to the park. The wind was a nice slow breeze. He was so excited. Daniel had never seen a kite fly before, so we told him that this was going to be very special. We unwound the string, and dad held the kite. Mom was with Daniel and we said 1, 2, 3 Go!

Dad threw the kite up into the air and it crashed spectacularly into the ground. Daniel kept running. The kite was dragging around the grass, and Daniel was laughing and thinking this was an amazing gift. Daniel didn’t know that kites were supposed to go up. Dad knew. The next day dad went and got a kite that worked, and Daniel finally understood how kites were supposed to behave. Mom and dad still remember Daniel’s first experience with kites.

Caught!

It was late in the evening. Ryan was returning to his friend’s house to visit. Unfortunately, 3 in the morning is a time when most people are supposed to be sleeping. Ryan didn’t care, he wanted to see his friend. Ryan was out running in the woods earlier on that day and found a beautiful columbine flower that he dug up and planted for his friend. So he grabbed the ladder and marched over to his friend’s house. He placed the ladder up against the house, and climbed up onto the roof.

Jennifer, like all good teenagers was asleep in her bed. Her mom, however wasn’t. Barb(Daniel’s Grandma) was very energy conscious. She did not like to waste anything. This particular evening, she had all the windows in the house open, letting the cool night breeze through the house. However, as the night drew on, the temperature started to rise. It rose so much that Barb decided to get up and turn the air conditioning on. Barb had closed all the windows in the house except for Jen’s when Ryan appeared at the window. She opened the door to Jen’s room, and saw Ryan sitting there with a plant in hand, on the second story roof.

Jen woke up to her mom, turning on the light, questioning Ryan as to why he was on the roof, at 3 in the morning, while her daughter was sleeping, and why he had this little plant in his hand. Ryan sheepishly climbed down, and went home, Jen went back to bed and Barb returned to her bedroom… All were a little surprised with what that evening had brought.

The next morning, Jen found the plant at her window.

On the 18th December every year, we celebrate our National Day to commemorate that historical day in 1878 when Shaikh Jasim, the founder of the state, succeeded his father Sheikh Mohammed Bin Thani in leading the country towards unity and foundation.
Born in 1242 h (1826 c), Sheikh Jasim was raised in Fowayret, north Qatar within the confines of his famous father Shaikh Mohammed Bin Thani. He was educated by religious clerks, learning the Qura’an, Shariaa and jurisprudence, along with equestrian, hunting and literature. Shaikh Jasim also shared his father in ruling the country.

Qatar had a huge number of events scheduled for it’s national holiday. We opted to attend the parade, and the fireworks show.

The parade was super crowded and was largely a military affair. Lots of trucks, tanks, fire trucks, quad bikes, a selection of navy craft, jets helicopters, troop carriers etc. Getting to the parade proved challenging – Traffic. what is normally a 15 minute drive took us just under an hour, and we had to walk the last half…

You can tell from the photograps below that we didn’t have the best vantage point.

The boys enjoyed rolling down the hill more than the parade…

Music was cool, dancing – even better.

Thomas did at least see some of the parade…

Just a cute kid.

The airshow was by far the schellenberg boy favourite. Jen liked the creative uses of the Qatari flag used in a lot of the kids garments…

The other event we attended was the fireworks show. We took lots of time, and planned to have dinner on the corniche (where the event was to happen) We arrived in the area at 5, for an 8pm show. We ate supper at fudruckers, then walked across the (crazy) traffic and to the water.  

We found a seat where we would have a good view of the show and sat and waited… 7:30, we were ready.

Qatar doesn’t have a good history of being all that punctual. I swear it was 8:01 when the fireworks started, and start they did.

First it was subtle, lighting what looked like small flares and encircling the various “stages” with fire. Then about a minute later, the music wa splaying and the show started.

I can’t explain what a few million dollars fo fire works looks like. but for about 18 minutes, this is what it looked like:

It was a great show. Thanks to the organizing committee, you outdid yourselves.

Here we are just entering the old Souk area

We got there early on a friday, time to look around and not get trampled… We were returning for dinner later that evening, so there was time to see the crowds too

We actually ended up eating here. I forget the name of the restaurant. I’ll update it later when I remember it. It was the arabic one.

Not the best picture of Thomas. Still cool seeing John Deere in Doha

They renovated the souks a number of years ago to make them look more authentic. With the exception of the HaagenDaz sign, I think they did an awesome job.

Here’s Scot and Jen Talking about something to their left, your right. And yes, Jen loves her geek.

Carved wooden camel… Thought it looked cool.

I a pretty sure this is when Scot put his sales man hat on and was trying to convince Jen that the schellenbergs needed the new nikon d3.

The boys weren’t quite sure what those Orange diver submarine transport things are… Scot to the rescue!

Window Shopping

Carnagee Melon university in Doha

Scot and Casey were fascinated that Filtrine were installed here… That guy knows A LOT about water fountains. Remarkable what you take for granted.

The green spine. Trying a group decision on  a wood or an iron.

Daniel was showing us how fast he can be

Thomas was not about to be outdone.

Parenting Doha Style.

Everyone takes turns

Flying Boats!

They were more interested in the crabs and snails than the rocket boats…

Here’s pics.

Brazil Kickin the ball(they won 1-0)

England stoping the ball…(They lost)

Jen gave Richard  a Britain flag on his head… didn’t turn out too well though.

Qatar centre spreads moderate Islam, dialogue | Lifestyle | Reuters.

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the Grep will remove the comments and Sed will kill the blanks. All you are left with is config goodness.