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ava and i constructed some people out of playdough, and decorated them with buttons. most of the body parts were assembled by mommy - excepting the amusing bits between their legs. i'm not sure what's worse - what they look like - or what ava intended them to be. we all know what they look like . . . but when ava placed them there she declared them to be "poopies".

today, right after nap time ava started throwing up her lunch. she cheered up immediately afterward, so i optimistically assumed that it was a one-time episode and took her to the park to hang out with grandpa. not so. after dinner - same performance. this time she didn't cheer up, and instead collapsed on the couch to watch some little bear. there are several amusing things about these photos

1. notice that she's wearing her shoes. while i tried to strip off her puked soaked clothes and contain the mess - ava went straight into a tantrum about not having her shoes on.
2. this is the first time i have EVER seen ava lying down for more than 5 seconds, except when she's falling asleep. this is also the first time i've ever seen her lie on her stomach.
3. anybody else think the bottom pics look like shiloh jolie pitt? it's not a resemblance i typically see (at all) - it's something about the way the couch is squishing ava's mouth.

today is one of the few days of this summer that ava and i were supposed to be in thunder bay. we've had an appointment for a visit to loon lake marked on our calendar for at least six months - and today was the day! this was ava's first chance to meet lucy and izze, daughter's of my friends joan and jill. conveniently, this date was set to coincide with the pinnacle of baby cuteness. lucy is 9 months old and izze is 10 months old - don't blink 'cause they'll be toddlers in two days. today though, they are adorable little chubby-legged, babbling babies.

joan started the day off in style by unveiling the matching sundresses she'd made for all the girls. smart gal that she is, she'd noticed that i take a lot of pictures with ava wearing green, and chose ava's fabric accordingly. we tried to get the girls to pose for a formal portrait, but lucy was none too pleased about sitting on damp grass, and ava just wasn't interested in entering the frame of the picture - period. the closest we got was this

the formal portrait location was close to the lake, and as soon as ava caught a glimpse she insisted on taking off all her clothes. the little ones soon followed. i then proceded to take an awful lot of pictures of babies in their birthday suits. lots more pics here

ever since arriving in thunder bay, ava has been on a miraculous good behavior streak. there have only been two exceptions to her default angelic behavior

1. she's been quite the screamer at bedtime.
2. she's become a control freak in the car

ava has always been a fan of (ridiculously lame kids) music in the car. it didn't take long after her first word for her to start piping up "music! music!" from the back seat. in the last few days though, she's crossed another milestone - now she demands specific songs. this is fine - as long as i know what's she's talking about. i've figured out what she means by "baby music" and "tick tock! tick tock!" - but a few other requests have left me sorely baffled ("ducky music!" "girl music!"). and if i can't come up with the right track in 15 seconds or less, there is a terrible meltdown in the back seat.

having figured out that she can (remotely) control the cd player, ava is now attempting to control the rest of the vehicular operation too. she has developed opinions on

1. whether or not the sun visor is up or down
2. at what speed the windshield wipers are wiping
3. who gets to hold the keys

this last item is particularly difficult to negotiate. i swear we had the following conversation today

• ava : my keys! my keys!
• cailin : i need the keys to drive the car. if i give you the keys we can't go anywhere.
• ava : i'll give them back!
• cailin : i can't give you the keys because the car will stop
• ava : stop! . . . a minute . . . stop!

today was ava's first full day at her new daycare. she has been adjusting to her new settings extremely well, but unsurprisingly she did not take a nap on her first full day. combined with a lengthy post-daycare visit to the hospital, and the poor little muffin was plain tuckered out. she kept trying to fall asleep on the car ride home and i kept tweaking her toes to keep her awake - she was so out of it she couldn't even scream in protest. by the time we got home, i felt bad for her, so we indulged in a very rare treat : dinner with ducky in front of the television.

unfortunately, ava's grandma is very ill. fortunately, she's getting better every day. to help her along the way, ava and i have unexpectedly relocated ourselves to thunder bay until the end of august. although the whole situation is obviously quite unfortunate, and we both miss daddy very much, there are few places as nice as thunder bay to be in late summer.

things i have appreciated about my home town (and the people in it) on this visit include :

1. local friends started calling me in san francisco with offers of assistance within an hour of me finding out that my mother was sick. (small town = efficient gossip network)
2. it took me all of 10 minutes with a phone book to locate a daycare for ava for the summer. added bonus : it's the nicest daycare i've ever dreamed of.
3. when ava and i arrived at grandma's house, there was a baby pool waiting for us on the back deck. (seriously, how cool is my mom's neighbour!)

in addition to serving as a grandma entertainment device, i've been trying to make sure that ava gets to spend some time experiencing summer the way it's meant to be enjoyed : naked and with water (if you're two that is!). ava's been having a grand old time romping around the backyard, blowing bubbles, hopping in and out of her pool and squishing the poor cat.

i'm currently working on re-engineering many of the development processes at digg. we're adopting a number of practices from the agile world that complement the type of development that we do. these practices include: build automation, automated deployment, daily scrums, short releasable time-boxed iterations, simple design, refactoring, and just-in-time specification.

we've decided to be agile about our adoption of our new agile processes, introducing them incrementally, measuring the results along the way and iterating as necessary.

as we worked through the cascading dependencies of our adoption path, it quickly became clear that automated testing had to be a cornerstone practice if we were going to make a success of the others.

recently i posted a couple of introductory articles on jmeter, a great apache open-source tool that allows you to measure the performance and scalability of a wide variety of services, especially web-applications.

i wrote these articles because although the online documentation provides reasonable reference material, it doesn't serve well as a jmeter introduction or tutorial.

things have changed a bit since then. the uk-based publishing house packt publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of emily halili's newly published book on jmeter, which is as far as i can tell, is the first book dedicated to the subject.

i have very few (okay, exactly one) direct friends with children who live in the bay area. however, the number of "one degree of separation" friends-of-friends who have children born within six months of ava is quite high. now that they are all mobile, talking and fun to hang around with, shannon, arantxa and i having been trying to organize some sort of multi-baby outing for awhile now. we finally succeeded today, taking a trip to the discovery museum with evan (five weeks younger than ava) and his mom kelley, and ronan (six weeks younger than ava).

ronan is the son of shannon's neighbours, and a last minute addition to the festivities. shannon wandered by her neighbours 5 minutes before departure and asked to borrow ronan for the morning. wise parents that they are, they responded "hell - yeah", packed him a diaper bag and buckled him in to kelly's car. ronan experienced such high anxiety about this situation that he drifted off to sleep for the drive over. when he woke up, he initially looked a little dazed and confused, but got more and more enthusiastic throughout the trip.

ava is typically very opinionated about where exactly she's going to go, so getting her to follow along with a group can be challenging. we did very well on this expedition though, by bribing her around with "crunchies". "crunchies" , in ava's world, means "snack food with a high fat and/or salt content that mean mommy won't give me very often. i have better luck with daddy." in this particular case, it meant an organic, baked and much healthier version of "cheetos" that kelley happened to bring along. ava was a big fan, and consequently was a docile little angel the whole morning. see full, annotated gallery here.

it was a typical fourth of july in san francisco. i awoke to the pitter patter of accumulated fog dripping off the trees. i expected this though, and had a fog-free adventure planned for ava and grandma. we started the outing with a visit to a lovely little neighborhood playground in belvedere. belvedere is a tiny little city on an island across the golden gate bridge with an entry level housing price of around $2.5 million dollars (i just got curious and looked that up). the trickle down effect of all that property tax revenue is a very nice playground with immaculately groomed lawns and playground-owned cars and kettler trikes scattered about for anybody to use. i think we might just come back.

after that we continued our journey north towards the sun, to the marin county fair. the big hit for ava was the "great american petting zoo", which featured some standard petting zoo characters like goats and sheep. and then some unexpected entries like a wallabee and a llama. we wandered around the rest of the barnyard, watched the chinese dragon dancers and then headed home for naptime. next year we'll come back and try out the rides!