Even when sitting in front of two PCs, if I have to take down a note, I always opt for a pen and paper. Upon further reflection, all the high tech doodads I’ve purchased to keep my life in check seem to fail because I keep relying on (terribly organized) notes.
Anyone else have this problem? Leave thoughts in the comments.
It was a good weekend. Aside from seeing our friends’ child’s baptism, Nora and I had some fun enjoying the nice weather, we managed to go food shopping first thing in the morning (where we successfully avoided long lines and short supply), and I installed this in my car:
The panel speaks for itself, I think. It’s a RCA video and audio adapter panel with a 110v plug port (currently not installed, but it’s a trivial installation).
Here’s how it looks after the install:
Good ole’ dremel. I had to cut through the dash to mount this.
The idea is as such: using that cable, I can connect my ipod classic to listen through the head unit and with the video port I can watch videos from my ipod on the overhead LCD which I haven’t installed yet (but I did wire – I simply need to actually install the thing). I will likely put a source selector box somewhere in the vehicle and and run patch cables to somewhere not as obvious.
I actually have a couple of things that can connect to that port, including my dingoo, my laptop, and my PSOne.
By the way, the cable I use for my ipod classic is a $6 cable from hong kong that connects to the 30 pin port on the bottom of the ipod, not the headphone jack. It sounds so very much better than the headphone jack – words cannot describe, it just has to be heard. It should work with all ipods and iphones/itouches not using 3.0 firmware. Totally worth the modification. Project blog entry should be forthcoming by week’s end.
I’m jaded. Non-stop watching of politics has me burnt out. I never got into the Obama fervor, and I’ve actually stopped watching the Daily Show because I’m just so sick of it (politics, not Jon Stewart). However, given how deeply the current events affect myself and my business, I need to have at least a basic daily understanding. Why, just this Monday, because of Senator Bunning’s obstructionism, doctors are taking a 20% paycut (twenty percent!) for all services rendered to Medicare and Tricare patients. These things creep up on you rather quickly.
That being said: secession. Rick Perry beat Kay Bailey Hutchinson in the GOP primary. KBH decided to drop her Senate race and then didn’t, allowing RP to label her a flip flopper. In the meantime, Rick Perry has more than once suggested secession from the U.S., and also rode a great deal of federal government hostility to the win.
The popular tea party candidate (whose name I’m forgetting) actually secured almost 20% of the vote. In essence, we’re talking about 70% of GOP primary voters had an anti-U.S., pro-Texas sentiment in this particular election.
Will Texas ever secede from the Union? Probably not, no. But, can anyone remember a time in recent memory where the country was this polarized? I blame the 24 hour news networks and constant feeds where this sort of demagoguery and frenzied battling has allowed federal employees to become something like rock stars; the crazier they are, the more adoration they get from their fanbase. Crazy is a relative word – obviously, and can be applied to each side of the aisle.
Speaking of which, Texas isn’t the only one with aspirations to secede.
Ever hear of the Republic of Cascadia? It’s a fascinating sort of movement / non-movement dating back to the 1800s that was first envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. Since then, the movement has been seemingly besieged by bad luck (you can read the wiki entry for details).
The basic gist is that it is a social movement: pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-social equality. Secession would require Oregon and Washington to leave the U.S. and the general Vancouver area to leave Canada.
It seems the Vancouver games have stoked the interest of the movement yet again. Will it falter this time, too? I imagine yes. Even so, it’s an interesting. It’d be a liberal mecca to rival even European countries. It’d have a top 20 world economy (and a top 10 if California took part). And it’s located in some of the beautiful land in North America.
I’m interested in your thoughts on the subject, so leave them in the comments.
I absolutely love the latest kids’ blog entry. I’m not sure why THIS particular entry moreso than others, but there it is. It could be that it was the first entry in a very long time that both Lisa and I worked on at once, the first that had a very clear theme, or because I left work early twice last week and spent more time than usual with the kids – and of course, it was a lot of fun. Probably a combination of all of the above.
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We’re watching season 3 of the Wire and we’re just about half way through it, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. It seems, so far, that this season is focused on the criminal aspect and the bumbling cops who can’t take them down. On the police side of things, it seems too much like ER or Chicago Hope. On the criminal side of things, the story is very interesting, though it took a turn for the ‘meh’ at the end of episode five.
Lisa hated season 2; it seems there’s a love hate relationship with that particular season across the interwebs. I’m still in love with it, only because the characters were brilliant. Frank Sobotka is one of the finest characters I’ve ever watched. His character evolved brilliantly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character as well defined as Sobotka. That being said, it looks like season 3 has zero relationship with the previous season, other than as excuse for where the major case squad came from (which presumably will last until the show ends).
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This is the year of the RPG. If you’re looking at statistics, I need to finish 8 games to get sixty percent. It may be all RPGs.
In other news, my xbox 360 appears to be close to death. I will of course attempt to mod and fix it if that happens. However, if it fails to work, I will be dumping my collection in the fastest way possible. It’s a shame – this is the year that all those great games seem to be coming out for the 360. Fortunately, I managed to grab Mass Effect 2 by trading in quite a few rare (but uninteresting) titles. I’d hate to have the 360 die now, it’s one of the very few games I’ve been looking forward to.
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Every year I get excited about working on the car. Maybe this will be the year? I did manage to completely sound deaden the car when Nora was a newborn. But with two kids?
On the flip side, there’s several hundreds of dollars of equipment I haven’t installed which is just collecting dust (and losing value). Maybe if I can’t swing installing it this year I should just sell it all off and be done with it.
Panzer Dragoon Orta (xbox)
What a stunning game. It’s a gorgeous and brutally hard shooter on rails by members of the same team who did the first few Panzer Dragoons. You get a 360 degree view around and almost 180 up and down. You have to be a fan of this niche genre to get into it, but boy once you do… wow.
The story is typical ‘weird Japan’ but with minimal dialogue (and really, it’s probably for the best); even so, it’s hard not to have even a slight emotional attachment with the dragon by the end. It offers a ton of replay value – you get the original Panzer Dragoon, ported from the Sega Saturn, plus side missions that extend the PD universe.
Once I finish a majority of my games, I’m going back to this one for a long while.
Sega GT 2002 (xbox)
It’s a racing game by Sega for the xbox which was intended to take on Gran Turismo 3. Graphically, it’s much prettier. Driving wise, it’s significantly more arcade like. Car selection wise, it’s limited. Fun wise? Far and away, tons of fun, with some caveats.
The game does require you to tune your cars (as compared to Forza, where the depth is limited by your imagination). In a race between tuned AI versus a non-tuned player, the AI wins every time. Further, you get to buy new AND used parts. The used parts are a crapshoot. A $1,000 turbo may last sixteen races or just one. Used tires may have a lot of tire wear already on them. And so on. Blowouts happen while you race, which was jarring the very first time it happened.
You can sell cars in this game, as with GT3, but in a manner different than any other racer I’ve played: you can sell them only one at a time, and you have to set the selling price. If you need to unload it quickly, you have to set it under market value. It could be weeks (in game time) before car sells.
I was scraping by with my broken down car when I learned you can sell cars for almost 2.5x their value. It takes longer, but once it sells, you’re set. I managed to a win Ford GT, and after selling that for $500K, I managed to buy several cars and outfit them with top of the line equipment. After that, the game was cake.
There’s no way to set the difficulty of the game. I raced one race in my favorite Lotus Elise, and noted that the car in the #1 position was an Acura NSX, so I backed out, thinking I can get a real challenge using an even faster car. Re-entered driving a GT50, and the #1 car was now a Subaru WRX.
The game has some serious flaws, but it was incredibly fun for the time it offered, which clocked around 10 hours to finish all the seasons.
The Conduit (Wii)
High Voltage Software set out to make a game as gorgeous as the 360 and PS3 counterparts. In some respects, they managed to do it. They made very pretty models and scenery. They forgot to make a full game.
Don’t get me wrong, it was fun. And it was short, which is good, because the game was brutally repetitive. Enter a room, clear out the Drudge. Rinse, repeat. Dialogue and voice acting was largely horrible. Kevin Sorbo does most of the voice acting, which is good, because he’s the only bearable one. But his lines, at time, were horribly cliched.
And the ending was lousy – a sequel/to be continued ending. No closure. No ‘job well done’. None of that. You clear out a room of drudge, enter a portal and BAM! ending credits.
It had it’s moments. It was cool to see the final battle in DC was in our old metro line. The battle at Jefferson Memorial was definitely memorable. Some of the weapons are amazing. Granting cheat codes at the end does add some value. Multiplayer is fantastic, but also suffers from being rather repetitive. If you’re a pure console gamer, you won’t notice; PC gamers get mods and such to keep these sorts of things interesting.
It was fun but $50 worth of fun? No. $15? Yes, absolutely. (Thanks Ray)
Nora’s birthday, while small, went really well. Nora doesn’t like being the center of attention unless she specifically asks for it, so having such a small party seemed to be much more enjoyable for her. She hung out with pretty much everyone there. The only time she showed her reluctance was during a stirring rendition of happy birthday (which you can see in the pictures on the kids site).
More importantly, I feel like I had major quality time with both kids. The downside was that I didn’t really get to see Lisa. This is one of those things I mentioned in entries months prior. We’re working on it.
Finally, I managed to get a few things done on Sunday: hang pictures in the basement (five total; 3 diplomas and two paintings) and install an adapter panel in my car. I picked up an ipod video/audio adapter that uses the dock instead of the headphone jack and it sounds significantly better. It gives me a really good reason to finish with the music project (which in fairness died because Jaya killed my portable drive).
Install is a misnomer, though. I need to take a dremel to the dash to permanently mount it. Aided by a flashlight, I tore apart my dash at 9pm to run wires. Lisa (god bless her) let me do this without second guessing me. It took a lot of effort to get out of the car at work this morning – the sound quality was that enjoyable. I’m very excited for warmer weather to install the better speakers, wire the amp to the fronts and install the lcd in the roof.
I’ve been loading some videos onto my ipod and dingoo; ideally, I’ll be installing the DVD player in Lisa’s car. Not sure when or how that’ll happen. I can install the overhead LCD in my car guilt-free as Lisa’s car has overhead airbags and a sunroof – that isn’t something I’d touch. My willingness to work on cars ends when it becomes a security risk.
It should definitely be an interesting spring.
Shorly after Isaac was born, this site went dead. For many days, I kept meaning to write and post stuff, but I moved my laptop to the dining room for doing work at home. In doing so, if I’m not doing work, I’m not really sitting in front of any computer. Usually I get all the items I want to write about, make an outline (unless it’s a rant, obviously), upload photos and save it for a work break. That hasn’t been happening lately.
I do have some r/c stuff I want to post, as well as some game reviews – all in due time.
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So, the first season of the Wire had me hooked on hype alone. The second season has me hooked, but it’s much harder to watch.
The first season set up the characters and the dealings. The first season was factual; there was a bit of plodding to explain the mechanics of the drug trade and the details of police bureaucracy. The second season does away with all that – season number two is plot and character driven. I can’t say that in the first season I had any major interest in any specific character other than Omar; in the second season, it’s hard to watch these characters’ downfalls. I couldn’t help but feel bad for even the most unlikeable of characters.
Therein lies the brilliance of The Wire: no character is straight evil or straight good. Everyone is a person with idiosyncrasies and ironies. I’m not talking about a Brutus-esque ‘tragic hero’; you can commiserate with these characters.
Except Stringer. He’s a mystery this season, and I’m hyped to see how he plays out next season.
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It’s hard to discuss this show knowing most of you reading haven’t watch the show yet. I highly recommend it.
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As you can tell, Lisa and I have been taking great pains to make time to watch this show. Lisa keeps telling me it’s the ‘Fourth Trimester’, and I should set my expectations low. My take is that if I can get what I can get done in the 4thT, the rest will be easy.
It’s just getting through this 4thT, though. Outside of this show, it’s hard to determine what I’m doing every night other than chores after Nora goes to bed. And before Nora goes to bed, it feels like I barely see her.
There’s a lot to work on, I guess.
The Tea Party might be many things, but stupid is not one of them: this screed is directed towards Sarah Palin, who until recently was the figurehead of this movement. It’s not a shock that Sarah Palin’s words and actions don’t necessarily add up – she’s out for herself and herself only. I’m still amazed that there’s a part of the public who gives allows her even a shred of legitimacy. Amazing.
And on top of that, Fox News is taking a hit for their relationship with a Prince in Saudi Arabia. The fallout from this nicely dovetails with the Sarah Palin issue. The only people who are really going to take issue with this will be the absolute fringe – but those are the most rabid collective. We’ll see where this leads.
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It seems Toyota’s reputation as a brand is now pretty much catastrophically brought to a close. There isn’t much that can be said regarding Toyota’s indifference that hasn’t already been said. Obviously, the latest vehicle we purchased wasn’t a Toyota (after years and years of driving nothing but Toyota) and our next vehicle won’t be a Toyota, either.
That being said, what will Toyota do? This recall is only the tip of the iceberg. When this issue originally rose, I recalled my own 2003 Matrix which had the same sticking problem (though, we resolved that but pulling the floor mat back so it wouldn’t stick). Truth be told, Toyota has been having a number of issues since the mid 90s in build quality. They’ve largely relied on name up until now.
In the meantime, Hyundai took a page out of Toyota’s book and built quite the nice brand and name for themselves. Hyundai must be thanking their lucky stars for Toyota’s downfall. They’re primed to take the #2 spot from Toyota, which will be reeling from this as more and more recalls happen.
Isaac was born January 22, 2010 at 9.09pm. He was 9 pounds, 5 ounces, and 22 inches long. His birth date, birth time and length are all palindromes (01/22/10, 9.09, 22). I mentioned it would’ve been kinda neat if he was 9lbs, 9oz, but Lisa gave me the death stare. I no longer think it would’ve been neat.
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I know it’d be typical to say that the day started as any other, but it didn’t. This day we had two appointments scheduled: an amniotic fluid index and a Birth Center follow-up. The two week date was rapidly closing, and making it to these appointments was not welcome. Lisa was already stressed out, and we had Nora in tow.
Lisa was having irregular contractions the night before, though nothing to write home about. We woke up that day without any sort of preparation that today would be ‘the day’. It was pretty somber.
We went to the AFI. We had yet another glimpse of Isaac; nothing clear enough to see his face. I remember vividly the one image where it looked like he was reaching out to us – his fingers wiggled.
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We immediately headed over to the Birth Center, where Lisa was strapped in to do a non-stress test. Lisa was depressed, and was on the verge of tears when the discussion moved to induction at a hospital. It felt like a lost cause at this point – the machine wasn’t picking up any of the contractions she was having. Worse still, Nora was reaching the end of her toddler patience, and was in a foul mood. Lisa sent Nora and I to procure food at Wawa.
By the time we came back, Lisa was standing outside the Birth Center. Her test ended early as the baby kicked the monitor off of Lisa’s belly. We headed home. On the way home, I decided to drive over every single pothole I could find. In the meantime, Lisa started to have major contractions, but didn’t make much of them as she just had her membranes swept.
We came home, and as we were eating our food, it was fairly obvious Lisa was in a lot of pain. She tried keeping a brave face for Nora. After timing the contractions and a call to the Birth Center, they decided we should come back in. I feverishly packed the last of the items on our list.
We raced to Mare and Michael’s house, where we quickly set up Nora’s car seat and her gear, preparing her to stay overnight. We had been trying to prepare her for weeks prior to this day, and she was actually going along with the plan (thankfully).
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Lisa would have everyone know that I supported her much more this labor than the last one; I believe otherwise. To be quite honest, the whole experience was markedly different. The nurses and midwives were friendlier and much more reassuring. There were more of them, too. At no point were we lacking for support – we had no less than two ultra supportive midwives/nurses by our side at any given moment.
My role was very simple: whenever Lisa had a contraction, she’d throw herself onto me, and bear down. My job was to keep her steady and hold her up through the contraction. This wasn’t a role we had practiced, mind you – it was just how it happened.
You have to keep in mind that Nora’s birth was an epic almost two day labor. This, in contrast, had my head spinning. When I called Lisa’s mom, I told her then that she probably wouldn’t be here before the baby was born. Unlike Nora’s labor, I had really no time to think about anything – Lisa wasn’t locking herself in the bathroom, nor were there long stretches of complete silence. Lisa was clearly in a lot of pain. She moaned. She talked. She didn’t walk around much. She didn’t try many methods of laboring. Most of my attempts of easing her pain were rebuffed (and that’s putting it lightly). I used a massage pin and a cold wash cloth for most of her labor.
Shortly after Lisa’s water broke, she mentioned that felt like she could push. At this point the nurses started prepping for pushing. I kept thinking “now? already? now? my son is coming now?”
They insisted she try laboring on the bed. After the first unsuccessful attempt, she got on her back, and the pushing started in earnest. The nurses exhorted her to push slowly – they were constantly talking her through it giving her instruction in an attempt to reduce the amount of postpartum bleeding. I mopped Lisa’s brow with a cold wash cloth and tried giving her something to hold onto tightly.
And then… there he was. After a few pushes, he was out and on Lisa’s chest. He was blue, and he was mad. After the initial shock on how blue he was, I fell in love with him. Like last time, Lisa bled, so while they stitched her, I took charge of Isaac. By this time, the color had returned to his extremities. My first memory: he swung his arms quite angrily, looking me straight in the eye. It took a few minutes to calm him down.
I couldn’t get over how much he looked like Nora – except he had much larger eyes. And while Lisa insisted (and later, as would everyone else) that he was smaller than Nora, as I held him I didn’t believe it. He took up much more arm space than she did.
He was here. And it was glorious.
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The next few hours were a blur. Lisa’s mom came, then my dad, then Nora and Mare and Michael. We ordered food, we ate, and much to everyone’s consternation I took two naps with Isaac. He easily cuddled right up to me, and we slept pretty soundly.
As of writing this, he still seems to prefer sleeping next to me.
As we were leaving, the nurse gave us a hug. I really appreciated that – she was by our side nearly the whole evening, and we shared all sorts of stories. Nora seemed to take to her.
It was quite an experience.
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When Lisa said that she was having major contractions, I ran up to quickly shower. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was shocked at how happy I looked. All the months of worry and anxiety with respect to having two children disappeared. It was right at that moment I realized that this is precisely what I wanted. I wanted a big boisterous family and siblings for Nora, and we were about to fulfill that. I did a little dance. I sang a little song. I moved faster than I had ever moved in my life.
And now that he’s here, that feeling hasn’t changed. When Nora is whining and he is crying, I’m not annoyed – far from it. When he wakes up in the middle of the night and needs to be bounced, I’m not frustrated. It’s odd, but I really relish moments where I can take care of both of my children. I relish the word children. I relish the phrase my children.
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A family friend I hadn’t spoken to for a couple of years called me recently asking for some help. In the course of talking, she mentioned that she talked to my mother. Apparently my mom is thrilled with Lisa and I as parents.
I’m glad, because I’m thrilled to be a dad.
According to HME Business, a trade magazine relevant to my field, the number of O2 suppliers was down 50% (fifty percent!) from last year. I thought it was 20%. Apparently the 20% is just HME providers in general.
There’s also a brilliant editorial note from the same magazine. When it becomes available on the site, I’ll have to copypasta it verbatim.
Some days I wonder if it’s worth working hard, if at all, when the government has us in the crosshairs.