Obama Is One Cool Cat

A neat photo, courtesy Reuters:

Speaking of Obama, Ryan and I had the following conversation a few days ago:

Ryan: Change! Yes we can!

Stephen: Oh, you’re voting for Obama now?

No, daddy. Change my diaper. Yes we can!

Playground Ball On Hamburger Mold

Mixed media, 2008

Part of Alyssa’s ongoing Toys & Tools series, currently on display in our kitchen. And the family room, play room, den, stairwell, bathroom, bedroom, and garage.

(And the backyard.)

The Eyes Have It

On Sunday, I was putting Alyssa down for a nap while Ryan and Michelle were downstairs playing with my laptop. Ryan actually considers that the laptop is “his [com]puter” — practically the first thing he’ll do in the morning is ask if he can type letters.

Ryan: Da-dee? Type letters?

Because of this constant request, I wrote him a little application called ‘TypeLetters’ that I can fire up, which allows him to mash on the keyboard and mouse without the possibility of hurting anything. Mouse input is ignored, most command combinations are ignored, the dock and menus get hidden, and letters can be typed with abandon.

He’s picking up the keyboard at an alarmingly fast pace, considering we only let him use the laptop for a few hours every day. Today, he figured out how to use the shift key to make the plus, question mark, and exclamation point, each of which he can pronounce.

Anyway, this particular day, Ryan has figured out how to use the slash and backslash keys to draw an uppercase V, or a tilty N, or an M or a W.

Ryan: Da-dee! Look like an… N!

On this particular day, he’s discovered that a slash-backslash combination draws an upside-down V:

/\

He’s typed a few of these into TypeLetters, but is in the process of deleting them, because he never lets too many letters queue up on the screen. Michelle, sitting next to him, wants to get a better look at what key he was pressing to make the upside down V, tries to pull his hand away to prevent him from hitting the delete key again.

And that’s about the time that it happened.

Ryan’s a two year old, and the laptop is his current favorite toy — he doesn’t much like it when people try to keep him from playing with it.

Ryan: No da-dee, no! Ryan type letters!

So Michelle is trying to keep him from typing, and this upsets him, and he flings his arm up to push her away. Unfortunately, at this exact moment, Michelle is leaning down to get a better look at the keyboard.

Fingernail, meet Cornea. Cornea, fingernail.

So Michelle screams, I toss Alyssa into her crib and come running down the stairs. Michelle is crumpled on the floor, and Ryan is looking seriously freaked out.

We go to the ER, and the doc puts a super cool florescent dye into her eye, and shines a blacklight on it. The ‘scratch’ is actually a gouge that almost covers her entire pupil and most of her upper iris.

She gets pain drops and antibiotic drops, and spends most of the following two days in a dark room trying not to move her eyes, because, as she puts it, “it feels like sandpaper.”

She’s followed up with an ophthalmologist, who helpfully spent half a minute in the room, long enough to give her another dose of cool dye and an apparently powerful dilation drop which is still in effect three days later.

Her vision is getting better — still a little blurry, but she’s on the mend. Which is good, because she’s been going crazy not being able to get out and do things.

Camera Phone Photos

Here’s a small collection of photos from my camera phone:

My Daughter Is The Silliest

Alyssa was biting down on her spoon this morning.

Isn’t she the cutest?

Search And Seizure

My puppy Bayliss — by ‘puppy’ I mean ‘11-year old dog’ (and by ‘my’ I mean ‘Michelle’s’) — is not feeling so great lately.

Thursday of last week, Michelle and I were sitting around in the living room talking about her work, and Bayliss was relaxing on the marble fireplace (as any dog is wont to do). The living room was a wreck, strewn with the kid’s toys, from where they’d been playing before they went off to sleep.

Without any sort of warning, Bayliss leaped to his feet and started growling, then started to run, apparently chasing a fly. He ran around the big toy chest a few times, snapping at the air, before falling over on his side and convulsing.

He was having a seizure, his first ever.

He snapped out of it in about two minutes, having emptied his bladder and bowels, and it took him another five-ten minutes to get full control over his hind legs. Michelle was obviously distraught — Bayliss has been her constant companion through thick and thin for over a decade — and we resolved to make an appointment with the vet post haste.

Bayliss seemed to recover nicely, and some research indicated that while serious, seizures are usually a symptom of an underlying cause and not something that will harm the animal by itself. We watched him pretty closely and set up an appointment for Saturday.

On Friday, at approximately the same time, he had another seizure, this time running in a clockwise circle. Afterwards, he was blind for about ten minutes, but still recovered nicely.

The vet did lots of bloodwork and found no immediate cause, although he did note a severe ear infection. Some of the results are still pending, and they didn’t screen for brain cancer. He gave us meds to treat the infection and Phenobarbitol for the seizures, should they recur.

Unfortunately this is a story whose ending has not yet been written. He hasn’t had a seizure since then — at least not one we’ve been present for — and we’re continuing to treat the ear infection. We’re holding off on the Phenobarbitol until we’re sure that he needs it.

It’s strange that this should happen so soon after reading about Scott Kurtz’s beagle Kirby. Hopefully Kirby will feel better soon, and hopefully Bayliss will too.

My Cup Runneth Over

Yesterday I had to stop by my mother in law’s house to pick up my kids. When I got there, the door was opened so that Ryan could look through the storm door at the cars on the street. As I got out of the car, Ryan walked up to the door and smiled broadly, then pushed his nose up against the glass.

My mother in law scooped up Alyssa, who can’t quite stand on her own yet, and propped her up next to Ryan. When she saw me get out of the car, she got a big grin on her face too, and flapped her arms like she always does when she’s excited.

I’d had a bad day, but it melted away to nothing in the time it took me to walk up to the door and scoop up Ryan.

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.” — Psalms 23:5

My Wife, The World Famous Photojournalist

Taken by my lovely wife Michelle in New Orleans, days before the hurricane hit in 2005. Oxford University Press is publishing a book about the event, and has requested permission to use it.

Go Michelle!

My Dad, The Chronology Killer

Because I’ve seen him in too many ‘likable ruffian with a heart of gold’ roles, I have a hard time buying his performance here. But it’s good to see him trying new things.

This was produced as an entry for Fox’s The Lot, apparently a new reality TV series involving filmmaking.

Sebastian Has A Broken Computer

Sebastian calls me up this morning to ask me about drive recovery, because the hard drive in his desktop failed spectacularly over the weekend. We discuss various options and eventually decide the best thing is to just go out and buy a new hard drive.

We got a little off-topic.

Stephen: So what I’d do is get a new drive, and maybe an external firewire drive to use for backups.

Sebastian: Ok, sounds good.

Good luck with that. I’m going to go get some breakfast even though the dentist explicitly told me not to eat anything solid.

Ooh, maybe you should get a milkshake instead.

And a second one as a backup.

Maybe a USB sundae.

(nerdy Homestar Runner voice) Excuse me, do you have any VGA-compatible hash browns? My stomach is not DVI compliant.

I always get the firewire stuck in my teeth.

I don’t know why, but whenever I talk to my brothers the conversations always wind up with rapid-fire jokes. Crazy.

Da-dee

Ryan’s understood a lot of English for a while now, but he’s been pretty adamant about not speaking it. You can ask him to point out certain things (“Where’s the couch? Where’s your hair? Where’s daddy’s nose?”) and it sometimes surprises me that he knows almost every word I’ve thrown at him. The only ones that really confuse him (and we’re still working on these) are the ones that require fine distinctions, like ‘whore’ versus ‘slut’, or ‘beer’ versus ‘watered down piss called Budweiser’.

I’m kidding! He really just gets confused when you ask him about his knees or elbows — right now he thinks they’re synonyms for leg and arm. He also gets confused about carpet versus rug versus floor. Normal stuff, considering that there’s qualities shared between them and there’s only a limited number of examples in the house I can point out to him.

Recently, though, he’s been starting to say more and more words the best he can. He’ll say ‘ma-mo’ when he points to Elmo, his little sister Alyssa is ‘ee-aah’, please is ‘dee’, that sort of thing. He’s been pretty consistent about them, and a few of them are starting to become more well-formed. Sometimes, I can tell that he knows what he’s trying to say, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

Which is interesting, you know. I didn’t realize that, as an adult, I’d have to learn English again.

So I’m getting Ryan ready for the day, and he indicates (by trying to leap out of my arms) that he wants to go over and say good morning to his “buddies” — a large wall decoration featuring the Sesame Street characters. So we lumber over there:

Stephen: Say ‘Good morning, Elmo!’

Ryan: Ma-mo!

Good morning, Cookie Monster!

Ke-ke!

Good morning, Oscar the Grouch!

Da-dee!

A pause.

No, say ‘Oscar the Grouch!’

Da-dee! Da-dee da-dee da-dee!

Like I said, he’s a pretty sharp kid.

Things I Have Done In Recent Days

In the last entry, I mentioned that I was having difficulty finishing the construction of a retaining wall. I’m happy to announce, as the picture to the right attests, that the damned wall is done.

Now I just need to build a similarly-sized wall on the other side of the house. (Sigh.)

I am also happy to announce that I have a job, and in fact I am starting said job tomorrow morning. I’m a “team lead” — not sure yet what that means in terms of responsibilities — and I’m working with C#. My C# is pretty rusty right now, but I’ll fix that.

I am also also happy to announce — I seem to be a very happy announcer — the very early, pre-pre-alpha release of Zugzwang, the chess game I started writing the day I lost my last job. It Really Works™ — you play against a chess program named Crafty (who is set to always make moves immediately), and he basically kicks your ass.

At least he kicks my ass. I’m not good at chess.

Anyway, there’s lots of fancy stuff in it that’s not entirely visible yet. It has a plugin architecture, so you can add new engines to play against. I’ve sketched out (but not enabled) human-on-human play via Bonjour and ICS. And the entire game is defined by an external file (currently internal) — so you can make up fairy chess pieces and play chess variants against your friends.

It’s got tons of bugs — most notably, it won’t tell you if you’re in check and it will let you move into check freely (although this confuses Crafty, who will then stop playing with you). Castling and en passant don’t yet work, so if Crafty attempts to castle the game just sort of stops.

Oh, and sometimes when you quit the game Crafty forgets to stop playing. If you’ve played a few games and your machine starts to get slow, reboot.

Mac OS X 10.4.x only, because it needs Core Image, WebKit, and a few other things. You might have to have a decent video card, I’m not sure.

Having said that, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can download Zugzwang 0.0.1.

Mama said there'd be days like this.

Things that have happened to me thus far today, with five hours to go:

• I woke up with my entire upper body feeling like I’d been in a car wreck the day before. I’d spent the prior day pushing soil, sand, and cement underneath my front porch — the soil that had been under it had eroded away due to my laziness in getting a retaining wall built.
• I went to a (yet another) job interview, this time for a firm which deals almost exclusively in Microsoft technologies. I sold myself pretty hard, but my résumé reads like an advertisement for open source. I did happen to run into a guy I knew from a previous job, who turned out to be the director of the department I was interviewing for. So that’s a plus.
• I got home and immediately left again to take my dog to the vet. He’d developed some sort of rash on Wednesday which we’d tried to treat (using my extensive medical background¹) but which, it turns out, needs actual medicine.
• The dog also got two shots, bringing the total of the visit to $123.36, which is just about $123.26 more than I have. (I still have two nickels to rub together.)
• The dog (who has been lethargic for the past two days due to his rash) and I (who am normally lethargic) head to FedExKinko’sOfAmericaCorp so that I can fax in some information to some people who just can’t wait another day for it. In doing so, I fumble around for about ten minutes with one of the Xerox CopyCenter machines (the exact model of which I’ve been using for the last two years at the job I was just “displaced” from) trying to figure out how to get it to send a fax. Just at the point where I was about to yell at the ‘associates’ for not paying any attention to me, I saw the actual fax machine sitting behind the copy stations. Go figure.
• I head out back to the van (yes, the van, the minivan, THE TRANSFORMATION IS COMPLETE), and the dog is sitting in the driver’s seat. I push him off and move to get into the van, and he jumps back up onto the seat. We stare at each other for a while. Eventually he jumps back down. I then put the key in the ignition, and ta-da! The van is dead.
• Then Michelle picked me up and we drove back to the house and it had burned down.

Ok, I made that last one up. It turns out the battery in the van had died; I had to give up both my nickels (and find 1083 more) to buy a new one. We’re still having it checked, because it’s sort of odd to have a battery die all of a sudden.

Other updates:

The job search is still lumbering along — I’ve got one solid offer and I’m sending résumés out as fast as I can avoid it. Thanks to all the people who sent me their best and to all of the people who gave me attention, even if they made fun of me while doing it. (Yes, I’m looking at you.)

The baby girl is having trouble getting toots out. She’s eating voraciously now, which is good because she should be about three days old right now — she was three weeks early, but in perfectly good shape. Her little big brother likes to gently stroke her hair, and he sometimes walks over to the bassinet and lays his head against hers, which is how he hugs people.

The god damned retaining wall is still not done. I was going to work on it when I got back from the vet, but that turned out to be deception.

The Diary-X Crap is still sitting in the den because I haven’t had time to arrange anything. Michelle took over, because she has initiative and I have procrastination.

The random crap is a chess game for OS X that I’ve been unhealthily working on since I lost my job. When I told some friends about it, they said “let me guess — it doesn’t work, but it looks really good.” Yes. Shut up.

That is all.

1. Gleaned entirely from watching ER, House, and Doogie Houser. Funny story: when Michelle and I were still in the hospital after Alyssa was born, I once referred to my “extensive medical knowledge” in front of a nurse. She turned to me and asked “Where are you going to med school?” I don’t say that in front of medical personnel anymore.

A conversation with Sean

Sean and I are discussing the horrible static sound that my cell phone produces whenever someone attempts to call it, or when I try to speak into it, or when I carry it around in my pocket.

Sean: What was that? It sounded like a game of ping-pong. (making paddle noises) Wiksh! TIK wisch WIKSH! Tik tik tik WIKSH!

Stephen: Well, I’m parked in front of a large concrete building, so it’s probably a dead zone. Or, my cell phone sucks.

Ah HAH! You know, Stephen, the first step in admitting you have a problem is.. uh.. thinking about whether or not you have a problem.

Always a fine report from Sean.

How much trouble are we in?

So much trouble.

Nerdy Entry Six

Ok, so I’ve been sort of quiet the last week or so, because I had to tear out part of AfterWords so that I could put it back together again. I write software in a random sort of way, pulling parts off, putting new parts on. I think I’ve written each part of AfterWords about ten times now, it’s sort of ridiculous.

Anyway, the latest changes were pretty extensive. I broke out the templates so that they could be stored with the journal entries — until now, the journal templates were stored in with the main AfterWords templates, and that basically meant that you could only have one journal design, which is just ridiculous.

You can edit templates and past entries, so we’re going places now. Maybe it’ll be ready for brave alpha testers in about three months. Bugs still abound — the time and date field isn’t saving properly, I think the summary and date fields (which generate the permalinks) are still broken, and of course we’re still rough around the edges like crazy.

All things in time.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

We have a new puppy, a cocker spaniel named ‘Elliot’. He’s named after Detective Elliot Stabler, the everyman detective from Law & Order: SVU. Bayliss (whose name comes from Det. Tim Bayliss from Homicide: Life On The Street) doesn’t get along with him very well yet. Elliot likes to play and nip at ears and paws, and Bayliss is a grouch who doesn’t like to play much. There’s been a lot of growling recently.

Also, we’ve got a vegetable garden out back now, and we’ve even managed to fill it halfway with mulch and dirt. We might have vegetables planted by the end of the week. Hooray!

But I also have to mow the lawn. Boo to that.

The Most Hysterical Magic Trick

Consider, for a moment, the lowly tape measure. At first glance, you might consider that it can do nothing more than sit inertly on top of lengths of board, its markings sitting idly by, patiently waiting for you to mark off where you’d like to cut. But its simplicity belies a deep and mysterious magic, known by the public only as a ‘spring’.

This amazing magic, which only parents can work, can make the measuring tape disappear and reappear at any time. But it doesn’t disappear all at once, and that’s what makes this magic so funny. It slides away from your fingers when you try to grab it and then it goes into the box with a click!

It comes out when you stop laughing, though. Yay!

Pease Porridge

I was reciting the rhyme ‘Pease Porridge Hot’ to Ryan this morning, and Justin asked what ‘pease porridge’ was. I told him, and then he asked me to say the rhyme. I recited it to him:

Pease porridge hot,
Pease porridge cold.
Pease porridge in the pot
Nine days old.
Some like it hot,
Some like it cold.
Some like it in the pot
Nine days old.

He replied: “Yeah, and some don’t like it at all. Yuck.”

Mr. Watson, come here; I need you.

You know, it seemed like I had AfterWords a lot more under control before I actually started using it. Now that I’m actually using it, though, I’m noticing more and more cases that aren’t handled, things that need to be fixed or changed, and lots of stuff that just doesn’t exist.

Such is price of pre-alpha quality software, I suppose. I remember when the Journaling Script was like this.

Anyway, I’ve made a few changes, most notably to allow for comments. Really basic stuff at this point; the form isn’t even really very pretty, but it works, and that’s what’s important, right?

I’ve also written some bridge code to allow some plugins meant for Movable Type and Wordpress to be used in AfterWords. John Gruber’s Markdown and SmartyPants plugins are available in AfterWords variants (I’ll submit a patch to him whenever I get the remainder of AfterWords ready), and Automattic’s Akismet anti-commentspam plugin is also available.

Which, incidentially, I’m using here to (hopefully) prevent comment spam from becoming a huge problem. Of course, it also helps that I’m on a custom journal management system, and that there’s very little reason to write a spambot to target this journal. It’s not as though anyone reads it yet anyway.

I’m also using Markdown here. Eventually I’ll have a generalized ‘filter chaining’ tool that will allow me to create a new filter using Markdown and SmartyPants, but that’s for another time.

Home Is A Different Story

Things have been crazy at home lately. Michelle and I built a five-by-ten foot garden box to install in the back yard; we’ll be planting vegetables of all sorts. We’ve also got a smaller box that will have a raspberry bush in it; Justin has been pestering us for ages about it.

Ryan is getting four teeth in at once, and he is suitably crabby for it. Baby Girl is kicking Michelle more often, and occasionally hard enough for me to feel. I’m going to have a daughter — that’s just crazy.

Michelle and I are also addicted to Sudoku, the puzzle craze that’s sweeping the nation. We’ve gone through like ten different books, and we’ve resorted to printing puzzles from the internet. We do them at the same time to see who can finish them the fastest.

I must go; I have to kick Michelle’s ass in sudoku and then get some sleep.