vanderwal.net

Baby on the way

We are at the hospital in labor and delivery, for those that care

Learning for lack of power

Over the past few days I have had a little more pondering time than normal. We were with out power, but thanks to the Net (wired and unwired) I could still post here, chat with friends, and had a site that was still up and running. I still had a means to communicate that allowed for updating from a mobile device, which my parents checked from a mobile device.

We did not have power, which meant no DSL (to me the dial-up was fingernails on chalkboard, only at last resort sort of endeavor. The Hiptop go me through to post. I could also e-mail with folks I had e-mail addresses for (found Hiptop truncates all my address book entries to only the primary address info, which is mostly work, and that was not were folks were the past four days around here). I really did not miss the power too much, although we cheated and went to a friend's house who had power and was out of town to do a load of laundry and recharge phones and laptops.

I did get to finish the book I started on vacation (The Discovery of Heaven), I still had nearly 300 pages left of the 735. I was rather disappointed by the ending, but the book made for a wonderful literary journey none-the-less. Much of the reading was on our screen porch and any snippet of time that was not tracking down places to get food or running errands, which took-up a great amount of time the past four days.

I not only grew with appreciation for our distributed information system, but I grew to miss the answering machine very quickly. We had a couple wired landline phone plugged in, but since Joy is still not greatly mobile I was getting the phone when it rang, well most of the time. I rarely answer the phone at home as the calls are rarely for me and I usually let the answering machine do the work for me. I also grew in appreciation for refrigerators and envious of neighbors with generators that powered their refrigerators so as not to throw out all their cold food.

Powered up

As of 4:50 this afternoon... POWER!!!

Gone Power Gone

We lost power last night at 12:20 am and PEPCO say we will have power back in 6 days. (I can still post from my Hiptop however.) Our house is fine, thankfully, but there are large chunks of trees down in front of our house. I will post photos when I find wifi or get power. The normal wifi joints are also without power at the moment.

More later...

Storm update

We are still with power, but it has flashed many times and even been out for a couple minutes a few times. The block behind us is dark. As the winds have picked up I can hear the transformer boxes hum then watch the lights dim and regain to normal. It seems much of the storm went a little farther West than was planned, but we still have a pretty good storm going at this moment.

Quiet before the storm

We are experiencing the last bit of quite before the storm. Rain is just beginning and we have had winds gusts up to 25 mph. The big thing is our 50 year and older trees not falling on our house and basement flooding. We are also hoping not to have power outages. Joy is not experiencing any labor related issues, so all is well.

More later...

To be kid update

Updating on to-be, Joy had to go get another sonogram this week as the doctor was concerned that the kid was underweight. Well after the sonogram the weight estimate for the kid is currently at 8 to 8 and one half pounds. There is still two or three weeks to go. I turned to Joy and the doctor on said, "Joy, you are not having a baby, you are having a house".

We are finishing setting up the kids room and we have a living room corner filled with baby stuff. This is the last days of the D.I.N.K.s (double income no kids) for us.

I see Mars

Tonight I got a very good glimpse of Mars. It was the moon peaking through the blinds in the office that caught my eye, but right next to it was a bright orange-red star. I went out the front door and turned off our lights to get a better look with binocular assistance. The moon and Mars were stunning.

This site made me feel small at first, but then apart of something so much larger. The moon and stars know no politics, no killing for ego or pride, no political boundaries, no foolishness. These objects in our sky, in our orbit and solar system know far more time and remind us to take the long view.

Maybe one day I will get a telescope, but looking to the stars through binoculars seems to only draw on a desire to get up on the roof to get closer to the stars and have a better look. I know that this would do little to assist my view, nor would getting on top of a tall building. There is great beauty in the heavens that are beyond our arms length, but still drive the desire to see and get beyond the petty temporal issues of the day. (Fortunately NASA site offers some solace.)

Congrats Nick and Crystal

Congrats are in order for Nick and Crystal who were married this past weekend. We wish them a joy-filled life and comfort in each others arms for all the years to come.

Bobby Bonds passes

Bobby Bonds dies. He was one of my early sports heros, along with Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. He was able to coach his son, Barry, and got to watch him dominate the game like no other. Bobby was a San Francisco Giants as well as a New York Yankee, California Angel, Chicago White Sox, Texas Ranger, Cleveland Indian, St. Louis Cardinal and the Chicago Cub. He will always be remember a Giant in my eyes.

Calling for messages

Yesterday I left my mobile phone in my car parked at the metro station. I had to use a landline phone to call my stationary mobile phone to get messages throughout the day.

I did have my Hiptop, but many of the stored numbers are not up to date, like Joy's new cell number. Numbers not updated is attributed to the non-synching ability of the device. The phone qualities of the Hiptop version 1 were are not too good. I do really like the ability to get POP e-mail, IM, and Internet from anywhere I get a service.

Good gatherings this week

This week did have some good points. I got to spend time with friends from San Francisco and meet some new folks at a cocktail hour and dinner that followed. This year there were no photos, unfortunately. The gathering did end up at Lebanese Taverna again, which was just as fun and tasty as before.

I got to spend time with a few local bloggers and Jesse. The gathering started early as most were not able to work as their e-mail and networks were down or were greatly frustrated. Nearly everybody that arrived early was victim of their organization moving to MS Exchange in the past six months. The conversations at dinner were very witty, insightful, intelligent, and hence very enjoyable, but the green pill rendered me more observer then participant.

Frustrating week

The floppy sneakernet returned this week as networking access to servers was blocked except port 80 (Web traffic). I have not used a floppy in two years and forgot how slow they were. E-mail was up then crashing. Access to the outside world via the Internet was also up and down. The ability to work easily and efficiently was shot to hell thanks to a company claiming to make an operating system, but its OS product only resembles flaky insecure software.

I was also uncovering many more undocumented features in Microsoft products, such as the save dialog causes Visio 2003 to want to crash. It took 5 minutes to diagram a small application database and 25 minutes to save and print the diagram. Outlook would intermittently hang my workstation for 5 minutes by eating all the computing resources as I clicked to move an e-mail to another folder.

On top of this I took the little green pill. This was to help reduce the itching from a rash on my arms (the rash and itching caused me to go to the doctor who said "you seem to have a rash"). The doctor warned the pill could make me drowsy, which to me translates to tired and cranky for me. I get cranky when I am tired because my mind slows, which I find very annoying. Yes, the pill helps to some degree, as does the cream for the rash.

We have been having some housework done by a contractor and his workers. It was supposed to have been seven days. We are on day 20. The workers don't really seem to know what they are doing and the workmanship is poor as the number cut corners is high. The contractor came highly recommended, but he used to do his own work with his brother-in-law as his partner. We had window frames painted, which seems to mean the window panes get cracked. This week the contractor finally agreed to fix the panes his workmen cracked. Fixing meant taking out the panes and replacing them five days later. We have had plastic food wrap and packing tape covering the holes to keep the bugs out. But being that it is humid the tape gives way and the bugs and hot air come in and cool air goes out. I came home the other night about 11pm to our garage door wide open due to a flaky garage door controller and nobody with a clue to unplug the one door and then lock it. This is the tip of the ice flow as nothing was done properly the first time.

Needless to say by today I was very cranky with the language of a sailor at sea for month or years. I was not even able to write a short coherent e-mail to explain that a PocketPC browser emulator did not actually emulate the functions of the PocketPC browser's use of CSS. It seems that the emulator ignores the external CSS when the media="all"@import attribute is used. A real PocketPC will actually render the page properly. I have been rather impressed with the browser capability in the current PocketPCs, but not enough to get one.

Site clean-up and other bits

Yes, we have done a little house keeping here by updating the links, fixing some of the "Previous Month" links in this section, fixing more non-standards snippets that have remained a bee in my bonnet (more still remain), and creating more continuity in the presentation layer. It is a continual update of design and development of the application that runs the site, but that is what makes it fun. I have been planning some of these fixes for months, but other things cropped up. I am trying to get many of these things done, as well as a long list of other items, before the baby arrives.

Yesterday's diversion was baby CPR class and baby safety, a power outage, trying to track down the contractor who was supposed to have been at the house all day finishing fixing the gutters, roof, and putting storm windows back on (along with a long list of other half done tasks).

Today I woke to a dead car battery and a dead PC. The car had a light that had been left on. The PC seems to have had the power supply die. Joy has been working on some stationary for the kid and printing cards for a small gathering at her sister's and needed to finish printing out the final cards today. I have only been using the PC for playing some older games and syching my Palm to applications that I have not ported or others have not ported to Mac as of yet. I got the car jump started by myself and ran the PC to the shop, it may become a Linux box in the near future, if Joy gets a new PC for work. I am also considering the G5 for a desktop in the Fall or Winter.

10 year anniversary but still not home

Today was the 10th anniversary of my arrival in the Washington, DC area to live. I moved to this area from San Francisco, which I was ready to leave but always ready to return to, to go to Georgetown University for a Masters in Public Policy. I initially planned to get my masters in two years then give Washington up to two more years then move on.

Well it has been a lot more than the initial three or four years I planned on. Actually this is the longest I have lived in any one geographic area. I like and have liked where I live and have lived, the streets and areas, but the Washington Area as a whole has never felt like home. (Oddly I have New York and San Francisco categories for the weblog, but no Washington.)

I have great friends in Washington, well those that are left, but I also have kept friends from previous homes via the Internet and have made friends that I think of as close in mind and focus thanks to the Internet. Actually the Internet is what made Washington a place to live for 10 years. I guess most any place could be livable with the Internet keeping a community I know and trust close by.

Another asset of the Washington area is its proximity to other cities that do feel a little more like they could be home. Baltimore, Philly, New York, and Boston are all a relatively short trip away. Europe is about as far a the West Coast and that has made the experience here enjoyable too.

I am not sure if it will be another 10 years in Washington, but who knows. We enjoy our house, even in its disruptive state of updating and repair. We really like our neighbors and neighborhood (as much as I did living in Arlington, VA too). I guess it is all up to jobs, winds, and other powers that drive us and blow us as to where the next 10 years will take me.