Two weeks

Maria survived two whole weeks! (And, her parents also made it through two weeks!!)

Only 17 years and 50 weeks to go.

Why babies don't come with instruction manuals

Imagine what it would be like if babies came with instruction manuals. After pushing out the cute baby on the left, the manual on the right would have to come out as well, and it's just too big (and the wrong shape) to fit. That's why babies don't come with manuals.

Child process forked

My wife successfully forked a child process last Tuesday (March 20, 2007) at 11:01 PM! The child process id is 3345. The executable exec'ed immediately following the fork is 'Maria'. Profiling indicates the child process spends significant amounts of time in the sleep(3) system call. Ironically, it appears the child process is interfering with the parent process's use of that same system call.

Waiting for baby

Okay, so it's not even the due date yet, but we're still waiting.
Here's a funny comic by Muncher (full blog post). Maybe it's only funny to expectant dads, but I really liked it.

Panoramic photos

I've been on a panoramic photo kick lately. Here's some pictures of the field across the road, some at sunset, some others after all the snow that came last week. Click on the pictures for a larger version.

Some of the panels get excessively dark. I probably need to set the exposure manually to be the same for all the photos involved, or adjust the brightness before stitching them together.

On blocks in the yard

I wondered what was worse: a car on blocks in the yard, or a broken hot tub? A friend pointed out that the car-on-blocks was so iconic that it's really hard to get past that image. This, of course, led directly to the idea of a hot tub in the yard, up on blocks.
Here it is

There's a hole in my sunroom where a hot tub used to be

See the previous entry for the remains of the hot tub. Here is where it used to reside:
Sue's uncle came down for a few days helped in removing the hot tub, and in installing the new joints and subfloor. (And on a side note, I did get to test hauling 4x8 sheets in the new minivan, and it worked well.)

The most tedious part of the whole process was removing the partial tiles from around the hole. When it gets warmer, we're going to install tile.

Hot tub for sale - cheap!

Some assembly required.

Minivan

As part of the preparations for the baby, we bought a minivan on Saturday. It's a used 2006 Dodge Grand Caravan. Sadly, we traded in the truck - it was a good truck and I had bought it with the intention of keeping it for a long time. However, the minivan should be a capable replacment vehicle for hauling stuff. All the back seats fold into the floor, and it can hold 4'x8' sheets.

So now we have a video camera and a minivan. I think we're pretty much set for the baby to arrive.

High Tech Mergers

Inspired after reading about Scranimals, I pondered the possibilities of various technology and internet companies merging. Potential corporate names:

• Googazon
• Microogle (or Goosoft)
• Amabay
• Amabaysoft (3 way merger)
• Microzon

Video from the new camera

As part of the preparations for the new baby (oh yeah, in case anyone reading this blog doesn't know - we're expecting offspring in March), I bought a video camera last week (a Canon Elura 100).

While visiting my parent's dairy farm for Thanksgiving, I made this short video on How to chew cud

Bowl bread

Saturday morning I started the process of making bread. After mixing and kneading, I heated the oven slightly (turn it on, turn it off after a couple of minutes) and put the dough in the oven to rise.

A couple hours later, some other member of our household (who will remain nameless to protect the identity of the guilty), despite having been warned of the bread dough in the oven, started the oven (to preheat it) without removing the dough.

Fortunately (*very* fortunately), the dough was in a metal bowl. When we went to put the chicken in the oven, we discovered, to our horror, that the bread dough was still in there, and well on its way to being baked. An executive decision was made to continue baking the bread on an experimental basis.

The bread baked (although with such a large loaf - it was supposed to make at least 4 regular loaves - the center still wasn't quite done), and came out of the pan quite easily (I had coated it with oil before letting it rise).

And now, I give you:

Bowl bread! (cue mad scientist laughter in the background)
(not to be confused with a bread bowl)

Don't confuse powdered wasabi with baking powder

Whilst making muffins, I noticed the proximity of the powdered wasabi and the baking powder on the shelf. This led me to contemplate the consequences of accidentally using the wasabi in the muffins.

(I mentioned this thought-mistake to my wife, and she said I should put on the blog. So here it is)

New Diet

I've been on this great(?) new diet. It lets me eat as much as I want, and no counting calories! I've lost over 15 pounds in just 3 weeks.

I call it the Mono/Pnuemonia diet.

The name isn't quite as catchy as those diets named after trendy places.

The tricky part (which I address in a chapter in my upcoming book) is how to contract mono and pnuemonia at the same time.

Sticky notes and moustaches

Over on JFKBits, Joel posted some ideas about Annotating web pages using a sticky notes model.

He created a very simple demo. I played with it and took a screenshot. It's quite possibly a shining example of the sort of juvenile behavior this sort of technology is *not* to be used for.

So this leads naturally (in my mind) to the idea of annotating web pages with virtual moustaches and glasses. The idea of virtual graffiti is very appealing as it satisfies two conflicting requirements:

1. The primal urge to change the world in silly ways.
2. The changes are not permanent (Note that I don't even like to make serious notes in my own books)

(In the comments of his post, Joel pointed a site with a similar idea www.mystickies.com. I didn't create an account and try it, mostly in an attempt to squelch the impulse to find a flat panel monitor ad and put virtual stickies all over the virtual bezel.)

Insult polishing

Tonight I mentioned to my wife that I needed to polish my insults - I needed to run them through the dis washer.

More breakfast blogs

In the course of important daily research, I ran across another breakfast blog. With an important difference - that blog actually talks about breakfast. What a concept.

Another difference is the focus on eggs (according to the tagline, anyway). I dislike eggs for breakfast. Any other time of day eggs are fine (as long as they are fully cooked), but they make me queasy in the morning.

Hot, fresh waffles on the road

I'm in Arizona, and the hotel I'm staying at offers one item that I've never seen before in a hotel breakfast. A waffle-maker. (And cups of waffle batter.) Pour in the batter, rotate the waffle iron to start the built-in timer (the other nifty feature is the waffle iron rotates), and 2 minutes later you have a hot, fresh waffle.

It was a tasty waffle.

According to reliable sources, at least one other hotel in the area has the same implement of fresh waffleness.

Illegal Sea Food

There's a place near my hotel that reads "Legal Sea Food" on the awning. I'm not sure if it's a store or a restaurant or something else.

Does this mean there is illegal sea food about?

I've only been in Baltimore a short time, but I haven't seen any shady characters in trench coats whispering "Hey budy, want some prawns?"

Saturday muffin blogging

Been a while since I've posted any pictures of breakfast foods. Time to get back to my blogging roots and rectify this great omission. This breakfast food picture even comes with a boring, pointless story.

Last week I had a hankering for muffins. Being somewhat competent in the kitchen, I set about on a quest to make some. I consulted my wife's "Joy of Cooking" tome for proper muffin making technique. The key is to keep the wet and dry ingredients separate as long as possible, and mix them just enough to get them sufficiently mixed. To the consternation of assorted bystanders, I actually *measured* most of the ingredients (okay, so I'm embellishing the story a bit - the only bystander was the cat, and he wasn't all that concerned.)

The pictured pineapple-coconut muffin is from my third batch (for the record, the first batch was blueberry, and the second batch was raspberry).

The recipe called for 4 teaspoons of baking powder. After reading the baking powder label, this seemed like a lot of sodium, so I reduced it to 2 teaspoons. The muffins still appeared to rise okay, and were still tasty.