November 4, 2009 - Halloween
Halloween was fun. The week before Halloween, our neighbors had a Halloween Party. They (the Leonards) have college degrees in costuming and stage design, and they always make impressive and elaborate parties. Angie and I dressed as zombies -- she was a soldier and a zombie, while I was a zombie doctor. Emily was a vampire and Savannah was a witch.
A week later, we went to a brief halloween party at my cousin Mika's house. It was pretty low-key, and primarily a chance for us to visit with them before they moved back to Finland (on Monday). Before they had plans to return to Finland, we had planned to come over for the party and then go home to Trick-or-Treat with the girls' friends. After their plans changed to move back to Finland, however, I think Mika's expectations changed and his family was planning for all of us to Trick-or-Treat as a group. I felt kinda bad that we miscommunicated somewhere. It was a sad visit, because the kids knew that they wouldn't see very much of each other in the years to come.
I had twisted my foot earlier in the day and the nearly two hours that I spent driving between my house and Mika's kept my foot in an odd angle and it started to hurt. Angie took the girls trick-or-treating with our dog Russia (dressed in a doggie princess costume). They came back when Russia got tired and I joined them for the second round. Angie didn't dress up for the actual Halloween and I only dressed in my red-satin lined cloak and burgundy rennaissance shirt. The zombie makeup was a bit messy, obnoxious and didn't look great... so I didn't feel like doing it a second time.
Overall it was a nice holiday.
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Entered: 11/4/2009 11:26:00 AM
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Modified: 11/4/2009 11:26:00 AM
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October 24, 2009 - Mac OSX 10.6.1
I bought a Macintosh Laptop -- a low-end one in the modern line (intel dual core, running the latest Mac OSX Snow Leopard). It's been a little while since I used a Mac extensively.
The Macintosh crowd has always been a noisy one. I remember the original Mac, the Mac in the Finder 6.0 days, the Finder 7.0 days, the Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9 days, and the beginning of the Mac OS X era. They constantly cited the innumerable superiorities of the Mac.
Now, in the early days it was quite a neat machine compared to everything else. I mean... it was black and white and didn't have stereo sound, but the GUI was cool. However, everyone caught up and since then, it's been "just another computer."
Well, the latest iterations are looking pretty nice and have some neat innovations. I'm definitely enjoying it, even though it's always annoying as hell to switch back-and-forth with a windows machine and mixing up my hotkeys and OS features.
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Entered: 10/24/2009 10:03:00 AM
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Modified: 10/24/2009 10:03:00 AM
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October 24, 2009 - Software Updates
Wow. I'm so freaking annoyed by software updates.
I can understand it from a software development perspective, from a software provider, from hardware providers, etc... The idea is simply that you can develop a "useful" piece of software that isn't finished, and deliver incremental improvements over time. It works well with budgets, development times and vague development goals.
However, as a consumer, I just don't fucking care. It irritates the crap out of me that I bought a new game for the PS3 last week... and I had to run a system update on the PS3 that took an hour to install. Then I had to "install" the game (Dirt Race 2) which took about 30 minutes.
Is that how a gaming console is supposed to work? I buy a game on a CD and I have to sit around and wait 1.5 hours until I can play it. That's pathetic.
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Entered: 10/24/2009 10:07:00 AM
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Modified: 10/24/2009 10:08:00 AM
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August 20, 2009 - Life Events
Since my last blog entry, a lot has changed. I limited my blogging in order to conceal some anxieties, frustrations, and adjustments that I've been going through. I think that I will be more private about such things in the future. The new job is going well. It took me a few weeks to "find my feet" in my new role as a project manager (which now includes NO DEVELOPMENT OR ADMINISTRATION). It is also taking me a while to understand my new work environment. The advertising agency is quite different from the petrochemical company that I came from. Just as I started feeling confident about my job, we lost our baby two weeks ago. That has weighed heavily on us. As I posted on MySpace and Facebook, we appreciate text messages and email expressing condolences, but we prefer not to receive phonecalls.
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Entered: 8/20/2009 4:02:00 PM
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Modified: 9/16/2009 2:55:00 PM
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July 3, 2009 - New Job
I started my new job last Monday. This was a shortened week because of the July 4th holiday. It was an interesting week that mostly involved my reading documentation about many software projects, sitting in on meetings, and meeting the various people that I will be working with.
It's a little weird being in a new place. At Oxy, everyone knew me... and they'd known me since I was 25 years old and a little less professional. I get a whole new start, here. This is nice.
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Entered: 7/3/2009 5:58:00 PM
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Modified: 7/3/2009 5:59:00 PM
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May 22, 2009 - Sleep Study Pt;.2
They connected me to a CPAP machine. The purpose of this machine is to blow air into your face so that it is easier to breath. To breath in, specifically. I seem to have a problem where I tend to hold my breath while I'm sleeping, and the air blowing in my face exaggerated my problem. I woke up probably 50 times because I was unable to breath. It was terrifying. It was one of the worst nights that I've had in ages. Apparently, sleeping with the machine is pleasant for most people, and a godsend for people with "normal" types of apnea. However, I hated it.
When I got home this morning, I crashed and didn't get up until around 11:00am. I've spent the day, ever since, on constant phone calls -- most related to my job search.
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Entered: 5/22/2009 2:11:00 PM
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Modified: 5/22/2009 2:13:00 PM
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May 21, 2009 - General Update
General update. I've spent the last week or so talking to recruiters, working on the new Helen's Heart website, reading blogs and commenting on pointless internet discussions. Notably on http://www.internetevolution.com , which speaks specifically on topics in internet business.
Sunday, we got new fish for the aquarium. When I moved our old fish (when we got new floors a month ago), they all spontaneously died. I'm not sure why, but I was disappointed. Our 10 goldfish were all in the 6" range. Our new fish are not goldfish. Shrimp, plecos, mollies, a rainbow shark, a loach, and a red male betta.
Last night, I made cookies with Savannah. Normally, I make cookies with Emily, because she really enjoys baking and cooking. Savannah has more rarely shown an interest in such things. Since Savannah asked, I made it a night to bake with Savannah. Emily was crushed; I guess she felt kinda rejected. I felt horrible, because... well I don't do things with the kids so that they'll be unhappy. I apologized and included her in the rest of the endeavor. We all happily made cookies and ate very few of them.
Of course... cookies are made with a cup of butter and 1.5 cups of sugar. The acid was horrible and kept me writhing in discomfort at 1:30am. Since I've started to use cholesterol medication, I can't take antacid for a four-hour block of my evening. At 1:30am, I took my zantac and had to wait 30 minutes for it to kick in.
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Entered: 5/21/2009 11:24:00 AM
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Modified: 5/21/2009 11:24:00 AM
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May 21, 2009 - Technical Interview
This morning, I had a technical interview with a consulting company
(Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group). It went very well. Although I'm a strong technical person, I've started to fear technical interviews. It appears that there is a huge margin for opinion and methodologies. I was shocked to have a person once indicate that I had weak SQL skills (primarily because I didn't do a lot of server-side maintenance, which seems somewhat irrelevent). Among most technical interviewers, most say that it's a strength for me, and I consider myself to be strong with it. My skepticism and light useage of deep abstraction methodologies -- particularly abstract classes, complicated class heirarchies, and many-tier (4+) development strategies -- has earned me some unfair commentary, too, in my opinion. I understand how to make things complicated... I do it if I have to. I just prefer my data to be structured in a pretty simple way.
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Entered: 5/21/2009 11:27:00 AM
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Modified: 5/21/2009 11:34:00 AM
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May 15, 2009 - Baby Girl
Ang and I went to the doctor yesterday to get ultrasound pictures of our baby. This was "the exciting one" where you get to see if it is a boy or a girl. Ang and Savannah have been wanting another girl, but Emily has been wanting a baby boy. I didn't really care which one it was. The extended family seemed largely convinced that it would be a boy -- Ang has jokingly blamed a lot of her complications (nausea, baby moving) on "the boy."
However, the ultrasound has demonstrated that it will be a baby girl. Her name will be (tentatively) Jessie Clay Jacobsen.
(btw, this is the first time I've used my "blog with a gallery" tool. It is super-easy to upload multiple pictures and they show up just like you see to the right. It includes tools for re-arranging the pictures and picking which is "the big one." I coded this several months ago, but hadn't integrated it into my blog until recently.)
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Entered: 5/15/2009 8:33:00 AM
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Modified: 5/15/2009 8:40:00 AM
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May 8, 2009 - DLink DSM-520
I got another DLink DSM-520, which I bought from eBay. This is a set-top box that accessing video files from my media server through our wireless network.
This is my second one, and I hope to get another one. My DVD collection (roughly 2000 discs) seemed a lot less practical after I got married. My anal-retentive disc habits were fine when I was single, but expecting my wife and kids to put DVDs back in cases and shelves in alphabetically order turned out to be unrealistic.
Now, I have 4 Terabytes of disk space on my media server, and I have thousands of TV shows and movies ready to stream wirelessly throughout the house. It is more convenient in every discernable way -- except that I have to encode movies. With 4 DVD-Rom drives and a quad-core processor, it turns out not to take too long.
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Entered: 5/8/2009 4:24:00 PM
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Modified: 5/8/2009 4:38:00 PM
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May 8, 2009 - Sleep Study
Last night I participated in a sleep study. I hadn't been sleeping very well for the past couple years, and my wife complains that I snore. She also says that I sometimes gasp for breath, and that she thought I had sleep apnea.
Well, doctors haven't been a big priority for me, but since I have spare time (being unemployed and all), I decided that I should take care of it while it didn't conflict with a job.
It was surprisingly easy. I showed up at 9:30pm at the medical center and went to bed in some rooms that were set up like a motel. I was supposed to get to sleep at 10:30pm (my normal bedtime), but I don't think I actually got to sleep until after midnight. Fortunately, I anticipated this and brought my laptop and some TV shows that I hadn't gotten around to watching, yet.
The nurse wired me up with a couple dozen electrodes and plugged me into a computer. Then I went to sleep. Actually, I was a bit uncomfortable and when the nurse "got me up" I was already awake... and I didn't feel like I'd slept at all. It was one of the worst night's rest I've had recently.
However, in spite of my perception that I didn't sleep, the nurse assured me that I had. I was afraid that I had wasted the entire sleep study by not sleeping. When I thought about it, I realized that I hadn't quite counted to a thousand (I count, slowly, when I want to get to sleep... it's boring enough to knock me out), and that would only have taken an hour, whereas I had been lying down for 6.
The different electrodes left sticky glue or some kind of gritty paste on various parts of my head, face, and body. They washed out easily enough. One electrode left a red mark under my left eye.
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Entered: 5/8/2009 4:37:00 PM
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Modified: 5/8/2009 4:39:00 PM
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Recently Read Books
Stephanie Meyer
The Host
William Gibson
Neuromancer (re-read)
Dan Simmons
Hyperion
The Fall of Hyperion
John Hemry
(as Jack Campbell)
The Lost Fleet Series: 1-5
Terry Brooks
The Shannara Series
Walter Isaacson
Einstein: His Life and Universe
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| www.humanmetrics.com |
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My Myers-Briggs Type: INTP
Introverted 56%
Intuitive 33%
Thinking 22%
Perceiving 56%
INTP types are quiet, thoughtful, analytical individuals who enjoy spending long periods of time on their own, working through problems and forming solutions. They are curious about systems and how things work. INTPs tend to be less at ease in social situations although they enjoy the company of those who share their interests. |
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