Snow in the Bay Area?

So yeah, I sometimes get obsessed with the weather, as may be evidenced by some of my other posts. Anyway, the forecasters say that it may snow in the Bay Area at sea level today! Crazy!

Needless to say, I’ll be taking pictures if there is snow here. What a fun thing to celebrate Cindy’s 1st birthday. Happy Birthday, Cindy!

Gizmodo’s RSS feed points to Fleshbot

It looks like for some short amount of time this morning, one of my favorite site’s RSS feed pointed to Fleshbot.

$ curl -I gizmodo.net/index.xml
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:18:17 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (Red Hat) PHP/5.3.2 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1
Location: http://feeds.gawker.com/fleshbot/full
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1


Pretty impressive. It appears to be fixed now, but what’s going on at Gawker? Passwords stolen, unusable redesign, reading feeds on my iPhone doesn’t work, now getting RSS feeds confused?

It may be time to just switch full time to Engadget.

It was a good day

It was my birthday today (technically yesterday) and let me say, it was a great birthday. I didn’t mean for the title to sound like it was only “good” vs “outstanding” or some such; I just liked the way “good” sounded.

My day started off this morning with my wonderful wife getting me McDonald’s for breakfast and picking up a copy of Battlefield Bad Company 2 for my birthday. We relaxed with our daughter for a few hours, I played the game for a bit, then we decided to roll the dice and see how Cindy would react to the outside world with an early restaurant dinner. As I’m sure all parents do, we timed it between feedings when we figured she would be asleep and it worked perfectly. We’re certainly in a sweet spot where she sleeps most of the time, is on a regular feeding schedule, and is pretty much only woken up by cold hands on her warm skin.

After dinner, we got home, cleaned up a bit, I played my game for a while, spent some time with the family, then put Cindy on my chest while Bernadette slept and I played for a couple more hours. Cindy woke up, I brought her up to Bernadette, kept playing, then Bernadette brought her back down and Cindy slept for a few more hours, allowing me to gain some important XP in my game. The little detail there is that Bernadette got a blanket and curled up on the floor while Cindy tried to fall asleep so I could play my game in peace. Don’t worry, I didn’t let her stay there and sent her back up to bed.

Here’s the thing I’ve been meaning to write about, though: my wife is a simply amazing mother. Throughout the whole pregnancy and the labor and delivery, she’s approached things with a calm and rational head, which has also allowed me to remain largely calm and collected. The way that I see her interact with Cindy is nothing short of astonishing. She is so patient, loving, communicative, and puts Cindy’s needs in front of all of ours; I would have it no other way and it’s yet another area that we agree completely on.

I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful daughter, wonderful mother and loving wife as my family and will cherish this birthday forever. It certainly was a good day.

Stormy weather brings a blog post!

Mid-October Storm

Finally, the weather forecasters are right, bringing a pretty awesome storm into the Bay Area! Sure, I should be posting about other things like buying a house, knowing the sex of my baby, the Sharks starting their season, etc, etc, but not this time pal.

I have to admit that the commuters on Lawrence Expressway this morning were surprisingly with it, cautious, and courteous. Overall, drivers were doing the right thing in the heavy rain, which is opposite from what normally happens during nice weather. Before I go into what almost happened on Caribbean, a slight diversion.

When there is nice rain like this, Marco and I usually like to go out driving, looking for puddles caused by backed up drains, and driving through them while giggling. It’s good fun. This morning, as I was going the speed limit on Caribbean (45, officer), I noticed I was the only one in the right lane and most others were in the middle or the left. I didn’t notice at all the huge puddle that was maybe 50 feet long and covered 2/3 of my lane from the right. Needless to say, I hit it at 45, couldn’t see anything, and fought my steering wheel to keep me on the road. Let’s just say I respected the next large body of standing water a little further down the road.

And, I took the top off of my truck and parked it on a slight decline in the parking lot to see how much water it collects. Yeah, I’m like that.

And, if you were wondering about the wind…

I like that there are professional writers who are worse spellers than me

So, spelling has never been my strong point. I peaked, i think, in around third grade. I remember specifically being in the back of the room with the teacher and another student as we were the finalists for the class’ representative for the school spelling bee. My word was “loose” and I remember thinking that I knew how to spell that word, but spelling it right might mean I would then have to go to the next phase and possibly have to do this spelling thing in front of the room. I also thought about how my same teacher gave a student a hard time for asking him how to spell “Halloween” and he kept singing the song “h-a-double-l-o-w-double-e-n” and she didn’t like that. So I spelled “loose”, “l-o-s-e” and I lost.

Several years later, spelling checkers on computers came out and my spelling went out the door.

In my professional life, I was IM-ing someone and asked how to spell that word that meant transitioning from one thing to another, as in, “that was a good blank into the new topic”. He told me “segue”. I believe I asked how to spell the full word. There was some silly back and forth as I’m a Computer Science major and he was some English major or some such. Ultimately, I was the idiot when I learned that, of course, he was right and I was dumb.

All that said, I couldn’t have been happier when I read this AP article about Clinton going to North Korea (not unlike the old Vulcan proverb, “Only Nixon could go to China”) and saw:

Releasing the journalists would be a face-saving segueway into talks, they said.

Nice! Go editors!

An now I’ll stop procrastinating.