An updated sonar reading has now been taken, and we have a confirmed penis sighting. We've upgraded the status of The Project from "unspecified gender" to "we're having a boy".

Time to figure out how to be a role model for budding masculine behavior...

Since I found out I'm going to be a father, there have been a slew of troubling questions that have preoccupied my thoughts.

- How am I supposed to give my child confidence in one particular area when I myself for most of my life have felt a lack of confidence in that area?

- How can I possibly provide a positive outlook on a subject for my child when I myself am angry, bitter, and negative about that subject? How can I say "everything will be alright" when for much of my life I've admitted defeat and sung the refrain of "yup, I'm boned"?

- How am I supposed to answer my child's questions about something difficult when I haven't even answered those questions for myself?

- How can I tell my child to go and slay their own personal demons when I haven't even slain mine yet?

- How do I balance my desire to be a good parent with my desire not to act like a total hypocrite when I don't heed the moral/practical advice I give to my child? How can I say "go clean your room" when there's a piece of dirty laundry on my own bedroom floor?

Such are the questions that keep me up late at night these days. I don't think there are any easy answers, I just wish I knew whether these troubling questions are normal for all new parents to ask themselves.

There are also those days where you skimp on necessary ingrediants and steps required to prepare a dish in the interests of saving time and money, only to find you have a culinary disaster barreling towards you...sigh...

There's days when I feel like I'm not really a very good at being Database Architect because I don't have some kind of fancy/shmancy Oracle certification and the headhunters who occasionally call me up to ask questions have never heard of the database I manage (i.e. PostgreSQL for the techo-nerds out there).

And then, there are those days when I see billion dollar companies who hire people like that who would refuse to hire people like me (on principle alone of not having a computer science degree) who have the guys with certifications and who do databases headhunters are familiar with who are unable to make the simplest and wisest of decisions (i.e. choosing a proper primary key for their business model, for the techno-nerds out there). On those days, I don't feel quite so bad about not having rubber stamps of approval.

- Spent the week with my parents, who left on friday. They really helped (e:inscrutable) and I a lot with setting up our apartment. Which we really need ready for the baby come April.

- Mom showed me how to make both her famous chicken and knuflies and her water chestnut stuffing. I will now be able to make these recipes for my family (the one I'm raising).

- Had thanksgiving dinner with my family (the one who raised me).

- I finally got a new vacuum cleaner to do battle with (e:ktmuffin) and her effect on my ability to breathe.

- Also purchased was a new washer and dryer. I've never actually had my own personal laundry machines in any apartment I've owned. It will be really nice being able to walk five feet to wash my boxers while simultaneously wearing boxers.

- Caught the tail end of (e:lizabeth), (e:john), and (e:jbeatty)'s non-traditional Thanksgiving.

- (e:inscrutable) and I took a road trip to see her parents in Dansville. I got to meet her other brother as well as several aunts. Had a second, belated thanksgiving with them.

- I had way too much turkey. This entire weekend, all I've wanted to do was sleep.

(e:inscrutable) got the sonar today.



The stubborn kid kept its legs crossed the whole time, so our master plan to choose pink or blue stuff is foiled once again.

I turned 32 today. It's cool that my birthday's finally on a saturday. I think I'll check out grandma moras tonight. For some strange reason, Buffalo doesn't really have quite as many Mexican restaurants as Raleigh-Durham has; I can't explain why but it's been two years since I've had anything in a decent mole sauce.

(e:inscrutable) made me a buttercream icing cake. Yum. I'll try to snag a picture of it later.

I haven't posted in a while. I'm not dead; I'm just in the process of moving into my new apartment. Although at times, I can't tell the difference.

Combining two households really sucks. When you move out from your parents for the first time, you have the evilness of having the expense of duplicating all the items you used to have back home. When you move in with someone, you have the its evil twin: duplicates of everything you own and deciding how to get rid of them.

What silverware do we keep? The heavier more expensive ones they don't make anymore, or the ones that go with the dishes? Whose furniture is sacrificed for extra space in the living room, and whose hobby is the recipient of that space? Which blender makes better margaritas, and should we keep the other one as well because it has more fancy settings, even if keeping both of them takes up more room?

I can only take solace in the fact that I can still store my car in the garage--I refuse to let it get taken over entirely by secondary storage.

(Warning, non-english computer rant below. I need to express my overwhelming anger somewhere).

Still no Apple-provided Obj(google-guard)ective-C way of doing regular expressions. After 5 major OS versions and 7 years! Motherfuckers!

Every other language framework has them, except for Cocoa. Every single damn one. Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Java, JavaScript, .Net/C#, Gtk, Qt. Hell, even WxWindows has a regular expression class. WxWindows for crying out loud! But still, nothing from Apple.

Having needed regexps many times when doing mac development over the years (as so many people just aren't nice enough to make their content into web services), the lack of this important functionality in the core library has been an enormous source of wall-punching ire for me. As is the protestation from hardcore NeXTies that 3rd party laissez-faire solutions are good enough, or that the API is just too damned 'selective' to have regexps, or that scripting languages should really be used instead. The last one is really confusing; as they've added automatic garbage collection, it seems like they're trying to make Ob(google-guard)jective-C competitive with scripting languages that provide regular expressions.

The emperor looks even more naked from the standpoint of an Ob(google-guard)jective-C developer when one looks at all the other stuff that's either missing an API altogether or has a C-based non-OO API (did I mention that Apple keeps telling us that "Cocoa is the future"). There's no Apple-provided OO Cocoa interface for web services, none for getting the basic system configuration, nothing for WebDAV, nothing for secure FTP, nothing for any sort of MD5/SHA-1 checksum, nothing for relational databases. It's stuff that so simple to add, or at least should be from the standpoint of a billion-dollar company, yet it doesn't get added. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I know that the world faces more pressing problems, and there could be happier thoughts running through my head than constantly thinking about giving Apple the finger by creating a framework called "CoreFunctionality" that intentionally clashes with Apple's namespace by including such classes as NSRegularExpression and NSHash.

Hell, I just think I need to rant so I can form my battle plan with a clear head and ponder on where to get stuff for my slutty costume I'm wearing tomorrow.

I wonder if she does govt. passport issuing offices?