This journal is painfully long, and more for documentation than to actually be read by another human being.

After taking several days of vacation from work, I ended up with a vacation that happened to span the 22nd to the 2nd. Not having had a vacation that long since, well, I came up here I pounced on the chance.

Up until the 26th, (e:inscrutable) and I lodged at her parents' house in Dansville. It was a restful stay in a country setting. I got to spend the first christmas in quite a while where I actually interacted with people instead of barricading myself in my apartment like a recluse.

The 28th, (e:inscrutable) and I took a flight to back home (what I consider to be my real home) in NC. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 7:30AM, and we had budgeted an hour to go through security, but alas, there was nearly a two-hour wait to go through security. At 6:30 in the freaking morning! So we had to rebook to a flight that left Buffalo at 5:30PM, and this time we decided to be safe and arrive at the Buffalo airport three hours early. And of course, there was no line in security at 2:30PM, so we ended up waiting three hours at the airport.

The funny part about going through the wretched process that cost us our flight was that they held onto my backpack for two minutes and searched it thoroughly because it had a container of sunscreen that I had forgotten to remove from Allentown Arts Festival six months earlier. Yet they totally missed the butane lighter in plain view sitting in the outer mesh of my backup (also accidently left there many months ago), something actually capable of damaging the plane during flight. Go figure.

During the whole experience with the plane, I mused repeatedly about the reactionary policy regarding air safety. Anythings okay to bring onto a plane, until someone tries to do something evil with it, at which point it's banned from any carry-on. Like the powers that be just couldn't have figured out earlier that you could mix harmless chemicals that could pass through an explosives sniffer together to form an explosive? And then there's the whole shoe thing. Richard Reid tries to blow up an airplane by hiding stuff in his shoe, and now we have to take our shoes off at security, and the only reason why we have to do that is that he tried to do this using his shoes. If he had hid the stuff in a stuffed animal, we'd still be able to wear our shoes through security and would get flogged by security if we dared to carry a Tickle-Me-Elmo past the TSA goons. It's so reactionary.

It's only a matter of time before some Al-Qaeda nutjob hides a bomb up his ass, and when he's caught trying to light his ass on fire at 36,000ft, airport screenings will be considerably more uncomfortable.

Friday I went to a Hurricanes game with my parents and (e:inscrutable) and got to see a Hurricanes game. We beat the Bruins 4-3. After living in Buffalo for almost two years, it was good to see an ocean of red and black jerseys. And of course, I got to purchase more Hurricanes schwag, which I really can't do in Buffalo.




Tonight, I hung out with a good high school friend and got to play with his kid, who's very cute. The racecar I bought him was a resounding success. I might be meeting with this friend again to hash out some ideas for the software I'm writing for him to keep track of computer network addresses. I'm not allowed to do work stuff on this vacation, but I guess altruistic stuff is okay.

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.