Clicking Paul's snowflakes.
Like digital bubble wrap
Strangely addictive.

I have discovered one of the deep, dark, ancient secrets of my predecessors at work: how they generated bar codes.

This occasion calls for a beer. Too bad my throat's sore and I can't eat/drink anything.

It makes me chuckle, especially since I've ended up literally playing the game backwards, moving from Raleigh, then seeing Lance diamond the first week I got here, to seeing the American side of Niagara Falls, and finally looking for someone cheap to live.

(This was originally a comment on (e:jim)'s Macworld journal post, but it started turning in article material when I started ruminating on my current station in life).

I am a 40 hr/wk mac/Cocoa programmer and I've never been able to afford the time and money to go to either Macworld or, more importantly, WWDC (Apple's yearly Worldwide Developer Conference for mac programmers). My current employer certain won't pay for me to go to WWDC, because the previous programmers turned down the offer for the company to pay them to go to it (and then proceeded not to renew the company's Apple Developer Program), which pretty much shut the door for me when I came after them.

The only opportunity I ever had to get a free ticket for WWDC(which costs $1500+) was when I was in college working in my mac programming work-study job, and I had to pass that up because it was summer school and I couldn't take time away from the last class I needed to graduate.

In short, I think I hold the monopoly on (e:strip) of sucktastic experiences missing Apple conferences, unless I happen to share a duopoly in that industry with (e:zobar).

Why am I complaining? Because it's hump day, that's why. I'm allowed to gripe like a 3 yr/old and shake my fist at the world, as well as having delusions of grandeur like starting my own mac developers conference in Buffalo and starting a Buffalo chapter of CocoaHeads where I am the sole member, the president, and still find time to call for my own impeachment.

Time for positives now. I:

Am employed
Have a decent-paying, fairly challenging job
In fairly decent health
Am well/over-fed
Have people who love me
I am living a life that 95% of the world's population can only dream about
Will get to see my son when he pops out in 4 months

Okay, so there probably are more important things in my life than going to nerd conferences and I'm making way too big a deal about missing them.

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.