To answer (e:jenks)' question, yes I'm downloading the iPhone SDK and I'll be trying to start writing iPhone applications. It would really help if I actually had an iPhone, but with a baby on the way, I've really been trying to justify it.

I'm not a very well-paid programmer, as I make less than a buffalo elementary school teacher, and once the little one comes into the world, I might as well have my employer do a direct deposit to my landlord, daycare, univera, whatever infant daycare provider I manage to find, and the bank that does my car payments; after those get taken out, we're eating and buying baby clothes off of (e:inscrutable)'s paycheck, which is about half of mine. I'm not going to complain, because people in some other area of the world would kill for 1/100 of what I have, but the situation has me scared shitless.

I probably will end up getting an iPhone, because I can justify it with trying to earn extra money for my family by developing and selling iPhone apps by whatever mechanism Apple sets up. I'm also studying Google's Android phone development environment, so I can enter something into their contest, which has some pretty lucrative prizes. There's so much crap I have to cram into my head to make money on the side, but the more I can cram into my head better off things will be for us.

Screenshot of estrip on a simulated Google phone

Before I got my job in Buffalo, I was severely underemployed in NC and desperately looking for work.

I wanted to work for this one mobile content divider; they seemed cool, and I knew some people in the company who might put in a good word for me. I also really wanted this one social software engineer position at Apple. I got neither job, and ever since I came up here I always replayed in my mind the "what if they hired me" scenarios.

This week, I learned that the mobile company was laying off a lot of its staff and quitting the area I wanted to stay in. I also read the blog by the guy who got the social software engineer position, and he says the position was pretty limiting.

I guess the point of this post is that it's kinda weird to look back and see the smoking craters of decisions I might have made if my life had gone exactly way I wanted it to, and to feel I'm lucky that it didn't.

Summary of the day.

(e:inscrutable) and I went to the childbirth class at Children's Hospital. We did the whole breathing thing, the whole pillow thing, and the identify-various-baby-hygiene-ointments-and-potions thing. We ate at the Cafeteria, which wasn't awful but doesn't really deserve a Visco-style food porn pictorial.

Missed Bedouin Soundclash at Mohawk Place because the cold I've been having the last several weeks re-intensified and I had to stay in bed. I hate being sick; it always seems to happen when there's something that I really want to do that I can't do very often, like seeing my favorite band perform in Buffalo.

Apparently, after I explicitly told National Fuel to cut off service to my apartment on Richmond on Nov. 1st, they didn't stop billing me.

In fact, they pretty much kept on billing me until Dec. 14th. So between Nov. 1st and now (my last and hopefully final bill from the old place), I've been paying/owing those idiots $300 for the privilege of heating the old place I no longer live in. And they say they "have no record of a cut-off request".

I am so unbelievably pissed right now.

Why can't any utility company in Buffalo get anything right? And where is the copious amounts of money that we pay them going that they can't fix the most basic website/computer/customer service problems?

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...