Posts tagged Random
Yesarooni Positooni
Apr 25th
I have no real reason to be excited for the weekend, but I’ve been really looking forward to it since Wednesday. I think the idea of going home, relaxing, and spending some time with the baby is really appetizing right now. The kid was really good last night, she was sitting on the spare bed while I was fooling around on the computer. The dog got on the bed — he’s great with her, because he really has a huge amount of patience with her. She smacks him, pulls his facial hair, punches him, and he just takes it. The only problem is that sometimes he just tries kissing all over her face and she’s clearly annoyed and can’t escape him.
Either way, somehow, he laid down and she reached over, so he put his front leg across her legs. She was sitting on her butt playing with his leg – drumming on it, petting it, etc, and he actually closed his eyes and let her just tap away. It was pretty amazing, given that he’s rarely that relaxed around Jenn and me and she’s so innocently rough with him.
Every time the dog pisses me off – which is often, since the big galoot is usually following us around and thus generally “in the way” – I remember how incredible he is with baby and how great it will be when she’s old enough to consider him a friend. I can sense he’s going to be fiercely loyal to her and she’s going to be really affectionate with him. The seed is already planted.
The entire scene just made me really long to spend some quality time at home with them, maybe let Jenn sleep late and pack up the baby and the dog for a good walk or something.
On Fatherhood
Apr 22nd
They tell mothers-to-be that they may not feel that motherly attachment to their baby the minute the baby is born. It has a lot to do with hormones, societal expectations, and culture. But they do tell them that the baby may seem foreign and unfamiliar at first, and it may take as long as two weeks or more to become familiar with this new life.
I didn’t take to fatherhood at first. I guess that’s unfair, I took to it just fine, but the minute Jillian was born, I was much more concerned about my wife who had just had a C-section than I was about the little baby. After all, if something happened to the baby, I’d still have Jenn and life would go on, albeit tragically. But if something happened to Jenn, I’d be crushed; devastated without direction.
I guess I could say I loved Jillian on day 1, but the truth is it took a few days to warm up to her. Babies really aren’t much – they don’t really tell you this – but they don’t do anything. They just lay around, sleep, cry, crap, and occasionally feed. They don’t smile, focus, laugh, or express any emotion. They mainly sleep and cry.
As time went on, each day, I’d find myself a little more enamored with baby. Each day, really around 2 months, she started becoming more and more a real person. She started smiling. She stopped crying all the time. She started expressing preference for one person over another. And I realized that I had a nice emotional bond with her.
Around 3 months, she started to actually develop some muscle and was able to hold her own weight on her knees if you balanced her. She chortled her first laughs and started being more comfortable in her own skin. She began to understand diaper changing and bottle preperation.
She just turned 6 months, now entering her 7th, and I just realized – I am paralyzed by how much I love my daughter. Now she sits up and rolls over. She communicates with us in so many ways and understands her surroundings like I never anticpated. She likes playing with the dog. She focuses on the TV and even prefers certain shows. She’s a full fledged person – she’s graduated from baby to infant.
As a new parent, you’re pre-conditioned to think you will love your child in a magical way. But I’m not sure people are capable of turning love on and off like that. Maybe mothers, who have a different kind of bond with an in utero child, but certain fathers are challenged to go from 0-60 on day 1. But the truth is, it doesn’t take long before you are won over by the absolute magic that is parenthood.
I can’t imagine life without my baby girl, and, as a parent, I worry about things that never would have crossed my mind. I spend time daydreaming during the day about hanging out with my kid and think about how much fun we’ll have when she’s just a little older. The other day I literally broke down in unexpected tears listening to the Beatles’ Golden Slumbers thinking about her, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I cried.
Being a parent subjects you to strong emotion and deep love in a manner I’m not certain one can truly understand until they experience it themselves. The idea that a piece of you is alive in this person, this person you have to strain to see as anything but perfect, it’s overwhelming. And it’s absolutely, positively wonderful.
A-whole-nother
Feb 29th
The word “another” is quote obvious born from a contraction of “an other.” I want “an other” opinion. Strangely, it has a different meaning when split apart, at least in colloquial use.
If I have a cookie and I want “another,” you would likely extrapolate that I would like a second cookie of the same type. Whereas if I wanted “an other,” you might believe I wanted a different cookie, perhaps even in place of this one.
Lately, I heard a phrase – not a new phrase, but certainly it’s gaining in popularity – “a whole nother.” “Nother” is not a word, so the phrase makes no sense in a literal translation. But how it’s used is interesting, because it actually has no true translation to an existing phrase that is quite as concise.
If I have a cookie and I want “another,” as we discussed, I might want a second. If I want “an other,” I might want a second, or possibly a different type. But if I tell you I want “a whole nother” cookie, you might believe I want an entirely different type of cookie – not merely another variation.
If we’re discussing movies, and I bring up something iconic like Star Wars, that might be “a whole nother” conversation. If we’re talking about the quality of computers and I discuss OS X vs Vista, that might be “a whole another” debate.
Urban Dictionary refers to this grammar destruction as “in-fix” (much like a prefix or a suffix). One thing is certain though – there is no phrase I know that comfortably fits into the common and casual vernacular that serves the same pupose as “a whole nother,” so I’m going to continue to use it until another phrase can replace it.
Random iTunes Sampling
Jan 22nd
I just hit “party shuffle” on my iTunes and this is what came up on the list. It was a great run, I really like all of these songs.
Immortality – Pearl Jam
Sandwiches Time – Weezer
Serve the Servants – Nirvana
Explode and Make Up – Sugar
For Me This Is Heaven – Jimmy Eat World
Out of Time – Blur
Spacesuit – Shift
Porch – Pearl Jam
Zombie Eaters – Faith No More
Listen to the Music – The Doobie Brothers
The Tain – The Decemberists
Anna Begins – Counting Crows
Caught Somewhere in Time – Iron Maiden
Dear God – XTC
Cryptical Envelopment – The Grateful Dead
Notice anything funny? Only three of the songs in the list are from the last decade. Needless to say, I’m feeling a little old today.
Carrots
May 15th
Not to get all random and off topic, but did you know that carrots aren’t all orange? And more importantly, the baby carrots you get at the supermarket are generally so processed and shaved down that they are consistently deemed less flavorful and less “carroty” than real carrots? Check these out:
Acronym Soup: A Short Story
Feb 9th
I booted up my QNX OS and tried VNC to my AIX box. Just then, I noticed a BSOD on my NT PC, which explained why I couldn’t RDP to it, but my data was probably safe thanks to VSC. “ic” someone wrote me on IM, and I quickly typed “BRB.” I jumped into my BMW to get to an ATM, and I drove through KFC. When I got back, I booted up my BSD machine and logged into KDE to check my files stored in UFS. It looked great even though I wasn’t using AIGLX, my ATI card showed my GTK and Qt apps looking A-OK.
I sat down and decided to write a program – but should I use ASP with VB or PHP? How about JSP? It didn’t really matter, because I was going to export into XML so I could use a DTS and SQL to import into my db. Since I was running BeOS, I decided that it would best to write my code in C with XHTML, so I just had to choose an IDE that worked with the API I had chosen. But my friend J.R. the MCSE told me he wanted it on his HP PDA and T.J., who is an RHCE and a CCNA, wanted it on his PSP. I decided to GPL whatever I wrote because the FSF would like that.
So I fired up my PC and booted Win Me. I had some old VB EXE files I wanted to review. Just then, some SOB asked why I was running Me and I asked him to keep it on the DL. He said “F U.” I kept track of my DLLs in an XLS file, and I had printed a PDF of the TOC. Outside the cubes, I could hear two VPs debating BFS vs. ZFS. One said he wanted ZFS to replace HFS. The other said he just wanted a fast CPU, a DVD RW, and a quality GPU. Since he bought his stuff OEM, he wanted to upgrade his PCI card to an AGP or PCI-X, but not until he bought himself a PCMCIA NIC. They talked it out, until it was ZFS, FTW.
“What’s your favorite app to open an RTF file?” someone asked me, and I said that I saved my work as TXT. But his docs were on a CD that discussed the benfits of SATA over IDE. So we plugged in an ATAPI (AKA EIDE) drive and since Me is UPNP, it opened. My screen was SVGA, but the system didn’t have USB. I got lots of IRQ errors.
We dialed into a BBS and cleared our ARP cache so ensure clean TCP/IP transfer. Someone wanted an a MP3 file, so I jumped on IRC and gave him a URL to DRM’ed AAC and WMAs. He got an HTTP 404, so we decided to FTP it or grab it off NNTP. The login ran through a CGI file, which failed, so I checked the FAQ. It required XP, but when I logged in and loaded AIM and MSN and my favorite XMPP program, I had a problem with my DNS, so I was SOL. I moved to OS X and dropped from the GUI to the TTY to try an SSH connection, but finally I used a PPTP VPN over my LAN via my DSL which uses the PSTN. I’m careful because, AFAIK, my ISP records my IP and blocks UDP, but then… IANAL.
Just then I was craving some TCBY. IMHO, TBCY is great, though YMMV. I emailed my buddy over SMTP from a machine running XFLD with XFCE, and he sent me a reply encoded with GPG. FYI, He was playing a MMORPG. FWIW, another friend, a real PITA, was writing a WYSIWYG HTML form.
It was just about closing time in UTC (AKA GMT), and IDK what came over me – I starting ROTFLMAO.
LOL.
Which Superhero Are You?
Dec 30th
You are Green Lantern
|
Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.  |
Links 12/11/2006
Dec 11th
Here’s a long overdue lists of tasty links for you:
33 things you never knew had a name
Seriously, this really weird – but common – stuff.
Make Ginger Ale
I’m going to do this.
What happens if you drink a Coke right now
Makes you think twice about that Ginger Ale.
Walking Table
This is the kind of ingenuity I like to see. Too bad the table itself it fugly.
Man trapped 4 days behind a wall of his own feces
Holy hell do I wish this were a joke.
Girl, 13, charged as sex offender *and victim*
Does this world make ANY sense at all?
Kids divide by zero
This is interesting, if you’re a math dork.
Family Guy: Osama’s message
Seriously, I laught for two minutes straight watching this.
Family Guy: Brian’s Novel
A classic.
File Under “Misc”
Nov 22nd
Quote Abuse
Man, this is “funny.” via Flickr.
Claygate
Yikes. This is where we’re gotten as a society. Rosie O’Donnell, who I didn’t mind that much until today, has declared Kelly Ripa – who was, I thought – a friend of the gay community, a “homophobe” because she told Clay Aiken, when he put his hand over her mouth on the air to shut her up and she said “That’s a no-no. I don’t know where that hand has been.” Okay, run-on sentence aside, this is cuh-razy. So, remember kids, if you’re a professional interviewer and you’re interviewing someone live on TV and some lame ass guest host slaps his stupid dirty hand on your piehole, embarassing you and touching your face in one dirty concoction, if you make a seemingly innocuous, possibly but not definitely snarky comment, you’re a gay-hater.
Rosie O’Donnell is a very outspoken voice for the gay community. To accuse someone of bigotry who (a) has no history of it, and (b) makes a VERY cloudily interpreted comment, and (c) is making this comment to someone WHO ISN’T EVEN GAY (admittedly, at least… and I’d add YET to that), she ought to be ashamed of herself. Rosie really ought to apologize.
By the way, ho-ly crap. Pictures of animals … in the womb.
I mean… seriously… check out the picture of the elephant. If this isn’t amazing, I don’t know what is.
Price is Right close finish
Nuff said.
Okay, that’s all for now. Have a great Thanksgiving.
So Much To Say
Feb 26th
Posted by Adam S in Random
Comments
On a normal day, I might point you towards links like this one, which demonstrates that The White House has removed quotes by Dick Cheney from their website. Or maybe this one, which claims that not a SINGLE member of George Bush or Dick Cheney’s family has served in this “honorable” war and set foot in Iraq as a soldier. I would explain that these are families of cowards, who continue to make this country worse each day they live, continue to decay our country and its framework, continue to increase the hatred for our once noble country. But instead, today is about good news.
This weekend, I won the Corporate Office Employee of the Year award, which was a tremendously validating experience. Combine that with the fact that my wife is newly pregnant and this was the first event that people have known about it, so they showered her with affection. And I’m so-close-I-can-taste-it to feature complete with OSNews version 4. So many cool features it makes me excited just thinking about it. I’ll detail several of them in a subsequent post.
Anyway, today is a GOOD day, and I will leave it at that.