Baby News

We are 7 weeks and counting to Junior’s due date. I am excited and nervous both and feel like these last weeks are going by slowly. My belly feels large enough as is, and all the other mothers at work smile and say things like, “Just wait and see. It will get even bigger.”

Martha, Matt’s little sister, is hosting our baby shower in May. For those needing advanced warning, we are registered at BabiesRUs and Target. And no, we still don’t know Junior’s sex. We still want it to be a complete surprise.

This past weekend we experienced Junior hiccuping. The number of things you feel when a baby is growing inside you is quite amazing.

rogue waves

To myself, an inexperienced boater, I find the prospect of rogue waves fascinating. Violent water is “typical” in many areas (Cape Horn, Cape Hatteras, etc) and is expected there. There are geographic reasons such as underwater topography, tides, and other factors that create to turbulent water. Other reasons for huge waves is simply weather patterns, particularly storms. Within the class of violent weather is a class of waves known as freak, or rogue waves.

Only recently have scientists begun to understand their frequency, and the more they learn about them, the more light becomes shone on past events. They are closer now to having plausible explanations for things that defy a simple explanation, like the unexplained disappearances of 200 ocean going ships, and the Bermuda triangle. However, there is much still to be understood about rogue waves.

Many scientists believe that there may be as many as 2 to 10 of these rogue waves generated each year. The 965′ ocean liner Norwegian Dawn had just weathered out a storm through the night and as dawn broke and the seas calmed, a 70 foot wave arrived and blasted the ship. The captain of the ship had 20 years of ocean going experience and had never seen anything like it.

Although sailing through the storm may not have been the wisest choice (it tends to make passengers “uncomfortable”), navigating his ship through a violent storm and a 70′ wave with only a couple broken windows to show for it a remarkable achievement. My hearty congratulations to the captain. Many a ship has simply disappeared under such conditions.

Volleyball Championship

Jen and I have been playing an indoor co-ed volleyball league all winter. We wrapped up the season last month and our team had a good season, ending up as third of twelve teams. As soon as the season ended, we badgered the league’s organizer to make sure our bracket (the top level) played as early in the tournament as possible due to Jen’s pregnancy. The first tournament date was April 10th, so we spent most of Sunday playing volleyball.

So, we played our best and won the tournament, right? Not exactly. We started out playing much as we had all season, which is to say, competent, but not well. The tournament was double elimination so we started by winning our first game, and then losing the next two. Losing our first match set us up for the long road through the losers bracket before we could get a chance to play the top team for the winners seat.

After losing our first match, we started fighting, a little. Our lot in life was knocking all the other teams out of the tournament by handing them their second defeat. Our next couple matches were difficult. We played three games in each match, losing one but narrowly winning two games. Simply put, we played just well enough to avoid ultimate defeat. However, during those first three matches, we slowly began achieving something we hadn’t achieved all season, synergy. As the day went on, our team play got better and better.

Late in the day, we had earned our right to battle against the top team. Their first match was a bye so they were well rested, having played no more than 6 games in their two matches. We got to watch them play one game. Comparatively, we had already played 11 games in 4 matches. That’s what I mean by “the long road” through the losers bracket. We would have to beat the top team twice, meaning at least 4 and possibly six more games.

Having watched them, we identified their biggest threat and devised a plan to control him. Our plan was simple. Their big hitter was super fast, with an explosive attack to the net. We watched for it early and double blocked both their hitters on every swing. Here was the critical difference. As contrasted to our regular season blocking, our blocking matured dramatically during the tournament. It wasn’t just one of us blockers that got better, nearly every one of us did. Karl, Rhonda, Eric, and I all stepped up our blocking and put the smack-down on the hitters. We started it in our third match, employed it well during the fourth, and by the time we got to our fifth and sixth matches against the top team, we used it so well that we effectively shut down their offensive weapons.

As we kept blocking, their big guns were pulling back off the net, hitting from mid-court, and doing a lot more placement instead of big swings. We had one team shut us down mercilessly in regular season by blocking our every hit. This time I got to watch the block from our side and I’m beginning to understand just how critical the block at the net is. An effective block forces their offense to settle for a less intense attack. It’s easier for us to defend and get up a good pass to the setters. As our passes improved, our setting picked up, and so did our hitting. Our little guns were credible weapons and our big guns pounded them relentlessly.

We won the first match in 2 successive games. We didn’t just beat them, we demoralized them. In the second match, they commented, “maybe we should just sit over on the bleachers and watch you finish up.” The very same ladies that fed Jay set after set when he subbed in for them during the regular season were ready to pronounce him one of the devil’s own for pounding so many successive balls at them. “It’s not all about power”, they’d snide. They were feeling helpless, and we were riding the tides of victory. Our last 4 games were our easiest, and we won them by substantial margins.

We played from 1 to 7PM, with only one break between our first and second matches. We closed out the day by winning our 15th and final game, handing the 4th consecutive defeat to the leagues top rated team. For me, the victory was bigger than the tournament. I saw us achieve a level of unity our team had lacked all year, and we all played our best, together.

iPhoto 5 crash solution

As anyone reading my blog knows, many consider me some sort of computing god that can miraculously fix anything that looks, smells, or in any other way resembles a computer. Some even feel that computers fear me, as my mere presense makes them work correctly. “Matt, why does it do….. now that’s funny, it’s working now. I swear it didn’t work yesterday when I did that!”

In reality, I’m nothing close to divine. What I am, beyond being gifted with computers, is highly pragmatic. I’m extremely good at solving problems. So today, I’ll walk you through a problem I just solved and teach you (and others) how to solve similar problems for yourselves.

Two days ago I had a buddy and business associate here at my home. I was demonstratrating some techniques for managing digital media workflow, particularly relating to video and DVD production. As part of this, I was showing off some cool stuff in iPhoto ’05 which I just upgraded to a couple weeks ago. However, I discovered that every time I clicked the “print” button, iPhoto crashed. This does not reflect well on Mr. Computer Wizard.

A quick google didn’t turn anything up, so I resolved to address the problem another day. Today was that day so I did a more extensive Google search which still didn’t turn up anything. There are millions of people using iPhoto, and many thousands that have upgraded to iPhoto ’05. Nobody else has reported this issue so that tells me that this problem is unique to my system. Oddly, everything else in iPhoto works perfectly. It occurred to me that I do have two export plugins installed (BetterHTMLExport & iPhoto2Gallery) so I removed both and still had the same problem.

One of the things I know and love about Mac OS X is that when an app crashes, it writes a crash log, like any good Operating System should. So, I checked out the contents of ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/iPhoto.crash.log. That file has all sorts of useful stuff in it for programmers, but it didn’t really indicate what the problem might be.

The next thing to check was the logs to see if they provided any clues. I perused through /var/log/system.log and found that iPhoto is a good app and does log errors to syslog but it didn’t log anything that would help me resolve this problem.

I finally turned to a last resort. I ran iPhoto from terminal (/Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/MacOS/iPhoto) which runs iPhoto and spits any debug output to the terminal window. Not all applications are good enough to actually spit out useful error messages so this was really just a wing and a prayer but it turned out to be the clue that solved my problem. I tried clicking “print” in iPhoto and these were the last lines in my terminal windows as iPhoto crashed:

2005-04-08 11:08:26.042 iPhoto[4631] loaded /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/PlugIns/KeywordAssistant.bundle
Bus error

Oh yeah, I had that plug-in installed as well. Doh! I deinstalled it, and voila, my problem was solved. I checked out the developers site and sure enough, a new iPhoto 5 compatible version was available.

In summary, my problem with iPhoto was self-inflicted. I had installed a plug-in, forgotten about it, and then caused myself a problem when I upgraded to iLife ’05. Learn from my error. If you don’t have the skills or bravery to troubleshoot a problem like this, don’t install third party plug-ins. If you neglect this advise, don’t blame your primary vendor when something breaks, it’s most likely your own fault and you should be using techniques I have just demonstrated to determine exactly what the problem is.

The cost of kids

In planning for our life in Texas, we need to have a budget planned. One of the unknown factors in the equation is child care costs. So, to aid myself in the guessing, I looked up the average costs or raising a kid in the U.S. The USDA (Department of Agriculture) publishes these stats, and the monthly per-child costs for a two parent median income family is as follows:

Housing: $270
Education/Daycare: $110
Miscell: $80
Food: $90
Transportation: $95
Clothing: $35
Health Care: $50

Monthly Total: $730

Can it be? Does it really cost $730 each and every month to raise a kid? Most parents I’ve talked to don’t think that’s so out of line. When you decide to have kids, you need a bigger house, more furnishing, and invitably, replacing furnishing, all of which contributes to that $270/mo for housing. Nothing else looks terribly unreasonable, so we end up spending $8,760 a year, per child.

If our family follows the trends of average Americana, we’ll have $158,000 invested in Junior before we can kick our pride an joy out of the house. The average American family (household) has $8,000 in consumer (credit card) debt and 2.3 kids. To just pay their taxes, child care, and debt payments amounts to the first $34,000 of their paychecks. That sum would raise several families with children in most parts of the world.

Pregnancy & Dallas

We are preparing to enter the 29th week of our pregnancy. I am no longer straining to see a pregnant belly. For the longest time (about 26 weeks), the only discernable difference was the enlarged mammaries. While those are some fantastic side effects, the real deal has finally arrived and Jen’s belly is now protruding. In fact, she now follows it around as it leads the way. Our “face to face” conversations are now belly to belly instead. Junior is growing rapidly.

Last week I drove to Dallas. At 9:30PM on Wednesday evening, Justin and I piled into the Jetta and headed South. We arrived in Dallas 23 hours later and sacked out. On Friday I attended a “Discover Dallas” event hosted by DTS. I got to sit in on a couple classes, meet several professors, and chat with the President of the school. I learned a lot about DTS and what to expect there. I’m pleased to report it was all good.

DTS was quite a bit bigger than I thought, with nearly 2,000 students. It’s one of (if not the) world’s largest non-denominational seminaries. In 1994 it was the sixth largest seminary, period. I’d guess it’s moved up since then. Dallas is certainly in Texas, where they do lots of things in a big way. The worlds largest seminary (SBTS) is there. Whereas most major cities have a mega-church or two, Dallas has dozens, with several that exceed 10,000. Where you might find a religious school or two in most cities, Dallas has dozens. It has been said that Dallas is “in the buckle of the Bible belt.”

That’s not the only thing “big” you’ll find in Dallas. Dallas sports the highest concentration of tech industry outside the silicon valley. Step aside Seattle (which we referred to as “Silicon North”). On Saturday, our real estate agent took us around to help us get a feel for the real estate market.

Yet another “big” is the amount of house we can get for our money. We can get a new 4 bedroom, 2 car garage house with a golf course in the front yard and soccer fields in the back yard for $173,000. Best, it’s only a 20 minute commute into downtown. The options in that price range are many, diverse, and overwhelmingly good. To buy that much house in Atlanta or Seattle we’d expect to be paying twice that, or having a commute measured in hours.

I’m feeling more ready to move to Dallas as each day passes. The house here in Cadillac is making rapid strides toward completion. Our monster profiles are updated and we’re watching for opportunies in Dallas. The pregnancy and health insurance concerns are the only obstacles to leaving before the baby is born.

Enroute to Dallas

We’re cruising past Oklahoma City just now. So far we’ve had a perfectly uneventful trip. We’re about 3 hours from Dallas. The only “odd” thing to happen was getting an email shorty after getting out of Cadillac from a client with a “down server”. I have been unable to make a SSH connection from my Sprint cell phone connection, a recent problem. I need to figure out what’s up with that, but it just happened we were driving past my clients site so we stopped in and fixed his mail server.

They treated us to dinner, we each had to pack in a 22oz steak. It was awfully difficult work, but Justin and I managed to deal with it gracefully.

Pregnancy Update

It’s been a while since we’ve posted a “how Junior affects Jen and Matt” update.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted a “how Junior affects Jen and Matt” update. In contrast to the first trimester (which was bordering on abject misery for Jen), the second trimester is pretty smooth sailing. Based on all the books and web sites we had studied, we expected this and planned our trips to Costa Rica and the Virgin Islands accordingly.

What we have learned in this second trimester is that Jen conceals the evidence quite well. While traveling, I had to point out that Jen was pregnant or people wouldn’t have known. Most challenged the pronouncement, looking first at the belly, and then to mommy’s face to verify. At 24 weeks, Jen is finally beginning to show, but the bulge is really only evident when she’s au naturale. Naturally, that limits the audience.

I’d expect that more than a few ladies read that nugget in envy. I’m also certain that nearly every proud papa out there knows my disappointment. After all, I’ve been waiting for that belly to “pop” out and make it’s self-evident proclamation. How else can I walk around with that silly “Yup, I did that” grin on my face? My day is coming, it’s just a matter of time.

I’ve noticed a few role reversals happening lately. For starters, I’m no longer the appetite that drives the eating habits of our home. Before the pregnancy, Jen was the driving force behind meal planning. She based a significant portion of her creativity on trying to select foods I’d like. In the first trimester, that shifted radically with her eating the few things she could keep down (or that tasted fine coming back up) and I fended for myself.

Now that we’re in the second trimester and Jen can eat again, I find our eating habits have reverted to their original patterns, except we’ve reversed roles. I’ve been shedding a few pounds so my intake is considerably moderated from my mountain climbing days. Jen has taken over my role as primary eater and for the first time, I find myself defending my food.

I have been advised to expect many more role reversals during this transition from happy dual income couple with no kids to the brave new land of parenthood. The best book I’ve read on this subject is Babyhood by Paul Reiser. Instead of boring (or frightening) you with all the details, he presents his own transition in the same comedic fashion that has made Mad About You such a popular television show. It’s a very enjoyable read.

Junior’s Photo

First, for you speculators, Junior is not a name, simply a title our Doc calls our little baby. Thus, it’s what I’m calling it for now. We have chosen not to know Junior’s gender, because I don’t want to know. Jen leans towards knowing, so the compromise was having the nurse write it on a scrap of paper which we’ve placed in a sealed envelope. Without further ado, here’s our 2nd and 3rd photos of Junior: