Many of you already know this from Facebook but I thought that I would make a post about it anyway because it is pretty big news in our family: we will be having a boy!

We went to the doctor on Thursday with Emma, Grammy, and Mimi in tow, to find out what the next little Robinson would be.  Grammy and Mimi were both fully expecting a girl, and Emma, when asked what the baby was, she responded “Gurl!”

After all the checking and measuring of the important baby stats, the technician had Kip call in the rest of the family to have the gender of the baby finally announced.  Once everyone was in the room, the Tech announced, “Well, it’s a boy.”  Her inflection showed no excitement or interest.  It sounded like she was telling us that “Well, it’s going to rain today.”  The reactions that followed though were more interesting.  Kip, according to my mother, beamed with a big goofy grin.  Mimi was so excited she teared up and exclaimed, “I know what to do with a boy!”  Grammy was all smiles, and asked me if I was ok.  (You have to understand that Kip and I really wanted another little girl, much like my sister Emily really wanted a little boy.)  I was in a state of shock and surprise for a few seconds, and then I just thought, “God is giving us a little boy, and he is healthy, moving, and going to be very precious when he gets here in less than 20 weeks.”  I was a little disappointed at first, and terrified because I figured out what to do with a baby girl with Emma, but I have no experience with little boys on an extended basis.  There are little boys in the nursery at church, but I usually let them be on their own and when they need a diaper change, I let the other worker handle that.  I am happy that we are going to have a little boy, and I am looking forward to buying him his own new wardrobe now that I know I need to have clothes for a little boy.

For those of you that have been living under a rock or don’t keep up with our lives like a stalker or super-fan, the plan as of now is to have the baby on July 19, via c-section, and name him Grayson Matthew Robinson.  No, the name isn’t a family name, it is just a name that Kip and I picked out when I was pregnant with Emma (in the event that she turned out to be a boy) and we still like it, so it will be the name of this baby.  And if you’re wondering, we are not naming him “Kip Robinson, III” because Kip says having the same name as your dad makes things too confusing. He figures maybe someday he might have a grandson named Kip. And I’m OK with that.

I thought I’d point you guys to Geronimo Jack’s Beard. It’s a podcast about Lost from Jorge Garcia (Hurley) and some girl named Beth (I think she’s Jorge’s significant other, or maybe she’s just a friend; she’s not one of the actors though). They recorded these podcasts after initially reading the scripts, but they are only releasing them as each episode airs (for obvious reasons). It’s interesting because Jorge is just as confused as the rest of us, even though he is on the show. They are only doing it for this season, so there’s only three episodes out right now if you want to listen to them all.

I’ve created a compact (fits on one page!) version of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics TV schedule. (Similar to the one I made for the 2008 games.)  And, like last time, I thought it’d be polite to share it with the world.

You can download it here (PDF format)

A few things to note:

• Times were retrieved from nbcolympics.com, on 2010.02.12. They are subject to change.

• Times are for east coast United States time zone. They’re also in military format to conserve space and avoid ambiguity.

• I don’t care about hockey, and there are a ton of hockey games, so I didn’t include them. If you’re into hockey this isn’t for you.

• Whatever aired on NBC from 8pm to midnight is usually re-aired at 1:30 am that night. I didn’t include that on my schedule.

• Some of the curling events are probably re-airings of the same events, but I’m not sure. I left out some that I thought were re-airings which might not have been. But does anyone really need to watch more than an hour of curling every four years? Just pick one hour, watch it, comment about how it’s such a weird sport and the people look so funny with their brooms, then forget about the sport entirely until the 2014 games in Russia.

• Universal and Universal HD air stuff nearly every day, but it looked like it was all recaps so Ieft it out.

• This was a bit tedious so it’s quite possible I made a typo or two.

• Feedback always welcome

A little over a year ago, I posted my impressions of Pandora, the free online radio station website thingy. At the time, I was liking it, though after a while I started losing interest and stopped using the site.

Last month, I saw a cartoon about Pandora on Hijinks Ensue. The cartoon hit on a problem I also had with the site. I left the following comment there, which I thought was interesting enough that I’d share it as a blog post.

Kip: I like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana

Pandora: Hey, you must love Red Hot Chili Peppers!

Kip: No, really I don’t. Well OK, I like Under The Bridge, but most everything else is thumbs-downed.

Pandora: Great, so you wanna make babies with RHCP! While I keep playing them, I bet you like Foo Fighters too.

Kip: Yes, actually I do like them a lot

Pandora: Great, so you like any alt-rock from early-to-mid 90s. I bet you love Alice In Chains!

Kip: Can’t stand them

Pandora: I’ll keep a few more Alice In Chains songs in rotation in case you needed 15 years for them to grown on you. How about some Soundgarden?

Kip: Please stop

Pandora: Candlebox?

Kip: Okay time to stop

Pandora: Here’s another Chili Peppers song since you love them so much

I think I have found the Bizarro World version of myself. I set up a Google Alerts feed for “Kip Robinson” some time back, curious to see if I’m being mentioned anywhere. To no one’s surprise, I’m not.1 Most of the new hits are either 1) this blog, 2) random business meeting minutes that somehow involved a “Kip Robinson”, or 3) a blog from a Mormon couple in California. It is the latter, sarahnkip.blogspot.com, where you will find Bizarro Kip Robinson:

If you read the blurb on the sidebar, you will see that I share essentially nothing in common with Bizarro Kip, other than the name:

Anybody that knows Kip knows that he is adventurous. He is into anything outdoorsey and anything that get’s your heart racing. He is currently in the process of applying for many different fire departments. He is also working full time for his dad’s construction company as a project manager. Kip still finds time to hit the gym, ride his dirt bike and spend time with his wife. He is working hard to ensure a comfortable and happy future for our family.

Last week I did something quite significant. I told my DVR to stop recording The Simpsons. Can you believe the show has been running for twenty years? That’s crazy! Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to care about the show lately. My DVR would record it, but I usually wouldn’t watch it until there came one of those rare days when we generally didn’t have anything to do. Then I’d sit down and try to get caught up on Simpsons episodes. I say “try” because only about fifty percent of the time would I actually be able to watch the whole episode. The other half of the time the show was delayed because of some sporting event that I couldn’t care less about, which means at best I could see the beginning of the episode.  In fact, just such a thing happened when I went to watch the 20th anniversary special, which I had heard was very good. This was when I finally decided to give up on the show.

So far in this post, I’ve done a lot of complaining. While complaining a highly popular sport on the internet, I’m going to try to spend the rest of this post reminiscing fondly.

I was exactly eight years and one month old on December 17, 1989. I have no idea what I was doing that Sunday evening, but I know I wasn’t watching the first episode of this new cartoon on Fox called The Simpsons. Before long, everyone knew who Bart Simpson was. I knew that Bart’s show was one of those shows that I wasn’t allowed to watch. It’s actually quite strange, by today’s standards, to think that this show was ever controversial. Especially the first season or two. I mean, the family even went to church and there’s usually some kind of “everybody hugs” moment at the end of the show. What’s even stranger, though, is to consider that there would be no Fox News today if it weren’t for Bart Simpson’s popularity.1

Once when I was in fourth grade I decided to sneak a peek at this forbidden show. It was Homer Defined, the episode where Homer causes a meltdown unrequested fission surplus at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. That episode aired on October 17, 1991, but I could have been watching a rerun of it. I didn’t see what was so great about the show, but I only saw a few minutes of the show before turning it off and going back in the living room for fear of being caught watching this show I wasn’t supposed to watch. The part I saw was where Professor Frink showed a diagram of concentric circles and explained that “These unfortunate people [in the center circle] will be instantly killed.  This circle, which I am sad to say we are in, will experience a slower, considerably more painful death.”

The first episode that I really watched in entirety was The Front, the one where Bart and Lisa write an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon and submit it in their grandfather’s name. In the cartoon, as I recall, Itchy sends Scratchy to heaven, either by killing him or by knocking him upward very far. Itchy arrives through Elvis Presley’s floor, with his head going into the TV. Elvis says something like “this show ain’t no good” and shoots the TV screen (and Scratchy). I’m not sure why, but my brother and I thought that was the funniest thing, and we repeated the line over and over. “This show ain’t no good. BANG!”2 That episode aired April 15, 1993, but we were watching it in syndication. I was in middle school, so it was probably more like 1995 when I watched it.

After that, The Simpsons became a show that we watched regularly. I think it was on twice a day in syndication, so we got caught up on the first five or six seasons pretty quickly. Over the next decade, I watched pretty much every new episode that aired. There were many great episodes and many forgettable episodes. Two that jump to mind are The Cartridge Family (where Homer gets a gun), and Homer’s Phobia (where Homer has a new friend that he finds out is gay). I continued to watch as the quality of the show went downhill for a while, before it seemed to kind of bottom out in the mid 2000s.

If I had to pick one moment in the show where I might say the show jumped the shark, for me anyway, it would be Million Dollar Abie, which aired on April 2, 2006.3 That was the episode that featured the “diePod.” I remember thinking to myself, “this is the kind of writing I can expect from this show. Who thought this was funny?” It just epitomized every corny joke that I hadn’t laughed at over the last few years.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been any good episodes since then. The funniest episode in years was That 90’s Show, which aired in 2008. The episode featured a flashback to the 90s, hilariously and intentionally shattering the show’s continuity. I mean, the show technically started in the 80s, so a flashback to the 90s should just be a flashback to the first ten seasons of the show! This was combined with many many references to the decade I became a teenager in, so I guess it was designed to appeal to me. I mean, Homer was in a Seattle grunge rock band named “Sadgasm.” The song “Closing Time” was used throughout the episode to represent the entire decade. Weird Al makes a guest appearance. They watch an episode of Seinfeld. I was laughing the whole episode.

Unfortunately, since that time I haven’t kept up with the show. When the show moved to HD, it started requiring a lot more space to have eight episodes of the show sitting on my DVR going unwatched. Maybe the writing isn’t really at fault; maybe I’ve actually grown into and out of the target demographic over the past twenty years. Whatever the reasons may be, I’m now saying goodbye to the show.

For those of you who don’t follow us on Facebook, I have added two new photo albums. First are pictures from Christmas/New Year’s in Newton.

And second, we have pictures of me pushing Emma around in a sled in the three inches of snow that we got here in Concord last night.  I also have a short video of me pushing Emma around in her sled. Enjoy!

I’ve never thought deeply about this topic before I had a child in the process of acquiring this mangled mess of words we call The English Language... but pronouns are hard you guys!

We sometimes ask Emma who different people in pictures are, so that she can remember the names of those family members she doesn’t see every day. When we get to a picture of Emma, we’ll say “Emma, who’s that?”

“Baby,” she’ll reply.

Then we will say “Emma, that’s you!”

At least, that’s what used to happen. After doing that for some time, if we ask Emma who is in a picture of Emma, she’ll now respond “you!!” And really, that’s our own fault. We told her that it was a picture of You, and so she learned who You was. Apparently You is a baby who looks suspiciously like Emma.

We could try to correct her by telling her it’s “me,” but won’t that get confusing when she actually does learn pronouns? She’ll wonder, “Why did mommy and daddy say that picture of me was a picture of them?” So I guess for now we’ll have to teach her “that’s Emma.” We’re also working on the whole you/me thing with finger pointing, but I’m not sure if it’s too advanced for a twenty-two month old.

Or maybe I could just try explaining that my “you” is your “me” and your “you” is my “me.” There’s nothing confusing about that, right?

So, I’ve now had two visits to the doctor since I learned that I was expecting again.  I’m coming to the end of the first trimester, and I was just curious if anyone who reads out blog knows any old wives tales as to how to figure out the gender of the baby before the ultra sound.  I want to go ahead and state that I put no faith in these hypotheses, I just enjoy hearing them, and seeing how they apply to my current situation.  I will go ahead and give you a couple of statistics from the first 13 weeks.  I have had some morning sickness, but have thus far, not thrown up.  The heart beat at the ultra sound was 168 beats/minute.  Then at the second visit when you get to hear it, the heart beat was at 160 beats/minute.  (I would like to interject here that Emma’s heart beat went from 181 beats/minute to ~165 beats/minute between the first and second doctors visits respectively.)

I have heard a few crazy theories so far:

1. Since I haven’t thrown up, it must be a boy.  (This I have a hard time believing since Elysabeth had a boy when I had Emma, and she was sick the whole way through her pregnancy.  And Anna never threw up when she was pregnant with Abigail.)

2. The heart beat started low so it must be a boy.  (I had hear that heart beats between 160 and 180 beats/minute are girls, and heart beats between 140 and 160 beats/minute are boys. Again, the baby’s heart beat falls very close to the middle range that makes it hard to tell.)

3. I have heard a tale that holding the mother’s-to-be wedding ring over her belly, and seeing which way it swings will tell you what it will be, but I don’t remember all the specifics of this wives tale.

Please feel free to share the crazy and not so crazy theories and tales, I look forward to reading them all!!!

Just like the last four years, the beginning of a new year on Vacant Nebula is marked by a look back at the posts of the previous year. I’m not sure if anyone else gets anything out of these posts, but I enjoy making them because there are so many things that I forget about. So let’s see what all we have been posting about.

Early in the year I made several small changes to this site. Then we got some snow. On Valentine’s Day I left Stephanie at home and went to Mexico. While I was gone Emma walked for the first time. Emma continued to get older, eventually celebrating her first birthday.

Two days before Emma’s birthday, though, I was laid off from my job at Dassault Systemés. Which meant I had to do some job hunting, and I had to figure out what to do with my old business cards. Fortunately I found a new job and started after only five weeks of unemployment.

During those five weeks, I started tweeting and went to the beach. I am very thankful that things worked out so well, especially as the unemployment rate continued to rise all year.

As spring turned to summer, I commented on pickup-truck-bed meat dealers and wrote a program to resize desktop wallpapers. I posted a conversation I had with someone at Sprint, who may or may not be a terminator. I also read the best book I’ve ever read.

As autumn arrived, I poked fun at a lady I heard on the radio. (She actually e-mailed me to defend herself, but what she said really reinforced my point.) I told you where to hide your cash, but I guess I should have come up with a place to hide ideas because Coca-Cola stole my idea.

The last few months of the year have been very busy at work, and as a result this blog wasn’t very busy. I did manage to post about Emma’s first Halloween outing, as well as my own aging. To finish out the year I posted some good bad writing and a high-quality video from my new digital camera.

Throughout the year, I reviewed a few things: Prince of Persia, Shadow of the Colossus, Netflix/Blockbuster (part 2), Anathem, and a SumoLounge bean bag chair.  I also gave out some free code: PHP code to create a gradient PNG, Java code to handle arbitrarily large fractions, and (if you don’t mind extracting it from a JAR file) Java code to resize images.

I hope everyone has had a great year and looks forward to twenty-ten!