Lots has been going on in our lives lately, but I’ll start this post by discussing one that many of you already have heard about.  My company is closing down their Charlotte office in six months.  A few people have been offered relocation to other offices in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and France, but not many.  A lot of people will be let go in two or three months.  And a few of us are fortunate enough to be offered jobs through the entire “transition period.”  I am in that last group, which means that if I stay through the end of March I will get a pretty substantial severance package (if I leave before then, the severance payment is much smaller).  I’m not sure what we will be doing from here, but I’ll try to keep everyone updated.

In more pleasant news, I thought I’d give some updates on Emma’s development.  She has turned into quite a giggler.  There are a few things that consistently trigger this giggling.  First and foremost, holding her in front of a mirror (especially while moving her forward and backward in front of it) will always make her stop crying and start smiling and laughing.  Another way of making her laugh it so simply let her see Punky.  It doesn’t matter what Punky is doing, she can even be sleeping.  When Emma sees her, she starts laughing.

A few days ago I spent most of the morning working from home, and I got to see Emma watch her Baby Galileo DVD.  This was very interesting.  Basically, random stuff comes by while classical music plays, and occasionally they show babies playing, or they’ll have a young kid say a word like “sun” or “moon”.  It reminded me a lot of A Clockwork Orange, when they brainwashed the guy by forcing him to vidie the ultraviolence while they played Ludwig Von.  I’m not sure if Baby Galileo is trying to brainwash viewers or not, but I had a strong urge to assassinate public officials after viewing it.

In other news, Emma learned to make the “d” sound about a week and a half ago.  This means that occasionally she sits there and says “da da da da da da da da!”  I’m trying to teach her that “da da” references me, by responding to her whenever she says the phrase.  I’m not sure how well its working, because she also says “da da da da da da” when she’s looking at Punky.  We’ll see.

As far as locomotive skills, Emma’s still not able to crawl and certainly not walk yet, but she has mastered rolling over.  She’s close to being able to sit up on her own, although she’ll tilt over to one side or the other after a minute or so.  She is also very aware, in that she’ll follow people around the room, and she can figure out where people’s voices are coming from.

I guess that’s enough updates for one post.  Until next time, keep on.. doing whatever it is that you do.. !

A whole new set of photos has been added to the photos page.

These pictures cover a day at the pool, Emma’s first experience eating food from a spoon, and a Labor Day weekend trip to Edisto Island and Charleston, SC with Stephanie’s parents.

Enjoy!

Last night I marked another item off my mental list of things to do with this website, by supporting Gravatars for the comments.  Since I haven’t been requesting e-mail addresses in the past, none of the old comments will show Gravatars.  If you’re a frequent commenter on this site and you want me to retroactively apply your e-mail address to any comments you have left on this page send me an e-mail telling me what e-mail address you use, or just leave a comment for this post with the e-mail field filled in and I’ll use that address.

I found it very ironic the way the title of my last post was displayed after being imported into Facebook:

Here is a message I got after logging into a website recently:

** NOTE ** Using a colon (“:”) in your password can create problems when logging in to Banner Self Service. If your password includes a colon, please change it using the PWManager link below.

Protip: If you are designing any kind of login/authentication system and you find that you need to give users a warning similar to this, you are doing something wrong.

On a much more nitpicky side note, why not just make “PWManager” or “using the PWManager” link to PWManager?  To their credit, at least they didn’t say “by clicking the PWManager link below.”

Sometimes I wish that I had a really crappy car.  ‘Why?’ you ask?  Because then when someone is tailgating me, particularly when I am already going 5-9 mph over the speed limit and there is a perfectly good lane to my left not being used, I could just slam on the brakes so that they would hit me.  After all, it would be their fault (who’s to say I didn’t see a deer about to run out onto the highway?).  They would learn the hard way not to tailgate, their insurance would go up, and they’d get a ticket.  Maybe they’d even be over the legal blood-alcohol limit and spend the night in jail.  Jackpot.  As for me, I’d just be out a crappy car that I didn’t care about to begin with.  I guess if I did it too many times the police or insurance companies might catch on.  Oh well, it’s not like I’d actually do that.  I’d probably react much more passive-aggressively.  Perhaps by writing a blog post about the tailgating incident.

Lately we have been getting Emma into a bedtime routine.  Ostensibly, this is to teach (condition?) her into going to sleep easily at night, provided the routine is observed.  In actuality, she doesn’t go to sleep much more consistently than before the routine.  But that’s not really what I came here to write about.  Part of Emma’s bedtime routine is for daddy to read her a story.  (Literacy for the win!)  Tonight I tackled Horton Hears A Who, one of her two Dr. Seuss books (which are by far her longest bedtime stories).  I noticed while reading the book that Dr. Seuss must have pronounced “mayor” as a one-syllable word, a homophone to “mare,” whereas I pronounce it as two syllables, rhyming with “conveyor.”  I’m not sure if I pronounce it differently because I live in a different region, or because the pronunciation has shifted since the book was written in 1954, or both.  (Contrary to what your grade school teachers probably tried to burn into your head, English is a constantly evolving language, and the accepted pronunciation and even meaning of words varies by region and changes over time.)

Here is an example of what I’m talking about from Horton Hears A Who:

There aren’t any Whos!  And they don’t have a Mayor!
And we’re going to stop all this nonsense!  So there!

And here is one more example, which is even odder to my ear:

“So, Horton, please!” pleaded that voice of the Mayor’s
“Will you stick by us Whos while we’re making repairs?”

It is weird to read because “mayor” is used for a rhyme several times in the book, and if I read it so that it doesn’t rhyme it sounds really weird.  In fact, I tend to pronounce the word that is rhymed with mayor (i.e. “there”) as two syllables.

I guess I’m not really going anywhere with this, it was just something I noticed and thought I’d point out.  Other than mayor/mare thing, I didn’t notice any other rhyming problems.  In one place, I think “grocery” must be pronounced as a three-syllable word in order to have the intended rhythm, although I (and most people I know) typically pronounce “grocery” as something like “groshry.”  Oh well, people still consider Shakespeare great poetry, even though many of his rhymes no longer rhyme, so I guess it doesn’t necessarily spell doom.

So today is an interesting day in the wonderful world of motherhood.  Both Emma and I are sick with colds.  So I’m learning very quickly that I have to put how feel on the back burner to take care of her, instead of only feeling icky myself.  What is really interesting, Emma doesn’t even act all that sick.  She is still happy when she sleeps enough, and cries when she is hungry or sleepy.  She just sneezes more, and has a runny nose.  She might feel as bad as I do, but I have no way of knowing that as she has yet to master the art of speech.  She is however really good at making lots of different sounds, to include the “mmmmmmmmmm” sound.  This could mean that she will say “Mama” first instead of “Dada”.  She is ever growing and changing.  We now let her sleep on her tummy, and she is growing like a weed.  At her last check-up she measured in at 13 pounds 11 ounces and 25 inches long.  I’ll try and keep you updated on other mommy moments.

Behold!  The original utterance of “That’s what she said,” from a 1992 “Wayne’s World” skit on Saturday Night Live, predating The Family Guy by seven years, and The Office by thirteen years.

That is all.

I was looking for a listing of the broadcast schedule for the Beijing Olympics that begin tonight, and I had trouble finding anything in a format that was close to what I wanted.  Fortunately, as a programmer, I am used to taking existing data and manipulating it into a format that I want, with the help of a regular expression or two.  The idea was to have something very compact that I could print out, that would be useful when deciding what to record on our DVR.  I figured I’d share what I made.

• 2008 Olympics Schedule in PDF format (probably your best bet)

• 2008 Olympics Schedule in Microsoft Word format

• 2008 Olympics Schedule in ASCII text format (not very pretty)

A few notes:

• Schedule is subject to change.  If it does, blame NBC and China.

• I used data from TeamUSA.org because it was the closest format I found to what I actually wanted.  If it is wrong, blame them.

• All times are correct for the east coast and most are correct for the west coast.  Otherwise, I’ll quote the source data: For NBC primetime and late night, all times listed are ET/PT.  NBC weekday daytime show airs at same time in all time zones.  For USA, MSNBC and CNBC all time listed are ET.  For Oxygen all times listed are ET/PT.

• The data is sorted by air date, to make it easier to pick what to Tivo in the next 24-hours.  If you’re trying to find when a certain event occurs this probably isn’t the format you want.

• The data is very compressed because it was intended to be printed.  Through the magic of columns and margins I got it to fit on just two pages.  I wanted to make it compact, because everything I’ve found online is either a huge spreadsheet or a huge list.

• I have omitted the listings for events streaming from NBCOlympics.com because this was intended to help with DVRing.

• I have omitted the Telemundo listings because I don’t speak Spanish.

• I have omitted the Universal HD listings because they all said “24 hour coverage.”  No need to repeat that every day.  (The listings for USA were almost as vague with 12-hour blocks, but they at least listed the events that would be shown.)

• I’ve omitted NBC Olympics Basketball and Soccer channels because: 1) it is pretty obvious what they air; 2) I don’t know if we get them; and 3) if we do I still don’t have any desire to watch basketball or soccer.

• Be sure to watch in the HDs if you can.  6.75 times more pixels FTW!