On Wednesday January 20, 2010 at 2:07am Jonathan Clayton Drimmie was born. At birth he weighed 8 pounds, 4.5 ounces and was measured at 21”. As of this writing he is approximately back in the neighbourhood of his birth rate as measured on a less accurate scale, and has been remeasured with more accurate tools to 19.5”. He is also fucking awesome.
Rewinding a bit, Jen first started feeling like something was happening almost a week before Jonathan was born and we spent a Thursday evening in the triage section of the Childbirth Centre (aka Maternity Ward) at Grand River Hospital. During that particular visit, not much of note occurred though the monitors recorded several moderate contractions.
On the morning of January 19, we returned to the hospital. We hung around for a while but progress stalled. We left the hospital and visited my parents (where Harvey was staying) for supper and celebrated Jen’s mother’s birthday. Through the course of the night the contractions increased in strength and lessened, increased in frequency and lessened. I was pretty obvious at that point that something was going to happen soon, but soon could encompass few or many hours.
We went home, leaving Harvey again in the care of his grandparents. Crackers was sent with my sister. The house was quiet, we watched some TV and headed to bed just after 11. At 11:16, Jen’s water broke. She thought. She wasn’t sure, it was a different experience and sensation than with Harvey. We sat on the bed for 10 minutes before deciding that even if we were sent home, we should go to Triage again to have a look taken. Around then, Jen’s water broke further, or more, or again, or.. something. Any doubt was removed, the van was started and phone calls were made.
We drove to the hospital. Our previous trips had led to a theory of a route to the hospital featuring both smooth roads and short travel time and were gratified in a very tiny way to have our guess confirmed. For the locals, from Homer Watson and Ottawa we travelled to Westmount then Glasgow, instead of Ottawa to Cortland or through downtown.
At the hospital nature took its course and labour progressed. We were moved from Triage to a room, waling down the hall this time pausing for several contractions instead of being hustled along on a gurney. In the birthing room the attending nurse (Judy, and I feel terrible for forgetting the Triage nurse’s name) talked Jen through several more contractions. Jen asked about the morphine that had been discussed but was told that she was much to far along to be able to take it and she buckled down and did another fully natural birth.
The details of the actual birth are hazy. It wasn’t as frantic as Harvey, there were moderately long periods (30-60 seconds) between the contractions through the entire process. The nurses kept talking about how great Jen was, and while they probably say that to most every woman who passes through there, it’s probably true in all cases. In Jen’s it absolutely was. She breathed through her contractions and was present throughout to the point where, halfway through active labour (after head, before shoulders) she cracked a joke that had the entire room laughing. Sadly, I didn’t make note of the joke. It was nothing complicated, just a simple one-liner comment but the awareness in the middle of it all required to pull that off is but a small testament to how amazing the woman I was luck enough to marry is.
As Jonathan was born, I heard the other nurse (Marjorie) mention something about a membrane and looked just in time to see her peel it off Jonathan’s face while the doctor (Schnarr, though I am simply guessing at the spelling) carefully but calmly unwrapped the umbilical cord from Jonathan’s neck. Within minutes, Jonathan was out and on Jen’s chest.
I’m pretty sure we spent less time in the birthing room leading up to Jonathan’s arrival than was required afterwards for all the post-birth tasks (everything from the placenta through to cleaning the linens). After hanging out on Jen’s chest for a bit Jonathan was taking for normal testing. We never did get his APGAR numbers but there was nothing to worry about.
Many months prior during a standard ultrasound, the technician suspected a sixth toe on Jonathan’s right foot. We got a 3D ultrasound a few weeks later – as we’d done and enjoyed with Harvey – and were able to see it we thought. He definitely has only five toes on the foot though. In the long run of course this is for the best, but I think we were both slightly disappointed; it would be a neat thing once he came to terms with it but not having to face that particular struggle is very preferable.
The rest of the story has only a few points of interest. We were told early on we’d be able to leave after the required 12-hour hearing test which went fine. Harvey came in to visit and mostly ignored Jonathan but returned to our house with his other grandparents to await our return. After getting home, he went with them to give us the night to figure everything out and we picked him up the next day.
In the week that has passed, we had minor concerns about jaundice that we seem to have gotten past and have started to get to know each other. Harvey is doing very well. There are some minor unconscious jealousy issues here and there as Jonathan somewhat diminishes the attention Harvey tends to receive but as a big brother Harvey has been loving and gentle.
So now we are four.
I got home from a normal day at work today to find Jen on the couch, looking like she’d recently been crying. Crackers had an appointment with the vet, and I was worried. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“Brad Graham is dead” she said. It didn’t register. “Brad,” she said “TheBrad”.
Holy shit.
I don’t remember where I first stumbled across The BradLands from. Was it before MetaFilter, or via MetaFilter? Was it from Halcyon or Succaland, or did he lead me to them? I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter.
I remember a fake text game in a really long thread at MetaFilter. I remember helping Brad get A Day Without Weblogs letting people post their names and links for participating. I remember finally meeting him with Jen on our honeymoon most of all.
I remember talking with him almost every single day, even though I only met him the once twice. Shit, I forgot about the big thanksgiving party. I remember now.
> come back
For a long time now, more than 10 years, I’ve been using Gillette’s Mach 3 razor. I bought one early in my college career and since I had no complaints I stuck with it, until a few months ago.
It wasn’t true that I have no complaints. The money that I spend on razor blades is troublesome to me, and these multi-bladed blades are really quite expensive. I’d tried disposables here and there in the past and thought that I’d give them a shot at the title, especially since Costco had a giant package of 52 razors for like $25 or something like that.
I very quickly regretted the decision.
Normally, shaving isn’t a big thing for me. I use moderately fancy shaving stuff from The Body Shop, and while I moderately desire a nice badger hair shaving brush I don’t yet have one, I just lather up my face and shave and wash it all off and go, and that’s about the extent of thought and time I devote to shaving.
I’ve considered going the straight razor route, but in all honesty daily maintenance of the nature that sort of habit requires is not something I’m really good, or even moderately competent, at doing. I appreciate the ritual aspect of it and can imagine a fancy little world where my morning routine takes an hour to do all the things I’d love to do, but in the short term I just don’t and am not going to any time soon be giving myself that kind of casual start to a day.
So with the straight razor out, I’m left with disposables and electrics, and I’m just not convinced about electrics. I don’t know why, I have no good reason to think that a disposable is going to give a better shave. Mostly I’m just worried that I’ll spend $100 and not enjoy the device.
So that’s why I stick with disposables. Laziness, cheapness, and illogical distaste for something I have zero knowledge of.
So when I made the switch to these ultra-cheap disposables, the standard blue Gillette two-blades that everyone has three or four of in a drawer or bathroom cabinet or maybe in the suitcase from that time you needed to buy some on the road, I was not expecting the regular persistant pain and bleeding throat that I ended up with.
I’ve read lots of articles in men’s magazines and online about razor burn, and have never experienced it. As far as beards go, mine is generally quite happy to be removed. It is kind of soft, takes two or three days to develop into 5 o’clock shadow and rarely becomes ingrown. It sucked as a teenager, but is great as a grown man.
As a result of this barely-a-beard, I generally only feel the need to shave twice a week. It leaves me moderately sloppy on the off days but since I never iron it kind of fits in with my whole theme.
And yet, these razors shredded my skin in a way nothing ever has. Not all over, just on my throat around each side of my Adam’s Apple. A strip about one-razor wide. Not super noticeable on the first day I shaved, and even the second it wasn’t anything terrible, but each successive week of shaving increased the damage, even with three or four days of rest between blades.
The razor burn was brutal. My throat was red and patchy and I couldn’t take any more. After a few weeks I stopped shaving for a full week to give my skin time to recover. Where I was used to a blade lasting for weeks or months at a time, I was using a new razor each time I shaved. I found a brief respite when I stumbled across some advice from Robert A. Heinlein to Neil Gaiman to use conditioner to soften a beard.
That worked pretty good. It dramatically reduced the damage I was doing to myself on a regular basis but no matter how slow and carefully I shaved I was constantly taking off layers of skin.
So just recently I gave up. I’m about a third of the way through my giant pack of disposable razors and I went and spent the money on a pack of Gillette Mach 3 blades. I’ve used the same blade for over two weeks (which means four actual shaves) now and my throat feels better than it has in months. Saving takes about five minutes because I can be fast and careless, and at least I’m throwing slightly less junk into the trash.
I’ve been thinking lately about the different factors that helps developers (specifically, but I think it probably applies to creative workers in general) do their job well.
Physical Environment:
By this I mean, well, the actual physical environment. The desk, the chair, the walls (if any). I’ve long been in favour of private offices (ideally soundproofed so music can be played on speakers instead of headphones), but I’m gradually coming around on the complete opposite – a wide open bustling environment like a coffee shop. I’m still rabidly against cubicles, as you end up with the worst aspects of both worlds and few of the good ones.
The interesting thing to me about the open and bustling environment is that in its way it offers the same sort of privacy as a closed office (though without the benefit of using speakers, generally). With so many different things going on, no one is especially concerned with any one person’s activity. People are floating freely between different places and collaborating as need be.
My ideal environment affords people the choice: Private offices for when they need to retreat and to give them a sense of ownership over their space, but loud and heavily trafficked communal areas for collaboration and interaction.
I’m moderately torn about where computers go, but for the time being I’m going to put them here since they are a physical beast and their physical nature impacts how well and to what extent one can work. My ideal setup is a laptop that has enough oomph to drive multiple monitors and external peripherals but is light enough to be portable. 15” laptops are on the very upper threshold of this for me, but I think I’m a little weird in my strong preference for 12” or 13” form factors.
Logical Environment:
By which I mean the tools available for work. The software and technical resources for people to use.
Operating systems arguably don’t matter, but they only don’t matter to people who aren’t in one all day. It’s possible to get the same work done in basically any operating system but the simple truth is that peoples’ preferences and experiences do have an impact.
The larger environment, the network to which everything is attached, shouldn’t matter. It’s possible now to share network space in ways that work well for every client OS and so each person working should be able to use the tools they prefer. For programming work, cross-platform and shared development is controlled well by enforcing style guides, but there’s a bit of collision when it comes to other tools such as version control.
It may be possible to have a master version control system that each user can access with the software of their choice (there are various ways to integrate git with svn, for example) but I’m inclined to think that there are situations where everyone needs to use the same tool. IDE or text editor? Whatever you do best. Version control? Everyone should be in sync with the same tool. If I were starting an environment from scratch I’d be starting with some form of distributed version control, but any is better than none.
Cultural Environment:
Corporate Culture may be an oxymoron, but I like to think not. It does seem to be a difficult thing to create and nurture though, especially when there are differences of opinion.
I don’t really know much about managing a culture but I do know that the culture impacts how people work.
There’s different ways for being open, you can either be completely transparent to everyone or you can be opaque but open within the walls of the organization. For me I think the key is to build an air of cooperation. It’s very easy for people to get pigeon-holed into specific tasks and knowledge domains and to start throwing things over the walls in between.
This tends to lead to passing-the-buck (“Oh, that’s a design issue.” “Oh, that’s a javascript issue.” “Oh, that’s a database issue.”) and adds process overhead. Not everyone is going to have the knowledge to perform every task of course (nor should they, specialization has its advantages) but as soon as someone considers a problem someone else’s, a barrier is raised.
I don’t have a clear handle on what a collaborative way to own problems is, but I’ve definitely had experiences where two (generally, sometimes more) people are working together at the same desk to solve a problem. Not full-on paired programming all the time, but working through a problem that bridges knowledge domains together. It is for problems like this that I like the communal physical environment, as it becomes much easier to work together. I like the split private/shared environments for this, as being in the communal environment is an indicator of openness for collaboration, where being in one’s private space is an indicator that deep thinking and flow is afoot.
There’s a lot more to the cultural environment. I’ve touched on it in the deep past here but I think most of my thinking on the matter has been spent in the Physical and Logical environments. I do think that those two have serious impact over the third. It’s possible for Culture to get past Physical and Logical limitations,
but it’s much easier to cultivate Culture when the ideas are supported by the other two legs.
Almost all of my work is done in environments that have no regard for the platform. I’ve moved to the web to a large extent, or at least have moved to software that leans towards platform-independance.
For some time, my personal platform preference has been OS X. I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary work platform since the spring, and of course I’ve been using Windows since 3.1 (and MSDOS before that).
It’s hard to remember how excited I was for Windows 95, and even 98. It’s hard to remember how much I enjoyed working on Windows 2000. I still have fond memories of how stable it was and when I do end up on a Windows system for any length of time I end up making customisation choices that end up looking more like Windows 2000 than XP or Vista.
In fact, I’ve never used Vista.
I was struck with a spot of inspiration this morning, and realized that I use OS X because most of the time I just don’t want to think about my computer. I don’t want to think about what keystroke is necessary or what interface norm I need to comply with to do the work I want.
That took me a while to get to, to be honest. I got my first Apple computer in spring of 2002, beat the crap out of it then after it finally died in 2005 didn’t get another until January 2008 – price being my primary reason.
I keep using OS X I think because when I do want to think about my computer – when I want to configure something or change a default or develop an application for it or do something to the base system I get – I want to love it. For me in a large way that love means the FreeBSD underpinnings of Darwin.
I associate Windows with “Enterprise”, which for me has almost entirely negative connotations. An organization that is an Enterprise is big and bloated and lacks passion. That reflects even in a company I like as much as Apple, whose web-based offerings tend to suck ass. No matter how rigid and perfectionist they are about their hardware and platforms, they’re still using iTunes Connect for their iPhone developers to interact with the App Store and that application reeks of enterprise.
I associate Microsoft strongly with Enterprise, perhaps because of their marketing or some other brand element? Every time I cross paths with them, they’re talking to deep-in-the-bowels IT types dealing with a large number of servers and political tugs of war and applications who serve many masters poorly.
I am looking forward to trying Windows 7 some day, but as near as I can tell that day is a long way off. The only purpose Windows serves for me any more is as a gaming platform, and since I rarely indulge in any hot-off-the-presses games (I still don’t have a system that can play BioShock, which is now two years old) I expect my XP license to support that hobby well into the next decade.
This year, Jen and I finally joined a CSA, an idea we’ve been talking about for a couple of years now. Harvey is a vegetable vacuum, and we figured the third mouth might help us prevent the fridge from being a brief stop on the vegetables’ way to the compost.
Today Jen picked up our first shipment, which due to the moderate temperatures and it being summer consists primarily of spinach, bok choy and young turnips. I’ve had bok choy in chinese food of course, and thanksgiving style turnip preparations but at present I don’t really know what I’m going to do with them.
We also received garlic scapes, which are the big tall above-the-ground part of a garlic bulb. I had never heard of them before a couple of weeks ago when an internet friend in Cleveland mentioned finding some at her local market and preparing them in some fashion or another I’ve since forgotten (but will have to look up).
The spinach in this shipment is not only copious, but fucking delicious. I have in the past frequently enjoyed claiming that baby spinach and mushrooms with generic ranch dressing comprise a spinach salad, so I’m appreciative of the maligned vegetable to begin with, but this stuff is (I may have said) fucking delicious.
Tonight Jen is feeling moderately unwell and Harvey and I were mom-less for supper. I staved his appetite with a plate of vegetables (the usual suspects, which for him are: cucumber, celery, broccoli and cauliflower. He also usually has some baby carrots, but we’re out) and a bowl of berries (straw, rasp and blue).
For me though, I couldn’t get the spinach out of my head (or off my tongue, I guess?) so I made something quite simple but will absolutely be prepared again soon… like, tomorrow:
I took a bit of red onion, coarsely chopped and chopped up a scape pretty roughly. I sauted the two of them together in some olive oil and after a couple of minutes piled on the spinach. I left the spinach only for two or three minutes maybe, just enough to get hot (very hot, as I discovered) but not down to mush. I added pepper and salt and after transferring to a plate, dove in.
Man it was good.
I should have either chopped the scapes more finely or cooked them longer (and before the onion), probably the former although it was nice to have the chunkiness of them.
If I had some goat cheese it would have blown my god damn mind. Goat cheese isn’t something I keep around very much, but if we get another big batch of spinach like this next week I will absolutely treat myself because, well: Blown mind.
So let’s see, what’s happened in the past few months. Lots of things and very little.
One day I went to start the blue car to go to work, it refused. We took it to the shop and the immediately-necessary and soon-to-be-necessary repairs to keep it on the road amounted to a value much higher than we felt the car was worth.
After a little bit of financial rejiggering and test driving we swapped it and a moderately large sum of currency for a new-to-us minivan. We like it, it is a nice vehicle that we paid a fair price for which seems an odd feeling to come away from a used car dealership with.
Harvey is fucking awesome, which is not a new thing, but which I feel it is necessary to restate on occasion. You’ll forgive me for repeating the obvious, I hope. He’s, jeez, well past two-and-a-half now and is getting quite deep into little boy territory (as opposed to toddler-land). He has mattered the intricacies of the iPod Touch, would much rather spend all day outside, and recently had his second haircut ever which went over swimmingly well and resulted in possibly my favorite-ever picture of him (though there are absolutely some rivals).
Really, favoritest (and even top x favorites) is not a quantification I’m able to readily assign to much of anything. There is no way I could identify my five top anything at all, despite my love for the desert island game. I make no claims of consistency.
I have released my first iPod Touch/iPhone game, called EeeAhOh” in honour of Harvey’s earliest demands to play it. I have sold over 3x as many copies as I expected to, which means the beer I can notionally purchase would be a rather nice import in a very nice bar, or almost a case of Laker.
I have several other game ideas that are burbling about, and am actively poking and prodding at two ideas. One a primarily combat focused RPG that I’ve been thinking about for a while (earlier discussions here of Fracas are relevant) the other being something like a light-gun type carnival style shooter.
When discussing the latest trip to Costco, I asked Jen to pick me up some ramen noodles.
I’ve avoided them for a long time, not ever out of distaste but always out of the knowledge that frankly they aren’t that good for me. And for a while I was working at a job and had the disposable income available to me to go to a really good (now closed, unfortunately) viet-thai restaurant and get all the soupy noodles I could take (which was quite a lot).
It’s been several years since I was regularly getting a pho lunch and several months since I last managed to sneak one into our budget and I’ve been keeping an eye out for cheap noodle soups to try. I realized recently that of course none of the instant soups is going to actually taste fantastic, and of course none of them are going to be even a little bit nutritious so if I’m going to dabble in salty soupy starchy noodle fun it might as well be the sort of salty soupy starchy noodle fun that I have an existing connection and memory of.
So just now, a couple of minutes ago, I filled a cup of Mr. Noodle (which is probably about as terrible a brand of ramen that exists, but I don’t know better and in this instance I prefer to maintain my ignorant bliss) with hot water and now I am waiting the requisite three minutes.
It has been several years since my last bowl of ramen, but it will be a while before it drops out of regular rotation again.
I’m fucking tired of demands for authenticity.
This is an ill-formed and poorly considered rant, triggered by the comments and regular recurrence of such demands for authentic ethnic food and you know what? I just don’t give a fuck any more if this is the same sort of food that I would get if I sat down in a restaurant in Mexico I’m concerned about whether or not it actually tastes good.
It’s possible for ethnic food to not be authentic yet still be fucking tasty. Lets take the ethnic out of the picture for a minute and just talk about hamburgers. I fucking love hamburgers, and I fucking love talking about hamburgers.
In a general sense, my favorite sort of food is sandwiches, which I describe basically as anything I can eat with my hands that contains two or more types of food – it is a nice, inclusive definition that includes things like layered cakes, pizza, and open-faced turkey sandwiches, the prince of the sandwich family.
The lord-high might fucking emperor of the sandwich family is the hamburger, and hamburgers themselves are an entire sub-family of the sandwich. There are a million kinds of hamburgers including McDonald’s (which is arguably the canonical hamburger, the hamburger by which all others are measured) and its fast-food brethren, cheap-ass frozen patties that disintegrate in ash and haunted souls if you cook them for too long and the upper echelon of finely-crafted homemade freshly ground cow-and-pig miracles-on-a-bun that I strive towards.
Hamburgers are fucking great.
Now, from that family of hamburgers, which one is the authentic hamburger? I posed the McDonald’s hamburger as the canonical hamburger (which is not to say it is the best, far from it) but I don’t think that detracts from the authenticity of the rest, even the cheapest of the cheap more-wood-than-meat kind you get at things like college activity group fundraisers. Those are authentic hamburgers and they serve a very specific purpose and when combined with a hot sunny day and enough mustard even they are desirable.
So. A hamburger is a hamburger. General Tso’s Chicken as Jennifer Lee so expertly explains in the linked video, is about as unauthentic a chinese food as you can get. Chinese food, as we know it in North American (and indeed any region outside of China), is about as unauthentic a foodstuff as exists. But it’s good fucking food, whether or not it’s the same thing I would eat in Beijing (which it isn’t).
Authenticity, used a metric of quality, is bullshit. Authenticity is a completely separate property from tastiness and worth and I’m sick and fucking tired of it being used as anything other than an elitist and exclusionary device.
And here I was thinking I didn’t have anything to say today.
Only a week or so ago, Harvey gained an important and significant understanding of a vocabulary word I never though I would love so dearly: “Yes”
Much of the discussion of Terrible Twos that I have seen in popular culture revolves around the insistent and repetitive use of the word “no” but the reality (in our case at least, perhaps we are unknowingly lucky… so far) isn’t so much that every request is met with a no, but that the first deep understanding of behavioural direction kids have is about what not to do.
I don’t know, I am no child psychologist and I don’t even play on one TV. Maybe we are terrible parents raising our child in a world of negativity but the simple fact of the matter is that as soon as kids start gaining some amount of motor control parents start teaching them what sorts of things are not okay to do. I can’t see the opposite method making sense – the possible number of prohibited activities is vastly inferior to the possible number of allowable and even encouraged activities.
So kids learn very quickly that it is not okay to do certain things, and that the word “no” is how that is indicated. Very early in life they have a deep understanding that rejection is performed by saying no, which means that very quickly in life they are able to start expressing their self by identifying that which they do not want – by saying no.
Parents, or at least Jen and I, take advantage of a child’s knowledge of this concept of refusal by presenting a variety of options to children, or at least Harvey, who in turn responds with either “no” or, in Harvey’s case for a long time, no response at all. Lack of rejection was a positive response.
Harvey has learned that there is an explicit positive response, the opposite of rejection, and has started using it. He nods his head, he says “yes!” when asked certain things, and as far as I am concerned life is markedly better as a result. That positive (and frequently enthusiastic) response is so absolutely charming and endearing that I want to offer him things I know he’ll like just so he can be excited and positive about them.
I am absolutely open to the fact that, rather than me learning something about Harvey’s development, he has learned something about causing me to engage in the actions he prefers.
