Tao Of Foo

According to Babel Fish it means “pretty lady’s man”. At 8 months Ben is already a ladies man according to a woman in Babies R Us. He’s been crawling faster than ever lately, eating like a horse and talking up a storm. I am constantly amazed at how quickly he’s developing. He’s quickly growing into a toddler and there’s nothing we can do about it.

I wrote my first full fledged PostNuke module. You’ll see it on the homepage in the upper right block “Song Last Played”. The module is called “WhatsPlaying” and I’ll release it for download pretty soon. Right now I have a shell script talking to XMMS to get the song info and then posting the data to PostNuke. I have plans to add support for other media players like WinAmp and to remove some of the system dependencies. Right now it requires XMMS, the XMMS Song Change plugin, the xmsctrl XMMS command line controller app, tcl etc. I need to clean up a few things and then I’ll release it. At this rate that could mean anywhere from a week to a month away though. Ahh the life of a geek dad. Maybe that’s what I need to focus this blog more on. Both titles are fairly time consuming. Anyway, for more info on my WhatsPlaying module, check the Wiki.

Amy has been bitten by the flu bug and I have been home playing both nurse and Mr. Mom. Remember that cheesy early 80’s Michael Keaton movie where the dad stays home to take care of the kids? I remember watching that and thinking “I need to learn all this stuff someday.” Give me a break, I think I was 8 or 9 years old. I’d like to think I can handle things a little better than Michael Keaton. I mean seriously folks, making a grilled cheese with an iron?

There are two positive notes I can take away from this experience. One, I have been able to spend a lot of quality time with Ben. I realized that I leave for work at about 6:15am and usually don’t get home until 6:30 or later. Ben wakes up at around 8 (give or take) and crashes at around 9:30 or 10pm. That means I see him for about 3 hours a day plus weekends. That’s not unusual for most American families I guess, but it’s a little sad. So a few full week days with just me and my boy. It’s been great. The other positive note has been a newly found respect for the Stay-At-Home Mom, or as Amy likes to call it “Domestic Engineer”. Wow. Juggling diapers, bottles, baby-food, dishes, playing, laundry, cleaning is not as easy as it may sound. And that’s not including getting dressed, brushing my teeth, eating and all the normal stuff. Ok, so it’s not that I under-appreciated it before, I just now have more first-hand knowledge of the art of being Mr. Mom. Eat that Michael Keaton.

Not that I have any free time at all, but I’d really like to get back into writing like I used to. In High-School I used to write constantly. Poetry, short-stories, prose etc. I miss that. Maybe that’s just another possible fascet for this blog or maybe it’s a PostNuke module waiting to be found (or written)?