Tao Of Foo

Is anyone else as impressed as I am by the new color photos of Mars from the Spirit? Wow! The spirit of space travel and exploration it still alive and well.

My friend/coworker Jason pointed me to Maestro. I loaded it up and was blown away by the 3-D view. Incredible! It’s a resource hog though. It’s basically the same software the engineers use to navigate through all the visual terrain data the rovers generate. It’s pretty cool stuff. I can’t wait until they upload some real Mars data (should be today sometime).

Many things happened in 2003. I received a promotion at work. Amy and I had a baby. My parents moved to Ft Worth. Amy decided to stay home with Ben full-time and quit her job (that she dearly loved). Amy’s parents decided to move closer to us and here dad got a job in the area. Int he last few weeks Ben has started standing on his own. All in all it was a pretty busy year.

Now that 2004 is upon us, I can’t help but wonder what’s in store for this year. Ben will certainly start walking soon. Amy’s parents will probably be moving up here in the next few months. Hopefully some great company will recognize what an asset my sister is and she will find employment.

To all those who couldn’t make it to our place on Christmas Day, you were missed. There was lots of great food and even more great company.

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)?

Every now and then one must stop and smell the proverbial roses. I realized last week that I really need to start taking more vacation. I have maxed out my accumulated vacation and it’s just being wasted. That’s my free time being wasted! Time to remedy that. My direct reports are kicking ass and I need to be able to turn over the reigns occasionally.

So on that note I took the day off yesterday for no reason other than to relax. That’s right, to relax. I went with Amy and Ben to the weekly Storytime at the Boerne Public Library. We have lived in Boerne for over 2 years now and this is the first time I have been to the library. For the rest of the day I played with Ben while Amy worked in the yard. I was able to tend to a few projects around the house and cook a nice dinner, but other that that I got to relax and play with Ben. Ah, what a great day.

Amy took a few great pictures of Ben and I sporting our plaid shirts. Ahhh, plaid.

Yes, I know it’s late. Ben and Amy are sleeping soundly and I’m up babysitting the websites during some database server maintenance. Ah the fun of database driven websites. Like this one.

I recently added a GeoURL link to the sidenav. I was originally a bit curious to see who else blogs out in my neck of the woods. And by “neck of the woods” I mean Boerne, Texas. Turns out it’s mostly a handful of kids on DeviantART. Oh well, I was hoping there would be a few fellow mid/late 20-ish blogging types out here.

My buddy Jason has setup a pretty cool RSS feed for single word domains as they expire. He’s rsyncing files from the registrar daily, parsing them and making them available via RSS. Just one more cool use of RSS.

Well, the database is back up and the web content is all restored to normal operating conditions. Time for bed.

If somebody had told me back in college that Patrick would eventualy marry my cousin Karen, I would not have believed them. Well, it has happened and the wedding was both beautiful and fun. The rain kept us indoors but it certainly was worth it. The ceremony and reception were held at Castle Avalon which was absolutely beautiful. Ben had an awesome time dancing and was an absolute angel.

Our friends Mandy and Jim had their baby shower this weekend. It was great seeing them and it was especially great seeing Mandy’s grandmother Alice. Jenny and I grew up next door to her and I have very fond memories of her birds. I haven’t seen her in years, but it’s good to know she’s doing well. She seemed to get such a kick out of seeing Ben. I can’t wait to see the look on her face when her new great-grand(son/daughter) arrives.

Matt and Kristin got married last weekend. As usual, plenty of pictures were taken. Amy also got a few really good pictures of Ben that evening all dressed up.

I have discovered that I am so addicted to RSS feeds that if I find a cool website that’s news related, publishes articles or announces anything and they don’t have an RSS feed, I find that I tend not to go back. For example I love the packages that freshrpms.net puts together, but I rarely go there anymore because they don’t have RSS feeds for any of their source trees. If they had a feed for Shrike (Red Hat 9), their site would be infinately more useable to me.

Ben has been really learning a lot lately. He’s days away from crawling and it’s so exciting to watch him learn a little more about the world each time he plays. Sometimes you can almost see his wheels spinning when he realizes that he can scoot over to a toy that’s out of reach. It it pretty obvious when things get him excited. Daisy licking his face or toes really makes him giggle. His reaction to Amy or me after not seeing either of us for a while is classic; he grins really big and sort of hides his face in the arms of whoever is holding him. It’s very heart-warming. He is sitting up very well now

The coast last weekend was great. Ben loved the sand and Daisy loved chasing the birds. The weather was pretty nasty driving down on Friday but couldn’t have been better the rest of the weekend. As usual Amy took lots of pictures.