Happy Birthday, Natertot!

Two years ago today, Sara gave birth to Nate. It was a long labor (18 hours), and by the time he actually popped out, it was late (about 10:30PM).

He came out a screamer, which Sara’s mom thought was funny, but we were too tired to appreciate it. Lucky for us, that first night he slept great, barely crying, and providing no clues of the horrible 4 months in store for us.

After that first night, Nate was up randomly throughout the night, didn’t sleep well during the day, and only did more to develop his lungs. He can still let out a piercing scream if you try to put him in his chair and he really, really doesn’t want to eat dinner because OH MY GOD DID YOU KNOW THERE’S AN OUTSIDE TO THIS HOUSE? WITH GRASS?

He’s since developed into one of my favorite people. In the last two years we’ve helped teach and watched him learn to eat, crawl, walk, talk, dance, splash, throw, run, jump, laugh, give hugs, demand kisses, request cake at every meal, bark, meow, squawk, ribbit, tickle, knock on doors, and sleep in his own bed.

He absorbs a lot more than we give him credit for, and every day one of us asks, “how did he know that?”

Happy birthday, Natertot. Hopefully this year we figure out how to use a toilet and get those sentences down. Cause and effect might come shortly after. Who knows.

And the obligatory birthday party pic:

Get angry and make stuff happen

I really like passionate people. Even if you’re wrong, you’ve got enough energy to care and to fight for what you think. Just the same, I can’t stand apathy. Have an opinion, dammit.

Some of the best meetings I’ve been in involved raised voices. It’s not because we’re calling each other stupid, it’s because we have ideas and we’re defending them and attacking others, trying to let the best solution rise to the top.

If you presented a solution to a meeting and it was shot down and you just said, “ok,” then I’d think that either you didn’t put a lot of effort into your solution, or you didn’t care, or both. None of those are good.

Earlier this week, a buddy at work approached me about a UI thing I’d been working on. Now, I’ll be the first to admit, UX is not my strong suit. I don’t think like other people. I love vim. My shell is in focus more than a browser. It’s just how I roll.

Said buddy started talking about how I’d laid out some things, and suggested another way to do it. I disagreed, because the change seemed superfluous to me. The other guy thought it made things more consistent and simpler. We disagreed. Voices got raised. It was clear he was angry. He even tossed a bottle opener (yes, we have bottle openers in my office, because it’s awesome, and because real developers like beer) in frustration.

Which is awesome. I went away unchanged, but I think the other guy got enough fire out of it that he’ll end up redoing it and making it probably awesome for most users. It’s a lot more fun to work with people who care about their work and actually want to put in the time to do things right.

If you get 8 hours of sleep a night, you’re spending at least 30% of your waking hours at work. If you have a commute or different hours, it might be closer to 45 or 50%. If you don’t get angry or passionate about what you’re working on, you should quit. As far as I’m concerned, you’re not doing good work*.

* Unless you’re Spock. But you’re not.

Another reason my wife is AWESOME

Let me preface this by saying that Sara’s a Christian, is happy with it, and we keep our discussions about faith and whatnot civil and respectful. We have different criteria for our beliefs, but reconcile them pretty well. Plus, she’s hilarious.

Anyways, the other night I was talking to her, explaining some of my forever-held, entirely irrational thoughts. The conversation went something like:

“But that doesn’t make any sense. Isn’t being rational kind of your thing?”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s just how I think. I can’t help it.”
“Well then why don’t you just believe in God?”

Nate’s Wedding Debut

Two weekends ago, Nate and I were lucky enough to be in Cookseys’ wedding (that’s right, it’s plural now, because there’s two of them). I was a groomsman; Nate was the ring bearer.

Traveling with little kids is tricky. Nate moved into a big kid bed only about 2 months ago, so going to a hotel room or a friend’s house (thanks Meezies!) is scary to him. You have to coax him into going down for the night, and naps are really hard to get at all.

Since the wedding was at night, we decided we’d have to work to tire him out, hopefully give him sufficient time for a nap, and then he’d be good at the wedding. So we took him swimming.

The pool was freezing. Sara didn’t stay in very long, and opted to hang out with Evie, poolside, instead. This meant that I spent an hour with Nate in the pool, so I was his hands-down favorite for the day.

Our plan for tiring him out was moderately successful, and the little guy slept for about an hour as we drove in a loop through a neighborhood in Irving. About the time he woke up, it was time to head to the chapel to get dressed and take pictures.

I don’t think anyone’s quite sure when it happened, but after a while in the chapel, Nate decided he needed to be attached to me. If I put him down, he was grabbing my leg and crying. He didn’t want crackers or a toy, just his daddy.

This would all be fine, except for the quickly arriving ceremony, where I’m supposed to be standing up at the chapel – sans Nate – and he’s supposed to walk up to me and then walk back to hang out with Sara. As we were called to get into positions, Sara decided to take the Natertot off by himself so he could get over some of his poorly timed separation anxiety.

So after we all walked up to the front of the chapel, it was time to let Nate loose. Sara released him from the back of the chapel, and the poor guy looked lost. After he was about ten feet in, I walked in front of Cooksey to try to persuade him to come up front. He noticed the hundred and fifty or so people in the room, and saw me at the altar, but was so tired and upset (though not crying) that he just drifted up to the front.

He finally got to me, and I picked him up, and everything was good again. But (being anal and thinking that, you know, everyone should be in their positions), I motioned Sara over to the side of the chapel so she’d be able to take Nate into the pews.

That didn’t work.

At all.

Nate freaked out, began to scream, so I did as Sara directed and picked him back up. I ended up holding him through the bridal procession and the opening prayer and message.

It was a Catholic wedding, so they were nice enough to let the bridal party sit during most of the ceremony. So I was sitting in the pews and, to the left of me, brushing up against me, was Nate, kicking his legs back and forth and bouncing and pointing to the stained glass windows to tell me that they’re bright. Meezy was sitting to Nate’s left, so he’d occasionally get the leg pat and the same message.

It was great. What started out stressful (this is just how I think, I can’t help it) turned into one of my favorite memories of Nate so far, with us both in tuxes and him eating goldfish and holding his newly acquired tiger from the Fort Worth Zoo while bopping his head back and forth to church music. Every time he noticed something he’d try to tell me about it, and I’d have to say “shhh,” but I was laughing the whole time.

There’s not that many years of that kind of innocence and unadulterated affection, and I’m thrilled that I wasn’t too dumb to keep from looking up and noticing it.

Here, for the record, is how cool we looked:

All dressed up, ready to go

Working from Home 180

I used to be a huge proponent of working from home. Use IM, Twitter, IRC, Skype, work without pants. Everything’s better.

Recently, though, I’ve flip flopped. That’s right, I waffled. I’m a damn John Kerry, if you will.

I work from home probably about 0.8 days a week (meaning every 5th week I work all 5 days in the office). There are days when this is really helpful, when I’ve got 15 JIRA items that I want to knock out. It’s also really useful if I need to stay home to help out Sara with something, like when she has a doctor’s appt, say.

But there’s a problem. Working from home is nice because I can get my stuff done, but I’m not as much helping out other people as much. I figure this is because online communication, no matter how early you started with it, is a little tedious. I don’t mind keeping 5-10 IM conversations going on all day (and let’s not even get started about Twitter…), but they’re passive usually. Only for a fraction of the IM conversations are both people staring at the window and anxiously awaiting what the other person has to do.

It’s also harder to convey complex sequences or diagrams over the internets. Sure, I’m a shitty artist, but at least I can represent a database on a whiteboard. I can’t do anything close to that with Skitch (well, I can, but it takes about 30 minutes*).

When Meezy and I cooperate on a project, we usually work remotely, and it works well for us, but we’ve been doing projects together for a long time. But even with that level of familiarity, we’re doing Rails Rumble this year, and are going to try to work in the same room. Remote communication is the first thing to crap out when stuff gets hard, so we might as well dodge that one right now.

I think the communication benefits come from easier approachability and that most people can talk faster than they type. I don’t think it’s the questionable “75% of communication is nonverbal” claim. I could be talking to Spock**, and I think talking to him 3 feet from me would be more effective than pinging him over Jabber.

*I might have lied about this a little bit. Have you seen my awesome ejabberd integration diagram? I’m really proud of it.

**Apropos, no?

Proof of a god

Over the weekend (while visiting Dallas for Cooksey’s wedding — congrats2Cookseys!), I had a fun (and drunk) conversation with @meezy. It turned to what would satisfy as sufficient evidence of a god’s existence.

I’m at a loss for what would qualify. If you’ve got an idea, I’d love to hear it.

A few quick guidelines. I’m not going to entertain any anthropic argument crap. Yes, we exist. No, that doesn’t imply anything except that we exist. Nor will I entertain any arguments from incredulity or tradition.

Meezy decided that most evidence he’d have to write off as hallucination, so if you’ve got a way to handle for that, that’d be awesome, too.

OMFSM! Hackez!

I’d been putting off upgrading WordPress for a long time. I was 3 or 4 versions behind, and had gotten really good at ignoring the upgrade taunt.

Apparently that was a mistake. Some douches took advantage of I’m assuming some WP exploit, and decided that my site should have a Palestinian flag and some script kiddies* names on it.

Not that I’ve got anything against Palestinians, but it was a little irritating. It was a simple fix, going into the database and resetting the password and then fixing the theme (also, found a new theme, woot!), but that’s what happened.

*How do I know they were script kiddies? Well, if they were smarter, they could have kept the OpenID lines and tried to use that to phish out an actual password**, and had a lot more fun from there.

**Yes, I’ve changed the important passwords anyways.