I Have Been a Little Busy

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The past few days I’ve broken my own new rule about trying to write every day. I have a really good reason for doing. Sunday morning we had a baby. My wife started going into labor early Saturday morning. Made one trip to the hospital early Saturday morning that turned out to be false alarm, so they sent us home. Full on labor began in the early evening Saturday. We finally had the baby, T Emma at 7:15 AM Sunday morning.

I was able to get a little sleep in the late morning Sunday before going back to the hospital with M’s parents to see her and the baby. She was still out of it so we didn’t spend much time with her, but I did get to sit with T for a while before going home.

Monday was spent all day at the hospital with both of my girls!  T had to stay in the critical care nursery for two days because of a potential infection. She was a trooper, and slept through most of it. M was able to start nursing Monday morning, but the baby needed a bottlefeeding here and there. I was able to give her one of them.  M was sure to get several photos. I didn’t leave the hospital until after 10 PM to head home. In the morning I took the train to try to save money on car service, but at night I took a cab.

Today was pretty much a repeat of Monday. I got up to the train to the hospital, grabbing breakfast on the way. I stayed until around nine when I headed home. I can’t wait to have both M and T home on Thursday.

Dragon Dictate 3 Upgrade

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Since I like writing, but typing at the end of the day after working at a computer all day is not the most fun thing to do I have been using dictation to write. It has been fantastic.

The issue is since I upgraded to mountain lion my dictation software on the Mac has not been working. I’ve actually been using the dictation on my iPhone 4S. I think I’ve written about that before. It’s actually quite good, but nowhere near as good as using the computer. As if to prove a point, the WordPress app on my iPhone 4S just crashed for the second time in a day. I lost about two paragraphs of this post and had to write it over. That sort of thing doesn’t happen on the Mac.

Today, Nuance the makers of Dragon Dictate released an upgrade for Dragon Dictate for the Mac that works with Mountain lion. Because of the limitations of the iPhone dictation I am pleased to be able to upgrade. But I’m not pleased about is the rather expensive price of the $149 to be able to upgrade. I don’t typically buy software is expensive. The only other software that comes anywhere close to this price is Microsoft office. Even that I got a rather steep discount through work the last upgrade. I just hope the price was worth it.

I am downloading it now, and I hope to have it working tonight. I’m wondering if I need to train it again. This software I like the mobile phone versions of the software requires you to train the software by reading. It does not take very long, but it does require some minor concentration to read to a computer. I will give my opinion in a later post.

Due Date +2

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As of today the baby is now officially two days late. I know that first children tend to trend late, but it still doesn’t make it any easier that we are here waiting. I have to give credit to MC, she has been staying at work regular hours. She doesn’t have to, but I think she wants to get things squared away before she takes off.

Hosting Changes

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All my thinking about changing domain names led me to another bigger change. For the past few years I have been using wordpress.com to post my blog. Before that I mainly hosted on TypePad for years. in between I played around with movable type, and WordPress. In 2009 my started using WordPress.com it was free, and they offered services cheaper then TypePad if I wanted any. At the time I wasn’t walking a lot and the easy dollars or so year just for bloging seemed like a lot from TypePad. With my recent revival to writing I was making changes to my site. Unfortunately any real changes that I wanted to make on wordpress.com would require several add-on purchases. At that point I looked at the price of a true hosting provider. I signed up for one, only to cancel the trial account within an hour. I then continue to waffle and signed up for another hosting provider. The second provider bluehost.com hey pretty decent rate for a 2 year package. It was pretty simple to set up all my content on the new provider and add both my new domain name and my old one to point to that site.

For the most of the life of my blog I’ve been on TypePad, but I have over the years used several different hosting providers on and off. In recent years using Google apps and other web services for free or small fees having my own hosted account didn’t seem like it was worth it. By simply decreasing my Google apps for business mail quota I was able to go from the paid plan to the free plan. That cost savings alone offsets the price of the new hosting plan per year, so I figured why not give it a try. I like the additional flexibility I can have with my own website. I am already playing around with media wiki again, and some WordPress plug-ins that I could not get on the hosted account.

Having my own FTP account should also come in handy. I can remember at least two or three instances in the past several months that I’ve needed it, most recently two weeks ago.

Now I just have to see if I continue writing to make these changes worth it. I told MC yesterday I would love to be able to carve out 30 minutes night to just sit and write. I always found that pretty therapeutic to do that. It helped me unwind from the day. I just haven’t done it in years. Of course it’s my luck that I decide to really get into this again right before I have a baby. That means pretty much no free time at all. On the flip side it would be nice to have time to document what the baby does, and other milestones. I think years from now that would be nice to have. I always said I like to write for me.

I will see how it goes over the next few weeks.

The Due Date

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Today is not typically a day I like to think about. I try to go most of the day without hearing people referencing the date. Today also happens to be the projected due date for our baby. We’ve thought about this a lot, and ideally just want a happy and healthy baby. That being said I’ll be perfectly happy if she’s slightly late to avoid this birthday. that last statement is pretty moot at this point because it’s 6 o’clock and so far no labor signs. I don’t want to jinx myself, but it’s already pretty late in the day and labor takes a while.

Now we wait. If the baby doesn’t come on her own I believe they will induce next Tuesday. Let’s hope she decides to show up sometime soon, there are plenty of people that want to meet her.

With today being 9/11 and the due date I really can’t remember much else from work today. I am usually pretty good about remembering high points, but not today.

Does The Domain Name Really Matter?

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Over the years I have used several email addresses and different domain names for websites. In recent years I have been using the powerz.org domain. It was unique and relatively cool 10 years ago, but as I get older and I’m less concerned about anonymity on the Internet and more about people finding me I question if I should be continue to use it. My thoughts are if I’m going to have customized domain name, I might as well have one that represents me and not some silly reference to a TV show from the 90s. To be fair it’s an obscure reference to The Simpsons, and the Simpsons are still awesome however that still does not take away from the fact that any online presence should represent me.

I’m not sure what made me start thinking about this topic. It might have been because I am planning on buying a domain name for my baby when she is born. Let’s not go into the fact that MC thinks it’s not really necessary. She is right by the way, a baby does not need a domain name. I am getting it so down the road when she is old enough she will have one if she ever wants one. I did the same thing for my oldest niece and she actually is using it for her maill right now. But that’s off-topic.

My domain name usage has progressed from using Scott.ac for email and for a time my blog, to powerz.org. there’ve been other ones I’ve played around with for a short period of time. For example I used powerpedia.net for my blog for a while. I loved the Scott.AC domain, but the international domain name kind of confused people. I still have that one, and don’t plan on ever really giving it up. I just don’t want to use it for day-to-day stuff.

I am probably overthinking it. It’s most likely not that big of a deal to have an online presence with one domain versus another. I guess, well I kind of know I’m a perfectionist about this or stuff so I am compelled to go through the painful process of moving things to a new domain. As I started writing this post last week I was planning on moving everything from powerz.org to scottw.net. After getting opinions from several people (Jay was for the move, MC wasn’t) I decided to move ahead with moving my blog to the new domain. I will over time move my non personal mail to the new domain, but i will keep my personal powerz.org mail address that i have been using for years. MC likes the domain name even though it has no real meaning. It just sounds cool, so for personal use i will keep it. That decision made things pretty easy. If i did move my personal email address, the one used as my main google apps account I would have had a lot of work to migrate google services. Some stuff like Google Play purchases can’t be moved. Other things like google voice is a very painful thing to do.

In another post I will talk about the efforts from this weekend to migrate my blog to the new domain and a new hosting provider.

Maybe Our Last Weekend of Rest For a While

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This weekend we have tried to stay low key.  MC spent most of the day yesterday and today on the couch with her feet up.  We did a big batch of laundry today.  Yup, it was that exciting of a weekend.  Amazingly there was still some baby stuff that needed to be washed.

We (MC) perfected our pot popcorn making.  We do it old school, and MC is pretty dam good at it.  Very delicious.  Saturday night we ordered in from Bearburger as a treat.  Tonight we ordered Italian.  We also had a freshdirect delivery.  lots of getting food stores ready in case it is hectic once the baby arrives.

I went out to get waffles again today for breakfast.  The waffle truck was in Forest Hills again.  The line was super long today.  I am glad they are getting business in the area so they will be back regularly but it was a long wait!

The rest of the day (and a big chunk of yesterday) for me was taken up by me tinkering around with my website.  I will write about that in another post soon.

We watched Jeff Who Lives at Home tonight.  It was not as funny as I thought it would be with the cast that was in it.  I would say it was OK, but nothing special.  Other TV watched this weekend was some more episodes of The Layover with Anthony Bourdain.  We have finished all our Top Chef episodes till a new season comes out and we have been trying that show out as a substitute.  So far it has been pretty good.  I have bookmarked some places to  try the next time I am in London, and MC and I did the same thing for if we are ever in San Francisco.

 

4 Year Anniversary

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Today is my 4 year anniversary working at Thomson Reuters. I almost forgot about it.  Usually Colin reminds me but since I am no longer working with him I don’t recall how I remembered but I know it was here.

Time flies because until today it didn’t really dawn on me that I have been at this job for longer than any job with the exception of Partsearch.

My 4 years broken down in numbers goes as follows.  In 4 years I have managed 3 groups, & 6 products or capabilities.  I have had 3 managers, one for over 3 years and then two changes this year.  I have been in 3 offices, and have moved offices 4 times.  After 4 years I still get energized  a little when walking to the office from the subway, so hopefully there will be more years to come.

Friday September 7th

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Not a huge amount to report that I want to write about publicly on the Internet, so I wrote a private blog post. I work from home today because I needed to have some scheduling flexibility. Thankfully in the end I didn’t need it, but it’s good to know it’s available when needed.

I ordered takeout sushi for lunch today. I was also able to play a little bit with Cisco and jabber. One of the guys at work and I tested to make sure that it functions and I can receive chat messages when the app is closed on my iPhone and iPad. It will be pretty cool when we all start using it.

We do not have any specific plans yet for this weekend. We are hoping to be pretty low key, since the baby is due Tuesday. Depending on how MC feels we might get a dinner out one night. Other than that it’s vegging and making sure we get anything we need to do around the apartment done.

Desk Reconfiguration

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At work I have had 5 monitors on my desk.  Let’s not argue the necessity of five monitors. It is a bit excessive. That is why I’ve been thinking about downsizing for a while.  At the time the setup made sense, and I had the equipment on hand so I figured why not.  Recently however my desk is been slightly cramped, and I found myself using my third computer significantly less.  This set up started when I got a new 27 inch display for my laptop.  It was a great needed addition since the extra real-estate is used and I blow text up a lot.  With that addition I had the two 19″ monitors I was using for my Macbook Air free to move to my Mac Mini that I use.  I have that machine mainly to sit on the guest wifi network to do Skype video chats with far flung staff.  I can use Skype on the internal network but it never seems the same.  The 15″ monitors (2 of them) I was using for the Min went towards a Dell desktop I have that I run a specific work app on.  I can run it in a VM but on my older Macbook Air the VM was starved for memory.  Now i may revisit the need for that machine but i like having a dedicated Windows machine around even if I dont use it often.

Since I wasn’t using the windows machine a lot I gave away the 15″ monitors and just have the Dell desktop plugged into one of the Mini’s 19″ monitors.  They take DVI & VGI so I created  poor mans switcher for the monitor.  Longer term i will probably just RDP to that machine.  Surprisingly 3 monitors is not uncommon at work.  Some people even have 4 but i was a bit out there with the 5.

Now I have space on my desk that you can actually see my wedding & engagement photos.  Now isn’t that whats important?