Brunch Out

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Today we meet up with MC’s friend Mary Beth who was in town visiting family and friends. We dont get to see her much with her living out of town so it was nice to meet up.  We meet at the Tick Tok.  I dont recall having breakfast there ever but I have had lunch and dinner a lot when I worked at Redcats.  The food was really good diner food.  i was pleased with the real hash browns.  Most places dont have them and they are way better than the regular breakfast potato options.

After breakfast/brunch we headed over to Home Depot to get some wood for shelves and some other misc stuff.

At home we spent some time figuring out were we want to hang pictures and paintings and stuff.  We have been in the apartment for 9 months and we are finally getting around to that.  We hung some items but still need to find a home for other pieces.  Time is ticking till the baby arrives and we wont have time for stuff like that!

The rest of the day was nice and restful.  Exactly what you want before you go back to work after a 3 day weekend!

Waffles and Resting at Home

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Last weekend while driving to pizza with my parents MC noticed the Waffle and Dinges truck that I love right off of Austin St.  I checked it out and they apparently have been showing up on Sunday’s.  Today I saw they were there again and I went out to pick up waffles for MC and I.  They were great as usual.

After breakfast we were living up our free weekend by continuing to chill out and do some light house work, and laundry.  MC found a new Italian place to try ordering from for dinner.  Turned out to not be so great.  Otherwise a low key day!

Plex On AppleTV

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I have had an AppleTV since the first generation one came out years ago. When the second-generation one came out I pick that up and sold the original on eBay. I have loved the idea of an AppleTV for years. I have even made my own homegrown media center on several occasions. If you read this blog you’ll read about several of those iterations. The problem is in practice I really haven’t had huge luck with the AppleTVs. The second-generation AppleTV I currently have has been replaced with a Mac Mini running Plex media center. That has been my media center of choice for a while. I have tried the Boxer box, and the Roku. with both of those I was hoping to plug into my media centers the a library, and with the Roku to use it as a front end for Plex. neither of those options worked out very well. All along the AppleTV has been powered on but not plugged into my TV. I would plug it in to music, but not really using it for TV. I have been generally lazy and didn’t want to jailbreak it. The Mac Mini has functioned generally well so I was in no rush to try anything different again. since my move I have had some more buggy experiences with the Mac Mini then the previous two years or so I’ve had it. It wasn’t enough for me to go making drastic changes, that is until I read that the Plex team had made a front end for the jailbroken AppleTV. So I gave jailbreaking a shot. At first I thought I had bricked the AppleTV, but after about two days of leaving it plugged in and I forgot about it. I turned on my TV and it had worked. I got really lucky.

After the small drama in jailbreaking, it was trivial to get Plex installed. After it was installed I ran into some problems with choppiness of the video. I fixed that by tweaking some of the bit rate settings. Since then it has been working perfectly. I got even luckier when less than a week after I had configured Plex Apple announced that Hulu is now available on the device. I covered that in another blog post.

For right now the AppleTV is now my main media center. I still have my Mac Mini. It’s needed to run the Plex server, and host all the videos and music on my Drobo. it is just not plugged into my TV anymore. It has been an pre-smooth experience so far. MC likes it that she can stream music again directly to the AppleTV without me having to plug it in or read it up since it is now always attached to the television.

We still have a TiVo, and use it for a DVR. Longer-term I would love to find a way to use Hulu, the Internet, and my AppleTV to replace TiVo and and really expensive cable bill. We are not quite there yet in trying that out.

One of The Last Lazy Saturdays

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Today we cooked breakfast like we have been dong a lot more since May.  MC made omelets.  I think today they were perfect.  It will probibly be the benchmark for all future home made omelets.  We also tried fo-sausage, aka soy sausage.  They weren’t so bad.  Still weirded out by eating soy but i will try those again.

The agenda for the day was relaxing.  We doubt we will have many free weekends when we can just relax so we were enjoying that and doing a little work around the house.

We went out to a Thai restaurant on Austin St.  It was pretty good.  My first time at a Thai place and MC loves it so it was a good night out.  We hit up Martha’s for some desert.  It was super busy at that place but thankfully we didn’t wait to sit, but did wait a while for service.  We had a great night out.

Back to Blogging

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I’m back to blogging full swing this week. A lot of what I have posted for May June and July have been things I’ve just written and never got around to posting, or things I had rough notes about and just never really elaborated on them. Not fully sure what got me to start posting again, but what’s made it really easy has been the ability to dictate what I want to say to my phone. Currently I’m running Mac OS X Mountain lion. Unfortunately it is not currently compatible with Dragon dictate that I have. After a long day working and writing on the computer typing a blog post sometimes is physically uncomfortable. So before I stopped blogging I was using dictation on my Mac. I was getting mixed results from it, but I was using it. With me being unable to use the dictation software on the computer I gave talking into my phone a try. I’m pleasantly surprised by the positive results. I first tried my android tablet because it has off-line dictation, but honestly the keyboard editing on android has not been very fun to deal with. So now I’m using my iPhone 4S and the WordPress app to edit after I dictate has been pretty simple.

Maybe Out From Under The Blockers

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This week it work has been stressful because I am under a deadline that is coming due next month to deliver some software and we had several items that have been blocking us from progressing most of our tasks. This is not uncommon but it’s a big deadline and things just have been progressing slowly so I have gotten concerned. Thankfully early this morning to the major issues seem to of been resolved and the third was clearing up. That means a lot of other items that have been kind of in limbo are now able to proceed.

We’re not out of the woods but I just feel better that we pushed some items aside that of been haunting me all week. I think I’ve mentioned that this deadline has been more stressful than most just because I’m going to most likely be away when MC has the baby right when it’s coming due. That means I need to make sure that everybody else’s up to speed and doing what’s needed and I have to be able to just walk away at a moments notice. My boss and I have a plan for my absence, but it still doesn’t make me any less uneasy with all that’s going on.

I’m glad I’m able to start wrapping up the week before holiday weekend on a positive note. Now just one more day until the weekend!

Meetup With Gus

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Today I met up with Gus after work to grab some drinks and dinner. He emailed me a week or so ago seeing if I wanted to meet up before the baby came. Since I was doing that with a lot of people anyway it was perfect timing.

Both of us were able to get out relatively early and we met up at a sushi place near Union Square that he highly recommended. The food was pretty good, and I tried unfiltered sake for the first time. MC and I have tried regular cold sake but never the unfiltered. Gus insisted we try it and it turned out to be very tasty.

It was good to see him and hang out. We talked about a numerous topics and were able to get out relatively early so I was able to get home at a decent hour. I was glad for that since I had been up since 5:45 to do a call with China.

Tuesday, August 28

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I think I’m going back to using the date as the title of blog posts instead of coming up with snappy subjects for each regular day I write about.

Today was the first day are cleaning has been here since late July. I think she took some vacation time and also was resting from minor injury. We were glad that she’s back. Her arrival meant I had to leave for work early. I had a lot to do anyway.

I know I have an awesome wife when her best friend is going to be in town and she says I might be busy Saturday night because it’s the premiere of Dr. Who. I didn’t think of that and of course I’m available see her friend. I just thought it was hysterical that she would think that I would want to bail out for TV. It was very sweet though.

On the plus side one of MC’s best friend that lives in DC is going to be in New York this weekend. We will hopefully get to see her for brunch one day.

This evening was pretty low-key. I need to get up early for a meeting at 6 AM going to bed early. The rest of the night was taken up with a little bit of TV, and calling some perspective nannies.

Monday August 27

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I am working towards a deadline for a big project at work. Were not late yet, but I have concerns about making our date. I generally am very sensitive to this sort of stuff but there is still a lot of work to be done, not a lot of time to do it, and I may have to run out any time have a baby. That last part about having to leave in a moments notice is probably what’s causing me to be the most concerned. Generally this kind of hectic work pace happens towards a deadline but as I said it is a little different this time because MC is due in two weeks.

Most of my day today involved making sure things were on track for the project that is due, and generally ensuring that we haven’t missed anything. The other half of the day was making sure everybody on the team knew what their priorities were.

I left work a little after 5 PM because MC and I have an appointment after work interviewing a perspective postpartum Doula.

Work Around The Apartment

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This morning we both were able to sleep in a little. We are living that up while we can before the baby gets here. Once I was up and dressed i headed out to run an errand and then grab some bagels for breakfast.

In the afternoon I hung curtain hangers in the babies room. I’m not normally a fan of doing that sort of work, since it’s pretty exacting and I like to do things right and I am not that precise with things like drilling holes into walls with my vision all. I totally messed up one of the brackets for one of the curtains but in the end you really can’t tell the difference so MC was pleased with the results, and if she is pleased with her vision I am happy. The short curtains, I’m not sure what they’re called look really good in the room. Overall the room is turned out pretty awesome.

After curtain hanging we did some laundry and then I got MC set up so she can work on the wedding photo albums for our parents. The mockup she has for my parents right now looks really good, she’s just touching it up and I think we will put an order in.

My sister and my nieces and nephew came over to see the babies room and grab some dinner. They are spending a couple of days at my parents before school starts so they swung by here on the way. We ate at bear burger. It was really good and I’m just glad to spend some time with the kids and my sister before the baby comes.

All of them, including Alexis, especially Alexis, is very excited for the baby to arrive. Alexis keeps asking about baby peanut, the name my mom uses for the baby until she officially has a name. Morgan worked on some babes and onesies decorations since she didn’t go to the shower. They were very cute. Alexis got to review and approve some of the baby books she donated to us when she was checking out the babies room. When I mean donated to us, I mean she said she wanted to give these books to the baby and gave them to my sister. It was hysterical when she did it.

All in all relatively productive weekend. It was good to see both sets of parents and my sister especially since it will get hectic pretty soon.