Tomorrow.

'nuff said.

11:37 PM - 6 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

Weights and Measurements

So... the baby doctor says that Ginger is 3cm dilated and followed that up with 'pack your bags and get ready'.

Bag packed? Yep.
Car seat? Sure. Not properly hooked up, but it's there.
Cameras? Absolutely?
Ready to pass out?

Yeah I think I'm there.

Looks like the baby is 'ready and in position'. If she doesn't head out on her own she'll be induced within the next two weeks or less.

I'm supposed to take a pic right before the big moment for the baby book.. so here it is...



Oh she'll love that one.

In other news, the game room 'redo' is about 75% complete. What's a redo? Well, as many of you collectors know, there gets to a point where almost all of your consoles become unhooked, unplugged, incomplete, etc over the course of time. Maybe it's because you took something to a show and never hooked it back up. After awhile, just one or two consoles are hooked up properly. Since most of us have miles of wires behind their TVs, it takes hours, if not days, to get everything back to normal. I'm almost done - even the CDI is hooked up. I hadn't hooked that up since I bought at the OVGE in 2006.

Speaking of hooking stuff up, the website I believe is finally *fixed*. If you have been there recently, you'll know that it crawled. My webhoster finally figured out the issue. My website one in one building. My SQL database was in some other town. Yeah that took awhile to run queries. It's been moved over and now it's fixed (check it at Retroputing )

11:01 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Little yellow critters

If you take the classic Coldplay song 'Yellow' and turn it into 'Pink' instead, you'd get a basic idea of what the old computer room has turned into. It's pink. The crib, pink. Stuff on the walls? Pink. Pink mobiles, pink clothes, pink toys ... pretty much anything you can possibly think of has turned pink. We are down to 5 weeks, and Ginger is in the 'nesting' phase - everything is put together.. car seats, strollers, you name it. We have diapers... and wipes, and toys for the tub. We're just waiting on the guest of honor.











Ginger is on full blown insulin now, but it's only for a few more weeks. She gets to stick herself with a needle twice a day but overall she said it's painless. We're down to weekly visits to ensure the baby doesn't get too big - diabetic babies can have larger shoulders than normal so they don't come out right. Too big = induce. She's fine with that, she wants it over with. I think we're both ready.


Where's the critters part? Well... this part may gross you out a bit, and especially if you live near me you'll be pretty nauseated.

Ginger, her sister and I went to grab some food yesterday while we were out and about (buying pink stuff no doubt.. hey that rhymes). We went to our favorite Japanese steak house, Shogun's for some grilled stuff. We've been there countless times over the last 5 years or so without ever a problem. We ate our salads, the drinks were brought out, and we were getting ready to have our plates filled with fried rice from the cook when I noticed something tiny on my plate.

Ants.

Dead ones at that. Ugh. I grabbed a plate from a seat next to me that wasn't be used. Dead ants. This time, 20 or 30 of them. Trying not to make a scene just yet, I found a plate that was fine. Rice was cooked, started eating, went to take a swig of water and.. yep, you guessed it. Dead ants in the water. I was done at this point. I told the chef, he got the manager. While waiting, I noticed though it was hard to see because the table was a very dark brown, that there were dead ants on the table. Ginger almost hurled. The manager showed up and I pointed out my water, plates of dead ants, and dead ants on the counter. The brilliant guy told me my food was free. Umm... you're not getting it. I wouldn't EAT this, free or not. He asked if I wanted my food prepared in the kitchen instead, completely oblivious that, hey, it's bad that you have an infested restaurant and where did the plates come from? Oh yeah, the kitchen. I told him, I am not eating this stuff he said I didn't have to pay and we left. No apologies or anything. If you've ever been to a Japanese steak house, you'll know that you sit at the grill with a bunch of other people. I should have made a bigger scene to scare them off but they seemed to know something was going on.

Nasty.

11:55 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Internet and Shortwave Radio (with a splash of pink)

I've been a fan of shortwave radio since I was about 12 years old when I went to my first 'Ham-Fest' and picked up an old Hallicrafters S-38E tube radio. Never heard of shortwave? It's not that surprising - in this part of the world it has been slowly replaced by streaming internet streams. Shortwave is more or less defined as the frequency on your radio dial from around 3Mhz and going to up about 21Mhz. The radio frequencies in this range skip or bounce across the ionosphere and can land many thousands of miles from where they started. Especially during the evening hours, you can pick up Radio Moscow for a listen to Russian politics in English, Radio Nederlands for a brief history lesson and then off to smaller nations such as Cuba to hear what is going on in that part of the world. More and more of the 'western' and industrialized world and moving their programs to the internet though there are still thousands of stations still being broadcast by most countries.

I'm still using an old Realistic DX-440 and DX-390 for most of my shortwave listening, though I thought about upgrading to the new Eton E1. With stations moving to the internet now, I thought it would be great if someone created a real internet appliance that looked and acted like a radio that I could use independently from my computer. I mean, listening to tunes on the computer is great, but I don't want to fiddle around with a laptop while I'm lying in bed reading. Then I found...

Grace Internet Radio

Yeah I know I'm sounding a bit like an infomercial so look at this more like a review since it is. Unlike a bunch of internet radios that they make, they still require you to have a computer to add streams to and from your radio so it becomes something that is a lot harder to manage. The Grace uses the Reciva service (www.reciva.com) which is a free service that keeps track of about 11,000 stations, catagorized by genre or country. When you fire up the radio, it connects to your Wifi network and pulls down a list of stations. On the radio itself you can pick the genre you want to here, tune to it, and bookmark it if you like it. You can also search by country. I've got stuff like Iceland bookmarked and some little island in the South Pacific. Ginger and I usually listen to an Old Time Radio hour station at bedtime. You can also bookmark your stations online if you want, and the radio will download it automatically. It also can stream stuff from the pandora project (www.pandora.com) so you can make a radio station to your taste. Basically, this thing is a more or less a modern shortwave-type radio.

The only bad thing? Stickers! No really.. you open the box and pull it out and there's a big ol' sticker that says "Internet Radio!" over the speaker. Yeah.. no kidding, I gathered that's what it was on the box. But the sticker doesn't come off right. So... I need to pick up a jug-o-Goo-gone to get rid of it. Thanks. Still, this is the first 'internet appliance' that has made sense to me so far. A refrigerator that has internet access and can tell me that I need milk? No thanks.

BTW, there's going to be more baby-type blogs in the future. It's been very, very busy around the household. A couple of baby showers later and I think we have most of it down. A huge thanks to everyone because it really helps. We went in for an ultrasound last Monday and Emmy is sitting at about 4lbs 10oz which is on the high side of normal. Still, she's normal. And when I asked the doctor if she really still was a girl, she zoomed in and showed me some unmistakeable girly-parts. That's good since the place is entirely in pink now.

5:57 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The clean, the knotted and the dehydrated.

Somedays, I wish there was such thing as a minivan for kitties. Today was one of those days - it was time for the kitty klan to head to the vet for their annual checkups, shots and whatnots. Of course, they didn't all go at once - if that had happened the chaos in the car would have ended the car up in a ditch somewhere. Still, the kids got a bunch of good and one mediocre diagnosis. Since you care so much about the lives of the cats, here's a quick rundown.

Jake (16) - back to almost 7.5 lbs so the thyroid medicine is doing well for her. She's was also unhappily 'deknotted' - we had her belly shaved due to all the knots she got when she couldn't take care of herself. She's not particularly happy about that.

Sid (4) - went in for his first teeth cleaning and if you don't know how all that works, the put the cat under to do it. He's been wandering around in a groggy state since arriving home.

Merf (15) - perfectly fine if not a bit cranky. He's getting a bit of arthritis and will now get a low dose aspirin a few times a week to help with him. His thyroid medicine is regulating him without any problems.

Mocha (12) - her kidney levels aren't doing great, but not particularly awful. She's in the 55 range of cretons (or whatever it's called) where she should be 30-40 max. She might see more water treatment in the future. Her kidney failure is due to old age.

and now the big one, Stripe who turns 3 in a few weeks, is now a perfectly fine, if not fat, cat. He's off the water treatment that they said he would be on for the rest of his life. Turns out the aggressive water treatment flushed the melamine out of his kidneys and he's able to maintain himself. He goes in for one more checkup in a month, but the cat with a freakin' million lives is fine. For those who don't want to bother searching through the back blogs, he was hit by the wonderful Iams/Menu Foods catfood recall and more or less sentenced to death. They gave him 3 years max. Then again, if you search even further back, you would have seen that he originally had a rare disease where less than 0.1% survive and beat that one too. Lucky cat.

Speaking of Menu Foods, it appears they're wanting to settle the class action lawsuit - up to 250,000 per pet owner. I know I'll never see that, but I'll be happy if they pay for the shitload of specialized food and treatments he's had to go through for over a year.

Emmy update - some not so good news for the wife is on Monday she was told she has gestational diabetes - i.e., diabetes caused by pregnancy. What this can cause in a baby is possible birth defects, but more than likely a big ass baby. 10lbs+, not coming out the normal way, baby. She's now on a strict diet, has the blood meter and we'll see if this is all she has to do. If not, it's insulin time but her sugar hasn't been out of control really - around 110-130 where they consider a normal 90. She should go back to normal when the new family member arrives.

6:34 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Life and Death

Right around Christmas this year, I got an email from a friend of mine that I have known since the very early 90s. We hadn't kept in touch due to a falling out that's long past, but he wanted to let me know that he found out that he had terminal colon cancer. That sort of took me aback a bit because I wouldn't think anyone my age would fall into the cancer category - it's too young. I'm a ripe ol' 34 and cancer is something you get when you're much older. A few days ago I received an email from his mom stating that Stew Young died on May 31st at the age of 36.

I met Stew at a BBS party in 1990 along with another person, Jake (whom my oldest cat is named after). They were the most normal of the bunch there, and if you've ever been to some sort of geek festival, you know what I mean. Stew was a sysop of The Whitehall BBS and had a ton to say on all topics though he liked to lean towards the political side when there were a bunch of us younger geeks around. There was much time spent on minor road trips around the Northern California area and getting completely lost. One time we went to go grab something from the store and ended up on a road going to seemingly nowhere. No turn offs, no houses and then we realized we were almost out of gas in my 1973 Datsun 610. We hit a 1 pump gas station and asked the clerk... wtf were we? Stonyford, CA... population of maybe 100 and were a good hour and a half from anything (except for Fruto - population 8). I still make that drive when I can when I go out to California.

I think Stew spent a lot of his life trying to figure out what he wanted to do.. from computer guy to chef to author. He was married once, moved to Washington for no reason at all and spent a perpetual amount of time in school. So anyways Stew, I hope you found what you were looking for during your time here. I'll fire up a 300 baud modem in your memory.

In other news, we went to the chick and baby doctor and Emmy is doing fine. Ginger is at over 6 months so we're finally on the homestretch. Her back hurts and she's doing the 'pregnant waddle'. Using the miracles of modern science, I can say that Emmy is currently 2 lbs and 2 oz, and 9.5" long. We're still on track for a early September birth though I think Ginger is wanting it much, much, sooner.

Here's a current pic... (face is on the right). If you tilt your head and look cross-eyed you can kinda see a picture - like one of those magic photo things.



We finally bought the stuff for the crib.. like a mattress, and a mobile and some other stuff that will show up via guys in brown and will drop them off at my front porch for me to assemble. Whee!

Stripe was taken against his will to the vet for a blood test. His levels are perfect and recent developments from other cats who suffered through the whole Menu Foods thing lead us to believe he *might* be able to be taken off the IV bag. It seems the melamine that crystalized in his kidneys might be able to be washed out over time. It's been a year so he's on a 3 week hiatus to see if he can finally lose the fluid treatments. He'll get another blood test on our anniversary to see where he's at.



About a month or so ago, the BBS went back up on a real Commodore C64 after about 10 months of downtime - a little rearranging of the game room and some extra time allowed me to get it back up and going. Go grab CGTERM (www.paradroid.net/cgterm) and point it towards particlesbbs.dyndns.org port 6400.

I'm getting ready for the OVGE in August (www.ovge.com) and have a unique item on order - for the US anyway. I've ordered a Commodore C116 from Austria. Never heard of it? It was an offspring of the Commodore Plus/4 and C16 but was released in very, very small numbers. Mine's a PAL model but that's okay - there's 1 known NTSC model in the world. I'm sure I'll have pictures later but for now, here's someone else's picture:

6:25 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Everything Goes With Chile

Day two in Albuquerque started off pretty uneventful. I woke up around 5:45AM MDT (an hour off of what I'm used to), Ginger finally peeled herself out of bed at around 7:45. We wandered down to the local watering hole, commonly known as Starbucks, and grabbed some pastries and liquified caffeine. The people running the place were in a bit of a panic as it seems that their hoses for their machines had sprung a leak and it was draining on the valet parking below. The only thing that was available was pretty much coffee and hot chocolate which worked out for both of us. We sat in there for a bit trying to kill time before Enterprise opened so we could get our 'used sub-compact so our possie could be laughed at' and meet up with Ubik at the Natural Science Museum. The mapping feature on my iPhone has been great so I had it map out where Enterprise is from me - one block, great! We headed off and wandered around a few city blocks trying to find out exactly where it was. Is it that building? Nope. How about this one? Nope. A guard walked by and said it was in what looked to be a closed up office building. He let us in and we found out.. well we were in the lobby of the hotel. The place was in the hotel, but it had a different street address. That makes you feel lame.

After waiting around for 45 minutes, we finally got our car and met up with Ubik a bit late. Inside the museum was a cool feature called 'The Startup Museum' which was funded or whatever from Paul Allen of Microsoft. It seems Microsoft started here and moved to Redmond later. The museum gives you a pretty cool history of very early computers (not really moving much past 1984) and it had, of course, Ubik's favorite machine - the Altair 8800. Pantechnicon met up with us with his kids but had a prior engagement so he took off fairly early. We also ended up taking the customary pictures of the dinosaurs and whatnot. Ginger spent a lot of the time hanging out on a bench - she's just shy of 6 months and has the stamina of a 25 year old house cat.

On Paul's (Pantechnicon) recommendation, we headed across a park to the 'old town' area and sat down for some real Mexican food. One thing that we realized pretty quick is that everything goes with chile. Pizza? You need some green chiles. Tacos? Yep, chiles. The lunch I just had came with green chile rolls. I'm not much of an adventurer when it comes to food, but after eating food with green chiles, I see I have a new favorite food. Tacos with green chiles and onions are just freakin' tasty.

The last main stop of the day was going to... a tall mountain. I can't remember the name. It's at about 10,000 feet, and the gutless-wondermobile that I was driving (Nissan Versa) absolutely hated the climb up there. The view was pretty awesome, you could see for many, many miles from there besides being able to see the entire Albuquerque area. There were also a lot of bicyclists flying back down the mountain (14 miles). I'm totally envious.

Today we're not doing much of anything besides hanging out at the hotel, chillin' out. We had plans to drive around and see things, but you know, I just don't have any motivation at all to pull myself out of this chair. I guess that's what vacation is all about, relaxing which I don't do often enough. Tomorrow we're off to grab our train back to Funkytown.

Check out the pics either on Myspace or here Clickyity Click

11:59 AM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

This is a people train. Don’t try none of that cow hypnosis.

Ginger and I took off for the Great Ice Memorial Day Vacation Trip (tm) last night from wonderful and scenic Kansas City. We're going to hang out in Albuquerque for the next few days and see Ubik and Pantechnicon for some sight-seeing tomorrow and the wife and I are going to chill a bit on Monday before heading back on Tuesday. We left on the 11PM Amtrak yesterday heading towards ABQ.

I don't know what it is, but the older I get, the less I want to be hassled. The younger version of me would have put some gas in the car and went. I would have slept in the backseat so I could avoid paying a hotel fee, or I would have gotten the cheapest room I could find. It was always about get there, get there, rush-rush-rush. Now I'm feeling like being leisurely is better, and that I don't *have* to cram everything I possibly can into a day anymore. So the train seems like a good idea - grab a sleeper car, doze the night away, wake up, have breakfast and lunch and off to do what I need to do at my destination. Seems it never works out that way.

We rented out a Roomette (Click for Info) and a family room - a larger version of the same thing for the way back. It's more or less 2 seats that turn into a bed when folded out with a bunk bed on top. I'm not pregnant so I get the bunk bed.

I was having a heck of a time trying to sleep with all the rocking and everything in the car. I think it was more that I felt that I needed to balance or I'd fall off the top bunk so it kept waking me up. I woke up enough to run to the bathroom at 3AM and then realized if I faced the *other* direction on the bunk I'd be more comfortable. Right after I realized that, I noticed the train was coming to a stop and the roll of thunder in the distance. I didn't care why we were stopping. We stopped, I fell right asleep and ignored whatever else happened.

... and I should have maybe been awake. Seems we stopped for 2 hours due to a tornado watch/warning/real thing somewhere in Kansas. The passengers said they hid the train between 2 freight trains in a switching yard somewhere. I guess it was bad but I was oblivious. I woke up at about 7AM and aimed for the shower.

The showers in there are kinda weird, but kinda cool all at the same time. It's not too much bigger than a closet, you are in a shower stall where you have to snap the show curtain to the wall to prevent water from running out and you use a showerhead type massager thing to wash yourself. It works well actually which is good since I was fearing the experience.

If you've never been on a train, you aren't allowed to have your own table in the dining car. They always pair you up with someone else so you never know who you're going to meet. I shared breakfast with an older couple who were on their way from Chicago to Phoenix. Luckily, they seemed like a nice bunch which is good since you never know who you're gonna get (que Forrest Gump soundbites). We had some weirdos in the past on our way to San Antonio.

The rest of the trip was more or less hanging out in the observation car, looking out the window/reading the paper/wandering around train stations during stop overs and a lot of napping. The two hour stop in the middle of the night delayed us and we were starting to make some time until 40 minutes outside of Albuquerque -

Cow vs Amtrak.

Cow lost.

We plowed through a herd of cattle and took at least one out (we never got a count). Basically, there was steak tartar on the tracks. Pass the A1?

After a quick inspection by the maintenance crew, we were off to the rest of the trip. Nothing else too exciting has happened - we're chillin in our room the rest of the evening, and will meet up with Ubik and Pant. tomorrow. BTW, check out the pics so far...

Pics of Trip So Far

7:08 PM - 4 Comments - 7 Kudos - Add Comment

Catching up on some stuff.

I know there's a few people that are waiting for the 'funny' blog to be posted based on last night's festivities, but for now, you get the blog that's a few days late.

The last week or so, I've been hanging out and getting the house ready for Emmy. The baby's room upstairs now has a full crib and changing table (will add pictures soon) and it doesn't resemble anything that was the computer room. A few more touches and it'll definitely be nothing but a kid's room.

Our oldest cat, Jake, was taken to the vet the other week with deep cuts in her head - we couldn't figure out what caused them because our cats are relatively tame to each other. The vet said that she had an inner-ear infection. What happens is that cat can't scratch where it really itches so they scratch to the point they're bleeding. The solution? Put on a dog-collar on the cat's head, give em eardrops and add some cream to make them feel better. I wish I had had my camera ready as Jake attempted to wander around the house - without the use of her whiskers, she couldn't figure out where the wall was and would frequently get stuck while perusing around at night. That gave way to the sound of scraping all night as she tried to figure out where things were. I had to take the hood off of the litter box because she couldn't fit through the opening...

Vacation starts Friday, and we're on our way to Albuquerque for some relaxation. Why Albuquerque? Train trip! We're taking the Southwestern Chief from KC into ABQ and will be checking out the Botanical Gardens, a tramway and some museums. Trains aren't cheap, but they're not overly expensive either. There's something about just hanging out and relaxing that you can't do while in the car. With gas approaching $4/gal, it almost makes more sense. I'm getting a roomette on the way there and a family room on the way back so I can at least stretch out. I'm sure there's *someone* who reads this blog who can recommend some good things to do.

6:14 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Nuts

You'd be surprised to know how few pictures of peanuts wearing dresses on the internet there are.

Doctor was mostly sure.. and that's about as good as we're going to get ... so say hello to Mrs. Emmy Peanut.

7:08 PM - 12 Comments - 16 Kudos - Add Comment