Jefflog

Today, I have been able to visit the doctor for a physical, write several e-mails, and make this update to my weblog, far more than I would normally be able to accomplish while watching the kids. It is all thanks to today being Hong’s first day of maternity leave.

To some of you, this is the first word you’ve heard that we were expecting our third child. We’ve kept it decidedly low key from the get go. Simply put, our newer larger house seemed like it needed another child, and I was looking for a bigger challenge in my job.

We don’t yet know the gender of the baby. We’ve already got both girls and boys clothes in the closet so we’re prepared either way. We haven’t begun picking out names either, although Hong has already shot down all of my suggestions.

The C-section is scheduled for December 21. Hong gets four weeks of paid maternity leave and had a week of vacation remaining for the year, which means we have five weeks before the big day. That gives me five weeks where my job function is reduced, since Hong is around to help out. Five weeks to to get things done that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.

I might put some extra love into this website, maybe putting up some new videos, something I’ve neglected to do for over two years now. I’ll also take some time to visit the car dealer to get a new minivan. I’ve tried to see if it was possible to squeeze three car seats in our existing station wagon and its a no-go. It’s time for me to complete the suburban housedad experience and become a minivan driver. The excitement is almost palpable.

With the help of a Wordpress plugin, I’ve been able to make most of Jefflog open to the public again. However, some posts are marked as “friends only”. To view these, you’ll need an account and I’ll have to mark you as a friend in the system. Chances are, if you’ve been able to access Jefflog at all in the last six months, you’re probably already logged in as a friend and you’re already viewing the private posts.

I’ve been hesitant to post lately because of my attempt to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout has made typing a bit painful for me in the short run. But, my typing tests currently peg me at about 30 words per minute, which is not too bad. I’ll keep working at it and hope that I’ll eventually surpass my old typing speed.

OK, I’ve been using typewriters and keyboards for the last 30 years of my life, and my career has been based on typing on the computer. For all this time, I’ve been what you could call a “creative” typist. It’s not touch typing, because my hands dance all around the keyboard as I type.

After reading Steve Yegge’s advice for programmers to learn to touch type, I decided I should do the same. Sure, I can sustain about 50-60 WPM with my current typing habits, but I bet I could get faster if I touch-typed, with fewer errors to boot. He claims about 40 hours of practice is all that’s needed. Sounds like a reasonable goal.

I downloaded and compiled GNU Typist and it seems to be “good enough”, even if the curses-based interface performs no better than my Atari 800 of 20 years ago. But really, you don’t need exploding rocket ships to learn typing.

Since I’m learning a whole new way of typing, I also thought I might as well learn the Dvorak layout. This might end up giving me a world of hurt, but it’s easy to switch between it and the QWERTY layout in software these days. GNU Typist comes with Dvorak lessons as well.

Considering I’m not typing all day long these days, this is probably an excellent time to start learning.

I cheated and used QWERTY for this entry, although maybe it would be better for me to go cold turkey and switch to Dvorak exclusively for a while. I don’t know if I’m that committed to the goal, yet.

I’ve had my Apple Powerbook laptop as my primary personal computer for nearly five years now. Yes, it’s pretty old by computer standards, and yes, I’m looking to buy a new computer sometime soon, but to be honest this laptop works just fine for web browsing and e-mail.

Until a few weeks ago, I needed to keep it tethered to the electrical outlet because the battery had been flakey for years. Sometimes it would work for 30 minutes, sometimes for 2 minutes, and completely unpredictable. I was doing a lot of my computing on the kitchen counter standing all the while. I decided it was time to buy a new battery despite its age.

What an incredible amount of freedom it has brought. I can work on the couch or the kitchen table for hours. This also makes it easier to move away from small fingers that like to touch the keyboard and screen.

So it’s nothing that most laptop owners don’t already have, just a little personal victory that I had not experienced for a while.

Lately, I’ve been trying to think of some other titles for my position other than “stay-at-home dad”. Something with a little more oomph. So far, I’ve thought of the following:

1. Stay-at-home man
2. Full-time father
3. Director of the house

Can anyone else offer any better suggestions for me?

It seems like every part of the country has its share of critters found near where people live. In California, we had black widow spiders, red velvet ants, and the occasional tarantula. New Orleans has its legendary cockroaches, who I’m guessing are faring after the floods much better than the residents are.

At our previous Indiana homestead, I blogged about finding bats and rabbits. We also had a raccoon who would sometimes peer in through our sliding glass window, and while not in our backyard, I spotted deer about half a mile from the old place. It was always interesting to see new creatures.

Our latest residence is no exception. The latest wave of storms caused a multitude of frogs to jump into our basement window wells. I thought about keeping them there as pets of a sort, putting a little tray of water to serve as a pond, but I soon realized that there weren’t enough insects to come by to keep them all alive. I captured most of them in a bucket and released them in a nearby wet area. I left two frogs in the window well just to see how they will fare.

We also had a field mouse fall in there yesterday. I fished it out too and deposited it in a nearby field. No telling how long it’ll last before falling into someone else’s window well.

A few months ago, we had a mole fall down there as well. My parents were in town and captured it, but not before it ate a hole through my window screen.

Lots of crickets, grasshoppers, dragonflies and fireflies to be found out here too. I suppose they’re common around most parts but not where I grew up, so these were always insects I only read about kids catching. I’ve no doubt my kids will be catching these critters in no time.

In addition to this blog I am using Twitter now. You can find more frequent but tiny updates from me on http://twitter.com/jefflog.

I’ve moved my website to a new server and a new URL in the process; you should see that the URL in your browser is now www.jefflog.com instead of jefflog.everybody.org. I haven’t decided whether this will be the new permanent URL or not. Photos are currently broken but I hope to have them back up in a couple of days.

Why the migration away from everybody.org? My buddy who does the bulk of the work on the everybody.org website is migrating away from running his own hardware to using virtual servers with hardware managed by someone else. It’s easier to manage and might even be cheaper in the long run. This website is one of the first to be moved. So far, I love it. It’s like having a whole server to myself, and if I need to upgrade something, A couple of weeks ago, I took down a number of websites when I tried to upgrade to Apache 2.2. Now if I try the same thing, I only have to worry about taking down my own site.

Since my last post, our grass has come in about as good as it’s going to get without additional work. It looks great from the neighbors houses but an upclose view shows that there are still a lot of unseeded spots and rocks.I’m not sure how much more work I want to do on this but I will probably be overseeding in the fall.

You may have heard about all of the rain we’ve been getting in Indiana lately, 8.28in in May and 9.38in for June so far, versus a normal average of around 4in for each of those months. It made my job a lot easier.

When we returned from our trip last week, the first thing we noticed was that our backyard looked different. When we moved in, the front yard had been sodded but the backyard was nothing but dirt. While we were gone, the home builder had graded and hydroseeded our backyard. That’s great and all, except that we’re supposed to be around to water it every day. We had told the builder we were going away and to wait until we returned to begin the hydroseeding, but it turns out they forgot. Luckily, they had just done the seeding the day before and we really hadn’t sustained any disadvantage by the day-and-a-half we weren’t able to water.

Since then, watering the yard has been my primary task. For the first six weeks, I’m ideally supposed to keep the ground moist at all times. They say that a light 10-minute watering four times daily is all that’s required, but due to the size of our yard, I can’t cover the whole yard with two sprinklers. Watering the yard means moving the sprinklers to several locations and watering other places manually with a hose. I may be home all day but I don’t have that much time. I just do what I can.

I saw some seedlings pop out of the ground for the first time yesterday. That’s exactly the encouragement I needed.