In a week or so I’ll be a father to a daughter…and married to a mom! Can you believe that? That’s so great.

My life is going by so fast! I think the older you get, the quicker it goes. When I was younger I couldn’t even fathom the amount of time it would take for me to be out of school and out in the world. Now that I’m there I kind of want to put the breaks on and just soak it all up.

So we’re pretty much ready to have this baby. I watch Bringing Home Baby and I’m always amazed at how many fathers don’t even think of building their cribs or assembling their baby gear until after the baby’s born. I see these new dads struggling to snap wheels onto a bassinet at two in the morning while their newborn is crying in the background, and it made me decide not to be so dumb!

I’ve spent the past few days assembling and/or installing a pack ‘n play, carseat, carseat base, stroller, ‘odorless’ diaper pail, two swings, a baby monitor, a bassinet and a rocking chair. I am READY.

There’s so much stuff you need to buy to have a baby, and a lot of it is pretty gadgety…almost anything that a baby sleeps in nowadays comes with a little device that plays soothing sounds and has a vibration function.

Our house barely has enough storage for OUR junk, let alone baby stuff. We’ve obtained all the essentials from our registry that the baby shower didn’t cover, and the only thing we’re waiting for now is for the furniture to get delivered.

I’ve stopped thinking of Babies R Us as “that goddamnned store I get dragged to to buy a registry gift whenever one of our friends gets pregnant” and I now think of it as “that awesome place that has everything I could possibly need, ever.”

We’ve spent the last few months cleaning out our guest room, throwing away random crap we didn’t need anymore, selling off the rest in a garage sale, and dumping anything left over on the Salvation Army. Our guest room is now a nursery and our office is now an “office/guest room”. Suddenly our three bedroom house seems very small.

Our due date is February 10th, but the baby really could come any day now… The sooner she gets here, the sooner we can start playing!

This and many other helpful illustrations appear in the book “Safe Baby Handling Tips“.

The MacBook Air is pretty.

Pretty EXPENSIVE, amirite?

Anyway it got me thinking. In the world of laptops, is it better to be thin or better to be small?

I say small!

Sony’s kind of had the small laptop market to itself for the past few years. But with prices for a Vaio TZ starting at two grand, subnotebooks have been a pretty unpopular product category.

All that changed in October when Asus released the Eee PC, a weakly-equipped Windows and OSX-compatible ultraportable for just $399.

It’s got half-gig of ram, 4 gigs of solid-state storage, and a sad 800×480 resolution, but at 6.5×9″ it’s not much bigger than a paperback book. It’s definitely not a desktop replacement, but at just 2 pounds it’s the perfect size and weight to throw in a bag for a plane ride or whatever.

Everex’s Cloudbook goes on sale tomorrow for the same price as the Eee, but with a 30GB hard drive (and a strangely off-center LCD screen.)

I think 2008 will be the year of the small footprint notebook. Steve Jobs got it so wrong!

Once these hit 1024×768 I might consider picking one up. Maybe.

I hate getting oil changes because I don’t know anything about cars.

Oil change places like Jiffy Lube or EZ Lube tell me to get my oil changed every 3000 miles. My car’s own manual tells me to change the oil every 7500 miles, so already that’s enough of a difference to cause me some concern.

When the greasemonkeys at the shop tell me that I need to buy this or that I have no idea if they’re actually telling the truth, and suddenly what started as a $24 oil change ends up as a $200 unplanned expense.

I get my oil changes at my local EZ Lube because they’re fast and close to my house. I hate doing it. I hate the guilt trip they try to give me when I turn down their sales pitches. I hate driving away wondering if my car will, in fact, break down in the middle of nowhere because I didn’t pay them to replace my transmission fluid.

In 2003 our local NBC affiliate ran one of those hidden camera investigations to show that yes, many EZ Lube employees will recommend unneeded services just to meet their sales quotas. Then in 2007 they secretly tested EZ Lube again only to find that nothing had changed!

The end result is that EZ Lube is paying California a $5 million fine. They’re also eliminating sales quotas – something a service garage should never have to begin with!

On Monday I got an oil change at EZ Lube. That lawsuit must have put the fear of God in them, because they didn’t try to sell me a single thing. They didn’t call me out to look under the hood to show me what was “wrong”, and they didn’t even try to sell me a membership in their cost-saving VIP club.

Before I knew it I was back on the road and my $24 oil change cost me…$24! I was astounded. It was everything an oil change should be! I hope EZ Lube doesn’t go back to their old ways, because my visit this week was absolutely pleasant and would probably encourage me to get my oil changed more often.

Hooray for…lawsuits?

I AM THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER, BITCHES!

Yes, that is THE Guardian of Forever, from City on The Edge of Forever. (TOS, season 1, episode 28)

Saturday we drove out to Long Beach to see Star Trek: The Tour, a traveling exhibit of Star Trek props. I’ve never been to the Star Trek Experience at the Vegas Hilton, but I’m guessing it was probably pretty similar.

I got to walk down TNG-era corridors…

…with static LCARS displays on the walls. (Note we’re at red alert!)

Here my father and law and I are reversing polarities and redirecting tachyon flow in main engineering.


We were also able to see and sit in the original bridge!

And the Next Generation Bridge!

Tammy’s favorite part was seeing Geordi’s visor.

This was Captain Picard’s actual uniform!

I have to say it was pretty fun! Saturday was only the second day of a nationwide tour, so check to see if it’s headed your way!

If you haven’t played Portal yet, this won’t make much sense.

But if you have, it’s hilarious.

Working at a grocery store might be a fun job – especially if you really like cooking and/or eating. I enjoy both! How about you?

The perks are numerous!
- Your pal Dallas in the produce department always lets you know when a fresh load of strawberries are on their way in!
- Pete in the bakery always makes a special batch of cookies just for you with extra chocolate chips!
- Jeff – the meat man – directs you to the freshest and choice-est rib-eyes!
- Employee discount!

Probably the only bad job at a grocery store is “shopping cart retrieval guy”!

If you were that guy, working at a grocery store would not seem so great, I bet. All you could do is watch people destroy everything! People would bring their carts out to their cars just as fast as you could round them up and bring them back in. There’s no end in sight!

I noticed how futile this all was just the other day when I was at the grocery store. Those poor kids with those carts! It made me sad for them.

And at the end of the day what have you got to show for your eight hours of manual labor? Exactly what you started with – some carts lined up neatly by the front door, and some more carts scattered around the parking lot.

Although on the plus side, you great much better exercise than any of your coworkers, and you get to spend time working in the fresh air!

I guess there really isn’t a downside to working at a grocery store! If you don’t count the forced union membership, that is…

Stop! Hammertime!

My parents bought me a shortwave radio for my last birthday. It’s a Grundig/Eton G5/E5. This little beauty-

A scanner is great for spying/listening to things going on within about a hundred miles of where you are, but to listen to worldwide broadcasts in the HF bands you need a radio that can tune a lot lower than 25MHz – where most scanners bottom-out.

The E5 goes from 1711 to 29999 KHz and it’s a pretty capable radio. The problem is, I haven’t really used it much. Shortwave signals propagate the best once the sun’s gone down – and I’m in bed. I’m not much of a night person. I go to bed around 9 or 10 so I haven’t really had much of a chance to tune around the dial looking for anything more than manic preachers broadcasting from islands in the south Pacific.

That’s all about to change.

Sunspots all but disappeared during the month of December and it’s looking very much like the bipolar sunspot observed six days ago marks the beginning of solar cycle 24!

Pictured below is “NOAA Active Region 980,” also known as the last sunspot of solar cycle 23.

This means that for the next eleven years or however long cycle 24 lasts, radio signals will extend much farther than they have in more than a decade…followed by another eleven years of spotty coverage.

The SSRC even says we can expect global cooling – 20 to 30 years of extreme cold – based on previous observed patterns. Iiiiii don’t know about that though…

This could make for some interesting listening in the coming months…if I’m not too busy changing diapers.

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