Archive for April, 2007
April 28, 2007 at 12:25 pm · Filed under General
Whoa! Why didn’t anybody tell me that I’m old now? I hadn’t really noticed my transition from being “a guy” into being “a grownup”, yet I can no longer deny it.
Steve at work pointed it out rather poigniantly the other day at work when creating a focus group.
“Who are the youngest guys here?” asked Steve.
“Probably the interns”, I replied.
“Good, we want to take them and some of their friends out for an afternoon and have a marketing think tank.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“No, you’re a Dad and a manager and we don’t want to hamper their creativity.”
Just like that I’m old. Chris, the president of statusfirm, always told me that once I was 25 he’d fire me because there would be someone younger, smarter and better than me. I suppose I should just take solice in my ability to eek out one more year (I’m 26 today).
April 20, 2007 at 8:07 pm · Filed under General
The grind continues ever onward as work continues to attempt to kill me. TheEnergyNews is going splendidly, and many of the things that had me saying”yikes” prior to launch are now just little “eeps”. I’m lucky that I work with a lot of bright people; without them there’s no way I could have kept everything straight.
Home is getting better now as Ali and I continue to adapt to the changes in our life. We’re starting to settle on a routine that works for us - as soon as it works for Faye all will be well. Ali carries the worst of the load at home, but is keeping on her brave face. We’re both exhausted mentally and physically, but we’re yet to start taking it out on each other which is a bonus.
Faye makes eye contact now. She’ll just stare right at me… or bright lights. I always lose to bright lights. In a relatively dark room though, it’s me she stares at and it’s pretty cool. Honestly, newborn babies have always scared the living bejeebles out of me, so prior to having one of my own I never thought that they did much more than poop and cry. Now I know that they don’t do much but poop and cry, but the stuff they do do (doo doo?) is pretty entertaining.
Ali and I are heading out tonight and leaving the baby with my brother Grant and his fiance Crystal. This is new, we’ll see how Ali and I do. My guess? Not well, but hopefully we’ll get used to it. Grant has demanded $20/hour (which I will never pay him), and declared that he will spend the entire time making out with Chrissy on the couch.
I’m leaving now… gads!
April 15, 2007 at 2:10 pm · Filed under Work
Oh man, what a week it’s been. I can’t believe that it’s only been one week since I’ve gone back to work; such an incredible amount of stuff has changed.
We’re restructuring the technology division at statusfirm, new jobs, new roles, new budgets, new projects, new presentations, new workflow; it’s all a little overwhelming, and it’s all happened in the last week. I suppose it’s a natural progression from being a small web development firm to being something bigger and better, but it makes my head spin. Forget having a baby, I’m losing sleep while I obsessively think about all that’s changed this week.
On top of all of that, TheEnergyNews.com (TEN) is launching on Monday, so I’ve been working crazy hours making sure that everything is taken care of. In terms of all of the projects I’ve worked on with statusfirm this one was the hardest for me. I suppose now that my role in the company is managerial instead of development it’s a change that I’m going to have to get used to. I’m used to having the reigns and being a really active part of the development team. Between Jeff and myself we probably wrote close to 80% of RawVegas, and it was all done exactly to my specs. Conversely, I hardly wrote anything at all for TEN, whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen.
I can honestly say that I have my reservations about some of the choices made while I was away learning to be a Dad, but I suppose I have to trust that my dev team was doing what they thought was best. My largest concern with this site is the way it was developed… it’s all so disparate, with a dozen different people each contributing something different, and each person doing it in a different way. Looking at the code base for the site make me shudder. Somehow we’ve managed something workable from all of this, but I’ll be hoping for some major improvements in the next month.
I am saying this now for the record: I think that statusfirm’s growing pains are just beginning for me. There’s nothing like being a new manager for a new company that’s doing work that few other companies have tried before. It’s equal parts exciting and terrifying; at least there isn’t much going on at home to complicate things… (so… much… sarcasm… must… end… post…)
April 6, 2007 at 9:21 am · Filed under Faye
Two weeks down and I’m still here (for the most part). I figured now would be a good time to recap the highs and lows of fatherhood thus far.
The Lows
- Sleep, eh guys? Cool. Well, see ya later!
Why can I sleep through everything but my baby crying?
- Poop
Sometimes it seems that each and every time I get a clean diaper under Faye, she poops. Not cool Faye, not cool. Diaper aren’t free ya know.
- The guessing game
Faye is crying. Is she gassy/did she poop/does she have to poop/is she hungry/does she need some love/would a soother work/should I just rock and shush her back to sleep/should I swaddle her?
The Highs
- Gassy smiles
I know they aren’t real smiles, but they’re close enough.
- Her smell
I don’t think anything has ever smelled better than my daughter (Note: Her poop doesn’t smell yet).
- The face she makes after feeding
It’s kind of hard to describe, I’ll have to take a picture. Rest assured that it’s really cute.
- She doesn’t cry too much
I’ve heard horror stories of babies who cry all day and night. Faye only cries when she wants something, otherwise she is completely content to sleep or just sit there.
April 2, 2007 at 10:24 pm · Filed under Internet
Facebook. It’s crazy I know - I don’t see how it happened. I signed up just to see what it was then completely forgot about it. Then out of the blue several months later I get an email “Amanda Hostland wants to be your friend.” Huh. This is fascinating, I haven’t seen her since this one time at a movie theater like 3 years ago and that was kind of awkward. Now all of the sudden we’re friends? What the hell, why not?
Facebook has it’s claws in pretty deep too; I haven’t been this obsessed with a website since last.fm, and I still can’t let that one go. I never understood MySpace and frankly I couldn’t deal with the complete abortion that it their web interface. Facebook is so much tighter, and it’s smart. Smart people programmed that website - it’s clean, intuitive and addictive, everything that MySpace never was to me.
I can’t place my finger on exactly what the draw of it is, it’s likely that simply seeing pictures of my grade three best friend all grown up and married was enough. Or maybe joining the “Bauerism - The Religion for Jack Bauer Lovers” group did it. I can’t really tell. All of my statusfirm friends are signing up too - seemingly Scooter and I inadvertently have create a vacuum into which many otherwise productive work hours will be sucked up and devoured.
Many of the girls I went to high school with are on there and it makes me really happy to chuckle at the ones who “done got chubby.” Take that pretty, popular girls! The greatest day in any nerd’s life is when he (me) realizes that the things he may have thought he wanted in high school were probably never all they were cracked up to be.
Ali’s on there too, and she already has more friends than me. I suppose my inner geek may never die. Is it odd that I’m sometimes too shy to ask people to be my pretend internet friend, that I feel even that level of contact with a stranger is too intimate?
April 1, 2007 at 6:09 pm · Filed under Faye
It’s been over a week now since Faye was born and I’m beginning to feel to effects of sleep deprivation. I haven’t even had it all that bad; between Ali, her Mom and my Mom the majority of the baby’s needs have been taken care of. I just change some diapers, feed her the occasional bottle and rock her to sleep - it’s no big drama. The thing is that I cannot sleep if Faye is crying and she’ll let out a good belt every 2-3 hours. I don’t get up every time, but I do wake up every time and it’s messing with my sleep cycles.
When uninterrupted I sleep like it’s a sport. I go to bed, fall asleep and then wake up 8 hours later. I challenge anyone to interrupt that sleep routine because usually once I’m out, it’s for the night. I’ve slept through the fire alarm (luckily the house wasn’t on fire), I’ve slept while there are people over, I’ve even slept on the floor of the Hong Kong airport. Before Faye was born I worried that I’d sleep through her crying but if that girl so much as coos gently in the night I’m wide awake.
This is affecting me in a fundamental way - my brain is ceasing to function properly. This does not bode well for my return to work as currently “what’s your name” is a hard question. Today I went to Home Depot to buy a new burner for my BBQ and some felt pads for my kitchen chairs (so they don’t scratch the floor). I found a burner, paid for and went home without even looking for felt pads. Going to the grocery store without a list is a lost cause, I’ll just stand there for minutes on end with a blank look on my face. Sometimes I’ll sit down at my computer, fire it up, then stare at my screen while I try to remember why it is I sat down in the first place. I wrote my cousin an email the other day to tell her about the baby, when I proofread it there wasn’t a compete sentence to be found. I didn’t even fix it because it seemed like too much work.
I wonder how long I’ll be like this before my brain adapts? Hopefully not too long or I’ll be a (forced) stay at home Dad when my lack of wherewithal forces my employer to offer me extremely early retirement - minus the pension.
I totally understand all those stories you hear about people forgetting their kids in the back seat or on the roof of their cars. If Faye makes it to be a toddler she’ll do so in defiance of my mental capacities.
