I took an excessive number of pictures of Madeline wearing her Baby Style turtle Halloween outfit during our walk in the arboretum on Sunday. Here are the pics.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was reading an article the other day about the Iraq war and they mentioned that October was likely to be a large spike in coalition (mainly US) casualties. I recall seeing the number and it was the first time in a while that I didn't see the number as a representative item like I was taught to replace oranges or apples as a kid. 2 apples can be substituted for two apples. But 109, the current count of coalition casualties in Iraq struck me as more than just numbers. I could see stuck into the numbers the dying and the dead people. It was as if were I to take a magnifying glass over each number deep in the text there would be bodies filled with gunshots, burns, and missing limbs. I am not sure who to address unhappiness towards because of these deaths. My first and favorite people to place responsibility on are the people who are killing coalition soldiers. They are the people most to blame. But as an early supporter of the original war and wanting to see democracy replace a dictatorship maybe I am one of the primary people to blame? Things haven't turned out the way I had imagined they would when we first went in there.

Either way I wonder what is so casual about a casualty. I did find a web site where they tally the dead and injured in Iraq www.icasualties.com. It even has XML RSS feeds if you wanted to syndicate such information onto your own web site.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was thinking this morning about finding a new home again. Every hermit crab must someday leave their shell. My thoughts were turned to the available information online and I came to the conclusion that despite the increase in availability of information to make the real estate market more transparent it has a long way to go. The big problem that I see is that people are still dealing with web pages and not XML data. I can go to the Boston Globe Online and find all the open houses in the area but if I wanted to track that over time and get a real time data feed all I can do is subscribe to an RSS data feed. The RSS feed doesn't provide any organizational/parametric features about the homes that would be helpful for automatically filtering or highlighing the ones that I am interested it. Instead it just gives a list with a link to the site where I can see more information. But I need to know things like listing price, square feet, proximity to T, sales history (has it been reduced? is it a new listing?), condo or home, taxes, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, neighborhood, date/time of open houses, etc. and I would rather not have to know any of these things unless some of them meet my basic requirements for a home. What I envision for a future to the real estate market is that somehow and somewhere each home is attached to a piece of changing data like a stock that has all of this parametric information in it. It might be managed by a realtor or by the owner through a public site. The home can then be located through either newspaper style web sites or advanced tools for visualizing and alerting me about my home search. I don't really want a realtor... I want a more transparent real estate market with Internet geeks working hard to get my attention with better ways to present the information that is publicly available. In a sense this has happened in the unstructured world of text search with folks like Google but for structured data like real estate, even with the Zillow's of the world, it is still not an easy process to see what you are looking for in the market. Maybe the real estate agents don't want this but as always -- the heretics like me are only the bad guys for the people in power. If the realtor folks listen to us and give us what we want then they can stay connected to real problems and provide real solutions of value in a changing world.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Saturday we had the big celebration of the birthdays. When she was born I was wondering how the birthday proximity situation would work out. It is like being twins but born 32 years apart and with a little more focus on one twin than the other. I like being the less focused on birthday person. The cake read – Happy Birthday Madeline and Daddy. Madeline was responsible for blowing out the single candle but she wasn’t likely to be able to figure out what to do. Luckily Judy sneezed and accidentally blew out the candle or we would have waited until Madeline finally figured out how to grab the candle while lit and tried to eat it.

That first year makes a big difference in the life of a one year old. She has changed from being unable to keep her head-up to a very solid walker. When she was born she would keep us up all night with a shrill cat like newborn cry. Now we just hear the cat at night mostly. Another big difference is the way that she goes to sleep. It used to be that if she was placed in her crib with no nursing or other aid to sleep she would cry incessantly until she was aided to sleep. Now when she is having trouble getting to sleep with us we place her in the crib, close the door, and walk away. It is like baking brownies in the oven. She goes to sleep on her own, if she is tired, within a few minutes.

Lately everything is a “GA”. I have found that as Madeline discovers language she lacks the basic understanding that different things have different names. So she will use the same name for multiple things. So she often will point to the ceiling, a dog, a cat, a toy, or some food and say “GA”. It is the universal noun for her. She also has taken the word for banana and when in a supermarket passing through the produce section will say “Na-Na-Na” until she is provided with either a banana or grapes. Recently we switched from feeding her grapes cut in half to the whole grape. It greatly reduces the time to prepare grapes to feed her. I think she prefers grapes over most fruits and even over cheese. It is nearly an insatiable appetite in comparison to other foods.

I am quite happy to have Madeline developing her language, dexterity, and personality skills. I feel as though lately we are more intellectually connected as we do things like working together to place the plastic rectangle into the castle with a hole for each shape or banging a ball with a plastic mallet through a hole into a ball run. On Saturday she started feeding her bear cup a part of her bagel into the mouth of the cup. So I opened my mouth and she fed me part of the bagel. I can see that light of understanding the world dawning within her and I get to be along for the ride to observe it. I’m sure within a few years I’ll be on a quiz show with her questioning everything including why there are words but this year with some conversations with Madeline it might be even more interesting than the last one.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I turn 33 today. Madeline has her first birthday tomorrow but we are all celebrating a hodge-podge of birthdays, anniversaries, harvest, pagan, and Indian holidays today. I’m surprised we aren’t getting Madeline dressed in her turtle Halloween costume. Maybe we should bring it? I am hoping this birthday isn’t like that 16 candles birthday. I watched part of that movie last weekend and continually thought how in retrospect Anthony Michael Hall deserved an Oscar for best actor for his performance. But maybe I’m just a little too ready to empathize with the ‘80s high school freshman geek who transcends geekdom by going after glory by betting his friends he can get Molly Ringwald’s underwear. But I do think it was under appreciated in its time. So for my birthday I bought myself an 800GB Seagate Barracuda internal drive. I don’t know how to install it but it can’t be as complex as putting a supercharger in a car. It will be a fun little project for me and can make space for video storage. I probably should have gotten a DVD burner along with it but I’ll get to that next year.

Madeline is wandering about in her birthday dress with yesterday’s salt and pepper grinders from our steak dinner and managed to find an old Ibuprofen pill on the floor of our bedroom. I took it away from her. It is quite hard to be fully baby proofed. In a few more years she will be able to open the bottle herself! But the real treat of the day was that Sarah told me that as I walked past Madeline in her high chair she said “DaDa”.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Go figure that I would have trouble sleeping now that Madeline is starting to reliably sleep through the night. Part of the problem is this darkness that comes in the fall. It isn’t even the shortest day of the year yet but even last night I was wandering around in the dark to exchange the movies and to pick up our Indian food at Rani. It was only about six thirty. Sarah is one of the people who can’t wait for daylight savings time so that she will see light when she gets rolling to work at 7AM but as soon as that happens it will be dark at about 5:30 or even 5:00. But I can’t exactly make a rational claim that I am unable to sleep properly due to increases in the length of night. In theory it ought to help. I normally would be reading my Tom Wolf book now but I stumbled around the condo for a few minutes trying to hunt it down in the dark without any luck. With three rooms and two occupied by sleeping people it left me with one room that was searchable with light and even then I had to remain quiet.

Annabelle is awake with me at 4:30 AM. She doesn’t appear to sleep until nobody is looking. As a nocturnal creature she is quite happy to have company. Unfortunately her idea of fun is to turn my world into a low budget haunted house by popping out of corners to bite or paw at me then return into the darkness. Annabelle is a kitten still which has been a challenge with Madeline because the cat has far too much nervous energy to expend. Today I pushed Annabelle off of the chair when the food came to keep her from riding her snout through the Chicken Tikka-Masala and afterwards for the next twenty minutes she had that Lou Ferigno/Incredible Hulk rage look about her. She was pissed off. So then we tried to eat dinner and let Madeline wander in the living room to do fun things like change the DVD. On Wednesday we were watching American Dad and Madeline managed to switch the DVD player to a cheesy CD starting with The Wheels on The Bus prompting a 30 minute sing and dance-along. Last night I watched the angry cat with fur bristling wait and hunt for Madeline until finally she pounced from behind scaring Madeline into the cry that led her into Sarah’s arms for the sleep inducing nursing.

I had thought up until recently that I was chump-change in Madeline’s eyes relative to Sarah. Since Sarah has the whole nursing thing working in her favor, spends a little more time with Madeline, and is a mother I thought that Madeline might even get annoyed when Sarah left me alone with her. But the past two times the baby sitters came (Phoebe on Tuesday and Julia yesterday, Madeline started crying as soon as she saw the babysitter and clung to my leg to show that she was very comfortable with me. So I sat in the rocking chair with her on my lap and she calmed down. On Tuesday we all walked to Brueggers and I parted after my morning bagel. Thursday I co-watched the Vincent Van Goat video with Julia on the couch slipping out at a choice funny moment when the cactuses were dancing. The important thing to note here is that Madeline seems to put me fairly high on the hierarchy of people that she is comforted by. I must admit a certain pleasure in being more attractive as a caretaker than the babysitter. I’m loved?

I feel a nasty cold coming on with a sore throat congested sinus and light headedness. It’s raining outside and according to some guy who planned a memorial golf tournament tomorrow it will rain all day on Friday. I don’t know what a memorial golf tournament is but I’m assuming it memorializes someone who died. Plenty of people probably say to their friends – “If I die why don’t you get 16 people together and figure out who is the best golfer in my name”. Personally I would hope to have enough friends and family to have a memorial capture the flag tournament. I’m not talking one quick game but a round robbin 10 team 20 person per team tournament with each team taking a name that relates to my life – like the ChannelWave team or the Improv team. I should sleep or replace fluids or something. I hope my cold doesn’t last too long. It probably won’t kill me.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I received a promotional item in the mail yesterday. It was a notepad that read at the bottom "Don't make a move without me" and had a small picture of the realtor at the top. The message was rather disconcerting when taken literally that I couldn't do anything without this stranger being involved. I promptly dropped the notepad into the trash with a twinge of guilt that I was wasting paper. It was frightening enough that I would have burned it if I could have.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is some heritage foundation event in the UK where they are trying to collect a day in the life of the UK. I heard that on the radio while driving towards Needham this morning. They are planning on getting non-bloggers to write what they did today and submit it to their archive so that historians have the content in 100 years to learn things about how we lived today. It reminded me that I haven’t been able to write lately given all of the business of shuttling through life. So I’ll attempt to get back into the groove of things for the Brits. I might even send them some info from across the pond.

The last two days have been marked by a choice for movies that involved some depressing thoughts. The first was Interview with a Vampire. It was a pretty bad movie in terms of the acting or directing. It left me with the impression either that the book by Anne Rice must be much better than the movie OR that the book itself must be melodramatic and stupid. I just didn’t get into or feel any empathy for any of the characters. Then last night we watched Kids. Sarah had originally stated that we needed something less dramatic and a light comedy but changed her mind for whatever reason. Kids was the kind of movie where towards the middle of it I started to think to myself – I can’t wait for this to end. For me, the father of a soon to be one year old baby, watching children in New York with various drug usage and abusive sexual situations was very traumatic. I may have been better off watching a horror movie like Saw, Hostel, or some other graphic disturbing piece of content. Jeremy had asked me why I wanted to see it a few weeks back but I wasn’t dissuaded. I won’t try hard to dissuade other people from seeing it but it is quite a traumatic experience to watch it. In the interest of dissuading people from watching a movie I recommend that nobody rents the Butterfly Effect II. I saw the first one and when I saw that a sequel had been made at Hollywood Video I nearly went berserk running along the aisles knocking DVDs onto the floor or pulling the tape out of VHS cassettes. I refrained.

The main delay and hubbub causing my writing stoppage were the two weddings from the past two weeks combined with a trade show, marketing activities, and taking on some new work with Peter. Madeline hasn’t become the ideal sleeper that Ozzie and Harriet had yet. Last night she threw a little party for us at 11 PM to 1 AM. I got a chance to watch some TV on the recently hooked-up HD antennae on the roof. I don’t get channel 7 so I couldn’t watch Monday Night Football. Instead I watched some awful night version of a daytime television show where a video game developer was in love with some woman (good looking) about to marry a man (also good looking). The story had something to do with cheating on New Year’s Eve but I was mainly just trying to get Madeline to calm into sleep. Madeline is mobile enough to open doors and she opened the door to our bedroom while Sarah was trying to sleep. So Sarah went to nurse her as Seinfeld came on in the living room. I decided to go back to sleep rather than watch Seinfeld as a sign of solidarity with Sarah in our fight to achieve a regular sleep balance.

Saturday night was Hattie and Jose’s wedding. They were married at Trinity church in Copley. Madeline was sent out to Bedford for the night. The main result of that was a question from Sarah’s mother to ask us if we knew what “DaDaKiDa” meant. We don’t. But Madeline has picked-up some new language tricks. My favorite one is that the sign for time to go is to do the basketball traveling penalty sign followed by a tapping on an imaginary watch. I noticed when Madeline is a little bored or ready to leave where she is she will tap her wrist impatiently. It’s quite endearing to see and better than the normal squawks and shrieks we hear most of the time.

Today Annie Leibowitz was on the radio hawking her new book of photographs including a large number of personal photos of her family and Susan Sontag dying. It reminded me when Kate told me at the wedding that as a graphic designer that she shouldn’t be using stock photography but instead should use original photo art. At first I thought she felt that I should show her how to use a camera at which point I told her I could teach her everything I knew in a few minutes. Then she clarified that I should do some artistic photography and send her the photos as possible art for her graphic design work. I told her my main work is focused on countless shots of family members growing older and that I was less of an artist than someone who struggles with the concept of passing time, aging, and who clings to the positive or emotional memories of life. Maybe that’s what a photographer is anyways. I did let her know that I felt the plain blue stained glass with a shadow threefold of gargoyles at Trinity behind the pews would have made a good photograph if I had remembered to bring my camera into the church. Maybe I’d benefit greatly from some photography classes or to read a book about photography. I could benefit from almost anything to escape the humdrum of my regular routine.

My brand new Canon Elph camera broke only a day after I got it in the mail. It is already on it’s way back to Canon-land for repairs. It may not have been a great idea to take it out at Lisa and Dave’s wedding while partying hard near the dance floor but I’ll stick by the story that they should fix it because it is under warrantee and I didn’t even jump into the Colorado river or go caving with it.

Lisa and Dave’s wedding was a beautiful sunny fall day. The ceremony was in the Newton Centre Playground. Having it there made it hard for me not to raise memories from being 10-18. I basically used that park as a backyard for those years and remember meeting girls I had crushes on while sitting on a bench only a few feet away from where the ceremony was across from the hut where I had gone to camp one summer. We had swung on the swings cross country skied over jumps on the sledding hill. I ran home sweaty in my father’s button-up shirt after singing “Cheese glorious cheese” with the chorus of the Mason Rice School. I walked both alone and with friends on fences . Ray, our German shepherd jumped over the fence repeatedly. Some Chinese kid threatened to make me eat a worm. So I was thinking of these things along with random thoughts of what to say during my role as a toast giver during the backyard reception. The reception did borrow my well crafted and invented description of the meaning of the Chuppah.
…..
As always.. I ran out of time to chronicle things. Maybe next time…It’ll all be clear in the pictures of the weddings as soon as I can get them out.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To whom it may concern,

The camera (PowershotSD 700 IS Digital Elph) that I purchased on October 1st has a problem where the lens will not retract. I had placed the camera into my pocket and the lens extended while in my pocket. When I then went to retract it by turning the camera off the lens would not retract into the camera. It gives a message like “Lens error”. I am unable to do anything that eliminates this error or allows the camera to operate.

I spoke with a customer service representative who suggested that I send the camera to this address for repairs or replacement as it is still under warranty. Enclosed with this letter is the camera with its original accessories, the sales receipt, and a copy of the warranty card. Please call me to confirm receipt of the item.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finally got around to watching it again on the flight out to Sacramento. I had hoped to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the last trip out to Vegas with Jeremy but I had been unable to find it at the local Hollywood video store. What I had failed to realize was that it wasn’t in drama or horror. It was filed in comedy. So when I was rifling for some replacement content for Sarah while I was away I found the film and it gave me something to occupy me as I was traveling to my 1 hour layover in Vegas en route to Sacramento.

Among the things that I noticed on this second viewing were the cameos. I wasn’t sure whether they were cameos or just actors in the film before they became famous. Cameron Diaz was a reporter in an elevator and Spiderman, Tobey Macguire, was a hitchhiker that they scared away. The film was as much horror as it was a comedy which is why I like it. Of course I am a big fan of the book because it is so grotesque in it’s hyperbolic descriptions of a drug trip in Vegas. It made me nice and anxious to watch it knowing I would be in Vegas and off on a three day trip with Lisa getting married on Saturday.

Things are looking great. Madeline has been continuing to progress on schedule with many confident walking steps. While she can only do four to five steps at a time before stumbling over she walks with confidence into her falls. She almost looks like a comic trying to make a joke of walking while drunk. Andrew, Sarah’s brother, came by to grab some laundry that passed through us and he mentioned that children from the age of zero to six live life in a constant state of being on something akin to an LSD trip. Andrew happened to go for Halloween last year as none other than Dr. Hunter S. Thompson complete with a pair of glasses from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Depp?). I am not sure if the LSD story can be scientifically proven but Madeline does gurgle like a dinosaur a lot and seems to try to communicate with objects that are only apparent to her. She has begun to wave and today, Yom Kippur, enjoyed waving at Maestro whenever he barked in the other room.

My parents and I went with Madeline to the park and stopped at the swings as well as the kiddie playground. At the kiddie playground she enjoyed riding down the slide. Her fleece pullover generated enough static electricity against the plastic slide that her hair stood-up at the base of the slide. The kiddie playground had a foam soft floor that she worked-out on with much crawling and standing. She liked to stand near an object then walk towards it. One of her favorite objects to approach was the adult swings. She would grab a hold onto it and then awkwardly fall down because it was an unstable object. Some teenage girls with braces and non brand name pants with holes cut into them came by thinking it would be cool to try to swing on the special kids swing. Madeline watched them and was entertained. Their brothers or friends, a tall skinny acne faced boy and a little kid with a mohawk, then played a karate fight that Madeline was entranced by. The footage from the video camera partially captured much of this experience so hopefully I can effectively archive it to show to Madeline at some point when she is beyond her LSD trip youngest years.

Life is good on other fronts too. I am starting to do work with Peter on a marketing project for a recently funded venture backed start-up. I find the chance to focus and drive the business forwards in a scalable way a great little challenge. I am psyched at the opportunity to build a marketing plan and execute it. Plus I’m getting paid for it.

In other fronts we found one viable prospect to expand our healthcare warehouse practice. The prospect is in Cincinnati, which is a pain, but it looks like a good fit and they have a lot of interest in getting a solution put together if we can get them to trust that we are capable at providing one. I am on my way to Sacramento for a conference just on warehousing for healthcare so I am hoping there will be some good contacts and I can find some qualified prospects for putting together a product in this space.

Sarah and I keep vacillating about whether or not to move away from our current spot. Our searches in Brookline have led us to start to investigate Newton. We went to watch the Patriots game at Carl’s house, a lab friend of my dad’s. Carl has a son, Elias, who is about a month older than Madeline, so the idea was to have a play date and watch the game. It was great to see the Patriots whoop the Bengals after everyone saying that the Bengals were a great team that would be almost impossible to beat. Any given Sunday? But the Pats had a swagger and confidence in this game. They were scoring touch downs while the Bengals had trouble sneaking field goals in. Carl’s house is in Newton and despite having the same number of people as us, three, they have about ten times the amount of space. They bought the house as a fixer-upper but it was in generally good shape from what I could tell. They had been fixing it up already for a couple of years and it looked great. It made Sarah and I think that maybe Newton would be a more likely location for our next move.

The other thing that the fixer-upper made me think of was that we could do some serious home improvements on the Brookline condo like a new bathroom and kitchen plus some electrical work including a wall mounted flat screen TV and it would make the condo not bigger, but more livable. The thought was that if we do buy some Newton house we’ll have to do ten times that in renovations so why should we be afraid of doing renovations where we live now. All the neighbors who just moved into the building are busy fixing-up their new living spaces. Why not us?

I believe that among the reasons to think about these living space changes is that now that we are having gotten married and with a baby and such rapid changes it feels strange to start having things stand still. At some level things are becoming daily routines again and with so many changes it feels awkward as a change to have no changes. Granted we get our surprise all-nighters like on Thursday and Saturday night when Madeline decided she wanted to clank her stacking cups and press the buttons on the Winnie the Pooh surprises interactive song book, but in general things aren’t changing much and we are in the mode of always looking forwards rather than just living in today.

Everyone’s birthday is approaching. Madeline will be one. I will be 33. Sarah will be 31. Lisa and Dave will be married. Hattie and Jose will be married. Ilana will have a baby. Amy will have her second child. Kilimnik and Hillary will be working on their first baby.

Among the rentals, not Fear and Loathing, we picked-up The Girls Next Door. I learned that the Playboy mansion is on 9 acres. It made me think since the Marshfield house is on 11 acres. My family has 2 more acres than Hef’s mansion. Will we end-up like Hefner, living in some dream life?

We don’t take as much advantage of the house in Marshfield but we live well when we are there. Hopefully the momentum from the Homer street pre-wedding clean-up renovations will be enough to get the Marshfield renovation begun. After 23 years my father had a new driveway put in just in time for the wedding. Nick Falkoff is doubling as contractor and wedding planner. The funny thing is that it is a very good combination for those of us who believe that if you have a nice house that you can have a great wedding in your own back yard plus it is a perfect time to invest in a renovation. So a wedding cost can include fixing your house the way that you want it. Thus a wedding planner/home contractor is a perfect slash business.

Lisa and Dave are holed up in Marshfield right now panicking about the last minute preparations for their wedding and their CD release party the following day. I need to create a toast, which is causing me to shuffle through my memory back to when I was a child in Watertown, going through those supposed LSD years with my big sister in a room we shared sleeping in bunk beds, with a floor full of toys, and a ladder to the loft above. I’ll come up with something for Lisa. She is a hero of mine and she and Dave are a good pair. I’ll have to remember some facts about Dave. I wish I had more stories or spent more time with them.

But things are good and having broken the fast with Starbucks at 2PM and then eating a Blue Ribbon dinner of brisket at 5 PM I find myself on the plane missing my baby and thinking those thoughts that most all fathers think when they kiss their baby goodbye to then board a plane. I hope this plane or the one coming back doesn’t crash and I get home safely. I want to see my baby again soon and there is no goodbye that would be dramatic enough to capture a last one. So I kissed her and she had cried because her bottle was empty. I’ll see her again soon.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)