The last few weeks we kept getting sick in the Housman family. I recall a blur from two weekends ago when people came over but I was dizzy throughout the weekend. Last week was worse than the one before since we caught the inexorable vomiting sickness. Madeline awoke on Tuesday night to surprise me with a sudden vomiting spell that led to a sheet and bedding replacement extravaganza. I spoke to two or three people around work who mentioned their kids had also gotten this illness so I figured that it was limited to the younger generation. But on Thursday night Sarah was ill with the same symptoms. So I cancelled work on friday to take care of her. So I figured that only women and children would fall victim to this vomiting flu. But by 9 PM on Friday I was on my knees sick. Oddly it was great to take the three day weekend with Madeline, Zachary and Sarah regardless. I enjoyed spending time with them.

By Sunday we were on the road to recovery but still cautious about eating any real food. Since it was easter I snapped a few hundred photos trying to capture Madeline's outfit and other various Easter occasions. Madeline loved hunting for eggs and despite only having 24 plastic eggs I think she found about 100 due to some creative re-hiding after she had filled her basket. We have been playing a dysfunctional game of hide and seek lately where Madeline hides in very obvious places like lying down next to a radiator but she loves the idea of hide and seek. She is good at hiding in her closet low on the floor under a shelf but that doesn't stop her from selecting the hiding places where she is in plain view. So I get to tune my acting skills multiple times per session to look for her in all of the places where she isn't. It is quite fun. Zachary is fighting the transition from breast to bottle. I felt like we were torturing a captured enemy into telling us the location of the big guns on the hill as he screamed in discontent from the bottle feeding experiment this evening. Hopefully it will get better since we are in need of some alternatives to Sarah always being 10 feet away from Zachary when he is hungry.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well I guess having the second baby was the rough equivalent of a blog blackout for the past month or two. I have been playing with slices of time to try to fit everything into the week and it hasn't been working out great to have that extra slice to take a record of what is going on. But with that said there have been a lot of updates in the home and nesting front that may have been all about burning off extra nesting hormones as a result of the birth of Zachary.

We went and bought a new rocking chair and Ottoman the day after Zachary was born. That finally came about a week ago. I also ordered some things online including a 32" flat screen Aquos TV and a system for making seltzer at home. Yuval's eye-fi card came in the mail a few weeks ago but I didn't have time to look into it for a while. I bought a blue-ray DVD player since it was too frustrating to watch the 1080P tv tell me my DVDs were playing at 480p. I also bought a 2 terabyte Lacie drive to hold the growing mountain of photographic documentation on our lives. We also bought a hot tub for the yard. That prompted us to need to acquire a patio since we couldn't figure out how to get to the hot tub without creating mud and when faced with the idea of having to build my own hard structure underneath it I realized I was better off hiring professionals. So the yard that I spent many an hour last year cultivating to grow grass is now a combination of pavers for the patio and torn-up from the construction. But the hot tub (a Sundance Marin) is now in the yard and Madeline's favorite thing to ask about before or after dinner.

Last weekend as Sarah's father was helping to rig the wiring behind the new television I was hunting for which panel on the circuit breaker ran the TV and I reset the computer in the office to the point where it wouldn't boot. Luckily I had already moved the photos off of it onto the Lacie 2TB drive so rather than worry about it I switched to my old Windows XP box that sounds like a jet engine but works fine. The benefit was that the computer that died was the Windows 2000 machine and the Eye-Fi card from Yuval requires XP to run. The unfortunate event lately is that I can't find the charger for the Canon Powershot camera so I am not sure what I will do when traveling or in situations where it is more convenient to have a smaller camera. I am tempted to deconstruct the whole house looking for it but don't have the time and I haven't taken a picture outside in a long time.

So I set-up the Eye-fi card and have been quite excited to see my photos saving both directly to the hard drive and output to Google/Picasa web albums. So I am considering revamping my photo publishing mechanisms to just point to Picasa Web albums given that I am already a few months behind on any publishing photos due to baby and start-up busyness.

But today is a quiet day for some reason with little plans and just some clean-up from the snow. Madeline and I began the day at 8:30 and took an hour long time in the hot tub with palm sized snow flakes falling on us. She enjoyed throwing the rubber ducks out of the tub and asking me to go fetch them... which I periodically did.

Zachary has been a lot of fun but I haven't had all the time I would hope to with him. He likes the swing which generally puts him to sleep. Lately he has had some unexplained acne that we are hoping isn't a long term thing.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While trying to entertain Madeline with the computer I drew this work of art. Probably will be worth something near the value of a Van Gough at some point.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just as I was feeling fatherly having made a hearty dinner of salmon with cous-cous I was cleaning up the large volume of cous-cous on the floor and table when the vacuum cleaner swallowed a napkin. This would be fine if it just sucked it into the bag but the napkin lodged somewhere in between and caused suction to be limited. So I tried disassembling the hose and discovered that it is hard to get to the place where things lodge, probably in order to sell wing-nuts like me a new vacuum whenever this happens. I did manage to find this helpful chart so my next step is to try to troubleshoot the derned thing.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Don't forget to fight for World Peace next Thursday at TT The Bears. Lisa and the Sweet Wednesday folks will be out in force singing and playing instruments. The benefit is for the "rock against land mines foundation". My guess is that in a battle between a rock and a landmine the land mines will usually win so you better go on Thursday to give the rocks as much help as they can get. On second thought, rocks don't really care whether they are blown-up or not given that they are inanimate objects and land mines are more likely to tear a young child walking through a field's legs off so I guess the rocks are going to win the battle by outlasting the land mine that self destructs. But lets face it - we don't want land mines everywhere so until there is a good solution you may as well listen to some great music on a Thursday night.

Sweet Wednesday
at T.T. the Bear's Place
Next Thursday (March 30th, 9 PM)
10 Brookline Street
Cambridge, MA 02139

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that 2005 is behind me I can confidently review the results of my attempt to fulfill my resolutions from last year. Before I try to weasel out of these I will first list the things that I did accomplish in 2005 that were not on my original list of resolutions.

* Got Jeremy to move out and employed Jeremy at a new start-up
* Get married to Sarah
* Had a baby with Sarah
* Moved from one side of my condo to the other and painted the whole condo
* Watched the entire first season of both Lost and 24
* Got halfway through reading Infinite Jest
* Built a reporting server and initial set of reports for a healthcare company
* Got through one year at a new bootstrap start-up and am receiving a salary
* Watched my former company get sold and purportedly will receive some minor compensation for it
* Learned how to use Macromedia Captivate to make screen capture movies

With that being said here is what happened with the rest of them:

* Get a job as an exotic male dancer

I looked into this for some time to find a local club using the Internet as my main tool to investigate. From what I could determine there is no exotic male dancer club in Massachusetts. The nearest one that I could locate in January was one in New York City. Since it was going to be a long commute and Sarah was pregnant I temporarily stopped my stringent daily workout regimen and gained ten pounds over the course of the year instead of losing ten pounds. So now I am further from this goal than ever. It isn't totally out of my sights but it is fading fast. I also never really learned how to dance properly.

* Finish making one film for the Boston independent film festival spring 2006

The lack of movie making was a fairly lame disappointment. Basically Robert and I put zero effort throughout the year into our filmmaking carreers. The result is that we did not edit the raw footage for Manufacturing Desire and didn't create a secondary concept to replace it. I have watched a lot of movies, mostly crappy Hollywood ones rather than the film festival circuit. Karen did take some footage of the wedding but nobody has edited it yet. I barely even have a minute of footage of Madeline as a small infant. Some filmmaker I am!

* Visit a country in Asia other than Japan

Nope. Unless San Francisco is considered Asia these days I didn't make it outside of North America. One trip to Canada but that was a funeral for my grandfather.

* Climb Machu-Pichu with friends

Hey. Who was responsible for organizing this trip? Falkoff, Kilimnik. This was a total failure of our annual cool trip planning. That's it. I'm going to have to plan Machu-Pichu for 2006 aren't I?

* Create the first prototype of the pet video game system

Well. Things got distracted. Luckily nobody has beaten us to the punch yet. There are people working on all sorts of pet services like social networks for pets (or pet owners) but no video games yet.

* Establish a consulting practice

We probably did a good job on this one. With help from Aaron, Shelley, Chris, and Jeremy together we have established a working model for a consulting practice that supports both our salaries and the freedom to build software products. We are considering how to expand this in a rational way in 2006.

* Execute phase I of world domination plan: Gain control of the media (hypnosis?)
Nope. I tried but the blog traffic is still very low. I include many subliminal messages in what I write but few people actually read it. Below is a graph of the traffic to the site over the course of the year. Don’t look at it too hard. It isn’t a magic eye image that will include dinosaurs or key subliminal control the media messages. At least the media is doing a good job of undoing the Republican party dingbats who have been breaking the law and forgetting about playing by the rules. I had nothing to do with this but I will take credit for it if someone asks.

* Add an FAQ to my personal website

Surprisingly although this is very simple it never got done. So I plan to quickly start one now in January of 2006 by adding the link and answering a few key questions.

* Have a great party in Marshfield once the house is fixed-up

The house never got too fixed-up. The pool was resurfaced or whatever you do to the pool along with the installation of a heater and we had a good time swimming in it towards the end of the year with the temperature cranked-up. I can push for more fixes for it next year. My parents did do a major renovation of 64 Homer Street and had a cool party on December 30th to show off the renovations and celebrate the holidays/New Year. Sarah and I also held a holiday party.

* Be nice to Sarah

Sarah can be the judge of this. I think I was pretty nice to her on the whole of things. We did get married this year after all.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)