It just took some ... time ... to get there.

-Pookah

... go from zero to angry in 0.5 seconds.

My older daughter had a tendency to make a screaming face before any sound came out, but you knew it was coming.

This one is more of a squawker. No long cries, more like staccato bursts. And when there is no discernable cure for the crying, there's not much I can do but let her get some of it out. We are most likely fighting sleepyness.

- Pookah

My second character definitely had a better run of it. A casteless dwarven warrior who fought her way out of Orzammar to find adventure among the Gray Wardens on the surface seemed to work better for me than an elvish rogue born in the city slums and kicked out for exacting his vengeance upon a petty human noble's son.

I like the fact that it gave a bunch of text at the end based on some of my choices. I was also impressed by the fact that, at the very end, one major dramatic decision was actually taken out of my hands ... and made complete sense that way, not just a deus ex machina moment.

Because I can, I copied down all the text I got. I'm recording it here for my own comparison with future passes ... and for reference for any of you who want to know what my ending was, whether you've played it yourself or never intend to.

( But I'll cut it, because I'm not THAT mean )

- Pookah

Yes, my second child is like a lost library book. Past due. But after today's doctor's appointment, the we're-starting-it-anyway induction is set for next Wednesday. So on or before next Wednesday we head in to the hospital.

- Pookah

Before I go all gaming geek, Halloween was fun. This year my daughter and sapphireblue and I were once again the first trick-or-treaters on our block, but she was able to carry her pumpkin bucket the whole time and walk half of it. She said "Trick or Treat" at maybe 4 of the 20 houses we stopped at and "Thanks" at about 15 or 16 or them. She wore her new renaissance style garb (photo later) and I wore my "Run Out the Guns" t-shirt along with a pirate-y hat so she wasn't the only one in costume. There wasn't much rain.

My latest gaming obsession: Tenchu: Shadow Assassins for the PSP. I had it from GameFly and sent it back, not because I was done with it but because I knew I should just buy it. Tenchu ninja games are known as snikt-ing to me and wmtrainguy since there is lots of stabbity death. I have not had a chance to play a Tenchu game with him in a while. I miss watching the crazy exploits of the "front ninja".

On the XBox 360, some Warriors Orochi 2 and Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires has just given way to Dragon Age: Origins for the XBox 360. That was a game I know I'm going to play the heck out of, and I and my elfy first character just got through the origin story. And it was a doozy. Yeah, no talking my way out of THAT one. Having read the fiction novel that pre-dates the events of the game, I like the concepts in the world.

On PC, I've been playing Torchlight, a Diablo-esque game from many of the original Diablo developers. It's a lot of fun so far, and plays well on my machine ... once I got around one little sound bug with my sound card.

Later, there shall be POLL!

- Pookah

Once again, circumstances beyond my control are pushing back activating the final piece of the major software release I was the development lead for.

In the hurry-up-and-wait ebb and flow that is large scale system development, yesterday was a hurry-up day. I prepped information for a Wednesday morning activation, then even worked late to help resolve a production issue that had been brewing since late Saturday night. I did get free pizza out of the deal.

And today, we found out our "last" approval we needed to turn it on was only our last direct customer approval. They have to brief another group based on our findings because it didn't go according to plan back in July. UGH.

---

This morning, my daughter noticed I was putting a belt on and wanted me to share it. Since that is a logistical improbability, I got another belt from my closet and let her play with that. End result: zero fuss through diaper-changing and a clean set of clothes, even when the diaper change took a bit longer due to a split in the diaper that leaked those absorbency crystals.

A little investment is continuing to pay off in spades, though. As I was getting in my car to go to work, she came to the door to watch me pull out. I waved to her and got a big grin and more waving in response. Smiles makes for a good morning. I hope she and sapphireblue had fun on the trip to the farm today.

- Pookah

There are some thing that have to be seen to be believed, and reality has a way of writing fantastic stories that almost seem like they must be fiction.

My only memory of the Colts leaving town is remembering the news reports the next day watching footage of trucks pulling out in a snowstorm. I was way too young to have an idea of what it really meant for a major sports team to leave town, and none of the actual circumstances of the event.

This film is eye-opening. I can hardly imagine the twists from the story it tells.

There are short clips of a now infamous press conference held by the then owner of the Colts, Robert Irsay. The mayor of Baltimore (and the media) met him at the airport for a press conference after an out-of-town trip where rumors were flying about discussions with other cities like Phoenix. He vehemently denied all the rumors and attacked the press-writers.

Owner wants renovations to the stadium, city and state balk at putting up the money, we've heard this story many times and that is part of what led Art Modell to move the Browns to Baltimore. So what's interesting about this story?

1) The press conference itself is absolute train-wreck TV. He cuts off the mayor multiple times, accuses members of the press of being out to get him, and weasel words his way out of questions by declaring that he's never been to Arizona. The clips in the story are the first I've seen from the press conference. Urban legend has it that he was drunk and it is now fairly well-known that he was an alcoholic. This show does include the beginning of the video from the press conference where Irsay does fail to open the door.
2) The focus of the story is the band, not just the team departure. They kept going by marching in parades and even playing in other NFL cities just to keep marching as the Baltimore Colts Marching Band. They even played at the NFL Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1991, seven years after the team left! Why? Inducted into the hall that year was Johnny Unitas.
3) How did the band keep their uniforms when everything else was boxed up and shipped out? The uniforms were at the cleaners! How did they keep them away from repo men before they could work out a deal with the team to buy them outright? The band hid them in a MAUSOLEUM!

Wow.

- Pookah

OUR ENTIRE HOUSE SMELLS LIKE BASIL. My wife picked two entire shopping bags worth of basil plants from our garden. We'll pick the leaves off later, but WOW they are fragrant.

But it sure beats the scent of the Cow Palace at the Maryland State Fair. Smell aside, it was a fun afternoon trip. My daughter really liked looking at all the animals. Cows and pigs and sheep and ducklings. There were even two llamas and a small herd of chicks. The sheep were the loudest, particularly those that were being shorn. We also watched the big ferris wheel turning around and around. The little one fell asleep in the stroller with our milkshake in her hands.

- Pookah

I lose a lot of words per minute but gain entertainment value when posting with my daughter climbing all over me.

- Pookah

It's home football game, Bengals at Ravens at 1:00 pm. The last one before November and probably the last one before the new baby arrives.

I just found out it's also The Bravery at The 9:30 Club that night.

It's also the day before my anniversary.

Wow.

- Pookah

Indianapolis was a fun trip. I flew out Thursday and rode back on Sunday. I ate more meals at Waffle House and Steak & Shake than I do the rest of the year, did some game shopping, and gained a new reputation.

On the shopping front, I bought more cards for a game called Warlord. The latest edition of cards is simply called 4th Edition. They have abandoned the "random cards in a pack" philosophy of other collectible card games. With this edition, I think all of the cards are fixed sets split into two decks. Not every set has perfectly tuned decks, as I found out doing some quick playtesting with dasquish. I've bought the Learn To Play kit, along with 3 other sets. That gives me one basic deck for each of eight factions, and there are 9 other sets I don't even have.

As for the reputation thing, well ... I was freakin' evil in a Call of Cthulhu game. Evil to the point of executing over half of the player characters and the few survivors (who ended up 250 years in the future) pledged to kill my descendants. Frankly, my character started with a sanity score that was 36 on a scale of 1 (low) to 100 (high) and a fiendish plan for how to take over the ship. I expected I'd be stopped and jailed or even killed, but some failure to respect protocol and some insane dice-rolls set up a situation where my plan managed to work. One player ran into shoggoth1 at a party right after the game and walked in with the comment "your friend Dave is an evil devious bastard." WOW.

And today, my daughter decided that chasing was her favorite game. Not surprising. What is surprising is that she said "Thanks" every time I let her up after catching her.

- Pookah

Grilling went well yesterday, though the grill capacity was maxed out. In total, I cooked 16 regular burgers, 4 turkey burgers, 4 hot dogs, 4 marinated portobellos, 2 marinated ancho peppers and 5 more burgers doused in marinade after the mushrooms were all done. I've got 3 more burgers soaking up the marinade as we speak. To go with all the food there were meat and buns jokes aplenty.

As I was checking to see who wanted cheeseburgers, one of my neighbors leaned out her window and said "I'll take one!" Then laughed and said "Just kidding." I'd have given her one. I wouldn't mind being on better terms with them. We normally don't talk much.

I think dasquish had a good time. He got a lot of good cake. And now there is a new "oh-so-broken" card in Race for the Galaxy.

Today the last extra boxes are gone, so the new baby room is quite empty except for a lamp and a stool. Even the closet is empty. It won't last too long. Maybe I'll use it quickly to set up and play one of the longer games no one else wants to play, to keep fresh on the rules. Something like Freedom in the Galaxy or Samurai Swords or even try out some different builds in World of Warcraft. Dunno. I'm still pretty beat from yesterday, but the weekend's going to be pretty quiet.

GenCon's coming up fast. My flight is next Thursday. It'll be weird to fly out there, since I never have before. We'll see how it goes.

- Pookah

Full vacation wrap-up to be done later. In the meantime, if you know Full Metal Alchemist, permit me my Maes Hughes moment.

The ambassador of cuteness, a.k.a. my daughter, has been in rare form this trip. She has been extra chatty and has picked up several new habits and words. Thankfully, they've all been good ones. She counted all the numbers up to eight tonight as she was going down the stairs. She had been known to skip everything between two and eight as completely unnecessary. The habit I had of counting the stairs as she would step down must have been enough usage for her to pick up on it.

She also knows "tackle" from jumping on me in an attempt to get tickled. "Bubbles" are popular from blowing bubbles and bathtime. She has a book on small and tall things, but anything large is "biggie". We even passed a McDonald's and she pointed at the golden arches and said "Biggie M."

Several verbs joined the vocabulary, like "running" and "chasing" and "digging" and "pushing". Pushing was used on chairs on the porch AND on her own stroller at one point on the boardwalk. That was a crafty manuever, since that also put her in the one small spot of shade behind the stroller while pushing it. Even "walking" and "sitting" got more use.

Pictures and more words (and Ocean City events that may not involve my daughter) another time.

- Pookah

And, thankfully, beginning my vacation with an extra "packing" day as a buffer worked out very well. Thursday was not actually a vacation at all. I worked from home for a full workday, on several AIM chats and wrote over 30 emails. But ... it let the office work out the "oh crap Dave's going on vacation" moments before I was actually inaccessible. Phew.

So Friday began the actual vacation commitments, with a trip to Otakon.

( And so we took pictures. )

Throw in a good dinner at Tir Na Nog at Harborplace in Baltimore, along with FMA geeking, squeeing over my daughter's pictures, and plenty of D.Gray-man anime viewing and manga purchasing ... it was a great day. Next year our goal will be more Venture character goodness if I can convince the players to do so. I even heard that the Williams Street folks make a number of appearances at Dragon*Con in Atlanta. I wonder if we got a large enough write-in request if they'd come to Otakon for 2010 ... I do still want to organize that wake skit for that one dead character.

I also picked up a Naruto chunin-level ninja jacket, to work on building Shikamaru and Kikashi outfits around it. I've been told by someone (who can take credit for the inspiration) that I reminded her of Shikamaru, and my wife likes Kikashi. In short, Shikamaru in the post-timeskip part of the storyline now wears a similar jacket to Kikashi, therefore the jacket can do double-duty.

- Pookah

I was going to post about Father's Day weekend and fun times with my family up at Dutch Wonderland in Lancaster, PA.

Instead I find myself writing a post to confirm that I am not dead or injured by today's DC Metro collision.

My trip home won't be easy, but I am getting a ride from K, who lives within a driveable distance of the Metro. THANK YOU!

- Pookah

Doves concert? AWESOME. The show was positively PACKED and the band was noticeably happy with the audience response. I was at the front, at the corner of the stage standing in front of a subwoofer. The view was excellent, and only two songs buffeted me with heavy bass beats to the point of distraction. And my hearing came through just fine, since it was just a subwoofer. Their new album is Kingdom of Rust and I definitely need to purchase it. I've have gotten it at the show if it was available. Instead I opted for a t-shirt. This band is so good live.

Work is slowly coming down from the level of INSANE, back closer to an area of simply busy, and even that should tail off soon. The biggest pain in my neck right now is an urgent data correction that I need to keep running continuously. I was up late last night doing a chunk of it in serial mode. It was stable, so now for the two larger datasets I'm trying to run chunks in parallel. I can run 4 at a time, but they do occasionally block each other out until one commits. I'm afraid of deadlock if I leave it running unattended, though.

Ah well. At any rate, this is just as easily watched from home.

- Pookah

All week has been heavy work, as anything and everything that happens to the main production system has become my team's problem. I got the be the "hero of the day" today, even though the first time people called I tried to steer them in the right direction without actively getting involved. Instead, I got pulled into an afternoon conference call which THANKFULLY resolved the issue. It merely made me just a little late for a 2-year-old's birthday party.

Even without sapphireblue and the little one around, it was a nice time. I got there just after the singing of Happy Birthday and was able to chat briefly with a bunch of the folks there. I hope the birthday boy likes the gift. He definitely is not as ... emotionally resilient as his cousin. That is to say, he frequently cried, almost at the drop of a hat. But when he did smile, he had an okay time.

Tonight is a Doves concert! YAY! I'll be at the 9:30 Club eventually. Doors don't open until 9 pm.

And in other randomness, I do have a bottomless ear for music. As I flipped channels, I came across a program which showed ice-skating clips with a familiar-looking woman and a tune I immediately recognized as Tori Amos. But only a few seconds, before moving on to clips of other locations and other programs by the same skater. And something about a tour of Japan. One deep Google dive later, I discovered it was Michelle Kwan. She had been skating to the song Winter. Two lines stick out in my head from that song. The first is kind of iconic: Snow can wait, I forgot my mittens ... The second is part of the chorus and I've rambled on enough about nothing much already.

- Pookah

... of a long, long night. I got in earlier in the night than I had to be, but I was able to talk to the other managers and sort out the seating arrangements and earn first crack at the food. =D Well, co-first.

But there was a flurry of activity at the beginning followed by a lot of waiting before another hurried rush of deployments and activations. And the biggest worry of the day? The dataload did take most of our release window but was making good progress the whole time. It wrapped up before we reached the critical "can we afford to wait any more" point. We did need a small extension but we were able to get things back up and running in the morning. There is a list of issues we still need to address, but I think all I am on the hook for now is to work out a schedule of on-call access for the month of June.

Phew. I am SO glad we had a large enough group of people involved to field everything. If we had not been able to divide and conquer so much, then the morning would have been a lot tougher.

So, scheduling, assignment of duties to people responsible, and then it's finally time to go home. I just wish I'd moved my car before the meters kicked back in in the morning. Ah well.

- Pookah

That's a nickname I have for my stuffed cheetah. He helps me out on airplanes as they get turbulence or come in for a landing. He fits perfectly between my side and elbow.

I'm headed into work, shortly, after a 2 hour-ish nap. It's deployment night, and it took 11 months of this project and most of a year before that on a prototype to get here. I didn't think I was going to drive home for the evening, but decided it was worth it even through the traffic was ATROCIOUS getting here. I-95 southbound was stopped completely, I just had to deal with the rubbernecking and other not-full-stop traffic jams.

I've superceded nervousness, cresting above it like I'm flying and breaking through the cloud barrier. I've had this feeling before, in the waiting room right before my endoscopy whenever that was. I was more scared then. This time there's something else there. I don't know. Maybe it's that I'll have coworkers to help. I'm not sure.

It's not a total contributing factor, but after my nap I went rummaging through comic books looking for ... well ... skipping to the end, I ended up re-finding Strangers in Paradise, a comic book drama that had a million plot twists, a zany sense of humor and a character named David. So I'm biased, I admit it. It's also the only comic book I can remember that I can honestly say moved me to tears. That part of the story was the part I found in the shelf. I had to go back and look and re-read. Couldn't help it.

I should feel better coming out of this on the other side. Should. Don't know. I'm not normally this nervous going into a release. I look at it and realize that coming up to this date I've been able to lock down certain things and take the "general consensus" top concerns about the concepts we're implementing and eliminate them ruthlessly, driving through them to come up with the shreds of proof to silence critics or at least give them enough pause to grudgingly admit that it might work. And it's now things I had taken for granted are the latest concerns of the day. No matter what I did, I couldn't have covered it all. There was just too much to do to get here, and even then I worked my tail off to make the things happen that actually came through.

Forgive my personal pep talking, but maybe I think I need to hear it. Read it. Whatever. You know what I mean, if you've read much of this journal besides this post.

I got to play with my daughter for 15 minutes before my nap. That and a hug made the extra driving and lost sleep ... trivial. I remember thinking to myself on the way home as I sat in the car and my legs ACHED already that "I'm never doing this again." Well, I got a bit of a nap. I'll be up for 12 hours at least and driving for at least 2 of those if not more. And now, thinking back, I think I'd do it again.

It's a pity I can't stick around for fresh cinnamon buns before I have to go, but it was a nice offer. Maybe tomorrow. They will taste sweeter after tonight.

Wish me luck.

- Pookah

... but I've done my best to keep things on track for May 30th. If all my best efforts end up in vain and the software release moves, I'll only end up more worried about the data migration. Or something else.



So yes, I've had enough nervous energy to fidget like Lina Inverse. Google Slayers if you don't recognize the name.

Anyway, J has had a morning of particularly good behavior. And I'm finding it easier to insert little lessons into everyday life. Like this morning, asking her if I should wear the blue shirt or the green shirt. FWIW, she chose blue. I think it was because of the stars on the shirt; it is a shirt from Hersheypark for a rollercoaster called The Great Bear.

This weekend? Moving shelves. sapphireblue and the little one are getting over colds, and I know I'm not going to be able to get it done next weekend.

- Pookah