• i actually traded in my corporate whore wings to go work for the DFTU client. i can’t get in to the details but it was a long, painful, stressful process. but tis over now. i’m no longer a consultant. i dunno if any of you care but it’s a big big big deal. ok not really. but whatever. anyway, i have a real job now, ok that’s not true, the shit i’ve been doing for the last 2 years is now somewhat more offical. go me.
• natty’s pregnant. i hinted toward that in the last post, uh 3 months a go or whatever. well here it is, she’s preggers and i’m the goddamned father. err well at least i think. she’s at 17 weeks tomorrow and just getting out of the pukey, i hate the world especially you jefke phase. it seems the wow i’m huge and this really sucks phase is already starting. apparenlty baby 2.0 likes his/her space and is trying to set up a condo in there. what’s that saying? if men had to have the kids there’d be none. damn. fucking. straight.
• we have a realtor coming by the house on saturday. kid 2.0 calls many things in to question, firstly our 14.5 ft wide house. it’s fuckign small kids. oh sure, people raise 22 kids in a studio appartment in queens. yay, good for them, jefke don’t rock that. so we have 2 choices. either add on to our house (which is fairly doable) or move. adding on will be a process similar to pregnancy, but this time i’ll be feeling the physical pain. adn will not be done by the time 2.0 arrives. moving will suck big ass, as we’d need to ’stage’ and sell our house. then actually move, and hten fix the new house. fucked on both fronts if ask me. a dp of badtimes. but somethign has to change. ok well maybe not. but perhaps. we’re entertianing both scenarios.
• the subie, while all that and a bag of old school taco flavored doritos, is a gas hog (yes i needed the goddamned turbo, fuck you) and actually doesn’t have that much space in the end. espcically for the air craft carrier sized double storllers natty is looking at. so on top/instead/or never, we are considering the jump to the mini van. yes, i understand people have 2 kids in a camry. they’re idiots. we have a dog and 3 cats and lots of shit. we neeed a big car. get over it.

so that’s pretty much teh update. i have heartburn and i’m getting my sympathy fat groove on.

so, yeah. that’s my update.

love and kisses

jefke

right so quite a weekend around the fort quite the weekend–i took friday off b/c the captain was having his long anticipated and much feared partial root canals, or pulpectomy or something. i’ll just give you the speech i give everyone, b/c they all ask the same thing:

1. he’s between 2 and half and 3. yes, kids get root canals.
2. no we really don’t give him alot of candy or juice. there are theories that night nursing can contribute to decay, there are just as many theories that say that breast milk has simple sugars that are easily broken down and doesn’t have an effect (affect? i nver get that right)
3. we do brush his teeth, but prehaps not as well as we could. the dentist told us that some people have bad enamel and they are susceptible to a bacteria that breaks down the teeth. he even said thatt here might have been some decay before the molars even broke through, yes, apparently it can happpen
4. he was put under using gas, then they ran an IV, yes it was general anthesia not twilitght .
5. the proceedure is farily common.

so that’s the majority of them. bascially we got him up and headed to the hospital. we had been telling him that he was going to play with a thing called the ‘bubble gum mask’ that would give him funny bubble gum smelling gas. well that was only half true, see the mask for the gas did smell like bubble gum but the gas…well that smelled like ass.

now we were fully prepared that the gassing out process woudl be harder on us than him. and that was pretty much the troof. he squirmed and freaked, the staff didn’t notice, we were panicked. but he went out in i’d say about 30 seconds. then natty started crying and we were out of the equation. an hour and a half later, we were in the recovery area with him as he woke up. he was groggy, disoriented and pretty miserable. but a couple naps and several hours later, he was ok. lips a bit swollen and with 3 metal teeth and one filling. he was a bit uncomfortable for sat and sunday, but not really that bad. modern medicine. i tells ya.

saturday was incredibly beautiful in the bawlmer area, the capt and i played outside and the family headed up to the depot and other errands. i got the final elements to my square foot gardening boxes. i also have the peat for the soil mix, jsut not the compost and vermiculite and shit. this weekend perhaps. i dunno.

sunday i put them together, mowed the lawn and did some other shit around the house. compelling, isn’t it!

so the macbook is pretty much complete. i upgraded the ram, got the super cheep office 2008 for mac nad have project (windows) but haven’t installed it yet. i’m like 97% of the way to getting entourage to make nice with my work exchange server, if i cna get that to happen, i’m home free….i don’t know why i care. but i do.

now i know the real mac experience is with their ilife apps, somethign, for the most part i dont’ really need. i mean i’d love to crack open iphoto and reorganize our 10’s of thousands of pics, but the home desktop is the designated photo machine, so until we upgrade to an imac, there’s no point. i’d love to rerecord all the el couche hits with garageband, but really, i don’ t have all that much time on my hands….so right now, i have a really really really nice web browsing maching. hmm. well never mind, i still get a techno boner when i use it. that’s what’s really counts…right?

right so this place is deader than disco lately, and i can’t say as i blame all of yall for not visiting. but i’m trying. i’m also bringing in help…

long time reader, jimmy has been granted authoring rights in this here blog-so should the mood strike him, he’s gonna post. there’s no schedule, no promises, no nothing, but hell 2 heads have to blog more than one.

do you want to be part of this elite club? say so in the comments andwe’ll see what we can do….

cheers kids.

so for 5 days now, i have been the owner of an apple macbook. as many of you know, this is a direct reversal of years of hatred and scorn for the apple line of computers. while i’m not quite a fan boy yet, i’ll say it’s growing on me.

this is going to be a boring post for most of you, but hell, it’s my site, right.

right so as you know, i had actually pulled the trigger on a lenovo thinkpad tablet pc. my dream was to have this as a semi work, semi personal lappy, and i’d take ti to meetings and take notes using the stylus and then draw super awesome diagrams in visio and all woudl be awesome.

well a couple problems: one, they’re fucking expensive. two they were super out of stock, like 6-8 weeks out of stock, three; what, in all reality, would be the likelyhood that i’d be using this thing that way. right: pretty fucking low.

so chatting with ex-coworker don, he told me to go mac.  which i’ve actually considered doing for the main household pc, as it’s where we do all the photos and shit, and natty’s mostly on line and creating documents and there’s not real reason to be on windows to do that.

but my lappy…a mac? after some research leveraging sarge’s apple discount, the macbook was about 300 bucks cheaper than the tablet (wha? i know right) and i didn’t need to buy (techincally) any other software. so i did it. and now i have it and it’s pretty cool.

i read a fair amount of “what to expect when you’re expecting a mac”* type shit.  so most of the stuff that is mac weird to a windows person i was already aware of. so for the most part the transition has been pretty smooth. i love love love the 2 finger scrolling (sounds dirty doesn’t it) i hate hate hate that menus are always at the top of the screen.

the whole minimize/hide/dock thing is sorta bizarre. (how do i add appications to the dock? how do i remove them? i’m not gonna be using time machine anytime soon)

i’m having more trouble than i would have thought adjusting ot a wide screen. all my windows are stubby. web pages disply like 3/4’s of what i’m used to above the fold. sure the scrolling is easy enough, but still. i’m a lenght not girth kinda guy. (ick)

so that’s the pristine state: now it’s time to start fucking with shit:

Overall, i’m slightly embarrassed at how much giddy joy buying technology gives me-but anyway i have purchased parallels which of course will allow me to run XP as a virtual machine, my intent is to use it to run visio and project as i need them. which is not all that often in my personal life, but there have been times. (like the diagrams of the yard with the firetrucks–can’t live without that)

my manager at the DFTU client thinks i’m stupid/crazy to muck up osX with a windows instance and he got me thinking-what i really need is a way to check exchange for work emails, that would allow me to pretty much convert to mac for everything.

so i did some research and i could run outlook via paralelels or invest in entourage, the MS’s mac version of outlook. more money right? well wouldn’t you know that the client  has a sweet ass employee discount for MS office software, including office for MAC 2008–which has entrouage–for 20 bucks. better even is i cna get visio and project PRO-07 for 20 bucks. i just about had a geek-gasam. I have 2003 versions of these, but for 20 bucks, why not go both pro, and up to 07. fucking brilliant

so if i can get work emails on entorage, use visio/project as needed, and i suppose lean on word and excel when i have to and can’t use pages and numbers or whatever the fuck they call them. i’ve got it, i’ve got the best of both worlds.

all that said, apart for the super slow boot time. i didn’t have that many complaints on XP. my pc almost never locks up, almost never just crashes. sure it happens but not that much. as for the ‘just stick in a device and it works’, i haven not found that to be true on the mac, i’ve had to go to verizon and download drivers form their website for my super modem. on the pc, i just threw the cd in there at it worked. weird huh.

so any other mac tips.

richard and basil, you offically win. there i said it.

*the expect when expecting joke is especially appropriate, b/c we’re expecting again.  see you get a little suprise for reading the whole post.

don’t get mad natty, i’ll do a big announcement tomorrow or so. just playing around here.

well for some reason, perhaps daylight savings, i dunno, i seem to have gotten a bit of steam in my stride this weekend, and i’m starting to actually get shit done the last coupla days. i dunno i was in a funk (imagine that) and i seem to be (hopefully) coming out of it.

first thing i accomplished was uploading something in the order of 1000 pics from xmas on to flickr. i dunno it got to the point where i didn’t even want to think about uploading them. but i sat down and did it, and as lame as it sounds, it was a relief.

i’m digging in to the  mounds of laundry, contemplating yardwork in a serious manner, and i actually did push ups yesterday (i think i’m as fat as i’ve ever been right not, if not more) yes kids, it’s time to come out of hibernation.

so i have a couple plans for the site. i need to get angry man back up there-change these images of random scenery, i’m thinking of setting up an el coche fantasico page again, and finally taking on the task of the mythical ‘i’ll never’ list. did i not mention that. i want to create a page of all the jackass things i said i’d never do, and then, naturally later in life, did. a sample? yoga, diet coke, pet ownership (first cat, then multiple cats, then dog). oh there’s tons. it’ll be a fun jaunt down jefke’s a douchebag lane, you’ll love it, trust me.

as part of that actually, one major thing is i’m getting a new laptop soon, and i can’believe it, i’m considering a macbook, no not the air, nor the hugeass expensive macbook pro, but the simple hearty salt of the earth macbook (richard–you ok? did you hit your head on the desk as you fainted). i’m torn b/c i really really also want a tablet pc. no i’m not a doctor, nor a field engineer, but i think i’d really use it, especially in meetings, and on the train and can you imagine actually drawing shit in visio? how cool would that be.

i even placed an order for the tablet via a super discount through mr. sarge. but when the ship date was mid may, and evil ex coworker don started spouting off about dual bootable OS’s on the macbook and running xp on it if i needed to, i got nerrvous, so i’m trying ot cancel the tablet order and regroup. god help me.

in other news, family is good. we wehre just out in norther cali, san fran and such. oddly enough i dont’ have much to report. san fran is a neat city. nice to visit, dont’ think i’d want to live there. the hills are no joke man, that shit is crazy. alcatraz as cool, though not as creepy or spooky as i would have hoped. redwood trees are indeed very fucking big. vineyard are pretty, err sorta. traveling with a toddler is hard. and i think that’s about it-

other than that, i tried to save some money by not admitting the diabetic cat to the hospital at 50+ bucks a day for her shots. well naturally she got sick from not getting her shots while we were away, so she had to go in to the hospital. costing more than if i had jsut put her in there. brilliant! another one for the “everytime i try to save money, i get screwed…” files. she seem to be better now, and well, it’s just more money down the drain…yay!

ok back to work kiddies.