Category Archives: Books

Not a Good Day for Emily

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You could tell it wasn’t going to be a good day for Emily right from the beginning. This morning when she got up she was crying at every little thing that happened. She likes to ride around the house while sitting on her bus and elephant toys. The string for the elephant toy was tangled in the wheel and she would scoot a couple of inches and then just start bawling because it wouldn’t roll correctly. It wasn’t a pretty sight and Jennifer confirmed that it didn’t stop this morning, but it was an all day affair.

I finished The Gunslinger by Stephen King this past weekend. It was good to get a refresher course on the first book of the Dark Tower series. The story was much better than I remember. Last time I read it was in college and I remember it being pretty dull, but the series really picked up in the next book, The Drawing of the Three. Next, I’m going to read The Mythical Man Month, a series of essays on software development. In particular how to tame projects which are out of control. However, first I’ve been given a book by our HR department called The Leadership Secrets of Santa Claus. It’s a very short book and it looks pretty stupid, but I’ll have a go. It can’t be any worse than Who Moved My Cheese?

Today’s picture is from our trip to the beach. Austin is lounging in the sun.

Shopping at the Mall

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Today was just a trip to the mall and then an excursion to Chuck E Cheese. At the mall, Jennifer got a new iron work to go over the new china hutch kind of like the plaques that hang in our living room (you can see them in the video). I picked up the next book I’m going to be reading, The Mythical Man-Month. It’s about how adding software engineers to a project doesn’t always improve efficiency, in fact it can sometime make it worse. For me, the book is kind of topical.

Today’s picture is actually a video. Emily is dancing to “Livin’ La Vida Loca” at the end of Shrek 2. At first she doesn’t know I’m filming her and then she turns around and says, “cheese”, but continues to dance. Notice at the end of the song how all the characters at the end of the video freeze and she does the same. I only recommend watching the video if you have a high speed connection. It’s a 12 MB download.

The Drawing on the Wall Incident

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One thing that I forgot to mention that happened yesterday was that Abby, for some unknown reason, thought it would be a good idea to take a crayon that she found and start writing on nearly every wall in our living room. She thrust the crayon into Emily’s hand and wandered off waiting for the yelling to begin. Jennifer found Emily with the crayon in her hand and started to survey the damage. It was readily apparent that Emily wasn’t the one who decided to do some artwork on our walls. The lines were out of her reach and there were people’s faces drawn on the windows in our living room. A tale tale sign of a four-year-old not a two-year-old. Anyway, a lot of yelling and spanking happened and Abby was sent off to her room. Today Abby surprised Jennifer by apologizing for drawing on the wall.

Abby stayed home from school again today because of her sore throat. Right now we are to the point where we don’t know what to do with her. She won’t eat because “her tummy says that she’s not hungry” when it’s time for dinner, but once dinner is done she complains that she’s hungry. It almost sounds like an excuse not to eat what we are having for dinner.

I finished the Joel on Software book I picked up while on vacation in Houston. This was by far one of the best software management books I’ve ever read. I’ve been a fan of Joel’s site for years and you can pretty much read the entire book online by reading all of the articles on his site, but it was nice to re-read the articles in book form. He really gets down to the basic foundations of building a successfully software team. It isn’t some whiz bang method like Extreme Programming or some other crazy method. If you don’t have the basic methods he describes, you don’t have a good foundation to support your software project. Anyway, if you are in the software industry, I recommend this book highly.

Today’s picture is another one from our trip to the Houston Zoo. This time it’s Emily on one of the zoo animals on the merry-go-round.

Searching for Mongolia

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After church we went in search for a Mongolian Bar-B-Q restaurant that the Yahoo Yellow Pages said was in Maitland, a suburb on the north side of Orlando near where we go to church. The pregnancy has made Jennifer very hungry lately and we missed the Mongolian Bar-B-Q restaurant that was in Houston that we used to go to. We looked and looked, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. We concluded that it was closed and ended up wandering up to Jason’s Deli, another restaurant that we miss from back in Texas. Once I got home, I confirmed that the restaurant was closed by calling the phone number and got a residence. That must suck to have a phone number of an old restaurant.

Congratulations to the Texas Longhorns who were able to beat out Cal to get into the Bowl Championship Series. The Longhorns will be playing Michigan in the Rose Bowl on New Years Eve and we will be watching the game from Jennifer’s parents house in Houston, since we will be on our big Texas trip during that time.

I finished up Dan Brown’s Deception Point last weekend. It was a very good book about political games during a Presidential Election when a meteor is found that contains proof of extra terrestrial life. The data on the meteor doesn’t add up and it may lead to a government cover up. I still stick to my description of Dan Brown being “Clancy-esque”, in other words kind of like Tom Clancy. I’ve given up on The Successful Manager’s Handbook. I read about half of it and just can’t pick it up again. It’s pretty much like reading a phone book. I’ve read several technical and business books and none have been as boring as this one. For my next outing I’ve started on a pretty big quest. I’m going to read the complete Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I read the first four books about ten years ago and Stephen King just finished out the series with the last three books just recently. Since it’s been so long, I decided I would re-read the first four and then go on to the last three and so I picked up a copy of The Gunslinger today.