2007

And so starts a new year.

Matthew is now going to preschool 4 days a week. Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri. This is in the hope that it will ease him into the 5 days a week when he starts school in the fall of this year. Wow, Matthew starts school this year! We have decided (#sarcasm in our infinite wisdom #/sarcasm) to try and get him into the AB Combs magnet school. ( see http://combses.wcpss.net/ ). You can read all about this school at this web site. Failing that there is a year rounds school 5 mins down the road will will try for and failing that there is the school was are assigned for. From what people have told us if we stick to our guns and follow all the procedures we ought to be able to get into AB Combs even if we are turned down initially... we shall see.

At the moment, if we say to Matthew.... let's sit down and learn how to read... he is not interested and we have discovered it is not worth the effort trying to pursue it. We just end up getting angry with him because he performs so much. However, we can quite easily teach him things verbally through game play. For example, sounding out words he knows. I quite often play the game of 'what letter does #insert word here# start with'. He is normally right in his answer and then he continues it with a game of thinking of other words that start with the same letter. I am also starting to try and teach him the sounds of the common letters that are put together....for example TH and WH etc. Margaret is starting to introduce him to a little addition now as well which he seems to be ok with. We bought him a simple card addition game for Christmas, when I opened it I thought we had wasted our time as it seemed to be too much. So I didn't even bother with it. I was lying in bed the other day listening to Margaret play the game with Matthew and he was receptive to it. We have also bought him a 'video game' for Christmas. It is a hand held game that you can buy plug in games for but the games all have an educational edge to them. It's really quite funny how if you try and teach them they don't want to know about it... but if you teach them when they don't know you are teaching them then they are fine with it.

Adam is doing great. His vocab is increasing. I know he says more than we understand but I am slowly hearing more words out of him that are pronounced well enough for us to know what he is saying. He is ( and has been since he was 2 ) already happily playing games on the internet ( seasamestreet.com. nickjr.com etc ). He has figured out the correlation between moving the mouse and the pointer moving on the screen, he knows to double and/or single click, he knows that the red cross closes the window and he play various drag and drop games. He can play the DND games if you can click on the object and it gets selected and then you move the mouse and click again to drop it. He can't yet click and hold while dragging..... but it will come. He has already mapped in his head where the games are at each web site that he likes to play...... not that I think he is a genius or anything... but it really quite cool that he can do what he can do at this age.

When Matthew starts school in the fall, Adam will be starting preschool. He will do the two morning a week deal that Matthew started with. Margaret is saying that she will use one of those morning to help out at Matthews school and the other one to squander on herself. She has been doing some part time work at a store called Pottery Barn ( see the web site for what they sell.... furniture mainly I guess ). She did it for the 40% staff discount more than the extra money ( which was really lousy ). But we have pretty much decided than now I am back at work she will chuck it in as it is just not worth the hassle.

I'm still at IBM but it looks like I will be having a job change and dabbling in something I'm not sure I want to dabble in so we shall see how it turns out. If things pan out.... and I won't know for sure for another couple of weeks.... I will be moving back to the 'old' product I use to work on..... the one that was, years ago called CSP... which is the language we used back in my Air New Zealand days. It has change a great deal since then and gone through several name changes. It is now called EGL ( Enterprise Generation Language ) and it's IDE is Eclipse based. Anyway, I will be doing what they call Tech Team Lead. My group will only be small ( 2 maybe 3 people and me ) so that's good.... I ought to be able to stay technical and not have to spend my whole life doing management BS. It will also mean I can have a real effect on how things are done so it ought to be fun.... assuming it actually happens.

All the very best to everyone for 2007... my new years resolution is to change every light bulb I can in the house to use compact fluorescents and do a small bit for stopping global warming.

ho ho ho

yayy I have finished work for the year!
We are still having to do some fall clean up. Leaves still seem to invade Margaret's garden. The front slope of our property is looking much cleaner now. We let it go for several years and didn't realize how much overgrown it had become until we found some old pictures. So last year I attacked it from one side and this year Margaret attacked it from the other and we met in the middle. I have a couple of largish saplings to cut down and then we are pretty much done. I have also recently chopped down the three very large holly trees that had been planted too close to the house. The house looks bare now without them but it gets a lot more light and Margaret likes it.
Margaret finally made me hang those silly icicle lights that many Americans hang from our house....

I managed to not kill myself. The hollies were at the two corners of the house and a third at the end of the garage ( that you can't see in the picture ).

Here's a picture from a couple of years ago with the hollies in....


Matthew is hoping for snow again this year.... we shall see, didn't get any last year and I can't say I miss it.

Talking

Adam is finally starting to throw out a few words! Things like 'shoe', 'head', 'mouth', 'eye', 'nose'. When he is playing with us on a bed he will reach for a blanket, pull it up and say 'ni ni mama'. The other day he had a sandwich that he didn't want as there were strawberries on the table that he could see. So he grabs the sandwich, tosses it across the table and says 'bye bye wich'. We got the hint. He is still super smoochie and always comes running when I get home from work with a hug and an 'awww'. While hugging us he will also pat us on the back.

BTW, I am really loving a new feature of Firefox 2.0. That is the real time spell checking. No matter what you are doing in the browser ( and I use Google mail so I answer mail from within the browser as well ) if you are typing then Firefox will underline any words it does not recognise. ( like the word 'recognise' because I have an American dictionary so it wants me to spell it as 'recognize' ). You can right mouse click on the word and it will drop down suggestions. Sweet.

I am also using bloggers new beta blogger. It now works like it ought to have in the first place.... like pretty much every other blogging software does. When you publish a posting what you are doing is just saving that post into a database and when someone is looking at my blog it is building the page dynamically. Before it would completely rebuild the blog and so the more postings you had made, the slower it was.

Another really cool feature (again not revolutionary as other blog software has it ) is the ability to label posts. Which is what I am now doing. So if someone wants to look at all the postings I have made of 'Matthew story' then they can just select that in the 'Labels' list on the RHS of this blog and they will get a list of all postings I have labeled as such.

School

The work has begun educating ourselves on the education system here in the states. This time next year Matthew would have started his schooling career. Currently he is in what they call 'preschool'. This is what most of us would know as kindergarten. He is going 3 mornings a week ( 9 to 12 ) and after Xmas will transition to 4 mornings a week. A couple of times a month he is eating his lunch at preschool as well. This is all to get him use to the school environment. Next year he goes to what they call Kindergarten here, which is what I knew as primer-1 back in NZ. After that it is grade1, there is no equivalent to primer-2 here ( if there is still a primer-2 in NZ ).
As far as schools goes here they have 'traditional school', 'year-round school', and some other school that I can remember. Each has different term lengths. There are also what they call magnet schools, which focus more one one thing or another.... for example math, or arts. The magnet school in our area for the elementary school level ( or primary school as we all know it ) differs from the rest because it is a year round school, not because it specializes in something. I think there is also a second magnet school in our area that has a traditional school year but has some emphasis on 'leadership qualities' I think I remember someone telling me they start teaching the kids things like looking someone in the eyes when talking to them, firm handshakes etc etc.

But Margaret is the one who went to a meeting today, not me, so I will become a little more enlightened tonight.

They have a cut off date here for getting into a school year. I think it is around October. So if your child turns 5 before the end of October then they go to school the next year. if they turn 5 after October then they have to wait till next year. This means that Matthew will be on the younger edge of the class being born in June and Adam will miss the cut off and be on the very edge of the oldest kids when he goes to school.

More decisions to be made regarding the kids.... more wondering if we made a right decision or not.

Pandoras Box

If you have a broadband connection and want to listen to free music that tries to tailor itself to your preferences then check out www.pandora.com

You create 'radio stations' and seed it with one or many songs and/or artists. Through analysis of the songs pandora then tries to serve up other songs it thinks you may like. You can help it along ( if you want ) by saying yea or nay to the songs it plays. You are allowed to skip over a certain number of songs in an hour ( I don't know what the number is ).

What it has done is introduce me to artists and songs that I would not normally listen to, or have never heard of. I have discovered a number of new artists that I like through Pandora.

and it's free

Independance Day

Last Tuesday was independance day. The IBM site I work at shut down on the Monday as well so I took the other three days off and had a week off. It was a week at home as we have less than no money after doing the attic and two bathrooms. When I had the time ( which is difficult with the two kids ) I was out in the garage trimming it out and trying to tidy it up and clean it out. It is still not finished and both the cars are still parked in the drive way..... maybe this weekend. We went to the pool almost everyday and also went to Jordan Lake on the Sunday for a picnic lunch and swim in the murky water.

The week before last Matthew went to bible school for the week.... they start the brainwashing early in the bible belt. It was fun for him, they sang songs and played and he got to hang out with one of his friends. It was for 3hrs a day in the morning. This week and the next he is going to the YMCA each morning to do stuff.... play and have some supervised fun with a bunch of other kids. This means Adam benefits from some one on one time with Margaret

I'm still managing to work from home 3 days a week. I heard on the radio driving in to work this morning that they are predicting fuel peaking at $4 a gallon over summer so there is even more reason to try and work from home. IBM recently introduced a new thing in our area... "Think Friday". This is where we are encouraged to inovate. They don't want us to work on the 'normal' tasks but to pull our heads from out of the sand and see what the market is doing and try and come up with new ideas to lead it. Considering the super tight deadlines we always seem to have I'm not sure how well this will work for us plebs in the trenches, I think it is trying to target more of the upper management than us. But we shall see. I am taking the opportunity to take a look at ajax and some of the open source tools available out there. I have recently installed MySQL, the Apache HTTP server, and ruby on rails onto my machine at home. I also have grabbed the ruby on rails eclipse plugin. I have managed to get it all configured and running together ( which was NOT a simple task ). Now I am going to write me some rails code and a few web pages to use it and then I'll have a go at ajax-ifying it. We sadly lack any tooling to help ajax develoeprs and so I don't think it will be a bad thing to get a general understanding of how it all works.

My Desk

... who says this blog is all about the kids??

Now that the attic is pretty much done ( except for a couple of lingering things that the builder needs to do and won't get any more money out of me until he has ).... I am enjoying my new desk. It means that I am now telecommuting ( geek speak for working from home ) at least 2 days a week and often 3 days a week. Where we are in the lifecycle of the product release means I am able to do this, but it will probably be down to 1 to 2 days a week during phases of whatever the next release is when we need a lot of team interaction ( design work mainly ).
What does this give me?... I have a 40 mile round trip (64km) to the office and back. So working from home 3 days a week saves me 120 miles! It also gives me around 3 to 4.5 hours of my life back a week. I'm not stressing in the traffic with the crap drivers we have around here. I also get to spend a whole lot more time with my family which Margaret appreciates ( I think ).

I can go up to the attic or the second floor ( or here it would be the third floor since they count the ground floor as the first floor ), I can close the door and not have to reappear until lunch time if i don't want to.... I have a small bar area with a fridge up there, a bathroom, and a big screen TV ( but I NEVER have it on while I am working ).

Anyway, here's a badly lighted photo of my desk.....

... and the living is easy

Spring has sprung and it is slowly getting warmer. I am inspired to blog again after reading my cousins blog http://shanghaiben.blogspot.com/ . Looks like he is doing his big OE in China.
Most of this winter has been taken up with watching the kids grow, being sick with cold after cold after cold and a few stomach bugs that have laid each of us out for up to a week thrown in for good measure. During this time we have also been getting our attic finished and the two existing bathrooms gutted and re-done.
The attic is now 99% done and we have moved stuff up into it and are using it. There are a few finishing things the builder needs to do but it has passed its final inspection so we can use it. The builder has been a disapointment... more so for Margaret than for me. He is not finishing things to how Margaret wants them ( but let's face it, that is a tall order for anyone ).
Here are some almost finished shots....



I need to take some more now that is it really finished so you can see the desk I help the builder make for me.... solid surface counter-top...very flash.

And here are a couple of shots of the bathroom in tha attic..... I did all the tiling over xmas. Fun to do once but I have learn't it is a sucky job and not one I would voluntarily do again