Cosine Jeremiah

Here are some pictures of the baby Vincent: http://cosine.shutterfly.com/121

My wife delivered Vincent (Vinny) at 2:42 PM by cesarean today. Baby's stats are 7 pounds 1 ounce and 20 inches long. He's really healthy and good looking. He has his mom's face and his dad's chin.

I have lots of photos, but I cannot upload them until tomorrow.

As I have opportunities to do so, I am updating Twitter with live information about the labor:

http://twitter.com/cosine

(from the babyrealsoonnow department)

For those of you waiting for the good news, the time is almost upon us. The doctors have decided to use drugs to make it happen. Watch this space on Tuesday, February 10, probably some time after noon.

Main link to this article from my infrequently used Power Blog: http://power.cosine.org/2009/01/dear-obamaphiles

Don't be too proud of this ideological terror you've elected. The ability to lead a nation is insignificant next to the power of the people.

And remember that the more things "Change", the more things stay the same.

In other words, the power to change this nation is in us as people, and I am specifically trying to imply that our power to effect change is not practiced in a voting booth.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled fanaticism. Please let go of my neck.

Here is the recipe for my famous yummy meatballs:

Meatball Ingredients

• 2 pounds ground beef
• 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
• 1/2 cup bread crumbs
• 4 eggs
• 6 small or 4 large cloves of garlic
• 1/2 tsp. allspice

Other

• 90 oz. pasta sauce (I recommend Ragu Old World Traditional if you do not make your own sauce)

Mince the garlic and mix all meatball ingredients together. Form about 50 small meatballs from the mixture. Pour pasta sauce into a large cooking pot. Add raw meatballs to the cold sauce; make sure the sauce covers all the meatballs (do not brown). Heat on medium-high until sauce begins to bubble, then cover the pot and turn heat down to medium until sauce is consistently simmering, then turn heat down to medium-low or low to maintain simmering. Continue to cook for 90 minutes after sauce began simmering, stirring occasionally.

Comments

Ground turkey has been substituted for the meat with excellent results, so I expect other meat substitutions will work well, too. If anyone can mangle the recipe to make vegetarian meatballs (or even vegan meatballs if cheese and egg substitutes are also found), I am interested so please let me know. The meat is not to be browned before cooking because the flavors of the meatballs and the pasta sauce are meant to mix together more than they do in traditional recipes where browning the surface of the meatballs prevents as much exchange of flavor. At the end of cooking, the sauce will be a "lightly meated" meat sauce. A relatively plain pasta sauce is purposely used at the beginning so that the resulting sauce reflects the flavor of the meatballs; keep this in mind when deciding on what sauce to use. Also, if you prefer larger meatballs, adjust the cooking time upward to keep them on the heat long enough to cook through.

Give me some feedback on the recipe if you try it out! Thanks!

Today is the fourth anniversary of my wedding. Happy happy joy joy!

I have just done seven days in a row of exercise on my wife's elliptical. I'm going to keep this up for a while and see what happens. I have not done any good exercising since moving to my house in the middle of nowhere five years ago, since driving anywhere with either a tennis court or a martial arts place with convenient hours stopped being easy options.

I learned this about a month ago, but just now realized I forgot to post it here... my proto-baby is a boy. His first name shall be Vincent; the middle name is still undecided.

My 16-port dumb switch blew its power supply yesterday during some electrical turbulence. Fortunately, the switch seems fine when plugged into a new power supply (untested on the network), but right now I've got my primary network running on an 8-port 10/half dumber hub that I had lying around—my first hub at home, even. In addition to the 8 RJ-45 ports, it has a coaxial 10 base-2 port and an AUI "backbone" port. I got the model with the extra ports because I had an ancient Macintosh, even by standards back then, that only had a 10 base-2 connection back in 1997 when I acquired it.

The Baby has been given the due date of February 14, 2009. We do not have a gender, yet.

Apparently there's a new holding facility in Denver that was created for the Democratic Convention:

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=97741&catid=188

It is controversial because people are claiming it was converted from an old warehouse to a prison in secret, and also because the whole idea of arresting protesters is unsavory in general.

I am curious how it may end up in the news, or not, during and after the convention.

I went with my wife to the ob/gyn on Wednesday and they found this guy, somewhere in his fourth month, inside (I'm using masculine pronouns for convenience until proved otherwise—we do not have a sex determination yet):

http://www.cosine.org/1/baby/baby.gif

He has a brain, spinal cord, beating heart, and two little kicking legs. He's so adorable! :)

andyhat was smart enough to post this link to Lambdacats (lolcats for programmers) that I sent to him and some other friends (and came to me via @Sutto on Twitter). It's such a good idea that I'm posting it here, too. :)

For those of you that I have not talked to recently, I have news. Today is my last day at my present employer, CCC Information Services, Inc. I have formed my own technology company and will be working as an independent contractor.

It will be a new experience. I see a lot of work ahead of me to keep the pipeline flowing. Please lend me a hand if you can or lend me your moral support if you cannot. My greatest expertise is in Unix security and application development (my strongest languages are Ruby, Perl, and C). I am good in front of a group of people in a training environment as well. Also, I am planning to build up some application security experience over the next few months as time and opportunity permits.

To my soon-to-be former co-workers at CCC: thank you for the awesome times we had the last four years! Good luck!

I'm trying to print a contract tonight, and it seems that I have no operational printer at the moment.

The laser printer seems to need all four of its toner cartridges replaced, and the ink jet has no more black ink.

*sigh*

Many of you already know that George Carlin has died, but I'd like to make a statement of my own about him. I think George was a very important man and one that should really stand out among the famous names. He was one of few that would push the limits that other people dared not traverse; he was always exploring the darker crevices of our habits as a society and our outlook on life. Of course, he primarily did so through comedy. And though not a well received movie in general, I thought his acting in Kevin Smith's "Jersey Girl" showed us all a side of George that displays wisdom and seriousness about life's issues as well. He seemed to get what life is really about and was always trying to tell other people through all his work. It seems that while many laughed, too few took to heart the message about life in what was just "comedy" to them.

George, let's do it again in the next life. Ciao!

So for about two weeks I have been trying to get new planner pages for my Franklin-Covey to cover me from July 2008 to June 2009. Unfortunately, Franklin-Covey has been making it annoying to achieve this.

First I tried their website, thinking it would be inconvenient to get to one of their brick and mortar locations. The order did not happen, however, as their website was so ungodly slow that I had to quit frustrated half an hour later. I did manage to figure out which pages I was purchasing so I could swing by one of the stores and pick it up quickly.

So a few days later I have my chance: take my lunch hour at work and walk over to the Franklin-Covey store on Michigan St. and get my pages. I do so only to find the location closed. Permanently. Grrr.

A look back online shows that Franklin-Covey has another store in Schaumburg and one in the Milwaukee area. Both possible, but let's try online again, first. Those locations are not places I frequent enough to be able to make it there soon. Second try online was much better from the performance department, and I got as far as the checkout before something happened: I selected the FREE shipping option (standard ground) on the order page, but then on the confirmation page shipping was suddenly $8. Excuse me?!

Finally, I decided maybe I'll swing by Schaumburg on my way to work on Wednesday. If they open at 9 AM or before, I can do it and get into work not-too-late. They open at 10 AM.

Aaaaarrrrrgh!

Clearcase is annoying me. My view (someone set it up for me) seems to auto-downcase my files. Very Not Good. Not being a Clearcase expert, I cannot figure out how to fix that. I really do not want to spend a lot of time digging around on this.

Update: Clearcase was fixed with some configuration changes made from the Windows Control Panel and then rebooting. I found all the little checkboxes that dictated whether cases were sensitive and if so, was case to be preserved. Notably, my previous configuration was case sensitive which would imply that I should be able to specify the case for my files. I just changed it to case-preserving case insensitive for the hell of it, though now I suspect all I needed previously was a reboot to get things working again the way they should have.

At 9:19 PM Central Time, yours truly was assaulted in the Great Hall of Chicago's Union Station by one of the local bums.

He claimed he needed fare for two tickets to Joliet (about $11 or so, I think), but didn't like that I only offered to buy the tickets instead of give him cash. When he moved on to request this from a woman sitting 10 feet away, I told him to just leave her alone. He did not like that, and threatened to punch me in the face, making a motion to do so and stopping inches short. While he choose not to repeat the motion or make a punch that connected, he did spit on my face and then left the building.

There were no officers in the Great Hall, and no one around had a suggestion, so I called 911 and reported it. No officers eventually showed, so with 6 minutes left to catch my 9:45 train I left the Great Hall and found one, who explained that since the event was by that time 20 minutes gone, it would not do any good to file a report at this point. However, should I see the man again next time I am in Union Station, he told me where the officers' office was so I could report it and file the paperwork then. It is across from the Metra ticket booth.

After leaving the officer, I barely caught my train, so my evening was not too poorly impacted. I do not regret my actions, but it is not something that calls for a repeat performance.