Somethin' to celebrate..

Rach's birthday was yesterday..

Last year I promised her I would respect her request to not let anyone make a big fuss on her birthday for once. To not have a special dinner or a little party. It's surprising how difficult a task that's become. Seems to be a success so far tho.. we've gotten through the actual day already. Just as long as we can get thru this weekend without my folks sneakin' in a celebration dinner, we'll be good.

I still need to find her a little something for her birthday, though. Any ideas?

-----------------------------

We're hoping to have a baby shower here in mid Nov..

I'll let you all know when exactly, but pretty much everyone we know is invited. I expect to have my Mom and good friend Shea help out with the plans. Rach and I haven't really ever done a "baby shower" before.. but our one prerequisite is that it be co-ed. We want to be sure the little munchkin knows that dudes exist too.. and they're just as anxious for munchkin to make an appearance. We still don't know if the baby is to be a boy or girl, so we've been going with black, white, tan, and some blues and greens to be safe. I'll plan to post some of the things we've gotten so far so you can see what kind of duds the little unknown munchkin will be sportin'.

I hope you all can make it.. there'll be invites once we settle on a place.
-len

Technorati Tags: Birthday, babyshower, baby, baby clothes

Sleepy..

I'm really tired. :)
-len

Bushwacker

I never used to give much mind to politics..

Today I get to leave work again, in the middle of the afternoon to finally get fingerprinted. It's the final step in my effort to secure permission to live with my wife in her home country. It's really not all that bad. The instructions have been quite clear and systematic from the forms. And I haven't had any trouble at all.. until I had to deal with local law enforcement.

I'm not really blaming local law enforcement directly for my headaches. I'm really just frustrated with the confusion the Federal government inserted into the process by injecting a redundant fingerprinting station in the INS office that is required specifically for American visa processing. Meanwhile the local law enforcement fingerprinting station is somehow under the impression that fingerprints for "Visas" are to go to the INS office only, and the INS office is under instruction that only "American Visas" are done at the INS office. A truly unnecessary frustration. Very redundant and inefficient.

So I planned to go in early.. but it's about 8am now. I just had to get that off my chest.

Rach and I started watching lost last night. I don't think we like it as much as Alias. Fortunately there's only one season to watch (if we make it through the whole thing) and we have another Alias season in D-4 days (D instead of T, because it's days).

I feel like I need to apologize for that previous uttlerly nerdacious post. I don't usually hack about that stuff in here. Good news is I refocused my attention on organizing all my stuffs (pictures, docs, data) that I had stored all over the place. DK also pointed me in the appropriate direction to get my system prepared for camming. I'm still hoping a linux solution comes along, but if it doesn't at least I'm prepared now. Thanks DK.

I've also got some awesome friends who are over in the Denny (Denmark) that I haven't given props to for far too long. Kat and Ammy.. two of the coolest peeps that you may ever get a chance to know (if you're so lucky). Right now they're tacklin' some pretty heady questions, and answerin' the call to leadership in thier global community. I'm really pretty impressed with some of the stuffs that they're turning out, and really look forward to seein' the results of all the work they're doing. Specifically the awareness projects.. lettin' peeps know about the Deaf! community and all the work that still needs to be done in some of the more remote areas of the world. You can check out more about the work they're doin' over there, if you follow the links to their frontrunners blogs.

Then there's Munchkin. Little one seems to be startin' to move a bit and I keep layin' my hand on my luv's belly, hopin' for a little high-5. Rach is doin' a whole lot better herself.. even after I made her make a run for it to get to the INS office yesterday. Bugger, I feel bad about that.. makin' a pregnant woman run in the cold for a dead end appointment (grr.. how rude). I love her so much tho.. she's such a trooper. I just hope to God that I'm not far from her side for any longer than I have to be. I think that's what drives me crazy the most about this visa crap.

That'd have to be all for now.
-len

Technorati Tags: Politics, INS, lost, alias, frontrunners, munchkin, baby

Windows behind closed doors..

This weekend I did some work on our little notebook. Trying to get a webcam working in windows 98. It's a cool little notebook, super tiny and all. It's a PII 266 running win98, though, and it's a bit slow compared to my Athlon 1.8 desktop system.

Needless to say it took me a bit to even get the bloated drivers installed, then it hung up so bad I had to restart and restart and well.. restart. Well, so that's why I'm not the biggest fan of windows. You start out with a perfect install, and then as you use it the thing becomes horribly bloated and self destructs. That's what happened ages ago with my poor mother's HP (that she still uses that way - despite endless frustration) and really any windows machine I've ever encountered. Days of maintenance and it's good for another week.

On a side note, my XP home partition on my main system hasn't booted for over a month. Linux loads the bootloader and it would boot fine, but.. once it's handed over to windows it won't even let me boot into safe mode without restarting the computer. I've seriously had it with Windows. Had it.

Been looking at the Ubuntu distro. Seems to be catching alot of media attention lately. Seems to be an altruistic premise, which is nice. I'm really feeling encouraged with all of these companies popping up with the appearance of selfless motives. It's something we've needed for a long time coming. I hope they all survive.

I believe that Google was the beginning. A company that just seems to help people become more and more productive, time and again. They even seem to be taking on the big companies like Yahoo and Microsoft.. challenging them to follow the leader and start doing the right thing by thier customers. They seem to be bringing us all together to collaborate and make the web more intelligent. I'm all for a more intelligent web, connecting mroe intelligent people and sharing incredibly useful information.

The precept would be scary if it came from a position of corruptible power. You might argue that all power is corruptible. Indeed you would be right, be it not for fair and equal distribution. I guess that's why I see open source as such a powerful force. Not only are the tools set in place by those with a propensity to share with the world (geedless/needless), but they are also freely available for public review and scrutiny.

I think the UK may have a good perspective and message with thier commonlaw. They have the understanding that a society develops it's own law with time, and knowledge or awareness of these laws bind them together. They have no constitution, or universal text.. they just learn from their own history, from their own mistakes.

I will stop there for now.. as I need to rebuild my resume in XML in order to wow the google elite. And if I don't succeed in wowing, at least I'll have a foundation for a far more configurable resume.
-len

Silver again..

Sorry to leave you all hanging...
Here's the surprise.

For the longest time my phone looked like a green tree frog. Now it's back to it's good ole' silver self. It's almost like she bought me a new phone.. all for $2.90 and shipping. What can I say.. I'm easy to please. :P
-len

Surprise!!

Rach is preparing a surprise for me. Something she told me that she got for me and would arrive this week. It arrived tonight. I can't quite guess what it will be. At first I just guessed it was something that she wanted. But all this preparation makes me really curious. It came in a small package. Rach says it's nothing big.. well, here goes.

Let's find out what it is..

Google.com.au

As many of you know.. Rach and I plan to be relocating around the end of the year.
With that relocation comes a renewed need to find gainful employment.

I've been oogling Google since they first arrived on the scene with this simple little box..

I've been in awe of their skill with data and simplified interfaces. Long story short.. I wanna work for Google Australia.

So my question is.. apart from the obvious (sending in a resume), do you have any suggestions for how to secure a future at a place like Google Australia?
-len

Displaced..

I just went for a walk in the cold night air..

It was really nice. I didn't go far because I was supposed to be looking for the cat.. even though I knew he would probably appear at our front door soon enough anyway. It was a good excuse to go for a walk. It was refreshing to amble around unfamiliar corners of familiar places. But as I shuffled my way between the shadows I felt oddly displaced.

I think that since I arrived in Sydney - Wow, that was over a year ago - I've felt so many things that were so familiar here just fade into obscurity. It's as if the memories of growing up were someone elses memories that I've borrowed. I know that these are the memories that made me. It is not enough just to be forged by the drifting shadow of your memories.. but also to know that you are forged. Except for the strength they gather in numbers, I couldn't understand how they discretly make a whole.

While we watched Alias tonight, Rach let me feel her belly. I didn't feel a kick.. but I felt connected. You know what I mean, to feel connected? Rach connects me somehow to the reality I'm living in right now. It doesn't matter how disoriented I am.. those bits that make up my whole still call out for her. Every part. Not just my head or my heart, but every part.

Someday we'll have a child, Rach and I. As hard as that is to believe even now with Rachael's beautifully swollen belly.. I'm still taken aback at the thought. Makes me want to speculate what the little one will be like.. but that's hard to do without knowing if it's a boy or a girl munchkin.

I told Rach today at lunch that I was gonna call our little one Bubbles. She thought I was being cute, but told me that the nickname wouldn't do just the same. Y'see Kat and Ammy have already chosen the nickname munchkin.. from the wizard of oz. But that's just the thing.. in The Wizard of OZ, Dorothy ends up back in KS. In this story, we couldn't bear to be stuck in black and white.. so we make plans to move back into technicolor. Back to the Emerald City so to speak.

Either way, I guess time will tell.. if it's a boy, I'll prolly call it munchkin (or buddy, I have a tendency to do that).. and if it's a girl, I'll prolly call it bubbles. Hmm.. or maybe I'll just call the little one Munchkin Bubbles.. haha.. that'd go over well. :P

*Raises his glass of grape soda*
Here's to finding home soon.. wherever we are.
-len

Alias on my mind

Rach and I have been watching alot of Alias lately. I mean like every spare minute we're ready to flick it on and see what happens next in the dangerously addictive mock-up world of espionage. I'm so into the story, that I start trying to work out who we're most like.

I would like to think I'm most like Will Tippin. I think Rach is definitely a Sydney Bristow. Of course, Rach's folks are far more stable than that.. but my folks might fit the role of Jack and that Russian woman, the way they go at each other sometimes. I love them both tho, and it moves me sometimes when I see them getting along. Yep, I'm gonna miss my folks.

I think Rach is a Sydney for lots of reasons. As for me being a Will, I think that's prolly just wishful thinking. I want to have all the best intentions, and do all the right things.. but sometimes it just comes off as being creepy or wierd. I never have been very good at showing affection appropriately, without it coming off as being a bit clumsy. Definitely not so good at playing it cool. So all I can do is play it Len. Rach tells me that's enough.

Oh, and I think Kat would be the sarcastic reporter with the british accent, and Ammy would be that girl that just started a restaurant and swamps herself with all the business that is entailed. Hmm.. I'm not sure who else I should typecast, but I could see this would take a while if I got too deep. I'd better call it quits while I'm ahead.
-len

Crawling in my skin..

When I was about 16 I worked at K-mart.. my first job. I would stand at those cash registers for hours absently dancing thoughts through my mind like a fizzling alka-seltzer. I learned alot in those solitary moments. One of those things that I realized was that I despised was this thing called ass kissing. Doing something nice for someone just to get ahead. And it was unfortunately what that store seemed to run on at the time. I despised it and it despised me. I had a hard time avoiding it there.. and when I was fired for befriending a kitten in my work area, I couldn't have been more vindicated.

As much as I hate it, I prolly seem like a crawler most of the time I suspect.. I am nice and smiley and cheery an awful lot of the time. Sometimes even when I really don't wanna be. But truth is, most of the time I'm nice and smiley and cheery because I am genuinely happy. I say nice things to people knowing they'll be good to me and do nice things for me. But I'd like to think that maybe I do it more because I want them to be happy too.

Forgetful and perhaps a bit nieve, but happy to be..
-len