One of the “perks” of my job this month is I get to go with the tech department to spend the night on Alcatraz. As a San Francisco Native, I’ve never actually been to this little island in San Francisco Bay. My company produced and maintains the Audio Tour there, and once a year we go to do some maintenance there. We leave on the last boat of the day, do some work, have a little BBQ, maybe get a private tour, and sleep someplace really spooky like a cell or the hospital or something…. I’ll update this later after I get back on Thursday morning

Middle of the week, on my hour long commute to work. Need to get gas, stop on 19th and Judah to filler~up…

In a hurry, leave the lights on—hop on out of the car…close the door…and pump away…

Put the hose back to grab the ticket and back into the truck to start the rest of the day only to find denial.

Door locked, keys inside, day crumbeling to the ground in pieces…what to do…what to do…

Go talk to the man in behind the window, who pitches in by lending a hand…but nothing to do…all the windows closed…all doors prohibited…

The MAN sends me across the intersection to the other service station—the dude cant leave the place but offers me the skinny tool to do the job…however the tool is new to me, but I say sure…

Cross back to the ride denied,,,slip the skinny in,,,and first shot~~_{dumb luck}~~caught the latch and found my way in.

quickly returned the took to the dude…and was on my way…

if you ever need gas on 19th…the orange ball is the place to be…

Well Christmas has come and gone, its been pretty busy this year. Its funny one of the biggest requests I’ve gotten was for more photo’s of our cute little daughter Ava. I always thought I would be one of those parents who has the endless digital photo album on his PDA of all the “cute” things their child has done, boring family and friends out of their skulls with multiple images of an almost smile, but really is more probably gas or something.

Anyway, I selected a bunch from the last month and here ya go, enjoy!

Ava December 04

Well almost directly home from the hospital, I was back to work on my first big project with Antenna. Finally on Friday the 19th, the press saw it and I understand its live and being rented to patrons of the Van Gogh Musuem in Amsterdam. The project I’ve been working on is a PDA based multimedia museum tour based on a timeline of Van Gogh’s paintings but also incoperates his life and times and where he lived while he worked on a particular piece.

I’m still making some small updates and changes, and hopefully things will be wrapped up in the next couple of weeks. Its pretty exciting to know that a project I built (and probably the most complicated thing I’ve ever had to program) is actually being used for something constructive, and is also so very public. And to top it all off its in a museum of this caliber. Hopefully I might get the chance in the near future to go and visit there and see it in action.

So with the baby comming and this project taking way too much of my time recently, I’ve been very aloof recently, and hope to spend much more time with family and friends soon…especially with the holiday’s upon us as they are. If you havent met Ava yet, I hope you get the chance to soon…she is so very adorable, as is her Mom (no wonder why she’s so adorable).

My year comming up at work is looking very exciting as well, but I can’t go into details yet, and probably can’t until the projects are complete. But with luck, it looks like I have one PDA project per quarter this year, and all are fairly blockbuster.

Laurence sent these out in an e-mail with this link a while ago, but I thought I should get it up here as well. here are a bunch of November pictures of Ava…enjoy!

Ava – November 2004

All of us finally arrived home Monday afternoon. Laurence was discharged Sunday evening, but little Ava had to stay to get her bilirubin levels down. Her Jaundice was a bit of a concern. Luckilly they had a place for Laurence to stay in the Special Care Nursery, and I found a little alcove to sleep in down the hall. We spent Sunday night getting up every two to three hours to get Ava to feed so she could get better faster. The really hard part was we had spent the previous three days on the same schedule.

So after a day of various combinations of Bili-lights and Bili-blankets, and a lot of milk and diaper changes inside an incubator, we were finally released. Let me just say that was probably the longest week of my life, with one day super-imposed onto the other. We were lucky to have such a great staff that took care of our little girl at the Lucilly Packard Childrens Hospital. We learned so much, and got such wonderful support from all the various Nurses and Doctors. They even made the cutest little sign for her crib in the Nursery, and got us a lovely quilt the volunteers make for special babies. It was such a nice touch.

Below are the images we’ve taken so far, there are three online photo albums, one from the Birth, one from our stay in the hospital, and one from when we finally got home. We are all doing buch better now…

The Birth: http://www.codyo.com/images/HappyBirthday/

Our stay at the Hospital: http://www.codyo.com/images/inThe_Nursery/

Home at Last: http://www.codyo.com/images/HomeAtLast/

Home With Us: http://www.codyo.com/images/HomeWithUs/

Well this morning at 4:30 am I awoke to a gasp from Laurence, because her water broke. We both kept a level head, quickly got dressed, into the car, got some gas, and off to the hospital. After a couple of quick tests we were off to the delivery room. Laurence had a c-section, and everything went beautifully. She never experienced a contraction. By 8:21 this morning, we got our first look at our beautifull baby girl, Ava.

They did a quick clean up, and we got to spend a few mintes with her before they stiched Laurence back up. I then got to walk her down the hall to the nursery where she got weighed and measured, and some preliminary tests. I hustled back to Laurence’s side while they finished with her. Amazingly Laurence was up and walking around (enought to get into a chair), and we took a trip up to see our wonderfull little suprise package.

She has a little water in her lungs, but is quicly improving, and when I left tonight (they had to kick me out), she had passed the first of two tests, saying that she is getting better.

She has been so quiet and so very cute, licking her lips and looking around, and its been the biggest pleasure to hold her.

Last year I had a wonderfull suprise party, this year I got to hold my beautifull baby girl for the first time. What can Laurence arrange for next year….

Sitting here in the quiet of the afternoon, longing to be out enjoying this beautifull day, there was a small explosion on the beach. I got outside to see a puff of smoke rise off the sand and up the cliff. A number of people thought someone had dropped a file cabinate or something else heavy.

An explosion is somewhat out of the ordinary, although when I was growing up here and the military was more active in the area, a sonic boom was not a surprise. It is a little weird now since I am working on a retired military base (Fort Cronkhite) and there is a “retired” Nike missle base just across the lagoon, and close to where the explosion took place. A few people went down to the beach to check it out, since one of them thought there was something in the sand out there that looked like an old mine (which is also not unheard of).

Anyways, no news crews yet, and no one seemes to be harmed. The funny thing is that there are usually Rangers all over the place here, along with a fire station; and they both seem to be not here.

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Addendum
I guess the Rangers were on the job, apparently it was some kind of Marine Flare found on the beach that they decided to blow up to be on the safe side. The quickest way to disarm a bomb is to blow one up I guess. They just didn’t happen to tell up that we should be on the watch for an explosion. Oh well, some excitement for the afternoon.

Yep we are way back from France, and seeing Laurence’s parents along with various other family members. First of all let me just say we got first class International both ways…which rocks, and was great for Laurence since she was just shy of 6 months pregnent at the time. Much nicer than being crammed in a middle seat in the back of coach. Getting there ended up being a little expensive though, we couldn’t get on the last two flights to Nice and got stuck at London Heathrow. With Laurence experiencing “Baby Ache” and the fact we had to be back at the airport at 6am, we ended up staying at the Heathrow Hilton. Let me just say the exchange rate SUCKS! The room cost over $400 US for the night, and we got a good deal with an upgrade to the executive floor from some booth just outside of customs. If we had walked in off the street, we would have paid more for a lesser room. It was a nice room, but one that cost more than the Fairmont in San Francisco. UGH.

We spent a lot of time on the beach, saw some of Laurence’s friends and much of her family. We ventured into Nice and over the border into Italy. We ate way too much good food, and got really, really tan. I really need to work on my French much, much more.

We stopped for a few days in London on the way back home so I could have a bunch of meetings with the office there. It was good for me to meet all of them since I’ve been on the phone with a number of people there. I’m also starting to build a large project they have been designing there, so we were able to hammer out many of the details.

London was cool, but let me just say that the British spend Quid like we do greenbacks. However Quid are worth twice as much. That ended up being a bit of a culture shock. Why couldn’t they just swing with the rest of their European Community and embrace the Euro. Oh well.

Well I finally got a chance to upload these yesterday. I have two versions you can see; a slideshow that changes pictures evey 10 seconds, and a table version that has a thumbnail to the full high resolution picture. Both contain the same images.

Slideshow:
http://codyo.com/images/theLoWeddingSlideshow/

Table:
http://codyo.com/images/theLoWeddingWeb/

I only really had time to rotate the pictures I saw that needed to be rotated. Some came out really well, some are kinda fuzzy. I was bracketing (taking many pictures of the same thing) so you are bound to see some repeats. And if there is an unflattering picture you would like me to remove, just e-mail me or post a comment below, I’ll get the message either way.

Enjoy