Well we’ve had our last sonigram, which means the last look before the birth. Have a look…

If you can’t make it out, turn your head to the right like your reading the spine of a book on a shelf.

Just down the road, and usually on the way home is the Guitard Chocolate Factory. Now you may or not have heard of Guitard, but you most probably have eaten their chocolate. I had the opportunity years ago to take a private tour they offered to the nearby Starbucks locations (they furnish all of Starbucks chocolate). Not only did I get to taste the whole process of how chocolate is produced, but see and smell the roasting process, the aging process, and the packaging process. I also walked out with 10 pounds of chocolate chips.

This plant operates 24 hours a day to produce much of the comercial chocolate in the US and many other places. I usually have to get off the freeway in Millbrae everyday since traffic is way too tied up from there on out. This allows me to drive down California Drive right around 6pm the rest of the way home. Right around then they are typically roasting a batch of coco beans, and let me tell you that this smell is just pure heaven.

If you’ve been lucky enough to smell coffee roast, or smell popcorn burn (I really can’t explain why this makes you want popcorn), you have some idea of what I’m talking about. But smelling chocolate roast is just so much better. If you are looking for a good euphoric high, just let me know, and I’ll get you some details. They don’t roast every day, but hit that spot at the right time, and you should be in luck.

This afternoon Laurence and I are hopping on a plane to Nice France so we can visit with Laurence’s parents and nearby family before our little one arrives. I know…poor Cody has to go and visit the in-laws just steps away from beaches on the French Riveara (spelling?) during summer, but I guess someone has to do it…

Lucky for me (and my Job) I’m going back through London and I can stop off there for a few days and meet with some people in the office Antenna Audio has there. I’m starting a large project with that office, and this is a good chance to touch base with them before we get rolling…

I might be blogging from my trip, but it all depends on time and when I get a chance to get on line…I’ll post some pictures if I can as well…

We had to go in for some tests a couple of weeks back, and as part of the workup they did Laurence had another Sonigram. What an amazing thing a Sonigram is, to use sound waves to see inside the womb, and the fact that its so fast and accurfate. We were seeing lifelike realtime movements. Now I’m sure I’m just being the excited father-to-be, and we’ve all kind of seen how this works (on TV and such), but again I just have to say how amazing it was.

We saw feet, a heartbeat, hands, but, head, spine, and everything else. At one point she was pushing back as the sonigram did its job, it looked like a little wave. You could even see her practicing swallowing. All I have to say is how cute!

Well Starting June 16th I will be gainfully employed by Antenna Audio in Sausalito, in thier North America Head Office. I’m very excited about working here, and they seem to be excited at having me there. Antenna Audio creates those museum audio tours at hundreds of museums all over the world. Its the kind of thing you’ve probably experienced dozens of times but didn’t think much about.

Lately they have been getting into developing their museum tours on the Pocket PC using Flash. So it looks like a great fit for me since I just love working with the Pocket PC. I’ll have various duties, and I’ll have to meed budgets and deadlines, but this has many qualities of my ideal job.

I felt pretty good about my first interview, but during my second interview they kept dropping hints that I got the job. At one point toward the end I was in an office with one of the programmers, and at seperate times both her and the Senoir Creative Manager mentioned that this would be my office…if I were hired.

The hardest part of this experience was that A.S.K. Learning had also offered me a 3 month contract working at Cisco with a good possibility of an extension. The pay was a lot better, but it would have been a bit of a streatch for me, and there was less stability. So this offer was made a week before Antenna Audio would be ready with their decision, which made it a very long week. Luckilly Antenna Audio was able to speed thing up a bit for me, and I got the Job offer yesterday afternoon.

Wish Me Luck…

My brother and his wife are comming home for the summer from Ireland. Matt and Niamh arrive this afternoon on British Air!!! We can’t wait to see them…

Well first let me just tell you that we’ve moved…same building…but apartment #4. It’s a two bedroom…so now we have room for baby, and (if it ever can be easy) moving was pretty easy since there was no truck involved, and the new apartment is just steps from the old one. In fact, with everyone’s help, we were able to move everything and get the old place cleaned up in just 3 Days…and I might say with no notice. So my heartfelt thanks to everyone who pitched in (Mom, Dad, Steve, Lauren, downstairs neighbor steve, Dan, Tom, Megan, and Laurence).

We also now have a bit of an outside…we have a balcony…YEAH! Its a similar layout to our last place, so organizing everything was prety easy. Empty one cabinate, fill the one next door. The rest went into the extra bedroom. But we seem to have most everything in its place now.

So the actual move went really well I thought. Even calling (most of) the utilities to have service switched over was a snap. We really were not as a loss for anything…Except the dreaded telephone.

Yes I love SBC…first they change the name of our ballpark to that “snappy” SBC Park, a phrase that rolls off your tongue like 3com stadium, but having the telephone switched over was something akin to throwing darts at me just to see if I would bleed, and if I didn’t die…they would throw some more. Now I know why Laurence didn’t want to call them.

So on April 30th when we decided to move, I called SBC and told them we would like the link switched over. No problem they told me, it should be live in 2-4 hours but the DSL ordering system was down, so I would have to call back monday to see when that would be back live again. But before I could finish the order…the phone was disconnected…as I am on the phone with them they disconnect it, I dont know if I should call that service, but it was speedy. So I call back on my cell, and complete the order. Wow I thought, that was deceptively simple…there has got to be more…and there was. So no dial tone that evening. I call back the next day between lifting boxes and they told me that they would look into it, and “have a dial tone in 2-4 hours” and I could switch the DSL over now and it would be live monday or tuesday. Cool. Still no dial tone. Again with the call and all of those lovely telephone menus that lead nowhere, just like wandering the halls of the Winchester Mystery House. I did the usual, name of the account holder, super secret last 4 digits of the social security number, quick explanation of a story…and still nothing but wasted minutes of my cell phone plan…which since they just bought my cell phone provider…I don’t understand why it shouldn’t be free…

So finally I get someone to “call a technician” who instead of comming out to see what was up and why we didn’t have a dial tone, they are able to “trace it back” from texas or someplace they were to the box at the side of the house…apparently their stuff was fine, it was the dreaded wiring inside of the house. I checked all the jacks inside, and everything looked great…it had to be the box on the side of the house…

So after a bit of deduction, we finally figured out that the previous tenant had that all in one RCN package (internet, cable, and telephone) and RCN had basically hijacked the wiring inside the house from SBC. I call RCN and they point the finger at SBC, and they point the finger at the landlord for having one working jack in the house, and that was the law. So finally I call our landlord and tell him the whole story, this was friday last week (one week after all this started), and he said just go ahead and get the work done, and he would reimburse us.

I call SBC back yet again, and get on the phone with a technician who told me I could have someone out the next week to switch the two wires for $120, or I could look under telephone in the phonebook and find a local person to do the work…so I looked, called the various dozen or so places, and found this guy who worked for PacBell for 20 years, John with z-com. He does custom wiring intallation now, but does this kind of thing here and there as it comes up. I called him friday afternoon ~ 5pm, he offered to come out Saturday and take care of it…then he calles back a half hour later and offers to do it that evening…what service…and what a nice guy. Finally a dial tone…

But it looks like as of today no DSL till the 20th…why it takes a month to get my DSL back…makes no sense to me…at least I can get on line now…

I’ve anounced this to a few people so far, but I would like to make this official. SushiFiend 2.0 is officially available for download http://www.confusionfree.com/sushiFiend.

If you have a Pocket PC with the Flash 6 player installed, simply open the file and tear into it. If you need an executable, drop me a line, and I’ll see what I can do.

This application has a basic menu with ~20 typical dishes, and it has the ability to update it with your own favorites. You can also rate each dish by how many servings you typically have. Then the menu information is passed along to the phone menu so you can easilly place a phone order. If you are at one of those sushi boat restaurants, the bill section will help you add things up. And the Prefs section will set prices appropriatly.

Download it, play with it, pass it along to your friends…Enjoy!

We are expecting a bright bouncing baby…due around Halloween.

If you haven’t heard yet, we’ve tried to contact as many family and friends as possible…but we just coudn’t get to everybody. Plus I just got this image and had to share it.

Welcome to our little peanut.

I wrote most of this Saturday April 3rd
I’ve flown a lot of places since I met Laurence. I never really had to fly stand-by until I met her, and I embraced immediately. We would both stress about the trip, but we seem to stress in complimentary way’s. It added a sense of adventure every time we went somewhere. There was always a chance we wouldn’t get on. This lead to the opportunity to travel the non-obvious route which also adds spice to a journey. Something always seemed to work out, even if it took a little longer to reach the destination.

Today was probably one of my worst experiences, but it could end up being my best. It actually started last night, friday April 2nd.

I had bought tickets to this Flash conference some months back. Because of Laurence’s flight benefits, it is actually much cheaper for me to buy tickets to a Flash conference in Toronto and make the trip there, than it is for me to buy tickets to a similar conference in San Francisco…go figure. I’m actually able to go to both conferences, but I had to volunteer at the San Francisco one. Which leaves the Toronto one for me to kick back, relax, and enjoy.

So last night I left for SFO. Laurence wasn’t feeling very well, but she was able to drop me at the train station, which would take me to BART, and in turn SFO for one of two red-eye’s to Chicago. And wouldn’t you know it, apparently it’s the Spring Break Sprawl and everyone is flying everywhere…so no flight for Cody.

Laurence was feeling well enough to come and get me, so I went home around Midnight for about 4 hours of sleep only to return to SFO at 5:30 A.M. To start the whole process over again.

I’m honestly not sure how many flights I didn’t get on to chicago, but I can tell you it was a lot. It’s not often I loose count of things. I seemed to develop a group of buddies that I really didn’t know, but I would see them at every flight looking as tired as I felt.

Lucky for me, Laurence was working in Kiddy City today and I got to hang out with her while I waited. She was like my inside man, running the flight loads and compairing them with the standby lists. Those little bits of information helped immensely.

Around noon my group of standby refugees and I were told to walk back down the terminal again to go and wait for the next departure. I started to leave after everyone else when she called and told me to hang out there for a few minutes. Lucky me,
There were a bunch of families traveling together an there was one last seat. Boarding pass in hand as I crossed the threshold of the jetway, I hear the agent yelling “WAIT”. Two paying passengers showed up after the last minute and the were going to board instead. All I could do was laugh…

Back in Kiddy City we went over my options, and things were looking grim. If I flew threw Boston and spent the night in the airport there, I would get there late tomorrow, but I would get there. I was getting ready to accept defeat and go home with Laurence at 4 P.M.

Lucky for me, one of the Chicago flights was running late, and was rescheduled to leave at the same time as the following flight, so my odds were cut in half. I got the last seat on a 2 P.M. flight, and through some last minute mixup I got to ride upstairs First Class in a 747-400, my first time riding upstairs.

It was fantastic, a warm sandwich, a couple if Gin & Tonics, and a nap makes Cody a new man. I’m sitting here in Chicago getting ready to board, and for a great weekend. I guess things really do work out…

As a little Footnote, I got First Class the whole trip. I got back late Monday night and I had a great time. I guess with a little patience…anything can happen…