Packing Day

Today I find myself with a bit of spare time, sequestered in the downstairs bathroom of our old house while a group of people pack up the bulk of our worldly possessions for the move tomorrow. I always feel a bit awkward having a bunch of people around me busily working while I'm obviously not, so this is probably about the most comfortable place in the house, overall. Certainly not physically comfortable, but it's nicely out of sight while still letting me hear if they're asking questions about whether something should be packed or not. Outside would be nice except for not being able to see the screen.

One of the things I've noticed while packing is that what appeared to be a giant stack of paperwork that I've been dreading sorting through and organizing isn't really all that big on the scale of packing stuff up. It's still going to take quite a while, since I have to sort it page by page rather than as a stack, but hopefully once everything else comes together at the new house, which is likely to include a new filing system, maybe it'll be easier to work through.

I'm looking forward to leaving my old commute behind: the billboards in Lake City with advertisements for Dubai, the two doughnut shops that I haven't stopped at since moving back up here, and the long, long lines of cars winding around the north side of Lake Washington. It won't be all sunshine and daffodils, since we're leaving daffodils here, and I've seen traffic on Boyer at rush hour heading the opposite direction (which rules out one house where I really liked the pictures but was going to be nearly impossible for us to get in and out of in the evenings). I did manage to squeak over 18mpg out of my last tank of gas, which is better than what I was getting with the old car, even including the autocross weekend, which were usually good for upping my average by 0.2 to 0.3 mpg. I have no idea where I'll be filling up the car going forward, but that's just more encouragement to bike. At least our timing on that is good with this move. When we first moved up here, I hadn't been biking for too long before we got to September when gloves and rain gear started to become very important. This time, I'll have a good four months to prepare for that (and find where all the rain and snow gear got packed away).

There are a bunch of things we wanted to do with this house that we didn't get around to. I suppose that's for the best. We'll be downsizing our water feature, but at least the new one does have a pump. The pump isn't working right now, but it's a step in the right direction. The setup of the house isn't so great for using computer speakers for most applications so I expect big upgrades in audio quality as well, once I find the time to put together a plan for the electrician. That'll be top of the to-do list next week I suspect, after we know where the internet connection will come into the house. Something's definitely changed, since not only will we not have an internet connection ready to go before we move in, but the stereo won't be the first thing unpacked and set up. I guess this is what comes from growing up.

California Sun (Mostly)

My second solo trip with Moira went pretty well, in spite of presenting a new set of challenges. Waking up, getting breakfast, picking up something for lunch, getting her to daycare and getting to work on time is a challenge when dealing with a hotel. This is as close as I care to get to being a single parent. It's clear that trying this at home, or even having a kitchen, would make it a bit easier, but there still don't seem to be enough hours in the day. I think the closest we got to bedtime was an hour later than usual, and that was only because we were in a hotel with no bathtub, so bath was postponed for a day.

On the plus side, she did her own packing, which was somewhat questionable. For Thursday and Friday, I'd mentioned that we should probably have brought her shoes. The downpour we got Saturday morning, though, made her rain boots the perfect choice.

We closed on our new house on Friday. Moving is two weeks from now. In the meantime, there's a huge amount of stuff to get ready. It's also the beginning of a new quarter that includes the review for a round of promotions, so there's a huge amount of stuff to do at work as well. This week also includes Norwescon, and prep for a long gaming weekend in May. This would be one of the reasons for taking it easy on caffeine most of the time, so that during periods like this, there's a bit of reserve to dip into when I start trading sleep for an extra hour or two a day.

Don't Stop Believin'

My original plan had been to start out by spoiling the ending of Journey by revealing that, at the end of the game, when you take off your robes, you find out that you are Steve Perry, and it unlocks Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) for Rock Band. Catching up on a podcast today, I heard someone make a similar quip. Sadly, I didn't have time to come up with anything else.

The biggest gripe I've heard about the game is that it has a $14.99 price tag for an experience that lasts about two hours. Honestly, for me, that convinced me to buy it now rather than wait. I've liked thatgamecompany's other work, but it took me quite a while to get all the trophies out of Flower. Knowing that even I could quite likely get through Journey in a single playthrough (which is apparently the recommended way of experiencing it) increased the appeal dramatically. Between quarter end activities for work, getting ready to move in less than three weeks, and trying to minimize getting out of bed in the middle of the night, there wasn't a two hour stretch to sit down in front of a game. There's an outside chance next Sunday, followed by near certainty while Shannon is at Norwescon.

A while back, I made a spreadsheet of the games I intend to get around to playing, and Journey will be ignoring that. From the spreadsheet, I'm slowly working through Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City as probably the last game I'll finish this year. The next game on the list is Dragon Age: Origins. Considering that Red Dead Redemption took me over 9 months to finish (and an extra 5 months to get the platinum trophy), I think it's safe to say that anything wanting my attention will have to be either bite-sized or run on Android. Maybe I'll get "lucky" and they'll release an interoperable version on the PS Vita. At this point, I think that'd be enough to get me to pick up one. I don't see it happening for much less than that.

This week's adventure: Moira and I heading to California for a business trip. She wants to go to Disneyland as well, and even though she was able to tell on a map that going from where we'll be to Disneyland is a longer trip than from home to Canada, she still wants to go. Hopefully seeing her Grandpa will be enough. For me, I think it'll be catching up on reading, sleeping, and maybe getting our finances in order as we prepare to deal with having two mortgages.

I can't let a post with this much Journey content go by without including my favorite web comic in recent memory.

More audio stuff, and a bit of nighttime reading

This blog isn't always going to be about music, but that's where a lot of my non-work time has been the past week. On the plus side, the portion of my non-work time I spend in my car is now more pleasant now that the stock radio/cassette deck has been replaced. It's amazing how much better a clean signal sounds than an FM radio signal.

Speaking of the car, I'm still getting used to the clutch. I think I'm averaging one stall a day. This hasn't incurred much wrath from my fellow drivers yet. Shannon's car doesn't challenge me this much, so I think there's hope. What is challenging me is that the cars have reverse in the exact opposite location. This will fail safely in my car, since if I'm frequently stalling in 1st, there's no hope I can get the car moving in 6th. If I mess up in Shannon's car, I'll start moving in the wrong direction. I think the only times I've gotten close were in our garage, so the damage would have been contained.

I did get a brief reminder of what's wrong with the Squeezebox music solution. Adding an extra receiver involves doing a factory reset on a remote and then resetting the new receiver at the correct time(*)(**). Thankfully, the remote does remember your registration with mysqueezebox.com even across factory resets, but I still had to enter the code for the wireless network after each reset. It also reminded me that when I first bought the system, I wanted to use it not only for music, but as a wireless bridge. That was doable with their initial product, and was technically possible with the ones I have, but they never exposed the configuration in the interface.

While we were at Disneyland in February, Moira decided she wanted to go on the Alice in Wonderland ride. I'm not sure if I'd ever been on it myself before, so we gave it a try. Thankfully, unlike Pinocchio, she didn't find it scary. She didn't like the Queen of Hearts being angry, but the rest of the ride was enough of a hit that, after the first time, we went on it at least once a day. Since I had the book on my tablet, we started reading it for bedtime while we were there. She told me then that it was boring and she just wanted to go on the ride. Since we've been back, she's been asking me to keep reading it. We finished Chapter 9 tonight. It gives me hope that maybe we'll be able to go back to Wind in the Willows, although she felt that ride was scary enough on her first trip that we didn't go on it this time.

* - there is a Perl::UDAP module that lets you do the configuration without a Squeezebox Duet remote. It may come as a surprise to some that I didn't go this route, but I didn't want to tear anything apart to free up a cable, or pull out the supplies to build one. I'm definitely getting older.

** - just in case I ever have to do this again... (1) Factory reset on the remote. (2) Configure wireless networking and accept the existing connection to mysqueezebox.com. (3) Scroll the menu down to "Choose Player". (4) Hold the button down on the receiver until it starts quickly flashing red (about 5 seconds). (5) Select "Choose Player", pick the appropriate one. (6) Hope the network configuration works (75% success so far).

Not Putting My Money Where My Mouth Was

About two months ago, I got asked about home music systems. At that time, I was particularly upset with our Squeezebox setup at home. I've had issues with it of one form or another for about the entire 3.5 years I've been using it. At one point, it was frustrating enough that I unplugged the players, but lack of alternatives around Christmas this year had me reluctantly press one back into service.

In the past, I've had problems with network stability, broken upgrades, missing search results, library scanning issues, and lots of extra steps I feel shouldn't be necessary to just keep the system working. Setting up the player for Christmas meant trying the latest software version, since that was a lot easier to do than trying to go back to the last version I know worked. Surprisingly, most of the issues were resolved. Scanning still doesn't always terminate, but a couple kicks tends to be enough to get what I want from it. The remote is much better about staying on the network, search actually finds the things I know are there, and the plugin system is working again.

With the house we're buying, the two Squeezebox receivers I have aren't going to be enough, so I decided to look at the options, and look for opinions on Squeezebox vs. Sonos. Looks like the general opinion is that people who are exposed to both are generally a bit jealous of what the other one does. I'm apparently not alone in my frustration with things being unstable. Meanwhile, it sounds like the Sonos people are a bit jealous of being able to fiddle with the system as much as is possible with the Squeezebox. Maybe that's not entirely accurate, but looking at actual Sonos website, it really feels like the Apple sort of "we know how to do this and it's all just going to work". Perhaps, but it'll work their way and not mine, and paying to find out what their way is looks a bit steep.

That the real decision point here for me - the Sonos bits are about twice as expensive as the Squeezebox ones for what I want. There's the small caveat that what I want from Squeezebox has been discontinued, but there's enough stock out there that I managed to get what I was looking for, with a couple spare remotes in case of accidents. That, and being able to use the existing two units, rather than having to buy two additional Sonos boxes sealed it. No way was I considering trying to have both systems going. I've sunk enough time into trying to get all the music in order, and there's plenty more work to do there.

So, for now, even though I recommended other people start off looking at Sonos, I'll stick with the devil I know, who seems a little less bad at this particular moment. I'm still looking forward to something other than a phone or tablet that'll interface with Google Music, but that'll have to wait. I suppose in theory, I could write a Squeezebox plugin, but I'm more likely to grumpily wait and, in a few years, if nothing else changes, get one of the kids to write it instead.

No Better Time Than Two Decades Ago

I've just returned to work after roughly three months off. A lot has gone on during those three months, and I've realized that I've lost a lot of information over the decades of my life because I just can't remember that well anymore. Had I been reliably blogging since I had internet access (which would have been really pioneering, since that was 1988), I'd have a chance of recalling a lot more, like how many times I'd seen various bands in concert, what rides Moira rode the first time we went to Disneyland, or how long it's actually been since I've been on skis (rather than simply running after a three year-old who is on skis).

We'll see how this goes. I'm going to aim for at least a post a week, life permitting. With two kids, a full-time job, and a new house being purchased, what could go wrong?

Holiday Letter 2011

Making predictions is for the year is always a challenge. The extended trip to London we were planning on taking this year didn’t work out. Turns out, we had plenty of other things going on to keep us busy. First and foremost, as should be obvious from the card, we have a new addition to the family. Since Moira was 1.5 weeks early, and the second child is generally earlier than the first, we fully expected him in November. Having him take his own sweet time arriving in December was quite a surprise. Everyone seems to be taking it in stride now, although it has made things a bit more complicated for Walker’s new manager. We did have our share of tacos this past year; we won a charity auction, which got us a taco truck to cater Moira’s birthday party. She now has a pretty good bar to aim for if she doesn’t want her coolness to have peaked at age three.

The reason for skipping the trip to London wasn’t Davis, but Walker’s move into management. With the new role with a new team in a new office, it no longer made sense to spend a large chunk of time helping out with a different office. Moira will have to wait to see the ancestral home of Winnie the Pooh.

Travel as a family this year was limited to one trip to Vancouver and one trip to Tucson. Shannon also got a long weekend in Boston while Walker took a few trips to Mountain View for work. We’re hoping 2012 will see a bit more. It looks promising so far, as Davis seems very happy to ride around in the car. Well, Shannon’s car. He hasn’t met mine yet, although his car seat will fit.

Moira loves being a big sister. Her favorite part so far has been the diaper changes, where she drops whatever she was doing and rushes over to pull out a new diaper. Some day, she’ll learn the reality of diaper changes, but for now, it’s good someone is showing enthusiasm. She also likes holding the baby and showing off for him, but is a bit disappointed he didn’t arrive ready to play with her. She has a knack for finding girls 2-3 years older than she is and making them play with her, so we’ll just have to continue to rely on the community to keep her amused for now.

Beyond sisterhood, Moira continues to enjoy arts and crafts, gymnastics, reading, playing with her extended doll family including a husband and several children, making grocery lists, and especially skiing. She’s still on the bunny slopes for now, making a couple turns over the course of the run. She has to make four turns and be able to stop before we go up on the list. We’re hopeful that will happen this season. We’re also hopeful that the grandparents will let us wait for two years before we’re taking Davis up to the slopes. At that point, he should be able to use Moira’s current “Princess” skis. If that winds up in a book about traumatic childhood experiences, you heard it here first.

In addition to increasing the size of our family by 33% this year, Shannon continued with her quilting group, helped with Norwescon organization, kept up with Moira’s busy schedule of activities, and helped start a pre-school co-op with some of Moira’s closest friends.

Outside of work, Walker’s main extracurricular activity has been autocrossing. Last year, he got 3rd in class individually and his team came in second (both because he wasn’t able to make it to the final event). This year saw improvement to first in both categories (although his contributions dwindled a bit after clinching the individual title. He’s very grateful to his teammates for not kicking him to the curb for slacking off at the end.

Wishing you a happy and healthy 2012,

Walker, Shannon, Moira & Davis