Skipday

I skipped a day... sorry! Lately I've been falling apart I'm so sleepy!! I fell asleep extra early last night and drank some coffee and an energy drink for breakfast and did about 13 hours of work today getting my code working! It's amazing how sometimes the code starts big and clunky, but as I add features and functions, the number of  lines of code quickly decreases. It's really nifty like that :) Also, I've done very well so far at keeping this fast. I hope it works out -- Just a few more hours and it should be usable as a beta. So tired!! maybe I can get some sleep this weekend.

Let's see.. I took time off today to go to Costco. I rode my bike there and back, it's a little less than 30minutes and mostly flat. It's not a bad ride at all.

So here's Emma and her teddy bear. She's got a long way to go before she gets old enough to enjoy it.

see you space cowboys!

Angel food cake

After all the talking... it is finished!

Today's the first day I've skipped a workout... well,  I didn't skip it, I stopped in the middle. Maybe I'm just too sleepy or worn out but weight I've done before just was unmoveable!! I'll have to either take it back down by the smallest amount or try again tomorrow with fresh muscles.

Cake turned out nicely if I do say so myself... Rieko likes it... she's been nibbling on it from the fridge, the cake looks like a leaning tower of Pisa now!
Emma had her 1 month check up, she's up 1kg and 7cm from last month.

See you space cowboy.

1 month old

Today marks Emma's first month! Also it's the wife's birthday. So we went to the shrine for Emma and had sushi for lunch to celebrate Rieko's big day.
I was planning to make an angel food cake today, but when I went shopping for cake flour, the nearest store was closed, so I had to go an additional 2 or so kilometers to get the cake flour. A 30 minute shopping trip took 2 hours, so if I made the cake we wouldn't be able to eat it until too late in the night. Tomorrow I'll bake it... to be honest, I'm nervous, angel food cake can be so temperamental sometimes.. I'm planning to top it with some whipped cream and candy bars and some marscapone cheese and maybe some coffee... cut the cake in half and use that as a "filling".. I think it will be great!... if the cake works out..
One of my high school friends, Katy Field, has a blog and it seems that she's posting her introspection on life: http://introspectiononlife.blogspot.jp/ .. go say hi and tell her I said 'Hi' ... What was that song... "One more slow dance... " I think she introduced me to it.

Finally...  let's talk about how I calm our crying baby: I just lay her on my chest! ...
No serious... she likes her papa and gets super calm laying on my chest. We have a baby bjorn, and if I put her in it, she goes right to sleep! Also she likes being swaddled. After her daily bath, I also make sure to give her a nice little massage to help her stay calm. She's generally a good baby, but she seems to cry when I'm working from home and in the afternoon... but she sleeps through most of the night!

Speaking of work.. I'm slaving away coding a project trying to finish it before the Esomar conference which begins September 9th -- only a couple thousand lines of javascript (jquery flavored) php and html with the mysql database with like 700,000 records and 256 columns. It's gonna be close.. but I should make it!!

See you space cowboys

Baby bundle

Nuff said.

Sunday..

Today is the 26th, in 2 days Emma will be 1 month old (by the calendar, she's already over 4 weeks old) Rieko's birthday will also be on the 28th so.. I'm going to pull out a classic... Angel food cake!! Should be a piece of cake :p pardon the pun. Actually I dunno... my oven isn't the most precise machine.
We started paper work today to register Emma as an American citizen... you know it costs money?
I hope to take care of it the week after next.
Here's a photo of Emma for your pleasure:

30's day 1

Let's see what pictures I have for the first day of being 30!

Birthday cheesecake: made from yogurt and 0 calorie sugar substitute.

Rieko's steak... very close to rare (it cooked a little on the plate)

My 2nd steak "sashimi" style

Side of bread, with a hair!

Steak well done with cheese coated hamburger steak.

salad bar!!

Let's see.. birthday was great. I had a nice steak and hamburger steak lunch with an apple pie for dessert which unfortunately went to crap! Rieko and I ordered our steaks cooked to the same degree, rare, but only her's was rare. Mine was almost well done, so I told a waiter and he admitted it was overcooked -- usually they try to deny it and they say "that's the way we cook it" -- and he ordered me a new steak... which came out raw with just a nice sear, fortunately they serve it on a hot iron plate, so it slowly cooked up to a rare... is that weird or what? "Cooked up to a rare"... Next, my lovely baby loaf of not freshly cooked bread had a black hair on the bottom of it... So they got me a new one, after I was done with my meal... then finally we ordered a "Sizzling apple pie" which is served on the hot iron plate, but it was not sizzling at all! It was barely room temperature.. I'm not much of a complainer, but it was a bad meal, and it seems like I always have bad luck when I go to restaurants for anniversaries or birthdays... regular days I almost never have any trouble..

The highlight of the day was Rieko's "cheesecake" which used no creamcheese or any cheese but still tastes very good! I suppose the lack of sugar and cheese makes it extra healthy right? I would like to have it every day!!

So what's it like being 30? I dunno, I don't really notice much of a change!!

See you space cowboys!

30

Happy Birthday to me!

Today is the first day of my 30s! Wow... I guess I'm about 25% or so through my life! (I'm planning on a long life) Today is also post number 101! I just kinda casually started writing a post a day and suddenly I have 101 of them... too bad they're not Dalmatians, winter is coming and I could use a coat with a scarf and matching gloves.
Emma started slow on the weight chart as per the CDC and WHO but we weighed her today and most baby weight charts  have a kinda logarithmic look to them, starting steep but then leveling off... Emma's is the reverse, it started kinda level, but now is looking very vertical. She was a little under weight (in the lowest 5%) when she was born, but she's making up for it!

Speaking of weights. I started working out again at the beginning of August. I'm considering doing running again, but right now I'm focusing on weights and interval training. Most days I do a whole body workout, but now once a week I'm doing a 5x5. I'm up to repping almost my body-weight on bench press... and I only have dumbbell weights so that's pretty tough! I weighed 98kg this morning and yesterday I did 95kg 5 times as part of a quick whole body workout. It won't be long until I'm over 100!! I don't have quite as impressive weights with squats since it's really really really hard to hold 2 heavily loaded dumbbells in such a way that you can squat. When my new plates come, I plan on just loading 80kg on 1 dumbbell and squatting that. In the interim, I'm doing 1 legged squats and lunges with weights. It's not the same as a heavy squat, but you do what you can! Also, I'm up to 7 chin-ups ... I know, it's weak, but you have to start somewhere.

20's something

Today is my last day to be "20's"!! I forgot about it until Rieko started talking about it. My birthday is tomorrow! I'll probably have steak :) and work hard! Look at Emma looking so surprised hearing about my birthday!

see you space cowboys.

Long days and longer nights

How does today's title even match my blog?

Well.. it doesn't!!
Obligatory cute baby picture:

Let's see... I finally made some significant progress on this project for work, hopefully I'll have something to present by Friday or Monday (if everything goes well) You know, it's really hard sometimes to get code to work when you have to deal with excel/csv , Japanese/English (really, why is there sjis? or iso-2022 or whatever it is.. I swear encoding was invented to make life more difficult) and finally memory constraints... really? I can't load my 100,000 records with 256 entries into a cookie? Please? I found a really nice way using JSONH.pack -- I don't know what the algorithm he uses to pull the keys out, but it's a really nice easy way to compress JSON data and make it super easy to store and manipulate. Basically the more records you have, the more space you can save since it removes all the redundant keys.

Moving along..
Today was a great day for eating around these parts:

 Homemade seafood pizza on a tortilla

 Giant watermelon (I carried it home from the supermarket which is about 2.5km -- 45min walk away) Funny thing about melons. I like watermelon, but I loathe the taste of other melons. I don't really know why, but they all just taste like .. blah. Not a really good taste for me.

Sauteed veggies (zucchini, bell peppers, spinach) and steak with watermelon and mint. It is some good eats!!

Heya space cowboys.

Look at little Emma with her little(?) teddy bear.

Busy days as usual! Today I tried a new exercise routine based on the 5x5 idea, I haven't truly exhausted my muscles like this in a while. Basically, just do 5 sets with heavy weights at 5 times each. I did supersets, arm x leg in 3 sets, Chin-ups and squats, bench press and lunges, clean press and straight leg dead-lifts. I'm gonna feel it tomorrow! -- I hope...

Emma is doing great, she likes sleeping on my chest, it's so sweet. Rieko went to the post office today, I put her in the Bjorn and leaned back in my chair and she slept so sweetly for 2 hours.

Busy days

Mondays... so busy... Get up around 5:00 a.m. cook/eat breakfast,, leave for work at 6:00 get home at 4pm, jog, bath Emma, cook/eat dinner, walk doggies, work, bathe, play HON and sleep!

Tired!

Meatloaf.

 Wasn't yesterday's baby picture cute? She has such a hard life! Cry, drink milk, poop, sleep... repeat.. Every time she's awake she's looking for something to eat.. I bet she dreams of milk (since that's the only thing she's actually experienced in life so far)

Today I made a braised meatloaf... it is MMMMMmmmmm good!!! I made a shiitake mushroom gravy, then put my meatloaf in the gravy, toasted the top and then spooned some mushroom gravy over it... if I weren't so tired today ( I did a pretty heavy work out) I  would have opened the oven and spooned some gravy up every 15 minutes or so. Even without it, the meatloaf is moist, and the gravy is divine, though maybe a little salty (it was reduced from slow cooking in the oven)

Tomorrow we start all over at 4:30-5:30 or so so I'm off to bed for the night.

See you space cowboys!

P.S. today I got immortal in HON! :) went 15/0 with Lord Salforis jungling :)

One of those days...

Emma tired out!

TGIF

Happy Friday everyone!

The computer is up and running albeit with a quirky Windows 8 -- I'm in SLI mode right now, maybe I'll pull SLI off and just run the two cards side-by-side.. If I watch a video, and play a game I can only do one at a time or the video slows down.

We watched Masterchef yesterday, so we had steak tonight! I dare say my steaks are much better cooked than the masterchef candidates.. I make a truly nice rare steak :) Heated all the way through, but still purple/red in the center it was super tasty.. served with my favorite summer salad, cucumbers and tomatoes with olive oil drizzle and cottage cheese with some cracked black pepper on top.

Steak and Salad

Our pepper harvest!

Windows

Look! I put windows 8 on my new monster build... however .. I don't like it much!

I tried putting the latest and greatest linux ubuntu 12.04 but it doesn't want to support multiple monitors nicely... or maybe it did but I made a mistake by upgrading it to the newest alpha.. ah well, I'll mess with it later. For now, I have windows 8 and it works.

see you space cowboys.

Revolution

Emma's first stuffed animal

  This post is a little late for my daily posting streak, and it's going to be the first in a while that doesn't have loads of pictures of my little girl.

Anyway, as I stated yesterday, my computer died... I push the power button, and it tries to start, but doesn't fully start.. like a car whose engine is flooded (I think?) engine makes noise but won't turn over!  I tried to salvage what I could, but, motherboards have changed since I built the old beast, and almost none of the components are compatible with the new computer excluding hard-drives (they were all SATA) So, as soon as the computer died, I spent a few hours on Dospara.jp looking for new parts to build a computer. I put it all together using their website and ordered around 10pm.. I got the parts the next day around 5:30pm!!

  I started building around 7 and took my time making sure I put everything in very nicely and doing a post etc etc. All the parts were delivered correctly and they all worked straight from the box. I didn't have any luck getting an operating system on it yet, but when I get home today I will try to put snow leopard on it using iBoot (from tonymacx86.com)  and the snow leopard DVD I bought last year to try to put on the laptop (that failed btw). I also have a release of windows 8 x32 and x64 as well as Ubuntu 12.10 alpha 3 to try along with ubuntu 12.04 and linux mint 13 ( because alpha 3 is not recommended for day to day use)
About the pc.. She is built in a coolermaster Silencio 550 black case, on the gigabyte z77x-ud3h motherboard with an i7 3700 sandybridge intel chip and 16gb ram (2x 8gb from G.skill), the Palit video card is a 560x TI 1.5gb DDR5 and a 120gb SSD harddisk from AData. All in all, it was a little more than expected but pretty reasonable!
Here are pics:

All of that goes in the case below:

Looks messy!

The monolith case

There's a special woman out there who gave this to me (Mom).

Almost ready to post!

Finished! (that big silver thing cools my CPU)

Time to sleep!

R.I.P.

My main computer bit the dust today. It's been limping around lately and not wanting to power up etc.. circling the drain. So, now I bought a new computer, and for the first time ever, (excluding the living room entertainment computer) I hate spending the money on stuff for myself, but, I want a reliable computer that will last! I got a nice case this time too which is supposed to block out all sounds, it's also really dark so it will be nice in the bedroom. It also has a nice built in SD card reader, dockable sata bay and easy USB 3.0 -- this should be very nice :) It says it will be delivered within 24 hours.. I hope I didn't forget any parts!
Edit:
Here are the parts:
CoolerMaster Silencio 550 (RC-550-KKN...　[ 1個 ]
　　送り状番号[ 326527435905 ]
CoolerMaster 90 CFM Blue LED Silent F...　[ 1個 ]
ADATA AS510S3-120GM-C　　　　　　　　　　 [ 1個 ]
Palit GeForce GTX 560 SMART EDITION 1...　[ 1個 ]
SilverStone SST-ST75F-P　　　　　　　　　 [ 1個 ]
G.SKILL F3-1600C10D-16GAO (DDR3 PC3-1...　[ 1個 ]
DEEPCOOL GAMMAXX 400　　　　　　　　　　　[ 1個 ]
GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD3H　　　　　　　　　　 [ 1個 ]
Intel Core i7 3770K BOX　　　　　　　　　 [ 1個 ]
Only 16gb of ram for now.. 
See you space cowboys.

Monday .. bleh.

Long monday! Maybe 10 hours on the clock, left the house at 6:20. I did get a chance to go for a jog with the doggies doing 30sec/1min HIIT and finishing with a Squat/Push-up pyramid, 10 squats, 1 push-up, 9 squats 2 push-ups etc... Now it's time to lay me now to sleep .. with Emma :)