Yes, yes, I’m old. Har. I turned 30 on Saturday, with mercifully minimal fanfare although I did get a chance to talk to my brother and a few friends who called with warm (and welcome) birthday wishes. I spent nearly the entire day playing XBox which was as much of a celebration as I wanted so even if from the outside it looked like I didn’t do anything, I spent the day more or less exactly as I wanted. And, you know, clearly turning 30 has not sparked any sort of spontaneous maturation so I dodged that bullet.

The real downside of Saturday was the passing of Gin‘s father after a long struggle with heart problems. He had been undergoing some treatments to try and get him healthy enough to get on the heart transplant list but sadly his health was just too poor to get to that point and he passed away sometime in the wee hours of the morning surrounded by his family.

Now I didn’t know Dan all that well, although I met and spoke with him on a number of occasions. He came to our wedding and as he danced with Nikki during the obligatory “money dance” she thanked him for coming. His only reply was, in his typical deadpan simplicity, “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” But I do know that he was a genuine war hero, having served in Vietnam and been awarded the Purple Heart, which is now displayed with honor in Gin’s home. I know that Gin was very close to her dad and she is suffering a great deal right now. I also know that Dan will be missed, for all the world.

If you’re of the disposition to pray, I know Gin and her family could use some prayers for strength and peace. If not, perhaps take a moment to reflect on your own family and how precious they are. Take the time to call them and say, “I love you,” without self-consciousness or ambiguity. Let ’em know for sure. Give them a hug if you can. Make a point to appreciate the everyday heroes all around us who sacrifice on our behalf. We all owe them that much, at the very least.

Sleepless in Silicon Valley

I started my regular shifts at work this week. I, of course, use the term “regular” extremely loosely. I start at midnight and get off work at ten o’clock in the morning so there is pretty much nothing regular about it. One odd thing I didn’t really think about before starting this schedule is that when I used to work from home (way back in the very beginning of ironSoap, remember that? Anyone? No? Okay, then) and I’d work through the night, I would technically be working a similar schedule to what I have now except that even then I would go to bed early in the morning, usually between six and eight. That meant I was up sometime in the early to mid afternoon which isn’t all that different from just sleeping in really late. But now I don’t even get home until almost noon and Nik and I have sort of agreed that in order to spend at least some time together every day I get up around the time she gets home from work.

But that’s like six o’clock in the evening so it’s this truly bizarre state where I go to sleep when it’s all light outside and when I get up it’s dark.

I was given a couple of extra days off last week to try and get my sleep schedule adjusted but I had the hardest time making that happen so instead I’ve been kind of zombie-like all week. Mercifully today is my Friday so I should be able to catch up a bit and continue to adjust and hopefully by next week I’ll start to settle into a groove.

Other Bits

I realize this post is kind of all over the map, but I haven’t done much updating lately so I’m just kind of brain dumping. Sorry.

• Nik’s car got broken into last night and they ripped out her new stereo that I just got her for her birthday back in October. This, you may recall, is the second break-in at our apartment complex in about a year and is the third car-related theft (including the swiping of the entire vehicle last summer) in the same time frame. It’s getting really old and while part of the fault lies with us (we’re not always the most diligent about keeping our cars free of enticing bait), it annoys me that car crimes are at the absolute top of the list of incidents in our otherwise pretty safe little community and yet the police seem generally uninterested in doing much about it such as increasing street presence.
• We also lost both of our iPods which were stashed in the center console where the adapter for the stereo interface runs, and annoyingly our insurance is threatening to cancel our renter’s policy as a liability if we file a claim. Which makes me wonder, if they’re going to do this the first time we file a claim, what’s the point of having it again?
• By the way, for those keeping score, that makes all three iPods that we’ve owned, stolen. Someone must sure like our taste in music.
• In a strange twist of fate, the same day Nikki’s Sirius-capable stereo was stolen, her birthday gift to me arrived via UPS. It is a Stiletto portable satellite receiver and it’s really slick. It has built-in WiFi so you can connect to Sirius’ internet feed when you’re indoors (the satellite signal doesn’t work too well when the antenna isn’t outdoors) and it has a 2GB storage feature and TiVo-esque recording/scheduling function so you can load MP3s on it or queue up radio content to listen to later. Which should work great for Sharks games since Sirius gets all the NHL feeds.
• The only problem with the Stiletto (okay, two problems) is that the portable antenna is integrated with the special headphones and they’re a it bulky and dorky-looking. Not that I really care, especially since I’ll probably be using it mostly in the car, but it is kind of funny. Also the software for loading music files is Windows-only so I have to fire up Virtual PC which is just dog slow on my aging iBook. Fortunately I prefer iPods for digital music anyway (stop laughing, it ain’t funny) so it doesn’t really matter it’s just kind of a hassle.
• So Apple announced the incessantly-rumored iPhone today. As much as I usually like what Apple does, I’m pretty underwhelmed by this one. I’m sure it’s a very nice phone but what about some scoop on Leopard? Nothing? Anyone? Is this thing on?
• Meanwhile, TiVo finally, finally announced that they finished TiVo2Go for Macs. Hoorays and street-dancing all around, right? Well, no. See, here’s a snippet from the announcement in TiVo’s newsletter:
  

  We’ve partnered with Roxio to enable TiVoToGo in Toast 8 Titanium, available TODAY! Yes, you can now transfer your favorite TiVo recordings to your Mac, watch them in a player, burn them to DVD, and convert them for
  playback on iPod or PSP. […] And yes, Toast is the standard for disc burning software on the Mac. The new version 8 is truly awesome.

  Standard for disc burning? O RLY? That’s so funny because OS X Tiger supports system-wide disc burning on the OS level. I’d say that’s pretty durn standard. So in order to get the same functionality as a Windows PC I have to spend at least $40 for software that does something the system does natively? Unless I’m missing something I’m gonna have to say thanks, but no.

• Nik and I continue to discuss the possibility of moving closer to my work, but after looking at some affordable places in the area we were pretty underwhelmed. Also I forgot just how stupidly expensive moving is so we’re still kicking the idea around, we’re just not sure if it is still going to happen or when. At this point, we’re taking a sort of wait and see approach and keeping our eyes open. The commute isn’t all that bad when I don’t hit any traffic (which I don’t, typically, for this shift) but I wouldn’t mind finding a better use for those hours than driving and burning through my paycheck gas.