everburning

As usual, I’ve been lax in my blogging. As you can see, we’ve been busy with other things. For some of you, this will be your first introduction to Brandon Oberon Sinclair. Born May 5, 2009 at 1258 hours. Everything went smoothly and seemed pretty quick, although, I think Stacy would say it was too long. I’ve been off work on paternity leave for the last 3 weeks helping out with the baby and generally around the house. (Yard work is the new bane of my existance.)

On the whole, everyone here is doing good. The stream of visitors has slacked off after the first week which was nice. Gave us some time to nap up and get things in order. We’re slowly moving in to a routine and getting used to all the feedings, poopings and droolings. I didn’t think it was possible to poop that much. On the whole I think we’re, slowly, getting this whole baby thing worked out and our ducks back in a row.

I’m gearing up to head back to work, which is going to be a change from staying home for the last few weeks. We’ll see if I fall asleep at my desk, heh.

Well, as usual, it’s been quite a while since I last posted. Lots going on the past month or two. As you know, I got a job a AideRSS where I’ve been having a lot of fun working with Rails, MySQL, Ruby and a few other bits. Lots of interesting stuff happening on both the front and back-end systems.

Along with the job, we’ve moved into our new house in Waterloo. Stacy and I have been busy unpacking and organizing stuff for the last couple of weeks. Most stuff is sorted out now I think, Canada Post finally found our mail from the two week hold they had on stuff and both of us are settling in pretty well. Just waiting on the last few pieces of furniture to arrive.

Since we’ve finally got a house, and a bit of a yard, we picked up a puppy on Saturday. We got ourselves a little Welsh Corgi which we’ve named Odin. He’s been a lot of fun so far. Lots of energy and lots of sleep seem to be the orders of the day.

There have been lots of other fun side trips, losing of Foosball tournaments, wine tasting and other goings on that I’m leaving out at the moment.

Hopefully I’ll get back into some more regularly schedule writing now that things are starting to settle down. Although, I appear to be getting volunteered to do a presentation at DevWaterloo tomorrow so we’ll see what happens.

Since I start my new job at AideRSS on Tuesday in Waterloo, Stacy and I have been busy getting the condo ready for sale. I spent a good portion of today steam cleaning the carpet in the living room.

While the steam cleaner works well at picking a lot of gunk out of the carpet it doesn’t do so well with cat hair. The hair just kind of clumps together into balls. Stacy spent a bit of time picking these up as our vacuum cleaner sucks.

Once we got sick of this method we went and bought a Dyson. If you don’t have a Dyson go buy one, it’s awesome. We didn’t have to steam clean the bedroom as the Dyson made the carpet look new. Damn, the amount of cat hair that thing sucked up. Was an impressive sight.

So, with the carpets almost clean, the holes in the walls filled and primed and about 1/2 of our stuff shipped up to my parents house, we should be ready to have this place on the market in a few days.

Here’s to hoping for a quick sell.

A friend of mine has just returned from many moons out in Vancouver working for big game companies to start his own indie company. He’s keeping a blog of the trials and tribulations of starting a company and creating his first game.

It’s been pretty interesting so far. If you’re interested, check it out over at http://streamingcolour.com/blog.

So, Stacy and I were planning on going to Seattle this week for a vacation. We wandered off to the airport early this afternoon and arrived at about 2.20 (our flight was for 4.20 so lots of time.)

At this point we ran into what must have been the longest line I’ve seen in an airport. All queued up for the Delta checkin. Ok, fine, I’ve been in lines before, we join the line. We wait. And wait. And wait. Three steps every 10 minutes isn’t much progress. The clock rolls around to 3 and we’re starting to get a bit nervous. You have to check in an hour before your flight so we start looking around for any Delta people on the floor that we could talk to. There was an American Airlines guy but he was just helping his passengers through the Delta line.

At about 3.20 I jumped the line to ask the guy at the Delta counter if we should be moving up as we had the 4.20 flight. I was, tersely, informed that everyone in the line was waiting for the 4.20 flight. Back to the line I went. 3.30. 3.40. 4. 4.10. 4.20. By this point we were about 10 feet from the start of the roped off section marking the beginning of the line. According to the flight board our flight was still on time. 4.30. 4.50. 5. 5.10. Ok, about 10 people left in front of us in line. Well, except for all the people that keep budding into line. And the people that take 45 minutes at the counter. What could you possible be doing that takes 45 minutes and the ticket agent to be on 2 phones at the same time? Yes, she had a phone pressed against each ear.

Keep in mind, in all this time Delta hasn’t said anything to us. There are no Delta agents in sight except for the people behind the counter. The GTAA (Greater Toronto Airport Authority) agents keep telling us that a Delta agent will be out soon to tell us what’s going on. No Delta agent appeared.

5.30 rolls around and an agent stands up and says Ok, everyone in line will have to be rebooked on a flight tomorrow. At which point a lot of people go ape shit. The two ladies in front of us were trying to get a connection so they can get to England. It looked like that managed to brow beat the agent into giving them a ticket.

Stacy and I didn’t bother. I called up Expedia and after an bit time on the phone got a full refund from Delta and most of a refund for the hotel. We’ve got to pay for one night but that’s it. Not too bad. Sounded like she didn’t’ have too much trouble with the Delta office either. Other people in line were calling and Delta was telling them they were still able to get on the flight or it was their problem for being late (not what you want to tell someone after they’ve been in line for 3 hrs at your ticket counter.)

So, kudos to Expedia for getting everything cancelled and the refunds for us. Delta, bite my shiny metal ass. I’ll never book on your airline again.