This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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So, here we are with the Kindle Ratio (what proportion of the last 20 books I’ve read are available on Kindle) as of right after my post about Ender’s Shadow. The percentage goes up a bit because this last book was available, where as the one that dropped off was not. As mentioned, this metric is now biased by the fact that the way I pick books now prefers Kindle books. For those interested, the 20 books this was based on were:
- YES – Ender’s Shadow
- YES – The Elegant Universe
- YES – Children of the Mind
- NO – Introduction to Algorithms
- YES – Xenocide
- YES – The Geography of Bliss
- YES – Speaker for the Dead
- NO – First Break all the Rules
- YES – Ender’s Game
- YES – Until the Sea Shall Free Them
- YES – Foucoult’s Pendulum
- YES – Java The Complete Reference
- NO – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- YES – The Audacity of Hope
- NO – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
- NO – Data Mining
- YES – The Children of Hurin
- YES – Dreams from my Father
- NO – The Odyssey
- NO – Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (Vol II)
I’ll note as I have the last few times that other editions of The Odyssey and the Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (Vol II) are available on Kindle, just not the specific editions I read.
So yesterday I thought my new iPhone 4 was in my pocket. In fact it was on my lap. So when I got out of my car it fell onto the pavement in my driveway. It was not unscathed.
Just some small scuffs in the metal and a tiny chip on the edge of the glass in one spot. Very minor. If you were not looking carefully you would never notice. And even then you would note that the cosmetic defects were tiny and trivial.
Nonetheless these are the first blemishes on my shiny new iPhone. And as always the first time this happens with new gadgets it makes me sad.
But I guess it means it is truly mine now. :-)
47.548409-122.174018
To drive that is… With an adult in the car… Which will happen in some parking lot later tonight I guess!
As of right now… 2010 Oct 20 20:40 UTC (1:40 PM Pacific, 4:30 PM Eastern)… Amy is exactly 15 years old. Happy Birthday Amy!
Next up… driving!
As of right now, 16 Sep 2010 at 07:39 UTC (12:39 AM Pacific, 3:39 AM Eastern) I am exactly 14244.4458 days old, which is also of course exactly 39 years. Ouch. Those are getting to be big numbers. :-)
Calculation below:
- Born: 16 Sep 1971 at 20:58 UTC (1:58 PM Pacific, 3:58 PM Central, 4:58 PM Eastern)
- Julian Born: 2441211.37361
- 1 year = 365.242199 days
- 39 years = 14244.4458 days
- Julian 39 Year Birthday = 2455455.81941
- 39 Year Birthday = 16 Sep 2010 at 07:39 UTC (12:39 AM Pacific, 2:39 AM Central, 3:39 AM Eastern)
Non-geeks might just say Alex’s birthday is September 12th and be done with it, but of course I can’t do that, I have to be a bit more specific. So here is the calculation…
- Date and time Alex was born: 12 Sep 2009 at 16:39 UTC (9:39 AM Pacific, 12:39 PM Eastern)
- Converting to a Julian date using a Julian Date Calculator gives: 2455087.19375
- Adding 1 year (365.242199 days) gives the Julian Date when Alex is exactly 1 year old: 2455452.435949
- Converting back to a normal date using the same Julian Date Calculator gives:
- 12 Sep 2009 at 22:27 UTC (3:27 PM Pacific, 6:27 PM Eastern)
Hey look, that is later today!
Specifically, that will be exactly 12 hours from the time of this post. I’m sure I’ll make another post in 12 hours when Alex *actually* hits the milestone, but consider this an early preview. At 3:27 PM Pacific, 6:27 PM Eastern, Alex will be one year old. Gulp, our little boy is just a few hours away from being a whole year old! Unbelievable. It can’t possibly have been that long…
Hey, look, after several days of pre-scheduling posts at regular intervals, it appears I am all caught up on both posting pictures and posting my little blurbs about things I have watched and such. Woo! Now I won’t know what to do with myself. I’ll have to start thinking of other things to post perhaps. Or maybe I just need to take more pictures or watch more stuff. Of course, I still need to catch up on the monthly Alex videos. And there is a Curmudgeon’s Corner that is recorded but not yet posted. So look for those soon. But for now, I’m all caught up. Woo! Woo!
As of a few minutes ago, Alex has figured out how to write on a white board with a marker. And how to write on walls. But we won’t talk about that. But he is now drawing! Woo!
Less than two hours from now, at 11:58 UTC (4:58 AM Pacific, 7:58 AM Eastern), Alex will officially turn 11 months old. Almost a year. Gulp! He is such a big boy!
I’ve been bad, I haven’t even posted the highlights video for his 10th month (although it has now been edited and will be on YouTube soon and posted here shortly thereafter), let alone gotten anything ready for the eleventh month which is about to end. Oh well, I’ll catch up eventually maybe. And after we hit a year, I’ll do those less frequently than every month anyway.
I’ve also not lately done just a general update on what Alex is doing and such, so here goes:
- As I posted a little over a week ago, Alex is now walking. We went from a few tentative steps without holding on to anything to toddling all over in the space of a few days. This means we have a toddler now instead of a baby, and he is of course using his increased mobility to the fullest, and is getting into everything he possibly can.
- He’s also doing the climbing thing, up onto things, down off things, out of laps, up and down stairs. All with no problem and no fear. (Even when there should be fear of course, so we watch carefully.)
- His vocabulary is growing slowly but surely. I am now “Daa Eee”. There is of course “MaMa” going on too. And I am pretty sure there is “Aay Eee” for Amy, but Amy doesn’t recognize it as such yet. And of course “dog”, still his favorite word by far. And “look”, constantly used while pointing at things he wants to see more of. And “book”. We have “clock” as well, but he associates that with the Tix Clock I have in my office instead of a normal clock. Oops. There is also now “up”. And “ball”. Those are the most common. I think a few others have made appearances off and on. (For instance, a handful of times he identified a couple of other animals in one of his games… a duck and and a goat… but that just happened a couple of times and didn’t repeat much.) Oh, and then there are the things for which there are words, just not the right words. “Guck” is the fish in his bedroom, but also all fish. And of course, “ning” has meant milk since long before his first English word (that would be dog I think) started being used.
- He has learned deception, trying to trick us to look the other way or otherwise be distracted before he snatches glasses off our faces.
- He loves the Jeopardy theme song and plays close attention whenever it comes on.
- When certain songs come on he starts to bounce and dance.
- He likes watching Big Bird on TV. Also other muppets and the occasional cartoon. Humans, not so much.
- He pushes his own mini shopping cart when we go out shopping.
- He will climb up onto my lap and put his head down on my chest when he is ready to go to sleep.
- He loves pushing buttons and has tried multiple times to send faxes on our printer. If we actually had the printer hooked up to a phone line, he would have succeeded. We get the confirmation pages saying tit tried to send a fax but failed. He has however made a variety of copies using the copy feature.
- He gets super happy and excited when I get home from work, jumping up and down and squealing and getting himself to where I am as fast as he can manage.
- When he finds things that we have taken away from him in the past, he picks them up, then yells at us to get our attention and hands them to us.
- He feeds the dog all the time. Roscoe and Alex are quickly becoming best friends. Lately, he has been going up to the dog, giving him a big hug, then resting his head on Roscoe’s side.
- In general he is a happy healthy little boy, doing all the things you would expect at this age. And having a blast doing them. He has so much fun!
Anyway, eleven months now. One more month until his first birthday. Wow. And there is that whole thing where somehow it simultaneously feels like it was just yesterday that we brought him home as a tiny baby and that he has been here forever and how could there possibly ever have been a world without him. I guess that is how these things go.
A few hours ago we got word that the final paper work was filed and signed by all the appropriate people. Brandy is now divorced!
I hadn’t mentioned this online earlier, but this was also tied up with fixing another legal mess. Washington state makes the assumption that any child born to a married woman (or any woman divorced less than a year from the birth for that matter) is the child of the husband. You can’t, it seems, even declare otherwise on the birth certificate. (At least that was the advice we were given when Alex was born.) So the “father” spot on Alex’s birth certificate was left blank. Tied in with this divorce were all the documents where Brandy’s (finally now officially) ex-husband was declared not to be the father and I was declared to actually be the father and updates to the birth certificate ordered. This required documents signed by everybody all around plus results of DNA paternity testing showing that Alex was indeed half mine and half Brandy’s. Etc. Fun stuff.
At the same time all issues to officially get custody of Amy in the right state were taken care of. This basically makes official the fact that Brandy’s ex hadn’t been involved in her life since she was a toddler and Brandy has custody and all that. It has been the de facto case for 12+ years, but now all the right paper work is in place.
Getting here has been a real mess. We finally got around to hiring a lawyer for all this stuff almost two years ago now. We tried to do it on a budget though and got a pretty cheap one, who spent the next two years proving you get what you pay for. I’d been arguing for a long long time (almost since our first interaction) to fire him and hire one who wouldn’t take several tries to get basic facts on paperwork correct, who wouldn’t encourage just signing the paperwork with the incorrect information because it was easier than redoing it to correct it, who wouldn’t miss court appointments and filing deadlines, who would actually answer emails or phone calls in a timely fashion, and who would actually occasionally communicate with us what was going on and give semi-articulate answers to questions rather than appearing to always be confused about both the facts of our case and the relevant laws governing the situation, but Brandy wanted to plug through it figuring eventually he’d manage to get it right.
Monday there was one last set of screw ups. Brandy got a call mid-morning saying to be at the courthouse at 3:30 PM to meet an associate of our lawyer, but no clear indication of exactly what would be happening, what was needed, etc. It appeared I wasn’t necessary though. So I wasn’t going to be there. Until about 3:20, when Brandy called me urgently to let me know that it turned out that I needed to sign two additional documents. And they had an appointment with whatever judge dealt with such things at 4 PM. It would have been very helpful if I’d known about that a few hours earlier. So I rushed out of work to try to get to the courthouse. I took the company shuttle to a building closer to the courthouse, then started run-walking as quickly as I could manage in the direction of the courthouse. I kept going and going and going. No sign of any courthouse. I had texted Brandy with “Go to 4th and then take a right, right?”. I hadn’t got an answer. Until she finally responded that I was going the wrong direction. I turn around, continuing to go as fast as my out of shape legs would take me without looking like a complete idiot on the street. Then I texted “The one with the big white steps”? Except my iPhone corrected that to “big white stars”. I headed into the building, but it turned out to be the wrong building, and Brandy texted to say I was too late, they were done.
Fully expecting the possibility that we had missed another deadline, or the lawyer had screwed something new up, or the the fact my signatures were missing would cause things to once again be pushed way out into the future while things had to be done all over again, I finally met Brandy outside the courthouse. She had the lawyer’s associate with her. There had indeed been a few other irregularities (for instance Brandy’s ex was technically required to take a parenting class as part of the disposition of Amy and he hadn’t) but the judge had given the green light to proceed anyway. The only thing missing was my signatures. If I had turned left instead of right after getting out of the shuttle, I could have been physically present in front of the judge too (I would have just barely made it), I would have signed what needed to be signed, and Brandy’s divorce, the declaration of Alex’s parentage, etc would all have been finalized on Monday. As it was, I signed the papers I needed to sign right there in front of the courthouse. The lawyer’s associate took them and filed them on Tuesday and all remaining approvals from the judge were given at that time. We just got confirmation that all was in order… finally… just a little bit ago.
So Brandy is officially divorced. Amy is officially in Brandy’s custody. And I am officially Alex’s father.
Woo! So we’re going to go out to celebrate in a few minutes.
And yes, this obviously opens up the possibilities for two additional things to happen in relatively short order. Namely…
First off, Brandy and I getting legal recognition that we’ve essentially been a married couple for a number of years now in every way other than the legal way. Theoretically that could happen as soon as Monday. But I’m guessing we may take a little longer than that. We’ll see. One question of course is if there would be any family or friends who felt strongly about needing to be present for such a thing. As far as the two of us are concerned, it is basically just paperwork and filing legal documents so that things like insurance and whatnot get simpler, so it is highly unlikely we’ll be doing any big party or ceremony or anything like that. :-)
Of course one of the things that being legally married would also allow is the second thing on our list, which is me legally adopting Amy. This is something that Amy has said she really wants, and I really want, and Brandy wants but all of the other stuff prevented it earlier. I have acted in that capacity in all ways but the legal ways for about half of Amy’s life, and I’m the only dad she’s really had, but “officially” there is no relationship at all there. I can’t sign things related to her school or health care or whatever. It would be very nice to get that all set up as well. It isn’t long, just a few years, until she is legally an adult and those things don’t matter as much. But still… we all want it. That might take a bit longer still, but we’ll get all that set up before she turns 18. For sure. :-)
Anyway, good day. Good stuff.
Off for a nice dinner out somewhere to celebrate.
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