Eleanor Jane Rooney

Last Thursday at 5:17 AM, after roughly 53 hours of labor my lovely and very tired wife Joanna gave birth to Eleanor Jane Rooney. She's remarkably adorable, and after one tiring but awesome week we've decided we'll probably keep her ;-)

Counting down...

Joanna pointed out this morning that she went in to labor as early as my Mom did when she had me, it would happen sometime around today.

Guess I better finish up work on that nursery...

Book Review: Home Game, by Michael Lewis

First, I should make a small confession. I'll read anything Michael Lewis writes. It started with Moneyball, but it's only gotten worse from there. From books to magazine articles, sports writing to the inner workings of wall street, the format or topic just doesn't matter. If he writes it, I'll read it. So, it's no surprise that when I saw that he was coming out with a book about fatherhood (something I'm about to become much more experienced in), I just had to pick it up.

The book is short, just 192 pages, and is generally a quick read. It's composed of a series of short chapters about the time around the birth of each of Lewis' children. The stories are amusing, and the writing is up to his usual high standards. I laughed out loud several times while reading the book, as did my wife. There are a few things you should be aware of going in to it though.

First, this is largely material that's been recycled from the "Dad Again" series of articles he published on Slate just after the birth of his second and third children. It's not entirely old material, there are some new bits, but lets be clear, the vast majority of this is already available online.

Second, this is a parenting memoir, not a parenting how to book. This book isn't going to answer any questions about how to raise your kids. It is going to amuse you with stories of Lewis helping to raise his though, and for me that was more than enough.

So, if you're at all interested in some well written and highly amusing stories about Michael Lewis' experience as a new father, check this one out, either on Slate or in dead tree form. You'll be glad you did.

A Little Disturbing

We appear to have food in our house with an expiration date that's further away than the kid's due date.

Science!

If you haven't been lately, can I just say that the Boston Museum of Science remains awesome? Joanna and I made a quick stop on Saturday to see some of the newer exhibits that we hadn't seen yet, and it was a lot of fun.

The new Triceratops (Cliff) is quite awesome, well worth seeing if you're into that sort of thing (although he does make the old model of a Triceratops look kind of depressed next to the real one), and the temporary exhibits (Frogs and Mythical Creatures) were both also very cool. They have provided a dizzying array of interesting frogs, and the mythical creatures exhibit does a great job of explaining the root causes of all those mythical creatures you may remember from the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual.

Plus, if you go now you'll have the added bonus of not going on the last weekend of February break like we did, so the herds of screaming children will likely be a bit smaller.

FYI, Joanna and I will be busy from August 10th through 2027...

Figured some of you might be interested in hearing that Joanna and I are expecting a baby sometime on or around August 10th. We just had the first ultrasound today, and everything looks great. Two arms, two legs, a spinal cord, everything you could want from a -6 month old ;-)

Now if only the little bundle of joy to be would stop making Joanna nauseous all the time, then we'd really be getting somewhere...

Obama's Inaugural Speech

While there are a great many things to love about Barack Obama's inaugural speech, there are two sections that stand out for me.

First, this paragraph:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Second, this one:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

There are few things that please me more than a new President who is willing to both put Science and Education in the place they belong and to acknowledge that not only do some people not believe in god, but that it's perfectly all right that they do not. The contempt that the previous administration held science and atheism in was reprehensible, and I'm glad to see that falling by the wayside as we move forward.

Welcome to Blogger

Over the weekend I finally found the time to do something I've intended to do for a while. I moved my blog over to my own domain and in so doing switched from TypePad to Blogger.

Let me be perfectly clear, I have nothing against TypePad, I've been using it quite happily for a number of years now, and it's never been anything but awesome. When it comes right down to it though I'm just not blogging nearly as much as I used to, so seeing that charge on my credit card every month really started to make less and less sense. Blogger is free, so that simplified the decision making process.

Amusingly enough, I actually tried to do this for the first time a few months back, but I found there to be a surprising lack of software for migrating a blog from a MovableType style blog (TypePad lets you export your data in MT format) to Blogger. I spent a fair amount of time trying to throw something together to do it, but I ended up never being quite happy with the result, and I eventually timed out on it.

Fortunately, if you procrastinate long enough on a software project it's uncanny how often someone else will solve your problem for you. On Friday I happened to see a blog post announcing the Google Blog Converters project, which lets you convert between the import/export formats of a variety of different blogging systems. Its MT to Blogger functionality worked just fine, and after a little fixing up of some formatting issues (some of which were actually sitting around from back when I converted from blosxom to TypePad) all my data made it over to Blogger quite nicely.

Anyway, I'll leave the TypePad blog up for the next few weeks, since I've paid through the beginning of February, but the cannonical home for my blog is now at http://blog.electricjellyfish.net/, and I'm now a happy Blogger user.