Adam Miller and Family

Most of the time I find myself cheerfully hea...

December 09, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Most of the time I find myself cheerfully heading off to work. I like what I do, enjoy the people I work with, and I grudgingly admit that watching the kids for long stretches of time can be a little exhausting.

But something's happened lately.

The last few weeks, the kids have been more interesting to hang out with. Emma doesn't require quite as much constant vigilance to prevent bodily injury. Sam's usually cheerful and polite. Work has been a bit crazier than usual. To top it off, there's that lure of holiday spirit and promise of hot beverages after spending time outside in the cold weather.

I'm going to try really hard to take a lot of time off, starting the week before Christmas and going through most of the week after. Maybe we can gather all my siblings and their kids together and head off to play in the snow. I'd love to make jam with Sadie one day. And hopefully I can spend some fairly quiet days with my family, doing nothing of great importance.

Like most grand romantic gestures, mine began...

November 14, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Like most grand romantic gestures, mine began with a mix-up, followed by hardship, and eventual doomed failure.

I forgot to bring my workout gear this morning, so when lunch rolled around, I realized this and headed out for a walk. After a few minutes of aimless wandering, I decided I'd head home to greet Jamie with a kiss and silently return to work. Well, it took quite awhile to get there, and it turns out she was gone. I ended up sadly leaving a note, which hopefully mystified her.

I got back to my desk with five minutes to spare before my meeting. I never did completely finish my lunch. Ah, well, it was worth it.

This pretty much says it all

November 02, 2005 by Adam in Adam

This pretty much says it all . . .

For the curious, this is the Penny Arcade folks being on their best behavior, writing a comic for Forbes.

Well, I'm all caught up with my OC fix

September 29, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Well, I'm all caught up with my OC fix. I'm a little less enthusiastic about it as things started trending towards the typical dramas and less about the family comedy. Or perhaps the family comedy episodes haven't been as interesting lately.

In any case, I've been having fun watching various new shows. Lost is an obvious favorite, as is Veronica Mars. I've also been watching Hex as well, an odd British show that seems similar to Buffy.

Of course, finding the time to feed my television habit is a tricky one. I often find myself multitasking, combining it with my evening cereal snack. Unfortunately sleep tends to suffer on occasion.

My dad has this funny thing about teen dramas

September 22, 2005 by Adam in Adam

My dad has this funny thing about teen dramas. We always used to make fun of him when we were kids (and still do on occasion). Still, he did go to an all-boys boarding school, so I figure he had a pretty good excuse.

Of course, now I find myself obsessively watching The OC, about two episodes a day, slowly catching up to the current season. Oh, sure, I can point to the hysterical comedy or the quality of the acting. One of the main characters is basically a nerd who's into video games and comic books. I can give excuses about my high school dating scene being terribly uneventful.

In the end, it's still a teen drama and I've found yet another unexpected way that I'm just like my father.

This site, adamandjamie

September 01, 2005 by Adam in Adam

This site, adamandjamie.com, has it's DNS hosted at a company called DirectNIC.com. Well, it turns out their headquarters is in the middle of New Orleans, where there's currently massive flooding and looting. Fortunately the building is being secured by a guy who's also blogging. It's pretty crazy stuff, as they work around the clock to keep things locked up and the power running. With luck, they'll keep doing their job and everything on this site will keep running smoothly. Pretty crazy to think how fragile all this technology is.

The server problems have driven me crazy the ...

August 30, 2005 by Adam in Adam

The server problems have driven me crazy the last couple days. I get pretty frantic, unable to sleep well or think about much else. Fortunately I think everything's on the mend. A few more days of fiddling and things should be back to normal.

My mom picked up a flintlock rifle for me and is currently taking it around to a gun store to have it cleaned. He's also taking it to a gun show to see if anyone can figure out it's history. Supposedly it was made in Germany, but I don't know much else.

Summer is coming to a close. It actually rained yesterday, much to the kid's delight. They broke out the umbrellas and wanted to stay out as long as they could.

Summer is finally feeling over

August 24, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Summer is finally feeling over. It's been cool and crisp riding my bike into work. Blueberry season is nearly over. Sam starts school in a couple weeks.

All-in-all, it's been a pretty good summer. It feels nice to get the patio garden going and the house painted. I think Jamie's felt a little weary from watching two kids all day long. Hopefully the fall will ease the load a bit as Sam goes to school.

I've been trying to get back into some things that seem to have been left behind. I used to play with just Sam a lot, which hasn't happened much with Emma around. Last night we played Legos for a long while, with me talking in a funny voice for nearly an hour. I also read a superhero comic book to him at bedtime, something I used to do every night.

It's Mocha Friday and I'm feeling fairly relaxed

August 19, 2005 by Adam in Adam

It's Mocha Friday and I'm feeling fairly relaxed. Work is somewhat busy, but with my boss and other team members away, it's actually almost relaxing.

I got my mom's new laptop all ready and configured. My sister's new computer should be coming in a few days too. Hopefully I can get everyone's tech support needs met by the end of next week.

I have become tech support to my entire family

August 14, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I have become tech support to my entire family. I spent a frustrating hour or two trying to get
jenny's old computer functioning properly. Eventually I gave up and ordered a new one through Dell. The prices are so darn cheap that it's not worth my time fiddling around with things.

I also spent some time getting Jamie's dad's computer properly configured. We should be sending it to him the next time he visits. It's his first, so I tried to make things pretty simple.

My mom's laptop arrives next week as well. It's the lightest one in a reasonable price right. Hopefully she likes it.

We've been having dinner on the patio for the...

August 11, 2005 by Adam in Adam

We've been having dinner on the patio for the last couple nights, which has been really nice. Finally the house is painted and the garden has grown in. The kids can do their typical finishing early thing and run around in the back yard, leaving Jamie and I to finish a leisurely dinner.

I watched D.E.B.S. last weekend, which was a fun and silly movie. Right now I'm hooked on one of the songs from the movie. It has that teen angst feel that I pretty much missed while rolling twenty sided dice and writing text adventures during high school. Ah, well, at least I had my wild college years.

I got a really nasty splinter last night when...

August 04, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I got a really nasty splinter last night when I went outside to dump a wheelbarrow full of yard debris. I have no idea how I got it, but it was quite painful. It took me nearly an hour to get it out, with Sam watching intently. The hardest part was that it was on the back of my calf and I had to go into contortions just to reach the spot. It finally came out and feels much better now.

I suppose the moral of the story is to fear the outdoors.

Work is busy, busy, busy

July 28, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Work is busy, busy, busy. I've decided that my latest approach is to simply ignore work in hopes that it will be forgotten by the requestor. I worked through lunch so I'm feeling a bit stiff now that I've reached the end of the day.

I had Emma this morning, who was wonderful. I was carrying her to our normal bagel visit when she spontaneously hugged and kissed me. Very sweet.

I'm taking a short break from wading through ...

July 21, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I'm taking a short break from wading through piles of e-mails now that I'm back at work. It's amazing how much has happened since I left. One of my coworkers had her baby, along with some stressful complications. Since their family is web savvy, they've started a blog about it. Best wishes to her.

26 e-mail messages to go, along with three voice mail messages to deal with. Sigh.

It's not quite Friday, so I'm only having tea...

June 09, 2005 by Adam in Adam

It's not quite Friday, so I'm only having tea this morning. Sadie sent me a CD in the mail which I'm listening to, my only lifeline to the world of hip music. Left to my own devices, I'd probably be listening to weird things that drift my way across the wide Internet.

Work is good, if busy again. I have endless tasks of moving data about and modifying web pages. Hopefully the tunes will get me through the day.

The meetings are done and my trip is wrapping up

May 25, 2005 by Adam in Adam

The meetings are done and my trip is wrapping up. It's just Dave Mehl and I left, sitting in an empty conference room until it's time to go to the airport. We'll probably go to the main hospital to take a look, get some dinner, and then wait for the plane to arrive. Then it's a two and a half hour wait in Seattle and we pull into Eugene at midnight.

Hopefully my car will start.

The plane touched down in Bellingham less tha...

May 24, 2005 by Adam in Adam

The plane touched down in Bellingham less than an hour ago. I'm sitting in a Best Western, having figured out how to hook up the wireless network adapter and connect to the Internet. It's very weird as I'm not a regular business traveler. I can hear the cars on the interstate driving by. The room itself is decorated in the faux fancy style.

The trip went fairly well, especially as four of my coworkers went with me. We joked with each other and admired the sights. In a few moments I'll be off to a nearby Mexican place.

I still miss my family. I got to talk to Emma on the phone, who's being watched by Dave and Kirsten while Jamie takes Sam to his T-Ball game. It's going to be a big and lonely king sized bed for me tonight.

I finally got some sleep last night

May 07, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I finally got some sleep last night. I started zoning out around nine, finally collapsing a bit later. I had made up a bed in the basement as Jamie's dad is in the bed room and I didn't want to wake Jamie up with my coughing.

Sure enough, I did cough a fair amount for the first half of the night. I also woke up when my inflatable mattress mostly deflated, switching my bedding over to pillows from the couch.

I awoke nearly ten hours later, something I almost never do. I don't think I've coughed once so far today.

I'm beat

May 05, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I'm beat. I spent most of last night coughing. I'd try to go to sleep, cough myself awake, then go downstairs to watch an episode of Wonderfalls. It's a funny, quirky show, especially when taking cough syrup and exhausted from lack of sleep. Around 1:30 am I collapsed and mostly stayed asleep until 5:30 am or so.

Somehow I'm keeping it together today.

I just got an invitation to E3 by some market...

April 29, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I just got an invitation to E3 by some marketing group, asking to show off some new computer game to me. Out of curiosity I wandered over to their web site and ran across this little ditty:

With our proprietary database of Superconductors, our term for highly influential trendsetters and opinion leaders, we have access to all levels of your audience. Plugging into the Superconductors, TAP can stimulate grass roots buzz and word of mouth, molding the perceptions and attitudes of NetSetters everywhere.

I guess I'm a highly influential trendsetter, presumably from my Neverwinter Nights stuff. Wacky.

I'm giddy with the amount of work I've accomp...

April 07, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I'm giddy with the amount of work I've accomplished in the last couple days. Sure I still have a lengthy to-do list, but it doesn't seem quite so overwhelming. We might be finally getting over the budgeting cycle and the craziness it brings.

Well, time for a meeting. I get to test out my new hand-me-down laptop and see how it works.

What a day

April 04, 2005 by Adam in Adam

What a day.

I've been frantically busy at work. Lots of technical and organizational issues bubbling around.

Jamie's dad ended up going to the ER, with pain in his foot. They were worried about blood clots, so everyone was treating him carefully. I hung out with Ray and Dave and chatted about the kids. I think it helped pass the time, which I suppose helped a little.

I find out in a few hours whether or not I have jury duty tomorrow. Someone was saying that they used to pick juries for federal cases on the first Tuesday of the month. That's today, so hopefully I'm not sucked into some lengthy court case.

Though yesterday was frantically busy, it doe...

March 29, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Though yesterday was frantically busy, it does feel like I'm slowly making progress with work. I have one gigantic project that continues to lumber forward. It involves loading and processing millions of records a day, so it's a bit exciting professionally. I did have some comical instances of different people telling me to make changes to an application in completely different ways. Even directors got into the mix, making "executive decisions" that were later overturned by the owner of the application. It's good that my job makes me laugh.

Well, I wouldn't say I was actually caught up...

March 14, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Well, I wouldn't say I was actually caught up with work, but there's a lot of things crossed off on my list. I'm also making good progress on one of my big projects. It involves fiddling with millions of rows of data, hence my time being able to post while a big conversion happens.

I've still got plenty of do, but hopefully I won't be stressed out when we take our vacation to the coast next week.

On occasion, I run into some fairly weird com...

March 09, 2005 by Adam in Adam

On occasion, I run into some fairly weird computer bugs. We're testing out a Google product that indexes our internal web pages. I wasn't really involved with setting it up, though I was somewhat aware of it.

It turns out it was able to get to some poorly secured pages. Since it's job is to follow hyperlinks, it basically clicks on anything it can find, including those labeled "Delete" and "Update".

I've fixed the immediate problem when I got paged at 5 am this morning. Hopefully there's not more unpleasant surprises waiting for me.

I was a coding machine yesterday, pushing cod...

March 01, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I was a coding machine yesterday, pushing code into live and finishing up projects left and right. I got to work a bit early, downed a mocha, and proceeded to hunker down and finish things up. My incredibly lengthy list is now feeling much more reasonable.

Today I've got a big go-live first thing in the morning, then it's finishing up several of the smaller projects as well as forging ahead with one of the big ones.

The good news is that my stress levels are down. Hopefully my weekend-working habit will be a thing of the past.

Work has gotten incredibly stressful

February 26, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Work has gotten incredibly stressful. This morning I woke up, connected to our intranet, and spent an hour and a half of my Saturday morning writing code. After finishing up one project and answering e-mails, I made myself stop and do something enjoyable.

I switched over to a little Unreal Tournament 2004 and spent the next twenty minutes blowing up a whole lot of stuff.

There's a huge amount of change happening at work and I'm trying to help shield my customers from the brunt of it, as well as trying to help Glen not go crazy. We have one developer taking a month off, two pregnant, a new hire, a position about to be hired, and a slew of people from another team that just merged with ours. Unfortunately most of the work is falling to me.

I love my new digital camera

February 22, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I love my new digital camera. It has lots of nice little features and the image quality is pretty darn good. I was having fun last night taking videos with sound, zooming around the pictures I took using the LCD on the back, and so on. I like the way it seals itself up when the lens isn't in use.

It's a Canon Powershot A400 in case anyone's in the market for a new digital camera.

I blew up my digital camera last night, unscr...

February 16, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I blew up my digital camera last night, unscrewing it from a tripod. It made a loud popping noise that sounded like something exploding, never a good sign. I'm leaning towards a static electricity situation, but it could be anything.

Anyway, I plunked down some cash and a new camera should arrive next week. The resolution is a bit lower than what I currently have, but it's a highly rated Canon and I was never satisfied with the quality of the Kodak (sorry Danica and Andy). I had the option of a $140 camera or a $280 camera, but decided the cheaper one had a better price/performance ratio.

For some bizarre reason I'm being cheery at work, even though massive amounts of work is coming my way. Fortunately I made some progress on a rather large database project. It involves importing 2 million records each day, which is nearly a billion records a year. Whew.

"Blackbird was there, doing something vaguely...

February 09, 2005 by Adam in Adam

"Blackbird was there, doing something vaguely breakfast-like." That's how some spam I received this morning started. They're becoming more like existential treatises on modern living, especially when the image about buying free meds pops up in the middle.

There's actually a site that takes spam subject lines and turns them into poetry. It's hysterical, if somewhat risque.

Work is slowly getting more manageable again,...

February 04, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Work is slowly getting more manageable again, though the sense of business hasn't yet faded. I've been fortunate to have Jonathan as my counterpart as he's been very much able to take on the work I throw his way.

I also seem to have become addicted to a new t.v. show. I've been watching Alias, getting drawn into the lengthy plotlines and twists. I'm a sucker for spy movies and am currently reading the Borne Identity when I do the stair stepper at work. For a few days there it was an episode in at night and another in the morning. Great fun.

I'm getting that "overwhelmed at work" feelin...

January 24, 2005 by Adam in Adam

I'm getting that "overwhelmed at work" feeling again. Perhaps if I simply took all the paper from my desk and ritually burned it, the clensing process would soothe my mind.

Strangely, it's not so much the work part, but the endless coordination and communication of work. I've probably read and responded to a hundred e-mails today. Whew.

Continuing my critique of television shows, I watched a couple episodes of Point Pleasant. It's a cross between a generic teen drama and the Omen, but not particularly good. Maybe if it was funnier they could pull it off, but alas it's just like watching a train wreck.

It was strange wandering around campus to get...

January 20, 2005 by Adam in Adam

It was strange wandering around campus to get my haircut today. The sky was blue and the temperature seemed more like Spring than the middle of winter.

Work's been nutty as of late. There's a tremendous amount of things going on and I feel like I'm barely keeping up. I probably need to stop thinking of myself as a hero and let some of the other people on the team pick things up from time to time.

I was a bad boy a couple nights ago. I stayed up late watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It's pretty good anime and I love the futuristic setting. I've also been getting into the new Battlestar Galactica. I have fond memories of it as a kid, though the new version is superior in nearly every way.

Today was one of those days where I felt "har...

January 03, 2005 by Adam in Adam

Today was one of those days where I felt "hardcore". The temperature was below freezing and frost covered everything. There was ice on the hill down from our house, so I carefully rode my bike across it and walked down to the bottom. When I got to work only a handful of bikes were in the bike cage.

I'm back at work after four luxurious days hanging out with the family. It was really nice not having to go anywhere or do anything, so I mostly just hung out with everyone. For some reason, just playing in the basement with the kids seemed very restful. It was probably that I didn't have anything I had to do so I didn't feel bad just puttering around.

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