ace’s blog

Aaron’s intermittent exotropia I discussed previously has been getting progressively worse. Meri and I have both been noticing that he is squinting more and more, even when he’s not outside in full sun and even when he’s wearing sunglasses.  Meri and I have had a bad feeling about what we both [pessimistically] thought would need to happen next.

Meri took him to the ophthalmologist again yesterday to have him re-examined (since it’s been 6 months since he was first diagnosed) The doctor is one of the best in the area (from what we’ve been told).  Meri works in an ER and has spoken with several opthamalogists that stroll through there and they recommend him (and more importantly, use him).

The doctor looked at Aaron’s eyes and told Meri that his condition was deteriorating. He told her that the only solution for Aaron’s case was to have the corrective surgery.  We knew this day was coming and have talked about what we should do next.  We’ve done a lot of research and have both anguished about this decision for a long time – we decided that Aaron should finally have the surgery.

I can’t speak for Meri, but I am not fearful that the doctor won’t do a good job and I am fully expecting that the surgery will be successful.  We are both very worried about Aaron having to be sedated for the surgery. Meri working in the medical for so long is both a blessing and a curse in that she knows a lot about what to expect.  Knowledge can be power but it can also be crippling, especially in the case of surgery for one of your kids.  While the surgery is not exactly necessary (in my understanding anyway), if successful, it would greatly improve Aaron’s quality of life.

So the surgery is scheduled for just under two weeks away (July 10th).  We have a pre-op appointment 7 days before the surgery so that we can hear about all of the details. Meri spoke briefly about recovery time and the doctur said that it would only be a few hours for Aaron, but he couldn’t go to the pool or play with sand for a week after the surgery.

Today, my sleep-deprived wife made me a big breakfast when she woke up.  Aaron drew me a card and actually wrote several sentences in it!  It was one of the best cards I’ve ever received.  Meri got me a picture of my boys together and a picture of their hand prints. She also got me Metroid Prime 3 for our Wii.

I had an interview yesterday for a 6 month contract. I really liked the facility and the work environment seemed very clean and nice. The people I interviewed with were very nice. The only problem I have with it, is the length of the contract. My biggest worry is about not being extended. Both of the people I spoke with spoke long-term so that made me feel a bit better, I just can’t shake the worry though. I thought I’d make a list of pro’s and con’s of my current and prospective contracts.

Current company pros

• Relatively stable – current contract expires in Sept 2008 but there is an extension in the hands of the client’s legal department awaiting approval that would expire in Sept 2010.
• I am allowed to work from home one day a week.
• Pay is good, benefits are decent and fairly inexpensive

Current company cons

• I’m fucking miserable here!
• I’m writing code about 10% of the time, the other 90% is spent analyzing production data and modifying it since it’s been screwed up by the system – basically, I feel like I work on a help desk.
• Being on-call. I have a pager that I have to “man” once every 10 days (approximately speaking); every 5th weekend, I’m on-call and basically can’t leave my house.
• I now how 3 time sheets to fill out! One of them, the newest, easily takes about 30mins/day to fill out.
• I’m not learning anything new here since I’m barely writing any code.
• I have to commute 62 miles (round trip) and spend about 45 minutes on I4 (with smooth traffic, no accidents).

Contract position pros

• Major pay increase, 66% from my current hourly rate – dollar for dollar, not including how much my benefits cost. Meri would pick up the benefits from working part-time at her job.
• 20 mile round trip from my house to client site.
• I would be writing code again!
• No more on-call support (and therefore no more feeling like I work on a help desk).

Contract position cons

• Only a guaranteed 6 month contract. The company has a very strong history of extending their contractors and eventually offering them full-time positions, but that is not guaranteed. The only guarantee is that I’ll have a paycheck for 6 months.

If the client decided not to renew the contract at the end of the 6 month period, they would have to let me know 45 days prior to the end of contract and vice versa if I decided not to stay with them either. If the contract expired in 6 months and was not renewed, we would be able to live on the “extra” money that I made from the hourly increase for about 4 months after the contract was over. That would give me 4 months to either look for another job or find another contract. If I was unable to find another full-time position somewhere else in Orlando. Moving out of Orlando is not an option. If I did have to start working other contracts, then I would potentially have to travel a lot.

So basically, I’m not sure what to do. Any ideas?

Last night, Meri and I decided to buy a Nintendo Wii. We’ve been talking about it since it first came out (Nov 19, 2006) and I described to her how it was different than every other system out on the market. The Wii came with Wii Sports, a controller and a nunchuk.We bought Wii Play as well since it came with a second controller.

Last night, we played for almost two hours! One thing that I thought was really cool on the Wii was that a message is sent to you with a “total time played” when you are finished playing. The Wii Sports game is really fun! The boxing is physically demanding enough to make me sweat after only playing it for about 20 minutes or so.

I know that we are going to get Wii Fit whenever we can find it – it costs around $90. Other than that, I’m torn as to what other game I want to get next. I have a small list going – in no particular order.

• Mario Kart Wii – comes with a steering wheel
• We Ski
• Metroid Prime 3 – Corruption
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 (or 2009 or whatever)
• The Legend of Zelda – Twilight Princess

I was surprised to see that Meri actually had fun with it. She generally doesn’t like video games. I think Aaron will really like playing this system and we’ll all be able to have fun with this as a family.

Aaron and I had a fun day. We played the beach ball game in the house a couple times, we went to the pool, we watched T.V. together and we did about 4 or 5 puzzles together. Aaron had his final soccer game of the season last Thursday (6/5/08).

The coaches had a party for both teams and all of the kids got a trophy for playing. They had all kinds of great stuff for the kids, pizza, cupcakes, fruit and veggie platters, soccer tattoos, a trampoline, a tire swing and a cool tree house. At the end of the party, all of the kids got a cool trophy.

We came back from Aaron’s soccer party tonight and started the bedtime routine about 45 minutes late because of the party. We came into Aaron’s room and I put some water into his fish tank since it keeps losing water somehow. Meri came in with Eli and was looking at the tank and I said “I put extra water in it” and she said “that’s not why I’m looking at it”. It turns out that one of Aaron’s fish, named Orange (see picture below) died. R.I.P. Orange, Aaron will miss you very much!

We bought Aaron a fish tank as a reward for behaving so well for a long time. He loved it. Here are a couple of pictures of Aaron’s fish tank and his final surviving fish, Grapey.

Well, not literally a ton but he does weigh about 16 1/2 pounds! I don’t think Aaron weighed that much until he was about 8 months old. The biggest difference between Aaron and Eli’s weight is that Eli doesn’t spit up nearly as much as Aaron did. When Aaron was Eli’s age, he had acid reflux which caused him to spit up all the time.

So this week at work, I was a lucky participant in the Disaster Recovery (DR) exercise. My involvement in the DR exercise this year (it is performed yearly) was that I sat in an un-cooled room with a lot of other lucky participants and we all did some things and everything generally went well.

Here is the DR in a nutshell – if primary server goes down, the users still need to be able to access the system and do their work with minimum downtime. This is accomplished (in very basic terms) by switching the IPs of the DNS entries of the servers. We were tasked with simulating a production failure and falling back to the backup servers.

That started Tuesday (6/3/2008) and I was on property overnight from 11pm Tuesday to 11am Wednesday. After that was completed and it was given the thumbs up, it was time to undo it – now we have to be back on the production server. That started at 11pm Wednesday night and lasted until 4am Thursday morning.

Now my sleep cycle is screwed up. Here’s to hoping that I won’t be here next year to experience that again!

Also, I have a phone interview for a contract job here in Orlando that I most likely won’t accept even if it’s offered to me. With the economy the way it is, I can’t put my family’s well-being at risk by taking a 6 month contract versus staying with my company with a 2 year contract. The money is a lot better but in taking the 6 month contract but what would I do in 6 months if the project actually completed on-time or the client just decided to cancel my contract? I’d be putting my family at risk if I couldn’t find another job or contract quickly.

If I am offered the contract, I’ll have to talk to Meri more about it.