mBabyTracker (mmm-bĕhbĕh-trakuh)

What is it?

There is a lot of downtime when you are on paternity leave. So, I took the opportunity to learn a bit about mobile software development. I started with wanting to write for the iphone, but quickly found out that I needed an iphone and a mac to do it correctly. So I settled for the blackberry, since Reba and I both have one.

What I came up with is: mBabyTracker. Predictably, this is a silly mobile and internet application that tracks things for our newborn baby Isabel. Specifically, it tracks her awake time, sleeping, pooping and eating.

Here's how it works:

1. baby does something, in this case: poop.

2. Reba opens mBabyTracker on her blackberry, clicks “baby poops” and then “submit”.

  

3. mBabyTracker sends the information up to my server at www.mBabyTracker.com where it is stored in a database.

4. At any time she wants, she can go to www.mBabyTracker.com and view a historical chart that shows when Isa was awake, asleep, eating or pooping.

5. Notice the new little brown star!

 

How did I build it?

For the blackberry development I used the RIM Blackberry JDE and handset simulators, and Java.  For the web server it’s good old Vbscript and T-SQL hosted by Gearhost, a nice cheap little hosting service I use.  The reports are displayed in a cool flash based charting tool called Fusion Widgets.  The whole thing was free, except for the hosting cost $20/month I was paying anyway, and the one time Blackberry cert registration, which was also $20.

 

Is this important?

NO!  There are lots of baby tracking websites out there: www.trixietracker.com is a good one for example.  I just thought it would be fun to learn how to write stuff for the blackberry and Reba was having a hard time remembering how the baby’s sleeping pattern has been.

isa in motion

Of course I’m now taking lots of stupid pictures and videos of baby.

 

stupid video #1 of 10,000,000,000,000

at the edge of something

Part 1 – 10:00 AM

Yesterday Reba had contractions all day long, lasting around a minute, of mild intensity and spaced anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes apart.  This morning she woke me up at 5:30 AM with contractions around a minute and 20 seconds, with a lot more intensity and spaced 2 to 4 minutes apart.  She’d been on the phone to the midwives at the UCL birthing center and they said if the spacing was 3 minutes for over 30 minutes, it would be on.  I spent about an hour timing her after that, we hit the numbers, and now…

it’s on like donkey kong.

We’ve been at the hospital for 3 hours now, and she’s gotten a shot of diamorphine which is a sedative and pain reliever that is common here.  This has taken the edge off of the contractions: she was literally writhing in pain and moaning an hour ago, now she’s doing all the breathing stuff and even dozing a little.  I’ve sent my coworkers the paternity leave note, I’ve texted our uk pals, I’ve called Reba’s mom and sis, and I’ve sent the facebook status as well.  The whole planet knows that we’ve snuck into our hidey hole and we’ll be emerging with a brand new baby Isa shortly.

It’s funny, I’m really not all that nervous.  It seems like Reba and the midwives know what they’re doing.  Even Isa has her head pointed in the right direction and is working to script.  On top of that, this process is very routine and Reba is a healthy girl… so, I’m relatively chill.  I think I’m going to go find some hospital food now.

 

Part 2 – 11:00 AM

Now the contractions are steady at 3 minutes, and she seems like she’s really in a lot of pain.  She’s showing her toughness, I’m pretty impressed (although the morphine shot helped).  I’m also impressed with the midwives here, these ladies are highly trained nurses that just do births.  They know what’s up and how to work with difficult pregnant ladies.  Ours is Angela and she brings a super chill vibe to the room.  Apparently the way she says “breath in through your nose and out through your mouth slowly” is different than when I say it, because Reba actually does it when she says to!  The English have a couple of labor pain options that I’d never heard of before I came here.  For example, they give something called “gas and air” which is what we think of as laughing gas or nitrous.  I should have just brought some whipping cream in a can.

 

Part 3 – 12:00 noon

We are very close now.  The pain is super intense, but she is within an hour or 2 at most of delivery.  She’s not very chatty and has her eyebrows so smashed together that they almost go vertical at times.  My job is the hand holder and breathing drill sergeant.  My hand is more like a stress ball than a husband’s gently grasped mitt… she is squeezing the blood out of it!

  this face looks silly, but she was in some SERIOUS pain and so was my hand

Part 4 – 1:00 PM

(ex post facto)

There was a lot of screaming, fluids, narrowly averted last minute changes of plan, and it was at this point that my breathing strategy was shown to crumble on the battlefield.  I saw things I shouldn’t have, and I won’t repeat them here.

 

Part 5 – 1:50 PM

We have a baby.  She is Isabel Josephine Hernandez and she has black hair with blue eyes.  She is loud and an energetic eater.  True to Hernandez form!  Reba is good.  The baby is good, and apparently weights 3.4 kg and measures 52 cm.  I don’t know what that means, but apparently she’s on the large end of things.  Now the only thing left is to figure out if she’s going to Oxford or Harvard.

Isabel(le) Josephine Hernandez in the flesh!

Finally we have a bass player who can’t quit

 

I took this with my phone, I think it’s my favorite

big city living

Lately, I’ve been trying to lose weight.  It seems like I gave myself a break from dieting and exercise to do my GMAT preparation, and then let it slide for my application papers, and then let it slide because I got into Oxford, and then let it slide because I was chilling at the end of my tenure at wamu (ok that was for 6 months, I know) and then of course because I was having my summer off before school and then during school and then when we were travelling the world and then when I was trying to get a job in London and then when I had just started a job in London, and now 1 year after that I’m 100% out of shape and thinking it’s time to get it back together again.  So, I’m eating light and not drinking during the week, and also even thinking about joining a gym.  So I had NO plans of having any wine tonight.

(Cut to Monday morning this week)

I was pissed off and yelling at people Monday morning on the 9:30 AM standup conference call because things aren’t moving along and my project is behind schedule.  I guess a 9:30 is better than Tom Bolger’s daily 8:30 back at wamu, but still, this current one is a daily bummer.  (a note on 8:30 meetings: while it is supremely useful to get your team together to talk through what issues are on the table each morning, assign new issues, close out old ones, remove blockers, humiliate people who didn’t get their work done, etc., the REAL reason for having an 8:30 is a demonstration of dominance.  Basically, it’s saying: “I can make you show up to an early morning grilling every day of the week and you have to come.  I have power over you, and I’m now punishing you for xyz.” )  In this way, the week has progressed in a uniform fashion: most of Monday was futile and hostile, while Tuesday was born, lived and died in much the same vein.  At 7pm tonight I was applying the last of my flagging will to resolving a did-it-work or didn’t-it-work question which you would think ought to be pretty straightforward but isn’t.  Despite my shitty attitude today, it really wouldn’t be fair to my employer or colleagues to go into any more detail than this.

I left the office demoralized and frankly a bit angry.  Thoughts of “I’ve had it with this”, “ENOUGH” and similar writhed in my mind, growing incrementally less poisonous with each meter I put between myself and Canary Wharf.

I got on the tube and broke out my copy of Foreign Policy magazine, which is a sort of less serious version of Foreign Affairs, but still cool.  A gaggle of Spaniards were sitting on the chairs, checking their tube maps repetitively, chatting, and assuming that no one else on the train knew what “de puta madre” meant.  I love listening to the Spanish language being spoken, it’s fun for me to test how much I can pick up when the Iberian is conversational and fast. 

10 minutes into the ride, a seat came open at the end of the car, so I went to the end of the seats and sat down.  I brushed against a sitting fellow passenger on my way.  This is typical since the trains are cramped and bounce around a  lot when they are moving.  As I sat down, the guy to the left of me turned and made a nasty comment about me sitting on his coat.  I apologized and turned back to the FP.  This is where the ensuing 20 minutes became fuzzy and I have a hard time remembering exact details. 

I BELIEVE the guy wouldn’t let it go, and began a barrage of verbal abuse ending in “I’ll mash up your glasses”.  I remember his face very well: brown, balding, and thin with the type of hearing aides that poke little plastic tubes out of your ears.  He was wearing little rectangular glasses that were rounded on the edges.  I think the thin metal frames were brownish too.  His left eye was closed, and didn’t stick out as far as a closed eye should.  It seemed sort of deflated and there was pus coming out from where the lids joined.  I think he was a bit disheveled in his dress as well, but that’s hard to picture now. 

He turned away from me and back to a very attractive 20s-ish woman who he was grossly hitting on despite the fact that he was obviously much older than she, and way not in her league.  He was holding 2 cell phones in one hand and gesturing to her while he told her something about how she should call him.  The woman was just smiling and shaking her head no.

Rejected, eyeguy turned back to me, even angrier.  He shouted that I was a “prat”, which is a stupid English term for “jerk” or “asshole” or whatever. 

I nearly never ever get into confrontations with anybody.  I just avoid trouble, it’s something I can usually sense and steer wide from.  I suppose that my angry day led me to ignore my surroundings, ultimately letting me sit next to a psycho without noticing it.  However, when these rare situations do crop up, my heart races and my mind goes cloudy.  Thus, I can hardly remember the details of what happened next.

Eyeguy continued on with his verbal abuse, but stepped things up by reaching for the handrail to the right of me and holding it so that his arm was in front of my face.  Then, as the train stopped he stood up and faced me.  I remember thinking that I wasn’t going to let this guy take a swing at me while I was sitting down, so I stood up and he stepped back a little.  At this point I was just staring at him intently.  He started shouting about something that was in his pocket and demanding that I touch his pocket. 

In a raised voice I said, “I’m not touching your fucking pocket”.  I was really starting to get worked up at this point.  He kept demanding I touch his pocket, and then took out this little wooden box.  Holding the box up and shaking it at me (kind of like those guys with the bibles downtown) he shouted that there was something very important in the box, I just stared.  He then put the box back in his pocket and started grabbing my jacket.  In retrospect I guess he was either working himself up to something or else testing how far he could push me.  I remember shouting something about not touching me (ignored), and then grabbing his hand off of my jacket and holding it away from me at the wrist.  At this point the door to the train was open, and for whatever reason I rushed him, slamming his body up against the wall.  This should have been easy as he was smaller than me, but it was oddly easier than I would have thought: he crumpled up against the wall with me pinning him.  I think this guy was even more frail than he looked.  I vaguely remember shouting at him to get off the train.

At this point, my head was so fuzzy and I was so agitated I don’t think I could have answered “what’s 2+3” correctly.

Immediately a woman standing near us put her body between mine and the eyeguy, asking me to “please sit down” and the guy to please get off the train.  I let him go, and went back to my seat as he let out another barrage of abuse, closing with “if I ever see you again, I’ll kill you”.  To really end his day on a low note, the tube doors then closed on his chest, pinning him once more.  These doors only look like they would crush you, what really happens is they close fast at first and then slow down, totally stopping if the encounter any resistance.  They don’t give much though, so he was trapped.  The doors then opened again, he stepped out, and the people around me on the train all started saying how there was clearly something wrong with him, it wasn’t my fault, I did the right thing, etc. 

Walking out of the tube station, one of the women who was sitting near me took a few minutes to talk to me about the incident and was really very warm and supportive as we walked along.  I think she could tell that I was really upset about the whole thing.  I asked her if I had hit him, because it was hard to remember details, but she said no I didn’t, and repeated that I had acted very well, etc.  It’s funny how I saw such a crappy awful side of Londoners and such a wonderful, kind side of Londoners all in the space of just a few minutes.

This whole scenario really upset me.  I don’t like conflict of any kind, and typically get a belly full during my work day.  Physical conflict with random strangers just turns me off completely, and I’d go through a lot to avoid it.  Then in the one case where I do decide I’ve had just about enough today and stand my ground, it turns out the guy is some physically and mentally sick loser, and I just ended up feeling like crap for possibly hurting him.  I guess you have to deal with this kind of thing living in a big city and riding the subway all the time.  In fairness, I have taken the tube at least twice a day for the last year, so if this only happens once in 500 or 600 rides, it’s probably not something I have to worry about running into again.

So, even though it was the middle of the week, I had a nice big glass of red wine when I got home.

 

catch up: flamenco festival in Jerez

This trip actually happened in March, but I haven’t taken the time to write about it yet.  Here goes…

Reba has always been interested in dance, and spent a lot of her youth studying ballet.  So, it wasn’t surprising when after a trip to Spain a few years back, she saw some people practicing flamenco in a park and became quite interested.  When we got back to Seattle, she joined a flamenco class and started giving performances with the class, listening to the music at home, seeing various flamenco groups when they came through Seattle etc.  Some of the girls in her class go to a yearly flamenco festival in Jerez, Spain, which is really the heart of flamenco country.  This Festival de Jerez last a couple of weeks, and consists of performances by top dancers and musicians at night and classes taught by these same performers during the day.  Conveniently, the old part of Jerez is cute with little windy streets and not too many people, and it’s the home of Sherry (Jerez is the Spanish word for Sherry) and this requires lots of sampling. 

For the past two years, Reba has of course been a lot closer to Jerez and going to the festival has been just a matter of quick 2 hour flight from London.  This year, she brought me, Kaysa, Ginny, and Brandon who was officially renamed el Brandito for the duration of the trip. 

 

Meat

The first night was great.  We got into town, settled into our respective joints, and met in town for dinner.  We went to Maison Asador, which is basically a meaty meat restaurant in the middle of a meaty meat town.  Seafood is much less common in Jerez restaurants than in other parts of Spain, and this place takes this MO very seriously.  The jamon iberico is the best thing ever, this is a dry cured ham like Prosciutto or Serrano, but it comes from pigs that live in Oak groves and only eat acorns.  It’s very expensive outside of Spain, but still: eat this if you can!

Reba and Ginny, me and el Brandito, on our first night out.

 

Market Day

The next day, we went down to the old market to get olives, cheese, iberico, etc.  Even though there are supermarkets in town, this place is really popular with the locals.  Folks are hanging around socializing, eating, shopping, arguing, haggling, etc.  It seems like a very inefficient way to shop, but still a great way to spend an afternoon.

 

 

there actually is SOME seafood in Jerez after all…

 

Churros 

After the market, we went to the central square and bought churros from the stand there.  These are basically like long skinny donuts, and are pretty much all any Spaniard consumes for breakfast aside from coffee and cigarettes.

is that David Lee Roth buying churros with my wife?

 

Lazy People Drinking in Cafes

A LOT of our time was spend sitting in squares drinking and eating.  This is really a marvelous way to pass the time, I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Unlike the Belgians, Germans, English and Americans, the Spanish have really failed to develop a beer culture which produces a wide variety of beers.  However, they have achieved one spectacular success in the art of serving beer that may well have catapulted them past the aforementioned competitors.  This success is called the caña.  A caña is a small chilled glass, maybe 1/2 a pint, of very very cold light lager.  This is delicious and refreshing to the utmost.  Unlike the less chilled lagers of the English, the caña doesn’t get lukeware 1/2 through your pint and thus suggests again the superiority of Spanish culture over all others.

 

 

cañas

Flamenco Girls

What makes a girl decide to dive headfirst into a tiny arts subculture based in a foreign country 1/2 way around the globe?  I don’t know.  Maybe it’s just that everybody finds something in life, and these girls found this.  Maybe there is some deep hereditary subconscious sociological connection with this music and certain long lost daughters of Spain.  Maybe flamenco is just the coolest thing going.  Maybe these girls are just arty.  Whatever the case may be, there is a certain type that saves up her money, takes time off work, and travels to a dusty little southwestern Spanish town for the privilege of paying to take dance lessons in a room with no air conditioning from severe people who don’t speak your language.  These are the flamenco girls, and this time they were Carmen, Rachel and Dani (and Reba).

 

Carmen, Rachel, Reba, Dani in their ay yi yi am going out tonight in Jerez suits!

 

Flamenco Performances

Ostensibly, the point of this trip is to see a bit of top flight flamenco.  We got to see Rocio Molina’s dance company perform the Teatro Villamarta, and the world famous guitarist Tomatito in the Tio Pepe Sherry bodega (storehose), which had a very cool vibe.  There were a lot more performances that Reba and the flamenco girls went to including Mercedes Ruiz, Belen Maya, Antonio Marquez, Pete Habichulea and etc., but I try to limit myself so I don’t get burned out and thus I skipped a bunch.  The guitarist in Rocio Molina’s company played a Cuban steel string guitar that has a double string in the middle.  I was really inspired by this guy, his style was just oozing passion.  I’ve seen a lot of guitarists, and a lot of flamenco guitarists and normally I don’t get too worked up.  This time was something special however.

 

after the show, do what the Spanish people do

 

The Bullring

Bullfighting is big in Spain, and Jerez, like many other Spanish towns, has a bullring.  Lots of people hate the fact that bullfighting is still going on, think it’s cruel, barbaric, and whatever.  If this is you, I DON’T CARE so don’t waste your time typing me a rant.  I and many people from around the world like corrida, and if you don’t, then DON’T GO.  With that out of the way, I figured it was worthwhile to check out the ring in Jerez, even though the season wasn’t started yet.  Having seen most of my bullfights in Madrid at the fancy Las Ventas, I was a bit suprised to find the Jerez Plaza de Toros to be so dilapidated.  To get there we had to walk a ways out of the old town, and the part of Jerez we walked through was pretty damn dilapidated as well.  In Madrid, the ring is surrounded by tapas bars and little streets and a night out after the fights can be quite an elegant affair.  Not so here!  Oh well.

 

 

plaza de toros, Jerez

 

on the side of the ring there are pictures of famous toros going back over a hundred years

 

  

I just love this one of Kaysa

 

 

and this one was too cute to pass up!

my baby shower

In almost everywhere in the world, baby showers are given by women for women who are about to have their first baby.  In almost everywhere I go in the world, my friends/coworkers think it’s fun to make fun of me via semi-emasculating attempts at humor.  Given this, my boss and the admin from our group bought a bunch of baby stuff for me, including diapers, baby shampoo, wipes, towels, and of course some sill baby shower crap like a baby balloon and a pink “daddy to be” sash.

Victory setting up before I got to the room

 

Victory giving me my basket of baby stuff

 

 

this one shows a bit more of my coworkers, from left to right there is me, Bola (African but I don’t know exactly where from), Chris (Greek south African), Torsten (German), Victory (south African), and Robin (English).

 

 

I just liked this one.

 

The people I work with also put together a little book with notes of encouragement and advice around being a dad, and also newspaper clippings of current events so I would remember what was going on when I became a dad.  At the end of the day, I let the baby balloon go in canary wharf and watched it float up and over a skyscraper.  There was no way I was taking that thing on the tube, and it kind of felt good watch it go.

 

baby baby baby

In the next 3 weeks I will have a baby girl.  Right now nothing is really happening on this front, but a new baby is going to be inevitable at this point and then I will know whatever it is that all the parents keep insinuating.  Apparently it’s supposed to be a real pain but great anyway?  Whatever the result, I’m tired of waiting around for it, I want my little girl now!  Reba is pretty uncomfortable and doesn’t like to walk too far or fast… I suppose know how she feels!

Last night we had a bbq at Ginny and Kaysa’s place, which was lots of fun.  Al and I decided we needed rum and went to the store to buy some Havana Club 7, which we drank entirely.  After that point it would have made sense to just go home, but we thought that purchasing a seconding bottle (Sailor Jerry) would be the right thing to do.  Following some intensive Sailor Jerry work, bad Pixies solo dancing in the living room, and a stumbly walk across the park, I was relegated to the guest bedroom based on a prior history of snoring.  Today we laid low, and Reba made beautiful lovely fluffy delicious pancakes based on a pedantic adherence to the instructions on the side of the Bisquick box, something that no one in this country seems to be able to do. 

Tomorrow is a bank holiday, which means the whole country is off at the pub enjoying the sunshine and the lager.  Since I actually work for a bank, I’m double definitely taking the day off.