TheFranciscos.Net

Geek Stuff

I’ve been slowly upgrading my computer setup at home for the past few weeks – I’ve recently gotten a cable connection from ATTBI, a router/wireless access point, a wi-fi card for my notebook and a new 60GB hard drive. I’ve had no problems in plugging in all this stuff until I decided that I need to buy my own cable modem (instead of leasing it from the cable company). I figured I’d save a couple of bucks a month and the purchase would eventually pay for itself.

Being the bargain hunter ever on the lookout, I figured I’d save a few bucks by looking for something on Ebay. After making sure that the cable company supported this modem (after a quick look at their site and a phone call) I was able to get a 3Com 3CR29210 for $40 shipped – a great savings if you consider that most cable modems go for at least $60+. Great job on the deal, I thought to myself.

When it finally arrived, I called tech support up and they said that I should be able to connect this with no problem. Just disconnect the old one and reconnect the new one and it should go ahead fine. Right away, this sounded really fishy to me, especially since I’ve worked for a cable internet company, and although I was never directly involved with installing these things, I know for a fact that it cannot be that simple. There’s the whole process of provisioning the modem to get on the network, which at times can be pretty lengthy. But the tech support insisted that it should take care of itself automatically. So I installed the new modem, and turned it on, waited for a few minutes – no connection at all. Nip, nada, ziparoonio. So I called tech support again and explained the situation, asking if they could please provision the modem on their network… again, I was told that there was no need to do so. I should try installing the old modem to see if it worked, and if it did, then the modem was the problem. Well, of course, the modem that they supply works because it’s already provisioned on their system. So I thought I would try again the next night and see if I could get semi-intelligent tech person that knew what the hell provisioning was. Again, no luck, and this time they even started getting rude.

Anyway, even though I’m sure that the cable modem I bought works, I’m going to have to return it simply because the morons at ATTBI tech support don’t know how to get a “supported product” up and running. I’ll try my luck with another modem, maybe a Motorola or Toshiba and see if I can get that to work.

Cleveland is just a couple of hours away from Pittsburgh. Probably around 150 miles between the two cities. Aileen was there for a convention for med-school students and their group was promoting the residency program at UPMC McKessport. Since she was going to be away for the weekend, Zoe and I decided to tag along. Here’s some of the fun stuff we did:

– We got to stay at the Renaissance Hotel in the historic Warehouse District in downtown Cleveland, which is probably one of the nicest hotels I’ve ever stayed at. For $250 a night, it better be good. It’s an old, rustic hotel which kinda reminds me of the French Quarter in New Orleans. It was very antique-looking, from the chandeliers, to the furniture, to the paintings displayed on every floor – the hotel had a very old-fashioned feel to it. And the best thing about it was staying there for free, as Aileen’s hospital picked up the tab for that.

– One of the more popular attractions in the city is of course, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Being a music freak, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to check it out and I dragged Aileen and Zoe along for the ride. It was pretty interesting to see all the memorabilia they’ve collected over the years. They’ve got stuff like Steven Tyler’s clothes from the 70s, the outfit that Britney Spears wore at the 2001 MTV awards (you know, the skin-colored one), TLC’s dance gear with the lights positioned at strategic places, and lots of old records, magazines, fan club buttons, etc. They even had James Taylor’s 5th grade report card. The one thing I have to complain about though are the steep prices. Although the hall of fame is very interesting (and at least worth checking out at least once) – $17 is just a little too much for what you get.

– On Saturday Night, we just had to go out for a drink, but our dilemma was where we could go get some beer and cocktails and still bring along Zoe. The solution? We went to a bar/restaurant called Cooperstown which is owned by rock legend Alice Cooper. Think the Hard Rock Cafe turned sports bar, and you’ve got the atmosphere there at that place. The food wasn’t that great (Aileen particularly didn’t like their buffalo wings), but I had some of the local beer and Aileen had a strawberry daiquiri all while watching the second game of the World Series. A really nice night, and I got to go drinking with my two favorite girls in the world.

– On Sunday, we ate brunch at the Watermark restaurant at the Flats (which is the equivalent of the Strip District in Pittsburgh and South Street in Philly in terms of it being the place for great bars, clubs & restaurants – in other words, my kind of place ). We were told that the Watermark is one of the best seafood places in town and they had Sunday brunch. We were expecting something like the spectacular buffet at Capt George in Virginia. To our disappointment, the only thing close to seafood was an omelette that had fake crab meat. Things weren’t all bad though as the roast beef and paella more than made up for it. I swear that they served some of the most juicy, succulent roast beef I have ever had. I heartily recommend anybody who goes to Cleveland to visit this restaurant just to try the roast beef out (just don’t expect seafood if you’re eating brunch).

All in all, out trip was a lot of fun. Cleveland is a very nice city to visit. Clean and spacious, it reminds me of Chicago, but in a smaller sort of way. It’s definitely worth another visit.

Check out some of our pictures here.

Our trip to Cleveland was a lot of fun… getting away every once in a while to relax is something that all families should do. Cleveland is a nice and clean city. It kinda reminds me of a mini-Chicago, but in a smaller sort of way. I’ll write more about it later today after I get some work done.

On another note, thank God the DC sniper has been finally caught… and of course with it come the eventual tribute sites to the heroes of this case. Check this out – presenting Chief Moose!

It’s off to Cleveland OH for us this weekend. Aileen has a conference going on there and her hospital agreed to pay for the hotel over the weekend. Although, with the amount of work that she does for them, she deserves to be treated well. While we’re there, we plan to see the sights, and maybe check out the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. Since the hotel is right in the middle of downtown Celeveland, the sights are just a walk away. I’m not too sure though if we’ll be able to walk around too much since the weather’s been a bit chilly these past few days, ranging from about 35° to 50°. Hopefully, it warms up a bit when we get there.

Naknangweteng ‘tong Blogger na’to o. I apologize for not having any updates for the past few weeks. Frikkin’ Blogger was just not cooperating… first, they lose the templates that I use to build my blogs, then after going through the process of rebuilding them, they had a problem with saving my new template. Anyway, I’ve finally succeeded in getting it to work, but I’m considering using another blogging tool, preferably something that completely resides on my own server. I’ve heard good things about Movable Type so I’ll probably explore that during the weekend.

Anyhow… the previous few weeks have been quite hectic, with Zoe’s finger getting cut, Aileen’s mom undergoing surgery, our fiasco with Cathay Pacific (more on that later), and our whirlwind trip to Manila, it’s been a bit fast-paced for us here. So what we’ve done during the past days have been to just kick back, relax and do as little as possible.

Our trip to Manila was fun, but getting there was a totally different story. This deal I was talking about a few months back turned out to be a disaster. After flying from Pitt to JFK airport in NY, our $125 tickets were not honored by Cathay Pacific, but we were told this only after putting our baggage on the plane and after we were giving out boarding passes and were already waiting for the boarding call at the gate. About 30-40 minutes before flight time, I was called down to the ticketing office and was told that the manager had decided to remove our luggage from the plane and cancel our itineraries. My first reaction was “you’ve got to be f**king kidding me”… but no amount of pleading would change their mind. These SOBs just said if you want to get on the plane, you have to pay for the tickets. And paying $1600 each is something I don’t on a whim you know…. so after a couple of minutes of deliberating (and getting the ticket price down to about $1000 each), Aileen and I decided that we were going anyway. The ticketing agents were assuring us we would get on the flight that night… unfortunately, the computers just weren’t cooperating and the manager made the harsh decision to leave us behind. If we wanted to go to Manila, we would have to do it the next day. At least the kind ticketing agent got us food and accomodations. We were finally able to leave for Manila the next day and go on our vacation.

In the end though, Trip.com was good enough to reimburse us for the tickets we had to buy from Cathay, and our only expense was the $375 we paid originally for our tickets. But what really pissed us off was the airline manager’s decision to not honor the tickets… which was bought legitimately. How they treated us was totally wrong… and because of this, I plan to file a formal complaint to the consumer board, IATA and Cathay. I don’t know what good will come out of it, but at least it’ll make me feel some sort of satisfaction.

Okay, just a quick post before I sign off for about a week or so – we’ll be taking a quickie trip to Manila next week. Unfortunately, it might not be a fun trip as we originally planned it to be. My mother-in-law had an ultrasound last week that showed that she had a pretty big cyst in her ovaries – turns out it’s probably malignant. Her operation is scheduled for late next week and will probably undergo therapy sessions after that. Anyway, we’ll know more next week, and who knows, it might actually turn out to be benign. We’re just glad that we’ll be able to be there while she undergoes this operation.

I’ll write back about our trip to Manila in a couple of weeks. In the meantime – peace be the journey.

Lacerated Extremities

Okay now…. yesterday was a horrible day for Zoe. The dumbass that takes care of her at daycare let her play with scissors, and that didn’t have a very happy ending. Her finger got caught in the blades and the tip of her finger was cut off. I took her to the ER and she got looked at by one of the doctors at UPMC. The bleeding was stopped and I was assured that the lopped off tip it would eventually grow back. What boggles my mind though is why the daycare center allows children to play with scissors anyway. She wasn’t doing any projects or anything like that – they just allowed her to play with the thing. I don’t know about you, but my common sense just tells me that 2 year olds and scissors just don’t mix.

Aileen and I obviously are going to file a complaint to the state… I’m not sure what good that will do, but we feel it’s our responsibility to let other parents know that this daycare center is careless enough for something like this to happen. We’ve also decided to take Zoe back to her previous daycare, which she absolutely loved. It’s a bit of a hike for me to bring her there everyday, but it’s more than worth it for the peace of mind that they won’t call me and tell me “Zoe is bleeding pretty badly”. The thing about the daycare business is that you need to earn and keep a parent’s trust for their children’s well-being while they’re being taken care of. This daycare center has totally lost mine and I wouldn’t even think of bringing Zoe back there again.

Today is the first anniversary of 9/11, a day which we will all probably remember for the rest of our lives. People will deal with it in their own ways – some will attend ceremonies, some will hear mass at their local church, some will watch tv specials and read news articles on the net, others will choose to write about it, whether it be in the form of a poem, article or even a weblog entry, others will choose to pretend it didn’t happen and completely ignore it, and in other parts of the world, some people are actually rejoicing. In any case though, this day has changed our lives and we should never forget what happened on this fateful day.

What I really think of the most when I remember 9/11 are all those fathers who left their families behind. When I think back, this event is what really made me think about how important my wife and daughter are to me. It made me realize that my family is the most important thing in life, and I should never take it for granted. I recall that my first instinct upon seeing the WTC tragedy unfold on CNN was that I wanted to be with my family, and that’s exactly what I did on that day. Right after work (which ended early that day), I drove the 5 hours or so to be with them. They actually could have been 10 or 20 hours away, and it still wouldn’t have mattered. I just knew that I wouldn’t feel safe until I was with them, and on that day I made my resolve to finally make the move from one end of PA to the other. I keep thinking about how this tragedy has affected everybody’s lives and what lessons it has taught them. Something terrible happen one year ago today, but at the same time I feel that a lot of lessons have also been learned.

On another note, I’ve been real busy with work lately – this week I finally got to start looking over some code and see what piece of our software that I’ll be working on. It turns out I’ll be working on something called a “packager”, which is a machine that basically packages drugs in order to be used my McK’s robots. Pretty cool and challenging stuff, especially since part of the work means that I’ll be porting some of the Powerbuilder code (which the original application was written in) over to VB. Coming from a VB background, I just needed to point out that the PB IDE sucks! Besides that though, it’s mainly just serial port communications and pretty straightforward, so I don’t think I’ll have much trouble getting it to work. We’ll see in a couple of weeks how this turns out.

Just a short post today before I plop over from exhaustion…

Tired, tired, tired, tired….. my first workday today was pretty good, but it was quite exhausting. Besides struggling to remember everybody’s names (which is always the first matter of importance at any job), I actually did some work today as I spent part of the day trying to familiarize myself with the product I’ll be working on (click here for details). My teammates seem like nice people (although it’s really too early to tell), but there’s a couple of new hires also on my team that seem like good candidates for lunch buddies. Anyway, all in all, a good first day.

Likewise, Zoe seemed to have a good first day at her new daycare. I was initially concerned that she might need to have an adjustment period since I’ve been taking care of her for the past two months. Well, those concerns disappeared as soon as she entered the playroom. She took to it like a fish adjusting to water. Zoe seems to thrive on group care, unlike other kids that are still shy at that age. Her caregivers were actually saying that Zoe acted right at home. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still rather have her taken care of in the comfort of our home, but since that’s way too expensive here in the States, daycare is a relatively more affordable solution.

Lastly, just a reaction to Aileen’s post below – that is such an accurate retelling of the day our lives changed forever, except for one minor thing – I only missed the entrance three times. ‘Nuff said.

Childbirth Revisited

Last month, I spent my time in Mercy Hospital delivering several babies. It was a very rewarding experience, professionally and spiritually. Just watching moms and dads receive their newborns with such anticipation, joy, tears, love. It’s amazing. I felt that I had a role in bringing these families together and it was a good feeling.

It takes all kinds of people to make a family though. There are the funny husbands who “push” with their wives during the labor, while holding their hands. Very sympathetic, I should say. There are the men who turn white at the sight of blood. I get kind of worried that they’ll fall into our sterile field. There are the ones who are just so overjoyed with their baby that they forget their wives at the delivery room and rush out to tell family members that they just had a boy. Family issues also crop up, as to which family members can not be together in the same room at the same time, complicating the whole labor process. (!) As I said it takes all kinds.

My experiences last month bring me back to when I had my daughter 2 years ago. I felt my contractions at 6 am. I wasn’t sure if they’re labor pains at that point so I was lying in bed, timing my contractions. Edu woke up to go to work and was surprised to see me already awake. (I was a housewife then and I had the luxury of sleeping 12 hours a day and it was very unusual that I was first to wake up). He had this scared/happy expression on his face. “Is is time?”, he asked. I told him that I was sort of in labor. He didn’t go to work because he didn’t want to miss anything. My mom was staying with us during that time and it was a great feeling that I had her there for support.

I forget whose idea it was (probably mine) to go to the mall. Unbelievable as it may sound, I was in labor and I went to the mall to walk around a bit. The sales manager in the Paul Harris store noticed that I was hunched over a display of dresses, timing my contractions. She walked over to me and asked me if I was in labor. When I answered in the affirmative, she laughingly told me to get out of the store before ruining her carpet. We chatted pleasantly for a while about her own childbirth experiences.

After a few hours in the mall, we went home and relaxed a bit (as much as I could in between those horrid contractions!). When they became unbearable, I told Edu that it was time! We rushed to the car (in my case, I waddled to the car) and drove thru a familiar route. The hospital in view, we turned right into the street of the emergency room of Bryn Mawr Hospital. We were right there in that street but somehow Edu missed the driveway into the emergency room. We did a u-turn and he missed it again! This happened 4 times!!! I was in so much pain already I couldn’t complain or laugh, which would have been my natural reaction.

Anyway, we made it in good time. At 6 pm, I was in my room, 6 cm dilated, but I had a good way to go! I had my epidural at that point, which slowed me down considerably because I couldn’t feel my contractions even when it was time to push already! After 6 hours of labor (with 4 hours of pushing!), I got my Zoe!

I felt relieved, excited, and just overwhelmed when I first held her. It was this onrush of love for the baby I’ve nurtured for nine months. She was just perfect!

*Edu, I think, has a totally different story about that time, especially about the part when he missed the entrance to the emergency room. He also saw Zoe when she was a bit on the purple side before she cried. I’m guessing that he probably turned pale for a while there.*

In case you’re wondering, this is not a prelude to an announcement that I’m expecting another baby. I may be getting sentimental in my old age but the old cliche comes to mind. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak!