Gabriel is talking all the time now. I would go as far as to say that he can hold conversations with you now. And if you don’t feel like talking he’ll have a conversation with himself! Since he first started saying individual words Devon and I have always repeated back what he said so that we knew we understood him correctly. We still do that now and he’s so used to it that if you don’t repeat his sentence back to him he’ll keep saying it until you do.

Some of the conversations we’ve had with him include:
Gabe: “I need my markers and my big paper”
Me: “You do?”
Gabe: “Yeaaahhh. I’m going to make a picture!”

Gabe: “Daddy needs an apple”
Devon: “He does?”
Gabe: “Yes. Here Daddy.” (goes to hand me an Apple slice)
Me: “That’s okay I’m full.”
Gabe: “Daddy full! I eat!”

Gabe: “I wanna see you do ‘woo woo’”
Devon: “Woo woo” (shaking her head)
Gabe: “Woo woo” (shaking his head same way)
Devon: “Woo woo”
Gabe: “I don’t want to say that!”

In August of last year I had the incredible opportunity to fly out to San Francisco to interview for a software development position with a start-up company. I made the initial contact through my friend Jesse who had been out in California for a couple of years at that time. I got my first experience traveling for an interview and my first trip to California.
One of the planes I flew on was fairly tiny.

I flew out of Dayton and connected to Denver. In Denver they had some issues with the plane being over-booked so there was a bit of a delay there. By the time I landed in San Francisco it was almost 3am EDT and was wondering around trying to find my hotel. I finally hailed a cab and got to the hotel, which was only about a block away from where I grabbed the cab!

The next morning I was up early to ensure that I had time to find the building. It was only a few blocks from my hotel. The interview went fairly well and the people at the company were great. The project that they are working on seems really cool and people will find out soon what exactly it is. They are currently in closed beta at the moment. Jesse knew quite a few of the people at the company so that was a great ice-breaker that made things easier for me. Unfortunately he was out of town while I was out there but after my interview the developers pointed me to some of the tourist attractions that I could see and still catch my flight home.

I walked around downtown for a while and then took the Trolley down to Fisherman’s Wharf. I tried to get a picture of Alcatraz and got to listen to the worst street performer ever!

Tomorrow morning at 7:30 am I start a new job. I’m still going to be writing software in the Dayton area. I’ll be back writing some Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for applications and some filters for existing applications. This is my first job switch in my professional career and, in total, in about 8 years. I felt that it was time to switch up companies and look for a position that used some different technologies so as to not let my skills get too stale. I was also open to moving out of state as well as into new technologies so that took me to some interesting places. I got the opportunity to interview at a Tech Start-up in San Francisco, a Java developer in the Metro-DC area, and phone interviews with Microsoft and Amazon! It was definitely some fun experiences.

One Day by Matisyahu

So when negativity surrounds
I know some day it’ll all turn around
Because
All my life I’ve been waiting for
I’ve been praying for
For the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more
They’ll be no more wars
And our children will play

This is a really good song with a semi-Reggae beat to it. Times when I worry about what Gabriel will see in his lifetime and how the world will be for him I like to think of those last two lines.

Tonight while playing in the backyard with Gabe Zoe had a little adventure. She had been sniffing and digging between two pots of lettuce that Devon had in the backyard. She got her head all the way in between the clay pots and suddenly 3 baby bunnies shoot out from behind them in 3 different directions! Zoe was so stunned that she stepped back about 1 foot and just stared as the 3 bunnies hopped away from her. One of them snuck under the fence and into the neighbor’s yard. Another one went back behind the patio and the third one stayed up next to the house. Eventually the one by the patio went into the neighbor’s yard as well. The third one simply stayed by the house for the next half-hour while we continued playing. Zoe walked by it about 12 times and the bunny just stayed really still. Then as Gabe was putting his toys back in the garage one of the bunnies came back under the fence into our yard and Zoe went for it! The bunny held it’s ground and didn’t move. Zoe just went right up to it and sniffed it intensely while it cried and hunkered down in the tall grass. She sniffed the bunny for another minute and then we all went inside. When it came down to it Zoe was just a gentle little push-over!

I am all caught up now on getting all the pictures uploaded to this new format. So all of Gabriel’s pictures that were previously viewable are again available and should be better sorted now. In the future it will be easier for me to upload new pictures so I should be posting them a bit more often now. Also all of the pictures from our Wedding and pictures of our pets are also posted again. I checked a few books on iPhone development out from the library yesterday so maybe this weekend I will begin working through some more tutorials in preparation for my first build of the app I intend to release to the public. I also discovered that our library here rocks! They rent video games, Blu-ray movies, DVDs, and CDs in addition to books. The entire catalog is also searchable online so that you can have an idea if what you want is available and if it’s not you can place a hold request online too! That’s it for now, have a good weekend everyone!

Valve released Steam for Mac yesterday and it included 50 some odd titles available for purchase. I believe that all of the titles featured “Steam Play” which meant that you could buy it on either PC or Mac and play it on either platform rather than having to buy two versions of the same game. This is awesome that there are already that many titles available! One of these titles was Braid (as I had hoped). So since I bought it during a weekend sale for PC I was able to download it on my MacBook Pro and play it. It, obviously, runs much better natively than it did under Crossover Games or Wine. Valve is also giving away Portal to anyone with a Steam login from now until May 24th so if you haven’t played that game yet and you own a PC you should at least try it out. Also, supposedly, Valve has made it official that they are bringing Steam to the Linux OS as well. source I am saying supposedly because I have yet to find an official announcement from Valve online anywhere. So exciting gaming news for those of us using alternative OSes.

I’ve slowly been adding in Gabriel’s old pictures that I had up previously. I’m all done getting his pictures from 2008 posted again and am just starting on 2009. I think this will be my last site overhaul for a while – it’s too hard and time consuming to catch back up! Since this involves posting the pictures back up if you are somewhere on the site and pictures show up as missing please let me know as I might not be aware of all the places that need updated links to the pictures.
I also need a bit of feedback on the types of posts shown here as well. I’m thinking that I want to start writing a lot more blog posts and a lot of them will probably be about Gaming – either console games, iPhone games, or Mac/PC games. Should I put those posts up on a separate blog or leave them here too? I also want to write about my adventure in learning to write apps/games for the iPhone. Should those posts be on a separate blog or here? Let me know in the comments please!

Well it appears as though the Steam for Mac client has an official release data now – May 12th. source So those of us who missed the Beta sign-up period will get our chance to get our hands on it. I’m very anxious to see the list of games that will be available. Valve is the only company to have said that their games will be available and so far I have not seen anything else from other companies. Personally I’m hoping that Braid will be made available since there is a Mac port and the PC version is available on Steam. I bought it a while back and it’s the main reason that I even have Boot Camp installed on my Mac. The PC and Mac versions are published by different companies though so I’m not sure it’ll be that simple for Steam to offer both versions under one license. Some other titles that I know have Mac ports and are available under Steam for PC are: World of Goo, Gish, Penumbra trilogy, Aquaria, and Bullet Candy. Most of these are considered Indie games so it might make a lot of sense for them to make them easily available on Steam for Mac.

There has been a lot of news recently in the Mac and Linux gaming realms. Valve software announced back on March 8th that they were bringing the Steam platform along with all Source Engine titles over to Mac OS X. The next big part of the announcement was that anyone who had purchased Valve’s games previously in Steam would be able to access those games in the Mac client as well so there was no need to purchase another license for a user’s Mac. According to another article Valve viewed bringing their games over to OS X as the “biggest even in Steam’s history.” (link) Valve then initiated a closed beta for the new Mac client in April. Actually having the full-blown beta client has lead to some more discoveries.

Phoronix, a Linux-related news site, has found several important pieces in the Steam for Mac beta client that seem to point to a Linux client being in development as well. They found several mentions of Linux or Linux-related libraries within the binary of the Steam client. And then discovered actual Linux files on the Steam servers themselves. See here, here, and here. Since Valve pulled the files from their servers it would seem that they really might be developing something for Linux and want to keep it a secret for a bit longer.

All of this could help to bring a unified area to find decent games for both Mac OS X and Linux at decent prices. Steam usually has many sales and if they cut the prices on all platforms that a game is available for it could make these two Operating Systems more competitive. For example, I own Braid for Windows that I purchased through Steam. The game has also been ported to OS X so I’m hoping to see an announcement soon that when Steam for Mac is released that I will be able to install the Mac binary since I already own the Windows version.