Actually, It's Called "Bonding Leave"

When a mother takes leave from work when she's having a baby, they call it "maternity leave", but when I was filling out the paperwork, they didn't call it "paternity leave"; they called it "bonding leave". I thought that was fine, I guess, but why try to get all fancy about it?

Then the other day on the radio I heard this talk show host ranting about how there shouldn't be paternity leave, because it's a "scam". He said mothers need time to recover and heal their bodies, but fathers don't, so why should they get time off of work? The more I listened to this blowhard go on about this, the angrier I got, on account of two things.

A Dad Alone

I've missed um, months of dadblogs. That's my bad. It's not like baby G has been sitting still (oh no, much to the contrary, as we'll get into), but I just didn't quite have enough to write about for a while, and I've been busy doing other stuff on my usual bus rides--writing code, mostly. I actually started writing this a whole month ago but didn't finish it promptly. Now half of this blog is obsolete, because he's constantly changing, so I had to insert some updates! Punishment for procrastination.

Index Types in TypeScript

When working on dksfight, I needed to make some global maps to cache various things. Some of these maps were indexed by an integer, and others were indexed by strings. The values stored in the maps were various different types, doesn't matter. The keys presented a problem, though.

When is an UPDATE actually a SELECT?

While I was working on dksfight, which was built with the mssql NodeJS package and Microsoft SQL server, I had a few places that used an UPDATE statement to modify some rows in the table. This is a short post about a snag I hit with these UPDATE statements in mssql.

Into the Blue Clouds

It's nice to get feedback from your peers. I made a thing a while back, but I didn't tell many people about it because I had reservations. I solicited feedback from my peers about it, and I decided the thing I made had problems I needed to resolve before I felt good about releasing it. Well, I've now solved those problems, so I'm ready to tell the world about the thing I originally created, the feedback I got, and how I incorporated it to make something neat.

ES6 Promise Types and Errors

I've been working on a new project using NodeJS. Again, I'm using TypeScript for added safety, which means I have to (and want to) play nice with the type system. This code also uses ECMAScript 6 Promises for asynchronous database queries, and I ran into some funny (like funny uh-oh) problems here. But also solutions, so I thought I'd share.

MySQL vs T-SQL Syntax Differences

I'm working on a web app project that uses a SQL backend. I wrote it originally using Ruby and MySQL, and I've been porting it to Azure and Microsoft SQL Server. You'd hope that creating the database schema would be the same for both, because it's all SQL, but nope, that's just wishful thinking. SQL has many flavors, and each of them support certain different things. T-SQL (which is what's used on Microsoft SQL Server) seems to lack some nice features MySQL had, which makes me sad.

The Golden Age of Dogs

It's time for a baby G update. It's been about a month, and he's just turned 6 months old. A half-birthday. A hirthday. Impressive stuff, staying alive and healthy for the first half year of your life. And time really flies. It feels like it wasn't so long ago that his oversized head just flopped around on that twiggy, useless neck, but these days I just heft him up on my arm and carry him around more or less upright. He wobbles a little, but keeps his balance. It's an amazing transition, and one that happened gradually with practice over time, not any overnight revelation. He just got better at stuff like balance.

A Giant Metal Tube

Aw dang, I missed a month, didn't I? I shouldn't do that, because around here everything moves rapidly. Every day I look at baby G and I see less of a baby and more of a little boy. It's exciting, and I'm excited. Someone was telling me the other day that moms tend to want their kids to stay young and dads want them to grow up, and I guess I fit that pattern for sure. The other day we were at a Sounders game and I saw not one but two dads with their little boys sitting on their shoulders and grabbing their head for support, and said, "That. I want that. That's my life goal, right there." She said it's coming, don't worry.

Babbling with Babadoobot

Guys, I did it again. I made another Twitter bot. This one absolutely crushes all my others on the "ridiculous idea" scale. I'm almost too embarrassed to share it with you. Almost.

I was walking to my bus the other day, and for some reason, the word "adobado" popped into my head--you know, the Mexican meat seasoning. I thought, "I wonder if I have that spelt right. It seems easy to mess up." Fittingly, as I wrote this blog, I got it wrong at first. I wrote "abodabo" and had to look it up and correct myself. Anyway, I kept thinking, "hehe, that word sounds funny... you know, I could probably write a program to generate funny sounding words like that."

The Formula Formula

This is a dadblog, but it's not really about baby G's development, for once. You might say this is about my development as a parent. As baby G has been growing, so too has the amount of food he eats (well, drinks, at this point). He started out drinking a mere 2-3 oz. of breast milk per feeding. Eventually, we weaned him off of that and switched to formula entirely. We buy Gerber Soothe, which our doctor recommended because the Enfamil and Similac gave him the rankest gas you can imagine and he always felt kind of bloaty.

Ruby MySQL Concurrency

I lamented the other day that there is a paucity of information out there about Ruby+MySQL. Really, I was able to find basically one decent site, and even that seemed to gloss over some details in the area of concurrency and transactions. I wanted to know a bit more about how this works, so I ran some experiments.

Hootin' and Hollerin'

We've now crossed the three month point for little baby G, and he just keeps developing at a steady pace, surprising us almost daily with weird, cool, and cute new things he starts doing and phasing out other behaviors like old clothes. Speaking of clothes, he really is outgrowing them constantly. Every week we have to go through his sleepers and figure out which ones still fit him. My wife has a constant task of seeking out cheap, new clothes.

Chasing the Elusive Smile

It's been another month, and baby G has passed the 2 months-old point. Happy 2 month birthday, little man! Oddly enough, 8 weeks for him was the last week of January. Can your science explain that??

Home Remedies and a Month

We have reached the one month mark for baby G! Wait, sorry, since I'm a parent now I have to count everything in weeks. In fact, it was five weeks this Wednesday. Happy birthweekday, baby G! You're all grown up now, horray! I jest, but he really is growing. He's gotten noticeably taller (longer?) than that first week, and he now clearly weighs more than the cat. That's our main metric around here. Getting heavy there, big boy.