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For those in the know, Arlo had his surgery today and he did just fine. From the way he was wolfing down dinner and banging his toys around later this afternoon, you wouldn’t think he had been in a 3 hour operation this morning, knocked out cold, intubated, with an IV hanging out of his little arm. Other than being a bit insecure for the rest of the day (understandably), he seems to be coping pretty well. Perhaps it’s the codeine elixir that we’re giving him for pain management that’s cheering him up. Zoe and I, on the other hand, have been up since 3 am, and it’s been a very long day… He’s got about 6 weeks until he’s healed up if all goes well.

Well, it took some time to settle, but I’ve been offered a full-time position with Trackvia as Chief Software Architect, which I’ve accepted. It’s been a few years since I’ve worked a full-time position, but I think it’s the right opportunity at the right time and I’m looking forward to it.

I’ll be telecommuting from Chicago for the time being, but it looks like a move back to Denver to work on-site sometime in the spring is pretty likely. For those of you in CO, I look forward to seeing you sometime soon!

Best wishes to everyone for the New Year!

Great news! Arlo has finally decided to join us out here in the world. Yesterday morning at 10:34 am, after about 12 hours of labor, Zoe gave birth to Arlo Henry Lee, weighing in at 7 pounds 9 ounces.

We’re in the hospital now and he’s busy learning how to breastfeed, getting measured and examined by the nurses here with lots of cuddles from Mom and Dad in between. It’s been pretty exhausting, it seems like Arlo really isn’t into the whole sleeping for 8 hours uninterrupted thing. Darn those small stomachs!

We get to go home tomorrow. Here’s a pic of Arlo just a few minutes old.

Well, November is speeding by, and my time in China is drawing to a close for now. The days have been quite filled of late; in addition to my normal training regime, I’m editing an Yiquan book for Master Yao and doing regular remote contract programming, which makes the time really fly. I’ve discussed my plans with Master Yao (pictured), and he’s agreed to take me on as his formal disciple (woohoo), and will be administering the instructor exam sometime soon before I leave, which is all great news. If all goes well, I’ll be in Chicago with Zoe, making some money and practicing Yiquan, and generally living a more “normal” life for the first time in quite a while. Enough adventuring for the time being – it’s time for the hobbits to return to the Shire, put on the fire and drink a nice cup of tea.

I was originally planning on leaving in mid-December but pushed the date up to the 4th, as there are some fairly pressing matters to attend to at home. But it’s good news, not bad ;-)

In other news, CM is in town, visiting from Crestone, and hopefully I will get to see her tomorrow!

Several months ago, on kind of a whim, I entered Zoe into a sweepstakes that United was advertising on the front of their website for a million frequent flier miles. Since she was eligible and I hadn’t flown in the time window required by the rules, I thought, well “why not?” registered her for the drawing and then promptly forgot about it soon afterwards. Well the other day I got kind of a incredulous e-mail from her, because apparently, she was one of 25 selected winners! Thanks United! It’ll definitely make all the traveling she’s been doing a little bit easier :-)

Come to think about it, Zoe’s always been great at winning contests. Just last year, she won another contest in London, by entering a short poem for the Foyles bookstore, which was looking for a little poem to celebrate it’s 100 years in business or something. Foyles, by the way is a fun bookstore to check out – a great independent bookseller that also happens to be London’s largest. Pretty decent martial arts section too…

I just read this interesting story on the BBC site about an incident in New Mexico:

Blazing mouse sets fire to house A US man threw a mouse he had found in his home onto a pile of burning leaves - only to see it run away and burn his house down. Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, found a mouse in his home and wanted to get rid of it. “I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house,” he said. Though no one was injured, the house and everything in it was destroyed. “I’ve seen numerous house fires, but nothing as unique as this one,” Fire Department Captain Jim Lyssy said. New Mexico has seen several major blazes after unseasonably dry and windy conditions which have destroyed 10 homes and devastated more than 53,000 acres (21,200 hectares) of land.

BBC story here.

Well, we’ve finally done it. After almost a year of sitting empty and on the market, we’ve finally sold our duplex condo in Denver! Whoo! I feel like a load of bricks has been lifted off my shoulders and a true sense of relief. I can’t believe how much stress this experience has been responsible for in my life and I’m elated that it’s finally done. Truly a lesson in real-estate for the books to remember – it seems like it should be obvious, but it’s easy to forget: buying property is not always a “safe” investment…

So, there’s no getting around the fact that I haven’t been exactly a regular on these pages in the last few months. I guess there just hasn’t been much to note – I’ve been pretty much heads down coding for the job and spending the spare time training the martial arts. So apologies for the lack of updates.

But I am happy to say that my 6 month contract with Barclays Global Investors has just finished today, and I’m a free man to enjoy the summer and do as I will. I feel like I just had the last day of school or something. Very strange. G has just announced that she’s coming over and she’s going to take me out to get wrecked. Considering I only get drunk maybe once every couple of years, if that, this shouldn’t be too hard.

The last time I had a done-with-work-let’s-get-drunk outing was right about this time 10 years ago in NYC when I left D.E. Shaw & Co for Colorado. I dimly remember shots of jello and Jaegermeister, culminating sitting in a restaurant on India Row in the East Village sometime around midnight with my forehead planted on the table, the restaurant spinning around me, and too queasy to eat. Blech. Definitely no Jaeger tonight. Definitely.

The Guardian is running a story today which marks the fifth anniversary of the NASDAQ hitting its all-time high of 5048.62, the pinnacle of the dot-com era before its steady march to the bottom, hitting 1114.11 by October of 2002, a loss of 78% of its peak value.

March 11, 2000 was a heady time indeed; I was a participant in the dot-com boom like so many of us, serving as the technical lead at a burgeoning sports lifestyle company Active.com, which was buying out its competition left and right like some huge Borg cube. Lots of caffeine, little sleep, and a frantic energy stemming from the belief that the “new economy” was an unstoppable wave that you could either ride to riches or would bury you in obsolesence. Well I guess it turns out that it was a wave, but not quite as unstoppable as we had hoped – I guess actually making money is still a fairly important business objective that can’t be ignored for too long, eh?

Well it didn’t exactly turn out as planned, but an invaluable experience nonetheless. And I got to work with some excellent people as well, that I still keep in regular touch with today. How did those times treat you?

I just read a interesting article about experiments being conducted by the Global Consciousness Project, hosted by Princeton University. Researchers there have assembled a black box random number generator, which seems to have predicted recent major world events including 9/11 and the recent Asian tusnumi.

The premise behind this assertion is that the probability of generated random numbers (in this case a binary 1 or 0) are skewed far beyond normal deviation during times of intense human concentration. A fascinating look at how science approaches the paranormal.