Baby had a great week at day care. No problems at all. I got the expansion to Guild Wars, Guild Wars: Factions. I’ve played a bit, haven’t tried too many of the new skills yet though. Been really busy at work evaluating new hardware.

I think it’s fair to say that Lucas rules. He’s very cute, smiles a lot, is well behaved and he’s getting huger every day.

I don’t really follow baseball, but I did join a fantasy baseball team again. Doing research on my team I was fortunate enough to have drafted Albert Pujols. That guy rules, he completely carries my team.

I spent a couple hours yesterday diagnosing a problem that stemmed from the fact that a 32 bit integer had overflowed and wrapped around without an error or notification. Damn those 32 bit machines.

Lucas sleeps a lot when he’s outside of the house. Sometimes it seems like he’s only ever awake when he’s at home. This is nice because we can go out for a meal or Tracy can shop with him and be pretty sure that he’s going to sleep through it. However now that he’s in day care during the day he sleeps a lot of the day and gets hungry and active in the middle of the night. Daddy isn’t too happy about this turn of events, but thankfully the day care workers have offered to wake him up on a regular basis if we want, so we’ll see how that works next week.

I stopped in at the nearest grocery store to work for a dinner snack. The Nob Hill Food near work has the new “Self-Checkout” lanes. They have 4 stations and one employee watches over all of them as people are checking out and paying. It’s kind of an interesting system, but honestly I’m not sure it’s a real time or space saver. People checking themselves out are damn slow(myself included). It takes a regular person about 2-3 times longer per item to scan it in, because they don’t know where the barcode is, and general unfamiliarity with the system. Maybe it’ll be better, but right now it isn’t, at least for consumers. They probably save some labor costs though. To me it’s odd that a higher end chain like Nob Hill would offer this and not one of the chains for more cost conscious consumers. Maybe the other grocers are concerned about theft and system abuse.

Lucas is going into daycare part time this week, in preparation for going into daycare full time next week. He seems to be adjusting well. He hasn’t apparently complained much. Although there’s not a nanny cam there or anything, so it’d be kind of tough for us to tell.

A friend at work who lives in Tracy told me a couple of interesting things about where he lives. They passed an anti-growth ordinance limiting real estate development because the rest of the infrastructure couldn’t be built fast enough. This of course drove up prices by limiting supply, against the desire to keep housing prices reasonable. The other thing is that his kids have the option to go to year round school with a month off in December and April. That rounds out the resource utilization instead of the standard 9 month on, 3 month off schedule.

Tango killed one of my machines. It was working fine, then he sat down at it and suddenly it stopped sending a signal to the monitor. This made me sad. I swapped out the monitor, video card, and ram so he must’ve fried the disk, cpu or motherboard. I’m guessing the cpu/mobo because disks tend to fail under heavy activity(although it might have been coming out of sleep causing a bunch of disk seeks).

Regardless, I need a replacement. I’m pondering all the possibilities. Desktop, laptop, AMD, Intel. I could even get a mac. I don’t think I’m quite to the point where I would get a mac, but it’s on the potential list for the first time in about 10 years. The problem with the Mac is that this is Tracy’s computer and she kind of needs a PC(work compatibility), so if I get a Mac, I’ll have to give her my PC, which means I need to use the Mac as my game machine, and I’m not sure how well those do for gaming. Realistically I have to run Windows for games. So an Intel Mac is fine because I can now boot into Windows. I’ll probably just get another Dell. I’ve had good success with them and if you’re patient and wait for the good coupons the deals are excellent.

Yesterday was the semi-annual YACHT poker tournament. I haven’t been playing much lately, but I always try and go because its a good time. As usual it’s a $40 buyin, but it’s ballooned to an event with over 90 players.

This year I spent most of my time bleeding off money in the main tournament, culminating in an unimpressive finish somewhere in the middle rounds. The side game I sat down in was a mixed dealer’s choice game pot limit game of .25/.50 antes. My side game performance was largely similar to my tournament performance, except for about 4 hands of courchevel where I made back all the money I lost. So overall it was good.