Lauren Tierney Chen was born April 29, 2008 at 8:22 AM.

She was born at 6 lbs, 13 ounces. 19 inches long.

I’ll post pictures in the next few days.

We’ve got a busy day ahead. We should have a brand new baby girl by midday. Managing Lucas at day care is a bit of a logistical challenge, but we’ll be fine. I’ll post an update or two today I hope. Dunno what net access they have at the hospital, but I’m assuming they have something.

Tomorrow’s my last day of work before my paternity leave. I’m super excited to have another baby. Lucas has been as much fun as I could imagine. We have a short list of names for the little girl, but we’ll make the final decision after we see her. Tracy is having a C-section because of the location of the placenta. She doesn’t seem too worried about it, but there will be a bit longer recovery time. I’m planning to be off work for 3 weeks.

I downloaded and tried out the Google App Engine the first day it was released. It falls into several different areas that are my favorite kinds of computer science: distributed computing, application frameworks, google, grid computing.

Here’s my impressions so far. I like it, but it needs some work.

They currently restrict developers to python. And understandably, there are some significant restrictions like no system calls and no files. This is fine for now, I’ve been meaning to improve my python skills. But to be have good reach they need to support Java and .Net at least.

DataStore. This is their data storage you have to use instead of a SQL db or the file system. This is probably the coolest part of their architecture. It’s interesting because it’s an interface into Google’s BigTable. Their interface is very very stripped down SQL. Restrictions include: you can only select *. Where clauses can only use <, > and =. You can only select on one =. There must be an index on that equality select. There aren’t any joins or subqueries. There are more and I’m sure I misstated some of them. Suffice to say, there are a lot of weirdnesses and it’s really not that similar to a relational database other than that they try to use something SQL-like for familiarity. It does however provide advantages that aren’t available in traditional RDBMses. You can add arbitrary searchable properties on a per row basis without a schema change

It quite a contrast to Amazon’s web services which seem quite separate from each other. One of my biggest beefs with what Amazon does is that by separating the CPU from the Storage, they are making it harder to use both than it should be.

I am also curious about pricing. Google claims you should be able to serve up around 5,000,000 page views/month before you have to start paying. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Tracy and I celebrated our 10th anniversary tonight. I’m super lucky to be with her and we’ve been very happy together. We went to Forbes Mill Steakhouse and the food was very good. Mike was kind enough to come over and watch Lucas for a couple of hours while we were out. We had also never realized that our anniversary is also the day that MLK was shot.

Last night my oldest friend Toby was in town so we went out to dinner with he and his family(wife and two kids) and his brother David. I haven’t seen them in like 8 years since his wedding. He’s now a cardiologist working in Tacoma. David is radiologist doing a fellowship at Stanford, but starting in the summer, he’ll be living in SF and working for Kaiser in the East Bay. That’s good because it means Toby will come down more often and I’ll get to see them all more.

On the way to work this morning, a van was tailgating me pretty closely. I sped up to almost 80 in the carpool lane, but he kept accelerating with me. He had some opportunities to pass me, but didn’t take them. Later he got stuck behind another car and was tailgating him pretty closely too. Finally when he was tailgating a third different car a thought occurred to me. Was he trying to draft behind passenger cars in the carpool lane? Maybe gas prices are so high that it might actually make sense. Wind resistance(and therefore energy consumption) does increase exponentially with speed, but could that really save you money?