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Back when I was a stripling fresh out of school, I was warned of the Married Guy Tummy. Not directly, of course. Just in passing: “Oh, yeah, so-and-so got hitched and had a kid and got the Married Guy Tummy.”

The implication was that domesticity automatically softens the midriff. Good thing the whole idea is a bunch of crap.

See, here’s the deal. Dads, if you get a baby paunch, you’re doing something wrong. Here’s just a sampler of the exercises that you’ll give you rock hard tasty abs, washerboard style, whether you want them or not:

• Clutching a twelve-pound screaming infant to your chest while doing endless desperate sit-ups in a row to try to soothe her back to sleep.

• Helping Mommy out by biking Big Sister to school in the mornings, then hauling the empty trailer back home, then biking to work as usual.

• Doing the grocery shopping and the child supervision at the same time by hauling a hundred pounds of giggling kids and twenty pounds of groceries over nine miles of Washington County’s hills.

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During the pregnancy, I learned a few things about expecting mothers. For example:

1. They don’t like to be told to hurry.
2. It’s called a dress, not a “tarp.”
3. Only Mama can reference the Simpsons’ pryin’ bar joke.

Fatherhood comes with its own set of lessons. Read on to find out what I’ve learned in the last six days.

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Robin is here!

We had tried everything to get this baby out: long walks, spicy food, plus various other folk remedies that can’t be discussed in polite company. There was just one thing we hadn’t tried: Murphy.

So, on the eve of our daughter’s official due date (the one day they say that children usually aren’t born), we went on vacation. Made sense to us.

Did it work? Obviously. How? Read on.

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I didn’t have high hopes for the LiveStrong ride this year. Things just seemed so chaotic at headquarters. No repeat of last year’s successful group training. Donations credited to the wrong account. Websites down for entire weekends. No schedules available until practically the day of. Vital information posted only in PDF (and broken PDF, at that!).

So I was getting bummed on the whole concept. Things started to pick up a little, though, when Lynn and I stopped by Nike headquarters the day before the ride to waddle over and pick up my registration packet. Read on.

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What do you get when you cross a gay Scottish cowboy, a world-weary French starlet, and a Hasidic Jamaican pirate?

Time-Based Art!

Usually, Portland’s annual experimental art hoo-ha is all over the papers, radio, Internet, etc. Sadly, T:BA 2007 was so far off the radar that we only got word in time to attend one event. It was a doozy, though—more on that in a sec.

At last year’s T:BA, Lynn and I indulged in a glut of activities, from a game of sketch-you-sketch-me over the Internet, to wordless season-themed movies of nekkid people, to a temple of wax and electronica assembled around us by two enthusiastic Germans, to one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking data visualizations I have ever seen (counting things like country populations, X-Box owners, and malaria victims as grains of rice).

And in a previous year, I deliberately splashed some frigid water on my senses by attending an extremely abstract modern dance performance. Since I’m not usually into abstract art, modern things, or dance, you can imagine I was a bit out of my depth. But exposure to wildly different things is good for you, and the dance was spectactularly executed—I had a blast.

So I had high hopes for this year, but as I mentioned, we could only attend one event.

Was it the get your hair cut by a ten-year-old exhibit, you ask? No, tempting as that was, we decided to go with Nature Theater of Oklahoma (despite the name, there’s no nature, and they’re from New York) with their wacky iPod-powered play, No Dice.

How was it? Well, I liked it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Huh? Read on to see what I mean.

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Well, it’s that time of year again. Time for me to dust off my beggin’ shoes and ask you all for donations to the LiveStrong foundation. See the full article for the juicy details.

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For those of you who are wondering where my book is, here’s the latest.

It’s done.

At least, the original 90-page PDF is done. But a funny thing happened while I was downtown for FOSCON. My editor was in town, so we talked about books and such. And she felt an upgrade was in order.

From her standpoint, we can sell more copies if I tie the lessons in the book into broader concepts. And for me, it means I get to add back in all the topics I’d had to cut ruthlessly to fit the formerly narrow focus.

So my little monograph is going to grow into an actual, real, 200-page paper book. And it’s going to do it by November. PDFs will go live sometime around then, with the print book coming out next spring.

Wish me luck!

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Well, we’re back from the Magically Corporate Kingdom. There are endless sights to write about, but let’s just look at the things that stood out as being particularly cool, lame, or strange. Read on.

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Here we are on the outskirts of the Magic Kingdom. Call it the Mildly Enchanting Suburbs.

Another day of California driving, and another day of beautiful, broad, bodily highway turns that you can lean into and delight in the way your chest muscles feel under the illusion of extra gravity. Even on the interstate. Even in a rented Ford Taurus. Read on.

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It’s been an unusual honeymoon.

We decided to do things a bit differently than other couples. We’re holding our honeymoon a good four-and-a-half months after our wedding. Our crew includes a bubbly pixie and a growing mama-belly. And we’re eschewing the standard “romantic” Paris/Hawaii/Niagara Falls fare for the sea of sticky-faced park-goers called Disneyland.

So far, the experiment has paid off handsomely. Read on.

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I’ve gotta be kidding you, right? I can barely keep up with this blog! Why on earth would I start another one?

Well, here’s the dealie-o. I’m writing a book, which is coming out in electronic form on my favorite technical press in a few weeks. And books need to have a place for their authors to host errata. Discussions. Follow-on projects. Those kinds of things.

Clearly, the book needs a home online. A blog or something. But to dedicate a whole site to pimping one lousy PDF is just lame. You’ve seen “buy my book” sites like that, haven’t you? It’s not a pretty sight.

I held off on starting a second blog until I felt I had something to say. Enter my friend John, who, unbeknownst to him but knownst to us, gave me just the kick in the rear I needed.

John often posts about the technical challenges he encounters at work, and it’s quite interesting to those of us who take our network services and “disks in the sky” for granted.

So it was time to get off my duff and start talking about a few of the little nuggets of software interestingness I’ve encountered in my twenty-year apprenticeship in computing.

And without further ado, I hereby break this imaginary bottle of champagne over the prow of the S.S. Let’s Play!

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This is a sketch of Robin, tailored to her approximate size in the womb. We had it done at the Oregon Country Fair, a weekend-long hippie family funfest that takes place every summer in the woods outside Eugene. Gaze at my beautiful bride’s belly, and then read on for my rookie impressions of the Fair.

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Just “ahem.” That is all.

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You pentathletes can keep your spears and Frisbees. I want a sport that combines the cameraderie of team outings, the “me time” of a solo race against the clock, the mystery of a scavenger hunt, free snacks, and of course the joyous hum of two wheels on the pavement.

Wish granted. Read on to hear about randonneuring, my new distance addiction.

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Woo-hoo! The second half of our wedding! I guess we could call that “Wed 2.0,” but we wouldn’t want Tim O’Reilly to sue us. He is a lawyer, ya know.

Everything was pretty much cooked and mixed and moved and decorated and so on during the week leading up to the wedding. So as noon rolled around, Dad and Jane and I had the luxury of just kind of hanging out and gabbing while Lynn and Avalon got their manicures.

Read on for what happened next!

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Time to talk about Friday. Yes, I know several Fridays have come and gone since the Friday we’re talking about—the day before the wedding back in March. Sorry about that.

Ah, well. Bygones.

The day was planned as a sort of smörgåsbord of downtown treats. Folks might be skipping a couple of activities, joining us for a few hours, and trickling off again. Kind of relaxed. Y’know, Portland-y.

Read on, MacDuff….

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Time for another chapter in the days of preparation before our awesome, epic wedding. On Thursday, the out-of-town guests and I set out across the Tualatin Valley in search of fantastic wine. We did it all: small private vineyards, big corporate places, and everywhere in between. Read on.

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Okay, day two of the festivities. I’m going to tell you in microscopic detail about my afternoon of running errands. Hmm—ya know what? Let’s just do the short-short version. FlexCar’ed my way to my favorite vegan grocer for hippie snacks, picked up a present for my bride-who-was-and-is-and-is-to-be (the present is also a clue for you, dear reader/s), and unabashedly did my best Eddie Vedder impersonation behind the steering wheel (don’t ask). In short, it was a day of spiritual preparation for the upcoming ceremony.

And on to day three….

We packed up Dad, Jane, and the extras from the Sidekick Man movie and shipped out to Cannon Beach for sightseeing and windowshopping and pizza and candy. (“And and and and and and and,” as Robert Earl Keen might sing.) When confronted with fresh-pulled taffy and handmade truffles, the kids predictably chose prefabbed artificial scuz that was manufactured miles away and months ago.

Just a few miles south of Cannon Beach is Oswald West, where we hiked down to a secluded little beach called Short Sands, where we attempted to launch kites as the kids chased us around with sand-laden shovels. Incidentally, kids have no notion of treaties, conventions, or limited warfare. Shoe’s untied? Rock in your sock? You’re gettin’ sanded, bub.

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The wedding festivities have begun!

You’ll no doubt recall the paper part of the wedding in December. We didn’t want you guys, our friends and family, to miss out, though. We promised a week of Portland-area fun culminating in an honest-to-goodness reception, and it’s time to deliver!

We’ve front-loaded the week with the more hard-core, Scorpio-type stuff. First up was a 20-mile bike ride down Portland’s vaunted Springwater Corridor rails+trails route. Just think: while we were out pounding down miles of trail and enjoying the cold drizzle, most folks were cooped up in their climate-conditioned offices and sitting in their comfy chairs as they poked away at Excel spreadsheets. Suckers!

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Man, I miss updating this blog. One month, it’s been. Yeesh. The sad part is: writing is a blast, but all my writing juices are getting sucked up by other projects.

As a way to clear the psychic decks and do a bit of early mental “spring cleaning,” let’s look at a smattering of current hot, lukewarm, and cold projects that are taking tons, some, or none of my time lately. Keep reading to see what turns up in the recycling bin of the mind.

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Hey, y’all. Sorry for the delay in getting these posted, but at last the wait is over. Feast your peepers on these.

And read on to hear the glorious tale.

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