Meanwhile, Amy's speech has improved greatly. Although she's still behind for her age, she seems at least equal to some of the other kids in her Gymboree class. She's getting the hang of stringing together 4-5 word sentences, knows most of the alphabet (recognizes the letters), and can even count to ten.

Taking care of two kids is a lot harder than one. Mia doesn't get anywhere near the amount of attention that Amy did at that age, and Amy's not getting anywhere near the amount of attention that she's used to, and it's hard not to feel guilty about either of those, but what can you do.

The other big news is that after five long years, I've left Zentropy for a similar position much closer to home, at Homestore.com. Today is actually my first day and as might be expected, there isn't much for me to do, so here I am writing on the blog. It's a much larger company than ZP, with a really big tech department, so it's going to take a lot of getting used to being a small fish in a big pond. I'm also working on product development instead of client services, which is different, although code is essentially code, no matter where it goes.

Amy said her first word! That's right, it was last night, and it was "Mama". She had been making the "ma" sounds for a bit, going "mamamamamama", but last night she made the sign for "Mommy" and then said distinctly, "Mama". It was pretty darn cool. Her first word was a little late compared to most babies, but she's apparently pretty advanced in other areas (she understands a lot of commands, is pretty good with a spoon for self-feeding), so it all evens out. Not that I was worried, since she was communicating just fine with us using signs and babbling different sounds ("dup" and "putt" were pretty common). We did schedule her to see an occupational therapist, however, since our pediatrician recommended it (her speech delays were more than 3 months behind) and my insurance was going to pay for it anyway, so we figured we might as well do it.

Besides speaking, she's been a social butterfly recently, going to a lot of birthday parties (six in six weeks). All of the other kids in her playgroup are older, turning two right about now, and in the younger playgroup, all the babies are right about one, so she kind of fits right in the middle. I'm not sure how much she enjoys the parties anyway because she's pretty shy and not a real mingler. So far at all the parties we just end up in a corner by ourselves while the other kids play, but she will probably get more social as she gets older.

Nancy is starting to organize herself for applying to CSU Channel Islands (in Camarillo) for a teaching credential. There's an informational session next week to get the details, but she's worried she'll have to take the GRE again, even though she already has a Master's degree. We'll see how that all goes.

So about the JETAASC site. I coded this thing four years ago as my very first dynamic PHP site, and they had been talking about getting a new design, but I just hadn't been able to do any work for them, having been swamped at work for the last few months. Fortunately for them, work on the Microsoft project trickled down in mid-June, so I was able to spare some time to start this (this still hasn't launched yet). My plan was to whack this thing out while I had the time, so I started that and worked through my vacation. At the office, work hasn't picked up yet, so I've been able to devote about half my time there to this thing. I'm redoing the entire site, including part of the database. One of the barriers to me working on the site before (in addition to the schedule) was that I just didn't want to deal with such crappy code. So I'm starting from near-scratch, just because I can, and because it will make my life easier when I have to do further upgrades in the future.

Amy walks about 90% of the time now. It's pretty funny when she gets near her destination and she doesn't slow down, but instead just runs into the wall/furniture/me to stop. At the last pediatrician's visit, we've discovered she gained over a pound and is now 17 lbs 9 oz, which is still below the third percentile for her age. Fifteen-and-a-half months and she's still wearing her size 6-9 month clothes.

She has become rather good at non-verbal communication (still hasn't said her first word yet) and she understands a lot of what we say to her, showing a remarkable capacity for learning new words. She recognizes some of the cats by name and even knows a few colors. It seems her brain development just grows by leaps and bounds every week.

Work-wise, we recently launched my GM Local Marketing Group (LMG) project. This is a set of almost 30 web sites for GM's dealer groups (e.g., Southern California Cadillac). The sites themselves are not particularly impressive (there's only 5-6 pages to each one) but there's a big administrative site (inaccessible to the public) that controls all the different LMG sites.

Right now, I'm in the middle of a big thing for Microsoft that we inherited from ZP-Minneapolis that's extremely complex and has a short delivery schedule, so we have almost the entire tech team on it plus a guy from Mpls. here in our office helping out. More news on this after we launch...

I hadn't mentioned this before, but she's become a very picky eater, as toddlers are wont to be, I've read. It's amazing that we have to bargain with her to get her to eat her baby food ("Eat two scoops, then you can have a piece of cheese"). If she had her way, she'd eat nothing but graham crackers, cheese, milk, and some yogurt/ice cream for good measure.

Working 7 AM to 4 PM makes the morning commute much, much easier. It's still 50 minutes, but it's free and clear most of the way (it's LA, there's still some traffic). The return trip, however, is still surprisingly busy, so I've been trying out the coastal route on the way home, which is longer, but turns out to be faster than going through the Valley. Going to bed at 10:30, however, is kind of a pain, especially on nights when there's a Lakers game that ends at 10:00, leaving me half an hour (or less, if there's overtime) to shower and prep for bed. Six and a half hours of sleep is still not my ideal (my alarm is set for 5 AM), but I can live with it for now.

Not only that, but it seems like now she is developing in leaps and bounds. This last week, she's started kissing (she only puts her mouth on you, but she recognizes the word) and raising her arms up for "banzai". She has also learned a few signs, like "hi" and "come". It's become a lot easier for us to figure out what she is trying to say or do, which makes taking care of her a lot easier as well.

It's now been a week since Zentropy's move and I have to say, the commute is killing me. Of all the routes I mentioned last time, Laurel Canyon is the best, but even still, it takes me about 40 minutes once I get off the freeway, pushing my average commute time to 1:30. One hour (how long it took to get to the old building) was pretty much my limit, and it's just exhausting to do any more, especially considering there's a twisty canyon road with heavy traffic to traverse, which usually means my legs and butt are sore by the time I get to my destination. Starting this next week, I am going to move my work hours to 7 AM to 4 PM in order to combat traffic and shorten my commute time. If this doesn't work and if Zentropy is reluctant to let me work from home (which they have been), it may be time for me to consider finding new employment closer to home. That, however, would be the last resort, as this is pretty much my ideal job and my ideal company.

But other than the commute, the new office is great. (A side note: pictures of the old office are now posted) Very clean, well-lit, and doesn't feel too corporate. My space is pretty much like the floor plan I designed. The cubicle walls are opaque white plastic that also can double as a white board. I have yet to take any photos of the new place, but I will get around to that soon.

Another anecdote that describes our neighborhood well: I took some pictures of the building on Wednesday (I will get around to putting up on the site soon) and as I was outside getting some shots of the building exterior, three tranny hookers walked past. I would have taken a picture of them, but I didn't want to get beaten up or anything.

But it was sad leaving the building on Thursday. I'd been at the same desk for three years, so as I left, I said goodbye to my stabicle, to warehouse 1, to the courtyard, and finally to 6600 Lexington itself. Tomorrow I have to find a new route to our new place, which is in the Miracle Mile section of LA, right down the street from the LA County Museum of Art. This also happens to be down the street from where the rapper Notorious BIG was killed in a drive-by a few years ago, but that was a hit and not just random gang violence.

My options for the commute are rather limited, as the location is nowhere near a freeway, and there aren't many routes out of the Valley and into the LA basin. I could go via the 405 and down Wilshire, which is really out of the question, as the 405 is just a nightmare in the morning (the popular sentiment about that freeway can be best summarized by a famous personalized license plate: HATE405 (as a side note, that plate is now available, so the owner must have moved out of the area)). The second option is to go down the coast into Santa Monica then across the 10 to Fairfax, but I don't like that either as it's a longer drive, and it takes me away from Costco in Van Nuys, where I can get cheap gas. Option 3 is to take Benedict Canyon from Sherman Oaks to Beverly Hills to Wilshire, which is the straightest route and might work depending on how crowded Wilshire gets in the mornings. Lastly, I can take Laurel Canyon to Crescent Heights, only requiring a 1-block trip down Wilshire. I'll just have to try out the different routes and see how it goes.

Communication is getting a lot easier. She consistently shakes her head no when she doesn't want something and it's pretty easy to tell when she wants to give us something or have us do something for her. Her new trick is to give me 5 when I put my palm out for her.

This is the last week in Zentropy's Hollywood office. My new space is actually a bit larger than what I have now. We drew out our floor plans for the moving company last week as well. I was having a difficult time doing it with pen and paper when my co-worker Drew instructed me that I could use Visio to do it instead and voila, check this out. The only thing I'll miss about this building is its decidedly non-corporate feel. We have an old recording studio and two converted warehouses with a courtyard and it's a very casual atmosphere. The new building is a lot more modern but it's very much an office space, and although we will be in cubicles, it's not going to be much like the movie Office Space. Otherwise, we'll be very happy to get out of this neighborhood. The car vandalism, stolen cars, and finally gunpoint robbery was getting to be too much. I'll have to take a few pictures of this space before we leave.

We took Amy to a pediatric gastroenterologist this week and he felt that Amy was just small, but they did some more lab work to be complete, and we're awaiting the results of that now. However, she decided that she likes whole milk now, which is good because we were worrying she wasn't getting enough liquid. She's also taken a liking to table food, like bread, rice, crackers, and tofu. But this has come at the expense of disdaining her baby food, of which we will have many jars. She has become a lot more communicative over the last few weeks. We haven't been doing baby signs consistently but Nancy will take a class for that soon.

In work news, we are back in the running for International Truck as it turns out the competing agency's bid was incomplete. We couldn't figure out how they were able to beat our bid for the amount of work, but they hadn't included all that the client was asking for. I am ahead of schedule in doing LMG, so much so that we've completed as much as we could without creative assets, and they're not due to be ready until next week, thus I had time to fiddle around howcheng.com. ZP-Minneapolis is handing over the Microsoft work soon and it looks like we might have to hire a real database administrator to help out with that. One or two developers have to go to Minneapolis, but even if I was able to leave Nancy and Amy on their own, I wouldn't want to go to the land of minus-20 degrees. There's a reason I live in Southern California, you know.

As a side note, I'm thinking I'm going to start blogging more often with shorter entries whenever I find something interesting, so that the blog itself serves as an archive of sorts for my own personal purposes. In the spirit of this, I hereby present, the spongmonkeys!

However, it was a little alarming to discover the following Monday at the doctor's office that in the last three months, she'd only gained about one pound, dropping her to below the 3rd percentile for weight for her age (she doesn't even make the chart). We don't know why she's so small, but I suspect it's because she's pretty active so she burns a lot of calories. The doctor wants us to feed her higher-fat foods like whole milk, but she doesn't drink liquids much, if at all, so we're not sure what we can do. We're awaiting results from her blood tests to see if anything's out of the ordinary, but my intuition says she's fine.

Work-wise, I have been busy the last week working on the new incarnation of GM's LMG sites. I had developed the initial version in April 2002, and those sites were an interim solution and supposed to last only a few months, but they're still going. This time we are expanding the administrative interface and converting the code from Java to C#. The office move is happening on March 19. We took a field trip over to the new office last Friday. Although still under construction, the space looks pretty nice, and the building is quite fancy. Our office areas may be a little smaller than what we have now, however, and the tech department got shafted by getting stuck in the middle of the floor.

Nancy and I both got new cell phones over the weekend. Our old Nokia phones were dying -- the LCD screens got messed up if pressure was applied to them, such as being squished in a purse or just sitting in a pants pocket. Not only that, Amy threw Nancy's phone and broke the speaker so she couldn't hear anything. I have another Nokia phone that was free (the Nokia 3595) and Nancy got the Motorola T720, which is free after rebate, but we had to shell out $100 for it now. After one day's use, she loves it. I haven't gotten enough usage out of mine to make a determination yet (I only have it on when I'm in the car), but it's certainly nicer with a color screen.

Lots of baby news to report. In the last month, Amy has stopped barfing when given semi-solid food (cookies, Cheerios), begun imitating people she sees (clapping when people do on TV), started to communicate with Nancy (shakes her head no when asked if she wants more), and figured out how to crawl up the stairs by herself (all the way up). This Saturday is her first birthday already, amazingly enough. We are trying to teach her baby signs so she can communicate better before she learns how to talk, but we just started and she hasn't picked them up yet. It's also time to buy her a new car seat. Actually, she technically outgrew her infant seat a little while ago, but a new Britax seat is $250 and she still fits in the small one, so we haven't bought it yet. However now she's pretty heavy and carrying her in that seat is getting to be difficult, so it's time to start scrimping.

This is supposed to be the week of my jury duty, but I postponed it It turns out that in Ventura County, you can't postpone it and be on telephone standby -- you actually have to pick a date and go in. But I had to do it for the sake of work because Dan has jury duty in two weeks and he's postponed it like 4 times so he has to do it, and the NADA project can't risk having both us out at the same time. That was the reasoning, but as it turns out, we have been waiting for client deliverables so it's been really slow here, and I could have done it without any problem. Not only that, I had a nice high group number and it was unlikely I would have had to report, but that's all moot now as I'm going in on March 29.

As for work, we didn't get the International Truck contract after all, and the Microsoft project from ZP-Minneapolis is on hold, so like I said, it's been quiet. The company is doing fine as we've won three new clients in the last month, but I'm not sure there's much tech work in there. On the plus side, Uniworld is calling again and we've just put in an estimate for more work there and that's very likely to happen. We are moving offices in March to a building at Wilshire and Fairfax. It will certainly be nice to get out of this neighborhood, but we're going to lose a few perks like ISP reimbursement, free drinks, and Friday lunches. On the other hand, we will get real parking in a garage and be in a much nicer location, plus a rec room with pool tables, etc. Commuting is going to be more of a pain for me, though, as that location is nowhere near any freeways, so I've got to either cross the hill on the 405 or go on canyon roads, neither of which is going to be easy.

As a political and business decision, we are perfectly happy with this, as the contract wasn't for very much money and there was a lot of work to be done. We shot ourselves in the foot by inserting a clause in the scope of work that says we will duplicate all existing functionality on the site, and they milked that for as much as they could get, and then more. It's never good to have such an ambiguous clause in a contract but none of our clients had ever tried to take so much advantage of us before. Happily, this practice has since been discontinued.

However, from a technology perspective, it's a little sad, because this was going to be such a technically challenging project. The decision came at a good time, though, as we had done all the research and planning and so we gained a lot of knowledge that we can apply to the next project without this learning curve. Of course there will still be some, since we haven't actually implemented any of it, but at least the bulk of it is over and done with.

So if you can picture it, upon hearing the news, my (and everyone else's) first reaction was, "WHAT?!?", followed by, "Whew!" My colleague Kishore is much more relaxed now that he doesn't have this hanging over his head while he's out on paternity leave (baby girl Ananya, born 12/28/03, congrats!!).

So it's on to NADA Guides for me for now. They are like Kelley Blue Book, but covering far more than just cars (like motor homes and boats). I've got to do some hiring, trying to find XSL developers, which turns out to be really difficult. Most of the resumes I've seen are for programmers, not for web developers who are comfortable working on presentation. Most of them might list "XSL" in their skills section, but when you look through the resume, there's no mention of it, and the two people that I did interview couldn't even do a simple test. I want to hire my friend and former Zentropian William up in San Francisco because XSL is his speciality (and he's available, too), but ZP has a "butts in seats" policy that requires him to be in LA. But at this point we're desperate enough that maybe management will make an exception. After all, MRM (our sister company) has an SF office that he could work in and still have network access to files. I will be working on this for the time being, until we hear more about International Truck (still no word), or planning starts for a Microsoft project that ZP-Minneapolis has but needs help on.

In baby news, Amy is now 11 months old and has just this week finally outgrown her size 3-6 month clothes. I still haven't seen her do this, but Nancy says Amy will imitate her too now, if she bobs her head to music (she previously had done it while watching "The Wiggles").

I got called for jury duty the week of 2/2/04. Last time I scheduled a day so I could go in and get it over with, but I think I'm going to chance it this time and just check in every night. My friend Dan thinks I should postpone it to a 4-day week so the chances of being called in are smaller, which seems like a great idea. I will have to try that out.

We decided to clean the deadwood out of our CD collection and I put a lot of stuff up for sale on Half.com and in Amazon Marketplace. In my last CD purge I went to eBay, but this time it's a bunch of lower-value discs (like Nancy's Spice Girls CD -- I disavow any connection to that), which meant I wasn't going to get diddly-squat from eBay, as for those types of discs there are like 50 sellers and 1-2 buyers, so almost none of the items have any bids, and the only ones that do are those that are selling for $0.01, but I can get more at the fixed bid places. I prefer Half to Amazon because they take out less commission (15% vs. 15% + $0.99), but Amazon has more traffic. The sucky thing is that Half is owned by eBay and they are going to close it this summer and make everyone sell on eBay instead. There are fixed-price auctions available, but the nice thing about Half (and Amazon) is that you post the items up and they stay listed until they get sold or you remove them, no matter how long that is, with a flat commission. eBay, however, levies all sorts of fees and if you don't want your auction to expire, you have to register to be a "store". Grr. At any rate, we make a little money for stuff that was just sitting on the shelf anyway, but the next time we do this my options are going to be more limited.