DIS Dads DDC XIII - Zerphonics spoken here!

[Captain_Oblivious]

Today is Ethan's 7th birthday and memories of when we were in NY adopting him are just flodding back like it was yesterday. The image that is continuing to go through my mind is the one (on Christmas Eve 2004) where his birthmom signed the papers to terminate her parental rights and how she and Shari together dressed him to leave the hosptial and then how she turned at looked at him for the final time with total heartbreak on her face knowing that she had no other choice but to do this. Also, at that very minute a tear rolled down Ethans cheek. There was no crying from him...just a single tear. it was so emotional that the attorney had to leave the room. We were blessed to be there when Ethan was born and blessed even more to have him with us each and every day since. I think from time to time about his birthmohter and birthfather, and wonder if they ever think of him. Esepcially on days like today. Or, I wonder if it is something that they have tried to not think about because of the pain it would cause. One of her saddest days was one of our happiest days!

Happy birthday Ethan! What a story. Bravo to you and everyone else who is willing to adopt.

Do any of you guys have to travel to family for Christmas or are you spending it in your own homes??? Thankfully our families are all close by here.

My in-laws moved down to Dover, DE a few years ago to be close to their grandchildren, and as it turns out, they're only 2 minutes from my parents' place. So we do Christmas morning at our house and then head 30 minutes down the road and get all the family business done in 1 afternoon. Works out great.

That being said, my wife and I were talking wistfully about how cool it would be to wake up to 2 ft. of snow on the ground and be forced to stay at home all day.

First Christmas in a few years that we are alone, even DS's Godparents, who we normally do the other holidays with, are heading up to Ohio. It's going to be great, I stacked the gifts heavily towards Lego this year so i'll have 8 days of building to keep me busy......us busy.......yeah yeah the Lego is for DS, that right, keep "us" busy.

Lego will be a heavy theme in our house as well. Plus whatever the kids get.

4) I am a huge geek.

New to the threads. Just thought I would say hi and am looking forward to reading and getting involved in the discussions on here.

Welcome to the nut-house!

 

[alanapapa]

New to the threads. Just thought I would say hi and am looking forward to reading and getting involved in the discussions on here.

Welcome to the asylum. You can take it as a reference to the lunacy here, or to the lack of estrogen. Dues are payable in dole Whips and bacon.

 

[IamTrike]

New to the threads. Just thought I would say hi and am looking forward to reading and getting involved in the discussions on here.

Welcome Nick... jump on in. Keep hands and feet inside the thread at all time.

 

[alanapapa]

Good Morning Gents.....It is a good day....The Herd pulled out a bowl win last night I enjoyed texting back and forth with Scott during the game.

I think I have it straight in my brain that today is Wednesday and not thursday....I was screwed up on everything yesterday...I am on call again tonight but after that no more call until January 2!!! I just have to make it until 330 Friady and then I am off all next week!!! Hopefully no stones will interefre with this little break

I still need to get things wrapped...I guess I will try to do that when I get off work tomorrow....

Do any of you guys have to travel to family for Christmas or are you spending it in your own homes??? Thankfully our families are all close by here.

Today is Ethan's 7th birthday and memories of when we were in NY adopting him are just flodding back like it was yesterday. The image that is continuing to go through my mind is the one (on Christmas Eve 2004) where his birthmom signed the papers to terminate her parental rights and how she and Shari together dressed him to leave the hosptial and then how she turned at looked at him for the final time with total heartbreak on her face knowing that she had no other choice but to do this. Also, at that very minute a tear rolled down Ethans cheek. There was no crying from him...just a single tear. it was so emotional that the attorney had to leave the room. We were blessed to be there when Ethan was born and blessed even more to have him with us each and every day since. I think from time to time about his birthmohter and birthfather, and wonder if they ever think of him. Esepcially on days like today. Or, I wonder if it is something that they have tried to not think about because of the pain it would cause. One of her saddest days was one of our happiest days!

In order of importance:
Happy Birthday Ethan.

Are you sure you are straight on what day it is?

Most of the family (I have some cousins living here, but saw them last at my Uncle's Funeral) live in Southern California, so it is just the 4 of us. When the girls were younger, Dmil came up often for Christmas. For the last few years I was able to get the week after Christmas off and since Boeing is closed (with pay) we would go to Florida or California.

I am fairly certain the birth parents think about him still. I have some friends who had no choice earlier in their lives and gave a child up. They know it was the best, but think every year around the time of the birth and around Christmas what might have happened if...

 

[IamTrike]

Happy Birthday Ethan. Steve your story was really touching. There is a ton of emotion there with the birth mothers loss as a reflection of your joy. I'm sure somewhere there she was joyous too in seeing the joy you had, and knowing that this was a much better life for her child.

I used the word joy a lot there. I might be listening to too many Christmas carols.

That’d be me…

When I worked in the “Operations” department, our entire 60,000 employee, 25 facility manufacturing business was run on an IBM mainframe…

An: S370-186 to be exact.


One of these…

Much was stored on cards. We did have state of the art disk drives though.
Three whole banks of Model 3350 drives (known as “Madrid” drives) with an astonishing 25 gigs of space apiece (I’m sure y’all can do the math)

As amazing as that was, the larger files were still stored on Mag-Tape so as to spare the hard-drives for the critical processes. I spent a lot of time running (literally running) between the Tape Library and a bank of 10 of these wonderful devices

As a child my dad would bring home the big foam supports that the mag tapes came protected in. We'd cut them apart and then use them as swords to fight with.

Happy Birthday Ethan. Steve, that's a very moving story.

As far as the old computers, my first computer was a C64. (friends had Trash 80s and Vic 20s before us but the C64 was our first). I've had the "pleasure" of supporting / working on many different platforms over the years including the following:

Trash80s
C64
Amiga
IBM DOS
HPUX
HPE9000
DEC/VAX
Multics
Apple II
Apple Mac (the originals)
TSO
A/S400
Sun Solaris (still one of my favorite platforms)
NeXT

I'm sure I'm missing some of the platforms I used at school as well (Comp Eng program in the early to mid 90s). Can't say I've had the pleasure of working on punch cards, but I can still recall some of my scripting days as a SysAdmin.

On a completely related note, DW and I watched The Social Network last night and a couple of thoughts we shared about the movie were:

1) Both liked it as it gave an interesting perspective to the founding of Facebook.

2) Justin Timberlake contiunes to amaze me as to how versitile he is wether it's dramatic acting, comedy (ala SNL) or his typical singing/dancing.

3) I was laughing aloud to myself at the "coding" references made while hacking and found myself thinking in a couple of situations, "There's a better way to do that".

4) I am a huge geek.

So I've used about 3/4 of those on the list. I remember getting my first Mac. It had no hard drive I had to swap floppies out to get it to boot and to run programs.

Korn shell for the win.

 

[cj9200]

Steve, congrats on the Herd win. Entertaining game. Great story about Ethan and happy birthday to him.

It will be just DD and me for Christmas. Family is in far flung parts. We will house hop to neighbors and friends sometime during the day. She is having fun during the break diving around playing with friends.

 

[RodBelding]

New to the threads. Just thought I would say hi and am looking forward to reading and getting involved in the discussions on here.

Welcome aboard!

 

[RodBelding]

Today is Ethan's 7th birthday and memories of when we were in NY adopting him are just flodding back like it was yesterday. The image that is continuing to go through my mind is the one (on Christmas Eve 2004) where his birthmom signed the papers to terminate her parental rights and how she and Shari together dressed him to leave the hosptial and then how she turned at looked at him for the final time with total heartbreak on her face knowing that she had no other choice but to do this. Also, at that very minute a tear rolled down Ethans cheek. There was no crying from him...just a single tear. it was so emotional that the attorney had to leave the room. We were blessed to be there when Ethan was born and blessed even more to have him with us each and every day since. I think from time to time about his birthmohter and birthfather, and wonder if they ever think of him. Esepcially on days like today. Or, I wonder if it is something that they have tried to not think about because of the pain it would cause. One of her saddest days was one of our happiest days!

Happy Birthday Ethan!!!

Touching story Steve, he's very lucky to have you as parents.

 

[IamTrike]

Welcome aboard!

Hey Paul, I must be pretty good at this whole nemesis'ing thing...getting Disney to mess with your vacation next year and all. I think its really shady business to move something like that after it's been announced.

 

[Rental01]

Before I wax nostalgic, lemme drop a little info here.

I'm kid born and raised on the IBM midrange systems. My mom was trained on them in '76 when I was born and I pretty much grew up on them. Home PC's started with the VIC20, 286, 486/dx2, P100, etc. I was a computer operator for a company in FL manning their 75 nationwide IBM AS/400s when I was 22. For anyone who wanted it, I'm sorry to say that I sold the IBM 9460-270 I had in my house about a year and a half ago because my wife wanted it gone. Anyway, that said...

That’d be me…

Much was stored on cards. We did have state of the art disk drives though.
Three whole banks of Model 3350 drives (known as “Madrid” drives) with an astonishing 25 gigs of space apiece (I’m sure y’all can do the math)

Not 25GB, but 317.5MB disk pack or 625MB per unit. You could string them together into a cluster of 4 allowing for 2.5GB of total storage. To reach 25gb you'd need 40 of these machines. Each one cost roughly $75,000 each.

The 8gb card in my phone cost $10.

Happy Birthday Ethan. Steve, that's a very moving story.

As far as the old computers, my first computer was a C64. (friends had Trash 80s and Vic 20s before us but the C64 was our first). I've had the "pleasure" of supporting / working on many different platforms over the years including the following:

Trash80s
C64
Amiga
IBM DOS
HPUX
HPE9000
DEC/VAX
Multics
Apple II
Apple Mac (the originals)
TSO
A/S400
Sun Solaris (still one of my favorite platforms)
NeXT

AS/400

Us IBM'ers get picky on that.

My dad recently tossed my old SPARCstation 20 that was running Solaris 9. It had a 21" flat-screen CRT that weighed at least 40lbs.

 

[afwdwfan]

Steve, I thought I multi-quoted you in here, but it didn't show up... anyway, Happy Birthday to Ethan and thanks for sharing the story. Have you been in contact with the birth mother at all over the years?

I had a cousin who had a little girl almost 7 years ago now. She had to give her up for adoption to a wonderful family. They've been great about sharing pictures of Claire as she has grown and they've even let my cousin see her a few times over the years. I know every adoption situation is different, but just wondered if you have ever had any contact with her.

On a completely related note, DW and I watched The Social Network last night and a couple of thoughts we shared about the movie were:

1) Both liked it as it gave an interesting perspective to the founding of Facebook.

2) Justin Timberlake contiunes to amaze me as to how versitile he is wether it's dramatic acting, comedy (ala SNL) or his typical singing/dancing.

3) I was laughing aloud to myself at the "coding" references made while hacking and found myself thinking in a couple of situations, "There's a better way to do that".

4) I am a huge geek.

We watched it a while back... Turned it off about halfway through.

I guess I just didn't have enough "geek cred" for it to keep my attention.

New to the threads. Just thought I would say hi and am looking forward to reading and getting involved in the discussions on here.

Hi! Welcome to the club!

 

[IamTrike]

Before I wax nostalgic, lemme drop a little info here.

I'm kid born and raised on the IBM midrange systems. My mom was trained on them in '76 when I was born and I pretty much grew up on them. Home PC's started with the VIC20, 286, 486/dx2, P100, etc. I was a computer operator for a company in FL manning their 75 nationwide IBM AS/400s when I was 22. For anyone who wanted it, I'm sorry to say that I sold the IBM 9460-270 I had in my house about a year and a half ago because my wife wanted it gone. Anyway, that said...


My dad recently tossed my old SPARCstation 20 that was running Solaris 9. It had a 21" flat-screen CRT that weighed at least 40lbs.

Hey Ian haven't seen you around much recently. Did you ever find that Chex mix you were looking for.

Out of College I had the choice AT&T wanted to train me to either run their HPUX machines or some of their mainframes. The long term job prospects with MVS skills seemed limited so I learned HPUX and then did a bunch of stuff with sun equipment.

 

[Emma's Dad]

Wow... I am SOOOOO behind in this thread! Life has been zipping along at an incredible pace right now and just haven't had time or energy to get in here. I know there are new dads that need officially welcomed and I hope to get to them soon! Haven't even transferred the photos to my computer yet from the vacation last week!

I do have some news... the inspectors came to the house today and the bathroom has passed all three rough in inspections! Now I get to put up drywall and finish off the room. About another week of nights and weekends... and a little break for Christmas. Sheesh.

 

[Rental01]

Hey Ian haven't seen you around much recently. Did you ever find that Chex mix you were looking for.

Out of College I had the choice AT&T wanted to train me to either run their HPUX machines or some of their mainframes. The long term job prospects with MVS skills seemed limited so I learned HPUX and then did a bunch of stuff with sun equipment.

I've been really busy. If I'm not selling Disney stuff I'm doing web work, shooting pictures for the NPO's I work with or trying to spend time with my family. We found the chocolate chex but it tasted really gross. There was something that screwed up the mix and the company sent us a check to apologize. Since then we've stayed away from it because it tasted so bad that we're afraid to try it again. It tasted like old fish. Really gross.

Unix stuff has always had better long term viability due to the fact that it's an open system by nature. Unless you're BSD. lol I'm surprised that AT&T offered you training on HPUX since they wrote the book on UNIX. Literally. It was developted by Bell Labs which is/was AT&T via NCR. I worked for Lucent which was the business phone system branch of AT&T after the guv'ment broke them up for being so big. No college though - I was taught the old fashioned way! I was thrown to the wolves and had to learn on the fly! Ahh - good times. No way you can get hired by a company now with that kind of experience. Back in the day, though, that was the best to have. Companies were willing to toss you money and see if you could do the work.

 

[IamTrike]

I've been really busy. If I'm not selling Disney stuff I'm doing web work, shooting pictures for the NPO's I work with or trying to spend time with my family. We found the chocolate chex but it tasted really gross. There was something that screwed up the mix and the company sent us a check to apologize. Since then we've stayed away from it because it tasted so bad that we're afraid to try it again. It tasted like old fish. Really gross.

Unix stuff has always had better long term viability due to the fact that it's an open system by nature. Unless you're BSD. lol I'm surprised that AT&T offered you training on HPUX since they wrote the book on UNIX. Literally. It was developted by Bell Labs which is/was AT&T via NCR. I worked for Lucent which was the business phone system branch of AT&T after the guv'ment broke them up for being so big. No college though - I was taught the old fashioned way! I was thrown to the wolves and had to learn on the fly! Ahh - good times. No way you can get hired by a company now with that kind of experience. Back in the day, though, that was the best to have. Companies were willing to toss you money and see if you could do the work.

Actually the Unix training coming from AT&T was one of the big draws. I figured who better to learn Unix from than them. I still have some of the internal books AT&T for System V training. We were working on HP-UX machines in the lab but much of what we learned was generic because our group was in the process of migrating from HP9000s to Sun E10Ks.

In college I told my dad the time I was spending on computers was a waste of time. Yeah I showed him...

 

[twokids0204]

New to the threads. Just thought I would say hi and am looking forward to reading and getting involved in the discussions on here.

Welcome Nick...

 

[scott2997]

Maybe this should be on the "rant" thread....

Can anyone tell me how in the world the price of gas can jump 40 cents in a single day?!?

Granted, we're probably lower than some on the price of gas, but our price went from $2.99 a gallon to $3.39 just today!

You NEVER see the price FALL 40 cents in a day!

Sorry - just bothers me that they can jab us like this!

Oh and.....


WELCOME NICK!

 

[IamTrike]

Maybe this should be on the "rant" thread....

Can anyone tell me how in the world the price of gas can jump 40 cents in a single day?!?

Granted, we're probably lower than some on the price of gas, but our price went from $2.99 a gallon to $3.39 just today!

You NEVER see the price FALL 40 cents in a day!

Sorry - just bothers me that they can jab us like this!

Oh and.....


WELCOME NICK!

It's merely coincidental that this happened right before a holiday weekend when a lot of people travel.

 

[cj9200]

Had 67 DVC points to use before June or lose them. Just called and snagged a studio standard view at AKV May 6-11 for 65 points. Solo trip and my Christmas present to myself. The remaining 2 points are in holding so they are unusable and will be gone anyway. Why? I don't know. First time I ever lost points.

With the HI/CA trip that leaves me with 0 points for 2012. But, I can always borrow from 2013. Looks like I will be using them more wisely for the next couple of years. I know it is tough stepping down to a studio but I don't expect many tears being shed over that.

 

[afwdwfan]

Maybe this should be on the "rant" thread....

Can anyone tell me how in the world the price of gas can jump 40 cents in a single day?!?

Granted, we're probably lower than some on the price of gas, but our price went from $2.99 a gallon to $3.39 just today!

You NEVER see the price FALL 40 cents in a day!

Sorry - just bothers me that they can jab us like this!

Oh and.....


WELCOME NICK!

But on the plus side, I filled up with diesel for only 30 cents more than gas was today. It actually dropped a dime.