Meri took him to the ophthalmologist again yesterday to have him re-examined (since it’s been 6 months since he was first diagnosed) The doctor is one of the best in the area (from what we’ve been told).  Meri works in an ER and has spoken with several opthamalogists that stroll through there and they recommend him (and more importantly, use him).

The doctor looked at Aaron’s eyes and told Meri that his condition was deteriorating. He told her that the only solution for Aaron’s case was to have the corrective surgery.  We knew this day was coming and have talked about what we should do next.  We’ve done a lot of research and have both anguished about this decision for a long time - we decided that Aaron should finally have the surgery.

I can’t speak for Meri, but I am not fearful that the doctor won’t do a good job and I am fully expecting that the surgery will be successful.  We are both very worried about Aaron having to be sedated for the surgery. Meri working in the medical for so long is both a blessing and a curse in that she knows a lot about what to expect.  Knowledge can be power but it can also be crippling, especially in the case of surgery for one of your kids.  While the surgery is not exactly necessary (in my understanding anyway), if successful, it would greatly improve Aaron’s quality of life.

So the surgery is scheduled for just under two weeks away (July 10th).  We have a pre-op appointment 7 days before the surgery so that we can hear about all of the details. Meri spoke briefly about recovery time and the doctur said that it would only be a few hours for Aaron, but he couldn’t go to the pool or play with sand for a week after the surgery.

Current company pros

• Relatively stable - current contract expires in Sept 2008 but there is an extension in the hands of the client’s legal department awaiting approval that would expire in Sept 2010.
• I am allowed to work from home one day a week.
• Pay is good, benefits are decent and fairly inexpensive

Current company cons

• I’m fucking miserable here!
• I’m writing code about 10% of the time, the other 90% is spent analyzing production data and modifying it since it’s been screwed up by the system - basically, I feel like I work on a help desk.
• Being on-call. I have a pager that I have to “man” once every 10 days (approximately speaking); every 5th weekend, I’m on-call and basically can’t leave my house.
• I now how 3 time sheets to fill out! One of them, the newest, easily takes about 30mins/day to fill out.
• I’m not learning anything new here since I’m barely writing any code.
• I have to commute 62 miles (round trip) and spend about 45 minutes on I4 (with smooth traffic, no accidents).

Contract position pros

• Major pay increase, 66% from my current hourly rate - dollar for dollar, not including how much my benefits cost. Meri would pick up the benefits from working part-time at her job.
• 20 mile round trip from my house to client site.
• I would be writing code again!
• No more on-call support (and therefore no more feeling like I work on a help desk).

Contract position cons

• Only a guaranteed 6 month contract. The company has a very strong history of extending their contractors and eventually offering them full-time positions, but that is not guaranteed. The only guarantee is that I’ll have a paycheck for 6 months.

If the client decided not to renew the contract at the end of the 6 month period, they would have to let me know 45 days prior to the end of contract and vice versa if I decided not to stay with them either. If the contract expired in 6 months and was not renewed, we would be able to live on the “extra” money that I made from the hourly increase for about 4 months after the contract was over. That would give me 4 months to either look for another job or find another contract. If I was unable to find another full-time position somewhere else in Orlando. Moving out of Orlando is not an option. If I did have to start working other contracts, then I would potentially have to travel a lot.

So basically, I’m not sure what to do. Any ideas?

Last night, we played for almost two hours! One thing that I thought was really cool on the Wii was that a message is sent to you with a “total time played” when you are finished playing. The Wii Sports game is really fun! The boxing is physically demanding enough to make me sweat after only playing it for about 20 minutes or so.

I know that we are going to get Wii Fit whenever we can find it - it costs around $90. Other than that, I’m torn as to what other game I want to get next. I have a small list going - in no particular order.

• Mario Kart Wii - comes with a steering wheel
• We Ski
• Metroid Prime 3 - Corruption
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 (or 2009 or whatever)
• The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess

I was surprised to see that Meri actually had fun with it. She generally doesn’t like video games. I think Aaron will really like playing this system and we’ll all be able to have fun with this as a family.

The coaches had a party for both teams and all of the kids got a trophy for playing. They had all kinds of great stuff for the kids, pizza, cupcakes, fruit and veggie platters, soccer tattoos, a trampoline, a tire swing and a cool tree house. At the end of the party, all of the kids got a cool trophy.

We came back from Aaron’s soccer party tonight and started the bedtime routine about 45 minutes late because of the party. We came into Aaron’s room and I put some water into his fish tank since it keeps losing water somehow. Meri came in with Eli and was looking at the tank and I said “I put extra water in it” and she said “that’s not why I’m looking at it”. It turns out that one of Aaron’s fish, named Orange (see picture below) died. R.I.P. Orange, Aaron will miss you very much!

We bought Aaron a fish tank as a reward for behaving so well for a long time. He loved it. Here are a couple of pictures of Aaron’s fish tank and his final surviving fish, Grapey.

Here is the DR in a nutshell - if primary server goes down, the users still need to be able to access the system and do their work with minimum downtime. This is accomplished (in very basic terms) by switching the IPs of the DNS entries of the servers. We were tasked with simulating a production failure and falling back to the backup servers.

That started Tuesday (6/3/2008) and I was on property overnight from 11pm Tuesday to 11am Wednesday. After that was completed and it was given the thumbs up, it was time to undo it - now we have to be back on the production server. That started at 11pm Wednesday night and lasted until 4am Thursday morning.

Now my sleep cycle is screwed up. Here’s to hoping that I won’t be here next year to experience that again!

Also, I have a phone interview for a contract job here in Orlando that I most likely won’t accept even if it’s offered to me. With the economy the way it is, I can’t put my family’s well-being at risk by taking a 6 month contract versus staying with my company with a 2 year contract. The money is a lot better but in taking the 6 month contract but what would I do in 6 months if the project actually completed on-time or the client just decided to cancel my contract? I’d be putting my family at risk if I couldn’t find another job or contract quickly.

If I am offered the contract, I’ll have to talk to Meri more about it.

I talked to Brighthouse to see if my cable modem was down and it wasn’t. I headed over to Linksys livechat and spoke with some people there and after 4 hours, I’ve got a new router on the way since this one is still under warranty! I was astonished since the router is at least 3 1/2 years old and I don’t even remember registering it.

It appears that all of the ports on the back of the router went bad. I could still configure the router via a wireless connection but not from a wired one.

That saves us approximately $150 and I’m very pleased about that!

We got back Tuesday and I went to the 2008 LANSA User Conference here in Orlando. I got to talk to a few people I worked with at Terminix and attended some of the WAM sessions. Those were great! I found the AJAX lab to be a bit lacking and the speaker wasn’t that good in my opinion.

I worked from home yesterday and now it is Friday and I am back at the office. I haven’t been here for a week! I must’ve saved a ton of money on gas (well, like $60). Now I’m on-call for the weekend.

Yesterday, when I was working from home, I took a break for lunch (which is unusual for me), I sat with Eli for a bit and I was playing with him on the couch. I started making some weird noises and poking around his mouth to try and get him to smile at me. Normally, it’s difficult for me to get him to smile but he smiled at me for about 20 minutes! It was awesome! I loved it when Aaron first started smiling at me and I love it now that Eli is doing the same. I can’t wait until Eli is walking and talking as well.

In other, less pleasant news, we’re flying up to Massachusetts to visit the in-laws and yes, we’re flying with both of our kids! In more pleasant news, we’re going to celebrate Aaron’s 4th birthday birthday while we are up there and and also let the rest of the family meet Eli for the first time. Aaron’s birthday is next Tuesday, May 6th.

I think that’s enough rambling for now. I have another blog that I’ve been posting short posts to, it’s at dfktv.com. Also, if you have any idea what Twitter is, follow me!  I can be found here.  Twitter is pretty damned addictive, especially if you use it in conjunction with twhirl!

We bought a new car! A mini-van actually; it is a slate metallic green Honda Odyssey. I heard a radio ad about “up to 30% off on clearance vehicles from a chain of local car dealerships and when I got home, I checked out the prices. I noted a Honda Pilot and the Odyssey. They had both listed for a very low price. I called, expecting they would be out-of-stock and sure enough, they were. I asked how much a base-line model of each vehicle would be and was told about $5,500 less than the MSRP on both vehicles. We went up there Saturday to look at both the Pilot and the Odyssey side-by-side and based on functionality (why did Honda shove an non-functional third row of seats into the Pilot?!), we bought the mini-van. I didn’t think we’d ever own one since Meri has been 100% against buying one since it would be her vehicle.

The Odyssey has the same gas-mileage rating as our old Jeep Liberty so there wasn’t a savings there. I feel like the Honda will be a longer-lasting vehicle (than the Jeep) and much safer for Meri and our boys. Plus, we now have even more room for more kids (hello Cadence - daddy’s little girl, someday I hope).

When they got in the car, Meri called me at work and asked me to come home. On my end of the phone, I hear my wife crying, asking me to come home, Aaron screaming/raging in the background and Eli was crying. So I picked up all my shit, told my team lead I had to leave and booked it out of here. It took me about 30 or 40 minutes to get home. I finally got there and, to my surprise, Aaron was STILL raging. This episode has been going on for over 90 minutes at this point.

This was been the single worst day with Aaron, ever. I hope that it remains the worst day in his childhood, forever. Since Monday, I’ve come home to Aaron screaming and raging at my wife two other times, every time with her and Eli being hit.

I worked from home the rest of Monday and Tuesday is my weekly work from home day. Meri and I talked about what we should do and how we should handle it and neither of us has a clue. Something has changed Aaron’s behaving dramatically in the past week. On Tuesday, I made an appointment to see a child psychiatrist! We are supposed to go next Wednesday, 4/23.

Meri and I have been thinking about what could cause such a degradation in Aaron’s attitude. The only thing that we can think of is the major increase in cow’s milk and casein in Aaron’s diet. Since we’ve discovered that Aaron is no longer allergic to milk and egg, we’ve been letting him try any- and everything he wants that he could never have before. He’s loved it. When he eats something that he could not eat before, he says “I’m not allergic anymore so I can have this”. It has been wonderful to let Aaron eat things that he couldn’t have before. He really seemed to love it. But now, we have decided to take out most of the milk from his diet. Our reason for this line of thinking revolves around the autism-diet.

Autistic kids should be on a very strict gluten- and casein-free diet. Casein is a protein found in milk and products containing milk, such as cheese, butter, yogurt, ice cream, whey and even some brands of margarine. It also may be added to non-milk products such as soy cheese and hot dogs in the form of caseinate. When the diet is followed correctly, an article that I just found says:

Some parents, doctors and researchers say that children have shown mild to dramatic improvements in speech and/or behavior after these substances were removed from their diet.

We are firm believers in how a child’s diet effects their attitude and behavior. We’re taking all of the casein out of his diet again and let his body “detox” for a while. We’ll re-introduce the casein at a very gradual pace this time. I don’t know if we’ll keep the appointment or not.

I would sometimes say to her “you always loved me” when she would reminisce about how much of a pain-in-the-ass I was when we were dating in college. On again, off again, on again…you get the picture. All of that drama caused because I was impatient and not ready to succumb to the fact that deep down, I knew that she would be my future wife and I just wasn’t ready to for that yet. We’ve been together for over 8 years and married for over 4, 5 in November.

Last night, she told me that she realized I was actually right in saying that “you always loved me”. She remembered telling one of her old boyfriends that she that she was going to marry me one day. That was after we had only hung out a few times. We talked so much more than that. Old

Somehow, even way back then, we both knew that we would be married one day. We now have each other and our two little boys now. Who knows if she will actually let me try to have that little girl that I want so badly (not just me, you know how that works)? With Meri, Aaron and Eli, I’m feel very happy with my family and where we are at this point in our lives.

Who would have thought that by just talking to someone one day, it would turn into a full-blown family one day?!

All I changed was the character encoding from

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to

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'."\r\n";

If you look at the second “known bugs” list at http://www.acedanger.com/vox-crossposter, you will see exactly what I changed. Now I need to get home so I can update the download link and the download from the Wordpress Plugin site.

Edit: I updated the source that the download link points to.