cat slave diary

Well, I’ve had the snip, which apparently is surprising to most of the folks who know us.

Both Tanya and I are pretty darn clucky. We want more kids. But there’s this huge issue we can’t get past - Tanya’s health is just not going to get any better any time soon. Her arthritis is looking like it is staying, and her meds to maintain a moderate level of activity are simply incompatible with a pregnancy. We were very lucky with Mackenzie that she wasn’t deformed or brain damaged or dependant. We can’t knowingly do that again to another child as it’s not our life we would be affecting.

After a couple of close calls recently, where there were two terrible choices - either Tanya going back to Australia with baby girl for nine months of bed rest at her parents and 10-15 hurls a day with the associated forced weight loss, or aborting, which both Tanya and I are against. We had to make a tough decision.

So here I am.

It’s not as bad a pain as I thought it would be, but it certainly wasn’t without it’s scary moments.

I’m not good with needles, and I’m sort of glad I was put under as I don’t think I could have coped with the normal process, which involves a needle to the each site to numb the skin, and then a big needle full of local to each of the testes so you can go home in some comfort before the real pain sets in. I don’t care if you’re brave or not, that’s just one big needle I could not face.

The biggest problem so far is getting up. You can’t lift more than 15 lbs, which is about 7 kg. Baby girl currently weighs about 10 or so kg, so basically I can’t lift her. I can’t easily lift me either. So getting up and down is a painful experience.

I’m resting comfortably. After 24 hours, the pain is manageable, and most likely I’ll be completely okay by Monday or Tuesday.

We took Mackenzie to the pediatricians today. She did real well - even the vaccinations she only screamed for a few minutes. 

Here’s a few very recent photos for you!

• The first image is her sitting. By herself. At 3 and 3/4 months.
• The second image is her out on the porch wearing her snazzy new sunnies from Rebecca.
• The third image is her holding her own full bottle and drinking away without that much help. She’s been able to do this for a while, but we’ve not always had the camera to prove it

I’m currently in Colorado Springs doing some training for a customer.

The flight in was long - nearly 12 hours all up from the east coast, all told including delays and running to make my little rubber band plane connection. It takes only another 15 hours to make it to Australia. The puddle jumper was funny - as soon as we had finished climbing out of Denver, the hostie announced we had commenced our descent into Colorado Springs.

It was surprisingly cold. I suppose the wind and snow should have alerted me, but the last time I was here in late August / early September, it was over 30C every day.

I love coming here. Not only do we have a family friend (Hi Michelle! Hi Justine!) who lives here, the scenery includes Pike’s Peak dusted in snow outside my bedroom window every morning. You just can’t beat that.

I don’t think I could live here, though. I’m used to fast paced life, and things move at a leisurely pace, commensurate with Colorado Springs’ diminutive size.

In 2007, I realized I am not particularly good at prioritizing what time I have available. In true geek style, over the Christmas break I looked at all the recent time management fads to ensure I picked the laziest/easiest/geekiest (pick two), and found 43 Folders, which is based upon a slightly older - and dead tree form fad - Getting Things Done (GTD). The only downside to this particular fad is the fan boys are positively frothing at the mouth, which is what scared me off Python and Ruby on Rails. Rabid adherence is never a good sign. However, the things they want you to do are pretty simple, which is what attracts me to it.

43 Folders is a bit structured for this unstructured procrastinator. With procrastination, it’s not about “doing X now, but sometime in the future”. As any true procrastinator knows, there is an infinite range of substitute activities instead of “doing X now”. So don’t think I’m lazy, for I’m not. I just don’t achieve as much of the things I actually care about as I want. And with married life and a new daughter in a new country, the time I have available is dramatically reduced to when I was a bachelor cat slave back in Melbourne.

So far, I’ve:

• Cancel Something I’m no longer on the OWASP Board. I have totally given up the idea of writing another book for a while. I’m seriously thinking about giving up updating the next edition of the OWASP Guide as it’s just as much work (if not more) than writing a 300+ page book from scratch
• Replace a Project. I’ve picked a few things I love doing, and I’m going to find ways to do these first instead of things which interest me less. Obviously, family time comes first, but in what time I have remaining, my life should be fun and enjoyable. There’s no point in busting a gut to do something I don’t really enjoy. I’ve still yet to really do the maths to work out what makes me happiest, but once I do it, there will be a few more departures
• Time to declare DMZ E-mail Day (again)

So today, it’s DMZ E-mail Day on my renewed quest for Inbox Zero. I’ve archived all my work and personal e-mail for 2007. If you haven’t got a response from me for something, it’s time to re-send. 

It’s that time of the year again. In my previous list, it turned out I did some of the things I said I would, and a lot more besides.

In 2008, my desires are:

• Be a good dad to Mackenzie my gorgeous daughter, and a wonderful (hopefully less chubby) hubby to Tanya, my beautiful wife
• Lose some weight and mean it this time. What New Year’s Resolution is complete without this one?
• Finish at least one piece of first class research in the web app sec field

Although my time will now necessarily be limited out of hours, I think it’s better to complete one or two really good ground breaking ideas than to spurt the same old, same old things over and over again. I think many of you know what I’m currently researching, and I hope to finish that by the end of the year.

Enjoy!

After the emergency caesarian, Tanya needed me quite a bit, so I ended up staying in the hospital with her until Friday. The rooms in the MCU are nice, but the fold out arm chairs which become a bed for the odd stay here and there are not so good for my back. Things were a bit strange as we didn’t have Mackenzie in the room with us, but down at the NICU where she was being closely monitored.Mackenzie was a little irritable in the first few days, but in the end, she didn’t need any medicine to help her over the meds that Tanya had to take to make it through the pregnancy.I had my diabetic nurse appointment at 9 am, so the commute two floors down was pretty easy. It turns out I have type 2 diabetes, which is not so good, but the prognosis is good if I can lose the weight, which should also help the high blood pressure and the sleep apnea. We talked about a bunch of stuff, but the main thing is behavior modification, along with diet and exercise changes. I have way more to learn about living with diabetes, including learning to live with pricking my finger four times a day.However, during the diabetic appointment I started having the sniffles, and soon enough it’s turned into quite the rotten cold. I’ve been unwell now for a number of days, which is no good when all I really want to do is hold Mackenzie. I still feel a bit disconnected from it all as we didn’t have her in the room, and because of the cold, I really haven’t had a lot of opportunities to bond with her beyond a feed here or there.

What a week!

Today, we came in for a nice ultrasound with the in-laws so they can see, and maybe beg our obgyn for an earlier inducement. We sort of got what we wanted, and then some! We never made it to the obgyn appointment as things had moved on!

In a whirlwind, it turned from being low on amniotic fluid to immediate inducement followed by lots of pain then to much earlier than expected epidural to … well, let’s just say a lot of folks rushed in and thirty minutes later we are the proud parents ofMackenzie Lynne van der Stock!

Awesome! She might have come a little early (38 weeks), but that’s not a day too soon for Tanya, who has had a very difficult pregnancy.

Mackenzie weighed 2.75 kg (about 6 lbs 1 oz after conversion - even the US folks measure in metric for babies now!) and is 50 cms long today.It’s been very exhausting and I’m using a tiny connection to the Internet via my mobile phone, so things will have to wait until tomorrow. We have photos and movies.

UPDATE: Photos here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/vanderaj/Mackenzie/

Well, I’ve been extraordinarily busy this year. Far too busy to do much beyond scratch myself. I feel bad as I:

• Didn’t end up writing a book, much to my wife’s relief
• Failed to blog as much as I wanted to, particularly on the layer 7, 8 and 9 issues such as business logic flaws that I love so much
• Left the OWASP Board without achieving anything major organizationally in the last twelve months. I never intended to stay on the board forever, but I achieved far less than I could have in the time I had, such as adopting a proper Foundation / Core / Leaders
• Failed to release any new releases of UltimaBB through complete inactivity
• Failed to lose any weight. In fact, I put on 15 kg since arriving in the USA, the single largest one year bump ever
• Failed to work on the OWASP Guide (much)
• Failed to improve my (weak) Japanese or learn Spanish even though that would be handy as you hear it so much here. My iPod is bursting at the seams with hundreds of Japanese and Spanish lessons, and I’ve listened to like five episodes all up

Listing it out like this, it’s like 2007 was a big fat failure. But that’s not entirely true:

• Moved to the USA and settled down. This doesn’t sound like much, but only if you’ve never moved country.
• Made a baby with my lovely wife. Our daughter is coming real soon now - we’ve had several close calls and she can’t wait to get out by the looks of things
• Saw about 25 of the 58 possible states*. The USA is awesome. I’ve been from Miami to Boston, from NYC to LA, and it’s so totally different and yet familiar. I can’t wait to see more.
• Got the job of a lifetime. The guys at Aspect are everything I thought they’d be and more. It’s a wonderful work environment with great people at the top, funny co-workers, and the work is challenging and varied, which is just up my alley.
• Lead Author and Editor of the Top 10 2007. That was a huge undertaking - incorporating all the other folks efforts. I’m glad it’s out there
• With my OWASP and Aspect hats on, worked on the SANS GSSP for Java with a bunch of other folks. We need certifications to get rid of the unqualified cowboys from our field. I am reasonably certain that multiple choice exams are NOT the way to do this, but it’s not likely my way (a master’s like dissertation or practical project) would fly
• Worked on the SANS Top 20 again (and got Jeremiah in on the act - he updated the first draft this year - much kudos to him!)
• Got the XMB folks back up on their feet with a dynamic set of programmers… which sort of took the wind out of UltimaBB, but that’s okay. XMB deserves all the success in the world after so many years of being effectively mismanaged
• Worked on researching mainframe security for web apps, which seems a total blank slate, yet vital to the world’s financial industry.

So next year, I plan to revisit some of my favorite themes, but I will only blog once in a blue moon by design. The blog entries will be farther apart, but I plan to make them content rich. Many of them will be previews for new OWASP research. In the meantime, I’m sure my life is about to completely change by a small 3 to 4 kg baby girl. We’ll see what happens next year!

* I say 58 not because I’m geographically challenged, just that Australia is the 51st through 58th (puppet) states. We’ll see if the new PM is a bit more independent or whether we trade one colonial master we ignore for another

The old guard has been thrown out. In true Australian style, if you stick it to the battler, attacking and destroying the very fundament of Australian society - “a fair go”, you’re out. And the Australian people have spoken, and it looks like soon to be ex-PM John Howard may even lose his seat. It couldn’t happen to a nicer person so out of touch with the modern day reality. The 1950’s were a long time ago, and we needed a modern government for these last twelve years, not someone who denied climate change despite a 9 year drought right in front of our very eyes. We needed someone who does not think that economic growth is more important than society itself. The Montgomery Burns world view simply does not work.

Good luck to Kevin Rudd. It’ll be awesome to have a Prime Minister who can speak two languages for once. As an ex-diplomat, I wonder if he has the cojones necessary to stand up to the Unions so it doesn’t go too far the other way. Whitlam lost that battle, and that was a worse disaster than even Howard, even though his heart was in the right place and most of his policies (free tertiary education for all, free health care for all) made him one of Australia’s best Prime Ministers, and a legacy that to this day is unsurpassed in Australian history.

I only wish I wasn’t disenfranchised at the moment by being in the USA. I missed out voting entirely as we’re now off the electoral roll. In the future, I can’t say to my daughter that I had a hand in getting rid of one of Australia’s worst ever governments, one which let power go to its head and conduct ideology experiments on an unwilling public. Oh well.

Let’s hope that if Rudd gets power in both houses, or at least Greens as the balance of power, the same thing that happened to Howard’s government doesn’t happen to the Labor party.