This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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Support Brandy Donaghy for Washington State House 44th Legislative District Position 1

Hey, I rarely post here any more, but Brandy is running to be properly elected to the position she was appointed to last December. Please visit her website and donate to support the cause, and if you actually live in the 44th Legislative District in Washington State, please vote for her in both he primary in August, and the general election in November. Thank you!

 

Washington State Representative Donaghy

Snohomish County Council voted 4-1 tonight to appoint my wife Brandy Donaghy to the vacant Washington State House seat for the 44th legislative district left by John Lovick moving to the State Senate. She was sworn in about an hour later by Judge Okoloko. Congratulations Brandy! I am so proud!

Over the Hump

DO. NOT. WANT.

Just a Thought

I don’t know (yet!) about the trials of parenting an infant or toddler or other ages younger than 7, but being a parent to a teenager is definitely much more difficult and stressful than parenting a 7 to 12 year old pre-teen! Just sayin’

Alex’s Baby Registry

Oh, and yes, since a bunch of people have asked over the last few weeks… there is of course a baby registry. Of course it is at Amazon. We fully anticipate to get most of the stuff ourselves, and some of the “nice to have” we may not bother with at all, but if anybody out there DOES want to help out at all with stuff for Alex we would of course welcome and appreciate it. The direct link to the registry is:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/baby/WOM4ACMY49EM

Based on the range of estimates, best we can really say is he is due “sometime in September”, although we are guessing earlier rather than later. And we were planning on doing almost all of our baby supply purchasing at the beginning of August (to coincide with my next batch of company stock becoming available). So… if anybody wants to help… THANKS! :-)

And our baby’s name will be… William Alexander Minter

William because I noticed awhile back that on my father’s side of the family going back through his father, and his father, and his father, etc… every other generation since 1736… 273 years… has been a William Minter. (Details below.) When I showed this to Brandy, her immediate and unhesitating reaction was “Well, we know what we have to name it if it is a boy.” And that was that for the first name.

We did also decide though that we would not actually call him that on a regular basis. There is already someone in the immediate family, my father, very much still using that name. So we’ll let him continue to be the William/Bill in the family. So we’ll call him by his middle name.

We tried a bunch of names as we were testing out calling him various things after we found out the gender. “Alex” just sort of stuck. There was no single moment where we decided that would be it, it just sort of happened and then we all realized that was what we were calling him. It is also the name of my sister Cynthia’s pet snake, but we decided we wouldn’t let that stop us. :-)

Anyway, it will be “William Alexander Minter”. We will generally call him Alex. Except Amy, who has decided to call him “WAM”.

Official due date is still September 21st, although the latest ultrasounds showed him a bit ahead of schedule, with an estimated date of September 5th. (Closer to what Brandy has thought all along.) So possibly not very long now at all.

Oh, and for those who are interested, the line of William Minters…

1619-1655: John Minter
1650-????: John Minter Jr
1690-1743: John Minter III
1736-1809: William Minter
1769-1846: John Minter
1797-1871: William Minter
1833-1913: John Russell Minter
1873-1943: William Ramseur Minter
1912-1991: David Ramseur Minter
1942- : William Maynard Minter
1971- : Samuel Antonio Minter
2009- : William Alexander Minter

And yes, for awhile there was something going on with the name “John” as well, but it seemed to have petered out almost 100 years ago. :-)

Edit a few minutes later: Look at my next post for baby registry information if you are interested.

Back in Action

Aside from one exception for last week’s podcast, there have been no posts here because there was a bit of a meltdown with the server that had been used to host Abulsme.com for the last little bit. This was a server owned by my friend Chris which I have been allowed to use as a favor, which I greatly appreciate. When the machine went down, Chris helped get everything set up another place temporarily to let me post last week’s podcast, but because I didn’t yet have my full suite of automated backups and such going there, I didn’t post anything else. And this proved to be the push to move off of Chris’s stuff onto regular old hosting that I’ve been meaning to do for years now but just never got around to.

So as of about 10 hours ago, abulsme.com is now in a new home which I actually pay for. And yes, I went for a cheap ass plan, and yes, because of that it was probably more of a pain in the ass than it would have been if I’d paid more, but whatever, it is all set up now. If it proves to be insufficient in the future I guess I’ll upgrade.

Oh, and the wiki and my graphs are still yet another place. I’ll probably try to consolidate those over the next few weeks too.

Anyway, I’m back. I have a few posts to catch up on, and I need to get this week’s podcast out tonight as well.

So, higher than average posting tonight.

Probably.

Unless I get distracted by something shiny.

Thirteen More Weeks of SemiProductivity

Back in March I last posted stats on my “things I want to do at home”. They are here.

Last time around in 14 weeks I managed:

  • 20 hours of catching up on putting things in Quicken and/or paying bills (43%)
  • 10 hours of reading (22%)
  • 7 hours of random things from my projects list (15%)
  • 5 hours of genealogy stuff (11%)
  • 4 hours of catching up on old email (9%)

That averaged to 3.3 hours per week.

This time I only have 13 weeks on my chart, covering 8 Mar 2009 to 6 Jun 2009 because I wrote bigger on my whiteboard or something, but I ended up with:

  • 10 hours of catching up on putting things in Quicken and/or paying bills (59%)
  • 4 hours of catching up on old email (24%)
  • 2 hours of random things from my projects list (12%)
  • 1 hour of genealogy stuff (6%)

That is only 17 hours total in 13 weeks. This is only 1.3 hours per week. Much much worse that the previous 14 weeks. Bad Sam. Bad Sam.

I must do better in the next batch of weeks.

So far I am not. In the 11 days since the next batch started, so far I’ve done 1 hour of this stuff.

Oops.

Of course, I’ve been doing some of the email stuff outside of this system. Maybe I need to stop that.

Less Than Seven

Hey, I posted the podcast less than 7 hours after we finished recording it. I can’t even remember how long it has been since the last time that happened. More often recently it has been more like three or four days. So anyway, go me for timeliness.

Of course, now it is way past my bedtime.

Time to go to sleep.

On the other hand, the big rally in Iran is supposed to start in just about two hours, and I wouldn’t want to be asleep for that, would I?

Hmmm. Tough choices.

But I do have work in the morning, so I guess I should probably sleep.

Drat.

Note added a few minutes after the above: Yes, I know there have been some reports that the rally has been canceled or postponed. There are other reports saying that is not true at all. I suspect that regardless, there will be something happening anyway. When you have a movement like this, having anybody say “Oh, never mind” stops some people, but a lot will still continue anyway.