Month: February 2014

I don’t recall what I took in my bag the first time to the hospital when we had Sloane, but I did try to pay a little more attention the second time around. There’s tons of advice for what mothers should pack, but what about the dad? The first thing you need to know is that labor, for the father, is boring — very boring.

With that in mind, here’s what I actually used this time around, what I needed, and what I packed but didn’t touch. I am not posting this to tell you what to pack, just to offer: “oh yeah” type stuff.

What I Used

• Camera: I packed the Fuji X-E2, and used the crap out of it.
• 35 f/1.4 R Lens
• 23 f/1.4 R Lens
• Joby Gorillapod (I knew the hospital offered a great view of downtown, so I brought that for some long exposures.)
• Pepsi: Yeah, you’ll want to pack some caffeine so you don’t have to go hunting for it.
• iPad
• iPhone
• Chargers for the iOS devices.
• Snacks: Granola bars, candy, anything that kept my hands clean and provided me with something to eat (i.e. no Doritos).
• Tissues: Most hospitals will have them, but still, I have nasal issues.
• Toothbrush & Toothpaste
• Gum/Mints

What I Needed, But Didn’t Have

• Pen: I forgot one, and man is there a lot of things to fill out and sign.
• More water: I only packed a liter, that wasn’t enough. It’s readily available, but the point is to bring it so that you can focus on the one in labor.
• More tissues.
• Slippers: my feet got really swollen and tired, but who wants to walk on hospital floors in their socks? Not me. Slippers would have been great. Really great.
• CP Filter: for the long exposure. I meant to pack it, but forgot it.

What I Packed, But Didn’t Use

• Change of clothes. Had we been there longer I would have used them.
• Battery-based chargers for my devices. Just didn’t need them.
• 18-55 f/2.8-4 lens: too slow.
• 27mm f/2.8: too slow
• Full toiletries bag.
• Cash: for some reason I remember needing it the last time, but I really didn’t need it at all this time.

The first time I packed a backpack. This time I went with a small duffle bag: it was a bit too small. I’d advise packing something with extra room for the trip home (mine was stuffed to the brim from the get go).

Snow forecasts in Washington state are pretty horrible. I actually am not sure they have ever accurately predicted snowfalls. Anyways, my favorite weather blogger, Cliff Mass posted a couple of articles on why forecasting is really hard sometimes. A bit weather-nerdy, but insightful.

On the missed Washington snow forecasts:

Weak disturbances that develop on fronts, or frontal waves, are relatively small scale, are often shallow, and are very difficult to forecast correctly even over land. But in this case, it is even harder because they are forming and evolving over the ocean where our ability to detect and describe small-scale structures are not as good. And the snow events this week have all been associated with such frontal waves and to forecast the snow correctly requires getting their position, size, and motion exactly correct…something current weather prediction technology is still not adequate to deal with.

And on weather forecasting overall:

There are at least three reasons:

1. The description of the atmosphere, the starting point of the simulation called the initialization, is flawed.
2. The physics of the model, how basic processes like radiation, clouds and precipitation are described, are flawed.
3. The forecasting problem is not possible considering the inherent uncertainties of atmospheric flows and the tendency for errors to grow in time.

Good reads.

While I was on leave Editorially announced that they were shutting down. As Pat mentioned, this is a service that was used heavily on this site, and was quickly becoming universal among the editor-freelancer workflows. It was and is the best of the lot of services like it.

I was granted early access to the service, and loved the idea immediately, but I noted to the team at the time that it really should be a platform, not an app. In a longer post about the service I said:

But most of all I want it to act more like a service — for example, the way Github does. Wouldn’t it be great if writing apps could integrate Editorially support like they do with Dropbox? You pull down the latest version and it is checked out until you are done editing — then it is pushed back up for others to edit and review changes. You could write in your favorite app, but have the full power of collaboration. In my mind that is where these tools need to be heading and I’d post with exclamation points upon this vision being realized.

I think the web based nature is what killed Editorially, because I don’t know many writers who actually liked writing in Editorially. Almost everyone I knew wrote in their favorite app and copy and pasted in to Editorially — or just didn’t use Editorially because of that extra step.

Editorially should have been a platform.

We should have been able to open up Writer Pro, Byword, Ulysses, TextMate, whatever, and pulled down our documents, seen the changes, and edited the writing and sent it back to Editorially. The web view should have been there, but that should have been about as well used as Dropbox’s website is. In my opinion the focus of Editorially was too heavy on the app side, and not enough on the platform side.

Users should have been finding out about the service because all the good writing apps were suddenly including support for it. It’s a real shame the service is shutting down, but here, at The Brooks Review, we have already received recommendations for six other like services and I still hold out hope I will get the platform like service I desire.

The three Ps:

1. Being pooped on.
2. Being peed on.
3. Being puked on.

Perfectly normal for parents, and after the first few times it stops bugging you.

I stirred up some controversy on App.net today, but among this was an incredibly salient point. Before I get to that, a little context.

The conversation ((Or whatever you want to call it, I don’t care.)) was about Google and the topic of this conversation was “Evil”. You can now see why I was involved.

Anna Tarkov chimed in to say:

@duerig @benbrooks @jbouie I just want to chime in to say I agree. I think the way we use words is incredibly important. Language has meaning and we should be cautious. If Google is evil, if Microsoft is evil, etc, then “evil” ceases to mean anything.

I knew this. I knew this. And yet I forgot it. We all seem to have forgotten it. Perhaps because Google famously says “Don’t be evil” is their motto we feel free to use evil when we disagree with that Google does. Even that motto doesn’t mean we should lower the debate, and devalue the meaning of ’evil’, by applying it to a technology company that has yet to, and may never actually do, something truly worth calling evil.

Evil should be reserved for truly evil things, just as using the word “rape” should always be reserved for actual instances of rape. I’m glad to be reminded of this.