Vista Seeker

• Don’t complain about grocery shopping, cleaning house, and making dinner… you got off easy on this one.
• Watching an entire, uninterrupted episode of Law and Order should be considered a major accomplishment.
• Childless yuppie couples with small dogs will say things like “I know what you are going through… when Sam was a puppy it was really tough on us”. Resist the urge to punch them in the face.
• Not going to a bar, restaurant, club, movie theater, mall, or store of any kind means unexpected and significant financial savings.
• You will get peed on, barfed on, and pooped on. Get used to it.
• Everyone will ask you “are you getting any sleep?”, so come up with some sort of clever answer to that a la Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions
• Single friends will invite you to go “party” or participate in other beer-soaked activities such as weekend road trips. They may be confused as to why you decline the invite. Similarly your drunken buddies will have a hard time understanding why you’re not so keen on inviting them over for the big game anymore. But don’t worry about that, because the next bullet point solves that problem.
• Your single male friends (and most of your wife’s single female) will disappear faster than spiked punch on prom night.
• Your wife will most likely go insane at some point from spending every waking hour placating a screaming 10-pound meatloaf. Give her a break for a couple hours a day. You can walk a baby and drink beer at the same time, trust me.
• Your weird childless neighbors will offer to babysit and you will seriously consider it, even though they chain-smoke cigarettes and are possibly alcoholics.
• Women, especially young women and baby-crazed thirty-somethings will pay a lot of attention to you, especially if you are walking the baby. Take pride in the fact that you have reached the pinnacle of the socio-sexual food chain, but resist the urge to punch yourself in the face because you can’t do a thing to capitalize on it.
• As a young yuppie parent you are now part of an exclusive club. Bask in your own sense of superiority as you discuss the latest in stroller technology, baby yoga, and the importance of early registration into the most competitive preschools. Prepare to judge and be judged by effete suburbanites who only allow Tyler and Madison to wear organic cotton and use the finest triple-milled French soaps. You will soon recognize that yuppie parents are perhaps the scariest people you will ever meet.  And that you are now one of them.

Julian Matias born 7/2/08, 6:49 PM. Weight 6lbs 10 oz, 19 inches long.

A happy healthy baby boy and two extremely tired new parents
You can view the pics here but you need to be my friend on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sassberto/sets/72157605984857075/

Mike F/S Grind, originally uploaded by Sassberto.

Beth’s Baby shower was this weekend so I headed up to the skatepark on the Pala Indian Reservation for an epic bro-down.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sassberto/sets/72157605498075226/

018, originally uploaded by Sassberto.

Beth got her Master’s degree this weekend. Congrats!

This week I attended the Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It was an interesting scene both in the content presented and the attendees themselves. Like any event of this size, the speakers, panels, and sessions are hit-and-miss, in my case with duds-vs-great about 50/50. Some observations in no particular order:

• Yahoo seems to be pushing forward with a very big and consumer-focused product line. Google is pushing the infrastructure and apps. I don’t think Google and Yahoo are really as competitive as it may seem.
• Google’s basically got a thing where if your app runs on python, you can run it on their systems.   That’s just wild.
• Yahoo threw a great party with free kegs, and thanks to all the little startups who’s free beer I enjoyed.
• Inarticulate 20-somethings may be getting millions handed to them, but they are impossible to listen to for 23 minutes.
• The company that created FunWall and SuperPoke closed a fifty freaking million dollar round of funding.
• Microsoft was treated like a now-dethroned bully who got his comeuppance, with any Microsoft-related joke or jab getting laughs. Ipods, Iphones, Macbooks were de rigeur. Woe for the MSFT product pitchman who has to face this group.
• MySpace was treated like a wildly-successful-but-immature younger brother : with equal parts envy and contempt.
• Clay Shirky was amazing, as was the guy who does the Fake Steve Jobs blog.
• Tim O’Reilly and Jonathan Schwartz were not as interesting as I thought they they’d be.
• Facebook and Twitter, et al. may be toys, but when you look at the numbers - the users, the downloads, the “tweets”, it’s pretty staggering.
• 90% of the business represented make their money on ads, or selling services to companies that do.
• The general trend is away from the ‘web site’ as being a basic and uniquely identifiable entity. It seems that without a social and participatory element, a lot of projects aren’t worth doing right now.
• Technically the cutting edge seems to be pretty stable - the focus has shifted away from language and platform and towards processes and methodologies.
• If you are serious about a web startup and getting funding you still do need to be in the Bay Area.
• If you are serious about your career as a web developer you still do need to be in the Bay Area
• I am not sure why but I found the levels of Iphone, BlackBerry and Laptop usage to be a little annoying.  You paid to do this thing in person, why not actually be there?
• There were a lot of Germans and a lot of hipsters.
• There were a lot of people who were younger than me working on cooler stuff.
• San Francisco is a great city to visit, but is kinda sketchy sometimes, in a way that SD isn’t.
• SF appears to be overrun with hipsters.   It is a little bit of a mini NYC scene over there.
• 8 hours of conference and then 6 hours of dinner and drinking is not sustainable for more than a couple days.

hippie floater, originally uploaded by Sassberto.

Memorial Skatepark, Logan Heights, San Diego CA

Mrs. Ari: I asked for one hour out of the day for his undivided attention and I can’t even have that.

Ari: You can have it if you want to live in Agoura fucking Hills, and go to group therapy, but if you want a Beverly Hills mansion, and you want a country club membership, and you want nine weeks a year in a Tuscan villa, then I’m gonna need to take a call when it comes in at noon on a motherfucking Wednesday.

Reality’s setting in, we’ve got less than 20 weeks to go. The belly grows and now pretty much anyone can tell by looking what’s going on. We have to make some crib / stroller / highchair decisions: Does anyone really need a 900-dollar German-engineered stroller? How about an “infant transportation system”. What about baby room decisions: Paint colors? Curtains? Does a baby really care about decor? Apparently my wife believes so.

The baby on the way is changing my perception on things. I haven’t been single in a long time, but now I have an even harder time relating to it. Listening to co-workers talk about their vacation or nightlife is like listening to teenage girls talk about their boyfriends. Instead I actually seek out other parents who just tell me about the hellish nightmare that is apparently raising a newborn child. I predict a swift but quiet exodus of our single friends shortly after the baby’s birth, not because they are bad people, but who the hell wants to be around a screaming baby that isn’t yours?

In walks with my wife around the city, my perception zooms to cracks in the sidewalk that might cause a trip, or homeless people or gangsters, or anyone with a dog. People that never really bothered me in the past are now cause for vigilance, even cause for crossing the street. Things that would have concerned me deeply a few years ago - the credit crisis, the elections, are just anecdotally important to me right now.

My long-term thinking revolves around things like public vs. private school and how long my wife can or should stay home with the kids. Not to mention the ’second child’ which realistically should happen pretty shortly after the first. Of course the question of “when do we need to get a bigger house in a better area” looms not-so-far-off in the distance, at that inevitable but unforseen time when the baby is not a baby anymore but a little kid, going to school on the school bus.

It’s a weird place to be - the anticipation is kicking into overdrive, but I know that it’s all just a few months away. So for now, I try to distract myself with home improvement projects and SimCity 4.

Consulting: If you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

Some more musings on corporate men’s fashion…

• Wearing all-black does not really make you stylish. If you are over 30, it makes you weird.
• If you are over 30, resist the urge to shop and H&M or Zara. Those clothes don’t fit you anymore. You can find lower-cost adult clothes at places like Lands End.
• The hem of your pants is probably the most important detail of all. Your pants hem should touch the sole of your shoe in the back for a full break, and about an inch above for no break. Showing your socks or man-ankles is absolutely forbidden. Similarly, walking around with sacks of cloth on your shoes is not good either.
• If your pants are hemmed too short, get them fixed at the tailor, don’t sag your pants down to make up for it.
• Invest in more than one pair of shoes. A good basic selection would be a black plain or cap-toe oxford, a brown oxford, and a brown loafer. If you wear the same shoes every day, people will notice.
• Wearing the same pair of Gucci Horsebit loafers every day is not going to cover the fact that you only have one pair of shoes. Instead of spending 500 dollars on those, get 3 pairs of Allen Edmonds on sale.
• Wearing loafers with a suit really doesn’t make sense. Loafers are casual shoes.
• Sportjackets are casual, not dress clothes. However in ‘business casual’ offices, you will get a little grief for wearing a jacket. Just keep at it and eventually they won’t notice. I’m wearing one today.
• A tie and a dress shirt is not really any dressier than not wearing a tie at all. If you wear a tie, wear a jacket too. No jacket, no tie. You can just wear a sportjacket with out the tie as well.
• If you wear a jacket, keep it on. If all you want to do is take the jacket off the minute you get to your desk, ditch the jacket entirely.
• Buy a pair of socks that stay up. Baggy socks are definitely a no-no. Club Room socks have EverStay technology and really do stay up!
• Socks match your pants. Not your shoes. So grey slacks and black shoes means grey socks.
• Please, for the sake of everyone else in the office, wear an undershirt. I can see your hairy man-nipples through your white shirts.
• If there is one and only one piece of advice I can offer, it is to either learn how to iron your clothes or go to the dry cleaner and get your clothes professionally pressed. You can’t just keep wearing the same shirt again and again without getting them pressed. My rule is 2 wears per laundering.