With all this false labor (for the last 3 weeks) its hard to know if this is real or not. But Nic thinks it is. Contractions 5-7 minutes apart and coming on strong for the last hour. Sorry about the ridiculous time of night, but we’re heading in to the hospital. Here’s hoping this is it!

While we all wait around for the new baby, and when I’m not distracting you with pictures of the current baby, maybe I can keep you at bay with some reminiscing on what used to be my baby.
There’s this fantastic tool online called the Wayback Machine, which has been, for over a decade, crawling the web and taking snapshots of popular websites, storing what it sees in a searchable archive. Internet geeks love it because it allows us to see, and remember, where our online home came from, and what it used to look like.
In 2002, this website (originally created in 2000 to store our wedding invitations list and a running journal of our preparations) became a serious enough venture that the Wayback Machine’s spiders took an interest in it. Today I decided to take a peek back…

The site has really only had 3 major incarnations, and although its been through a half million color schemes and banners (some better than others) its really only had 3 real designs.
The top-most in this picture is the original layout, essentially hardcoded in ASP — although I was smart enough, even then, to keep the color schemes in a seperate CSS file. Back then I had much bigger ambitions for the website, and possibly my biggest inspiration was a certain Ensign from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Alas, Wil’s site is not what it used to be, and frankly not as interesting either. But I still give him credit for helping to shape iteration #1 of jonandnic.com.
The second and third pictures represent the design and technology that probably had the longest life. In this version of my code, something I’d had hopes to productize one-day, the design was implemented by XSL. It was, frankly, brilliant, although it did cost me some of the features of the original site.
This particular design, lifted from my new blogging inspiration, Dooce, saw us through some pretty interesting parts of life: from the kid we bailed out of jail, to a trip to Asia — essentially our whole life between college and kids is recorded on this website, and still online through my own archives.
The third iteration of the site, this time on WordPress, came at the end of our lives as we knew them. When we found out we were pregnant with Benjamin, I knew I wouldn’t have the time I used to have to put into maintaining both the website and the underlying code.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be as interesting to you as it is nostalgically fascinating for me to look back at where we’ve been. But as we sit around waiting for what comes next, you might want to hit the Wayback Machine, and browse some of the other times we were… sitting around waiting for what comes next!
Got a website of your own? Search for it in the Internet Archives and see if you’ve been captured for posterity…

Here, let us entertain you with pictures of our first born, while #2 continues to hold our lives, and maybe soon our sanity, hostage…

This image fairly succinctly illustrates just how frustrating the past couple days have been…
Wondering when Abi is coming? So are we, so stop asking. Instead you can use the Poll on the right to register your guess.

Today is Abi’s due date (40 weeks pregnant baby!)
So I had my weekly doctor’s appointment. I was interested to see if I had dilated any more from last week, which was just over 1cm, and I figured I would maybe be 1.5cm to 2cm. But to my surprise when he checked me (which by the way is not very fun) he said I was 3cm dilated and 80% thinned out, or effaced. Now this is interesting to me since at about this time with Benjamin I had already been at the hospital for 8 or so hours and had an epidural.
Oh and I guess since I was progressing so well from last week he decided to do a procedure called “Stripping the Membranes” and if anyone has had this done you know how NOT fun it was (Google it if you want to find out more). So in case anyone is wondering the doctor said it could happen tonight OR it could happen next week… in other words, we are still waiting!!

As our friend Dave pointed out, we’re now sure that we’re having a girl — because she’s making everyone wait.
The official due date isn’t until Thursday… which really means that it could be another 2 weeks before she arrives (after 2 weeks past the due date, they’ll induce labor.) Nicole’s been having pretty regular bouts of contractions usually about 10-15 minutes apart — although “bouts” isn’t the right word because they last half the day, then mysteriously go away. We’ve stopped getting excited about those, but Nic still diligently writes them down, hoping for a pattern to emerge.
I’ve been working from home this week, hoping to be near-by when something starts happening. Really that just means that we’re both trapped in the house, scared to go anywhere. The cabin fever is setting in and we’re almost through every episode of Firefly and Jericho (another great show likely to be canceled before its time) so we’re starting to go a little crazy.
In short, absolutely nothing is happening, there’s nothing to read here, go about your business. We’ll post again when something happens — I already have the post saved as a Draft 😉

So last night we’re laying in bed watching Firefly (because as I mentioned earlier, there’s nothing else we can do right now) and I noticed Nic is keeping a spreadsheet on the craptop. This isn’t unusual (because as I mentioned earlier, she makes spreadsheets for everything) but I glanced over and figured out that she was writing down contractions, and the last 15 were almost exactly 10 minutes apart…
Around 11:00 we started getting ready to go to sleep, but not before I put the bags by the door, laid out some comfortable clothes I could quickly get into, and texted Brooke (and maybe one or two other people) to suggest she keep her cell phone handy.
I’m pretty sure we were both awake for the next 2 hours — Nic timing her contractions, and me almost bouncing with excitement. But eventually we both fell asleep, and when we woke up this morning the contractions were gone and there was still no Abi.
She’s being very stubborn. It was not like this at all with Benjamin. We told him when we were ready, and the next day he arrived. And the water broke first so we didn’t have to deal with the ambiguity of timing contractions. Maybe this kid is gonna be trouble…

Literally, we’re sitting around waiting for something to happen. We can’t plan any outings, or date nights, we can’t even travel too far from home. We just sit here, watching TV, playing with Ben, and waiting for something to break… literally.
So to pass the time, here are some geeky gadgets we’ve recently acquired or fallen in love with.
This is our new monitor: a Dell SP2008WFP. Its not an Apple monitor, although its hooked up to our Mac Mini, but that’s OK, because the equivalent Apple Studio Display is $350 more, and nowhere near as nice.
This guy has a gorgeous 20” glossy screen, wide-ratio, of course. Has a 2000:1 contrast ratio 4 USB ports, and a built-in webcam. For those of us not rich enough to have an iMac, or with employers not cool enough to spring for MacBooks, this Dell monitor is perfect. Couple it with an adjustable height stand and its ideal for video conferencing.
Speaking of which, if you don’t have Skype, get it now. It’ll probably never completely replace our other IM clients, but its unimaginably cool being able to have a video chat whenever you want, with people all around the world — regardless of what kind of computer they’re using. We use Skype to talk to my parents in Malaysia and Nic’s parents in Ontario, chat with friends in Colorado, and maybe soon, my brother and sister Alberta.
Skype lets our friends and family see Benjamin as he grows up, and eliminates the miles between us and the people we care about. And its dead simple to use.

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This was my Christmas present from Nic’s parents. Its worth about $60, but in one use saved us $150. Its an ODBII code reader.
The automotive industry has almost as many acronyms as the computer industry, and honestly I have no idea what ODBII stands for. But its the standard that all modern car manufacturers are required to adhere to for diagnostic reporting. Simply put, you hook this thing up to your car and it tells you whats wrong.
Most car dealerships charge and arm and a leg to “diagnose” a problem whenever your “Service Engine” light comes on, but in most cases all they do is hook up their own ODBII computer and the car reports the problem. Couple this device with a table of car codes, and you can probably eliminate most trips to the dealership. For example, last time my light came on, the car was telling me that my emissions were 20% below top-performance standards. Since it was 0 degrees outside at the time, I figured that was OK and cleared the code myself. Had it been a more significant problem, at least we’d have the information we needed to decide if and when we wanted to take it in.

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And finally a round-up of software that is the new hotness:
Plaxo has been around for a very long time, and has, at points in its history, been somewhat evil. They seem to have cleaned themselves up lately, though, and they happen to be the only game in town that will let you synchronize your address book between multiple Macs and multiple Windows PCs. They even support Thunderbird.
It can’t be that difficult to exchange vCard data, but for some reason neither Microsoft nor Apple (nor any other third party) has stepped up to the plate to make this happen (although Kerio does a good job, if you can afford to run your own server). So despite my aversion to giving anyone my contact data, Plaxo does the trick.
Mozy is one of many automatic online back-up systems. But its got a tiny footprint when running, works seamlessly on both Mac and Windows, and gives you up to 2GB of free online storage.
Mozy runs continuously on our Mac at home, and between that and a small partition for limited Time Machine use, we never have to sweat about losing our day-to-day files.
We have other solutions for backing up the bigger stuff — including our 13GB music library, and 7ish GB photo library. But for our finances, e-mail and other personal documents and correspondence, Mozy is elegant and worry-free.
FolderShare was recently bought-out by Microsoft and became Windows Live FolderShare — but not before they rolled out a decent Mac client. I’ll likely move to DropBox once they let me into their Beta, because it looks pretty sweet, but until then FolderShare does the job.
Our useage for it is pretty limited. Multiple computers end up with an assortment of files on the desktop — notes to ourselves, URLs to check out later, spreadsheets (Nicole makes a spreadsheet for everything), and we usually end up mailing them back and forth to ourselves, just to get them on the computer we wanted to use.
FolderShare eliminates that by setting up a sync folder on each of your machines. Whatever you drop onto that folder is instantly copied over to all your other computers. And when you update a file on any one of them, the updates are pushed to all the others. Its simple, its fast and its mostly invisible (save for the annoying and pointless dock icon in OS X… why?!)

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Well… still no baby yet. I guess I’ll go back to watching TV.

Our new favorite show is Firefly — an old school western series… except its in space. Totally under-rated. Joss Whedon is a genius.