It’s been an eventful week:

Babies

Tuesday morning, 9 minutes after midnight, Grace Marie Steinmeyer was born, at 7 pounds even.  This is the third child for us, and we are very happy and thankful for her safe and healthy arrival.  Even after having been through this twice before, bringing a new baby into the world is an absolutely amazing event – really without comparison to anything else that’s ever happened in my life (except the previous babies, of course). 

And to bring in a geek note, if you’ve got a baby in your future, or just like odd web pages, check out this site, which shows you the popularity of various baby names through time.  Type in “GRA” to see the decline in popularity of “Grace”  in the 1930’s through the 1980’s, and it’s rise to popularity again in the last 10 years.  (No, we didn’t pick that name based on the popularity-meter, but it’s still a fun tool to play with).

Cars

The addition of a 3^rd child to our family brings one sad note – the end of my footloose and fancy free days driving a convertible (trivial in comparison to having a new baby, but still…).  My Mitsubishi already had one strike against it – it was a stick, which my wife can’t drive, thus complicating things when we needed to juggle cars (our other car is, of course, a minivan).  The new baby added a second strike, in that the convertible only seats 4 – we’ve got an overflow error here, and to fix the bug, I’m selling the convertible (details here).  To replace it, I bought a Hyundai Tucson (automatic, seats 5).  I really like the Hyundai, but the buying experience was classic car-buying goofiness (details here). 

Game Development

The baby arrival was well-timed on another front.  I’ve been working with a freelance artist for the last couple weeks, and while waiting to get our overall visual look nailed down, I’m basically stalled, programming-wise.  Gives me more time with the baby, but still a bit frustrating.  While I may be premature in saying this, it appears that for a reasonably experienced game programmer, the programming side of doing a casual game is almost trivial – maybe 2 months programming tops (assuming you’re starting with a solid framework).  Which means a lot more time on design and bouncing art stuff back and forth.  In the future, I might run two projects concurrently to reduce the waiting.

Apple/Intel

In the broader tech world, Apple announced a switch to Intel microprocessors, with the switch starting in mid ’06 and not being completed until the end of ’07.  While this may have been necessary for Apple to get good, low-power chips for their notebooks and other portables, I see it as a bad sign overall.  Consumers will hold off on buying new Macs until the Intel-powered machines come out.  Developers will face higher porting costs, with the need to develop and test for two processor platforms.  Higher costs to develop and smaller target market equals fewer developers making Mac products.  I’d like to support the Mac, and probably will, but overall, I see Mac’s market share falling even further from it’s already low 2.5-3.0% level.