Jersey tagged me on his 5 people lunch meme, and as a good blogger, I feel compelled to answer.

My first answer would be to have lunch with five geographically-distant friends, as having lunch with famous people (who, let’s face it, would be complete strangers) would be an awkward situation for both me and the other party. Furthermore, I’m not a fan of this question because it begs you to impress everyone by naming a lesser-known, non-celebrity-but-famous-for-a-reason answer. I might as well be out tutoring some bartender on how to make “my” drink.

Since the friend answer defeats the fun of this question, I’ve answered below (in no particular order). I wasn’t sure if dead people were acceptable (otherwise it’d be Christ, Buddha, and Mohammed FTW), so I kept it with the living.

1. Shigeru Miyamoto. The Walt Disney of the video game industry deserves my thanks for a happy childhood.
2. Steve Jobs. The Willy Wonka of our generation can’t be off this list.
3. Bill Watterson. Of anyone who could tell me the joys and pitfalls of creating comics, this is the man.
4. Warren Buffett. Last year, Zhao Danyang paid $2.1 million to have lunch with the Oracle of Omaha. If offered, why turn down something so valuable for free?
5. Gordon Ramsay. Someone has to cook the meal!

My wife gave birth to our first child, Ronan Camden Hauck, at 11:06 am this morning in our home with the help of a midwife (7 lb, 20 1/2 inches long). While he was slightly late, Ronan didn’t arrive while I was to teach class, plus he let Daphyn and me watch the Super Bowl uninterrupted, so he’s definitely okay in my book

For a brief moment, I considered naming the child Jeffrey Mohit David Lamar Yosef Hauck, but negotiated a child name my wife liked (Ronan, although Irish, makes me think of Japanese ronin, and Camden, well, I’m still an Orioles fan to some small degree).

I’m not the type for playing paparazzi to my kids (my pet peeves include people who substitute their own Facebook profile picture with that of their child), but I’m getting grilled by friends for not posting anything, so here are two quick pics (below). Ironically, a lot of friends replied to my text messages earlier in the day saying they’d seen him before I even took a picture of him. Apparently I have a lot of family working overtime on their Facebook tagging.

To the Twitterati, take heart in the fact that you guys found out the sex (it was a surprise) and the delivery time before my parents even knew. Serves them right for not following me.

My friend Mundy pointed out this video of Optimus Prime vs. Megatron to me awhile ago. True Transformers fans, you may want to avert your eyes, as this even makes me teary-eyed as to what the Transformers movie COULD HAVE BEEN.

Alas, it only proves that Michael Bay’s aliens can’t design better than Hasbro.

Yup, my favorite beer comes in cheese form. Just like the Belgian monks ale, it’s not cheap, but really good.

If the Yankees had an NFL counterpart as far as fan-base goes, it’d be the Steelers. I swear, there are more Steelers fans around the country than followers of any other team.

Thanks to SteelersNYC.com (they found me . . . somehow), I was able to find Steelers Country in Manhattan–Iron City Beer and all, over at Scruffy Duffy’s in Midtown. Too bad Jacksonville wasn’t Steelers Country last night, though.

Can’t the NFL just let NFL games to stream on the Web like MLB (yes, I know Direct TV has a contract locked-in until 2012, but more power to the people)? I don’t bother with cable TV, although last night would have been nice to have ESPN. Fortunately, I’ll be back in PA, with cable, for Sunday’s game.

I happened to run across a link the other day that explains how to play a built-in version of Tetris on Mac OS X’s Terminal (it’s really included in UNIX). Perhaps more interesting is to run the game “doctor” instead of Tetris (follow the same instructions and instead of tetris type “doctor”). It’ll bring up the old, well-known, simple-to-program psychotherapist program that provides feedback to your answers.

My blog’s back up!

Unfortunately, my database was accidentally dropped during the server transfer, but I was able to reconstruct most of the posts from an archive SQL file and Google cache (Somewhat scary in some regard).

I didn’t bother to rebuild everything, including some recent “inconsequential” posts from the past few months. The posts I made an effort to recover included my rant about Harrisburg Tourism and most any post with an accompanying picture. Perhaps most importantly, I recovered the posts that helped other out with technical issues and posts that I’m sure I’ll refer back to when I’m trying to remember something. Unfortunately, I didn’t recover all of the comments.

Quite a bit’s changed since I posted regularly–I’ve moved and started a business. Hopefully, I’ll post more, too.

I never thought I could program with ambient music in the background, but I’ve gotten used to it, and have happily discovered a nice mash-up along the way. The commentary is kinda silly, but this mash-up of the Beatles and the Beastie Boys makes me look at Love Me Do in a whole new way.

Hooray for YouTube for making someone a celebrity!

The Simpsons in Real Life – from the ITP listserv

It’s that thing you tell yourself only happens to other people…until it happens to you. Yup, on Friday my laptop hard drive crashed, and with it quite a bit: my vacation pictures, my freelance work for the past few months, the cure for cancer. Sigh.

Fortunately, the hard drive is covered under an extended warranty, so I’m getting a new hard drive in two weeks. Unfortunately, the data recovery (if it works) is setting me back $650. In the meanwhile, I’m on my PC (it got backed up as soon as I got on it) and keeping my eyes peeled on any available MacBooks to migrate to.

It’s amazing to see how independent one can be with the Internet. I lost my bank account pins as well as the username/logins for several accounts, but these loses are all remedied thanks to one or two main e-mail addresses. My bookmarks are on del.icio.us (although my collection of RSS Feeds aren’t), And all of my thesis work looks to be backed up.

Of course, anyone who knows me knows I’m going nuts without working. I don’t know how many more Madden games I can take…