My bio-brother Marcus, last seen here, has been turned into a comic book character in the latest issue of Little Scrowlie (#14). I suppose I'm spoiling the surprise ending, but he ends up getting his heart ripped out and eaten by some sort of she-devil and dies with a picture of his dog Dubh in his hand. How freaking cool is that?

When I was in university my friend Kevin did a weekly comic for the school newspaper called Adventures of The Wombat or something along those lines. It featured all of his friends (myself included) as a sort of crime fighting team. That was kind of neat, but my inky counterpart never had anything quite as exciting as death by heart extraction.

My friend Thomas Sullivan sent me this juicy tidbit. A wired news article on the Tesla Roadster, a wholly electric street legal two seater roadster that gets 250 miles per charge, does 0-60mph in about 4 seconds and costs about 1 cent per mile in energy. It will be unveiled at midnight tonight.

I've been planning on building an electric car ever since reading an article in issue 5 of Make Magazine that showed how doable this is. You just take a small light car, tear out the motor, and add in batteries (well al little more, but its all doable). These cars get a range of about 40 miles per charge, which is plenty for our typical around the city trips. Hopefully I'll get to that this year, although we may have to get an interim car first.

In 2008 Tesla Motors should be releasing a sedan, perhaps I'll trade up then!

Tesla Rhea Yaginuma.

Why did we name our daughter Tesla? It was a name I came up with well after our first attempts failed. A month or more later I visited my friend Michael Rei and his family. M.R. told me he briefly considered naming his daughter Ellington after the famous jazz musician Duke Ellington whom he admired. This got me thinking about people I admired.

I asked Mie how she liked the name Tesla, and she thought it sounded pretty good. This immediately shot the name to the top of our list, as we really didn't have much affection for any of the other names we'd come up with at that point. Naming a person is hard.

When we ran it by other people, reactions varied but were generally positive. This is how I would break down the initial reactions:

• 50% You mean like a tesla coil? Like Doctor Megavolt?
• 25% Wasn't there a crappy hair band with that name?
• 25% Like the scientist?

The most apt association is (C) like Nikola Tesla, the Serbian born American scientist who was a contemporary and rival of Thomas Edison. In fact I tend to describe their relationship as Tesla was the Apple to Edison's Microsoft. Although it's not the best way to put it. In some ways it's more like Tesla was the Xerox PARC to Edison's IBM.

Nikola Tesla did important research and created inventions in all manner of electromagnetic pursuits, and in his time was one of the world's most famous scientists. His name has faded from the public consciousness, in my opinion, because he was not nearly as brilliant a businessman as he was a scientist. He was also always a bit eccentric, an attribute that only increased over his long life.

Tesla did invent the Tesla Coil, a device for making artificial lightning. He invented radio, a feat erroneously attributed to Marconi, who was actually using circuitry invented by Tesla. In 1898 he publicly displayed a wireless remote control operated boat and submarine. He also was the force behind worldwide adoption of alternating current as the principle means of power grid distribution (this was after a very heated and public battle with Edison who promoted direct current for the same task. Edison's propaganda assault included paying 25 cents a head for stray dogs and cats that were electrocuted via alternating current in order to show how dangerous it was).

For these reasons and more, Nikola Tesla in one of my favorite scientists.

I liked the name 'Tesla' as a girl's name as well. It has the ending -a which denotes femininity in most romance languages. The nickname Tes is a three letter version of a common girl's name Tess (Mie and I like three letter names). It's pronounceable in Japanese (where a name like Arthur, for example, is not; it comes out as 'Assa'). I liked that the name is associated with energy and power. The general concepts of energy and power are something nice to associate with anyone, and the specific connotation of power transmission and energy production are subjects that I believe will play a central role in the era of Tesla's (my daughter's) life. In fact Nikola Tesla is often on my mind these days because the modern energy crisis is something I believe he would have tackled with relish and creativity. And finally, Mie pointed out that having a daughter associated with magnetism isn't too shabby either (a tesla is a unit of magnetic flux density equal to one weber per square meter (no, I don't really know what that means either)).

Most of the people we presented with the potential name liked it or loved it. Some thought it was pretty. Some liked that it was a strong name for a woman (this mainly came from the strong women we know). My fellow science buffs liked the connection to Nikola. I concurred with all of these assessments.

It wasn't all roses though. Most people from our parents generation thought it was too strange, or too masculine. In Japan, for example, any name that begins with 'Te' is usually a boys name. Almost uniformly anyone over the age of 50 didn't care for it.

In the end, Mie and I had to decide for ourselves what we wanted to call our daughter. We left ourselves open to last moment inspiration, or even to leaving the hospital with her still unnamed and amending the birth certificate at a later date, but after she was born and I was getting ready to call in the announcement, we simply decided to go with our gut and give her the name that had been growing on us for the past few weeks.

Funnily enough, five days after she was born, BoingBoing posted a blurb celebrating Nikola Tesla's 150th birthday anniversary. I hadn't even realized it was coming up, she missed it by five days! Also, my friend Alex pointed out that there was a british comic book super-hero named Tesla Strong, a "science hero... [who] like her father ... is possessed of a genius intellect, incredible physique, and insatiable thirst for adventure." Word.

Her middle name Rhea is the middle name of my adoptive mother. She died in 1991 of cancer. In these days where I spend more and more time with my biological maternal family, and can expect that to only increase in time as I want Tesla to have a relationship with her kin, I thought it was important to honor the mother who raised me.

So those of you who signed up for my announcement service or follow kokochi already know that Mie gave birth to our daughter, Tesla Rhea Yaginuma, on July 5th. She came out at 7 pounds even and 19.5 inches in length. It's been quite a ride, but things seem to be settling down into a bit of a manageable routine now.

The labor started on July 4th at 2AM, but I slept through most of that. Throughout the day Mie's contractions were getting stronger, so I was still holding out hope for a July 4th birth. Mainly so she'd have fireworks every year for her birthday, but I also liked the patriotic element. As much as I disapprove of the USA's policies today, I have always believed America has great potential to truly make the world a better place. It's a potential we have squandered, but the coming era of Tesla's generation is probably going to be the one that sees if America gets back on track or becomes a failed state. Hopefully we have that long anyhow.

But back to the labor. Mie's moans during contractions were growing in frequency and volume, but around 5PM I could hear a deep bellowing noise coming from the direction of Survival Research Laboratories HQ a few blocks away that was actually louder and shaking the house. I thought it was nice that SRL was already celebrating Tesla's birth :) I found out later they were testing a german V1 missile engine replica. Mie didn't seem so excited about it though. Her contractions were about 40-60 seconds long at this point and around 4 minutes apart. It seemed like she was getting into that transactional active labor stage. She was worried about going to the hospital too soon though, so we stuck around the house for another couple of hours before heading into the hospital around 7pm.

Once at the hospital, she was already at 4cm so we settled in for the long haul. By 9pm she was in an increased amount of pain and decided to go for the epidural. Our hospital room had a nice view, we could see the July 4th fireworks going off at Pier 39. In fact, here's a short video shot from the room with the fireworks going on outside the window and Mie's moans as her mom massaged her providing the soundtrack. This was right before they administered the epidural. I know, I know, how could I be watching fireworks when my wife is moaning in labor pains? What can I say, after twelve hours of it you can get just a little distracted.

After that kicked in, the pain went away for the most part. However things did not seem to be progressing too quickly, it became apparent that it was going to be a July 5th birth. The contractions kept coming, but Mie didn't seem to be dilating very quickly and the contractions weren't increasing any more. So they gave her a shot of something to stimulate contractions which seemed to work but then after a few hours, the baby's heart rate started decelerating after heavy contractions. This alarmed the doctors enough for them to give Mie a shot to stop the contractions and wheel her into the operating room in case they needed to do an emergency c-section. They told her if they had to, they could have the baby out in about 60 seconds. Tesla's heart rate stabilized though and we went back to the delivery room. The doctors made it clear that if there was no more progression (the dilation was still practically halted) and there were more heart rate dips, they would have to start seriously looking at other options. They gave her another shot to get the contractions going again. Unfortunately once the contractions started up though, the heart rate dropped again. At 9AM they wheeled Mie into the operating room. It was a rough night for all of us but the c-section operation went very smoothly and everything else seemed to stop when we first heard Tesla's cry. I peeked over the operating curtain to see her little head, then shoulders, pop out
of Mie's belly. It really was quite a moment.

Mie's mom and I went with Tesla to the Newborn Intensive Care Unit while they finished sewing up Mie. I wanted to take my shirt off and hold her skin to skin but they had her under this heating lamp thing so I just made sure I was touching her as much as I could until we could bring her back to Mie. Wow. I can't really express what things were like in that hour. I just couldn't take my eyes off her. They had to tell me to stop leaning over her because I was blocking the heat lamp.

;

It felt great to bring her back to Mie. They had only been together for a couple of minutes right after the birth. By the way, Mie is super bloated in that photo of her and Tesla above. She hardly looked any different than normal throughout her whole pregnancy, unless she was standing sideways, but in less than 24 hours a mixture of IV fluids and hormones bloated her out like a usual pregnant woman. It's her first photo with Tesla, so vanity aside it has to be special. The sudden weight gain was funny though, she couldn't even fit her feet in her sandals afterwards.

I try to help out as much as I can, but it's become very apparent to me how special the mother-child bond is and Mie is a wonderful mother. We spent three more night in the hospital in order to let the cesarean section incision heal. The three extra nights of instruction by the nurses and doctors were of enormous help though. It's weird being a new parent, you really don't know what you're doing even though the instinctual route is usually pretty safe. We learned a lot from the different nurses that would come in on how to do everything from changing the diaper to breast feeding. The Kaiser facilities and staff were almost uniformly superb, but we were itching to get home.

On the last day the doctor came in to remove the staples from the c-section incision. Unfortunately there turned out to be a complication called a serona. This means that fluid built up in the wound area that prevented bonding of the flesh. The incision in the uterus wall healed up fine, but when the staples came out the skin and fatty layer above opened right back up again. This will now take another 4-8 weeks to heal. She has to keep the wound stuffed full of wet gauze and twice a day I have to put on surgical gloves and replace the gauze. I have a photo of the wound, but don't click on it if you aren't comfortable with that sort of thing. Cesarean Section / Serona Photo. I tried to find another one on the web, but couldn't find one. Apparently this is a fairly rare complication. I'm happy to report that a couple of weeks later it seems to be healing up right on schedule.

Well this was a long rambling post. And like most things these days it was done in small steps. I probably changed 5 diapers between starting this and finishing it, plus a trip to the hospital for a scheduled appointment and a short nap on the couch with Tesla. Being home with her has been great. It's so more conducive to realizing that we are a family now than living together in the hospital. And speaking of family, major props to Mie's mom, Mikie. She's leaving to go back to Japan in two days, and I suspect things will get either more hectic or more cluttered pretty quickly after (probably both actually). She's been a major source of strength for the past few weeks both in practical around the house matters and in supporting Mie throughout.

I'll stop now. There will be many more posts concerning this adventure we've embarked on.

I'm not really sure wha the deal is with these pictures my brother Marcus just sent me of himself and his girlfriend, but they're too cool not to share.

Tomorrow is the official due date for our baby. Mie is doing well, although it's become apparent that the landing gear has been lowered. We're putting up the tray tables and bringing our seats upright in preparation for arrival.

If you would like to be notified when our daughter makes her post-natal appearance, you can sign up at http://NewBaby.AkuAku.org/. This is a web app I whipped up using Ruby on Rails and TellMe Studio that will allow me to fire off an email from the hospital. Cell phones often don't work in hospitals, and I doubt they'll have wifi either, so this seemed to be the best way to get the word out. The TellMe Studio part uses Voice XML to create a phone prompt system that asks me some basic questions: Boy or Girl? What time was s/he born? How many pounds and ounces, etc. I can answer all these questions by just calling an 800 number and speaking, no need to thumb type or any wacky stuff like that.

Since I was in a rush, I hardcoded some things as a one-off for my needs, but it wouldn't take much more effort to turn this into a general service. I might do that in my copious free time in the coming months.