Learning to walk

She's learning to walk with her walker. She could do this all day but you have to follow her around and turn her because she only goes in a straight line.

A+ for effort

son:	My tummy's hot.
me:	Your tummy's hot?
son:	Yes
me:	Do you feel ok?
son:	Yes
me:	<checks for fever> You don't feel hot.
son:	Yeah, but my tummy is hot.  I think I need some ice cream to make it cooler.

It's starting

Sitting at the table eating supper.

son: Why do I have to eat?
me: So you can get bigger.
son: Then I can drive a car?

...sigh...

You know you're a dad if...

...you get yourself a glass of water and half-way up the stairs you realize you're holding a sippy cup.

To play, or not to play - make up your mind

son: Daddy can you come outside and play fwisbee (frisbee) with me?
me: Yes, just a minute.
<repeat 20x>

We go outside with the frisbees.

son: Wait daddy
<runs off to play with something else>

me: I thought you wanted to play frisbee?
son: Oh, ok

I throw the frisbee at him but he's too busy looking at the other 4 things he wants to play with and just lets the frisbee hit him in the head.
<repeat 4 times>

me: Ok, if you're not going to play frisbee I'm going inside.
son: NOOO!! I wanna play fwisbee <starts crying>
me: Fine, we can play but you have to play too.
son: Ok

I throw the frisbee at him but he runs off to go hang on the tree.

Nighttime routines

Putting kids to bed at night is generally wrought with a long list of items.
- bath, check
- brush teeth, check
- go to bathroom, check
- hugs and kisses, check
- water cup, check
- kleenex, check
- read a story, check
- sit up by himself to read a story after we already did it, check
- turn light off, check

And if it's not done in that order you can pretty much count on doing it again.  Then there's the final, last second ditch effort "Daddy I have to tell you something" phrases that he always musters up just as your closing his door to keep from going to bed.

"Don't run into monkeys."
"Ummm......ok"

"I love you daddy"
"I love you too"

And that makes it all worthwhile.

Levels of Knowledge

Here are 3 sites that list the levels of knowledge for CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. I think I rank a 5 on all 3. Level 6 in CSS and HTML would require a more forward thinking, "How can I make CSS and HTML better", type of attitude. While I think it would be interesting to work on making CSS and HTML specifications better, I'm happy just sitting on level 5 and knowing how to work with it.

I would, however, like to bring myself up to a level 6 on Javascript. In the past Javascript has always been looked at as a "kiddie language" and that isn't the case today. With the emergence of the social Web 2.0 sites and the Javascript frameworks like Prototype, Script.aculo.us, and Atlas.net (among others), Javascript has become a very big player in the game.

Mmmm...Apples

scene: My son is eating an apple at the kitchen table and using both hands like it was a chocolate cake covered in chocolate sauce and sprinkled with M&M's.

me: I'm going upstairs real quick - take little bites - eat slow - don't die.
boy: Ok
<I come back maybe 60 seconds later>
me: Where's the apple?
boy: I ate it.
me: Did you throw any of it away?
boy: No
me: You ate the whole thing?
boy: Yes.  (Kind of like a "Well duh" type of yes)

Mmmm...Apples + core + seeds + stem + the little flowery thing.

Amazon S3 - An unlimited harddrive

I heard about Amazon launching yet another API and I assumed it was just another way to poke into the inner workings of their product engine. However S3, Simple Storage Service, is an API that allows the developer another place to store data. The cost is 15 cents for each Gb/month of storage and 20 cents for each Gb/month of data transfered. If you have a lot of data this would be a very cost effective way of storing it. Keep in mind though that this is web storage and not web hosting. While you can store the files used on your website you still need to access them via the API.

So, if you're creating the next greatest photo storage website or whatever then you could find a cheap web host and use S3 as a way to store the files. This way you're not paying for unused space or bandwidth as you would if you went with a more expensive web host package that offered greater storage space.

Innocent honesty

My wife and I were walking at a furniture store the other day and the sales guy was leading the way.  theBoy, never having been quiet for 30 seconds in his life, was talking the sales guys ear off.

theBoy: This is my baby sister...her name is [theGirl].

sales guy: Oh really, her name is [theGirl]

theBoy: Yeah, mommy pushed her out.

nice

Muscles

My wife said that her, her mother, theBoy and theGirl were going somewhere with pumpkin seat, diaper bags, purses, etc. in tow.  All theBoy had to carry was his LeapPad.

boy: Mom, this is heavy.  Can you carry it?
grandma: If you carry it you'll get big muscles.
<30 seconds later>
boy: Mom, I don't want muscles.

Cool aerial shots in Mexico

This picture almost looks fake - but it's not. This guy flys his chopper around taking shots of Mexico City. There's a lot of cool one's in there - go take a look.

Google Talk search added to GMail

I'm not a fan of IM but this is cool. The ability to search your chat history already existed with Google Desktop but you were restricted to the machine you were chatting on. Now you can search via a centralized location.

The service has to be activated from your GMail settings for all your chats to be recorded. This could pose an issue with the person your chatting with not wanting their conversations to be recorded so they have the option to go "Off the Record".

Not bad for IM fans but for the rest of us we now have a useless link cluttering up the GMail interface.

Flickr Badge Viewer

In my quest to make free blog hosting work more like a having your own full website I've finally added something I've been wanting to do for a long time - Flickr Badge Viewer.

Flickr provided a JavaScript file that you can place in your site and it will display however many images you set.  You can see the four photos to your right (or here if your viewing through an aggregator).

I threw together some JavaScript to take the HTML that Flickr feeds to the client and strip out the image url, Flickr url, and image title.  I then re-write the anchor tag for each image to call a JavaScript function (displayImage) to remove the main content of the site and display the image.

<script language ="javascript">

var mainHTML;

function displayImage(img, url, title)

{

    //Replace the main2 div element with the image.

    var main = document.getElementById("main2");

    main.innerHTML = "<div style='font-size:17pt;font-weight:bold;margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px'>" + title + "</div><a href='" + url + "'>View this image on Flickr</a> | <a href='javascript:displayImageClose();'>Close</a><br/><br/><img src='" + img + "' />";

}

function displayImageClose()

{

    //Put the original html back into the div element

    var main = document.getElementById("main2");

    main.innerHTML = mainHTML;

}

function editFlickrBadge()

{

    //In the event the javascript from Flickr

    // messes up then don't do anything.

    try

    {

        //main2 is where we're going to put the image

        var main = document.getElementById("main2");

        mainHTML = main.innerHTML;

       

        //photos is the div element wrapping the

  // Flickr Badge javascript

        var rootNode = document.getElementById("photos");

        for (i=0; i<rootNode.childNodes.length; i++)

        {

            if (rootNode.childNodes[i].nodeName == "A")

            {

                aNode = rootNode.childNodes[i];

                imgNode = aNode.childNodes[0];

                title = imgNode.title;

                img = imgNode.src;

                img = img.replace("_s.jpg",".jpg" );

                url = aNode.href;

                aNode.href = "javascript:displayImage('" +

 img + "','" + url + "','" + title + "')";

             }

        }

    }catch(ex){}

 }

 //Calling this function should probably be called after the page loads

 // ...but I'm lazy

 editFlickrBadge();

 </script>

Cindy's place

Must be difficult to step out of your bedroom and fight all that rush hour traffic by walking down the hallway to the office. Then having to deal with the unsightly views of the lake out the office window must be torture. I don't know how The Graphic Goddess does it.

Dream Custom Homepage

Home pages built on AJAX are a dime a dozen.  Here's a small list of them on TechCrunch.  Every single one has exactly the same thing - weather, basic rss feeds, stocks, blah blah.  I'm looking for 2 main things that I have yet to see any of them have.

The first is an aggregator.  Yes they all have the ability to add rss feeds where you can view a site feed in a little box on your screen but if you have 50 feeds then you're going to have 50 boxes on your screen.  I want a full aggregator that could take up half the screen while the other half is left for things like weather, stocks,  and movie times.

The second...ah but you'll have to wait.  Because the second is actually a very decent idea.  And I'm not one to throw out a good idea for just anybody to snap up.

Get with the RSS

I'm amazed at the list of people, technical people, who do not use an aggregator.  All these people tell me how they read news, blogs, technical articles, etc. and how they actually go to each one of those sites to look for new articles.  I won't name any names on what set me off - you know who you are.  Most of the technical, non-aggregating, people I know are not quite that technical but the one I talked to today is and has no excuse - none!

So, go get an aggregator - there are tons of them.  Here's how.

1. The best aggregators are internet based.  2 of them are NewsGator and BlogLines.  Although I'm told that the new Google Reader is good but I've tried it and...well...ick.
2. Go to the blog or site that you want to read and look for their rss feed.  If they don't have one then they're morons and aren't worth your time.  Most links to rss feeds are marked by a little orange icon.
3. Grab the url to that rss feed and add it to your aggregator.

RSS is also just a format - XML feed is the real name.  Another popular format is Atom.  Saying RSS is kind of like saying Bandaid or Kleenex (because really, who say's "I need a facial tissue").

There, now you just have to go to one website to get all your news and you can rest easy that I won't be making fun of you.  Because I will be making fun of you - in a big way.

David's Tidbits

Here's a Yahoo group that lists a ton of information on getting the best deal for various items. In one of David's recent Tidbits he mentions that he wrote his own software to track items.

I now have the internet monitoring software working on office depot, I am using a testing software that allows me to record my shopping online, I filter out the SKU and make it a variable and I can get all the price changes at a store that I load the sku's for. I have these run via scheduled task then dump the data to a excel spreadsheet. I now know when all of the St. Louis market is dropping their prices and what stores have it available.

While most of what is listed relates to getting deals on computers, monitor, printers, cameras, etc. there are also items that are related to the more technical crowd such as his Tidbit on Microsoft firewalls.

Hey, ever wanted to know what the MS firewall is doing, can you make direct changes? well amazingly there is a way
To enable logging of dropped packets:
netsh firewall set logging droppedpackets=enable
To enable logging of connections:
netsh firewall set logging connections=enable
If you want to see the firewall configuration for logging:
netsh firewall show logging
Turn it on and you will now be able to look at the log (default %windir%\pfirewall.log) and you have it.

On the downside - sorry David - there is no structure for the messages that are posted. I think this is more of an issue with Yahoo Groups (that's a negative in itself) more than anything else. Trying to search for past items is near impossible with the search tool provided by Yahoo.

However, with his new software program and his uncanny sense of penny pinching (honestly, I think he separates 2-ply toilet paper and re-rolls it into 1-ply), I think Tidbits is still something to keep an eye on - or at least aggregated.

IE7 gets native XMLHTTPRequest object

Well, look at that.  Microsoft is doing something that's industry standard.  Special code will still have to be put into place for IE6 and below but and least it's a start.
Link

Quick tour through the Google campus

ABC takes a quick walk through the Google campus. I like the monitor with all the current searches going on in the world. Take a look at the video.
Update: Here's another video from the BBC. This one is 30 minutes long and is done much better than the ABC one. I didn't really like the guy from ABC since he seems sort of ticked off as he's walking around the campus and he treated that guy in his office like a child. "So, all this stuff helps your creativity? You actually work better? Well, my office certainly doesn't look like this." Moron.

2 new Google News sections

Popular and Recommended. Sign in to your Google Account and if you have Personalized Search enabled the new Recommended section will pull the news articles based on your past news selections.

Microsoft Research Group Shot

Have you ever taken a picture of a bunch of people and one person will have their eyes shut?  Did you take that picture again and someone else's eyes are shut?  Microsoft Research has created an application that will allow you to take the best parts of those 2 pictures and put them into one shot were everybody is looking their best.
Link

Back to the grind

Today is my first day back to work after having 17 days off - the most consecutive days I've ever had off. Coming back to work was almost physically painful. I would completely be ok with my wife getting a high paying job and me being a house-husband.