Archive for Blog
July 25, 2008 at 06:10 PM · Posted under family
Edward continues to increase his cuteness level. Last weekend he learned a new syllable, “guh”, which he has so far shared only with me. It may, in fact, be his name for me. He’s already got a very cute parroting of “hello” down. It’s kind of like “aaahlooo” and he only brings that out when he’s really happy and talkative.
He has learned that his hands can be used for useful things, such as pushing himself up, pushing bottles away when he has had enough, and (just today) holding on to them so they don’t fly away while he is eating.
When Sarah puts him on his stomach to play “roll the baby” (maybe the game is the act of turning the baby over?) he has no trouble holding up his head, and actually seems like he is figuring out how to turn himself over. He’ll push with one arm and tilt his head, and wiggle his legs back and forth. Like a little Bender on his back!
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July 24, 2008 at 07:24 AM · Posted under quicklinks
Knol, Google’s online encyclopedia with articles written by verified users, is now publicly accessible. It looks great and already has lots of good content. Hopefully it won’t devolve into the deletion bickering of Wikipedia.
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July 18, 2008 at 10:19 PM · Posted under movies, site, tech, television, videogames
There are a ton of cool things happening now. Let me show you them.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is pretty much the best thing ever. It’s a musical starring Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as a swaggering superhero, and other people that I don’t really know or care about. Watch it now, part three of three comes out tomorrow and it’s all gone by Sunday. After that if you want to watch you’ll have to pay.
Avatar: The Last Airbender has finally had new episodes all this week, leading up the to inevitably incredible two hour movie “Sozin’s Comet” tomorrow (Avatar and Dr. Horrible on the same day, sweet). If you don’t watch it, you are missing out one of the best shows on tv.
Sarah and I have made semi-complicated plans to see The Dark Knight) tomorrow (oh yes, Avatar, Dr. Horrible, AND Batman on the same day). We still can’t bring ourselves to both leave the baby at the same time, so Sarah and her sister will see it in the early afternoon, followed by a dinner by Lance, then Lance and I will see it in the evening.
E3 is going on. The coolest announcement so far may be for the 1-to-1 movement add-on for the Wii that will come with Wii Sports 2. Wii Sports 2 has frisbee throwing and sword fighting. Sword fighting and frisbee.
Terminator 4 looks fantastic. I was very “meh” until I saw that we have Christian Bale as John Connor. Bam!
The wonderful Hulu:http://hulu.com has The Secret of Nimh available for your viewing pleasure. My favorite Bluth movie and it holds up quite well.
I’m on del.icio.us roughly eight years behind everyone else, but now I have a cool little linkroll widget over there on the side. I’m pretty sure you can subscribe to del.icio.us links as an RSS feed if you’re all that interested.
Identi.ca just annouced that they’ve implemented the Twitter API, which is great because that means that every cool app people have written for doing Twitter updates will seamlessly work with identi.ca with just an address change. So Twitterific, can I have an Identi.cariffic for my iPod Touch?
Speaking of the iPod Touch. Its firmware 2.0 is great for two reasons: multiple message movemenet and deletion in email, applications. As for iPod Touch/iPhone applications I have three standouts: Remote, Pandora, and Scrabble. Scrabble is scrabble, so that’s a given. Pandora gives me access to my Pandora radio stations via my iPod Touch anywhere there’s open wifi (and that would be a huge win for an iPhone user, Pandora everywhere! Who needs XM?). Remote lets me control the iTunes on our mac over wifi with my touch. Let me say that again. I can sit on my couch, and with just a flip of my iPod Touch start browsing through our entire music collection (including videos and podcasts) and play them on our nice surround sound system. Of course I could do this before, but it involved: turning on the tv, switching to the computer video input, turning on the surround sound, getting the (sadly, wired) keyboard and mouse, and then going to iTunes and playing the music. Now I just have to turn on the surround sound, and start up Remote on the touch. Oh yeah. It’s really nice to be able to jump around our whole music collection while feeding Edward. It even streams the album artwork to the iPod just to be cool.
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July 11, 2008 at 11:43 PM · Posted under programming
So what’s being going on in my life, except for the whole newborn baby thing? A new job, that’s what. Two weeks ago I started work as the newest member of UNC-Chapel Hill’s University Library web team. Although this job move meant giving up my corner office (and its glorious floor to ceiling windows) in the Undergraduate Library for a cube in a windowless room in Davis, it’s been lots of fun. It’s just so great to have a job where I can actually apply the knowledge I’ve gotten from reading tons of programming and web design books. So far I’ve gotten to get into the CSS and jsp code for an upcoming catalog design (IE6, we hates you), had serious chunks of time to work on the reserves website that’s been languishing in my todo list for over a year, have been encouraged to explore an interesting project idea, and have had lots of collaborative fun with Nivex.
Today I also had the brand new pleasure of working an entire day from home. I’ve just never had a job that didn’t require me to be physically present. I gotta say, it was pretty enjoyable and genuinely productive. I wasn’t sure how well it would work, but I was really able to just hunker down at the kitchen table and hack out code for hours straight. Although library systems doesn’t allow telecommuting on a regular basis, I’ve gotten approval to do it for the rest of the Fridays this month to be be available for baby helping.
This job is also nice because I feel like I’ve finally completed a long circular journey. My library career started in Davis Library as a student assistant for the technical services department. When I was returning to the library as a reserves processor and exploring the (still on the horizon) possibility of library school I contacted one of my old bosses who put me in touch with the guy who is now my new boss in the web team. It’s weird, but it just feels complete. Like I’ve finished one major life stage and am moving on to the next. Although a lot of that may come from the whole baby thing, I’m still loving the new job. Programming has always been one of the “work” activities that just makes the time fly by until I find myself staying ten or fifteen minutes late just to try out one more idea, or wrap up to a stopping point. Somehow I’ve always ended up doing it no matter what job I’ve had, so it’s great to actually get explicitly paid for it.
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July 09, 2008 at 09:26 PM · Posted under videogames
The fifth Penny Arcade book is out, The Case of the Mummy’s Gold. If you are at all interested in videogames and funny, then you should already own a copy. The book spans the year 2004, which I consider to be the first year of the ongoing golden age of Penny Arcade. The art, the humor, the crazy storylines (e.g. Twisp and Catsby) really came together and created something wonderful. PA had always been funny, this is when they truly started making me laugh with every comic and I became a true fanboy.
Here are some of the gems (including my favorite PA comic ever):
Interact with any significantly large online environment and you will see the following theory in action.
As one who greatly prefers the chill of winter to the heat of summer, “Your star burns!” is practically a catchphrase of mine.
Some context for this, my favorite PA comic. It is set in the game Ninja Gaiden for the XBox. There is a room early in the first level that has several secret doors. When you enter the room, these doors open and out burst several waves of deadly ninjas. The skillful player can dispatch them with ease, leave the room, re-enter the room, and out come more ninjas! If you’re after the ultimate weapon in the game (and you are very patient) then this trick is a great way to make a ton of cash early in the game. No matter how many times you wipe the floor with your extremely dedicated foes, more keep on coming. This comic depicts what surely must be happening behind the scenes.
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July 08, 2008 at 10:47 AM · Posted under learning, programming, quicklinks
From Cut and paste one line of code to make any website editable:
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';
document.designMode='on'; void 0
What’s that you ask? That is an awesome small chunk of JavaScript that allows you to make the text of any website editable within the browser window. Just:
- Copy the code to the clipboard
- Browse to the site you want to edit
- Paste the code into the address bar and press return
- Edit the site’s text however you like
Let the pranking begin.
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July 07, 2008 at 11:55 AM · Posted under quicklinks, tech
Dave’s article How to think about identi.ca on his excellent blog Scripting News pointed me to the nice new twitter replacement, identi.ca. I’m now on it as xyzzyb. Currently the service is really snappy, we’ll just have to see how it scales as more users load it up. One nifty feature (although I probably won’t use it) is that it can slurp your IM away messages as status updates. Now I just need an iPhone/iPod touch API.
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July 05, 2008 at 12:31 PM
I’ve finally managed to overcome the incapacitating cuteness and capture a picture of Edward’s adorable smile. Enjoy!
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July 01, 2008 at 08:23 PM · Posted under family
Edward just finished his first shower and was a very good little water baby (just like his dad!). The technique is a little tricky, but one hundred percent less annoying than setting up the baby wash tub. I just hold him in the shower with the water running at a comfortable temperature for him while Sarah washes him with the wash cloth and soap. No bowl of soapy water, no complicated rinsing procedure, and certainly no tricks needed to keep him warm during the bath.
When the water first hit him he cried for just a second, then quickly decided that the water was just fine with him. Even getting his face rinsed off was no big deal and, in fact, seemed to be a pretty enjoyable procedure. Cute!
And just so this post isn’t just boring text, I give you Blanket Baby:
And a rare snapshot of Plotting Baby:
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