a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Just one week ago today we welcomed Hannah Elizabeth into our world. She weighed in at 9 pounds, 6 ounces and measured 21 inches long.
Life has not and will not be the same. Ashley and I are beside ourselves with joy and excitement and yes a tad sleep deprived.
After reading about Rosecrans Baldwin’s visit to the Elizabeth Arden Salon & Spa, Gothamist wonders what he would make of John Allan’s, a midtown and downtown men’s salon that has haircuts, shaves, massages, manicures, and a generally clubby atmosphere (pool table, beer, etc.). [Gothamist]
Spent some time checking out the lunar eclipse tonight… Fortunately we had a great view right from our window on this crisp fall evening. The shots are far from my best work (as if I was a pro), but give a good sequential overview of the events.
Today is my last day of Grand Jury service… four Weeks, three hours per day finally over.
I’ve learned some interesting things in the time and I thought I’d share:
I supposed there are some other obvious lessons like a crazy amount of crime (that gets reported and for which arrests get made) takes place above 113 street.
All in all, not a horrible experience… though there were some horrible crimes we had to listen to.
Many babies and toddlers are now immersed in electronic media for hours every day, according to a new study. [New York Times: Education]
Thought this was of particular interest as my wife Ashley is now in her 9th Month!!!!
Just in time for Panther, one of my external drives started failing on me. This is sadly, not the first time this drive has crapped out. I took action and replaced it not wanting to risk losing the almost 80GB of music I’ve got archived there… I picked up a second La Cie D2 drive – 200GB – and consolidated my tunes which were spanned on both the 80 and another La Cie D2 120. Now all my music (all 134 GB) is in a single place which is nice so I have one folder neatly managed by iTunes – love that Advanced menu!
I wish I had a clue what was causing the issue on my drive… I was not able to maintain a finder based connection of any kind long enough to do a complete transfer. I tried moving through the finder and even FTP which worked mostly. I finally ended up resorting to rsync, whicih is an amazing tool. I was able to recursively copy all I had from two mega directories into a single one. I had never used it before, but I found all the help I needed with a bit of Google.
I spent some time tonight reading up at A List Apart and was immediately interested in implementing the tip (and code) for an image randomizer. As you can see (unless of course you are reading this in your aggregator), there are now images on the left side bar. So far I’ve got 16 in the folder… all shots I’ve taken in my travels. I have many more and will be adding more as I go. Enjoy!
Thanks to a very helpful tip from Chris, I’ve resized the images appropriately so loading should be nice and bandwidth won’t get too crazy too quickly.
I apologize for those of you getting errors on the site. I have not figured out what is causing the script error on IE/Win or what is making the CSS totally wacked out on Safari. Input is welcome… I’m working on it!
I woke up a bit earlier than I usually do and caught this shot outside our living room:
Usually the sun is already blasting inside, but today it was still cooking…
I actually get a full day of work today as the courts are closed in observance of Columbus Day. Quite nice to be in at a normal hour with enough time around my colleagues to get stuff done…
I was “selected” (had no choice) to be on a Grand Jury panel for the next month! I have to report from 10-1 each day through November 3.
So the latest mac blog rave is to post your doc thanks to an O’Reilly article featuring some prominent mac users and their docks…
Here’s mine:
I am currently keeping the following in case you don’t recognize some icons:
iChatAV, Status Symbol, AIM, Lotus Notes, Mail, iCal, Address Book, Safari, Mozilla, Thunderbird,, Mozilla Firebird, Hydra, HyperEdit, VoodooPad, StickyBrain, Remote Desktop Connection, Acrobat Reader, NoteTaker, OmniDictionary, OmniGraffle Professional, OmniOutliner, Preview, Palm Desktop, iSync, HotSync Manager, Documents To Go, PGP, iView Media Pro, iTunes, Kung Tunes, NetNewsWire, , iBlog, Dreamweaver, X-Chat Aqua, Central, Kung Log, Transmit, SpamSieve, CPU Monitor, Terminal, LaunchBar, System Preferences, Tri-Backup, Copy Paste, APOD Grabber (gets the Nasa photo of the day), Speed Download, Word and a Folder Shortcut to my Reading folder
Damn that’s a lot of stuff… guess that’s why I keep it nice a small at the bottom. I’ve tried the sides and it just doesn’t feel right to me.
If you are reading this in your aggregator you’ve been missing my messing with the template on the site. I’m far from an expert coder, but with a little help from the Dreamweaver MX Trial, I am able to tweak my style sheet with relative ease. I’ll be messing in the free cycles that I get over the next week or so so pardon any construction oddities.
I have noticed that Safari is not treating my blog very nicely. The sidebar is loading at the bottom instead of on the side – even in the 10.2.8 update which was applied tonight. Moz and IE do just fine… if anyone has any thoughts, I’d appreciate knowing how to fix this.
I just switched us back to Verizon for local and now LD and as well as regional calling. AT&T had a similar plan at a similar rate which we’ve used for the past few months, but for some reason the way the voicemail works on AT&T really interfered with Call Waiting and our building intercom making them indistinguishable. I heard a fair bit about how much of a pain this was but rarely noticed since I am not home during the days and also since I spend a small amount of time on the home phone.
AT&T found nothing wrong but clearly something was causing a problem where there was previously nothing. We’ve had Verizon for almost 5 years prior to the switch and never had an issue like that. I guess there’s something to be said for being the local guy in certain instances – like when they did the actual wiring here. Not something I considered when we made the switch intially, but something I considered frequently when hearing about the issue repeatedly.
Wife Approval Factor – 1 / AT&T – 0
I noticed a few referrals from http://www.pruem-web.de/ which lists the last entry I wrote from when I used Radio. I have no idea why I would have an entry on this page – in Germany of all places.
I know I have not been posting much since the powerbook lid snapped and for good reason… I’ve been advised not to close the lid and move it around as it may actually break completely off. We are still negotiating the repair – whether it is possible and how much it will cost if so.
Since I can’t move it around, my normal level of intense computing has been reduced as a result. It’s interesting when your usage patterns change without you making a conscious decision. I don’t normally work on our home computer (but the older one) which I’ve really tried to make as much my wife’s as possible. She uses it during the day and evenings and even when I do a quick thing or two I don’t generally log in choosing instead to use it as she would. For now though I am back to logging in as myself to use my browser and my bookmarks – plus my own saved passwords in Mozilla.
In the meantime, I’ve used a recently updated RSS Subscription file I read in NetNewsWire and uploaded it to my Feed on Feed site for consumption while at home (NNW is at the office on my laptop). I’ve used a subset to do a complete overhaul on my blogroll as well.
Guess that is about it… just waiting this one out hoping a new system is in my cards.
My three year old 15-inch Titanium Powerbook suffered a significant blow tonight.
As I opened it to do some work, the hinge cracked open on the right side wiping out the screen. It’s shut down resting wondering if in fact this is the sign that it will be officially retired knowing that it’s replacement was officially announced today.
I can only hope that in fact this is just the kind of breakage that warrants replacement through my company’s IT. No idea what it costs to replace. And actually not happy that it broke. I had quite a bit I wanted to accomplish tonight instead of watching TV.
As I watched the memorial events this morning I was overcome by emotion following the moment of silence when a young boy read a poem in honor of his father.
ResearchBuzz has a solid blog index of 9/11 resources
Heading off for a vacation… posting may or may not be lighter, probably depending on the weather. This weekend – Rhode Island… Next week – Long Beach Island, NJ.