I guess at some point we'll need to trim that swath of hair just above Maya's right ear. She has no other hair that is the same length on the sides... Ah-uh-huh! Or perhaps it's a bit of payot.
It's definitely winter here in Atlanta. Temperatures have been averaging around 30F at night, with the occasional dip down to 25F. Daytime temperatures are anywhere between 40F and 65F (although I think that might've been a fluke). So we got to put the kids in their "faincee" winter wares to take them outside!
Oh, and lest I forget... a Popover supplied by Aunt Roni! Devin has a good grasp of the spoon concept, and knows that it goes in his mouth. But, he's a little short on the depth of his pie-hole. We didn't get barfed upon, but he was gagging a bit!
Stella exhibits odd behavior, since she will usually not allow her bare fur to touch cold leather without a blanket. And she will usually not share a seat with her brother (or anyone else for that matter). What a princess!
Ha! Had a little fun with the hair brush and Maya. The Donald!
In my haste to pack for this current trip, I neglected to bring black shoes. However, Karyn and Deb saw fit to mail me a care package on my last foray to the OC, and it included these wonderful Deerfoam slippers. Finding myself lacking in black shoes, and wearing black pants for which tan shoes are not appropriate, I decided to wear the slippers.
I feel like a housewife, trundling about my abode. All I need is a garish housecoat and some curlers.
Yes, it's San Dimas... home of Bill and Ted, and starting point for their Excellent Adventure. I'm passing through on my way up to the San Gabriel mountains for a few hours of canyon exploring. I'll post more once I have a chance to download some pictures. It should be pretty interesting.
I am productive. Today is Saturday. I'm in Southern California. Why? Because my customer wishes to do a production migration. Starting at noon... I am to sit by and see if anything goes wrong. If it does, I fix it. So... I sat around for 8 hours and did nothing. Well, not really nothing: I've kept busy by updating the drivers for various hardware and software components on my laptop. Yeah, I did that. Exciting!
As it turns out, I left the customer site at 8pm, after 8 hours of nothing. My hotel is just a few blocks down the street so I figured they could call me if they had any problems. And they did. Not 45 minutes after I left - they called with 3 problems. So I showed back up at the customer site, and after 3 hours of discussing, looking, probing, debugging and being constantly bothered for status ("how's it going? when will it be done? what is wrong? what caused it? how will you fix it?")... it turned out that there were no problems and their test data was garbage. Imagine that.
At least the year and a half of work done to get to this point was not in vain. Of course, my customer could've exercised a little more care in the post implementation planning.
Anyway, it's done. 1:30am.
While sitting around, waiting to be released from production migration hell, i've managed to keep busy. I did what should
Anyway, the socks are appropriate for today.
Well, I was supposed to be out in the OC for two weeks, but due to poor planning, my client had to push their production deployment until next weekend. So I basically spent the week on my thumbs... But, I did get an opportunity to take in a few movies this week:
Eragon - Boy, this movie could've been so much...more. If you saw the movie, that quote makes sense. But the truth is that while watching this movie, I felt like they took major parts of the movie and cut them out. The editing was horrible. If you're read any of the Inheritance series, you know that Christopher Paolini is a pretty good writer. I'd stick his work in the same arena as J.K. Rowling - mostly adolescent reading material and not the J.R.R. Tolkein wordfest. It's not overly complicated, but it's an interesting world that Paolini has created. The movie, however, tries to be the red-headed stepchild of Peter Jackson and a straight-to-video production crew. And it succeeds. Strangely, when I walked out of the theater, I noticed that the movie was only 1 hour and 39 minutes long - a short movie by today's standards. I had planned to take in The Good Shepherd, Apocalypto or Casino Royale, but all of those approached 3 hours in length - too late for me at the time. At any rate - wait for Eragon to come to video, and then put it on in the background while you're doing something else. Like reading the book. :)
Next up: Night at the Museum
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, totally exhausted and screaming, "WOO HOO what a ride!!!"
And no, I'm not talking about gestational control. Sheesh. Get out of the gutter, people. For all my bitching about the iPhone, there is one piece of tech that I hope lives on even if the iPhone becomes another Newton - multi-touch controls.
Anybody who has seen Minority Report knows what I'm talking about: the scenes where Tom Cruise uses an interface that consists of a reflective display screen and his fingertips to manipulate images and interact with data. I always felt that was really cool.
Well, seems other people think it's cool too and I am drooling in anticipation when they announce that the tech is available. Me? I'm just waiting for an input device that allows 3rd party application development with a free API.... so I can plug that up to my PC and have fun video or photo editing. Or writing blog entries - wait, maybe forget that last one.
Still don't know what I'm talking about? Try this and this.
For you Windows + Firefox users out there... this nifty little Firefox add-on gives your tab switching efforts a tasty visual appeal. That's about it. Think XGL/Compiz for Linux, and I think there are some Mac apps out there doing similar things.
Speaking of XGL/Compiz, check this out.... scroll down to #10 and watch the video.
Ok, so Brian has to be contrarian. My, what a surprise. I'll spare you the point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint debate, but just allow this one item:
"As for the video iPod suggestion, I’m gonna have to suggest backing the
truck up. This is not being positioned as a video playback device. At
all."
Might I suggest you check out apple.com/iphone, click the first iPod icon there so you can see the iPod features of the iPhone. What's that? The iPhone playing an episode of The Office? Yeah, I guess Apple isn't trying to position it as a video playback device. At all.
Look, I don't need to defend my position, and I don't need you to argue it. It's my opinion. I personally didn't read any reviews of the iPhone. I based all my opinions strictly on what Apple had to say on their website. So, that's that. My opinion, take it or leave it.
Oh, and one final thing: my expectations are mine, so really, how can they be misguided? That's like saying I shouldn't like tofu, because you don't. But I still do.
EDIT:
I did some more reading today, so I don't appear to be so knee-jerk in my dislike of the iPhone. Realistically, the only innovative thing that I do like about the iPhone is the gestural interface. I don't necessarily like it for a phone, but I like that it is making it's way into consumer devices. But it seems that there are more than a few people who have slightly negative comments about the iPhone. Read and decide for yourself if anything of these drawbacks mean something to you.
So I saw in the news today that Jobs did his usual song and dance and flitted about with this iPhone. I'm sure all the Apple fanboys will be right up his crack as usual, and all the iPod afficianados will be drooling to get their hands on an iPhone... but seriously. Let's think about this shall we?
Other than the interesting user interface, what is of real substance here? A conflux of devices that brings together a web browser, a widget based operating system (they are calling it OS X, but really, what is under the hood there?), a phone, an iPod Video and a touchscreen. Well, minus the iPod Video, it sounds an awful lot like a Treo or a Blackberry.
Say you want a revolution? If you read all the hype on Apple's iPhone website, you'd think that the rest of us knuckledraggers are running around with Motorola StarTACs or
Nah. I don't. And I don't need to be able to pick my tunes based on cover art (who really remembers cover art anyway? Judge any books by their covers today?). Honestly, I would've rather seen more standards innovation here. Give me a method to display a web page without all the crap on it. One of the great things about simple WAP browsers is that their simplicity breeds KISS'd design (you know: Keep It Simple, Stupid). I navigate to a news page, and I get headlines and content. No adverts or popups or flashy reminders of how great your HD newscast is, or various viral videos of the latest despot hanging or whatever. Perhaps I'm just being stodgy, but I guess what I'm getting to is that I don't see a lot of revolution in the iPhone. Sure, Apple's UI group went nuts and you can press an icon and "flip" the CD cover to see the list of songs on the back. Wow, that's great guys.
How about instead you give me a voice controlled phone where I don't have to finger it like a, uh, almost-empty jar of peanut butter (whew) to get to the good stuff? How about instead of the same old meme for finding music you give me a voice controlled player where I can say, "play all the live tracks from Led Zeppelin" or "shuffle my reggae tunes" - and you just do it. Or perhaps instead of presenting the TV guide, you let me tell you to "play last week's episode of The Office". Maybe instead of a widget for weather, you use the cell phone part of the phone to figure out where I am and display the weather.
Better yet - instead of hobbling your iPhone with 4-8GB of storage (a video iPod with 8GB? C'mon! That's like 4 movies and 2 albums!), why not have just a phone. That's the boat I'm sailing on at the moment. Just a phone. I have a Treo. I have an iPod. I have a Blackberry. I don't want a iBerryo or a TrePoddy, or a Blackpodeo. Now technically I wouldn't normally have a Blackberry AND a Treo, but the Treo is mine and the Blackberry belongs to work, and it's just for email.
So I guess I'm saying all of this to say that I will definitely not be looking to acquire an iPhone. In fact, I'm probably going to slim down my nerd belt accessories. Instead of having several gadgets each of which does several functions moderately well, I'll have several gadgets each of which does one function very well. Call it best of breed or whatever. I have a video/audio player, and while it's the top of the heap in marketshare, it's certainly limiting what I can put it on. I have a phone that's the top of the heap for business, but it's big and duplicating a lot of functions. I have a wireless office device that's the top of the heap for business, but it cannot be enabled for phone usage. So I get a small phone that has what I need: phone, sync, SMS and perhaps a camera. I keep the Blackberry. For now I'll keep my iPod, but when that goes - I'm saying good bye to Apple and the iTunes monopoly. I've about had it with DRM, so I think I'll go back to buying good ol' CDs.
I want this. Not for anything in particular, but man would this not be fun? Just imagine all the cool and useless stuff I could make, like, personalized ash trays made out of wood. Sweet!
Update: Brian apparently already asked his SO about it... and was denied. I mentioned it to Steph. She said, "huh". I guess that's a no. :) But I need to remind her of all the cool chotchkes I'll be able to crank out, and she can decorate with... oh well.
I saw this over on Josh's blog, and while he didn't tag me, I'll consider myself tagged, and tag a few other folks like John and Brian, perhaps Vickie (if she reads this - post a comment!), Aunt Mary, and Dad. Steph, since you got that snazzy laptop for Christmas, you need to jump on here too. That oughta be an interesting list.
The gist - it's a virtual cocktail party, and you list 5 things about yourself that (you think) most people don't know.
1. I'm into art in many forms. I've always been a sketcher, mostly drawing comic book characters. In fact, every once in a while I review my college and high school notebooks, and find that I really did more drawing and doodling than note-taking. I've dabbled in other art forms too: painting, sculpting, throwing pottery, etc. My favorite? Still sketching.
2. I don't like 80s music. In fact, when New Wave music was big, I listened to very little of it. I was heavily into classical music at the time, mostly because I was playing a lot of classical piano. So, I know next to nothing about 80s bands, song titles, albums and the like. Unless it's any of my favorite bands who were around before, during and after the 80s, like Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, Widespread Panic, etc.
3. I'm an ordained minister. Yep, an honest to God Reverend in the Universal Life Church. And I've even performed a marriage.
4. I love the ocean. I'd love to spend all my vacations near a tropical locale, but I also like travel and Steph isn't much of a sun-lover, so I have to compromise. But every other year I get to go someplace tropical, and get in some quality scuba dives. Most recently? Curacao - check my pictures. Other tropical places I've been: Trinidad, Tahiti, Jamaica, Cozumel, Grand Cayman and Belize.
5. I collect patches from places I've been. Generally just flag patches, but there are other emblem-type patches, from all over the place. I haven't attached them to anything yet - still trying to figure that out. A banner, perhaps? Or a bag? I don't know.
Well, it's 2007 and already there are many changes afoot in the Little household. During Christmas, as a surprise for Steph, I had her Mom fly up secretly and surprise her Christmas Day. It was a great time, and the kids got to spend plenty of quality time with their grandparents and aunts and uncles.
New Year's Eve was quiet; we had a small party here with Steph, myself, her Mom and Karyn & Davis. We lit off a couple of sparklers and "blooming flowers".
In other news...the kids have started eating solids - not exclusively, but just to introduce them. I tried to get some pictures up on here, but Picasa is giving me troubles with the new version of Blogger. Hopefully I'll have an update soon.
