For those of you who aren’t regular visitors to this site, feel free to read what I wrote on the day Emma was born, and my much longer post that I wrote the following evening.

I have finally gotten around to putting the pictures of Emma up on this site.  The pictures are divided into two sets: pictures from our arrival at the hospital up until the day Emma was born, and pictures from her first week.  The first set covers most of the pictures that were on the Flickr page, as well as a few new ones.  The other set covers pictures since the day she was born.  There are a few pictures in here that were on Flickr before, but most of them are brand new to most of you.  You’ll see in the pictures that her eye has improved quite a bit, which really shows in the latest pictures.  (Like this one, taken yesterday.)

Stephanie was released from the hospital last Tuesday, and her mother stayed with us all week to help out.  Because she was here to help out, I went back to work on Wednesday, and I’m using vacation days most of this week.  I’m telling you this to set up a little anecdote.

On Wednesday (which was also the third anniversary of our wedding, by the way) Stephanie and her mom took Emma to the doctor’s office for her first checkup.  After hearing from the doctor that all is well, she decided to surprise me at my office with a “picnic” lunch.  When she got there she asked the security guard to call me and tell me I had a package at the front desk.  Well he called and told me, and I started to head down there.  Then I started thinking—why in the world would he call me?  Normally they just send an e-mail when a package arrives.  So in the minute it takes me to walk to the front desk, the main thought that went through my head was this: “Is this what they do when they fire someone??”  Like I would get down there to find security guards who would escort me out of the building, then they’d send someone else up to get my stuff.  My other thought was that the police were taking me into custody for some kind of violent crime for which I was being falsely accused (something kind of like this story).  Fortunately, when I got there and asked for my package, he said “it’s right there” and then Stephanie came out from around the corner.  Well, I was happy to know that I wasn’t being fired or arrested, so we went and had our picnic in the break room near my desk (a picture of said picnic is up on the second photo set).

I guess that’s all the news I’ve got to share today.  Emma gets to meet her Aunt Mandy later this week, and I’m sure she is excited.

I kinda know someone who will be on national TV this weekend.  Stephanie’s sister’s husband’s sister is Miss North Carolina USA.1  She is in Las Vegas right now preparing for the Miss USA pageant, which will air on NBC this Friday, April 11th, at 9:00 PM.

I’ve just rolled out a few changes to the site.  The most obvious one is probably the vertical navigation bar to the right.  It’s a bit bare for now, but I’ll be implementing tags on this site eventually and that’s where you’ll see them.  Doing the navigation this way will make it a lot easier to redesign the site.  (The way it is now I have to go through a big Photoshop process before any significant layout updates.)

I’ve also added a comments feed.  That’s mainly something to help me out, but if anyone else would benefit from it feel free to subscribe (I’m not sure why anyone would need to though).  Adding the comments feed necessitated permalinks to comments, which are represented by a hash mark.  Eventually I’ll probably change it to the more conventional “X says:” format, where the word “says” is the permalink.  In one other small change, I now conform to most of the rest of the internets in that hyperlinks are only underlined when you hover over them.

If anything looks broken, try refreshing the page (usually CSS files are cached).  If you still notice something being broken, let me know.

You’ve probably heard before that the mo money we come across, the mo problems we see (Wallace 1997).  While that may be the case when mo money is acquired posthumously, statisticians and economists now have evidence that your happiness is proportional to the logarithm of your wealth (see chart below).  In other words, sadness is for poor people!  The corollary is that the more money you currently have, the more you would have to acquire in order to attain an additional happiness unit.  Much like crack cocaine.

See also a more formal paper about this topic.  I didn’t read it because it looked super boring, but the charts at the end are interesting.  For instance, did you know there is a “U-shaped life satisfaction in rich English-speaking countries”? (Figure 5)

This is a quick update to say two things-

1. Two new sets of baby pictures are up.  They are both under the “Emma Leigh arrives” photo set.  I have to say that photos from Wal-Mart turned out much better than I had anticipated.  We even got full-resolution unaltered digital images on CD, along with full rights to reproduce and redistribute, something I really wish we had with our wedding photos.

2. You’ve probably noticed the site looks a little different.  If it looks broken, try to refresh (browsers tend to cache CSS files very liberally).  I finally implemented a tag cloud, and I’ve made one pass through all my blog posts to add tags to them.  Let me know what you think about it.

I created a Facebook profile.  I sent friend requests to a few people.  If you’re not one of those people, feel free to send me one.  I’m not promising that I’ll use or update it any more than my MySpace; however, the fact that Facebook doesn’t look like the internet threw up on it makes me more likely to log in some as opposed to none.  Plus I think it’ll repost my blog posts from my feed, so that those of you who use Facebook all the time but don’t want to have to check this website (ahem) should be able to keep up with, let’s say, photos of Emma.