For those of you who like photos, I put a lot of them up last night. A hundred and twenty-four to be exact. I decided at the beginning of the month that I’d hold off putting up photos until the end of the month, rather than making lots of “heylookit new pictures!” posts every week.
There are pictures from our trip to Tampa, Florida to spend Independence Day with Stephanie’s sister and her family. We went to the beach and Emma was OK with getting in the water this time (unlike last time). There are also some pictures from my brother’s wedding, in which I was the best man. Then there are some professional photos of Emma that we had made last week. And finally, there are a bunch of Emma pictures from the last month that didn’t really go with any of the others.
Enjoy!
P.S. I changed a lot of code on my website, but you shouldn’t visibly see any changes. Let me know if something doesn’t seem to work like it used to.
I was looking for a listing of the broadcast schedule for the Beijing Olympics that begin tonight, and I had trouble finding anything in a format that was close to what I wanted. Fortunately, as a programmer, I am used to taking existing data and manipulating it into a format that I want, with the help of a regular expression or two. The idea was to have something very compact that I could print out, that would be useful when deciding what to record on our DVR. I figured I’d share what I made.
A few notes:
Schedule is subject to change. If it does, blame NBC and China.
I used data from TeamUSA.org because it was the closest format I found to what I actually wanted. If it is wrong, blame them.
All times are correct for the east coast and most are correct for the west coast. Otherwise, I’ll quote the source data: For NBC primetime and late night, all times listed are ET/PT. NBC weekday daytime show airs at same time in all time zones. For USA, MSNBC and CNBC all time listed are ET. For Oxygen all times listed are ET/PT.
The data is sorted by air date, to make it easier to pick what to Tivo in the next 24-hours. If you’re trying to find when a certain event occurs this probably isn’t the format you want.
The data is very compressed because it was intended to be printed. Through the magic of columns and margins I got it to fit on just two pages. I wanted to make it compact, because everything I’ve found online is either a huge spreadsheet or a huge list.
I have omitted the listings for events streaming from NBCOlympics.com because this was intended to help with DVRing.
I have omitted the Telemundo listings because I don’t speak Spanish.
I have omitted the Universal HD listings because they all said “24 hour coverage.” No need to repeat that every day. (The listings for USA were almost as vague with 12-hour blocks, but they at least listed the events that would be shown.)
I’ve omitted NBC Olympics Basketball and Soccer channels because: 1) it is pretty obvious what they air; 2) I don’t know if we get them; and 3) if we do I still don’t have any desire to watch basketball or soccer.
Be sure to watch in the HDs if you can. 6.75 times more pixels FTW!
Behold! The original utterance of “That’s what she said,” from a 1992 “Wayne’s World” skit on Saturday Night Live, predating The Family Guy by seven years, and The Office by thirteen years.
That is all.
So today is an interesting day in the wonderful world of motherhood. Both Emma and I are sick with colds. So I’m learning very quickly that I have to put how feel on the back burner to take care of her, instead of only feeling icky myself. What is really interesting, Emma doesn’t even act all that sick. She is still happy when she sleeps enough, and cries when she is hungry or sleepy. She just sneezes more, and has a runny nose. She might feel as bad as I do, but I have no way of knowing that as she has yet to master the art of speech. She is however really good at making lots of different sounds, to include the “mmmmmmmmmm” sound. This could mean that she will say “Mama” first instead of “Dada”. She is ever growing and changing. We now let her sleep on her tummy, and she is growing like a weed. At her last check-up she measured in at 13 pounds 11 ounces and 25 inches long. I’ll try and keep you updated on other mommy moments.
Lately we have been getting Emma into a bedtime routine. Ostensibly, this is to teach (condition?) her into going to sleep easily at night, provided the routine is observed. In actuality, she doesn’t go to sleep much more consistently than before the routine. But that’s not really what I came here to write about. Part of Emma’s bedtime routine is for daddy to read her a story. (Literacy for the win!) Tonight I tackled Horton Hears A Who, one of her two Dr. Seuss books (which are by far her longest bedtime stories). I noticed while reading the book that Dr. Seuss must have pronounced “mayor” as a one-syllable word, a homophone to “mare,” whereas I pronounce it as two syllables, rhyming with “conveyor.” I’m not sure if I pronounce it differently because I live in a different region, or because the pronunciation has shifted since the book was written in 1954, or both. (Contrary to what your grade school teachers probably tried to burn into your head, English is a constantly evolving language, and the accepted pronunciation and even meaning of words varies by region and changes over time.)
Here is an example of what I’m talking about from Horton Hears A Who:
There aren’t any Whos! And they don’t have a Mayor!
And we’re going to stop all this nonsense! So there!
And here is one more example, which is even odder to my ear:
“So, Horton, please!” pleaded that voice of the Mayor’s
“Will you stick by us Whos while we’re making repairs?”
It is weird to read because “mayor” is used for a rhyme several times in the book, and if I read it so that it doesn’t rhyme it sounds really weird. In fact, I tend to pronounce the word that is rhymed with mayor (i.e. “there”) as two syllables.
I guess I’m not really going anywhere with this, it was just something I noticed and thought I’d point out. Other than mayor/mare thing, I didn’t notice any other rhyming problems. In one place, I think “grocery” must be pronounced as a three-syllable word in order to have the intended rhythm, although I (and most people I know) typically pronounce “grocery” as something like “groshry.” Oh well, people still consider Shakespeare great poetry, even though many of his rhymes no longer rhyme, so I guess it doesn’t necessarily spell doom.
Sometimes I wish that I had a really crappy car. ‘Why?’ you ask? Because then when someone is tailgating me, particularly when I am already going 5-9 mph over the speed limit and there is a perfectly good lane to my left not being used, I could just slam on the brakes so that they would hit me. After all, it would be their fault (who’s to say I didn’t see a deer about to run out onto the highway?). They would learn the hard way not to tailgate, their insurance would go up, and they’d get a ticket. Maybe they’d even be over the legal blood-alcohol limit and spend the night in jail. Jackpot. As for me, I’d just be out a crappy car that I didn’t care about to begin with. I guess if I did it too many times the police or insurance companies might catch on. Oh well, it’s not like I’d actually do that. I’d probably react much more passive-aggressively. Perhaps by writing a blog post about the tailgating incident.
Here is a message I got after logging into a website recently:
** NOTE ** Using a colon (“:”) in your password can create problems when logging in to Banner Self Service. If your password includes a colon, please change it using the PWManager link below.
Protip: If you are designing any kind of login/authentication system and you find that you need to give users a warning similar to this, you are doing something wrong.
On a much more nitpicky side note, why not just make “PWManager” or “using the PWManager” link to PWManager? To their credit, at least they didn’t say “by clicking the PWManager link below.”
I found it very ironic the way the title of my last post was displayed after being imported into Facebook:
August 6, 2:08 pm
Just for future reference...it’s Aunt Caline...not Colleen.
August 6, 5:18 pm
Fixed it, thanks. Steph told me that the other night too but I forgot to fix it.