Lots has been going on in our lives lately, but I’ll start this post by discussing one that many of you already have heard about.  My company is closing down their Charlotte office in six months.  A few people have been offered relocation to other offices in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and France, but not many.  A lot of people will be let go in two or three months.  And a few of us are fortunate enough to be offered jobs through the entire “transition period.”  I am in that last group, which means that if I stay through the end of March I will get a pretty substantial severance package (if I leave before then, the severance payment is much smaller).  I’m not sure what we will be doing from here, but I’ll try to keep everyone updated.

In more pleasant news, I thought I’d give some updates on Emma’s development.  She has turned into quite a giggler.  There are a few things that consistently trigger this giggling.  First and foremost, holding her in front of a mirror (especially while moving her forward and backward in front of it) will always make her stop crying and start smiling and laughing.  Another way of making her laugh it so simply let her see Punky.  It doesn’t matter what Punky is doing, she can even be sleeping.  When Emma sees her, she starts laughing.

A few days ago I spent most of the morning working from home, and I got to see Emma watch her Baby Galileo DVD.  This was very interesting.  Basically, random stuff comes by while classical music plays, and occasionally they show babies playing, or they’ll have a young kid say a word like “sun” or “moon”.  It reminded me a lot of A Clockwork Orange, when they brainwashed the guy by forcing him to vidie the ultraviolence while they played Ludwig Von.  I’m not sure if Baby Galileo is trying to brainwash viewers or not, but I had a strong urge to assassinate public officials after viewing it.

In other news, Emma learned to make the “d” sound about a week and a half ago.  This means that occasionally she sits there and says “da da da da da da da da!”  I’m trying to teach her that “da da” references me, by responding to her whenever she says the phrase.  I’m not sure how well its working, because she also says “da da da da da da” when she’s looking at Punky.  We’ll see.

As far as locomotive skills, Emma’s still not able to crawl and certainly not walk yet, but she has mastered rolling over.  She’s close to being able to sit up on her own, although she’ll tilt over to one side or the other after a minute or so.  She is also very aware, in that she’ll follow people around the room, and she can figure out where people’s voices are coming from.

I guess that’s enough updates for one post.  Until next time, keep on.. doing whatever it is that you do.. !

Last night I marked another item off my mental list of things to do with this website, by supporting Gravatars for the comments.  Since I haven’t been requesting e-mail addresses in the past, none of the old comments will show Gravatars.  If you’re a frequent commenter on this site and you want me to retroactively apply your e-mail address to any comments you have left on this page send me an e-mail telling me what e-mail address you use, or just leave a comment for this post with the e-mail field filled in and I’ll use that address.

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.

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’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.

I’m thinking about implementing tags on this site, but I’m curious if anyone ever actually uses tags when visiting small sites.  The only time I use them is on a large blog like Joystiq, which publishes dozens of posts per day, far more than I care to read.  But maybe everyone else uses them and I’m just behind the times?  As far as I can tell, on a site like mine the only purpose would be to quickly find other posts similar to the one you just read.  A search feature would help in that regard too, and I’ve thought about using ZendSearch because it looks really easy to use.  But I just haven’t bothered to sit down and figure it out.

If I do implement tags, would I really need a tag cloud?  I happen to find them only slightly more useful than they are aesthetically pleasing.  And like I said, for a site like mine you probably wouldn’t use the tag cloud much.  But again, maybe I’m just behind the times?  Like when I launched this site and didn’t have an RSS feed for like six months because feeds are for hippies.  Then I started using feeds and decided I needed one too.

Tonight I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and started playing on my guitar and decided I’d record it.  So if anyone’s interested I put up a recording of myself playing Tonic’s “If You Could Only See” on the acoustic music page (you’ll also find it at the end of this post).  Which reminds me I never got around to making that page look nicer.  You know, using some CSS and what not.

After I recorded this I listened to the original again and realized I’m playing it way too fast, and my strum pattern is different.  I still thought it sounded ok.  I came up with a way to kind of play both parts on one guitar for the cool part of the song after “when she says she loves me.”  I guess you only know what that means if you’re familiar with the song, because I’m certainly not going to put a recording of myself singing out on the intertron.  I mean I’m not masochistic.

Download

if you could only see how blue her eyes can be when she says
     when she says she loves me

Yesterday Stephanie and I got a black 2006 Toyota Camry Solara!  We love it so much.  It’s a used car, but not very used at all—only 1210 miles on it.  We got it from CarMax, and I’d highly recommend anyone looking to buy a used car go there.  They have “no haggle” pricing, which is good for me because I think I’d be pretty lousy at haggling (I think Saturn dealerships also do no-haggle pricing.. I’ve never been to one so I’m not sure).  They’re not paid on commission either, so they aren’t super pushy.  Our salesman was an Irish guy, which was kinda neat.  The whole process was about as easy as we could’ve asked for.

My 1995 Camry was starting to have a few things go wrong with it lately (which is to be expected for a car with 180,000 miles on it).  Most of them were pretty minor issues, but we decided we were approaching the point where it’d be more economical for us in the long run to buy another car than to keep putting money into this one (an economist might call that an effect of the Law of Diminishing Returns).  The latest thing was that the car was leaking engine coolant, which meant I had to put antifreeze in it every morning before work for the last two weeks, and by the next morning it’d be almost all gone.  It could have turned out to be a simple thing to fix, or it could have been expensive.  We decided we’d start looking for a new car and see what kind of trade-in value we could get.  Since we now have another source of income (and we’ve been capable of living off of just mine), we figured out how much money we could afford to spend on a car.  CarMax ended up giving more than Kelley Blue Book valued our car at, so we took it.  Although I have to say that it was kind of sad to see my old car sitting on the back lot to be cleaned up.  I mean, we were leaving it for a younger and sexier car, and it didn’t even put up a fight. :)

So far, we are really happy with the car (of course it’s been less than twenty-four hours).  We both love driving it, and it still has that new car smell.  The ride is incredibly smooth and quiet.  We’ve been taking turns driving it, which is different from normal (where neither one of us would want to drive).

I took some pictures of the car, be sure to check them out!

For any who may care, my site now is now validated XHTML 1.0 Transitional.  I was gonna do strict, but it seemed a little too strict (no target attribute on an anchor tag?  What’s that all about?).  Oh well.  I wanted to make a very short post after my previous very long post, so... peace out homies.

Some of you are probably aware of PicTML, a Visual Basic program I wrote with back in high school.  Well, now it exists on the web.  Go here to see some examples of what PicTML can do, and feel free to make your own pages and publish them for everyone to see.  There are a number of improvements, namely different optimization options (I find it easier to tweak settings in “small HTML” mode, and then convert to “accurate image” mode before publishing).

I try to make my site accessible to non-geeks, and PicTML could use some help in this area.  The background color field currently accepts the following colors:  red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet, purple, magenta, white, grey, black, and pink.  And of course you can use any hex color you want, but if you know how to do that then this paragraph isn’t really directed at you now is it.

I was actually a little disappointed with how easy PHP made it to do a program like this.  I had the working prototype done in a single evening.  I had set out to make this a two-week project, to take me right up until Christmas break.  I mean, when I was learning to code on the TI-83, we had to program uphill, in the snow, barefoot.

Geeky sidenote- once I had finished I realized that I had used an MVC design pattern without even intending to.  The image itself, the $_SESSION vars, and the script to validate the $_POST vars are the model.  Then the control frame is the controller and the preview frame is the view.