Isaac Paul, born on Feb. 28th. I know I’m a little late on that one, but that’s his fault not mine.
Anyway, sounds like everybody is doing okay and Isaac is living up to his initials, I PP. (Again, that one is Reid’s fault, not mine)
So, Congratulations to Reid and Jaime (and Lillian too!)
It has come to my attention that certain people feel I haven’t been posting enough fun stuff lately, so I guess I need to rectify that. As such, I have shamelessly stole this video from her.
This is what would happen if business meetings were like Internet forums (including strong language):
And also, now that Meg has visited my new blog, I finally have a dot from outside the U.S. on my Sitemeter!
You know how when you were like 13 you thought your parents were just *so* embarrassing? Well they probably were. I mean, if you could peer into our house at any given moment, you would see some pretty embarrassing behavior, such as barking like dogs, doing silly made up dances, making hideous faces and rude noises at Evie; anything for a smile. I’m sure after a few years of doing that you have no choice but to completely lose your sense of what is embarrassing and what isn’t. You really couldn’t help it.
Evie is crawling a little bit now. She says pretty much every sound in the alphabet except for “Ma” which Sara doesn’t take to kindly. When she is really upset / crying she has started going “nein nein nein” for some reason…must be in her German blood. And I think she is a little confused because everytime she sees the cat she starts yelling, “Da da! Da da!” Also, sometimes she makes this angry really loud breathing noise through her nose like Melissa trying to get Butters to attack her. I hope Melissa reads this because that would only make sense to her.
My mom is obsessed by the game Scrabble. I mean, really obsessed. She even has jewelry made out of scrabble tiles. She can never get anybody who wants to play with her, so she invented a game called Speed Scrabble (at least I think she did, she could have stole the idea from someone else and passed it off as her own). Anyway, we have been playing that game since we were little and I have introduced it to many people over the years. Well, in the tradition of Uno, Skip-bo, etc. someone has taken that game and monetized it into BananaGrams. Boo! My mom deserves a check.
I have endorsed ThinkGeek on this blog before and I probably will again. That is one of the coolest stores online. But I am not only doing a commercial, I also am a customer! (You may have seen Evie in an “I TCP/IP but mostly IP” shirt, among other things) I have even signed up for their mailer, something I would normally NEVER do. But every time, there are such good things in there that it is worth getting an email about, such as a personal soundtrack shirt with a built in speaker for playing the soundtrack to your life, selected from a remote in your pocket. Now it turns out it was just an April fools’ joke, but compared to some of their other products it doesn’t seem ridiculous. Well apparently it was not so crazy because they got so many orders and emails that they are now going to produce it! So anyway, if you are a geek and you like things, then you should check it out. And while you are there, perhaps you can buy a Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock for your home:
Oh yeah, and Guns and Roses rocks. FACT. I just needed that to be down in writing.
Today we attended an outdoor “Spring is here!” party. It was like 40 degrees, grey and rainy…not very springy! Also, it was in a garden that is still all dead and brown, which didn’t scream spring either. Still, we were there hoping we could get a plot this year, both to grow some food for ourselves and so Evie could have a *little* green space here in the city. There was actually a lot of really good food and everybody was really nice, even though we didn’t talk to that many people. There was obviously a sense of community. A few of the people were…interesting, to say the least. It is a very eclectic group of people, that’s for sure.
The strangest thing that happened while we were there was some sort of protest / performance art that took place. There were people linking arms and digging in the dirt with hands and the next thing I know we were repeating things like “they are poisoning our food supply” and “we embrace Mother Earth.” As Sara said, it was “worth the price of admission.” The best part was the disclaimer that the views represented were “not necessarily the views of the gardeners, the experimental station, or the performers themselves.” Well, who’s views are they exactly??
Last weekend a very strange coincidence happened. I was browsing one of my favorite blogs, Hyde Park Progress (see over there on the right ->), but it is on hiatus at the moment, so there wasn’t much time killing to be found there. Next I flowed over to I Hate My Developer for the Woodlawn perspective, which I fully intend to spend more time reading. There I found a post pointing me to another Woodlawn blogger, Swim and Glitter, with a very nice review. So I started reading that and lo and behold, I find out that I know that person!! Well I kind of know the person; they used to be our landlords! I don’t know how much time you spend on the Internet, gentle reader, but it is a very large place! So, to stumble randomly upon someone you have had contact with in the real world is very startling. Needless to say I have subsequently been cyber-stalking her. Her blog is everything I wish mine could be, so pop on over there for T.M.I. and some frank talking.
Finally, I will leave you with the pinnacle of human achievement. Gentlemen, I give you…the Dough-Nu-Matic! And yes my friend, there is a video. Okay, it’s not quite the pinnacle of human achievement, because Tony Vegas came up with a rotating conveyor belt with 3 Dough-Nu-Matics on it, rotating once per minute so you were never without a doughnut popping in your mouth. Apparently, even the perfect can be improved upon!
So…the new me!
I mentioned a while ago that I was getting pretty frustrated with LiveJournal. Everybody knows time has sort of passed them by, but in particular it is ridiculous that they don’t have an integrated search feature! I also was annoyed with the lack of support for Google Analytics or any sort of page tracking at all. Those were probably the two biggest problems.
So I got a Blogger account and spent some time getting that all set up the way I wanted it. I really like how Blogger lets you adjust the style sheet manually if you want to, something that WordPress charges you extra for. With Blogger I could integrate Google Analytics (you better be able to since they are both Google products!) and of course there is a search feature (again, Google) so I was happy enough about that. I went back and forth for a long time, but eventually it was clear the only reason I was staying with LiveJournal was loyalty.
So I was all ready to make the switch when I discovered that you can’t easily import into Blogger! I certainly wasn’t going to let all of my old posts disappear! There were clients you could download to do it, but it essentially amounted to adding all of your old entries and then backdating them. Kind of annoying.
Of course WordPress is sort of the hmm hmm hmm of blogging and I kind of always felt deep down inside that a computer programmer aught to be using something a little more complex than LiveJournal. Really though, the ease of importing is what caused me to make a 90 degree turn at the last minute and set up a WordPress account instead.
So I like the integrated page tracking / analytics from WordPress, the search capability, and I already mentioned the built in import (and export should I change my mind) functionality. I like the ability to customize the sidebar that I didn’t have with LiveJournal. I like having the comments on same page as the entry so you can look up and reread it, as opposed to the Blogger style where the comments are on a separate page. And LiveJournal had the stupid idea to ignore my nice style I spent all that time setting up when you clicked on the post or went to look at the comments! I also like the idea that with WordPress I can always host my blog in my own domain in the future if I so choose, not just redirect there.
So anyway, here I am! I don’t have a mood or music setting with each post, but frankly I won’t miss them! Sometimes it was annoying to try to think of my mood and the whole thing seemed kind of myspacy (although pre-myspace). I have a lot of options to explore (a lot more than I had with LiveJournal) so I will probably still be tweaking things for a while.
So tell me loyal readers…what do you think?
Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!
Please bear with me while I get this blog in order…
