home

The movie came from France, the DVD came from China, it took me weeks to recode it so it would work correctly in the US, but now its fully functioning and ready to go. This week we’ll be watching Luc Besson’s original Taxi. We’d love to have you join us for some high speed fun. Start time will be 8:34.

in which I talk about iTunes, blogs, babies, and probably my eyes again, damn my eyes.

In researching why my iTunes decided to delete all of my music the other day (a bad script in case you were wondering), I found some more tricks that can be done with folders and playlists in iTunes. These are all really simple things, but they help me to better organize the music I’m listening to at work and thus makes me happier. For example, you can use a folder as the source for your Party Shuffle, which means I can put several playlists inside of one folder and use that as the source for all of my music for the day. Since I occasionally want to rate some songs, while also listening to stuff I already know is good, I can now move playlists in and out of the main folder and it will change what the Party Shuffle plays. Its silly, but I feel like I’ve learned a completely new secret to iTunes and have fallen in love with it. I feel like iTunes is all new, even though there’s nothing really new to it at all.

---

I’ve been looking at more and more stuff on WordPress. My brother even started a WordPress blog and I already like the look and feel of it over LiveJournal and he just used a built in style sheet. I have confirmed that there are plugins for WordPress that facilitate cross posting to LiveJournal automatically, so I will probably take advantage of them. I was considering MoveableType for a bit, which has even more LiveJournal plugins, including the ability to have LiveJournal comments appear on the MoveableType blog. I’ll have to investigate further to see if similar things can be found for WordPress. I really do enjoy blogging, and I’m hoping that changing things up a bit in the way I do things will refresh my interest in blogging more, kind of like how finding one new feature in iTunes made it feel new. I kind of want to get WordPress for Dummies” not only so I can really know how to use my WordPress blog, but also because I think it has a little bit of “Blogging for Dummies” in it, which may also inspire me to be a better blogger.

---

Yesterday was Valentines day and Steve and Jenn had their little baby. Pretty cute timing, even if there was a bit of scheduling involved. She looks pretty cute in the photos I’ve seen so far. As for our baby, when we went to pick up Ansel from daycare, our daycare provider, Cathy, had a Valentine card for us “made” by Ansel. It had photocopies of his hands pasted inside, holding a heart on a string. It was so cute, and makes me realize that we really lucked out with our daycare. She’s super nice, really seems to care about the babies, and its just nice to have one person to put all your trust in instead of a whole institution. She’s got four babies now, two toddlers and two infants and she seems to juggle them all very well.

Ansel is getting too cute now, too. He still hasn’t really started talking yet, but his babbling is getting more and more intentional. He still doesn’t want to sleep flat on his back, but I think if we got him a hammock, he’d be all about that. He loves to sleep in his papasan swing, even if the batteries are completely dead. He just likes to be cradled a bit. We still have two weeks to try to at least shift him into the pack-n-play before our trip to Memphis. I’d love to not take the swing with us on the trip. We could manage it, but I’d much rather not.

Exciting news. Next week, I think Heather is going to let me try to feed him some semi-solid food. I’ve been really excited to try this, even though I know the first few tries are going to be a miserable failure. I just want to be a little bit more involved in his life other than being the funny guy and the diaper changer. Ever since we went back to work full time, I think I’ve fed him all of twice because we can’t spare the bottled milk. We need all the milk we can get for daycare so if he’s not at daycare, he only feeds from Heather. I’m looking forward to being a part time food provider again. I don’t mind being the funny guy, but I want to help him grow, too.

---

My eyes are still bugging me and I should probably call Eyemasters and check on the status of my lens. I’m suspicious that they don’t ever call me when the lens comes in so I should probably check on it. I’ll probably go ahead and do that right now, even.

addendum (3:17pm) – Looks like my lens will be in on the 20th. Bleh.

The iTunes meme: Open up your iTunes and fill out this survey, no matter how embarrassing the responses might be.

How many songs total: 22433
How many hours or days of music: 59.9 days
Most recently played: :Carry Stress in the Jaw” by Mr. Bungle
Most played: “Lizard (Megavoices Mix)” by Mauro Picotto (9 plays) – though its important to note, I trashed all my playcounts when all my tracks when in the trash a couple weeks ago
Most recently added: “The Eyeland” by Michael Giacchino

Sort by song title:
First Song: “A-500” by Klaus Badelt & Mark Batson
Last Song: “!!!!!!!” by The Roots

Sort by time:
Shortest Song: “Flip Sting” by [no artist] – 0:03
Longest Song: “Sasha’s Voyage of Ima” by BT – 42:41

Sort by album:
First album: “A-Haunting We Will Go-Go” by The Ghastly Ones
Last album: “2046 Soundtrack”

First song that comes up on Shuffle: “Real Solution #9” by White Zombie

Search the following and state how many songs come up:

Death – 111
Life – 293
Love – 1022
Hate – 67
You – 1884

In which I talk about work, babies, glasses, and colds

So this week I’ve been kind of on the ball at work. I have spurts like that where I feel like I’m knocking down projects as fast as they come to me. It doesn’t hurt that most of the things that have gone wrong at work this week were in no part my fault and I could evaluate exactly who did what and when to result in the fucked up situation. I’ve rolled out three computers this week and have another one nearly ready to go, though the user will not be available until next week, so it will be sitting here a few more days. My student assistant and I forgot about a couple other computers that were in the works, and will be able to roll them out soon as well. We’re clearing the shit out, which is great.

Speaking of clearing the shit out, we’ve determined that our servers are overdue for a serious clearing, so I’ve spent a lot of my afternoon going through some ancient files and deleting or archiving them off site. There were a ton of files in there that I haven’t looked at in probably 9 years or better, so obviously I didn’t need them at all. Add to that, the fact that last night I was able to fix a web problem for a side job I did back in 2005, and its been a really productive work week.

---

Heather and I are trying to get Ansel into a new sleep mode, particularly the “sleep in your crib or play-yard” mode. As it is, he can only sleep in his swing in motion, or in heather’s arms attached to “the tap.” This, as you might imagine, gets very old. He’s definitely sleep deprived and it shows when he just passes out instead of eating when he’s actually hungry. The sleep overhaul (as heather calls it) is tough work and I can now see why people say babies are so hard. He was easy when we just relied on his “sleep-crutches” to get him through the night, but now that we’re trying to stir things up, its getting really unbearable. You can only listen to your baby cry for so long before you start to twitch.

I’d love to have him at least napping in his play-yard in two weeks when we go to visit my parents and grandparents. I don’t want to have to take the swing, and I don’t want to have him awake and grumpy for three days on end. The play yard packs up so nice, it would make a great overnight napper.

---

Ever since Knight’s been gone, its been a little different around the house. Sometimes I think Ia knows, but most of the time I think she doesn’t really care. Today, however, she went on a rampage and tore up a bunch of stuff around the house. I know that dogs just do that sometimes, but I’m really hoping this isn’t a delayed reaction to Knight being gone. I can’t say that he really kept her in check, but its the first time she’s shown signs of separation anxiety since he left our house. We’re going to have to keep a close eye on her and make sure she’s doing okay.

---

This post is not nearly as focused as I’ve felt this week, but I think its late in the day and my eyes are really bugging me at this point. I’m still waiting on the third pair of glasses to come in. In case you hadn’t heard, my glasses broke over christmas and I ordered a new pair as soon as we got back to town. When they finally came in, they had been cut wrong and the lenses were too small to stay in the frames. They offered to recut them. While I was waiting for the replacements to come in (which takes two weeks, due to my astigmatism), I started to notice some particularly bad eyestrain, especially around 2:00-3:00 in the afternoon and especially when reading. I chalked it up the lens not sitting right in the frame and figured the replacement lenses would be better. When the replacements finally came in, I found that the eyestrain is just as bad. Here’s where the story gets funny in a “that can’t be true, but it is” kind of way.

I went back to the store and took my original classes (the ones that broke over christmas) and my printed prescription with me. I walked in and took my current glasses off (always a relief from the eyestrain) and said “these glasses are the same prescription and materials as my old glasses, which are broken, but I’m suffering some serious eyestrain and having trouble focusing in the late afternoon.” To which the girl at the counter responded, and I quote, “What do you want me to do?” It doesn’t translate nearly as well over text… but the traditional “about it” was implied in her inflection. My response to her was, after a short stutter, something to the effect of “I don’t know, but I can’t wear these,” and continued to explain that they’re supposed to be exactly the same as the old ones which I had no problems with. She finally asked me if I had my prescription, which I gave her, and she took my glasses over to check and make sure they were the all right. After a few minutes, she returned and said “Well, the prescription is off just a little on the right lens, do you want us to remake it?” Swallowing the overpowering “DUH” that popped into my mouth, I simply said “I can’t wear these, so yeah, I need a new lens cut.” So now I’m waiting on the third right lens since December 28th. I hope that when it comes in, everything will finally be fine, but I don’t have high hopes.

---

Eyestrain and lack of focus aside, it would appear that Heather has caught a full on cold and I’m at least suffering symptoms of it. Even little Ansel, poor guy, has been coughing and sneezing a lot lately. Heather, the overachiever that she is, will not accept that she’s sick and take a day off to get well, so I worry that she’s going to get worse and worse like she always does. Currently I’m just sneezing and have lots of phlegm, but otherwise still pretty good.