He can’t help it, he just is. I love this age. He’s not old enough to talk back, but is old enough to play. He’s so happy most of the time, whether we’re rolling the ball, playing peek-a-boo, he’s chasing Max around the basement, or we’re wrestling (watch out for his flying elbow, it’s a killer). Everything is new, interesting, and unfortunately, usually gets eaten.
I love waiting when I know what the outcome’s going to be. I have to have surgery to repair the navicular bone (near the ankle). Well, not really “repair”, more like “remove”. Then they’ll reinforce the tendon. It’s “serious”, according to my doctor. He told me, “You’re about to do something very difficult.” Yeah, that’s exactly what I want to hear from a doctor.\
Now, I’m waiting around for my insurance company to approve an MRI so we can find out how “difficult” this is going to be. After the MRI, I get to wait a week, then I see the doctor, then I get cut on. Oh, then the fun begins. I’ll be short a bone in my foot, in a cast for a while, then in physical therapy for who knows how long.\
And herein lies the silence. It’s hard to walk in the boot. It’s hard to drive. It’s hard to sit at a computer. It’s hard to sleep. And it’s only going to get harder.\
So, I write my presentations, I help my people, I talk to folks and I take a lot of ibuprofen. Oh, and redesign this site, read up on Ruby and thinking of building something worth trying Rails for. Oh, and I’m working on my very own microformat.\
And tomorrow, it’s time to compile all the comments on the big CSS Question, sort them and start coming up with some concrete proposals.
After reading Salon’s review, I have to go see it. I’m all about jokes you shouldn’t tell, and smart ways to gross people out.\
When I lived in Tucson, my friend Jim and I used to play this game where we one-upped each other until one of us gave and did the “here’s the line, and here’s you” pantomime thing. It was great fun, and I don’t really get to play that game anymore (because really, how do you find those people who like playing those games without offending everyone?).\
This game was even more fun when we did our public access TV show with Brain and the gang. A whole room of people up for the game, late on a Saturday night, with three phone lines, a camera and lots of stupid props. It was way too much fun, and I miss it. It was silly and juvenile, and we loved every minute of it.\
And if you know me… that’s pretty much what I live for.
If a baby is allowed to run around naked while trying to air out diaper rash and then poops, the baby will try to eat the poop.
I am so bored and so over summer! I like the Fall. It needs to be Fall now. But it is still 3 months away. So, I need fudge and frozen custard to get me back in the swing of things. My diet lasted all of one day and then Kevin brought home some yummy cookies from Great Harvest and I ate them all. I’m such a master of will power, aren’t you jealous? My foot hurts so I can’t do what I should be doing. Brian is uber-cranky and I am sick of shows from the Food Network! (Max likes them though.) My little bitty cousin is getting married in a few months and that makes me feel old, cuz oh yea, I am old. The End. Continue what you were doing.\
PS- Watch Veronica Mars on Wednesdays, on UPN at 9pm and Fridays, on CBS at 8pm. Also, the DVDs are available for pre-order now.
This one’s for Heather. Max and I went to dinner with my mom, brother and sister last night and we ended up talking about mashups and podcasts. Heather wanted me to send her some links, but I’d hate to go through all that effort only to repeat it when someone else asks me. So, this post will get e-mailed around to folks (hi, folks) when they ask me what a mashup or a podcast is or how they can get some.\
<dl>
<dt>mashup</dt>
<dd>Taking any musical work or works and turning them into something else. This isn’t a cover, which is someone performing a song. It’s usually taking the recorded version of the song and combining it with other recorded elements (usually other songs… you know, mashing them up!).</dd>
<dt>podcast</dt>
<dd>Recording an audio file and posting it to a website. I know, it’s more than that, but that’s it, really. The real hook to podcasting is syndicating those audio files and producing them on a semi-regular basis so people can use their feed reader of choice to download them automatically to their iPod (hence “pod”casting) or to their music player of choice.</dd>
</dl>
\
I’ve only recently gotten into listening to podcasts, and have just a couple favorites:
# Radio Clash: This is first for good reason. Tim puts together a fun show, with just the right balance of talk and music. He picks the best mashups out there and throws them together with interesting conversation about what’s going on in his world. Good stuff. Show 38 (the most recent) isn’t a good representation of a “normal” show, so you might want to start with Show 37
# Coverville: Not mashups, but this guy is funny, and he picks some hilarious covers to play. Covers are another secret passion of mine. It all started in Tucson listening to KXCI (the best radio station ever) and hearing Social Distortion‘s cover of Ring of Fire followed by an accordian-laden cover of the same. I was hooked.
# Odeo: They don’t make ’em, but they’re the easiest way I’ve found so far to find ’em and download ’em.\
As for mashups, there are a few folks who produce world-class stuff (at least that I’ve found). Here are my faves:
Today is my mom’s birthday, so Happy Birthday Mom! You are wonderful, loving, fun to be with and a great mom. I am really lucky to have you. And so are Kevin, Max and Brian.\
Some of my other loves, in random order (cuz I can’t pick my fave):
I don’t normally talk about work, but I’m making an exception because this one was a lot of fun. It’s officially in beta now, and I can talk about it. Yay!! The new My AOL launched its first beta today, and I worked on it! I got to play with everyone’s favorite new javascript toy: XMLHTTPRequest, and did most of the CSS and a good deal of the markup. It was a fun project to spend a couple weeks on, and there’s a lot of potential for cool stuff with it.\
It is still very beta (in the traditional sense of the word). It’s a little slow in Safari for some reason that we haven’t been able to track down, and there’s a really funny jumping icon thing in Firefox that, again, we haven’t been able to figure out (it jumps the exact width of a scrollbar, but no scrollbar shows up, so it’s double-weird).\
Play around with it, try adding your own feed, and see how it goes. There are a couple odd things about how it chooses which feeds to grab, and which RSS fields to display (for example, if you have both summary and content:encoded, it will only use summary), and if you have multiple feeds in your HTML, it will choose the first if they all have the same link. Hey, it’s a beta.\
There’s lots of cool stuff coming in subsequent releases, so stay tuned!
I finished the latest Harry Potter book and am sad to say that I was disappointed. I have no qualms about any of the plot points, so this isn’t bitterness talking. It just seems that the book is 3/4 filler of back story without any action or moving the story forward. Kev said that it is a “fourth act” book. While I think all Potter fans should read it, don’t expect too much from it.\
In other news, CBS has agreed to air four episodes of Veronica Mars!
At our last CSS Working Group meeting, I volunteered to ask the design community what y’all want as far as backgrounds and borders go. We spent some time talking about the CSS3 Backgrounds & Borders module and we need some feedback (because none of us are designers).\
If you’re a designer, is this what you want? Is there anything missing from the module that should be there? Is there anything there that shouldn’t be?\
Some ideas to get you going: