Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Too overwhelmed to write right now, need time to process all these thoughts. Such a day, such a fantastically beautiful day. Our baby was born less than three hours after Amy went into labor. It was an intense labor, very pure and very fast. We now have a dark-haired boy, six pounds 12 ounces, 19″ long, blue eyes (we think – so far he’s barely squinted up at us out of them). We don’t have a name for him yet – that will come soon enough.
The birth was so incredible. More tomorrow.
At 2:15 pm, Scot got the call at work from Amy, who had just gone into labor during lunch with Stacia, our doula (perfect timing!). Scot rushed home to find Amy having contractions a few minutes apart. We packed her bag, dug out the birth plan, and got ready to head to the hospital.
This is it: the axis upon which the rest of our lives turn. More later.
Found a note folded up, sitting in the ivy, on the way to breakfast the other day. Junior high came rushing back in a flash of memory:
(click)
I love the way the sentence ends w/o question mark, the way an entire sheet of notebook paper is used for four lonely words, the minimal expressiveness of the note, as if it’s a statement of fact rather than a question.
Ack packet via Dylan Tweney: Just how far has the art of magazine covers declined in the past 50 years? This plays like a microcosm of all modern aesthetics – engaged in an ongoing and unstoppable slide from care to crap.
And speaking of MSN, they’re promoting a “New Bread of Secret Agent.”
Just finished titling and encoding Weblogs — Challenging Mass Media and Society in QuickTime format for our Darwin Streaming Server. Posted both Sorenson3 and MPEG-4 versions (but no modem-friendly version, sorry).
We’re sort of testing the waters with MPEG-4 here, so let me know how the viewing experience is for you. Was kind of suprised not to get better filesize savings with MPEG over Sorenson. For example, the 2nd segment is 43 minutes long, at 320×240, 15fps, keyframe every 12, QualComm Purevoice 22kHz 16-bit mono. The Sorenson is 181MBs, the MPEG is 140MBs. I had hoped for something like a 50% size reduction. Hmmm…
In Talk like a pirate — or prepare to be boarded, Dave Barry reminds us that this – today! – is Talk Like a Pirate day – and here I’ve let half the day slip away without talking like a pirate, damn. He’s recruiting lots of celebs, but :
I see no need to recruit President Bush, because he already talks like a pirate, as we can see from this transcript of a recent White House press conference:
REPORTER: Could you please explain either your foreign or your domestic policy?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Arrrrr.
Thanks Howard Berkey for pointing out the unsanity of KOMPRESSOR :
We do not use a macintosh
instead we use a tandy
KOMPRESSOR break your glow stick
KOMPRESSOR eat your candy
Now let’s all take a magical journey upon Harry Potter’s vibrating broom.
Cool fog guns!
Far out — the author of Kung-Tunes has released Kung-Log, an OS X client very similar to iJournal for posting to MT from the desktop rather than via web forms. This fills in a big missing hole for me in the LJ-MT transition. Hotkeys and music detection would make my life complete.
Our weblog panel discussion was tonight – turned out to a great event, a full house. I’ll encode it and put up a streaming QuickTime tomorrow, if I have time. Very interesting.
Wow – folks at work got together and put up a collection to buy Amy and I a gift certificate for Appleseed – extremely generous, too. A true collaborative effort – thanks everyone, you’re all the best. Grabs set up a fake staff meeting, all assembled, and he started it off claiming there were some serious problems with our intranet… I got weirded out for a minute there…
Ex-Be employees with blogs:
Adam Haberlach
Frank Boosman
Adrian Ziemkowski
Mike Popovic
Mike P’s HipShake
MikePop via HipTop
Daniel Sandler
Wendy Hall
Deirdre Saoirse Moen
Joseph Palmer
Leigh Ann Hildebrand
Michael Alderete
Duncan Wilcox
Adrian Ziemkowski
Others I’m missing?
Whoa: BeOS icons for OS X. See also: Daniel Sandler’s BeOS screensavers for OS X.
Interesting… more than 500 emails on the BeOS Refugee articles, and for the first time someone has pointed out an embedded puzzle in my thinking:
On one hand I talk about how I believe in the open source philosophy, benefit hugely from the fruits of open source efforts in my daily work, and always support collaborative development as a general concept.
On the other hand, I know from experience that closed source development models under a single control structure, with a single unified vision, are capable of producing a better user experience, more cohesive design, etc. more quickly. Despite best intentions, open source efforts are inevitably tripped up by fragmentation or bad communication resulting in a “cobbled together” atmosphere in the user experience.
The email I received subtly implied that there was a hypocrisy in my thinking here, but I see it more as an irony. And on further thought, this probably has something to do with my attraction to OS X – it’s the perfect blend of open and closed source development models – closed at the desktop level, where the user experience matters, and open at the command line level, where collaborative efforts work best. Hmm….