Evan Valentine, Stay-at-Home Dad

A huge snowstorm like this is hardest on the dogs. At first we really can't do anything except wade through snow that is taller than the dogs in an effort to find a place for them to pee. Eventually we can walk on the street but not the sidewalks. At least having dogs forces me to go out and shovel a few paths.

By this morning we were able to take a fairly normal walk, albeit on the streets. Here are some shots from yesterday when it was really hard for the dogs.

I am the biggest idiot on the planet. I took my dogs for a walk.. a regular walk, which is 1.5 or 2 miles. I saw things I may never see again. I trudged through waist-high snow in the middle of the street. I saw piles of snow six feet high or more next to people's freshly-shoveled driveways. I took my camera, of course. Who wouldn't want to take an opportunity to document the area's biggest snowfall on record?

Many streets had not been touched by plows. We were walking along places where tires had crushed the snow, slipping and sliding all the way. Everyone was out taking pictures or shoveling their driveways.

I got back to the house and grabbed the measuring tape. While trying to take a few snapshots of the measuring tape sticking out of the snow, my spirits were crushed. I had the camera on manual focus for the entire walk, and my pictures are most likely completely worthless. I had some good stuff at my fingertips, and I threw it all away by having manual focus turned on. What an ass.

By the way, my measurement was only 23" which is certainly not any kind of record. It's only one more inch than we had December 19-20th.

This is probably going to be the most snowfall on record for Metro Washington D.C. There are 200,000 people without power in this area. These images are from this morning. It is still coming down pretty heavily, and we are supposed to accumulate about 6inches more before midnight.

I couldn't be more satisfied right now. We're just preparing to be snowed in, eating frozen "California Pizza Kitchen," and catching up on recorded shows. I walked the dogs already, and we're waiting for the heavy snow to kick in.

Jaime stopped at Burger King and the gas station on the way home. She arrived bearing Whoppers, french fries, beer, and cheerios. Stephen just ate his first Cheerios a few hours ago, and he took it like a champ. He had quite a good time, and seems to be mastering the pincer grasp.

The local news makes it seem like there is a madness all around, but I saw other people walking their dogs, nice and calm, enjoying the weather. The grocery store was calm and empty this morning. All is well.

There have supposedly been nearly 600 traffic accidents already today in this area.

We're going to bathe Stephen and enjoy our night. Cheers.

Just six weeks after we got 22" of snow, we are predicted to get 18-24" 20-30" over the next two days. The 22" was record snowfall for the month of December, and the snow this weekend is supposed to be the most snowfall in a century for the area (record snowfall for this area was 28" in 1922). It just started snowing about five minutes ago. My dogs' lives are going to get hard for the next five days.

Fridays find us at the end of a grocery cycle, so I went to the store to pick up a few things this morning. They were out of a lot of stuff, but they had everything I needed. Yesterday must have been a record grocery shopping day; everything is like the end of days around here when it snows. People are referring to this as "snowpocalypse," sigh. We just had this much snow on December 19th!

Stephen was practically falling asleep at the grocery store, so I just gave him a little milk when we got home and he instantly went down for a nap. That allowed me to get a shower, my first since Monday. Maybe he will like the snow more this time around. We'll see (anything for a photo-op).

Jaime is signed up for automatic updates about baby development. They have been pretty funny for a while, as Stephen is well ahead of the developmental milestones. This is the one from today, titled Your 8-month-old: Week 3

One day you'll walk into your baby's room and find that little person standing up, grinning at you. Many 8-month-olds are strong enough to pull themselves onto their feet and stay there by holding on to you or a piece of furniture. A somewhat comical aspect of this wonderful development is that some babies know how to get up -- but not back down again. They will stand and stand as long as they can hold on, and finally either tumble down or cry to be "rescued."

I'm pretty sure he could do this in his sixth month. He has mastered the sitting back down part, too. That's one less thing to worry about, I guess.

It appears we will get 2-3x the amount of average snowfall this winter. We had a couple of small snowfalls, then 22" on December 19, 4" this past saturday, 3" last night, and we are supposed to get a large amount this upcoming weekend. Snow is nice for the first two times every winter, then the next two times it's "meh," but by now it just sucks (though I will have to admit that the 22" of snow was pretty cool). The stuff that fell last night is wet and sticky, so it piles up on even the smallest of twigs/pine needles. It looks really nice and picturesque everywhere you look.

February 03, 2010

After I walked the dogs this morning, I went back out with my 24mm lens and my new flash (it was still dark). I currently have two flashes. I have an old Minolta flash on loan from my uncle, and I have a new flash that I got for Christmas from my brother. The new flash is an E-TTL flash which communicates with the camera and automatically adjusts the exposure and flash power depending on the shot. I am still trying to figure out a way to put the flash on some sort of "manual" mode and make it flash with full power every time. The old flash that I have is not able to communicate at all with my camera, and it makes the brightest flash every time. That way I can just adjust the aperture setting to get the proper exposure. You can never have too much light!

But this morning I just took out the E-TTL (auto) flash and snapped a few shots as quickly as I could. I still haven't quite figured out how to use a direct flash, either. When I'm indoors I can point the flash at the ceiling which eliminates all shadows. But if I point my new flash at the ceiling, it doesn't realize that I'm doing that, and doesn't adjust the flash amount accordingly. Everything is too smart these days, and I wish I could just override all of that nonsense.

I feel that I have been engrossed in WordPress long enough that I can put together a fairly authoritative list of WordPress plugins with an explanation of each. These are the plugins I use. I don't use twitter or facebook, so you won't find anything related to those two services in here. Presented in alphabetical order:

1. AddToAny. This plugin allows readers to add a more profession-looking link to your blog on their networking service of choice. It has automatic options for Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Digg, StumbleUpon, virtually anything you can imagine.
2. Akismet. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not, then it automatically files them under "spam" if there is a match. It allows you to manage/review the comments after they are marked as spam, and undelete comments if necessary. This plugin has already saved me from over 600 spam comments on this blog.
3. All-in-one SEO Pack. This plugin allows you to setup your metatags for your both your main page and individual posts. You can add comments, craft an excerpt, or add tags for Search Engine Optimization.
4. Apture. My favorite plugin. This allows you to contain your links within java pop-up windows on your site. Instead of people clicking your link to a Wikipedia article, they merely hover over the link and the article pops up within your page. This allows people to view material that is pertinent to your articles without navigating away from your page. It works automatically with YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, IMDB, Amazon, and many more.
5. Audio Player. A highly configurable plugin that turns your links to .mp3 files into a stylish Play button. It uses Flash animation and expands when clicked. It also keeps the clueless from stealing .mp3 files off your server and forces them to stream the files.
6. Better-Wiki-Link. This plugin automatically creates a link to a related Wikipedia article if you put double brackets around any text in your blog entry. When used in conjunction with Apture, it creates a hover-link that brings up the Wikipedia article in a pop-up java window.
7. Better Tag Cloud. A more configurable tag cloud than the default tag cloud provided with WordPress.
8. Blog Protector. This plugin attempts to prevent people from plagiarizing information from your blog. It disables the highlighting of text (and in turn disables copy-and-paste of text from your blog). It can also be set to a) disable the ability for people to drag your photos onto their desktop and/or b) disable the ability to right-click on your page. I currently do not have this plugin enabled because it causes conflict with some other features of my blog, but maybe after a few more developments of the plugin I will be able to enable it.
9. Broken Link Checker. This plugin continually checks all the links (past and present) on your blog entries and validates that no links are broken. I have over 600 links in my blog thus far, so this is a great plugin for me (this post alone has 29 links). Sometimes pages disappear and links in your old posts no longer work; this plugin keeps you from having to constantly re-check all of your links. It runs in the background and is not visible to readers of your blog.
10. CommentLuv. When people fill out their information to leave a comment on your blog, this plugin checks the URL they provide. If the URL points to another blog, the plugin will automatically add a link to their most recent blog post. This provides free advertisement to others' blogs and helps the blogging community as a whole.
11. Do Follow. Removes the nofollow attribute that WordPress adds to comments by default.
12. Feed Pauser. Allows authors to pause a feed from immediately being published. I frequently make a host of minor changes to a post immediately after it is published. This ensures that the post does not show up in my RSS feed until I have made all of my final adjustments (I have my Feed Pauser set to wait 20 minutes).
13. Flickr Widget. A widget which displays the most recent photos from a Flickr account (mine displays in the right sidebar). You only have to set it up once and it automatically shows the most recent photos for you as you update your Flickr.
14. GD Simple Widgets. This is a pack of several basic widgets. Most of them are improvements of widgets that come with WordPress by default, such as Recent Posts, Related Posts, Recent Comments.
15. Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. It runs in the background and updates automatically every time you make a change to your blog.
16. Gravatar Signup Encouragement. Encourages commenters who do not already have a Gravatar to sign up for a free Gravatar.
17. No Curly Quotes. Stops WordPress from turning the ' and " characters into curly quotes in blog posts, titles, excerpts and comments. Options can be set for each element separately. Curly quotes cause problems when cutting&pasting text.
18. Outbound Links. Forces all outbund links to open in a new window. This helps ensure that people do not navigate away from your page when they click a link.
19. Sidebar Login. Adds a sidebar widget to let users login to your blog. I use it as the top widget in the right sidebar. (No one ever logs in, though).
20. Smart Ads. Allows you to automatically place Google Ads at certain places in your posts. You set certain rules (ie, minimum wordcount) that determine if and where your ads are placed.
21. SubZane YouTube Plugin. Like the Flickr Widget, this plugin allows you to automatically display the most recent YouTube videos from your YouTube account.
22. Visitor Maps and Who's Online. Displays Visitor Maps with location pins, city, and country. Includes a Who's Online Sidebar to show how many users are online and a Who's Online admin dashboard to view visitor details. The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more.
23. WordPress.com Stats. Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Similar to Google Analytics.
24. WP Super Cache. A fast caching plugin for WordPress. If your page gets a lot of traffic, this plugin can cut down on the amount of traffic to your server while still allowing everyone to view your blog. It creates an up-to-date HTML version of your site instead of the more consuming PHP version. I do not currently have it enabled because I do not get what is commonly known as "traffic," hehe.
25. WPtouch iPhone Theme. Formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android and other touch-based smartphones.
26. Wunderground.com Weather Sticker. Adds a sidebar widget to display the standard wunderground.com Weather Sticker for your [chosen] location. Because of this widget, I actually check my own blog to get the outside temp before I go out.

Travelers Insurance chooses good music for their commercials. First it was Trouble by Ray LaMontagne, and now Worries by Langhorne Slim.

Another Travelers commercial, this one, also has a great song that was specifically composed for the commercial and consequently can not be heard anywhere else. It really sounds like the "hot jazz" playing of virtuoso violinist Stéphane Grappelli (though it is clearly not, because Grappelli has passed). More information about this style can be found in my article about Django Reinhardt.

If you believe what he just said in his press conference, Kurt Warner has officially retired (See, Favre? That's how it's done! None of this wishy-washy retiring business). His is one of the greatest and most improbable stories in NFL history, to say the least.

After playing in college, he was not drafted by an NFL team. He then tried out for the Green Bay Packers in 1994 but did not make the team. He (now-famously) stocked shelves at a grocery store for $5.50/hr until he signed with an AFL team in 1995. He was eventually signed as a third-string quarterback to the St. Louis Rams in 1998. Teammate's injuries forced the coach to use Kurt Warner as a "temporary" starting quarterback. In his first four games as a starting quarterback in the NFL, Warner threw a total of 14 touchdowns. He led the Rams to a Super Bowl victory that same year, throwing for 414 yards in the big game (still the most ever in a Super Bowl game). He received league MVP as well as Super Bowl MVP awards in the same season. He had a few more good seasons--including a second Super Bowl appearance--followed by a couple of shaky seasons, and the Rams released Warner in 2004.

He immediately signed a two-year deal with the Giants. After starting the 2004 season with a 5-4 record, the Giants benched Warner in favor of the rookie Eli Manning, who finished the remainder of the season with a 1-6 record. Warner signed with the Arizona Cardinals in 2005 and had two tumultuous years in which he was benched and replaced with untested quarterbacks several times. In 2008, the Kurt Warner of old was back. He made all his former teams and coaches look silly for benching (or releasing) him in the past. With the exception of losing the Super Bowl, his 2008 postseason was the best on record. He set the yardage record and tied the postseason touchdown record. The 2009 season saw him break more records and reach career milestones (such as reaching 200 career touchdowns). He had a playoff game with 5 passing touchdowns against the Green Bay Packers but was nearly shut out by the New Orleans Saints the following week. After enduring several sacks and a brutal block-from-behind following an interception, Warner left the game for a time. The Cardinals suffered a 31-point defeat to end the season (and Warner's career).

Now the talk has shifted to "does Kurt Warner deserve to be in the Hall of Fame?" Some rankings and records in favor of Warner:

• Career pass yards in Super Bowls: 1,156 (1st)
• He owns all three of the highest yardage performances in Super Bowl history.
• Pass yards in a single postseason: 1,147 (1st)
• Career MVP awards: 2 (T-3rd)
• Career Pass Yards Per Game: 258.8 (2nd)
• Career completion percentage: 65.4% (2nd)
• Pass Touchdowns in a single postseason: 11 (T-1st, Joe Montana)
• Highest completion percentage in a single regular-season game: 92.3% (1st)
• Consecutive 300+ yard passing games: 6 (T-1st)
• Number of games to reach 30,000 total yards: 114 (T-1st, Dan Marino)

The common arguments against him are his refusal to rush for yards and his tendency to be very streaky (in both the negative and positive aspects of the word), but the general feeling has shifted and most experts now believe he belongs in the NFL Hall of Fame.

Bye, Kurt. Now who will be my wife's fantasy quarterback?

We got a package of "leftover" gifts that my parents forgot to bring with them when they visited at Christmas. Stephen has improved at opening presents in the past month. He was having quite the good time with the wrapping paper by the time my wife turned on the camcorder. There is also a compilation of videos from Christmas day that I just uploaded, which I'm sure is terribly boring to people outside of my family.

The 40th anniversary of Sesame Street was so widely publicized that it was impossible to go anywhere without hearing about it. Google even changed their logo for a whole week leading up to the anniversary date. Apparently the staff celebrated the anniversary with a custom cake from Carlo's Bakery of Cake Boss fame. The episode featured no other cakes (they typically feature 2 or 3 custom cakes per episode) as it was an extremely large cake. For inspiration, the staff of Carlo's Bakery visited the Sesame Street set, complete with active puppets. Then they delivered the cake with the entire staff present: watch here.

I have watched a fair amount of Sesame Street in the past four months, and as an adult, I certainly have a different perspective. I can't help but notice how expertly the puppets are manipulated. They are extremely lifelike and I wonder every day how they do it. These are excellent puppeteers to say the least. Sometimes it seems that it would take more than two people to run one of these puppets, especially when there are facial expressions and arm movement involved (for instance, Elmo squishes up his face and goes cross-eyed when he is about to sneeze). Murray is a large orange puppet that goes out on the streets and performs human-like tasks, like playing a real drum set or breaking a board with a karate chop. When Buddy and his crew visited the set of Sesame Street, I was hoping for some "behind the scenes" footage of the puppets being operated, but there was none. Searching around on the internet did not reveal much, but here is a pretty good one:

I really couldn't find much more footage than that. There is some behind the scenes footage of the Kobe Bryant sketch, which I just recently saw, but it's of a different nature. More like getting a chance to interview Kobe Bryant, and they didn't care about the Sesame Street aspect of it.

Also, here is a funny parody called Preschool Musical.

• As you may have guessed, giraffes are very susceptible to throat infections.
• The Mormon Tabernacle Church in Salt Lake City was built without any nails.
• In tennis, the term "love," meaning zero, comes from the French l'oeuf which is an egg, as in goose egg.
• Zachary Taylor never voted in a presidential election--not even his own.
• The odds against a flipped coin coming up with the same side showing ten times in a row are 1,023 to 1.
• Abraham Lincoln was carrying Confederate money when he was assassinated.
• The shell is 12% of the weight of the entire egg.
• The biggest playing field in sports? A polo field: 12.4 acres.
• Liberace once used the stage name Walter Busterkeys.
• Paul Revere took his midnight ride on a horse named Brown Beauty.
• In China, the day a child is born it is considered one year old.
• An armadillo can be housebroken.
• Rudyard Kipling would write only with black ink.
• In many species of birds, the eyes weigh more than the brain.
• The P.F. in P.F. Flyers stands for Posture Foundation.
• Before 1859, baseball umpires sat behind home plate in rocking chairs.
• The term "senator" comes from the Latin "senex" which means "old man."
• Insects can shiver.
• Until 1869, the master's degree was an honorary award.
• In days of long ago, when railroad men patronized brothels, they left their red lamps outside--such was the derivation of the red light district.
• A bee uses 22 muscles to sting someone.
• The stopwatch seen on television's 60 Minutes is made by Heuer.