Apparently, if you put two talking computers in the same room, the conversations spirals out of control and ends up in a passive-aggressive argument.

Henry is five months old today, and he is wearing the clothes that Stephen was wearing when he was 12-15 months. Soon they will be wearing the same clothes and the same size of diapers. Henry holds his own bottle, rolls over like a champ, and can scoot across the floor pretty well. If you sit him in Stephen's easy chair, he can sit up on his own and watch TV for half an hour or more. It's almost time to start putting him in the highchair, and he is already sitting in the walker a lot. He has slept through the night (9 hours) maybe 5 of the past 7 days.

Stephen woke up Monday morning and decided that he now hates milk. Just like that. Hand him milk, he takes a sip and says yuck! while handing it back. At first I responded by trying to "break" him and not offering him anything to drink except milk. I figured he'd get thirsty enough to drink some eventually. If this is a ploy to get chocolate milk or more juice, it won't work. That lasted a day. Now I give him water all day and don't worry about it. Kids do need a little bit of dairy, but not a lot. The result has been: he is eating like a maniac at every meal. I think he's just switching from getting a lot of calories from milk (like babies do) to getting a very high percentage of his calories from food (like adults do). When he wakes up, I give him one of those Danimal smoothies (basically liquid yogurt with probiotics), then I give him some V8 Fusion with breakfast, and for the rest of the day it's all water... and man can he eat all of the sudden!

About a month ago, one of my hard drives died. It physically was not working... seemed like the motor died. It's not my most important hard drive, so I was debating what to do about it. I dropped it off at a local place for a $50 diagnostic fee. I figured if the fix was over $150 then I would just let it go. It was my windows xp partition, mp3 collection (>100gb), my sample library, my software installers, and some other unorganized downloads. Anyway, the guy finally called me back and said that "100% of your data is recoverable, and it'll be $150. You've already put $50 towards the repair; we'll just apply your diagnostic fee towards that $150." This was a best-case scenario and I gave him the go-ahead.

Well, yesterday I went and picked up the new hard drive. I came home and hooked it up and it was far, far less than "100%." I called the guy and told him something was amiss, and he told me to bring the hard drives back and he'd scan it again and see what was up. When Jaime got back from the library, I grabbed the hard drives and headed back to the computer shop. I dropped the stuff off and gave them a little cheat sheet I made that showed the information about the hard drive (master boot record, number of partitions, approximate sizes of the partitions, file system types, etc). Then, due to the job being incomplete, I asked him for a refund until he could actually get 100% of my data back as promised. He refused. He even refused to refund me for the new hard drive which I had just returned to him. We got into a pretty heated discussion regarding it. My argument was basically that I didn't have to pre-pay the first time, so why am I pre-paying the second time? Additionally, he didn't do what he said he was going to do, which was to recover 100% of the data on my hard drive. He was very defensive about the second statement. My point was that he had 1) my old hard drive, 2) my new hard drive and 3) my money. As a consumer, I have absolutely no leverage at this point. It spiraled into me using words like "inept" and "dishonest," though I did not lose my cool. The problem with these people is that they are used to dealing with customers who know absolutely nothing about computers and therefore they can talk down to everyone. Once I started using terms like NTFS, master boot record, and GRUB, he began attempting to make peace with me. "Look, before you go down this road, let me re-scan it and see if we can't get that other partition to show up." In one sense, that's fair enough, but I've already paid for work which he has not proven he can complete.

We left the house to go grocery shopping at 8:07 this morning. We got back at 9:10am. It was great. The weather was better, no one was at the store, and the boys were still refreshed from their sleep. Stephen stood in the main section of the grocery cart the whole time and loved it. Whenever I'd get something from off the shelf, I'd hand it to Stephen and he would set it down in the cart gently. Somehow we got away with only (only.. ha!) spending $140 at the grocery and $20 at the farmers' market, so we'll see if we run out of food this week. We've changed a lot of our eating habits to try to give our children good habits, and eating healthy costs a lot more. Cheap, processed food is almost exclusively an American commodity (though that is changing), and that kind of annoys me. It doesn't seem like it should cost more for me to buy food that was made locally or naturally, but the cheapest option is indeed to get food that was made on the other side of the country, loaded with corn by-products and filler, frozen, and shipped. As a nation, we are now spending a lower percentage of our income on food than ever before, due mostly to technology. Despite spending less on food, we are also fatter than ever before.

I went to the 9:30 Club on Thursday night to see The Books with Steve and Coren. It rained pretty hard for the drive there and the drive back. Driving into DC is hard enough without the weather interfering. I have to say I was fairly underwhelmed. I've sort of made it a point not to attend electronic music concerts, but The Books are somewhere in between. On stage, they synchronize a video and a background audio track using a laptop -> projector. Then they pick up the slack and play whatever instruments are not present in the backing track. They don't try to add anything new and do "live" versions.

Overall it was enjoyable, but for me, most of the reason to see a band live is to take in the nuances of the live version. This show had none of that. Afterwards, we met the band and passed Nick one of our earsauce cd's, which he pretended to be enthused about (they are very nice guys).

Yesterday was Stephen's second "Music Together VIVO" class. The premise of this class is this: the parents are the only ones who have to do anything; the kids can do whatever they want (including nothing). All of the kids walk around aimlessly at some point except for Stephen. Stephen sits in our laps the entire time. If an activity requires us to stand/walk/dance, we have to pick him up or he cries. There was a slight bit of progress yesterday in that he was very interested in the instrument portion, but there was also more crying than the first week.

It's been nice working on new music for a change. No more obsessing and re-obsessing over 5-year-old songs. Out with the old, in with the new. Finally.

My "big computer" (the tower) is back to running normally. I had a slew of problems for months, and it was all ubuntu-related. For the time being, everything is running properly, which is why I'm back to posting pictures on here.

Well well, I finally posted all the vacation photos I wanted. I am over a month behind on photos. I am sucking! Honestly, I've been spending all of my free time trying to finish up the earsauce album, and that's done now (click, then push "play." voilà). I just have to post some pictures from the county fair this weekend, and all will be right with the world.

I made Chicken Cheesesteak sandwiches last night from scratch. No recpie. I thought they were so-so but Steve and Jaime seemed to like them fine. Cut up the chicken into small pieces and cooked it with butter, season all, and pepper in a pan. Added fresh chopped onion. Once it's cooked and the spices taste right, add the provolone cheese right in the pan to melt it all over the chicken. Mix it up and slap that hot mess on a big roll with a little mayo. Next time: different spice(s), add green/red peppers.

Stephen is.... growing up. The good parts of my day get better all the time, and the bad parts of my day get worse (bona fide tantrums). That's just the way it is. Sometimes I can give him a spoon and a cooking pot and he can walk around for an hour playing with them nicely ("cooking"). This morning we played a "game" on the couch where he jumps up and down repeatedly and slams his butt down on my stomach, working his way up to my chest. When he gets far enough up, he jumps off of me and onto the pillow on the couch. Then I tickle him and pick him up and put him on my stomach. The game starts over. We did this about 50-60 times and I was feeling it. Ouch.

We've watched the first three episodes of Pushing Daisies in the past week and a half. My jury's still out. The cinematography is gorgeous and the omniscient narrator is a great character, but I'm not sure I like the dialog. It tries too hard to be clever and turns out wholly unrealistic. Example: Chuck: I've been ruminating, and by "ruminating" I mean "pondering," not "chewing cud." Who talks like that?

I did a bunch of work on the theme/look of this website yesterday. As soon as I was finished with that, I saw that WordPress had upgraded to version 3.0. So, I upgraded this site, my wife's site, and the earsauce site. Then I ran a backup on my server. That all took a bit of time. I wish I would have thought ahead and done these mindless upgrades during game 7 of the NBA Finals last night. I made some changes to this site that are quite noticeable. I think the new darker matting for the photos really helps, especially with black&white images. I think I enhanced readability and simplicity of the site by moving the author/tag information to the top of every post and getting rid of some unnecessary horizontal rules. I really need a banner across the top to finish it off.

We bought a wooden planter and put in a few sun-hardy flowers on our front steps. The bushes/ivy out front need to be trimmed, and I am hoping to do that this evening when it's nice and cool.

At different parts of my life, I have found out that people just love to give away old things, but only if they know that their old "things" are going to take on a new life.

My parents got me a new turntable when I was maybe 17. Well, saying "turntable" nowadays alludes to a DJ's turntable... this is a record player. Most of the music I was listening to at the time was available on records, and over the next few years I found out that people just love to give away their old records. Stacks and stacks of them. Crates full of LPs, from behind the dress clothes in the closet, or under some boxes in the attic. As long as I showed a genuine interest in these records--which I did--and as long as I would allow them to talk to me about their albums as they looked through them one last time, people had no problem giving me all their LPs.

I mean, you can get LPs at a thrift store for a buck a piece, and there are occasionally some good finds in there, but getting 70 or 100 records all at once... there's nothing like it. And you have all the time in the world to sift through them and listen to whatever you want, in your own home.

Well, once I figured out this small fact of life, I casually brought up listening to records in conversations with my friends' parents. Instantly, I'm in some sort of club. "Oh, you listen to records? You like records? Come upstairs to the closet in the guest room, I'll give you a whole bunch of records." This is how I ended up with about 700 LPs in my collection, most of them free. This is also how I ended up with 4 or 5 repeat copies of some popular albums. Then the record donor would paw through all the records, telling me which ones they liked, or which ones were no good (those were always their sister's albums, or their ex-husband's).

There is something satisfying about music on vinyl. It's just there. I don't have to worry about losing my data or any of that nonsense. Nothing can destroy it except a house fire. The records will even survive a flood and still be playable once given a cursory cleaning. They will still be playable hundreds of years from now, provided anyone has a player for them. Brand new store-bought CDs will last 20 years if they are lucky (even with no scratches).

Jaime got a new laptop in January and I inherited her old one. I did a lot of tinkering around with it, and eventually it could do everything that I needed it to do, just like a brand new laptop. Like old vinyl records, a lot of old computers still work.

Now, my main computer is irreplaceable and no amount of tinkering or OS installations will replace the sheer power of it. Being able to manage/modify my library of [over] 20,000 photos with Lightroom was unheard of 10 years ago.

BUT, running Windows 7 should not require a supercomputer. I can understand that a lot of modern software (especially games) will inherently require a more powerful computer, but booting up into Windows really should not require an increasing amount of computer power. The technology has increased so quickly that no one is focusing on making their software work correctly. There is so much extra processing power and RAM in modern computers that programmers figure no one will notice if their software is full of memory leaks and requires half of your CPU's power for simple calculations. It has gotten to the point where cell phones have a 1GHz processor in them and there are still mysterious delays when trying to do something simple like navigate the menu system.

Anyhow, this has made me a magnet for old computers recently. People love it if you tell them that you can make an old computer run a few modern programs and perform well on the internet. My father brought me four kind-of-mostly-working computers last week, Steve has some stuff for me, and Eric got an old Pentium III from his boss that he gave me today. So far I have breathed life into the best computer that I received, a Pentium IV with 256megs of RAM (I spent 20 bucks and upgraded it to 512mb RAM). I gave it back to my Dad when he drove through town a few days ago. Now I have this Pentium III with only 64mb of RAM and I'm trying to find something to run on it. I may just use DOS on it.

Anyone got any old computers that work? First I'd have to get rid of these current ones (and prove to my wife that I'm not a hoarder), but I'm open to some old computers that are just sitting around.

Well, I installed two distributions of linux today, national nerd day. I upgraded my desktop computer to the newest version of mint this morning. I had only one major problem, and fixing it involved temporarily moving my desktop computer upstairs so I could plug into the internet while I looked up a solution before Stephen woke up.

So, after I got that straightened out, Jaime brought in the mail, which had a replacement DVD-ROM drive for this laptop. I reformatted it and put Ubuntu 10.04 on it. Things are going well so far.

What a disaster my computer situation has been.

Three day weekend for working folks. Going to Jaime's parents' house tomorrow, and planning to do music stuff with Steve on Monday. Extra days are nice.

It still amazes me how fast Stephen learns things. He got a lot of new toys on his birthday and he seems to have a pretty good understanding of most of them by now. He can also do things like: open the right cupboard, get out a can of green beans, and walk over and put it in the dog's bowl (we feed the dogs green beans as part of their dinner every night. We, of course, open the can before we feed it to the dogs, but he's got the right idea). He can also do really annoying things like unlock the dish washer while it is running or pull all the glass bowls out of the cupboards onto the kitchen floor.

We had a great time at Stephen's birthday party, and I think he handled it well. We managed to squeeze in a bath (after the blood-red icing got all over his face, in his hair, and on his feet) and a nap for him during the party. He opened most of his presents by himself, and thinks wrapping paper is the greatest thing invented by man. Also, the leftovers from the party and dinner with my family kept us going for 4 days after the party.

I ordered an exact copy of the laptop that I killed (used laptop on ebay) in the hopes of plugging in my old hard drive and being able to pick up where I left off. I got the computer via fedex on Tuesday, and no such luck. Old hard drive is destroyed. Old cd drive is destroyed. On a positive note, my old memory worked.

I still have a lot of pictures to post from the past week. I need to get moving on that.

Well, I inherited Jaime's old laptop in January. I spent a little over a hundred bucks upgrading/repairing it (keep in mind that I don't have a job.. so any money that I spend makes me feel a little bit guilty).

Well, last night, after having a laptop of my own for an entire four months, I spilled wine on it. The whole living room was dark except for the glow of the laptop because I was the last one up. I ran to get a paper towel, and I as soon as the paper towel made one swipe across the keyboard, *pop* goes the laptop. Boom. Pow. Bam. Miniature explosion sound and the whole thing went dead. I opened the laptop up all the way to 180 degrees and laid it on the carpet upside down over night. That is probably what I should have done while the computer was still operational.

There is still a tiny bit of hope that it will turn on, but the rational side of me knows that something in the motherboard blew up and the computer is inoperable. For good. I had gotten so used to hanging out in the living room with the laptop. I basically never made trips downstairs except to edit photos.