What a week. Henry's due date is fast approaching and we still have a couple things left to do. On Sunday we replaced the garbage disposal under the kitchen sink. That went off without a hitch and finally gave me an excuse to throw away half of the crap in the cabinets. (We can't be the only ones with far too many vases, can we? Annoying)

On Monday Jaime had another level II ultrasound scheduled because the baby seems to be quite large, and the ultrasound basically confirmed that. The baby's abdomen measured in the 99th percentile. With that comes large collar bones and shoulders which can be hard to birth. Stephen behaved very badly during all of this.

On Wednesday, Stephen and I had lunch with a friend of mine. We went to the Backyard Grill, which Jaime and I have been meaning to go to ever since it opened. My food was really good and any place that dumps SeasonAll on their french fries is okay in my book.

Wednesday night was our interview with the Fat Man. It went all right. It was fun having a lot of my family members from up and down the east coast listening live. I was a little annoyed/frustrated at the time because Steve was mostly chatting on facebook (you can hear incessant typing at some points) and trying to interject whatever awful zingers people were feeding him. Also, by the end I couldn't get a word in edgewise. But when I listen to the recording, I realize that it was mostly paranoia and we did pretty well. The interview definitely needed more Evan though.

It can be heard here on the earsauce news/mentions page.

The interview went late (until 11pm) and I had a hard time going to sleep after that. We met up at Steve's office so we could be on landlines and be able to see each other during the interview. On Thursday, everyone at Jaime's work threw a baby shower for her. She had to leave straight from that and go to the (now-weekly) appointment with the OB. Her car was completely full of presents, decorations and balloons. We met her there to discuss possible birthing options with the Doc.

Then we came home and unloaded the car. Our living room is completely full of baby clothing, balloons, and gift bags. Just when we get on top of things, we get assaulted by the kindness of others AGAIN. Leave it to me to complain about free stuff, hehe. The big present that she got from her bosses was a double stroller, which we are quite thankful for. Those things are hundreds of dollars!

Last night was the Leon Redbone concert at The Barns (a small performance space within the Wolf Trap Center for Performing Arts that seats 382). I'm not much of a concert-goer, but I have a strange obsession with seeing Leon Redbone. I have seen him over ten times. I lost count several shows ago. Now, the last time I went was with a group of 5 or 6 at the Birchmere. That night was an "off" night. He did several songs twice within the same set (very strange), and there was a lot of awkward silence.... more than usual, let's say. It actually made me reconsider going to see him every time he's in town. But Jaime got me two tickets for Christmas and last night was the night. The Barns is my favorite venue around here and we sat right in the middle of the balcony.

The show last night was great. Leon was lucid (unlike last time) and it was a really good set list. It's the only time I've ever seen him that you could easily understand everything he said (maybe he was sober?). He explained the history of a lot of the songs/artists he was covering, which is something I enjoy. He did about 50% fast songs, when usually he only does 1 or 2 in a night. The slow songs are nice too, but his guitar work on the fast-paced stuff is always quite impressive. I'm going to be 30 in May, and a Leon Redbone concert is one of the only places I can go and still be the youngest person there by about 20 years.

(I love parentheses more than anyone I know)

If you visit my Visitor Map, it says that this website has had 4,400 unique visitors in the past 60 days (not counting bots). I actually had to lower it from 90 days to 60 days because it exceeds my server's memory load to process all the visitors from the past 90 days at once. Anyway, that averages out to nearly 75 hits per day, not counting repeat visitors.

I also have a "Wordpress Statistics" plugin installed, which shows far fewer hits, more like 25 or 30 visitors per day. This plugin also shows me where on the web all my visitors come from (whether it's google searches or links from other sites etc). I already uninstalled the default WordPress hit counter because its numbers were wildly inflated (that's the hit counter that WordPress.com-hosted sites use).

Why would there be such a huge discrepancy in the numbers when neither of them are counting bots? Google analytics also provides inflated numbers, in my opinion. Even though it's a blow to my ego (hardy har), I trust the counter with the lowest numbers. It doesn't really matter to me; I'm not a professional blogger. I'm just confused as to how it all works. Why would google analytics show so many more hits than my WordPress Stats plugin?

Who can I turn to? Who can I trust?

Now that I have everything pretty much organized the way I want it, this site is a bit too large to browse the traditional way. Here are some ways to categorize this site that will allow you to peak into my past a little bit. If you ever have some spare time, you may find this of interest.

Music Category - Both finished and unfinished songs.. a way to reduce the site to just music and playable files.
LJ Category - Old pictures, including our New Hampshire and Alaska vacations.
Snapshots Category - Sick of me blabbing? Tired of reading about linux? This is a way to reduce my blog to nothing but photos.
Video Category - YouTube videos, mostly of my child.

'Bio' Tag - A list of posts I have written that tell an artist's life story.
'Animals' Tag - Posts relating to animals, most of them being images of my pets.
'Photog' Tag - Tags where I mention techniques related to photography. May contain insights/tips.
'Favorites' Tag - This is a subsection of my snapshots category that contains my favorite photos.
'Linkfest' Tag - Posts containing a lot of links to other sites/articles/videos.
'Facts' Tag - Facts gathered from a variety of locations. A good series on this site.

Pogo (otherwise known as "that kid who cuts up scenes from Disney movies and makes songs out of them") is back, with a real-world mix of 100% original samples. The subject: his mother and her pretty garden.

In the words of my friend Adam: "This kid is annoying. Everything he does is perfect." After seeing all those beautiful camera shots, I agree that this guy has too much talent. Everything he does is so ethereal, atmospheric, and professional. I wonder how he made the video. It looks like some really nice lenses, so it's probably a digital camera that can shoot video also.

Stephen certainly is mesmerized as soon as the lady comes on screen. This is one video that he watched the whole way through.

Edit: I don't know why I said that Pogo is "back," considering he never went anywhere.

I grew up on the demoscene, though I never participated. When I was 13 years old, I would dial in to a BBS that had ftp capability so I could download demos and songs off hornet.org. In its most basic form, a "demo" is an executable file that shows off the graphics/programming/music talents of a group of people that form a "demogroup". It can be any visual effects/themes imaginable, synced to music. Demos have been around for over 20 years on all platforms of computers. About a week ago, I was curious to see if the demoscene was still alive, and it is still alive and well (mostly in the EU, just like when I was a kid).

Demos were always "cutting edge" as far as technology was concerned. People were programming 3d effects in their demos well before computer games were using 3d textures and shadowing effects. The average user could not run the current day's demos when they were first released due to not owning the most current model of CPU/graphics card. Nowadays, the visual effects/animation world has completely caught up to the demoscene as far as visual effects go. Special effects producers can now do all the things that programmers could do. This has really made the demoscene less relevant, in my opinion.

One thing that continues to be fresh about the demoscene, though, is the file-size limitations. There are categories for 64k, 4k, and 1kb filesizes. This places a limit on the total size of the demo (including textures, music, graphics, and coding). For instance, this demo has a file size of 1k:

That entire video, including the song, is generated on a PC from a .exe that is 1024 bytes (smaller than the size of this post). These days, it's all about exploiting tricks in people's graphics cards. Even though it has a very small file size, it has very steep system requirements to run this file. There are even competitions who can make the best PC Game at different file sizes. All downloads are free and can be found at pouet.net.

Some more demos with small file sizes:

4k - Elevated by RGBA and TBC (2009)
4k - nasa by Still(2010)
128bytes - spongy by TBC (2009)
32bytes - matisse by orbitaldecay (2010)
1k - Tracie by TBC (2007)
4k - Sincere by TBC (2008)

One day before Stephen turned 10months old, we spent our first dollars on formula. Since the hospital gave us so much formula and my wife has been pumping like a machine, we have not had to buy any formula for Stephen. Theoretically, he'll be done with formula altogether in another 8-10 weeks. He's eating a lot more real food now, just stuff I give him that I'm snacking on. Popcorn, banana, dry cereal, oatmeal. He can use his sippy cup pretty well by now.

What would you do for five bucks? Fiverr.com finds out (actually, sellers only receive four dollars after fees and stuff).

This is all the rage right now, and it will only be relevant for 1 or 2 more days. A 24/7 webcam of some hatching hummingbird eggs. The entire nest is slightly bigger than a golf ball and the eggs are about the size of Tic Tacs. Yesterday around 11am EST, some cracks were spotted on the eggs. Since then, more and more people have tuned in to watch. Last night when the sun went down, no progress had been made. There should be light on the west coast at 10am EST. I've been watching a blank screen since 6am this morning.

A while back, I made a post featuring a track by an mp3.com artist named Thuggin' It. Apparently there are very few people who remember Thuggin' It the way I do (here is one place that talks about it and titles the post "Worst Rap Song EVER!"). Though I didn't mention it in my post, I knew of another song that the kid had released under a different name, presumably because the material released under his Thuggin' It moniker was the butt of so many jokes. I searched the internet, I searched my hard drive, and I asked a few friends about it. No one knew what I was talking about (or even believed such a thing existed, quite frankly). I went through my ancient "misc mp3" folder and listened to every song that I didn't recognize. I couldn't find the song anywhere. Why would I have deleted such a gem?

I had one last-ditch effort. I contacted my cousin David (with whom I lived for three summers) because I know we definitely used to rock out to both of those songs. He still has his old PII up and running as a toy for his 16month old daughter. He said it was running very slowly, the registry full of junk, and his daughter had all but destroyed the mouse and keyboard, but he would look for it. The next night I received a text message: "Masta Verbalists - Welkome 2 Our World."

Sometime that weekend he was able to get the file off his old PC and email it to me. I have searched quite a bit for any reference to this song on the internet, and it seems to have vanished from the collective unconscious. So I am proud to say that I have exclusive content of this awful track, released by the Thuggin' It crew under a different name. His voice is immediately recognizable.

Masta Verbalists - Welkome 2 Our World

There is a lot of talk recently about enacting new "Financial Literacy" requirements in order for students to finish High School in this area. A lot of schools have pushed back the launch of the program for another year because of budget problems. So, the states who mismanaged their money are teaching our children about financial literacy? Am I the only one bothered by this? To quote Bill Hicks, "It's irony on a base level, but I like it. It's still a hoot."

I got this link off fazed.org: The 100 best free science documentaries online. This is my kind of thing. Documentaries. Free. Online. The list loses a great deal of credibility when Super Size Me is the first "science documentary" on the list, though. Just saying.

Michał Jacaszek finally came to America. Just come do D.C. and I'm there! A partial clip from his concert in NY on Feb 11:

I like to say how much I love Lightroom and that I don't miss Photoshop at all. This is only partially true. I sort of have to say that because I spent $299 on Lightroom version 1. With that money, you get all 1.xx upgrades until version 2 comes out, then you have to pay $99 to get all version 2.xx upgrades. I saved my $99 and did not get version 2, but version 3 is coming out this April, and I will spend the 99 bucks on it. They have put some Photoshop-like features in that will make me miss Photoshop even less, such as the ability to make selections, the ability to combine photos into HDR images, and improved features all-around, notably sharpening and noise reduction.

I have been wearing Acuvue 2 contacts for about ten years. These are now considered the "old style." They have advanced several generations since then. Now the contact lenses are made of different material and they allow your eyes to "breathe" more. When I got an eye exam two weekends ago, the optometrist gave me one pair of Acuvue Oasys and one pair of my good old standbys, Acuvue 2. I put on the Oasys contacts at the doctors office, and at first my vision wasn't as clear as it should have been. I think that after I got used to them, they were fine, since I do not notice a major difference right now (I just switched to the Acuvue 2 pair about ten minutes ago). The side of the story that I did not tell my optometrist is that I never take proper care of my contacts/eyes. I leave them in for 2-3 weeks without ever taking them out before bed. This is why I am leaning towards the newer, more expensive contacts that allow oxygen transfer through the lens. Another notable thing from my exam: I haven't needed a stronger prescription in the last two years, so that's a good thing.

I finally figured out what makes my desktop PC freeze. It's µTorrent, which is supposed to be the bittorrent client that is more streamlined. Before I had µTorrent, I was using Vuze, but that was too bloated and so forth. Anyone have any suggestions of torrent management software (preferably one with a smaller footprint than Vuze or BitComet)?

I take 3mg of melatonin before bed every night. Well, every night that I don't forget. I have been doing it for about a year now, and I really like it as a sleep aid. It is a naturally occurring biochemical, so it doesn't have the same effect as a "drug" would. The purpose is not to make you really sleepy or groggy; it just makes you feel naturally tired. Around 20-40minutes after taking it, I just sort of yawn and say "I think I should go to bed now. That would be good." It has other advantages, too, like the fact that it allows me to get up feeling completely normal if Stephen starts crying at 2am (where 99% of sleep aids make it much harder to get up before you have gotten 8hrs of rest). It is safe, has no side effects, and has no chance of addiction. The problem is that an overwhelming majority of the population says that melatonin has no effect on them. I will say that it took two weeks of me taking it every night before it had an effect on me. Maybe I wasn't noticing the subtleties before that, or maybe my body had not gotten adjusted to 3mg of melatonin at roughly the same time every day. No idea, but I like it.

And finally, How Tough are NES Games? Answer: really, really tough. Like, getting-run-over-by-a-car-and-still-working tough. Like, getting-dropped-thirty-feet-onto-concrete-and-still-working tough. (Note: usually when I find out about a YouTube video via another blog, I don't actually link to the blog post, but this is my friend Martha's blog, so I didn't take the credit this time)

Edit: fazed.org copied me for once (not really), and put up a link to the 60 Minutes story about the Bloom Box. Nice try, copycats! I was first!