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.

(An entry about this very site. How boring.)

A while back (over two years ago), I thought that maybe I could/would monetize this blog. I think a lot of people go through this phase when starting a blog. I attempted to write articles, provided tons of links, and installed ads on the site. Remember when I was writing a lot of short biographies for musicians? Basically, if you can be the number one search result for virtually anything in google, then you are able to amass followers and maybe get some revenue from advertisements. For instance, if I could get this site to come up as the number one result for the google search "stay at home dad," then I would get thousands of free visits every month. The more you learn, however, the more you find out that SEO (search engine optimization) is a very tricky game and requires a lot of time. Anyway, that notion has long since left me and I have been attempting to clean up the look and feel of this site. I removed all instances of advertisements. I stopped creating backlinks (what a waste of time). But don't worry, the useless facts aren't going anywhere! I love doing those.

I think I'm going to keep the extremely simple look of this page, but I've been looking through a lot of lists of WordPress plugins. One of the reasons I'm such a fan of WordPress is its unending supply of plugins that can do anything you need. Need to implement a slick-looking slideshow of your images? No problem, there's a plugin for that. And it's free. Same with virtually anything else you could think of. These plugins have allowed me to modify this site well beyond the initial theme, and I don't even know any base-level programming.

I am also in the middle of taking steps to protect the material on this site, even though that most likely won't ever be an issue. I posted a link to a creative commons license and am testing a bunch of watermarks on my pictures. I can't quite get a size/opacity combination that works for me yet. You want the watermark to be legible enough to point people back to your site, but you don't want it to be annoying and take over the image.

Anyway, we are under construction over here, but it's the kind of construction that still leaves one lane open. You can browse, but the experience might be hampered for about a week.

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've been interested in robotics since I was a child. There were several times when I was young that I was going to spend a large chunk of my savings on a toy robot (before they were widespread and commercially available, I used to look through Edmund's Scientific catalogs at the primitive robots). Now I follow several robotics blogs. The best one right now is http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics

The most interesting developments in recent years all have to do with autonomous robotics. The Roomba (or robotic floorvacs in general) is a common example of this. The Roomba Robotic Floorvac is autonomous in that it makes its own decisions about where to go, where to avoid, and when it is finished. You do not need to program it or provide it with the floor plan of your house in order for it to do its job vacuuming. It also knows how to avoid stairs on its own.

RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition and the star events in this competition are the soccer events. These are not remote-controlled robots; they actually know how to play soccer. Each side's goalposts are a different color so the robots know how to orient themselves based on the goal posts and the lines in the soccer "field." There are two main divisions, humanoid robots and "other." The humanoid robots are bipedal. Within the humanoid category, there are several sizes, the largest being adult sized robots. The larger sizes are not interesting yet; they spend most of their energy just trying to balance and not fall over and they basically behave like zombies. If they fall over, they cannot correct themselves. The next size down are teen robots and then KidSize robots. The KidSize humanoid robots are actually quite interesting. They can make passes to teammates, the goalies can dive (more like a controlled fall) to make a save, and they can stand back up if/when they fall over. They know to go back to the center of the field after a goal is scored.

For the past several years, a team from Germany has cleaned up in the KidSize humanoid category, but this year the USA took the cup thanks to a team of graduate students from Virginia Tech. The soccer games themselves are not particularly interesting, but the implications for robotics are quite interesting. It should be stated that the end goal of these roboticists is to have a team of AdultSize humanoid robots that can beat the best team of human players in the year 2050. For now it seems like a lofty goal, but given the advances made in the past five years alone, it may be possible before the year 2050.

The finals match of the KidSize humanoid robots can be seen here. And for a whole lot more videos in all of the (often strange) categories, you can go here.

It is not very often that I get motivated to roll up my sleeves and fix some things that bother me about this site. Editing the look ("theme") of a WordPress site involves editing a style.css stylesheet and/or any number of .php files. Now, I don't know the first thing about either of these, so that involves a lot of googling, trial-and-error, pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth. But once I get going, I usually discover a lot of new "problems" to fix.

In many ways I was lucky when I first started this blog (and didn't know a thing about WordPress). I immediately disabled the "Visual" mode in the post editor and switched to HTML editing mode. The Visual text editor makes it impossible to align/space everything correctly, and it inserts unnecessary html tags all over the place.

I initially searched for "minimal" when searching for themes for this site. I settled on the ever-so-popular Journalist theme (preview of original). I was fortunate, because this has to be one of the easiest themes to modify. People have modified it and released unofficial versions of it, like Journalist 1.9.9.9 and Journalist 2.1. I have slowly morphed Journalist 1.9.9.9 into what you see now. It's larger, more spread out, and the photo caption boxes are different. I just have to change the title at the top of the page to a banner image and it will hardly be recognizable.

Last night I eventually got everything lined up the way I wanted (it literally comes down to shifting things 2 pixels this way, 1 pixel that way). Then I snooped around and found out how to make a permanent, auto-generated Archives page. Also--remember when I made that "WordPress Plugins Used on this Blog" entry? Well, that took a lot of work to type all that out, insert the links, and format the post. Last night I found a plugin that automatically generates a list/description of plugins, so I made a permanent page here that does the same thing. Pretty cool.

After having nice weather for a few days, we are supposed to have a couple of scorchers this weekend. Wimbledon starts Monday. My fav tournament.

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.

Tennis is back but I don't really care this time around. I think I'm sick of all the weather delays and timezone difference issues. I got two tickets to the final match of the Legg Mason Tennis Classic coming this August. I had a good time at last year's matches even though the heat was quite bad in early August. I'm excited to be going again. Going to the Men's finals ensures that you'll see at least one "famous" player in person.

In many ways, babies and dogs go hand-in-hand. For instance, I gave Stephen about ¼ of a leftover biscuit in his highchair this morning. He just mashed it up and made a huge mess. I'm not sure how much he even ate. With one swipe of a clean cloth, a hundred little crumbs fell to the floor. The floor was clean within ten seconds.

I think I have the new/old laptop set up pretty well by now. Didn't take long, once I received my replacement CD drive.

WordPress is now seven years old, and it is growing faster than ever. This tiny blog post is a good recap of the accomplishments of WordPress, most of them happening in recent times. This free software now manages over 20 million of the world's websites.

WordPress (the software used to manage this blog) has changed the way I think about computers and software. The more I learned about WordPress, the more I couldn't believe it was free. That prompted me to try a version of linux (a free alternative to Microsoft Windows), and has eventually landed me here, where I only use free or legally purchased software on all my computers. To be honest, once you learn your way around linux, it takes less effort to operate free software than it does to steal commercially-available software for Windows through means of warez.

I just took the dogs out literally minutes before it started raining out of nowhere. Gotta love it.

Since I began this post this morning (when I said I didn't care about Tennis), Robin Soderling has ended Roger Federer's streak of 23 consecutive appearances in the semifinals of major tournaments. One of the greatest streaks alive in sports, and I saw it end on live tv. To put the streak in perspective, it's like Tiger Woods finishing in the top 4 of every Major Golf Tournament for six straight years. It's equivalent to the same team making it to the "final four" of the NCAA basketball tournament for 23 years in a row. Robin Soderling is now the only player in history to have beaten both Nadal and Federer at the French Open.

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.

I am doing endless reconfigures/reformats/repartitionings/reinstalls on my desktop PC. Trying to get my linux and windows installs just right. The curse of being a nerd. I won't get into the hairy details at this point (hopefully ever), but i'm using virtualbox to sort of emulate a PC within a PC. And on this emulated (guest) PC I installed Windows XP. Hopefully, this means I can run Windows programs from within Linux. This way I can run the Windows programs that I need without rebooting my system.

Other than wasting all my free time with computer nonsense, I have been trying to get back on a roll with this blog. Needless to say, it's hard to maintain a web page when you don't have a computer.

I have recently done our grocery shopping at night after Stephen is sleeping. It cuts down on the time Jaime and I can spend together, but it also cuts down on the amount of time I spend at the grocery store. The place is empty at 8:30pm on a week night (of course).

I have also been spending/wasting about 30-60 minutes per day playing liero. I have a permanent server set up called "classic liero" if anyone ever wants to play. I have all the settings and weapons perfectly trimmed to get rid of boring moments and redundant or unfair weapons.