Evan Valentine, Stay-at-Home Dad

I'm getting back into a non-tv phase. This is a good thing--a very good thing. I used to watch cartoons all morning with Stephen, and then leave it on ESPN's endless loop of Sports Center all day. There is no reason to watch ESPN at all anymore since football is over. Without Merril Hoge, there is no analysis worth watching. Merril Hoge is the best post-game analysis personality, in any sport, on any channel. You have to ignore the fact that nearly all of his predictions are wrong; that is not his thing. I love all of his little "inside the play" replays.

I should just cancel all of my DVR recordings (PBS' Nature, FRONTLINE, Nova) and stop downloading documentary specials. I don't watch any of them. I just watch 60 Minutes every week. That's it. I'm listening to more music as a result, and writing more blog entries. (It's not all good, however. I spend a lot of time on link sites).

The verdict is that I really like Linux Ubuntu. If something goes wrong or does not work "out of the box," things get very difficult, very fast. For instance, my Logitech webcam was working in every program except Skype, but after searching a lot of forums, I found that the webcam works in Skype when I load it by typing "LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype" instead of just typing "skype." It was a pain to figure out, but now that I know, it's not a big deal. It would be much harder if I wasn't running GNOME. This old laptop doesn't even have enough power to run Skype video chat in Windows XP, so I don't actually have any other options.

Speaking of that, I spent about a hundred bucks last night to repair/upgrade this laptop (Dell laptop from 2004). This old battery lasts 7 minutes when unplugged, and the keyboard is kind of destroyed, so I spent about 50 bucks buying replacements for both of those. Hopefully replacing the keyboard is as easy as it looks. I also spent 49 bucks on 2gigabytes of memory. I'd like to extend the life of this laptop for at least a few more years. Running linux is already helping me turn this little pony into a fast horse, and upgrading the memory should make everything run smoothly even though I like to keep lots of software open (and 10+ tabs in my web browser).

Now that my photos site is all debugged and displaying properly, I have no excuse not to finish it. Still need to finish my little bio/profile/about page, and I'm going through several years of photographs, finding a few of the best ones to add. That is where they have been/will be some photos on here recently from a few years ago.

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:

Jacaszek - Lament - Le Poisson Rouge NYC 02/11/2010

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!

(The title of this post refers to the bottom section of the post. I'm sure you'll agree that it is stupidity in action)

There are rumors of another big snowstorm on the horizon. No one is saying how big or what portion of it is hysteria, but the current Wolfram|Alpha prediction for Manassas is snow all day Monday and Tuesday (Feb. 22nd and 23rd). I still haven't dug my car out of the snow from Feb. 6th and 9th.

We got another fish for our one-fish bowl this weekend. He is a red Betta named Monte. I took several pictures, but none are any good. I'll get one eventually. Aquarium photography is nearly impossible.

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Steve (my friend) and I were watching this video last night, and it made Stephen (my son) so happy for some reason. He had a big huge smile while he rocked his head and pulled on some guitar strings. It was quite adorable.

The Morning Benders - Excuses

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I have already showed the following link to most everyone I know, but I'm posting it here anyway so I can lay it to rest.

Q: Who polices the police?

A: Police police police police.

The first two words mean "those who police the police." It's like "fashion police" or "fun police" but it's police for the police. The third word is the verb. The last word is the initial "police" that need policing. It could also be

A: The police police are the ones who police the police

But that's not as cool (I don't know if "cool" is the right word here, heh).

Another more extreme example is this:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

The above is a grammatically correct sentence because the word "buffalo" is a) a city b) a transitive verb meaning to bully or intimidate, and c) an animal (both singular and plural). One translation is "[Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo."

Or "Bison from Buffalo, New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community."

Steve and I were trying to think of another one last night. If "orange" was a verb (meaning "to color something orange" maybe?) you could do something interesting.

Orange's orange oranges orange Orange's oranges.

Or "Orange-colored oranges from Orange county paint Orange county's [other] oranges an orange color."

Oh well, that's a fake one, but that's the best we could do. The wikipedia article says the same type of construction can be made with the words dice, fish, right and smelt.

Well, I'm composing this post in linux (Ubuntu 9.10, to be exact). Now I can be an elitist. Yay.

They make it so easy to set up a dual boot. You can download a "Windows Installer" that automatically sets up a partition and the dual boot screen when you restart. It also leaves Windows XP as the default boot option (something that doesn't take over your PC, how refreshing).

First and foremost, when you set up a new computer or operating system, you try to get on the internet. Well, that didn't work for me. After reinstalling Ubuntu three separate times, printing about 50 pages of forum nonsense, and typing "sudo [command]" about 200 times, I finally got Ubuntu to recognize the WiFi card in this laptop. I was immediately introduced to the negative aspects of linux. Supporters of linux say "It's not linux' fault that manufacturers don't make drivers for linux!" I had to use ndiswrapper to convert Windows XP drivers into linux drivers. Finding the correct drivers was a snap, the rest is entirely linux' fault. They have to know that a lot of people are going to encounter the same problem that I did, and they do absolutely nothing to make it intuitive to new users. I had to download 4 packages (installers for utilities/software) on another computer, burn them to a cd, install them in Ubuntu, and then figure out how to use the wrapper. Then I had to diagnose what the conflicts were and remove the other...... okay, I'm bored typing this, so I can only imagine how it is reading it. I'll stop now.

The point: it is definitely linux' fault that this nonsense isn't at all accessible. I am in at least the 98th percentile of computer users, and it took me 8-10 hours of work to get the internet on this sleek, modernized installation of linux. There is nowhere I can go and click "disable all default WiFi drivers," for instance, which would have saved me a lot of time. At least do something to try to make it intuitive for new users. From what I read, my problem occurs in a large percentage of Ubuntu installs, yet there is still no easy (or even reasonable) fix.

I guess it's just a different mindset.

There are some advantages I have already found. You update all your software from one window. Just a few clicks, and all the software on your whole setup is updated at once. Also, Ubuntu natively supports a desktop that is twice as big as your monitor. Just scroll over, and you have the space of a whole other desktop. It also natively supports scrolling by dragging with two fingers at once on the trackpad (like a MAC). That's something that could get addicting. I already use it kind of naturally when browsing. No need to find the scroll bar to browse further down on a web page. We'll see how this pans out.

Also, all software downloads files to the same place. Adjusting the colors/theme of your setup takes effect on all installed software.

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.

I am typing this from my new laptop. And by "new laptop," I mean Jaime's discarded ex-laptop, circa 2005. I just did a system restore and spent about THREE HOURS uninstalling AOL and all the other crap that comes pre-installed. Then, after I did all that nonsense, I find out about the PC Decrapifier--made for removing all superfluous software at once. Maybe next time, sigh... maybe next time. I'm already getting used to hitting the missing 'x' key on this banged-up keyboard. So, since this computer is older and needs some help being fast, I installed Google Chrome. I think I like it. I mean, the tv commercial said it was fast, and commercials don't lie, right? Right? It has some cool ideas, like running a separate process for each tab within the browser, so if a website crashes the browser it only takes out the one tab.

I'm afraid I am addicted to lamebook, and I have brought my wife along with me on that one. It's like bash.org, with less racism! It includes such gems as this idiot:

It's bad enough to get teen pop lyrics on your arm like it's Shakespeare or something, but then to do THAT? Why not just put "waist" on there? I guess I like sites that make me feel good about myself (those are not hard to find these days). Jaime and I were wondering if the tattoo artist caught the mistake and just let the kid be an idiot, or if the kid and the artist are both blissfully ignorant of basic spelling.

I don't think Wolfram|Alpha has gotten enough publicity (not that putting it on my blog will help with that). It is definitely the next generation of search engines. It combines data from google searches, databases, and Mathematica to not only retrieve information but put it in a useful format. It also traces your IP and chooses results most likely to relate to you. For instance, if I search Springfield from my PC, it assumes I mean Springfield, Virginia because it is only a few towns over. Here are a few more examples:

weather in washington dc when rickey henderson was born. Despite the fact that Rickey Henderson was born in Chicago and has nothing to do with D.C., it retrieves his birthday and displays the weather in Washintgon, D.C. on that date. It turns the information into graph form, which is typically much more useful than straight data.

internet usage in europe. Again it displays it in a variety of forms, including a color-coded map, all which it generates real-time. It does not have to store all of this information (graphs, maps) anywhere on a server; it just calculates it as you search.

x^2 sin(x). Not sure what is going to keep people from cheating on math homework. You can go down to the derivative section and click "show steps," and it will show the answer and every step and rules that were applied.

new york. Basic city search. Shows current local weather in addition to the usual population-type stuff.

ibm apple intel. Real-time stock comparison. It not only shows current prices, but it plots graphs that historically compare the prices of the stocks you entered. It also compares their performance vs. that of the S&P500, bonds, and T-bills. This is all information that was readily available before, but this kind of comparison would have taken at least 30 minutes of work prior to Wolfram|Alpha. Now it takes seconds.

eiffel tower sears tower empire state building. It shows all measurements in standard U.S. measurements because it knows I am searching from a computer in the United States. Metric can easily be accessed, of course, by clicking "Show Metric."

2 slices bread + 8oz 2% milk + 2 eggs + 1tsp butter + 1tsp olive oil. Typical American breakfast. I included the butter for the toast and the olive oil for the eggs. It combines nutritional information for all listed ingredients and makes a food-label type list of nutritional information. Normally it would take some time and thought to calculate the calories alone in this meal. Now you can see everything from calories/fat content to Riboflavin content in seconds. If you would like to be more specific, you can change a lot of the information at the top of the page, just under the search query bar. You can change "eggs" to poached, fried, scrambled, etc. You can change the type of bread to wheat, rye, pumpernickel...

$200,000 15 year mortgage at 4.125% interest.

valentine mcdaniel huff young. Comparison of a lot of surnames in my family. It can also tell you how two people are related like daughter of my first cousin or great uncle's father's brother's daughter's son.

That's quite enough. Most categories can be expanded by clicking "More" in the upper-right corner of the results box. Also, you can save the results of any search as a .pdf file to be used in presentations and the like.

We are buried in snow. I just took my final measurement of the night--22½ inches. It is still snowing a little bit, so we will probably get to 23 inches falling in the span of 26 hours. For this area, that might as well be eight feet. We are going to try to get a few pictures of Stephen in the snow tomorrow. It is very hard to even take the dogs out in the current conditions.

Spent a good portion of time upgrading WordPress to version 2.9 today. This doesn't change my blog to the reader but just how I use it as "Administrator." There is something that comes with WordPress called Akismet. This little plugin collects data from all the other blogs about which comments are "spam," and deletes them automatically for you. You have the ability to review them... blogs really get a lot of these things; here is a good example:

Hey this was potentially one of the most intelligent posts I've had the chance to go over on the subject so far. I don't have any idea where you get all of your information but keep it coming! I am gunna send a few individuals to this site to check this out. Fantastic, simply fantastic. I'm have just started getting into writing articles myself, nothing remotely close to your writing skills (doh) but I'd love for you to check out my work in progress someday!

...Followed by some sort of link to a used item for sale. The thing that really makes it funny is that it is linked to a post of mine with no words.

Lots of things are just random encouragement in poor english:

Very great web.
The info here is very important.

I will refer it to my friends.

Cheers

Then if you click the person's name it takes you to some whey protein sales site. Broken English is throughout:

Dear Author blog.evanvalentine.com !
I am final, I am sorry, but you could not give little bit more information.

So weird. I also wonder how many of these are related to mechanical turk.

I'm going to nerd out here for a second. Bear with me.

I built a new computer over an 18month period. That alone is a long story. It was meant to be a gift to my brother but I failed over and over to get this thing to boot. Anyhow, I instead bought my brother a camera and this is now my computer. I got it working maybe six months ago. It's a new computer. It's nice. I can actually use Lightroom as it was meant to be used. Blah blah. I've never been one for flashy new computers; I always just wish my old one would have kept working. Anyway, it took me way too long to realize that this new computer can't record audio worth a damn. Lots of noise.. it seems to add a frequency in all the recordings, like a low-to-mid hum. I believe everything that has been recorded onto this computer in the last six months is useless. It's all I can hear when I listen now.

As a workaround, I purchased a USB interface cable, which has audio hookups on one end (that go into my mixer) and a USB plug on the other end (which goes into my PC). Ain't USB grand? I can barely remember what we did without them.

So I had difficulty getting everything to work right, BUT... I think it's going to work. Not only that, I think it's going to work really well. While I was trying to get everything set up properly (pacing around, muttering curse words, running wires, reading related message boards--all in between feeding and changing the baby), I left my Dave Smith Evolver plugged into my computer. That way, if anything started to work while I was messing with settings, I would know instantly because I would be able to hear my synthesizer coming through.

Dave Smith is a pioneer. Among other things, he was the main engineer of the Prophet-5 (and its more recognizable brother, the Prophet-10... early Van Halen, anyone?) and the originator of the MIDI interface (maybe the most important music technology invention to date). He has worked for several companies, but eventually went on to form Dave Smith Instruments.

I have owned a desktop version of the Dave Smith Evolver (Serial 00694) for maybe six years and I am very happy with it. It certainly doesn't look like four hundred dollars (I paid that for a used one actually), but it sounds like it. It is an analog-digital hybrid, sort of the best of both worlds. You really can't make the analog filter on this thing sound bad even if you try. Of course it has its disadvantages: it is hard to program, it can only input monophonic MIDI signals, and only one setting can be altered at once. Basically it's not good for live performances. I think the layout of it is nice and I can cook up a sound/sequence pretty quickly on it. Here is about three minutes of what I recorded last night. It takes a little while to fade in, so don't turn up your speakers.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

One of the things I have discovered being home all day is The Tavis Smiley Show. Tavis Smiley has done and said a lot of things I disagree with over the years, but his interview show is great. It (or at least the version I see the day after it airs) is a 30minute one-on-one interview. I have seen a select few that are two 15minute interviews. He gets a wide range of guests (I have seen Serena Williams, RZA, Edward Norton, and a bunch of news/media people I have never heard of).

A few weeks ago his guest was Paul Mooney, who I was not familiar with. Very funny interview.

The episode today featured Yo-Yo Ma. If you ask an average citizen to name a classical violist or flutist, 99% of them (myself included) will not be able to name one. If you ask people to name a famous classical cellist, they will undoubtedly name Yo-Yo Ma. That in and of itself is an achievement. Beyond name recognition, Yo-Yo Ma has critical acclaim beyond any instrumentalist in the past century. He may already be the most celebrated instrumentalist of all time (on any instrument), and he is only 54 years old. On top of that, he is thoughtful and extremely humble, and open to music that is not in the classical/baroque style. He's even done an album with Bobby McFerrin. His new box set features over 90 CDs and he has only been recording for 30 years.

Anyway, that is what was on my mind.

I have decided that today is going to be a good day. I got the kitchen faucet installed last night (no leaks). I couldn't find one of my adjustable wrenches, so I bought some slip-joint pliers at the grocery store, which turned out to do the trick for only four dollars. Tools included, a new faucet cost us about 45 dollars and 17 days of downtime (sorry Jaime). While trying to go to sleep, I had visions of my handywork coming undone and flooding our house all night.

This morning I made myself some coffee (something I very rarely do at home for some reason) and a grilled cheese sandwich for breakfast. Grilled cheese is one of my low-budget specialties. I use white american cheese and olive oil instead of butter. I just sat Stephen up in his high chair while I ate. I felt like I should have had a newspaper while I ate my breakfast, even though I haven't read a newspaper at any stage of my life. After that I fed Stephen a new food: turkey. So far we have only tried two Stage 1 foods. He liked the carrots but disliked the sweet peas. Today I busted out the pureed turkey with turkey broth. He more than disliked it; he hated it. He was a good sport and choked down 7-8 spoonfuls of it, though. Meanwhile his bib was covered in disgusting turkey product because he was involuntarily leaking it out of his mouth.

While all this was going on, Raffi was playing in the background. I fully endorse Raffi as a musician for children. He plays mostly traditional songs, always using real instruments (no fake keyboard sounds to save money). He also sings a handful of songs in French, which is early exposure to another language. I enjoyed children's music even before having a child. I owned Leadbelly sings for kids--Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger too. It is good stuff and something I can play for my child without getting enraged. He responded positively to Raffi as early as seven weeks old! (May have all been in my head though).

Mr. Stephen slept 10.5 hours last night, so I can't expect the usual lengthy morning nap, but when that nap comes I'm going to check out the new webcast version of The Mike O'Meara Show. Starting yesterday, a webcast version of the show is available on their website. When the mighty WJFK flipped formats to become a sports talk station, Mike O'Meara had the rug pulled out from underneath him and his nationally syndicated show was canceled. He had been a staple radio personality in this area and many other major markets for decades. Anyhow, they are trying to get picked up by financing their own show with the addition of Oscar Santana. A better way to check it out may be to subscribe to their RSS Feed where you can actually download .mp3s of each day's show instead of streaming it off their site.

I run into this problem all the time because I do not install any programs that I deem unnecessary onto my PC. For me, virtually nothing is necessary. This means that I can not view .MOV files, for instance, because Quicktime tries to take over your computer and associate every file known to man with its bloated software. Extend that example to virtually every file type out there (I can't load Word documents, all kinds of stuff). To convert files to a type that I can actually view means I have to install software to convert them, which I do not do. Here is the solution: Zamzar.com. This site converts a seemingly endless number of file types to many other comparable forms. Movie files, audio files, documents, image formats, you name it. Here is a list of the supported file types. Pretty cool. Sure will help me out a lot.

EDIT: Once again, my prediction was dead wrong. After waking up at 6:30am, this child went to sleep at 8:30am. Maybe it was the tryptophan (hardy har).

One of my favorite sites for a while now is archive.org (about). They focus on hosting public domain or creative commons media. A certain percentage of the archives is old material that has seen its copyright expire, while the other part of the collection was intended for public use from its conception (stock video, home videos). Among other things, this means that you can use this material in your own works without fear of being sued for copyright infringement. This is one of the reasons why classical and baroque music is used so much in television, movies and advertising: the composers are long dead and gone so there is no hassle with contacting the owner of the copyright, paying royalties, paying lawyer fees, etc.

Examples:

• If you click this, you can download (or just stream) 298 individual episodes of the old-time radio detective series Dragnet (1949-1955)
• This is a hilarious video (everything from 1990 is hilarious) about the release of Windows 3.0 and how it related to competing products at the time.
• 1949: Care of the Skin by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films. This ten-minute video covers the basics for teen cleanliness such as "the proper way to wash" and "the correct use of soap."
• Thomas Edison's oldest known voice recording is on this page, a recording of the inventor himself from 1888.
• Here is an opensource .pdf file of all the Beatles songs in sheet music format. 292 pages worth, free for download.
• On this page, you can watch someone beat Super Metroid for the SNES in 1:05 while collecting 100% of all items. I'm not sure why you would do that, but you could. You could even download high quality DivX versions of the videos and burn them to DVD.
• Searching my birthday, I found "Secret White House Recordings" of Lyndon B. Johnson from May 4, 1966

All of the material is downloadable, and all of it contains copyright information right there on the page. Some of it is free for use (no rights reserved), some of it is posted under "some rights reserved." Theoretically, all of our current entertainment will someday lose its copyright (although the lawmakers keep extending it, as much as 100 years now). One day, someone could use clips from E.T. in a film and not have to pay royalties.

(Another reason I like archive.org is they host a bunch of my music, but I'll get to that later)

I installed a lot of WordPress plugins this weekend, and am sorting through several more. For starters, if I link to a Wikipedia Article or a YouTube Video, the information can be brought up simply by hovering over the icon next to the links. Sleek. Modern.

Jaime and I have both been sick all weekend, but we did at least sell her old Honda. Back down to two cars. Mine needs some work, but not nearly the $2000 we got for the Honda. It doesn't seem like Stephen is sick, although he has a runny nose twice a day.

Just playing around with links and stuff, I was trying to find a picture of my guitar, but I can't find one that looks exactly right. Maybe mine is just more beat up than most of the pictures I found. The sunburst is far more subtle on mine.

Also, let's see what happens when I link to a picture off of Jaime's Flickr.

Okay, I'll stop now.

ps--Started a new song yesterday morning. A clip:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

When I bought the wireless router to set up internet in this house, I just plugged it in and let it do its magic. I never password protected access, changed the admin login/pwd to the router, or set up any filters. This was five years ago.

I had always suspected that people were hopping on to my wireless network, but it never bothered me (the only thing they can steal is bandwidth). This morning, I woke up to find that someone had logged on to my router (the login/password were still the default admin/admin and my network name was still linksys) and changed the name of my network to Broncos. This morning, I have password protected the router admin login and set up a MAC filter so only computers on "the list" are granted access. It's enough to keep the honest and the clueless (99.9% of the population) away from my network. How annoying. Should have done it a long time ago.

Between that and setting up a static IP and port forwarding yesterday, I have learned a lot of router crap in the past 24 hours.

I have not found a proper way to remove this spyware anywhere online, even after searching a lot of forums. Many many people said that once this had infected your computer, you should back up your stuff and reformat your HD. This same group of viruses forced me to reformat my wife's laptop about a year ago, but that shouldn't be necessary if you catch it early. I am really only writing this to add traffic to my blog, but this technique actually works:

I somehow got nailed with this very vicious spyware this morning. I got a very sudden error message on my real-time spyware scanner. I didn't even have time to read it before all my programs shut down and my computer rebooted. As soon as Windows XP came back up, I had a red circle with an X through it on my systray, like it was a Windows XP error. It emulated it perfectly, even with the bubble rising up saying "Windows has detected spyware, click here to remove it." Then it tries to install some fictitious anti-spyware software (something with '2010' in the title, it looked like the Windows XP color scheme, too) against your will. This collection of files is referred to as braviax or cru629. These files are initially located in two different places on the hard drive. It disables many forms of spyware removal software entirely, gives you pop-up ads in Internet Explorer (even if you never use IE), and installs many other forms of spyware.

Note: Braviax can not be removed with any software. It must first be removed manually, then the spyware removal software can get rid of the rest of the other components. It does not help to start in "Safe Mode." It is not a lasting fix to remove all components from the registry, either. This malware mutates itself, so some of these path names may not be correct; this is where I found the files in my instance.

Follow these steps to remove braviax.exe (in Windows XP):

1. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del simultaneously on the keyboard and click the 'Processes' tab when the Task Manager pops up
2. Click/highlight braviax.exe and click "End Process"
3. Click "yes" in the warning window that pops up
4. Open Windows Notepad (Programs->Accessories)
5. Click File->Open to open a document
6. Near the bottom of the "Open File" dialogue, pull down the menu for "Files of Type" and choose "All Types"
7. Navigate Notepad's Open File dialogue to C:\Windows and open braviax.exe
8. Once the file is loaded, you will see a bunch of gibberish characters that are not all text. Delete several characters, replacing them with letters or numbers. Do this a few times throughout the file. (Note: you must replace the same number of characters that you remove. Braviax checks for missing code or different file sizes, so it must be saved the same size that it was loaded in order to fool its self-check)
9. Save over the original file in the same location (pc should warn you that the file already exists and you are overwriting, blah blah, click yes to save over the file)
10. Navigate to c:\windows\system32\ and delete the file braviax.exe (In other words, delete c:\windows\system32\braviax.exe)
11. Navigate to c:\windows\system32\drivers\ and delete the file beep.sys (In other words, delete c:\windows\system32\drivers\beep.sys) This is the initial beep that Windows plays when it boots up. The virus attaches itself to this file and it must be deleted or the virus will regenerate itself upon reboot
12. Reboot the pc. If the red circle does not appear in the lower right corner of your screen, you are almost there. If the circle and fake error messages still appear, you may have to redo all the previous steps, replacing more characters in c:\windows\braviax.exe (I ended up replacing maybe 50 characters throughout the file, many of them consecutive)
13. Once you get the red circle to not appear when you boot, then install/run as many spyware programs as you can to get rid of all the programs that came along with braviax

It may take several boots and scans to completely eradicate the remaining spyware files. Free spyware software includes Spybot Search&Destroy (recommended) and Ad-aware, but they can not remove this software without first doing the above steps.

Stephen slept 9.5 hours last night... consecutively. That's a record. In fact, I woke him up at 6:30. Who knows how long he would have gone.

Last week was one great week. I did so many 'firsts' with the baby, and they all went very well. I installed the other carseat base into my car, visited HH and was gone for five hours (including a restaurant visit), went grocery shopping with the baby and walked the dogs with the baby. I saw 1.5 good movies this weekend (we had to leave District 9 early because the shaky handy-cam was making Jaime motion sick). Inglourious Basterds (spell check is going crazy on that one) was good. Saw that at 11:45am on Saturday with only about 1/3 of the seats occupied. Had a nice dinner with my wife on Saturday night. We finally arranged for S&S (really just one S) to babysit on Saturday night so we could have a date. Good time at dinner, but the movie made Jaime sick. I felt bad for her. Motion sickness is awful.

I set up Carbonite to back up my important stuff. Steve wanted me to because he loses sleep over the possibility of our entire catalog of music being wiped out by a power surge. Honestly, it's a legitimate concern. I still have songs that I made when I was 15; I would hate to lose my data too (the only thing I have ever lost in a crash was a bunch of pictures from 2008). So, once I set it up, I saw that it was going to take weeks for the initial upload (170GB), but then it will update my backups every night at 3am. Pretty cool. It's 110GB more if I back up my mp3 collection. Also, not ten minutes after I bought a year's worth of service for $46.71, they raised the price to $54.95/year. Pretty cool, eh? I figure by this time next year, Google will have a [nearly] free backup service (the rumored "G Drive") that I can use instead.

Stephen makes a small milestone every day. He can now turn over from his back to his stomach whenever he wants, although it still takes quite a bit of effort, screaming, spitting, whining, etc. He is drinking about 25oz of milk per day (my poor wife), and I've got the feedings down to a very efficient system with virtually no spit-up.

When discussing the "most famous movie scene ever," several famous scenes come to mind: the opening scene of Alien, the last scene in Planet of the Apes, HAL disobeying Dave, the T-Rex chasing Jeff Goldblum and company, and Moses parting the Red Sea in 1956's The Ten Commandments. There is one scene, however, that has been remade hundreds of times on film: the brutal shower scene in Psycho. This scene is referenced in everything from mocking comedy films to children's cartoons. The music is instantly recognizable (and often imitated) and still makes me uncomfortable just hearing it. Here are some facts about the famous shower scene, lifted from the pages of my Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: 4Ply Edition (©1988, 1989, 1990, 1991).

• There are approximately 65 edits in this 45 second scene.
• Although there's practically no graphic violence in the scene, it has literally scared some people out of taking showers--including Janet Leigh (the actress portraying the protagonist who is stabbed to death in the scene), who says in her autobiography that she refuses to take them anymore.
• Alfred Hitchcock later claimed he made the film as a joke.
• It took seven days to shoot the 45 second scene.
• The blood washing down the drain was actually chocolate sauce.
• Only one shot in the entire shower scene montage shows a knife entering the body and no blood is seen in that shot.
• Some shots use as little as eight frames of film (at 24fps, that's only 1/3 of a second).
• Anthony Perkins (as Norman Bates) did not actually act in the scene. He was on Broadway at the time of the shooting, starring in a play; a stand-in filled in as "Mom."
• Mixed-up priorities: According to Hitchcock, studio executives were more concerned about having a toilet flushing onscreen than they were about the implicit violence.
• Janet Leigh refused to let her daughter (actress Jamie Lee Curtis) watch the movie as a child when it appeared on TV.
• Hitchcock got the movie past censors by first submitting a script with many more horrible scenes, knowing that by allowing them to be cut he would get more leverage on the others (a tactic often used today).

Janet Leigh on the Shower Scene:

"What I was to wear in the shower scene gave the wardrove supervisor migraines. I had to appear nude, without being nude. She and I pored over striptease magazines, hoping one of their costumes would be the answer.... There was an impressive display of pinwheels, feathers, sequins, etc., but nothing suitable for our needs. Finally, the supervisor came up with a simple solution: flesh-colored moleskin.... So each morning for seven shooting days and seventy-one setups, we covered my private parts, and we were in business.

"For sundry reasons, we had to do [the scene] over and over. At long last a take was near completion without a mishap. Abruptly I felt something strange happening around my breasts. The steam from the hot water had melted the adhesive on the moleskin, and I sensed the napped cotton fabric peeling away from my skin. What do to?...I opted for immodesty...and made the correct judgment. That was the printed take."

(By the way, I highly recommend the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series for articles and facts about anything and everything).