From Wit’s End

…of a recursive blog post. This is about the latest Facebook archive page posted here, and also about testing to see if I can automatically post to Facebook by just writing on this blog. Confused yet?

…six words I would have never thought belonged consecutively in a sentence five years ago.

I poured all the bags and drawers of my legos, sorted meticulously by color and shape years ago and left in the closet, all into one big plastic box for Jack. It will help spark some creativity probably, but alas for the entropy! Rachel said, “Don’t worry, he’ll probably want to organize them when he’s seven or eight.” Ouch! Five or six years of utter Lego disorganization. The things I do for my son…

I was trying out the new facial recognition feature on iPhoto, and practically fell out of my chair giggling when I saw this:

Per grandmotherly request, the time is now shown on each post. I was pleasantly surprised that I found the WordPress syntax to make that change, and I was pleasantly unsurprised that it was so easy to do it on the iPhone. (Enter gushing Apple fanboy statement here. )

Since I’ve been refreshing this site, I noticed that all the banner pictures are at least a year old, so I just added six more from late 2008. If you want to see them, you’ll just have to reload the site over and over again until they all come up through the banner randomizer. Why? Because it’s fun, and it boosts my website-hit-driven ego, that’s why.

Rejoice! I have retroactively applied logical categories and emotional tags on all the posts for this blog. At this moment, here are the top three of each:

Categories:
1. Reality – 120 posts
2. Thoughts – 89 posts
3. Family – 83 posts

Tags:
1. hooray! – 25 posts
2. funny – 23 posts
3. cool – 15 posts

May we continue to cheer for reality, have funny thoughts, and enjoy our cool family.

Every morning, Jack has peanut butter toast (“toast an’ bubber”) for breakfast. I spread peanut butter on the toast, then cut it in half and fold it over into a sandwich. Then I put it in front of him and ask him what shapes he wants it cut into. Until today, he has asked for squares, triangles, or rectangles, and usually there’s also a “moon” shape from the rounded top of the bread. Today, though, he asked for something different, and I did my best:

When he invited me to play Legos with him up at the farm this weekend, this is what he wanted me to build:

Here’s what this picture sounds like

Jack likes to sit down at the computer and “bype” different letters out. Today he freaked us out a little bit by typing “TAC” and saying “cat!” Whoa.

While Rachel and I were out watching a movie this evening, Jack apparently made his first pun — at the age of two and a quarter, no less:

My folks were watching him this evening, and they were playing in the backyard with Jack’s favorite ball. Everytime it was kicked or thrown, Jack would squeal delightedly. My mom told him that he was screaming, and that of course that was okay to do outside. After some more ball-playing, Jack would squeal and then yell, “Ah! SCREAM!” everytime the ball was kicked.

Then Grandpa kicked the ball and Jack squealed and yelled, “Ah! Scream!” and then he rolled his eyes and grinned real wide like Groucho Marx and said, “…AND CAKE!”

WordPress’s iPhone application was just released in the App store, and this is my first post using it. There is picture uploading capability here somewhere, so I’m going to peruse the photos I’ve taken with my new toy so far, and include it with this post. Here goes…

[UPDATE: Okay, Rachel, this isn't really a photo taken with the camera from the iPhone, but it is a screenshot taken from it, using the screen shot function that I heard about (Hold down the home button and quickly press the lock button). When looking through the pictures residing on the device for this post, this one seemed like the most appropriate. So there. Nyah. ]

…because I can!

I have been in possession of my new iPhone for about 24 hours, and it is COOL!

I was actually in the original iPhone line on Friday morning, but after two and a half hours, it was taking too long, so I left. I had showed up five minutes before opening time, and I was far back enough in line that the manager of the store told those around me that we were all “borderline” as to whether we would actually get one of the first seventy available that first day. It was an interesting experience, but I am glad that I left early. We’re currently trying to potty train Jack, and Rachel runs out of energy pretty quickly in this first trimester. I came back to the same store later in the afternoon and signed up for one by mean of what they called “direct fulfillment”, which basically means that they will special order it and contact you when it is in the store.

So I went to pick it up last night, and though they still had a little trouble with their computer system, it eventually all went through. On my way out of the store, I heard, “Hey, How’s it going?” I looked up and saw the guy that had been immediately ahead of me in the original line. I said “Hey! Did you get one?” He said, “Yeah, I was actually the last one to get one.”

I just found the Speech Recognition settings on the Mac. I’ve been using it for about the last hour. It’s totally rocks!

Courtesy of iWeb ’08, we have a new photo album section here at Wit’s End. I’ll still post photos one at a time here on the front page, but to see more pictures, you can click on the link below the picture, if there happens to be one.

When it comes to computer programming and web programming issues, here is my approach:

1. Determine objective.
2. “Throw something against the wall to see if it sticks.”
3. If that fails, google a solution to the objective, and attempt to implement solution.
4. If that doesn’t work, look for typos and stupid, illogical mistakes, of which there are usually a few.
5. If things still aren’t working, fiddle around in the guts of it and get really frustrated. At this stage, if I don’t luck out and get things right…
6. Walk away in disgust. Wait between three and twelve months. Move on to other things.
7. After the prescribed time period, be working on something else entirely [usually at stage two or three above] and think off-handedly: “Gee, it’s been a while since I worked on that. I wonder if I can get it to work now?”
8. Walk right into the old situation, click a few buttons, correct a few lines of code, and fix that old problem in just a few minutes.
9. Return to stage three or four on new problem…

I was in the middle of Stage #6 on the problem of importing my old blogger entries to this WordPress environment. I had set up the personal blog here last May, and had manually transferred a few posts in the next month or so. This was extremely tedious. I tried doing it automatically, and it just didn’t work. Today, I decided to see if I could try it again. Since last time there had been a couple WordPress upgrades and Google had bought out nd upgraded Blogger. Just a little bit of typing and a few mouse clicks later, and Badda-Bing! Now I just have to categorize the old posts and clear out the 53 old unpublished draft posts that have been added to the wordpress database.

The fact that puts me in a good mood for the rest of the day is further proof and confirmation (as if we needed any more) that I am a geek.

UPDATE 08/17/07: I’m done sorting through the published posts in the archives. And I just remembered why there are so many drafts from the old blogger posts: I decided at some point to remove impersonal, culturally-oriented posts from the public side of what was my personal blog at the time. So I’ll have to sort through those next and publish the ones that are in a passably good form on the “impersonal” side, whenever I happen to get around to it.

Well, shoot. I got a nasty-gram from my webspace provider that I was using too many CGI resources and overloading the MYSQL server (whatever that means, it basically means I was breaking their little piece of the internet.) They shut down my website for a few hours yesterday afternoon and evening until I took out the offending code from my front page. After some experimentation, I figured out that it was mostly the code that rotates the banner pictures at the top of the page. (Reducing the number of posts on each page from 50 to 25 helps also.) So the picture at the top will be static and unchanging until I can figure out a more resource-efficient way of having them change. If the slowness of it depends on the sheer number of banners available for the rotation, then I should be able to fix it fairly quickly. Otherwise, it may take a while. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

UPDATE 07/27/07: Well, it turns out that the scoreboard on the left sidebar of the impersonal site was what was causing most of the trouble. So until I can fix it, I’ve resorted to the sidebar widgets to make a more “standard” sidebar. The end of it will be a page that loads much faster, with a link to the scoreboard instead of the scoreboard itself.

Things I am doing simultaneously with the Mac right now:

• Ripping the complete works of Archangelo Corelli from ten CD’s into MP3 files.
• Downloading the last three days worth of podcasts from Glenn Beck’s radio show.
• Uploading a giant ZIP file of home movies to my webspace for my Dad to download and enjoy.
• Transferring all the latest pictures and movies from my camera’s memory card through my printer.

All this is happening at once, and the computer isn’t even blinking. In fact, its singing the Corelli tracks back to me the whole time. This computer ROCKS!

I just added some new banners to the 18 that were already in the rotation. So reload away! It will be most “refresh”ing, I’m sure! Collect them all! Trade them with your friends!

Also, I wasn’t kidding when I said we would be posting more pictures. Some of them are posted retroactively. See here and here

Longtime readers will know that I used to post a lot of photos, because all that HTML that I had to use to do so was novel. As the novelty wore off, the pictures gradually petered out. Indeed, it almost took the rest of our personal blog with it. But no more! Because I had a second reason to work to make posting photos easier, I found a really great photo blogging plugin for WordPress called “Photo Blogger”. So watch out world, here come some more pictures!

Rachel and Jack gave me a Father’s Day present today. Jack supplied the homemade wrapping paper, and Rachel supplied what was inside: an iPod Nano!

I’m at the Apple store in Chicago! I’m in the Windy City on a business trip, and I took a pilgrimage into downtown riding a bus, and then the “L” (for the first time!). I came here intending to buy a copy of TurboCAD Pro, but got waylaid by another box with the name ViaCAD 2D/3D. It is half the price, and it looks just as capable and possibly even just more fun. So I have been waffling back and forth wondering which one to buy. I came down to the first floor to see if I could find anything on the internet about the two products. Once I found the internet on one of the laptops, I realized that I had to blog about this, too.

I was going to stop by the Apple store in Charlotte for all this, but now I can just come straight home in time for dinner at Sister-Jennifer-in-law’s house with Rachel’s folks. I hear their going to order stromboli’s.

Well, I’m going to buy ViaCAD, because then I’ll have more money to buy something else some other time.

Wow. This place is amazing. I am basking in the yummy geekiness of all this. Speaking of yummy, its time to go have dinner.

At least on the personal side, the theme transformation is complete. Thanks for your patience. A new theme has renewed my interest in blogging, both personally and impersonally.

Just like on my other site, upgrading to WordPress 2.2 has blown away my poor sidebar. Oh well… it will keep me off the streets, anyway.