The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • Lots of Yardwork

    The past couple weekends have been full of yardwork for the Johnsons. Last weekend we purchased and planted a tree out front, and this weekend we’re getting the garden all ready to go for the year. I had a cubic yard of dirt delivered yesterday to top off what went missing from last year (where does it go??). This morning I ran over to Sunbelt Rentals for a tiller and got the dirt all ready for Ana to get things planted. She’s working away on that as I type.

    Kudos to Sunbelt Rentals, I was able to submit a reservation online for the tiller while I was still in bed this morning.  Much better than talking to someone on the phone!

    Our grass has greened up nicely – due in large part to the first aeration we’ve had done to it (thanks www.trylawns.com), followed by round 1 of Scott’s fertilizer.  And to top it off, Ana’s Azaleas are starting to bloom.

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    Our neighborhood gets VERY windy, so I followed the advice of a neighbor and tied the tree down.  Rest safe, Springfield, my tree won’t be wandering out of the yard anytime soon.

  • To the Zoo!

    Given the final arrival of spring (or did we just skip to early summer?), we decided to take a day trip to the St. Louis Zoo.  So after eating breakfast, we loaded up the van and headed south.  Upon arrival, we were greeted by quite a bit of traffic in Forrest Park and lots of zoo-goers.  Not too surprising for such a nice day, but it still felt like parking at the Arch would have been closer.

    David got to get up close and personal with a few of the animals, starting off with a few monkeys.  Good thing that glass was there – that monkey would have been missing a handful of hair if not.

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    After that encounter, he was on the lookout for animals!

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    We had lots of fun, and look forward to going back.  In fact, we purchased a family membership – so we WILL be going back.   More photos available.

  • Kites

    I don’t know what it is, but Ana and I really enjoy flying kites.  Since it was finally warm when Ana and I got off of work, we thought it would be fun to take David to the park and introduce him to a kite the Easter Bunny left for him this year.

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    Beautiful weather, and a good time.  A few more photos in the gallery.

  • Trillian Astra

    I’ve been a Trillian user for quite some time, having used one of the first versions in beta form. Sadly, the current version has been showing its age and late last year I was forced to stop using it because it had become unreliable on the Windows Live Messenger platform, which I use for work.  I felt I had held out long enough and the next version was nowhere to be found (well, it has been under development seemingly forever), so I gave in and went back to using multiple chat clients.

    Fast forward to last week when it was brought to my attention that the next version of Trillian, called Astra, was available in a limited beta.  I quickly signed up and have been very pleased since.

    Kudos to Cerulean Studios for all of their hard work, it is very clear they have put alot of thought into this “chat client”.  I won’t go into the laundry list of features, but will mention a few that I really like:

    • Settings are tied to a single Trillian account, so I don’t have to redefine connections between the 3 computers I use. 
    • iPhone support coming!
    • Twitter integration – tweets are listed in the main window where contacts are.
    • Facebook integration – near-immediate updates without having to login to the website.
    • A very well designed logging and log searching system.  I rely heavily on this for work, and being able to search by date in a nice UI is great.  AIM, Live, and past versions of Trillian have been lacking here.

    I mention that it seems very well thought out, here’s an example.  When alerts of some kind happen, there’s a small unobtrusive “popup” window that appears for a few moments and then goes away.  Yeah, nothing new there.  BUT I have noticed that birthday alerts from Facebook don’t just go away – you have to close them yourself.  There’s a decent chance that if it just stayed visible for just a few seconds, you’d miss it completely.  Good design, I like it.

    I used the beta all of 2 days before deciding to purchase.  Thanks for bringing my chat client back, Cerulean!

    I have 4 beta invites remaining, let me know if you want to give it a try.

  • 16 Months Old

    This morning after searching our house for Easter Eggs and before going to church we decided we’d do a quick David photo shoot.  It had been a while since the “monthly photos” ended, and he was all dressed up for Easter.  As luck would have it, today just happens to be his 16 month birthday too.

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    Ran into some lighting problems (bulb burned out), so some of them are using a combination of lamp and natural lighting.  Those look a little odd to me.

    The rest of the collection are in the gallery (still uploading, should be done soon).

  • Happy Easter!

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  • Daily Photo

    I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a Daily Photo.  I’ve been wanting to spend some more time behind the camera as well as expand my photographic “eye”, and a Daily Photo surely would do both. 

    But can I really commit the energy needed to take 365 disparate photos over the course of a year? 

    I don’t know…

    It sure is tempting though…

  • Day 4

    Today was Day 4 of David’s fever.  As a result, I present a 1 year old with 4 days of little sleep:

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  • The Return of the Hippo

    The hippo is back, this time as a picture frame for Ana’s desk (to hold a picture of David… on a hippo)

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    Last weekend I purchased a few cheap boards of wood to get some practice on my scroll saw.  What better way to test it out than to cut out the hippo again?  It takes alot of patience and concentration for me at this point – if you go too fast or turn too quickly, the blade will snap and scare the hell out of you.  It’s not perfect, but by the time I got to the oval I was able to make it in almost one continuous cut around.

  • Spring

    Yes!

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