Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
Today is officially the first day of Winter, and what an introduction. Springfield was reportedly at 1 degree, with a windchill of near -20F. That just hurts.
I passed the lake a couple of times today and finally decided to take a few pictures of it.
Brrr!
Here are a few Gems from David’s Birthday:
And he was very adamant about making sure Mom got some of the cupcake too. God knows he didn’t get that from me!
Today was David’s first birthday! As has been the monthly ritual, I got the camera equipment out and took a few photos. (More photos in the gallery)
In one sense it’s incredible that it has been a year since he was born; but in another it feels like he has been with us all along, and we’ve experienced so much: turning his head to our voices; reaching for toys; rolling over; giggling; trying to crawl; crawling; picking out his favorite books; snuggling up for reading time; trying to walk; walking; and on and on.
His smile is infectious, his laugh even moreso. And I could sit for hours just watching him concentrating and learning about the world around him.
Tonight he received a set of small toy trucks from my parents and he sat and ran the trucks over every surface he could find, making little engine noises. He also received a toy filled with gears, which he occupied himself with by spinning and tinkering – I couldn’t help but just step back and smile; that’s my boy.
It was cold and a bit windy, but I was able to get the Christmas lights put up this afternoon.
Last night Jay and Katherine came over for dinner, followed by a trip to Lowes to each get our Christmas trees. Their selection was pretty dismal, and Ana and I eventually bought the very first one we look at. Go figure.
So today we got the tree put up, and boy does David enjoy it.
These pictures took some experimenting to get, my first attempts at using the flash and keeping the backgound as close to its natural luminence. Not too bad, I’m sure I’ll be getting alot more practice with as much as David likes the tree 🙂
Too bad the iPhone makes you get sucked into the world if iTunes – because it sucks. I knew this going in, but it still isn’t fun when the limitations smack you in the face.
The limitation of which I speak is its inability to detect new files in its directories, automatically update its library database, and make it available for syncing and playing. I spent a while fumbling around the UI looking for the option to turn it on, only to be ultimately disappointed by a few google searches.
My initial plan was to take home movie clips (btw, MediaCoder is pretty handy..) and drop them into a directory managed by iTunes so they’d automatically get sent to the phone, but now I was going to have to add additional steps of manually adding the new videos each time they get created. That’s just too much work and I’m too lazy.
I ran across an app or two that would do this updating for you, but instead decided to go a different route – creating a podcast that iTunes would auto-update and sync to the phone. Tuesday night I whipped up an ASP.NET request handler (IHttpHandler) to generate feeds based on directory contents. So now I’ve got the auto-updating capability I was initially looking for: after I create the video, I just drop it into a directory accessible by my webserver and iTunes will pick it up the next time it requests the feed. As an added bonus, David now has a podcast for family and friends 🙂
Some more details on the code below the break.
Need I say more?
OK, just a few more words about my data backups.
Last week I ordered a few Army Surplus, 30 Caliber Ammo Cans, they arrived today. What the heck are these for, you ask?
Well I thought they could make a great way to transport and store the hard drives I’m going to be rotating off-site. So tonight I got to work with a knife and some dense foam, to create what should be a pretty sturdy (and water-resistant!) hard drive case.
And here it is, with a spare drive not quite halfway pushed in. The foam cutting was crude, and it may not be pretty, but I like it.
The cans are $4 apiece + shipping.
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