Golf pants for babies?

At least I think they look like golf pants

And some bonus pictures, just because I have a camera, and she's so cute.

Note the two bottom teeth. We are eagerly awaiting more (poor Maria's been have teething pain on the top ones for quite some time).

Look at that upper body strength!

Rapture or not?

I read the first book in the Left Behind series a while back, just to see what all the fuss was about. It struck me as very similar to the DaVinci Code. (Not in terms of plot details, but in terms of writing style, writing quality and the ruckus surrounding them. And it greatly amuses me to lump these two books together.)

So the Left Behind series focuses on the rapture. Here's a couple of posts analyzing the support for the rapture in the Bible: Why i will not be raptured and Why i will not be raptured, part ii. (Executive summary: Not finding it.)

Walking with Maria

We finally got around to taking Maria for a walk over at Homer Lake. Sue is excited about her new ergo baby carrier. She says it works better than the other baby-carrying contraptions she's tried.

Maria fell asleep during the walk - here you can see the hood in place to support her head a little better while she sleeps.

Maria got a little warm near the end - it was getting hot outside by that time.

Flash tricks

Inspired by a post at Cheapshooter, I tried putting a (clean, unused) tissue over the flash.

Here are two pictures of Leo in a box - the top photo is with the bare flash, and the bottom photo is with the tissue diffuser.

I love peas

Maria seems to like peas.

Maria's View

I took this picture of Maria in her bouncy seat this morning.

Often parents (and others) try very hard to make babies smile and react. I wondered what that looked like from Maria's point of view. I put the camera down by her head, and this is what she sees.

And all this time I thought she was laughing with me ...

(Alternately: All this time I thought she was smiling - now I know it's actually an expression of abject terror)

Evolution and Creation, and/or Intelligent Design

Sometimes I want to express opinions about evolution, creation, and intelligent design. But I often wonder how to best put it into words. Being lazy, I'll take a short-cut and just link to these posts by Henry Neufeld (who can write better than I can): Why talk about evolution in church? and Evolutionary vs. Scientific Thinking.

Also check out his FAQ about evolution and theology.

Okay, I can't resist adding my own little rantlet: In all the debates, there seems to be an implication that accepting evolution automatically implies an atheist world-view. But this doesn't have to be the case. Evolution and Christianity can co-exist.

One social difficulty with believing in both evolution and Christianity: the voices stating that "accepting evolution implies atheism" are pretty vocal (not sure how numerous) - both on the conservation Christian side and with several prominent atheists. And if those two camps actually agree on something - it really makes one feel like you're swimming upstream to believe something different.

Grout, grout, grout

The sunroom floor is getting much closer to completion!

I put down the tile a couple weeks ago, and we finally got all the grout done last week. (Thanks to Sue's mom, who watched Maria a couple of evenings so both Sue and I could work on the grout). The whole grout thing was much harder than it seemed (and the tiles are textured - I imagine it would be much easier cleaning the grout off of smooth tile.) There's still a film of grout on the tile that needs to be cleaned off (The directions on the cleaner said to let fresh grout cure for 10 days before using the cleaner).

Then it's just sealing the grout, and we will have full use of the sunroom.

Oh, and we need to get some chess or checkers pieces of the appropriate size...

Drying tile

The hot tub in the sunroom has been removed, and now it's time to put in tile. Finding the right tile took time, but Sue persevered and finally found some with a matching pattern. The only problem was it didn't come in 6 inch sizes, so I had to cut a number of 12 inch tiles down to size. The wet saw left a lot of residue on the tiles, so I washed them yesterday and hung them out to dry.

Okay, so I didn't actually dry all the tiles this way. It seemed like it would make a good picture.

Get a long little baby

Many people seeing Maria have commented on how long she is. She had her two month checkup last week, and she was 25.5 inches long, which puts her in the 99th percentile. I see now she really is a long baby.

Sleep books

So I've been reading a book about sleeping babies (Sue asked me to read it - and speaking of her - Sue has a blog now. She has an entry about Maria sleeping). The particular book is Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. The main problem is I keep falling asleep while reading it.

Things found in the yard

A sampling of things found in our yard:

Pea plants

Diapers drying on the line

Bird's nest in the satellite dish

Eeek!!!

Leaves of three,
spray it with Round-up

Not as catchy as the original saying, but effective.

Mark on his new Dixon zero-turn mower. (well, new to us. It's a used mower)
Mowing the lawn has never been so much fun.

Grow, Baby, Grow

Here's a picture of Maria at a little over six weeks, next to the manual for a size reference.

For comparison, the picture from first post with a manual is also included below

Brand Awareness Training for Infants

While holding Maria the other night, I decided to try a little Brand Awareness Training for Infants (BATI). I had no logos to show her, so I did what I could and started reciting names of fast food restaurants: McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, ... At this point Sue overheard what was going on and quickly put stop to it. I guess I'll have to come up with other ways to train up our little girl to be the brand aware consumer necessary to to survive in today's modern society.

Mass-Energy equivalence lullaby

I've been singing to Maria lately - she's a captive audience, and I'm taking advantage of her being too young to know that Daddy can't sing.

One of the songs I made up was the "Mass-energy Equivalence Lullaby", to the tune of "Mary had a little lamb" (more or less)

E E E equals m c squared
m c squared
m c squared
E E E equals m c squared
Just like Einstein wrote

Dad: The Superior Napping Platform

Okay, so she's not actually sleeping in this picture, but she seems to really like sleeping on Dad's chest.

Two weeks

Maria survived two whole weeks! (And, her parents also made it through two weeks!!)

Only 17 years and 50 weeks to go.

Why babies don't come with instruction manuals

Imagine what it would be like if babies came with instruction manuals. After pushing out the cute baby on the left, the manual on the right would have to come out as well, and it's just too big (and the wrong shape) to fit. That's why babies don't come with manuals.

Child process forked

My wife successfully forked a child process last Tuesday (March 20, 2007) at 11:01 PM! The child process id is 3345. The executable exec'ed immediately following the fork is 'Maria'. Profiling indicates the child process spends significant amounts of time in the sleep(3) system call. Ironically, it appears the child process is interfering with the parent process's use of that same system call.

Waiting for baby

Okay, so it's not even the due date yet, but we're still waiting.
Here's a funny comic by Muncher (full blog post). Maybe it's only funny to expectant dads, but I really liked it.

Panoramic photos

I've been on a panoramic photo kick lately. Here's some pictures of the field across the road, some at sunset, some others after all the snow that came last week. Click on the pictures for a larger version.

Some of the panels get excessively dark. I probably need to set the exposure manually to be the same for all the photos involved, or adjust the brightness before stitching them together.

On blocks in the yard

I wondered what was worse: a car on blocks in the yard, or a broken hot tub? A friend pointed out that the car-on-blocks was so iconic that it's really hard to get past that image. This, of course, led directly to the idea of a hot tub in the yard, up on blocks.
Here it is

There's a hole in my sunroom where a hot tub used to be

See the previous entry for the remains of the hot tub. Here is where it used to reside:
Sue's uncle came down for a few days helped in removing the hot tub, and in installing the new joints and subfloor. (And on a side note, I did get to test hauling 4x8 sheets in the new minivan, and it worked well.)

The most tedious part of the whole process was removing the partial tiles from around the hole. When it gets warmer, we're going to install tile.

Hot tub for sale - cheap!

Some assembly required.

Minivan

As part of the preparations for the baby, we bought a minivan on Saturday. It's a used 2006 Dodge Grand Caravan. Sadly, we traded in the truck - it was a good truck and I had bought it with the intention of keeping it for a long time. However, the minivan should be a capable replacment vehicle for hauling stuff. All the back seats fold into the floor, and it can hold 4'x8' sheets.

So now we have a video camera and a minivan. I think we're pretty much set for the baby to arrive.

High Tech Mergers

Inspired after reading about Scranimals, I pondered the possibilities of various technology and internet companies merging. Potential corporate names:

• Googazon
• Microogle (or Goosoft)
• Amabay
• Amabaysoft (3 way merger)
• Microzon

Video from the new camera

As part of the preparations for the new baby (oh yeah, in case anyone reading this blog doesn't know - we're expecting offspring in March), I bought a video camera last week (a Canon Elura 100).

While visiting my parent's dairy farm for Thanksgiving, I made this short video on How to chew cud

Bowl bread

Saturday morning I started the process of making bread. After mixing and kneading, I heated the oven slightly (turn it on, turn it off after a couple of minutes) and put the dough in the oven to rise.

A couple hours later, some other member of our household (who will remain nameless to protect the identity of the guilty), despite having been warned of the bread dough in the oven, started the oven (to preheat it) without removing the dough.

Fortunately (*very* fortunately), the dough was in a metal bowl. When we went to put the chicken in the oven, we discovered, to our horror, that the bread dough was still in there, and well on its way to being baked. An executive decision was made to continue baking the bread on an experimental basis.

The bread baked (although with such a large loaf - it was supposed to make at least 4 regular loaves - the center still wasn't quite done), and came out of the pan quite easily (I had coated it with oil before letting it rise).

And now, I give you:

Bowl bread! (cue mad scientist laughter in the background)
(not to be confused with a bread bowl)

Don't confuse powdered wasabi with baking powder

Whilst making muffins, I noticed the proximity of the powdered wasabi and the baking powder on the shelf. This led me to contemplate the consequences of accidentally using the wasabi in the muffins.

(I mentioned this thought-mistake to my wife, and she said I should put on the blog. So here it is)

New Diet

I've been on this great(?) new diet. It lets me eat as much as I want, and no counting calories! I've lost over 15 pounds in just 3 weeks.

I call it the Mono/Pnuemonia diet.

The name isn't quite as catchy as those diets named after trendy places.

The tricky part (which I address in a chapter in my upcoming book) is how to contract mono and pnuemonia at the same time.

Sticky notes and moustaches

Over on JFKBits, Joel posted some ideas about Annotating web pages using a sticky notes model.

He created a very simple demo. I played with it and took a screenshot. It's quite possibly a shining example of the sort of juvenile behavior this sort of technology is *not* to be used for.

So this leads naturally (in my mind) to the idea of annotating web pages with virtual moustaches and glasses. The idea of virtual graffiti is very appealing as it satisfies two conflicting requirements:

1. The primal urge to change the world in silly ways.
2. The changes are not permanent (Note that I don't even like to make serious notes in my own books)

(In the comments of his post, Joel pointed a site with a similar idea www.mystickies.com. I didn't create an account and try it, mostly in an attempt to squelch the impulse to find a flat panel monitor ad and put virtual stickies all over the virtual bezel.)

Insult polishing

Tonight I mentioned to my wife that I needed to polish my insults - I needed to run them through the dis washer.

More breakfast blogs

In the course of important daily research, I ran across another breakfast blog. With an important difference - that blog actually talks about breakfast. What a concept.

Another difference is the focus on eggs (according to the tagline, anyway). I dislike eggs for breakfast. Any other time of day eggs are fine (as long as they are fully cooked), but they make me queasy in the morning.

Hot, fresh waffles on the road

I'm in Arizona, and the hotel I'm staying at offers one item that I've never seen before in a hotel breakfast. A waffle-maker. (And cups of waffle batter.) Pour in the batter, rotate the waffle iron to start the built-in timer (the other nifty feature is the waffle iron rotates), and 2 minutes later you have a hot, fresh waffle.

It was a tasty waffle.

According to reliable sources, at least one other hotel in the area has the same implement of fresh waffleness.

Illegal Sea Food

There's a place near my hotel that reads "Legal Sea Food" on the awning. I'm not sure if it's a store or a restaurant or something else.

Does this mean there is illegal sea food about?

I've only been in Baltimore a short time, but I haven't seen any shady characters in trench coats whispering "Hey budy, want some prawns?"

Saturday muffin blogging

Been a while since I've posted any pictures of breakfast foods. Time to get back to my blogging roots and rectify this great omission. This breakfast food picture even comes with a boring, pointless story.

Last week I had a hankering for muffins. Being somewhat competent in the kitchen, I set about on a quest to make some. I consulted my wife's "Joy of Cooking" tome for proper muffin making technique. The key is to keep the wet and dry ingredients separate as long as possible, and mix them just enough to get them sufficiently mixed. To the consternation of assorted bystanders, I actually *measured* most of the ingredients (okay, so I'm embellishing the story a bit - the only bystander was the cat, and he wasn't all that concerned.)

The pictured pineapple-coconut muffin is from my third batch (for the record, the first batch was blueberry, and the second batch was raspberry).

The recipe called for 4 teaspoons of baking powder. After reading the baking powder label, this seemed like a lot of sodium, so I reduced it to 2 teaspoons. The muffins still appeared to rise okay, and were still tasty.

Naming your new variables

There are these lists around of popular baby names for a given year. (No links, do your own Google search). I wonder what such a list would look like if someone did the same tabulation for variable names in programs? How would it change over the years? ("i" and "j" would probably be perennial favorites, with "idx","indx",and "index" not far behind)
Seeing the lists broken down by "ethnicity" (ie, programming language) would be interesting as well.

On a related note, expectant parents have books of baby names at their disposal for aid in choosing a name. I wonder if programmers could use such a resource to assist in naming their variables (and functions and namespaces, etc)?
(Actually, a thesaurus is handy for that purpose. (Ugh, I just answered my own rhetorical question))

Questions from the Edge

The Edge asks a big question annually. This year, it is: What is your dangerous idea? They have a pile of responses from scientists and other notable people. Many of them have to do with brain and biology, others have to do with religion and science, and there are sundry other topics discussed Give it a read (You'll have to scroll down a ways past all the blurbs to get the actual responses on the first page).

Recasting Harry Potter

Raymond Chen's picks for a humorous (perhaps nightmarish) recasting of Harray Potter. Mr. T as Hagrid is brilliant!

Coincidence in the library?

While browsing at the library this evening, I noticed the books on codes and cryptography were right next to the books on Word (like "Word 2000 for Dummies").
Coincidence?

Daylight Savings too commercial

Daylight savings time has lost its way. It's become a big, commercialized, impersonal event. We get so busy with all the hoopla and fanfare, we rush around like mad and never stop to consider the true meaning of the event anymore. It used to be that stores put up their displays at the proper season, but now - now it's barely past Labor Day and every store is decked out in daylight savings time dioramas.

That's just one complaint, and a surface complaint at that. No, the real issue goes deeper. I feel it my heart. I have become distracted. Some years, I think I just want to throw off all the endless festivities that purport to celebrate, but somehow, seem to drain the season of all meaning. One year I'll actually do it - no parties, no festivals, no made-for-TV movies, none of the accoutrements that we consider indispensible - just a single, solitary observance focused on the true meaning of daylight savings time.

In the final analysis, it's not daylight savings time that has lost its way. It is we who have lost our bearings. But it doesn't have to be that way. Will you join me in rediscovering the joyful simplicity that is the end of daylight savings time?

Unnatural fashion chimeras

Whilst listening to 80's music tonight, I suddenly had a vision of stonewashed baggy jeans, with rips in the knees. (Perhaps worn by a rapper with Big Hair (TM)?)

On a similar note, would it even be possible to tight roll baggy pants?

And the cultural collision images kept coming - two guys collide, their clothes get mixed up - "Hey, you got your hip hop in my disco." Second guy - "Hey, you got your disco in my hip hop".

Panoramic pictures of Homer lake

It was warm and sunny the Friday before last, and we took advantage of the occasion for a walk at Homer Lake. I took some panoramic pictures.

I didn't adjust the color and brightness on some of the pictures before combining them into one image, and the sky looks strange in places.

Click on the pictures to get larger versions (at Flickr).

This Old Shed

My mom came down to visit this past weekend, and she wanted to make improvements while she was here. This time the target was the shed/barn structure that had some holes in the roof, needed some boards replaced, and needed a coat of paint.

Before:

After:

Thanks, Mom!

(Lest there be any confusion, my mom did not do the roofing. I did that part)

Belgian Waffles

It's high time I started digging out some food related pictures from the trip to Europe this summer. The first pictures are of genuine Belgian waffles. This might also appear as an attempt to be true to the title of this blog, but it is not so - these waffles are an afternoon snack, not a breakfast delight.

The first ones we tried - one had caramel and one had strawberries.

And this beauty was slathered in chocolate

Panoramic vistas, take 1

The idea of stitching multiple photos together to make a panoramic view has always appealed to me. Attempts to join by hand in the Gimp where unsuccessful, though. Now, with hugin, I can do this on Linux quite easily.

Here's my first attempt, joining two pictures I took while skiing in Colorado this spring.

Wisconsin in the mist

A few weeks ago, I was visiting my parents on their farm in northern Wisconsin. One morning I got up early (yeah, my family was shocked too), and took pictures around the farm with fog in the background.

Compositions I'd like to hear

Continuing on theme of last post, here a few compositions I would like to hear. The first is "Sonata for Three Piccolos, One Tuba and Niagara Falls".

Generally, the instruments used to make music are under the control of the musician, and the better the musician, the more control they have over their instrument. Niagara Falls adds an uncontrolled, unrepeatable aspect to the piece. (Of course, recording it would restore some control and repeatability)

Classical music is quite the collaborative enterprise, with the composer, conductor and musicians all bringing their separate talents to collectively achieve a great social good - curbing teen loitering in 7-Elevens

Performing on the road would be challenging. The smaller part of Niagara Falls (American and Bridal Veil Falls) passes 150,000 gallons per second. This would take about 1800 tanker trucks to transport each minute of the composition. Art on a scale that would make Christo jealous.

The other piece I'd like to hear is "Overture for 13 Trained Squirrels on Violin and One Muskrat with Cymbals."

Overtures involving Jacob's Ladder?

The 1812 Overture is memorable in part because the score calls for real cannon fire.

There are other compositions that call for unusual instruments, but are there other compositions that call for slightly dangerous implements, like Jacob's ladders (high voltage electricity) or thundering herds of water buffalo?