Wednesday I moved all of my bookmarks, RSS feeds, and favorites over to Firefox 3.0 after getting bogged down by Safari’s memory leaks and slow response times once too often. Firefox has a nice new interface (much improved from 2.0) and seems to be zippy enough, but it’s got a nagging annoyance I’m not sure I’m cool with yet: the bookmarks bar allows for folders of links and RSS feeds, but doesn’t display the number of new RSS entries like Safari does. This, and some other minor differences, will take getting used to.
Meanwhile, the drive I spent an afternoon archiving ten years of digital pictures on started to go wonky, so I did some musical chairs with hard drives and servers and now I’m backing that up to a secondary drive, even though I don’t have much faith in either of them. Looks like I need to seriously consider yet another storage solution for all of our digital media. The need is increasing daily, too, because I’ve taken over 2 gigs of video of Finley since she was born, and I’m terrified of losing any of it. It’s all backed up on DVD, but given the uneven predictions for the lifespan of that media, I’m thinking I need to shoot some Super-8 film of her so that we’ll have physical media in 50 years. (I’ve already shot some medium-format film of her with the Rolleicord, but that’s a small amount relative to the digital format).
Daddy wants. This is a short article on the diesel version of the Kawasaki KLR650, made only for the Marine Corps. Eventually, I’m going to own one of these, diesel or not.
…about the 1/2 of snow crippling the greater Baltimore area this morning is that it has confirmed a suspicion of mine about the lack of insulation in our porch ceiling. I originally put R-19 up there, thinking it would be plenty for the application, but as my lovely bride will tell you, it’s fucking freezing out there. The radiators do in fact heat the space up, but all warmth dissipates within about 20 minutes or so, making it useless for an all-season office (we’re currently using the dining room table).
This morning I peeked out the front bedroom windows and noticed the snow melting on the porch roof directly over the office area, which tells me I need at least another layer of R-19 over top of the existing insulation to keep that warmth in. Which means I’ve got to find a way to get up in there that doesn’t involve carving a hole in the drywall or using a shrink ray. Fortunately, I’ve got fresh freelance checks in my back pocket and there’s a sale on insulation at the H-D this week.
I consider myself a pretty technologically savvy idiot. I’ve had a weblog for eight years, I’ve been working on the internet for over ten; but I’ve resisted jumping on the social networking train, with one exception. It seems like everybody’s on the Facebook these days, and in the last two weeks, I’ve had three different people tell me I should join. I’ve made my reservations about social networking pretty plain here before, which basically boils down to avoiding the same crap I dealt with in high school, but this evening I decided to stick my toe in the pool, for reasons I don’t quite understand yet.
This is why the internet is awesome. Kick back, turn up the speakers, and rock out. (YouTube link). There is no word to describe the awesomeness of this video.
Miss Finley is going for her first daycare appointment today so that Mama can get some work done. I can’t imagine the house without her in it.
Finn stirred at 6:15 this morning, and we both listened to her from across the room, wondering if she would fall back to sleep or start crying (she amused herself quietly for 45 minutes). She’s gotten so much better at settling herself in the last month, there have been days where she’s put herself to sleep alone after being put down in the crib wide awake—something I thought we’d never be able to do.
Not wanting to upset her inner clock, Jen waited until 7 to get her some breakfast, and I stayed in bed to try to get a little more sleep. At 8, right about the time I usually get up, she brought Finn back in and laid her down in the bed between us, a rare and special treat I haven’t experienced since we started the sleep routine. She played with my beard and kicked her feet against my leg as I nestled her up against my chest, and within a few minutes fell fast asleep clutching the collar of my shirt, peaceful and serene. I stayed with them both for a few minutes, stretching out the time as long as I dared, before grudgingly and quietly rising to rush around and get ready for work.
Thank you, ladies, I needed that.
LOST is on tonight at 8PM. We won’t be answering the phone.