Barry’s Daily Web News

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We had a fun time at the library tonight. For the first time, Sean let me hold his hand while walking through the library. We attracted more attention than I wanted, because Sean kept blowing raspberries and squealing while he was walking. At least with we me holding his hand, it was easier to keep him from pulling the books off the shelves. The next thing we need to do at the library is keep Sean from throwing the toy trains at the play table in the children’s area.

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Really nice day today. The high was 105 degrees, but it was dry, and we had a beautiful blue sky with no clouds. Cortney went out with a friend to the movies later in the evening, so we took Sean into the pool right after dinner. Even though the sun was still shining, the cooler water in the pool made the swim very pleasant.

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We were going to go to the zoo today, but we had a late start, and Sean was a little on the fussy side, so we decided to go to the mall instead. With the hot temperatures here, we really need to do the outdoor activities as early in the morning as possible to avoid the heat. We plan to go to the zoo Saturday morning. At the mall, Cortney bought a pair of shoes on sale. I looked at the digital cameras. We really don’t need any features that our current camera (Olympus D340) doesn’t have, but we are looking for a camera that has an improved lens with the digital equivalent of a faster film speed to avoid blurring in our pictures of Sean. We are considering the Olympus 2040Z.

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Another news article on global warming. Is it me, or have people lost the ability to apply logical thinking? Read this article carefully. Ignoring the hype, the scientific statement is that previous assumptions made in climate models are incorrect, that climate change might occur quickly. A logical conclusion is that there is more uncertainty than previously believed, and less cause to take action. Only a political analysis would state that we have more reason to reduce emissions. I guess most people cannot tell when someone with the title of scientist is making a political argument that has no basis in fact.

We had a very enjoyable swim in the pool today. Even though the high today was 110 degrees, the drier air made the pool water seem cooler. Here is a picture (taken yesterday) showing Sean’s favorite pool activity:

This picture is taken just before he falls into the water. I let him stay under for a second before I pull him up.

I was feeling a little out of sorts this morning, so I decided to take it easy on my morning run. I was very surprised to find out that I finished my 3 mile run in under 27 minutes. It shouldn’t be too much effort to drop my time under 24 minutes.

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We took Sean into the pool today. This is the first time he has been in since the 4th of July. The combination of cloudy, humid weather and treating the pool for algae has kept us out for a week. Sean had a great time in the pool. His favorite thing to do is to stand up in waist (his) deep water and lunge forward, going under the water, then waiting for me to pick him up. Just before he lunges forward, he sticks his hands up in the air. It’s real cute.

I see in the news that Napster will be shut down for a while. I think this decision is silly. With the filtering level that Napster currently has, no one would deliberately look for copyrighted files, so Napster isn’t contributing towards copyright infringement. Obviously, the judge has never used Napster. Part of the blame goes to congress, for passing the DMCA. Under the DMCA, publishers and content owners can take away our fair use rights by transfering media to digital formats. Of course, I think Napster’s business model is dead in the water anyway. How can they charge me for using my hard drive and internet connection to provide music to other people? Remember, Napster doesn’t store files on their servers, just listings of files on users’ harddrive. My choice today is Morpheus. Napster’s only initial advantage was that it is easy to use, and developed a huge user data base. I believe file sharing is here to stay.

More mysterious happenings on my computer at work. Some time in the middle of the day, internet explorer (or Microsoft Exploiter) lost my history information and my cookies. While I don’t care much for cookies, I like to keep them for internet sites that require logins so I don’t have to remember passwords.

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Sean let out a big squeal when I came home from work. He was excited to see me. Cortney said he was a little under the weather earlier today, but he was full of energy in the evening. When he walks, he still holds his arms up in the air. Occasionally, he will clap his hands or slap his stomach. It looks hilarious.

I had another problem with my computer at work today. I normally do not log off when I go home, so I just lock the workstation and turn off the monitor. When I went to unlock the computer this morning, the window dialogue to enter the password did not have the NT domain like it normally does. Even though the window had my usered entered, it would not take my password. At that point, I gave up and rebooted the machine, and everything worked fine after that. If I were the superstitious type, I would say my computer was possesed.

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I had fun playing with Sean tonight. If you just sit down, he gets upset; but if you walk around and play with him he really loves it. He followed me around the house for about a half hour. I think I wore him out. After I gave him his milk, he crashed on the couch. Letting him sleep turned out to be a mistake. When I woke him up to put him to bed, he started crying, and continued crying, even after trying to comfort him. This happened to us once before. I’m stumped as to why he would cry so much just for being woken up.

Yesterday’s entry didn’t show up until this morning. The blogger server must have had some problem that prevented posting yesterday’s entry to my website. I tried repeatedly last night to get the post out to the web page, and it wouldn’t work until I tried it again this morning.

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We took Sean to the library for baby time. Even though we go every week, this is the first time he walked around the library. Before the baby time started, he had fun pulling books off the shelves. We tried keeping him at the library for story time, which starts at 7:00pm, but this was to close to his bottle time and bed time, so we had to take him home after just a few minutes.

I’m trying the music download tool Morpheus as a replacement for Napster. Morpheus has some features Napster doesn’t, such as getting files from multiple sources to improve download speed, and auto-resume for failed downloads. The music selection is reasonable, but not as good as Napster was at its peak. Apparently, Morpheus uses true peer-to-peer connections, so it doesn’t know what files are being traded. This should mean that it will be difficult to sue for copyright violations.

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Monday. Slow day at work. Sean was fussy most of the day. Even though it was hot, we didn’t feel like swimming in the pool because it was cloudy and humid. The high point of the day was Cortney’s delicious seasoned chicken dinner.

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Quiet day today. The weather forecast was for sunny skies, but it was cloudy most of the day, and it drizzled on and off for a few hours. I spent the early morning doing yardwork, and the rest of the day relaxing and getting caught up in my reading. One of these days, I plan to put my reading list on this website.

Sean barely crawled at all today. There were at least a couple of times where he was sitting a few feet away from one of his toys, and rather than crawl to get the toy, he stood up and walked over to pick it up. Even though he is now more comfortable walking, Sean still gets excited when he walks. He will squeal and shake his arms. It’s so cute.

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We went out to dinner, and we ordered something for Sean for the first time. We ordered some chicken fingers, thinking it was similar to the breaded, frozen chicken we typically feed him. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to be interested, so we wrapped it up to take home, where it is likely to be a snack for Cortney. We did bring food for him as a backup, so he didn’t go hungry.

I installed the firewall software on Cortney’s computer. It took several hours, as the first time I tried to install it, I couldn’t get either the configuration routine or the program itself to run. I ended up uninstalling, then reinstalling the program, which then ran without problem. It’s frustrating working with software that doesn’t work for any fault of your own.

We took Sean to the playground this morning. This is the first time he has been to the playground since he started walking. For some reason, he didn’t want to walk on the sand. He wasn’t too thrilled with the playground equipment either, so we let him walk and play on the grass nearby. Sean is definitely walking more. I estimate that he is now walking 90% of the time versus crawling.

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Bizarre weather this week. If you are a regular reader, than you will recall that Monday, we set a record high of 116 degrees, which was the hottest temperature here in 3 years. Today, the high was only 88 degrees! It was cloudy all day, and we got a bit of rain midday.

I took advantage of the cooler weather to take Sean out to the back yard. He likes walking in the grass. Now that he is getting more proficient in walking, he constantly circles about the yard, only occasionally reaching down to grab a leaf or piece of grass.

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Sean is definitely walking more. His favorite thing to is to walk into the room holding a toy in one hand, and then hand it to you. He seems to enjoy walking, and he frequently just circles the room. He is getting better at changing direction when he walks. He still hasn’t given up his crawling, and when he is in a hurry, he still crawls.

My network login problem with the configuration management program at work seems to have mysteriously disappeared. On Monday and Teusday, I was not able to log into the database when loading the configuration management client, but my network access was otherwise working. Today, I was able to login into the configuration management database without any problem. It only makes sense that since nobody had any explanation of the original problem, that nobody knows why it went away.

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Happy 4th of July to everyone.

We went over to a friend’s house to celebrate the fourth. Sean spent several hours in their pool and had a great time. They had a video monitor that we used to watch him after he went to sleep. He looked so relaxed with his hands behind his head after he went to sleep. It was tough to wake him up to put him in the car to take him home.

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It only got up to 114 today, but we had our first monsoon thunderstorm of the year. Cortney was excited. She says she misses the rain from Florida. I worry about the heavy winds associated with the storms causing damage to the trees in the yard.

After months of speculation, the Honeywell merger with GE is officially over. The company was pretty quick in removing the “GE integration” link from the company intranet.