Barry’s Daily Web News

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Ethan went for his well visit to the pediatrician this morning. His weight is now up to 7 lb, 3 oz, which is close, but not quite up to his birth weight. The doctor says Ethan is doing just fine.

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Today was my first day back at work after the birth of Ethan. Not much has changed in my absence. I’m going to work shorter days, so that I can come home early to help Cortney out with Sean and Ethan. I’m going to attempt to install a VPN connection with work, so I can spend at least some time working at home.

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Sean was bursting with energy tonight, so we took him to the park. I used the double stroller to take Ethan as well, and Corky joined in. It was a beautiful evening for the park. It was nice and cool, and we had a full moon to light the way. Sean held the ten count on the monkey bars twice this evening. His favorite thing now is to go down the slide on his stomach, feet first. Sean is also talking more, and he talks to himself and the other kids.

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I start back at work tomorrow. I took off for six days, and I look back and wonder where they went. Of course, I spent three of those days at the hospital. Cortney’s father is staying for another week, so Cortney will have help when I’m at work. To help me get back into the routine, I spent time today working out in the yard and doing the bills.

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I decided not to overseed the lawn this year. It would be nice to have a green lawn for Sean to play on this winter, but I don’t think I have the time to maintain it with the new baby.

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All of the picture links should be fixed now. It turns out that my web page is hosted on a unix server, and so the paths to the pictures are case sensitive. The pictures were working on my local web server, but not the public server. I had to go back and rename some of the files, and change the path names in some of the posts.

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www.bdwn.com is now live (at least on my nameserver)! Don’t forget to update your bookmarks.

If you see broken links, please by patient. I’m in the process of fixing them.

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Now that I have the space, I finally got around to putting up my photo essay Ethan comes home from the hospital. You can find it both on the stories page and on the date I put in the place holder.

I also posted the Ethan takes a bath picture on yesterday’s page.

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Here is one of the picture’s I’m printing out to take to work tomorrow (click to enlarge).

Windtalkers

After some time off for the new baby, it’s time for some movie reviews. Last night’s movie was Windtalkers. Despite the fact that this was an action movie, this was one of the worst World War II movies I have seen. The violence level was off the scale, but the war scenes were completely unrealistic. Every single grenade and artillery explosion was accompanied by a flash of pyrotechnic flame. If a comic book effect was desired, then this movie would have been better off as a computer animation. I hope that this movie took liberties with the real story, as it doesn’t make sense to me to need a code to call in artillery fire. Codes are only needed for strategic communications. I can only assume that the Navajo code talkers were involved in combat when the command headquarters was overrun. Of course, this would not have made a good action movie. One more complaint — I thought Nicolas Cage was a poor choice for the leading role. I rate this movie a D.

Buy it.

Insomnia

The first of the weekend movies was Insomnia, as in the perfect cure (grin). Let me start of with a disclaimer that I really don’t like these types of murder-suspense movies. I did think that the plot was very slow to develop, and once you new the plot, the rest of the movie was boring. Al Pacino is definitely over the hill in this movie. I rate it a C.

Buy it.

Changing Lanes

Last Wednesday, we saw Changing Lanes. This was a fairly interesting movie, but with nothing exceptional to offer. Samuel Jackson did a much better acting job than Ben Affleck. I think the movie took some cheap shots at Wall Street lawyers, but that didn’t affect the movie. I rate it a B.

Buy it.

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Sean said all 26 letters of the alphabet tonight, for the first time. He doesn’t know the letters if presented in random order, but certainly knowing them in order is a good start.

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We had our digital cable installed today. I ordered it yesterday, and was lucky enough to get an appointment today. The digital cable is a little pricey, but has some nice features. We decided to get the digital cable since Cortney wanted HBO. We could have purchased HBO on the “classic” cable system, but we would only have had one channel, and would still require a converter box. With the digital cable, we get eight HBO channels. We also get all of the premium channels for a 3 month trial period. I was worried about integrating the cable box with the VCR and DVD player, but the cable box integrates seemlessly with the TV and VCR, so we really only need one control for the 3 components, with an additional control for the DVD player. With the digital cable downstairs, and the TV tuner card in my computer, it seems like we have a full multimedia household.

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Interesting day today. Corky finished pulling the cable line down into the office. This was quite a challenge, as we had to go throught two fire breaks. I decided to try it out by purchasing a TV tuner card for my computer. I ended up buying an ATI TV Wonder VE card. The card itself was easy enough to install. The software doesn’t seem to work well with windows XP. I had to update the drivers and software just to get it working. It also appears that the video signal is corrupted every once in a while. Closing the program and restarting seems to fix it. When it does work, it works well. The full screen video looks like an inexpensive TV, but the windowed screen is very sharp. The TV guide software also seems to work well.