XP on Intel Mac
Well, after the much anticipated Windows XP boots on a MacBook Pro picture;
It looks like they finally got it working. Here is a comic that pretty much explains it all;
noodad
I found a funny site this morning that actually has some decent advice for new dads. Check out http://www.noodad.com for both some entertainment and lessons. It's in my bloglines lineup now.
snow
Remember last weekend I said it rained? Well it did again this weekend. We don't know what to do with ourselves around here.
Here is a link to a pretty sweet picture of snow at Cave Creek Road and Carefree Highway from last weekend;
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mvcornelius/111689347/
For those of you not in Phoenix, that is more snow than anyone can remember on the outskirts of the valley.
rain and baby stuff
It rained yesterday after 144 days without it. It probably rained the entire 24 hours, but if you look outside this morning you can't even tell. The best part should be what it did to the air, not necessarily what it did to the ground.
Lori and I spent the better part of the day looking at baby furniture and strollers at various stores. I also bought a book on buying baby stuff and signed up for consumerreports.org. It's a hard choice with all of this stuff, everyone is touting the best new convenience or safety feature. We want it to be safe, effective, but not break the bank.
I know at least a few people that read this blog have had kids recently. Let me know your input! What brands did you like? What stores did you like? What did you spend too much on and not end up using? What do you wish you'd spent more on? What broke too easily? We want to be informed parents! =)
beisbol, traffic, and mozilla
I went to the USA vs Mexico World Baseball Classic game yesterday, which was a really cool experience. I met my dad there, and arrived just in time for the USA team to be announced. I have pictures that I'll upload soon. The game was full of annoying Mexico fans.. suddenly those Cubs fans don't look so bad, but they lost, so who cares.
After the game I went to the gift shop and practiced my mosh pit skills by getting through a crowd of a few hundred people in about 2 minutes to get in the door. I'm pretty positive I didn't make any friends there, but at least I got in. I bought a simple USA baseball t-shirt and I got Lori the purple Diamondbacks dragon she had wanted at the end of last season. After that I went to my car on top of the civic plaza parking structure and waited. Actually, I took pictures of the valley and the stadium, then talked on the phone to Lori for a bit. After 35mins or so traffic finally started moving, and I hit Jefferson going East an hour after the game ended.
Next, I spent over twenty minutes going from 7th st to 16th st on Jefferson (that's just over a mile for non-Phoenix people). Then another fifteen getting to University and 16th St where the two lanes of construction on 15th St became one. After that it was pretty smooth sailing and I decided to stop off at the Fry's on 24th St and Baseline. I was in and out pretty quick and then went to turn on to 24th so I could turn left on to Baseline at the light. There was a small problem though. This soccer mom idiot in a Suburban would not turn left. She had blocked the entire exit from the parking lot and just wouldn't get up the guts to turn. I sat there for over 5 minutes waiting for this woman to drive. It's people like that who shouldn't be given driver's licenses. At this point it was 6:30 and I thought I must be in the clear.
Oh no, that couldn't possibly happen. I next had the joy of sitting in traffic on Baseline and then on the slow drive around the Pointe on 48th St. So between the gift shop, the parking structure emptying, traffic, the grocery store, and people who can't turn left, it took me two hours and twenty minutes to get home from the game.
On the plus side, I got plenty of cool pictures from the parking structure roof that I will be sure to post.
On an unrelated note, I was just going through my web server logs, as I often do, and I tallied up what web browsers are being used to access this site. Well guess what, Mozilla (that includes Firefox and others) is the winner, by almost double. Take that Microsoft. Good to see most of you are using the right browser.
san diego
Well, I in fact got off my lazy butt and put up the San Diego Pictures. Only took a week, not too bad. I was pretty disappointed at the picture quality of my cell phone. I had the batteries on my digital camera die pretty early on. Not many of the cell phone pictures made the cut. Here is the link;
sonograms, cleaning, and pandora
I finally have the sonogram Lori took back in January online. Thanks to Chris' scanner the baby now has a web presence. Even *I* wasn't that advanced.. watch out. You can view the scanned print-out full sized at;
It took forever to do because of a massive mess in my office that I've finally cleaned up. Consider that there was a ton of Christmas stuff in here and you'll understand the full impact of the mess. I not only needed to clean it to keep my sanity, but also because this will be the baby's room before we move to the new house. I wanted to make sure everything was open for it's stuff well ahead of time so that was one less thing to be worried about later on. Now I just need to keep it clean.
I've been playing with this online music service called Pandora lately. Based on music you add and music you tell it you like or don't like it picks music for you. For instance, I added eminem, Yellowcard, Bob Marley, Smashing Pumpkins, Paul Oakenfold and others. Then it picks randomly a mix of those songs as a radio stream through their flash web interface. To give you an example, it's playing Foo Fighters right now. When I tell it to explain why it's playing that it says;
"Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features hard rock roots, a subtle use of vocal harmony, electric guitar wall-o-sound, repetitive melodic phrasing and extensive vamping."
Then I click the album cover, and say I like it so knows to play more music like this. I've been pretty impressed so far.
The best part is you can tie this in to the squeezebox I mentioned a while back. It costs $36/year, but it may be worth it, we'll see. I can get a 90 day trial that I think I'll take advantage of. You can create seperate radio channels within your account so Lori and I could maintain separate lists as well as different genres we liked or moods we were in. For instance, Mike's Pissed Off Metal and Lori's Mellow R&B.
You can look at Pandora here;
and the squeezebox deal with them here;
http://www.slimdevices.com/au_press_pandora.html
PLAY BALL!
135 days without rain here in Phoenix. The longest stretch in recorded history. I got about 12 drops on my windshield on the way home from work the other day, but nothing measurable yet.
The baseball off-season has come and gone since it rained and the Diamondbacks started off spring training by beating up on the White Sox who won the World Series last year.
Northern Arizona has gotten the least amount of snow in recorded history and is expected to have the worst fire season .. in recorded history. If only they recorded forever I wouldn't have to say that at the end =).
So Lori and I took a trip to San Diego this weekend to see the Zoo and Sea World. It was a ton of fun, and I have some pictures to upload as soon as I get off my lazy butt. On the way back in to the Valley I saw a huge glow off in the distance as we approached Gila Bend. Meaning we were still well over an hour away and you could see the lights from Phoenix. This city is so enormous it's just amazing. It was a dark night, but still.
As we got closer to Maricopa on I-8 there was a fire on the side of the road. I've seen the after effects of wildfires, and even entire valleys covered in their smoke up north, but never actually seen something burning. It was immediately on the side of the freeway, probably sparked by someone throwing a cigarette out the window. It had grown to a few hundred yard and covered the freeway in smoke. An interesting sight to be seen.
Anyways, back to the trip. At Sea World we got to see polar bears fight under water through glass from about 10 feet away, and at the zoo a bird eat a rabbit about 8 feet through a mesh net. Up close and personal nature. Can't beat that. I thought it was a pretty good time to go to both places, not as busy as I'm sure it is during the summer, and the weather was right up my alley.
Lori did a great job, considering she's pregnant, and the only time she had an issue was on the way over she had to sleep. It was pretty exciting though because I got to smuggle her through a border patrol checkpoint. She was asleep in the backseat, and I drove through without them seeing her. I am now officially a human smuggler. You can call me Coyote Mike.
Elsewhere in life, work is ridiculously busy, but I have managed to hire a new employee to help out with the load. It still won't be easy, but I can maybe get back to being a manager rather than just an engineer. I started my next class last week in school titled "Organizational Behavior". I ended up getting a B in the last class, just as an update since I don't think I ever mentioned that.
I'm sure I'm missing three hundred different things, but that's what comes to mind at the moment.