Archive for February, 2008
Sunday, February 24th, 2008
Today was a nice warm day, 35 degrees! Oskar, Xavier and I spent some time outside playing in the snow. Oskar really wanted to make 4 ball snowman last time but, the snow wouldn’t stick so well. Today we were able to make something quite a bit larger! Xavier hung out inside with Nancy and Mom while Oskar and I did the heavy lifting. We spent much of our time after this just having fun outside in the snow. I did some more shoveling to scrape down more of the driveway and sidewalk and the kids just threw snow at each other, tress, and other snow. It was a nice afternoon.
We concluded today with a trip to the RAC (Rochester Athletic Club) where they have a really cool kids area. Today happened to be the block party and Xavier had a grand time going up the inflatable slide with Oskar. Xavier did really well with following instructions, waiting in line until he was permitted to go up the slide and coming down quickly afterwards. He siad it was a little bit fun and a little bit scary to slide down - but you would have never guessed as he streamed into the line over and over and over and over and over and… Oskar worked on his mini golf game and enjoyed sliding himself. He also had a great time playing on the giant play structure with X. Xavier was so exhausted after today he didn’t even finish his bottle before falling asleep. Pictures from both events (although the RAC photos are terrible) below. (more…)
Tags: block party, egg, gretchen, nancy, oskar, outside, rac, snow, snowman, winter, xavier
Posted in Family, Kids | No Comments »
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
Yesterday I posted about an email I received from Rackspace regarding their $600 referral promotion. Surprisingly alynfamily.com had a real spike in traffic as a result. I guess they spend more time keeping up with their brand than they do their customers? Did this really warrant 21 visits? (more…)
Tags: analytics, hosting, isp, rackspace, rant
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Rackspace, the less than fantastic, albeit fanatical, web hosting provider is trying to buy support. They have had an incredibly bad last few months. Recently a major datacenter outage in November took many customers offline. Additionally, very public technology failures for sites like 37signals and Tumblr are causing a mass exodus. I’ve never hosted anything there myself, but nishnash.com was hosted there while I worked on it and so I still have an account linked to their customer portal. Generally, Rackspace’s prices are high for the service rendered (a recent proposal had them 30-40% more than comparable hosting providers). (more…)
Tags: hosting, isp, rackspace, spam
Posted in AF-Design, Technology | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
In an effort to cache in on the latest and greatest Social Networking craze, sites are using weirder and weirder methods to get folks to use their tools. I stumbled onto this one from a Photojojo article today. The site MagMyPic has a number of photo magazines they’ve cropped out that you can insert your photos into. I figured I’d check it out and found they had a link to post it directly to Facebook - only to find out they wanted me to add the application (probably followed by some invites and so on) so I decided to grab the photo and let everyone just see the result here instead. The idea is cute even if their viral marketing is draconian. It reminds me of the Photo Cutout Tool developed by Cate Sia at NWF many moons ago (2004). Apparently NWF was ahead of their time - they should bring it back. Oskar was in the training video - although he probably didn’t realized it at the time.
Tags: fun, marketing, nwf, oskar, photo, rant, video
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Boys are all trimmed up. Gretchen did a nice job cropping back the mops on the boys heads. Oskar was very concerned he would be getting hair in his eyes. Xavier was more concerned he wouldn’t have enough candy. Some photos of the event are below. (more…)
Tags: gretchen, haircut, oskar, xavier
Posted in Family, Kids | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Two weeks ago Xavier decided that he could double his fun by inserting an extra disk into the Nintendo Wii - in effect doubling his fun right? Well, it turns out that the slot load drive isn’t a big fan of dual discs and the drive was rendered incapacitated. Two weeks later, I finally got around to calling Nintendo Support to inquire about costs for replacing the drive. As it turns out, repairs (for drives anyway) are about $50! An additional shipping fee (via FedEx) is $7.50. All in all much cheaper than trying to replace one of these highly sought after systems. Today we’ll finish packing it up and drop it into the FedEx drop box for delivery. Nintendo said 7-10 days and we should have it back. So I backed up our saved game data and Mii’s onto the Wiimote and a SD Card I had here and hopefully it comes back with the data on it. I was surprised by the apparent lack of capacity of the card (32Mb) only holds about 250 blocks of game/channel info. I expect it to hold more.
If I could offer some advice to folks who are curious, do not put two discs into your Wii as it appears to break it. I’ve heard water also has a negative effect but that is as of yet untested and unconfirmed.
Tags: nintendo, repair, sd card, wii, xavier
Posted in Kids, Technology | 1 Comment »
Saturday, February 16th, 2008
Minnesota Children’s Museum. Gretchen stayed home to work on some things she’s not been able to carve sufficient time out for and generally not get nagged at by the kids for a few hours straight. The museum has lots of great exhibits and all for a reasonable price. There’s even a parking voucher $3 for 3 hours (although 3 hours is hardly enough time to see and do it all if you’ve never been before.) Pictures and more after the link. (more…)
Tags: children's museum, egg, oskar, st. paul, xavier
Posted in Family, Kids | No Comments »
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Okay, not the best picture, but still funny. Xavier has decided that the brown slush/ice that hangs off the car behind the wheels is “car poopies.” You just can’t make this stuff up! He is so matter of fact about it - you just can’t help but laugh. (more…)
Tags: car, poop, xavier
Posted in Kids | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
Some folks will recall back in November I wrote how OpenSocial was irrelevant as a platform for social networking applications. I’ve been working with it for the last three days on MySpace and have to say, over the last few months the folks at MySpace have been working hard to bring OpenSocial to a usable reality. I’ve had some time this week to experiment with it and I must say - while certainly not “done” it’s come a VERY long way. Warning: This is going to get kinda lame for those who don’t care about Social Networks and application development. (more…)
Tags: api, code, google, myspace, oauth, opensocial, rant, social network, Technology
Posted in AF-Design, Technology | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
LAMP, for those who don’t know, is a software architecture commonly deployed for high availability web applications. It’s entirely open source (meaning free to use) and is very inexpensive to get started with (some hosting plans offer LAMP for as little as $2-3/mo). I’ve worked with a number of websites running on LAMP and find as a developer I think very little about what’s going on under the hood. Recently I had a horrible experience (fortunately one that was reversible) deploying a site onto FreeBSD — afterall, there’s a reason this is called LAMP and not FAMP. (more…)
Tags: freebsd, lamp, mysql, opensource, php
Posted in AF-Design, Technology | No Comments »
