Michelle's step brother, Michael Crowley, has an official webpage through the college where he teaches. He is the department chairperson for mass communications at Briar Cliff college and teaches a number of courses in photography, communications, public relations, photojournalism, website production, etc. Most interesting for a photo buff like me is his gallery of photos. Update: His photos from the Flagstaff family reunion this month are here.
In one of those anal retentive bursts of obsessive compulsive behavior, I spent some time this evening making sure that my top level home page was correct HTML version 4.0 by repeatedly running this web page through the offical HTML validator fixing the errors until it was "clean". You would be amazed at how many web sites have sloppy HTML coding. It's no wonder that the pages render differently in different web browsers. The web browser has to make some decision when the code isn't accurate about how to handle the error. Some folks get a kick out of how fancy they can make their websites with graphics and Javascript. I have this strange interest in interoperability and loading speed. I think it comes from hating two things: a) sites that say "best viewed with Internet Explorer/Netscape" and b) WWW seeming like it means “World Wide Wait”.
Michelle got a few nice birthday cards today. Claire also got a nice post card from her upcoming teacher welcoming her to the school and her class. I mailed 11 bills that had built up while we were gone on vacation. Writing those bills was one of my ways of trying to help Michelle on her birthday. The killer bills were the new mortgage (of course) but also finally paying for the washer and dryer. We had chosen a deferred billing when we purchased the washer and dryer because money was going to be a bit tight until our Nashua home was sold and the proceeds deposited.
Regarding the boys and their stomach bugs, Michael seems to be slowing down on his rate of (ahem) filling his diapers but still is recovering from the nasty diaper rash the sickness left him with. Daniel, unfortunately, is still going strong on his diaper filling capability.
Tomorrow Michelle has another OB/GYN prenatal visit. It's also Claire's last day of freedom. School starts Wednesday in Southern NH. As I was putting Claire to bed, she told me she couldn't believe how fast summer was over. I remember feeling that way as well.
Michelle and I started work on tearing down all the boxes used in our move to Milford. The mountain of boxes that had occupied our dining room these past couple of months is gone. Last weekend I also worked on making sure the spare bed was ready in the extra bedroom for my mom's visit which starts Sunday. The movers hadn't assembled it correctly and that made the headboard loose.
Since we've returned from vacation, Adelphia PowerLink broadband internet service has been downright respectable. I've been getting over 2Mbits down and about 110-115kbits up. It made it relatively easy to upload the vacation photo album yesterday. I hope the bandwidth and response times can stay this good. On a related note I got a chance to have a quick tour of MV Communications (one of our service providers) last week when I had to return the ADSL modem. It was neat seeing the servers, switches, etc. that relay my webpages, email, etc. I also had a chance to talk briefly with their tech support about where MV was going in the near future.
I was excited to hear that last weekend Chris helped my dad get setup again with the Gateway computer. When Suzanne left for college last week, she took her computer with her. Now dad can keep up to date on his stocks, news, and BilikFamily.com, of course! (grin) The Gateway computer is the original computer dad bought a few Christmas's ago to be the “family computer”. Glad to see it's back in the family, now upgraded with new hardware and software.