Timothy - Today Timothy turned one year old. Not much happened since he's only one. Michelle took the kids to BK for dinner and to use their indoor playground. She took a few pictures earlier today which I'll post in a few days.
Shakespeare - Little Claire saw her first Shakespeare play this weekend. She was invited to tag along with neighboring friends to see A Midsummer Night's Dream performed by a small group in nearby Wilton. I think she enjoyed the concept of going out to see a play more than she actually understood the play.
Non-Superbowl - On Sunday Claire had two of her girl friends from school over for the afternoon. Between the four girls (Abby included) there was some sledding, some dancing, some piano playing, some video gaming, pizza, and I took them to Santos Dumont for hot drinks or ice cream. By the time it was all done, I thought nothing of the SuperBowl. I had to ask Michelle Monday morning if she'd heard anything on the news about the game. Considering the scandal of the half time show, I'm almost glad we didn't watch it. I didn't even bother recording it. The commercials are all available online anyway.
Whiners - Among the more popular internet discussions of the day there was a bit of a tirade against internet web pages done with Movable Type (the software that manages this) on a site called Kuro5hin. The troll author claimed that Movable Type weblogs must die because 99% aren't worth reading, because they have security holes, and because they (supposedly) mess with the quality of Google's search engine results.
I find his missive to be just a useless rant. No one has to read anyone's webpage. 99% of newspaper content is crud, 99% of TV is crud, 99% of the books published are crud, blah, blah. I write for my friends and family. We live a thousand miles away from the nearest relative but want them to be able to stay up to date. I don't like emailing news and pictures, but we have five kids who are growing up fast. Unlike some weblog authors, I could care less if strangers don't link to this site. So yes, 99% of personal web pages aren't worth reading by the general public. So don't. It's amazing when someone complains about the impact lewd photos have on society, they are called a prude and told to keep quiet amidst outcries of censorship. However when morons like this say that weblogs should die because they (while harmless) are worthless, how can anyone take it seriously?
Album experimentation - I've been doing a bit of experimentation this past week to see if there's anything to could be done to make the photo albums a bit more animated -- something where the pictures cross fade, pan, and zoom a bit. First I looked at a piece of software called Still Life. That program would be useful if I were making DVD videos but might be a bit much for the web because the resulting downloads are huge -- like watching a movie trailer via the web. This past weekend I looked to a more light weight alternative -- SWF 'n Slide. Instead of exporting raw video as Still Life does, this program exports to the open Macromedia Flash file format. See more examples in their sample gallery. Since these Flash downloads are basically composed of still images with small embedded commands telling the computer how to display them, the sizes are significantly smaller than any compressed video format. But another part of me says not to bother with any pizzazz. Just show the pictures with some simple navigation! (as I currently do)
Get those pictures up!!! Yesterday was the first day I did actual phone counseling. So mom said for me to mark that day down. We talked about how Timothy's birthday will also mark the first day of me officially counseling. Oh, we're nerds!
Posted by: Suzy at February 4, 2004 01:17 PM"Get those pictures up" That's easy for you to say. Getting the pictures out of the camera, fixing defects and lighting, putting captions on, getting them into albums, uploading them and writing up an entry linking to the album with a leadin thumbnail -- it takes a bit o' time. It's fun, but it still takes time.
Yesterday it was announced that ARC is drastically reducing its Nashua peripherals group, so I had a few other things on my mind last night. Michelle and I spent much of the evening just talking about the future (after putting the kids down so as not to worry them, esp Claire). While a part of me wanted to work on pictures, it was more important to discuss 'things at the office' (which I rarely do at home).
Congratulations on your first phone counseling. What had been your role at Chestnut before this? Somehow I thought you had already been doing that kind of counseling.
Posted by: Scott at February 4, 2004 01:42 PMHello!
At Chestnut, I do case management. I do talk to clients, but before, if they said they needed to talk to a counselro right away, I was instructed to pass it along to one of three master's level counselors. So, they were kind of waiting on me to get some more clinical experience. My boss was very proud because it turned out the guy was an executive director of one of our client companies!
Ah, I see. I hadn't made the distinction between case management and counseling. Well, congratulations again.
Posted by: Scott at February 4, 2004 06:52 PM