BilikFamily.com

Happy Saint Patrick's Day to friends and family! Today is also Claire's 'half birthday' — as in "today Claire is eleven and a half".

Thursday - Since I had to go in and stay late on Wednesday, I worked from my home desk on Thursday. Despite the occasional noise from downstairs, I was actually quite productive. I had a number of customer inquiries to respond to, and I did an adaptation to a tool I wrote last week so that it could handle another popular data input format.

Friday - Having had a nice break from the daily commute, Friday I head into the office. I did a fitness class mid-morning, as I often do on Fridays. Just before lunch a co-worker asks if I plan on staying all day. At first I think it's just a comment referring to my working from home the previous day. "No," he says, "I mean the storm." "Storm?" I think to myself. "What storm?" Michelle had neglected to mention that a significant Nor'easter was headed in Friday afternoon.

Early in the afternoon I head back to New Hampshire after having reviewed the dopler radar. It was good thing too. As the afternoon went on, the roads got worse. I did fine on the 'major roads' leg of my commute, but the highway going south on route 495 (opposite my direction) was at a standstill! On my back roads portions, I averted an accident on three occasions within about 10-15 miles. In all cases I was spared by my car's ABS brakes and snow tires. Finally I'm getting some use out of those things! (read more about the local accidents) I spent much of the rest of the afternoon and early evening back online from my desk at home.

Saturday - This morning was time to pay up, time to clear the driveway. In order to mitigate against future winter anomalies, I did my part to contribute to 'local warming' by firing up our CO2 emitting, gas powered, internal combustion engine in the form of my 6HP snowthrower. If you wanted to have a snowball fight, today's snow was perfect. If you wanted to actually clear your driveway, it was a nightmare. The snow kept bonding to the auger forming a solid cylinder of snow and ice that wouldn't break up the snow that you were trying to remove. I kept a little gardening hand shovel with me to periodically clear the augers. This was the first time I remember ever having to do that. Consequently it took a long time to clear the driveways even though I'd estimate we only had about 10 inches of snow.

Claire had a friend sleep over the previous night and had been begging me to take her to the Carriage House Coffee Shop this weekend. Although I was tired from snow removal, it was a good tired, not a sleepy one. After I cleaned up, I took the two of them for hot drinks. Me, I had a white chocolate steamer with green sprinkles (in honor of St. Pats). When we got home, Michelle, the other kids, and I were served lunch by Claire and her friend. They went all out: they made typeset menus, took our orders, made the food, and cleaned up. This wasn't just PB&J, either. For instance, I had a cran-apple drink, cheese and crackers, carrots, chicken & wild rice soup, and ice cream for dessert.

After lunch Claire and her friend left for her friend's house. Abby, one of her friends, and the twins played WarioWare Smooth Moves while Timothy napped and Michelle and I rested a bit on the couch. Later in the afternoon Michelle finally broke out the copy of Big Brain Academy DS that she had purchased on Thursday for her and the girls. Along with Brain Age, Michelle was looking for some stimulating puzzle oriented games to appeal to her tastes. After about 15 minutes, Michelle was hooked! She resumed playing it during almost any idle moment the rest of the day. (see examples of play) Michelle was even more excited to hear that a version of Big Brain Academy is slated for the Wii soon.

Mobile Web - For my part, during the afternoon I did a lot of investigation into how one designs a site to be ready for mobile devices like cell phones. You can't make the same assumptions that you do when you assume someone has a big screen with Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari running. While there's a whole bunch of designers playing with concepts of the hyped term "Web 2.0" applications (like Google Maps, GMail, etc.), on the other end of the spectrum is the ability to convey content on the small screen.

A few months ago I made a subtle switch to the way this site works. The front page and the individual entries are all static files on the web server. The files get recreated if I change an entry or if someone adds a comment, but otherwise it's just ordinary files to make it fast and easy on the web server that hosts the site. The monthly and day-by-day archives are rarely accessed though. I quietly made those dynamically generated for that <1% time that they get accessed. The Webnotes have always been dynamically generated.

While I did the move to tune the performance of the site, I'd learned a lot about making a combination static/dynamic hybrid site in the process. While I was researching mobile web sites and playing with them on my phone, I started to form ideas in my mind about how I would use those same techniques to let me access and check up on this site via my cell phone using a dynamic rendering approach. Hmmm… custom bare bones mobile edition pages… hmmm. Perhaps if these winter days keep me stuck indoors.

[Update] Bilikfamily.com Mobile edition work has launched. Initial trials look fine and load reasonably efficiently on my humble Nextel Motorola i580, which is quite a ways down the technology evolution ladder from an expensive Treo or Blackberry smart phone. The infrastructure is there, but the templates could use some adjustments here and there. I plan on adding a filter to optimize the content for cell phone loading, ie. remove the gratuitous eye candy pictures. Otherwise things look decent... If you look at it in a PC/Mac browser, it looks too simple, but on a cell phone, all the browser bling is useless and just slows things down.

Sunday - Tomorrow is a typical Sunday. There'll be Mass, donuts, etc. I hope to have taxes finished tomorrow. If things go well, we may take the kids out to Shorty's for dinner. They have great kids meal rates and tasty food for all ages.

Monday - Happy 41st anniversary to mom and dad this Monday. At least, it darn well better be the 41st anniversary. Otherwise, "Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do!"