BilikFamily.com

New Host - As mentioned last week, this morning I moved the content of this site from Cornerhost.com to FastMail.fm. There will be some kinks to smooth out, but hopefully it looks very similar. What's broken? For now there are no comments, no gospel or saint of the day, and no working site search. Webnotes are not coming back, but they had already lost their popularity. Click on the "Scott" link above to send me feedback about whatever else is broken.

Album - I haven't taken many pictures since Christmas, but Abby has been taking some. Unfortunately her pictures often have a feline theme to them. Still, if you look over this album, you'll see pictures from each of the boys' birthdays. Enjoy! I hope to take more in the month ahead.

GIMP - The GIMP is the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. I used it early on when the twins were first born. Later when Adobe ported Photoshop Elements to run natively on Mac OS X, I bought that. It was about one tenth the cost of full Photoshop with about 99% of what I needed Photoshop for. I still run that version and am reasonably efficient at it. But what I have is version 2 and Adobe is currently on version 7. Perhaps some day I'll pick up "the latest and greatest".

For now though, I'm giving the GIMP another try with the album mentioned above. I installed the very latest version of it yesterday. The two things that used to bug me about it have since been addressed. What I always preferred about the GIMP was that it was user scriptable. If I come up with a technique that I want to automate, it can be done with a small amount of script coding. Indeed many in the GIMP community share their script creations with others. That didn't seem to happen in Photoshop Elements, as it's aimed at a different market.

MacBook - The other big news is that on Tuesday my new Mac laptop arrived. This will be my third in the series. The past two served me well, each for between three to four years. I always keep it simple and buy a base model. My last one was running tight on disk space and was slow in handling Adobe Flash websites and many sites that do streaming web video. This new one addresses those issues and then some. In the week ahead I need to move more content from the old Mac iBook G4 to this new MacBook. In particular I want the generation of this website to move there as soon as possible. Once I'm done with the iBook, I'm giving it to Daniel's godfather, Ed, who asked about it.

Vacation - The kids had this past week off for New Hampshire winter break. On Monday through Thursday I worked from home and Friday took a vacation day. With all of the errand running Michelle had to do, it was a good thing I was home so she didn't always have to drag the whole brood for every errand.

Jingle - I mentioned in my brief updates that we came close to euthanizing Jingle this past week. I'm happy to say that "reports of his death are premature", at least so far. When he was at his worst, the vets thought, but didn't know, that it was feline pancreatitis. To confirm it would cost a lot of money. Feline pancreatitis doesn't have a high recovery success rate.

I never was at the vet but was getting information second hand. I had the impression that it was pretty definite and recommended that the girls think about letting him be put down. When they went to the vet, she recommended a change in his medicine before we went that far, just in case it was a reaction to his medicine or something else unrelated to feline pancreatitis. I won't say he is fully recovered, but he seems to be doing much better.

Books - Lastly I wanted to thank my cousin, Louise Carmichael, and my grade school classmate, Laura Valenti Wymer, for recommending the Diana Gabaldon "Outlander" series for Michelle. When Michelle finished the "Twilight" series, they both recommended "Outlander". Michelle is currently finishing up book two, shown at right. Today I ordered books three and four in the series. Michelle was looking for something new to delve into, but didn't necessarily want it to involve vampires. All to often, book recommendations from "Twilight" steer towards more vampire books.