March 06, 2011
A Warm but Rainy Sunday
Good morning! It's the last Sunday before Lent. We took the kids to early Mass because Claire and Abby were serving. Afterwards we took the kids to DFE for breakfast.
While Claire and Timothy were workin' their Just Dance 2 moves, I was researching SquareSpace. They have fast, reliable, intuitive web hosting and I'd recommend them. The price is competitive with what I used to pay a few years ago but unlike that ol' service (CornerHost), they are rock solid. These days I just use static hosting from FastMail (cheapskate!), but for dynamic sites I'd say SquareSpace is probably the service to beat.
Graph: Global trends in tropical storms and hurricanes for the last 40 years. But, but, but... the trend is slightly down! With global warming, er, catastrophic climate change, shouldn't these be getting more frequent?
Timothy and I were looking at some simple upgrades for my two year old MacBook (Intel, unibody case). While a decent SSD replacement for my harddrive would run around $500 (still too rich for my blood), I could spend $50 and upgrade my RAM from 2GB to 4GB and that would go a long way towards speeding things up.
An investment our town made 11 years ago might finally pay some dividends. (related link)
Timothy and I decided to go forward with the memory upgrade from Crucial. Next weekend we should be able to upgrade my laptop from 2GB to 4GB.
Watched Cool It with Michelle and some of the children. While I still have my doubts about the links between CO2 and average earth temperature, I like that Bjorn looks at it from an analytical, almost engineering, point of view of cost vs. benefits. Yet because he isn't a big "Let's buy solar, wind, hybrids, etc.; Let's do Cap and Trade" kind of guy, he gets regularly ostracized by hard core, cultural greenies who just want to make energy expensive so we use less of it.
While Michelle took the girls out shopping, the twins are playing Nintendo and I did the other website optimization I had planned on trying. If you have an older browser, things will look a bit plainer, but I was leveraging newer CSS3 techniques to do what I used to do with images. Meanwhile Timothy is looking at the Sony PSP line and we're trying to figure out the tradeoffs between the PSP Go and the PSP 3000.
Since none of the kidlets felt like going out for dinner (or couldn't agree where to go), Timothy and I picked up some take out dinner from Milanos on Elm Street: pizzas, gyros, soups, and subs.
After dinner Timothy and I worked on another WebGL project. This time we made a rotating floating pyramid with the kids images on it. As before you'll likely need a Mac with Chrome or beta versions of Firefox or Safari to see it. I've yet to get WebGL working on Windows or Linux, so good luck (and tell me if you do get it working.
Got the boys tucked in bed with their prayers. The girls are downstairs watching last week's episode of "Chuck". I did a few last tweaks to the lighting computations in the WebGL project. Time to get some sleep. Tomorrow the kids go back to school, hopefully refreshed from their week off. Good night all!
Decided on another tome for the upcoming weeks of commute: Dostoevsky's "The Idiot". Going to have the Mac transcode it into MP3 overnight. Good night all! This time for real!