April 2004 Archives
Conor had a pretty good 1st birthday! Here are some photos from Friday:
Conor is all ready to go for his big day!
Great Aunt Norah and Conor opening some afternoon presents
Gifts on the Kitchen floor
A card from Primo Liam
Humm, what's in this box?
More cards for Conor
Con, mom and gran figuring out how to disassemble the presents
Wow, i can write on the Walls with these things?! (Thank goodness they make washable crayons now!)
Look at that cake! (ok, i just had to put this one in, as i spent all afternoon baking and cooking!)
Yum yum!
Conor opening presents video - its a bit dark and 9 Megs in size.
I'm pretty sure he had a good time for his birthday. I don't know that he remembers it even now, 2 days later, but it was fun for the rest of us at the time!
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and Con has now managed to come down with a fever. The poor gaffer is also doing some truly nasty diarrhea. He is all listless, with the glazed eyes, and just lying in our arms - so different then the ball of energy that he usually is. I hope it breaks tonight, and is on the mend by tomorrow - i know that i would not want to be that sick for too long!
Conor's got 2 more teeth on top, bringing his total up to 6. We're pretty sure there is a 7th also making a break for it on the top right.
He has been pretty happy to get out of the house and into the park - the swings and playground equipment is very interesting. Still not sure about the slides yet however.
It seems that the amount of intake far exceeds my ability to keep up. This is both for my digital side and my analog.
I've finally started to read Quicksilver, and i've got to say, it is very, very good. I wish i could read it while having the Metaweb handy so i could look up all the references! As most of my reading takes place while Conor is napping, and i'm right beside him, its a bit impractical.
After Quicksilver i've got Rapid Development and Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design to finish off. Rapid Development is by the same guy that did Code Complete (Steve McConnell) and is, like Code, a huge Tome of a book.
If you want to check out some of the things i'm reading online, you should check out my del.icio.us page, its like a links only blog. Of recent note is an article by Naomi Wolf - The Porn Myth, Software Engineering for Internet Applications, the text book for the MIT course of the same name (released under the MIT open courseware initiative), the upcoming Subtle Technologies event in Toronto - "an annual, four-day multidisciplinary event exploring the complex and subtle relationships between art and science", and the Annotation of Literary, Historic, and Artistic References in Alan Moore's Graphic Novel, V For Vendetta. There is lots of other good stuff there, especially filed under articles.
Tony has an interesting series going on at ClickableCulture about SecondLife, but i'm going to write a whole other entry about that.
That kind of gets us up to date!
First, some new photos:
I'm posting this in the hope of being able to help somebody else do what i've been trying to do for the past year, on and off. Namely, to convert an old Outlook PST file to another email format, without having Outlook installed on my system. If you have Outlook installed, its a piece of cake to convert your email, just download Mozilla and use its import tools. However, if you do not have Outlook installed, its quite a bit trickier. There is an app called libPST, which if you are running Linux or some BSD will let you convert your PST files to mbox format. Excellent. But i'm running winXP. Hurm. I dug around and managed to find a version of libPST built with cygwin, allowing it to run on windows. Its a command line tool, but its use is pretty straight-forward. I've now got all my old emails imported into Zoe and searchable. Ciara asked my why this was good, and while i couldn't give a clear answer, it just feels right to have them all available again.
Conor and managed to get in a bit of culture last week. We went to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see Edward Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes exhibition. The photos are of several different kinds of industrial landscapes, ranging from oil fields to strip-mines to ship yards. The prints are very large, 5 or 6 feet tall and wide, and he has captured some incredible colours in these images. All his photos were striking, but i was especially taken by the images of the ship-wreckers in Bangladesh. They made we want to go there to see it in the flesh. You can see them on his site, but they do not have the same impact at such a small scale. It was great to see such excellent work from a Canadian artist. I sometimes forget that we have a rich art community here in Canada, and don't get out to experience it often enough. As an aside, i didn't know that he owns Toronto Image Works.
