Roblog

Donna and I are planning our first vacation by ourselves without our daughters since they were born. We have been away from them overnight before, but that was for a conference Donna was attending, so our days were spent apart.

This time, we'll be away for three nights, with no obligations to anyone but ourselves. Donna has some frequent flyer miles with Continental to spend, so we looked to see where in the country we'd like to fly to for this first romantic getaway since the twins were born.

We chose Cleveland.

The reasons are practical: since our daughters will be staying with their grandparents in Richardson, Texas, we wanted to fly from Dallas, and the only places Continental flies non-stop from Dallas are Houston, Newark, and Cleveland. As we live in Houston and have too many relatives in Newark to make it a getaway, I chose Cleveland.

Perhaps not surprisingly, even though we are flying into Cleveland, we are not staying there. Our first night we're staying in Michigan, mostly so that Donna can check-off another state on her list of states she's visited. The next two nights we'll be staying on Kelleys Island, the largest US island in Lake Erie. From all appearances, Kelleys Island (notice the lack of apostrophe) is a laid-back island with not much to do except walk (or bike) around enjoying the trails and small beaches. That sounds just perfect.

But I get a kick out of telling people that our romantic trip without the girls will be to Cleveland. The unsaid implication is that it will be romantic not because of the destination, but because of the company.

Ever since my car accident I've experienced some vertigo of varying degrees. Except for the week after the accident, it has been very mild and only when I moved my head in certain ways. It was so mild, in fact, it never prevented me from doing anything - I continued to play soccer (and broomball) without any ill effects (although I wasn't very good at either to begin with). But since it had lingered for all these months, I scheduled a doctors visit for this week (tomorrow).

As luck would have it, though, I recently realized my symptoms have disappeared. I can't say for sure when it was (since they were so mild to begin with, I may have been symptom-free for several days before I noticed), but it seems like it was late last week. So now, I think I'll be canceling my doctor's visit.

There's part of me that says I should still go, but it really feels like this is a permanent state, rather than a temporary cessation of symptoms. And if I have no symptoms, there's really nothing for me to say at the doctors office. If the symptoms recur, I can always schedule a new appointment.

It really shouldn't be this hard. I wanted to have my daughters describe some photos, which I would overlay as a narration to a slideshow of those photos. I have a Mac, so that should be easy. Indeed, you can add an audio track directly in iMovie, but you can do that only against an existing video track, and I don't know in advance how long the girls will talk about each photo.

What would be great is to have iPhoto (or iMovie) record the audio narration along with the timings of when I advance to each picture, so this information can be used to generate a slideshow that is synched-up with the narration. Alas, despite much Googling, I was not able to find an easy way to do this.

But being stubborn, I did get it to work, although in a rather laborius fashion:

• Collect the photos you want to use in an iPhoto slideshow
• Set the slideshow settings to show the title, manual controls, and transitions between slides to 60 seconds (this sets the maximum amount of narration per slide to 1 minute)
• Open up a sound recording program (e.g. Audacity) and start recording a new file
• Go into iPhoto and start the slideshow
• Record your narration, advancing to the next photo as you wish
• When finished with the slideshow, stop the audio recording
• Edit the audio recording as needed (remove any unecessary silence, technical glicthes, or daughters bickering)
• Create a new iMovie project, importing both the pictures you used (from iPhoto) and the audio file with your narration
• Manually change the duration of each photo in iMovie to match the narration
• Export the iMovie project to iDVD and burn to a DVD

Although this is a lot of steps, it's really only the next-to-last step that annoys me. Since I already used the computer to advance to each slide, it should be able to store and transfer those timings to iMovie.

It's not all bad, though. This long method does allow me to edit the audio to take out the bits I don't want to be there. And having the stream-of-conciousness narration from 2 six-year-olds is pretty neat, regardless of how I had to get there. I especially like the part we recorded before the slideshow starts of them asking me what they're supposed to do (I'll have this playing over a black screen) and the time when we had to stop the slideshow so we could snuggle.

I think it will be one of those things that will be fun to listen to 10 years from now. Assuming old-fashioned DVDs are still playable then.

Apple announced an upgrade to the iMac line of computers today, without much fanfare. That's typical when the upgrade is generally just a bump up in processor speeds. That's true with this upgrade as well, with no major redesign of the computer.

There have been iMac upgrades in the past that have not caught my attention, but our current iMac is showing its age. It's not too early for us to think about getting a new one. The difficulty, as always, is price. We have a major bathroom remodeling project that is about to sap about $13K from our assets, so any other large purchases will be difficult to fit in.

When I went to the Apple site to check out the prices, one with all my ideal upgrades is $2200. That's the 24" version with the standard processor (2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo) and hard drive (320GB) but with an upgraded graphics card (2.2x increase in graphics performance) and increased memory (doubled to 4GB).

Since I don't do any gaming at home on the iMac, I waffled a little on an upgraded graphics card, but the trend in computers seems to be offloading more and more calculation tasks to the graphics processor. So my thinking is an upgrade to the graphics chip might make a bigger difference in performance in the future than upgrading the CPU.

Even if we decide to get a new iMac, it won't be until after the finances for our bathroom remodeling job are setteld and underway. After that, though, if it looks like we can fit it into our budget, an iMac upgrade is probably in our future.

Somehow, I got culinarily ambitious and wanted to try to make some homemade marshmallows for Easter. Not only that, but Donna was going to be away all Easter weekend, so it would just be me and the girls to make them. I found a few recipes online and picked one that sounded fairly easy.

I was pleasantly surprised when the experience was fun and the marshmallows turned out nicely. At first, I was a little underwhelmed by the results, since they tasted almost identical to a fresh store-bought marshmallow, but after getting several compliments about them I'm changing my moderate opinion of them and have decided they're fresh and yummy. It sure was a blast making them with my 6-year-old daughters.

I'm still looking forward to playing with the recipe a bit by adding food coloring or flavoring. Doesn't a homemade peppermint-infused marshmallow floating in a mug of hot chocolate sound wonderful?

I got a surprise Valentines day present from my wife last month: a bear from Build-a-Bear Workshop. She got one for my car, actually.

You see, back when I got my first Saturn, which was the first car I bought myself, I was very excited about it. I thought it would be fun to have a representation of the other 8 planets in my Saturn. I had a Mercury thermometer, a small glass Earth hanging from my mirror, a Mars bar wrapper, and a small Pluto figurine in the back window. When we started dating, Donna helped me get a few others: postcards of Venus de Milo and Neptune. I never did get Uranus or Jupiter (although I thought about spilling some red nail polish to make a great red spot).

So for Valentine's Day this year, Donna got me a bear with a solar system t-shirt. It stays in my car as its mascot. It took a few weeks for me to come up with a name, but once I realized it should take on the name of a moon of Saturn, I just had to pick one. Most of the names of Saturn's moons sound feminine. I sort of like the names Tethys and Enceladus, but in the end, I chose Mimas.

Naming the bear after a moon of Saturn is particularly appropriate because the bear's pants keep falling down. He really needs some suspenders.

I have been looking at a unique opportunity to determine how fast my thumbnail grows. When I got in my car wreck last December, the depoying air bag's cover hit my thumbnail, and gave me a small bruise. I suppose it was coincidence that it happened to line up almost exactly with the edge of my lunula. Since then, it has been traveling up my thumbnail, more or less intact.

Carefully measuring its position, I can see that it has traveled about 6/16 of an inch since December 11, which is 70 days ago. Some quick calculations indicates that this translates to almost 2 inches (5 centimeters) a year. This is 0.0000000035 mph, in case you were wondering.

Searching on the web, I can find growth rates between 0.8 and 1.8 inches per year, so that puts me right on the edge of the upper bounds. If those figures are accurate, perhaps my thumbnail just grows faster than most, or maybe my thumbnail injury did not move along precisely with my thumbnail growth as I'm assuming.

I do dislike transitions. They're actually a little invigorating and exciting, but they're generally always painful.

I got a call yesterday from a Senior Executive saying that they needed some help on performing the "due diligence" on a new deal (that is potentially quite large) for taking on support of 900+ applications (in this context, "due diligence" is the initial investigation phase to collect and analyze as much data about the potential deal as possible to confirm that the original exchange of information between Accenture and the client does not contradict any assumptions). Getting in on the beginnings of a large deal like this could be a great role for me, since it would likely lead to a long-term role. That combined with the fact that I've not been 100% utilized recently in my current role which ends this summer regardless made me eager to get involved.

The problem, as always, is ending my current role. I *really* like the client I'm working with now; it's a striking difference from my previous client which endemically treated contractors as resources to expend, rather than partners to value (although some individuals there were very supportive). I want to not only live up to my professional responsibilities here before I move on, but I also don't want to leave my client manager in a lurch.

I try to reassure myself that it wouldn't be so painful if there wasn't mutual regard between myself and my client contacts. If they disliked me, or I disliked them, it would be a much less stressful transition (which is how my last transition was like, now that I think about it). So overall, I'm glad that this transition is somewhat painful.

The way these things tend to start, it's very important to get involved swiftly and visibly with the new project, since these are among the first impressions and contacts the client will have with some of the people that may be coming onto the project to stay. That means that if I am to get involved in the new opportunity, it has to be immediately or not at all so someone else who has the time can start.

Thankfully, both my current project's Accenture leadership and the client manager are willing to work with me to allow this to happen. It all hinges, of course, on my ability to complete my deliverables by the end of this month. I'm confident I can do that, but it will make for a busy month. Although, frankly, an uncomfortably busy month will be a nice change of pace from the slow drip of activity I've had recently.

We had to take the iMac in for service this weekend. It would suddenly turn off (lose all power) anywhere between 5 seconds and 10 minutes after turning it on. These are the same symptoms it had a little over a year ago.

So what's going on? Did I get a lemon? Is there something in the way we use it or in the environment that causes the same problem to recur? It turns out it may be a design or manufacturing flaw. The Apple service technician found an entry for this issue in a Repair Extension Program at Apple. This indicates that multiple people have had this issue and that there has been some amount of root cause analysis performed.

This means that the repairs should be covered at no cost to me! Yay! But that also means we're without a computer for about a week. Boo! I figured out how to read our email via my ISP's web interface, so at least we won't be totally out of touch. It does mean, though, that I can't extract the 6th birthday photos from my camera just yet (although I can print them out directly from the card from my printer - they'll just be totally unedited).

This event also brings home the fact that our computer is nearing the end of its useful life. The new iMacs, while nicer than the one we have, don't seem so astounding that they make me crave an upgrade. Historically speaking, the iMac is upgraded about once a year, so if the repairs to our current iMac allow it to run well for another year, maybe we'll consider getting its replacement for my birthday in 2008.

Santa Claus brought the family a Wii for Christmas. He must have gotten it several months early, since Wiis were hard to come by this holiday season. Donna got me a game to go along with it: Super Mario Galaxy. It has gotten rave reviews from every site I can find, and it's my kind of game (no excessive blood and gore).

I was hoping the girls would play with the Wii more than they are. They liked Wii Sports Bowling, and play every so often, but they seem to enjoy helping me play Super Mario Galaxy more (it is a one-player game, but there is collaborative play in which they can assist me while I play). That's OK. I enjoy playing the game, and I suspect they'll use the Wii more as the get older - until it is so woefully outdated that they would be embarassed to be seen using it.