In short, yes. This is going to be a big one, so for the first time, ever I think, I am introducing subheadings. This way you can skip to the parts you care about and I don’t have to figure out how to transition from one subject to the next.
Evan Almighty
My sister finally delivered her son, Evan, yesterday. From what I understand, it was quite the show, unfortunately for Evan, he will have to hear how his mom labored for 3 days before he was born for the rest of his life. For now though, he and mom are healthy and happy. He was born weighing about 8 pounds and some 21 inches in horizontal height; very similar to someone else. Let’s hope for the new parents sake, he doesn’t get the same temperament. So congratulations to the new parents, and remember… Oh nevermind, you are going to get a million people telling you a million things, you don’t need anymore advice from me.
I should also mention that because of extenuating circumstances, my sister and her husband had a significant role in raising me from about age 13 to now. Really they helped with all of us (us being my other two brothers and two sisters, yes there are 6 of us total and yes its just like the Brady Bunch) at one point or another, but probably had the most significant impact on me because I am the youngest. I think they did a pretty decent job too, so I have no worries about young Evan’s future.
The Little Guy
Will is doing something new everyday it seems. If its not a new word (yep he as has picked up on some unsavory words too) then its a new “action”. Apparently our bed’s footboard is the perfect ladder and if a dining room chair is pulled out enough, it provides perfect access to the table. He is also successful in getting both feet off the ground to jump, but rarely lands on them again. Getting him to jump is usually preceded with him telling us to watch five times. I posted a bunch of new videos and photos of the little man, so just see for yourself.
A View from the Top
I forget when exactly I re shingled the garage, and theres a good chance I mentioned it already in another post, but I know I did it when it was reasonably warm, so that would rule out the last week at least. I took some photos of the roof, but you have to be really gung-ho about home improvement to want to look at some black asphalt on a garage. The whole process was pretty easy, aside from doing the entire project by myself which required heaving literally tons of shingles around. If you happened to look at the photos, you’d see the siding is in poor shape too and I have already started addressing that issue. I picked up 30 sheets of OSB from a guy on craigslist and started tearing the siding off and putting up new sheeting. As of now, only one side is done, but I am not in a huge hurry. I take a little time each weekend and only tear off what I can put up, usually about an 8 foot square. I generally think most of the neighbors are pleased with the idea of the garage being fixed up. I am 90% sure its the largest non-house structure on our side of the street.
Thanksgiving
What a break Thanksgiving was for this household. It is the first time I can remember both Angie and I having some time off and not having to travel during that time. Angie made homemade noodles and I turned them into chicken and noodles (the more I tell people about this dish, the more I am convinced it is an Indiana thing). I also roasted a turkey breast, made homemade gravy, my sister’s sweet potatoes, and green beans (which were average compared to everything else). It all turned out very well and I was pretty pleased with myself (can you tell?). We also took time to assemble and decorate our Christmas tree for the first time since living in this house. Will is quite enamored with the lights and bulbs, or as he calls them balls. I might have to try to convince Angie to make the lights blink, because I am sure that would keep Will entertained for hours. It is pretty nice having the tree up even though I initially fought the idea.
Letters to the Editor
As editor and chief writer for niblet.us, I understand it is my sole responsibility to not only keep the site updated, but to make sure the updates are coherent and easy to read. I will admit that sometimes I get in a huge rush to post something or I work on one post for so long that I just give up on making it sound good and post it. Nevertheless, I am told either directly or indirectly that people still, on occasion, read this site for updates. In fact, I bet there are at least a couple of people that keep tabs on us solely through niblet and its rss feed. To those people, I say thanks for coming to the site and reading my poorly written and never edited words. Just always bear in mind that niblet is my digital journal and life log. It is a place where I attempt to keep various media organized so that I can sort through and find various things for the next 10-20 years. So even though you are reading this and wondering why in God’s name would I bother to write about a dumb roof, its only because I want to document a particular thing that I have done. Also note that my current job consumes far more of my time than my old job when I literally had nothing to do on Mondays but write up a blog. Nowadays I have to do this on my own time and that adjustment is taking far longer than I expected. As it turns out, I have other things I want to do on my time than sit and type 1054 words (the current count of this particular post).
Is There a Doctor in the House?
Sometimes. Angie’s current rotation is in emergency medicine. She works shifts so she can’t really be held over, so predicting what time she will get home is easier. The shifts, however, are so dang random it has to some psychological procedure to break down a person’s internal clock so they can function at any hour of the day. I am sure once Will and I get use to the routine, the rotation will end and we’ll have some new schedule to learn.
Thats all Folks
So is that it? Pretty much. There are a few other shop projects I might share in the coming weeks. They are gifts for people, but I am pretty sure none of them read this site, so the secret should stay safe. At any rate, its time for bed for me.
November 27th, 2007
Since Angie is studying for her final final and Will is soundly asleep on her, I thought I’d write up a little something. For the first time I can remember, I won’t be eating Thanksgiving at my Grandma’s house. I think Angie and I are both a little sad about it, but I know I won’t miss the drive and Thanksgiving traffic. I took the next two days off of work and I will be spending the bulk of the time in the basement. Yep over the next few days there will be major, major changes. Then I will have all of first weekend of Dec to work on the never ending project too. By Dec 3rd, I am hoping to be painting, or at least priming. Now as far as what needs to be done, as I told a friend, there is a little framing left, a little electrical, a little plumbing, a little insulating, and a little cleaning. In short, a little of everything needs to be done and in other words, it means that nothing is done, yet…
Now other than the basement, I have been consumed with some geek stuff. Since I know that most that read this site don’t care about that kind of thing and even my geek-enabled friends don’t really care, I am going to save you the trouble of reading my ramblings. Suffice it to say, I love MythTV. I have also come across some Black Friday sale flyers and I will be picking up a few new hard drives for all my recordings (which consist mostly of New Yankee Workshop and Good Eats episodes).
If that weren’t enough, I have had my eye on a Canon Digital Rebel XT. They’ve come down in price, and although I hate to admit it, looking at sample photos from the camera kinda makes me drool like Hank watching me eat. I swore if I got promoted, I would buy it. Well I got promoted, but I don’t know what my raise will be. They may come back and just tell me “Oh its just a ‘paper’ promotion.”
Okay enough of all that tech stuff. Just a note to the regulars that read this site. Say something! Anything! I get so excited when I get a comment, I go and run the statistics for the site which have been heavily moved because of, well you can guess:
November 21st, 2006
Um, I had no idea how far behind I was on the captions for the basement, so I updated them for everything that is posted so far. I also finally figured out how to add links to jump to the last page of an album instead of clicking through every page (the Next Generation album made that painfully clear). Sep 26, '06
What I have been debating and laboring over for the past 3 months has finally taken shape and execution has begun. Obviously the site is changing. Version 5.0 marks a dramatic change. I have moved completely away from writing my own PHP scripts to using very well written and very well supported open-source projects. The transition was not an easy choice and many things still need to happen for it to be marked complete.
The first and most basic change was a change of hardware for the server. I was generously given an older Dell p4 desktop machine and with a little help from Slackware, I made a server out of it. That server has been running quietly in my attic since January. At that point, I knew I wanted to upgrade niblet to a more robust framework, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do.
So I started poking around with some blog scripts out on the net and testing them out. I came across this decent script called BlogPHP. It’s a pretty good script for what it does and very simple to use. I took version 4 of niblet and was very happy at how easily I could make it fit with the script. However, I grew tired of my layout and I still didn’t have a decent way to handle all the photos and albums I had in version 4.0. I started looking around and once again returned to WordPress. I have tried WordPress in the past and found it frustrating to use, but this time, for whatever reason, everything just clicked. After a few errors and mis-steps, I had all my posts ported from the old server to the new one (still working on comments).
I then started looking into scripts for photos. I probably tried out every AJAX capable script out there and a bunch of other non-AJAX scripts. I didn’t find any that really did what I wanted. So I started looking into plugins for WordPress. Two of the most popular photo services out there are Gallery and Flickr. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and Gallery is just an open-source project that basically creates photo albums for you. I’ve looked at both in the past and they both have their drawbacks. To really utilize Flickr, you’re going to have to pay for the annual service. Gallery, while free, is just messy in my opinion. Learning to navigate Gallery is learned art.
Nevertheless, I went with Gallery. There is a plugin for WordPress called embedded Gallery and it was basically the answer I was looking for. The question was, “How do I make Gallery work seamlessly with WordPress?” You can see the results working now. There are a few formatting errors I am correcting as I go, but now I want to focus on getting all the photos and comments into the new site. I have drawn out this process for too long, but I am happy I found two things that do the trick.
Why the change? Why the need to ditch the old stuff? I have written about it before. So I am just hoping this change has setup that structure.
April 12th, 2006