Mail server updated
I updated the green-ant.com MX records tonight to move into the 21st century and get the mail hosting onto webmail.us, who we use at work. In cleaning up my old mailbox, I ended up paring 21,000 messages in my INBOX (ineffective spam filtering) to some 1100. I hate the Internet. Long live the Internet.
The Wedding! It is over! And she didn't run!!!!!!!
Uploaded some photos from Beth and Jared's wedding, which was awesome. The pictures, alas, are ok, but our camera misbehaved muchly during the day, and some shots that should have been great came out blurry or very motiony. But these are good. Enjoy!.
It's a baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Some early pictures of mommy and baby! Woohoo!
We haven't completely decided on a name yet - that comes tomorrow. But enjoy.
One match - that's all you get
For those who don't know (and why would you? It's not like I'm great at keeping abreast...), we're working hard to get version 4 of ARESTravel.com out the door, and it's been painful these past number of weeks because I'm running on empty. So Kathleen and Emma and our new roomie decided we should go camping - get away from everything - what a great idea.
Now I complain from time to time about my Scouting past, but if there's one useful skill that's never failed to impress, it's being able to start a fire with one match. Just one. I did it again this weekend while we were out on Palomar Mountain, even with damp wood. Practical knowledge is cool...
More later, with pictures...and did you hear about that earthquake? That was sweet...
Ten years, man! Ten! Where have you been for ten years?!
So I'm driving to work today after dropping Emma (who is still a lion) off at preschool, and I get a call from my ittle bittle sister, who was asking for help for a friend of hers who just found out yesterday that she was named salutatorian of the Class of '05 at G-AHS. I tried to give some points about what I went through on my whopping three days of notice to write a speech in front of thousands of people, and told her I'd post the salutatorian speech I gave in 1995. All in all, not bad for three days - just pales in comparison to a little proclamation given up the road a bit many years before...
Oooooooopsie
I just this moment chanced upon the fact that the photo gallery wasn't working. As it turns out, this happened when I upgraded to PHP5, and forgot to install the exif support, which the gallery relies on to pull out the date/time/etc. information. All apologies, but you should be able to kick the gallery around again.
The construction begins
The grand backyard renovation has begun. We're ripping out that horrid deck and cracking concrete slab and trimming back the tree. Things are coming along really nicely so far, and we're quite happy with the progress. I'll post a blow by blow on the job in a few days when I gather the pictures and find a moment.
Asta la vista, puppies
In preparation for the big dig, we've loaned the pups to one of Kathleen's friends from NMCSD. They watched the pups for us when we went back east for the holidays, and they loved it. As Kathleen tells it, Cadence figured out where he was going on the ride, which is pretty funny. Hope to get them back soon...if they give them back to us, anyway. :)
[emma incrementPnuemoniaCounter]
For the life of me, I can't figure this one out. We have a 95th percentile baby in height and weight who is healthy as the day is long, and yet she seems to have a monthly bout with pneumonia. I'm sure it has to do with daycare, but it sure isn't fun to watch your baby wheeze. She's fine now, btw, but that doesn't make it any less unpleasant for her mainly, and us secondarily. On the other hand, we're getting to meet a lot of the doctors at Kaiser...
++(*Emma)
Our pretty baby turned one today...pictures here.
State champions - next stop...the Meadowlands?!?
As Emma, Kathleen and I were chatting with the grandparents over iChat using both our iSight and video camera, we found out that G-AHS won the state band competitions of both Pennsylvania, and somehow Maryland as well, for schools their same size, and this weekend travelled to Giants staduim to compete in a big competition. How cool is that?
More pictures. Whoa.
Truth be told, I posted these a number of days ago, but I also screwed up all of the tiemstamps of the galleries, so I waited til I fixed that before I posted the note. I uploaded two new galleries - one from our trip to a pumpkin patch in North County, and one with our Halloween 2004 pictures, mainly focusing on our pumpkins. All original designs!
Pictures? You want pictures
I figure it would be wrong of me to imply that only Emma and Kathleen are worth looking at on the site, save random pictures. So I thought I'd post Diana's online picture albums, one of the more recent ones also has Matthew in a tie - a weird sight indeed.
The family gallery is up
Took longer than expected since I ended up wrestling with Apache, but the family gallery is up. The start of it anyway - I'm missing a lot of pictures, and Kathleen hasn't had her say in putting the pictures where they should be.
Coming shortly - a family gallery
I've been starting a lot of personal projects lately, including (finally) a full MVC webapp architecture and multi-site scalable publishing system. Unfortunately, I'm at that point where I have way too many things open, and they're all suffering for it. So I'm going to try to put those things on hold and finalize some of these simpler projects and give up and unifying the codebase for all of them. So I'm working to get the image galleries up today or tomorrow, and some other things in the next week or two. Keep checking.
Doth my eyes deceive me?
Yeah yeah…I updated the site. The new look is on the way, though to be honest this all just sorta fell together one evening. I figured I'd go ahead and give into the reality that CSS is here to stay no matter how much cursing I can throw at it. Alas, it's really not 1995 anymore.
What's coming?
Well, in addition to making the site look good, I plan to finally build out a real site chock fill of cute baby stuff, at least two blogs - one for the family, one for development projects - and much more I haven't even though of yet, and therefore procrastinated. That I shoved it out the same day I started it is a credit to Kap and John who have beaten into me the general software rule of "the best is the enemy of the good."
I also plan on redoing the résumé app I wrote some time ago, and use this CSS stuff with it. It would also be nice to clean up the code, and enhance the app a little. In time, I'd like that whole section to become a portfolio for all the projects I've worked on, including all the fun travel industry applications I've architected in the past three years.
And while I'm at it, I might as well wade hip deep in "everyone else is doing it" and add an RSS feed of posts to the stuff, a link blog, links to all my homies, and the like.
So apologies on any broken links, or if you were just dying to see the three year old Aqua rip off - I hope you all like what's coming.
© 2000-2008 Mark J. Hughes
