wowza. it looks like using a technique similar to our own recent ultrasound researchers have uncovered evidence that there's more going on in the womb than previously thought:

"From 26 weeks, they appear to exhibit a whole range of typical baby behaviour and moods, including scratching, smiling, crying, hiccuping, and sucking."

with an estimated round trip distance of of 410 miles and the notorious chicago and southwest michigan summer construction season in full swing, getting from home to the mothership in a single day can be, um, a trying experience.

amidst all the other interesting tiger developments, is the fact that iChat Server willl apparently play nice with jabber. well, it's about time, since rumours have been floating for awhile ichat speaks native jabberwocky.

• Webmonkey returns
  [ "Wired News editors will work with Webmonkey writers to publish two articles a month." ]
• What's hip daddy-o
  [ " There's no better way to discourage a dad from taking the baby for a walk than to hand him a flowered diaper bag and a stroller that's too short, forcing him to bend forward when he walks." ]
• 21 Rules of Thumb – How Microsoft develops its Software
  [ "Elements you think would count the most count for very little." ]
• How Microsoft Lost the Joel War
  [ "The harshest conclusion is that Joel's article is a piece of FUD from a very frightened ISV (Independent Software Vendor), who has decided to try and invent the future." ]
• Bad Comma
  [ ""Eats, Shoots & Leaves" presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it's hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax." ]
• Waxy.org's Bandwidth Blowout!!
  [ First up, the best TV pilot you've never seen..." ]

as one who can never escape the 'i' in intp and also as one who quite possibly could be mildly agoraphobic, there's few things that i consider more tortuous than shopping. doubly so if the shopping lasts longer than 15 minutes and triply so, if it involes buildings with large amounts of square footage and masses of pregnant woman invading your personal space.

and so it was no small miracle that i made it through 2.5 hours of registering for baby shower items at our local babies "R" us. as a sign of just how well kris knows me, she scheduled the trip at 7:00 p.m. on a friday evening on the suspicion that the store would be less crowded than a saturday afternoon, thusly reducing the chance of me freaking out and engaging in passive aggressive button pushing. she's smart like that.

well after all the hullaballo surrounding The Great Midwife Controversy, it was nice to finally get our diagnostic ultrasound performed. it was relatively uneventful, as the technicians don't really tell you anything about what they're seeing for fairly obvious liability reasons. we'll know the official results after the radiologist gets around to looking at the images.

although i think i might have had my hopes set to high for the image quality on the 3d ultrasounds, they're still pretty amazing to see - baby's not a little legume with sprouts for legs anymore!

sniff. they grow up so fast.

• Tunes create context like language
  [ "Ever felt as though a piece of music is speaking to you? You could be right: musical notes are strung together in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature, according to an Argentinian physicist." ]
• Getting More Out Of Gmail via kottke
  [ "...the following is a collection of programs, sites, and information that will allow you to get more out of Gmail." ]
• get camino
  [ "Camino is good. You should get it. -- Mozilla Foundation" ]
• How Websites Learn
  [ "A look at how Stuart Brand’s classic work of social and architectural criticism, How Buildings Learn, applies to web design and development." ]
• The Location Field Is the New Command Line
  [ "I think Spolsky is very much correct that Microsoft is losing the API war. But what’s ironic is that they’re losing this war despite the fact that they won the browser war. " ]

• Mama don't let your baby grow up to be a Generalist
  [ "There's a name for this in rugby (New Zealand's national sport). The Utility Back." ]
• piPod: An iPod-Based Field Guide To NYC Pizzerias
  [ "The guide is organized by borough and is meant to be a quick-and-dirty on-the-go reference tool." ]
• Does spanking lead to bad behavior later?
  [ "According to a recent study discussed in the May 2004 of Pediatrics, there seems to be a link between early spanking and the development of behaviorial difficulties during the school years." ]
• XTen Maps FWD(R) World
  [ s-ed: what! no greenland fwd/xten clients?" ]
• How I emailed Bill Gates and How I got a response from him!
  [ "With four people in my office chanting “Do it! Do it!” I pressed the send button." ]
• Google Censorship, Ouch
  [ "I’m not sure whether I’m saying Don’t be evil or Don’t be stupid but whichever, please don’t." ]

kris doesn't think i can celebrate before the baby is actually born, but that's going to stop me from declaring today as my first ever father's day. so it's off to the golf course for my yearly game of golf with my father-in-law.

in this yearly ritual, i wack away at the ball and get so frustrated that i vow to never play golf again until next year. hi. ho.

Mbox & Maildir to Gmail Loader:

"The loader will then send one message every 2 seconds to GMail's servers. The delay between messages is to reduce the load sending so many messages will certainly create. Start it running, go to bed, and see the results in the morning. "

apparently, i'm not even close to being a full-blown info freako, since my 214 rss subscriptions don't even put me in the top 100. even with my relatively paltry subscription list, i can't fathom subscribing to 500 feeds. and 1000 feeds? not the way things are currently structured. as usual, phil is more eloquent than i could ever be on this issue:

"I read every word (well, not every word about phones, which don't interest me, but every other word) in, as of today, 310 feeds, but that's about my limit, and I'm not doing all that well with it. It certainly doesn't feel like I could add the two or three hundred more I'd like to keep track of, with at least partial attention.

They are looking at ways to painlessly republish. Reading a lot of feeds is useful, but it's not nearly as useful as reading a lot and sharing the best of what you read. When I swing through my feeds, I usually open twenty or thirty tabs as maybe being things I could post about, leave them open for a while, then either bookmark them all, lose them in a crash, or close them in frustration, and settle for a linklog post or two for the things I know I'll want to find again someday. I want to skim more, read less, and share more of the best with less effort."

complicating things even further is the fact that i tend to have a "remembering methodology" that looks a lot like sippey's 'interaction of privacy and context'. right now things get dumped into voodoopad for further processing based on a variety of privacy and contextual concerns. michael sippey thinks things will eventually settle down to look like an, "...email-like application that's well integrated with the browser." he might be right, since people tend to like comfortable metaphors. and if that turns out to be true, as he alludes in his post, then google is looking like a company that could deliver the goods.

i just wish they'd hurry up because i'm drowning in a percieved sea of feeds that's apparently really only a puddle.

• Something Daring
  [ "It’s like when you pledge $100 to PBS and they send you a tote bag; no one does it to get the tote bag." ]
• Build a Fault-Tollerant Terabyte Storage Server for Under $1.98
  [ "I have a small studio apartment that used to stay at about 70F by itself. With this server in the room, it's now always at least 80F." ]
• Don’t fuck the babysitter
  [ "...apparently, the target market for this book is newborn dads who need to be told that fucking the babysitter is inappropriate. “Oh,” I’m supposed to exclaim, “you mean I pick them up, pay them, and don’t fuck them? Oooooh, now I get it.”" ]
• How Microsoft Lost the API War
  [ "The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet." ]
• Marathon training principles
  [ s-ed: good luck! personally, i always just thought of a marathon as 'slighly less than 9 5ks'. and how hard can that be? ]

given my experience with the d70 i can see why nikon is making noise about getting out the analog game.

• What is geocoder.us? via laughingmeme
  [ "Geocoder.us is a public service providing free geocoding of addresses and intersections in the United States." ]
• O.J., 10 years later
  [ "Things That Make Me Feel Old, Chapter 253" ]
• $14 Steady-Cam
  [ "Unfortunately, professional steadycams cost around $1500. Even the cheap 3rd party ones cost $600+. Not exactly a bargain considering many of us use cameras in that price range. So, I decided to make my own version. It turns out, it only costs $14." ]
• why do programmers have to be such fucking dorks?
  [ "is there some unwritten law or secret indoctrination ritual where it states that if you write code, you all of the sudden turn into this raging wankmaster of dorkness?" ]
• Test Driven
  [ "We've been talking about making software more like civil engineering for a quarter of a century. It hasn't happened." ]

having grown up in and around machias, maine, which is about as far downeast as you can get, it's with no small amount of amusement that i see that the fine folks at downeast.net are making the news by providing a hotzone in ellsworth.

ellsworth is about 45 minutes south west from machias and was considered to be the closest metropolis. i mean they actually had a mcdonald's, an arby's and a dunkin donuts. when lobster and clams were a dime a dozen, chicken mcnuggets were like manna from heaven.

after debating the merits for nine months and occasionally coming to the conclusion that i wasn't going to do it, i've decided to test google's adsense on the conflux and {bio,medical}informatics portions of the site. i think they work well on the informatics section, less so on conflux, although the selection of obesity-related ads are amusing given the topic of the current post. i may or may not turn on ads here, but it's unlikely.

• Be Prepared: A (Great, Funny) Practical Handbook for New Dads
  [ "This is not your father's parenting handbook." ]
• the mac pip via anil
  [ "It's a great read; not only for the religion (McKenna was instrumental in creating the cult of the mac), but also for the process." ]
• Watch your Histogram via dangerousmeta
  [ "What we actually need from the histogram is the information about under/over exposure." ]
• Hooters Air begins flights from metro Chicago airport
  [ s-ed: time to schedule a trip to myrtle beach. ]
• CamWorld Turns Seven
  [ s-ed: here's to seven more. ]
• Portable Firefox
  [ "Starting with version 0.9, Firefox now supports running from removable drives with minimal reconfiguration." ]
• PictPress 0.91
  [ "PictPress is a wordpress 1.2 plugin that automatically appends thumbnails and picture pages to a post for all images found in a directory associated with the post." ]
• Rules of Success. #1: Sweat Equity is the best equity!
  [ "The best businesses in recent entrepreneurial history are those that have been started with little or no money." ]
• rvw 0.2
  [ "I've put a draft version 0.2 of RVW online, to be used in feeds for syndicating and aggregating reviews." ]
• Bold motorists clear roads
  [ "Aggressive driving can ease traffic congestion, say researchers who have created a computer model of the mean streets of Colombia's capital Bogota" ]

i don't know if i'm revealing some sort of cultural bias, but i'll admit to being surprised that these chairs are not in fact from a way-off-the-main-strip vegas club, but rather were uncovered [ahem] by a friend in a restaurant and pottery shop in south korea.


i'm thinking that these would go perfectly around our dining room table, but i'm not sure i want to pay the shipping charges.

i knew something was up when i saw multiple comments to my post on The Great Midwife Controversy. you'll note that the comments are not from random hecklers but from people who have actually had midwife assisted births. then the emails started arriving, as i sat scratching my head, wondering what great unseen force could instantly bring the "homebirth" demographic to my virtual doorstep. eventually technorati, revealed the source of the flow.

kottke remaindered the link.

i'm not one to normally wallow in such obvious backlink naval gazing, but it truly is amazing. between the comments, the emails and blog posts from people who have had an actual home birth, i'd say that jason has, for reasons unknown, gathered quite an audience of midwife/home birth types. amidst the many new "imaginary friends" [ kris' term for my internet aquaintances ] that i discovered today, i'd like to take a moment to single out greg allen for pointing me to his excellent daddytypes site. he was far too modest to pimp the site in the comments so i'll do it for him.

and while i might rightly be accused of engaging in the slightly sappy sentimentalism that soon to be fathers have license to engage in, i'd like to say a hearty 'thank you', with all sincerity, to everyone who took a few minutes out of their day either to send an email or post a comment or write a blog entry to share their own personal stories and words of encouragement. as david weinberger eloquently wrote years ago, "On the Web, however, strangers are the source of everything worthwhile. Strangers and their utterances are the stuff of the Web."

i feel for zeldman. i really do. it's hard to believe that things are moving along so quickly. it feels like we're hurtling towards october. i hear it slows down in the third trimester, so we'll see.

observant regular readers may remember that, while we had an early ultrasound in week 10, we should have had an "official" 18-20 week ultrasound last week. that didn't happen, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that our OB/GYN ditched us after she discovered that we were going to have the baby at home with a midwife. that's right, at least with certain doctors, the hippocratic oath be damned if you decide to go with a midwife.

kris decided to be upfront with the ob/gyn and told her on her second visit what her eventual plans would be. incredibly, the doctor's response was to tell kris that she didn't want to "clean up someone else's mess" if something went wrong and then went on to tell kris all manner of horror stories about non-hospital births! when kris challenged her on the ethics of denying healthcare to someone for such a spurious reason, the doctor backpedalled a bit and said that she would have to consult her partners. my guess is that you're seeing what happens when you start messing around with a hospital's pregnancy profit center. all the margin is in the actual birth itself, so there's not much incentive for a doctor to pick up all the low margin prenatal work without the payoff. and don't even get me started on what kind of person you would need to be to tell a healthy pregnant woman horror stories about what happens when you have an at-risk pregnancy in the home. it's comparing apples and oranges. she should know that there isn't any documented evidence that having a baby at home is dangerous if you're a healthy woman with a normal pregnancy. but hey, people will do the darndest things to make a buck. undeterred, kris talked with our midwife and we found a doctor that is more than happy to work with a midwife to make sure that kris isn't at risk for any complications and can have the baby the way we want.

so, we've got a backup in place, however, the doctor couldn't get us in for an appointment for the ultrasound until week 24, which is a couple of weeks from now. that's the bad news. the good news is that our new doctor is going to do one of those super cool 3d ultrasounds, so i should have some amazing pictures to post.

amusingly, i was just considering blowing a hundred bucks on wireless print servers a couple of weeks ago. i'm glad i didn't, since for just a little bit more i can get an airport express with airtunes.

• Listen to AirTunes
• How AirTunes Works
• Why Apple's Airport Express May Unofficially Extend Non-Airport Networks
• AirPort Express Brings Audio, Portability to Wireless Networking

well it didn't take me long to decide to get the the nikon d70. as scoble notes, it really is a "sweet camera". given it's price, i won't be getting a birthday or christmas present until i'm 40, but i think the camera will be well worth it.

the d70 body is a little bulkier and feels just a bit "cheaper" than my n50 body, but after a few minutes the difference is hardly noticeable. it only took minutes to slap on my 70-300mm lens and start snapping pictures. it was raining at the time and the light was bad so i was reduced to seeing what i could do with a city refuse sticker that was sitting on kris' desk. i'm trying to get back into the habit of taking the camera around and looking at things as if i were peering at it through a viewfinder.

i think i'll probably rely on iphoto for image management and the gimp for basic image manipulation. it might be time to look into different gallery applications, although ids has served me well of the years and i generally fall into the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" camp.

update: well, it didn't take me long to discover the first "gotcha". if i want to shoot in nikon's RAW format, then i'm forced to purchase nikon's image editor, to the tune of $150, as iphoto can't directly deal with raw files. i'm not sure if the gimp has a plugin for editing nikon's raw format or not. hi. ho.

whew. i was in chicago for most of the week. there is nothing worse than a week's worth of commuting from downtown to the mothership [ i.e. suburbs ] in the summer. i have no idea how people could do it day in and day out. throw in a traffic accident for two and you're talking about a 3 hour round trip commute just to go 40 miles. yuck.

a recent economist article on differences in naming style based on gender is particularly relevant for us since we're spending a bunch of time trying to come up with names. the purported reason as to why parents seem to be more inventive with girls names is amusing given some of our conversations while pouring over baby name books:

"One possibility is that in a society where family names are inherited patrilineally, parents feel constrained by tradition when it comes to choosing first names for their sons. As a result, boys often end up with the names of their ancestors. But when those same parents come to choose names for their daughters, they feel less constrained and more able to choose based on style and beauty."

i've always been a big proponent of naming a boy after me, my father and my grandfather - i.e Eric C Snowdeal IV ( kris is much less in favor of this idea, but is willing to humor me ). you can't get much more of a partilinieally defined name than that. but for girls names we've been leaning towards the inventive. so i guess in that sense, we're really just quite normal.