Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

Baby in a Construction Site.

Before the construction began I was worried that Gabriel would have problems with all the banging and assorted symphony of power tool noises. I was wracking my brains to come up with places to go to give him a reprieve from all the chaos. If anything, he’s been dealing with it better than I have.

It hasn’t been so bad, really. It’s just I find myself constantly relocating around the house in search of a room where they aren’t banging away just outside. This of course involves not only moving Gabriel with me, but also an army of little toys, seats, mats, blankets, and other assorted baby paraphernalia. This of course makes it a bit of a production number for me. I’m the one looking for little escapes for awhile. As for Gabriel, he’s napping away on his play mat while they tear large sections of wood siding right outisde the window.

Never a Dull Moment When they Remodel Your House.

I’ve always known that whoever did the additions to this house in the 80′s had no clue what they were doing.  I don’t know whether they were some sort of incompetent contractor, or some do it yourself yahoo who was reaching way too far with their ability.  I’ve cursed their unknown names like some religious mantra, almost daily since I moved in to this place.  While most of my best cursing is reserved for anything involving the kitchen, the living room hasn’t escaped my fury either.

My favorite example is when we went to replace the rather ugly and weather worn front door.  We bought a brand spanking new door from Home Depot.  Nice, clean looking, great window in the middle, and highly energy efficient.  We watched videos on replacing your own door and had some good printed material.  We’re both fairly handy and felt that the job was well within our means.  When we tore out the old door we discovered many things.  The first was they used no insulation in the walls at all.  The second, and more damning, was the fact that the door frame was cut at an angle.  We always thought warping caused our door to stick, but no, it was because it was put in at a bit of an angle.  Lots of sanding and pounding with a chisel later we had a frame that was much closer to resembling something straight.  A few dozen shims later and we had a door that looked good and opened and closed with ease.

All of this brings us today and the newest discovery of previous owner ass-hattery.  While stripping the siding above our deck one of the works idly kicked at a board on the outside wall of the house.  Next thing we knew our deck partially collapsed.  Yes, while on one side of the deck they dug posts, poured concrete, and all that jazz, on the side attached to the house they attached it to the masonry with wood lags.  And went less than a 1/4″ in to the masonry.  Seriously, a tiny bolt meant to hold some wood together was the only thing keeping our porch vaguely attached to the house.  That it never collapsed before this is a bit of a miracle.  Fortunately no one was hurt, and now it’ll get attached properly.

We knew there would be something that would got beyond the initial estimate.  There pretty much always is.  This certainly wasn’t what we had been expecting it to be.  With fingers crossed we hope this is the last deviation from the master plan of home repair, but you just never know.  Stay tuned.

My Blog, Now with More Minimalism.

My old theme had a couple minor glitches with the newest incarnation of WordPress.  Nothing major, but enough for me to decide I had used it for awhile and was ready for a change.  I’ve had a bit of a minimalism kick lately and decided to aim for a more clean layout.  Find one I liked and have been doing a couple extra nip and tucks to it in order to really call it my own.  Once I create a new banner graphic for it everything will be full steam ahead!

Whatever you Think, You’re Never Ready.

Denise and I didn’t decide to have a baby lightly.  To be honest it took me awhile to warm up to the idea at all.  It’s safe to say that babies have always petrified me.  Small kids, yeah, not so much of those either.  I’ve always had a tough time around them, and until Gabriel was born I had never actually held a baby before.  Nuts, I know, but there it is.

I have no regrets about our decision.  Watching him being born was one of the most singularly happy days I’ve ever had.  It’s impossible to not believe in miracles when you watch that tiny little person being born.  A life being brought in to the world.  A life you helped create.  There aren’t words in any language that I know of sufficient to describe that feeling.

Sure, before he was born I read a lot about babies, and did some research.  I really knew next to nothing about babies in general let alone how to care for one.  I wanted to do my best to be ready for the experience.  During the entire pregnancy I knew he would one day have to come on out of the womb, but it wasn’t entirely real.  That feeling that I was going to be a parent hadn’t quite registered in my brain.  There were brief moments where I began to see the light, before some part of me slammed that door, locked it, and pushed several dresser sets up against it.

I had braced myself for it as best as I could, and the second he was born that all went right out the window.  Any last bit of of prepared that I had felt evaporated like a drop of water fizzling away on a hot skillet.  My feelings of happiness were tempered by feelings of absolute terror.  I’m not sure it’s possible to ever be ready for when you’re first child is born.  You can go through all the motions, do all the leg work, but once that moment is upon you and there’s no denying that everything is absolutely real, the game changes.

Four months later there are still many moments throughout the day where I find myself wondering what I got myself in to.  But still, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Apple Releases Safari 5

Well Apple’s Safari web browser just got updated today.  Safari 5 first became available via Apple’s software update and now is live on their website as well.  There had been rumors swirling about that perhaps the new version of the web browser would be announced at WWDC.  It may not have been part of Job’s iPhone 4 super fan party, but word of it did slip out quietly later in the day.

I’ve played with it for a little bit now, and it does feel snappy.  I’m not sure it actually feels faster than Chrome (which I had been using), but then again I haven’t run any tests on it.  Still, my initial feeling is that it certainly is a speed improvement over the previous version of Safari.

Apple also boasts vast improvements with HTML5, but seeing as how HTML5 isn’t an official standard yet it’s really hard to say if there’s any real improvement in that area.  It would require some actual development work to see how it plays with the HTML5 standards (even though those standards haven’t been set in stone yet).  I’m sure it’ll all be worthwhile, but so far there’s not much to say in that area.  I guess it’s good that Apple is focusing on it now before it becomes a widely adopted standard, but at the moment it’s not much of a selling point to the vast majority of users.

Something that has the potential to be quite interesting is Apple adding developer extensions to the browser.  This is going to allow developers to create their own extensions (much like with Firefox or Chrome) that will work with Safari.  While it seems Apple is still going to exercise some control be using digitally signed certificates, it certainly is a much more open move than they have been with the browser in the past.  All of these extensions will be sandboxed so that extensions won’t be able to access other resources or data on the users hard drive.  It’s a good step towards extension security.  Right now it’s such a new feature there isn’t anything out there yet, but it’s something to watch.  Hopefully developers will be quick to start releasing useful extensions for the browser.

Finally, a new feature that I am the most interested in so far, is their “Reader”.  In the address bar, while you’re reading an article on a website, the Reader icon will appear.  Clicking on this brings up a PDF like view of the web page, bringing up the text and related pictures, but not any of the other cruft that populates a webpage, in theory making it easier to get at the meat of what you’re trying to read by eliminating all the other distractions.  It also has controls for zooming, printing, or e-mailing of the information on the webpage.  It seems like it’ll be rather useful, especially on some sites that make reading articles fairly difficult by littering them with advertising that goes throughout the text.

Safari 5 seems to be a lot more under-the-hood style of improvements opposed to Safari 4 which was much more of a cosmetic release.  Safari 5 holds a lot of promise and it’ll be interesting to see what people do with the new improvements.