My writings, photos, music and links
I’ve been helping Mike Rivard — amazing bass player and composer and leader of the Cambridge-based band “Club d’Elf” — turn his emails into a blog proper. It’s live at http://blog.clubdelf.com/ and Mike’s begun posting there. Great stuff, check it out!
Here are just a few of the things I’ve done to my Firefox client to make it more useful.
View > Add Ons > LiveHTTPHeaders > Options > Config > ‘Add … to sidebar’ checkbox
View > Sidebar > LiveHTTPHeaders
View > Toolbars > Customize: drag icons to Navigation toolbar, esp. “Clear Cache Button” and ieTab and Firebug
Type URL "about:config" in location bar, confirm "ok" at warning
Right-click and choose “new > string”
Enter name (without quotes) “extensions.firebug.yslow.cdnHostnames”
Enter CDN URL values (without quotes), e.g. “im.529.com,olmcdn.529.com”
Right-click and choose "new > string" again
Enter name (without quotes) “ietab.filterlist”
Enter value (without quotes) “/^file:\/\/\/.*\.(mht|mhtml)$/ http://*.usa-ed.net/* http://*update.microsoft.com/* http://shrpt/* http://ushare/* http://www.windowsupdate.com/*”
There are many more add-ons I like, and some about:config tweaks as well, but as a core shortlist of web development -related add-ons I find these ones indispensable. Enjoy!
Last week she was doing a tumbleweed across the carpet (roll, turn, sit, topple, repeat, gradually making her way across the room)… but just yesterday she woke us hollering something serious in the middle of the night, and when I went in to comfort her she was standing stock upright, holding her crib’s bars. She wasn’t very happy about it but it’s a pretty good milestone as far as I’m concerned. =)
Also my great friends Ben and Jody just closed on their amazing new house; Jody is due in about a week(!), we’re pretty excited for them, and relieved the house came through in time. And it turns out their new address *is* in the same elementary school zone as ours! So awesome.
I’ve been splitting online writing between here, facebook, twitter and comments on taplin’s blog. 8 or 9 years ago I made a concerted effort to bring all my online stuff together in one place, now it’s gotten dispersed again. I have the feeling there’s a reasonable way to avoid this balkanized content publishing, some kind of federation (the twitter javascript api does not come close) … but I haven’t found it. Interested in others’ thoughts, or if you’re reading this and are interested in following me, try also:
http://twitter.com/cweekly
or come find me on facebook. Cheers.
Hi
A reader kindly let me know he had trouble posting a comment here. I had cranked down the security on commenting too far (in fighting comment spam) and accidentally blocked discussion. Whoops. The comments are now open again and I welcome any non-commercial thoughts anyone reading this might care to share. Cheers.
“I am watching Obama drive to his inauguration right now. The genius of this experiment is that a revolution can look like this.”
- T. Bone Burnett, 1/20/2009
“Da da! [dadadadadadada]” — perhaps even “Hi Dada”? — first spoken Friday.
Definitely language, not babble. She looks right at me, smiles, and says “Dada!”. 
First 2 teeth (bottom) came in 12/25 and 12/26.
She also slept 10 hours unassisted last night (with just a few brief crying wake-ups).
The end of our constant sleep deprivation may be in sight.
Abi played with finger-paint for the first time this weekend too and has to do everything herself.
Learning slide guitar.
Banging on OWL at work.
Reading Tom Waits’ biography and City at the End of Time.
Listening to Beirut, The National, Waits, The Low Anthem
Needing more fresh air, more time for making music, more time with friends, more exercise, more sleep. Grateful as hell for this little family of mine.
Good night.
From an interesting thread on my favorite blog:
I love how when you get out beyond the feeble reaches of our local, Newtonian perceptual framework just how fantastically, unbelievably *strange* things become. Quantum mechanics are simply mind-blowing. Some rational experts in the field have concluded that at its most irreducible form, the Universe is in fact comprised of mathematical axioms. Which sounds ridiculous until you start looking at alternate explanations. We understand so very little. Yet it’s so damn beautiful.
My aging PC (a mostly home-built frankenstein AMD64×2 Windows XP box) crashed and burned last week. I had properly backed up nearly everything of importance (with a few painful exceptions) and decided it was time to get the Mac Pro I’d been coveting for a long time. After consulting w/ Mac-owning friends I settled on a refurbished 2.8GhZ quad-core from Apple, which arrived two days ago. It’s a gorgeous piece of hardware, inside and out, and I know I will appreciate OS X increasingly the more time I spend with it. I think it’s good for me finally to leave the comfort of XP. (In the last few years I’ve spent some reasonably happy months with Ubuntu, some wasted hours trying to get Gentoo Linux to work, and have played some w/ others’ OS X Macs, but most of my time has been spent in XP at home and at work.) The not-quite-the-same keyboard mappings are still bugging me, e.g. use of Alt instead of Ctrl to skip to the next word, and other off-by-one-key differences… I’m still using the same Logitech keyboard and a KVM switch to share it (and the mouse and monitor) across my work laptop and home machine, toggling back and forth… so the context-switching while likely good for me like broccoli is not much fun. Here’s hoping that becomes second nature soon! And there have been some annoyances, like wasting time finding the keyboard mapping for ejecting the optical disk tray (hold down F12 for a couple seconds — no button in the UI, no hardware button!)… but worst of all is not being able to read the backup USB drive. It’s FAT32 but large (a single 149GB partition). My XP laptop can read/write no problem, but for all its “I can do anything [PC] can do better” promise, OS X (a) thinks it’s NTFS when it’s definitely FAT32, and (b) can’t read or mount it. Argh. And it doesn’t seem to ship with a partition tool, even for an external disk. So I’m forced to use a *third party* OS just to access a standard hard drive formatted w/ the most ubiquitous easy filesystem of this decade. Fail. Anyway those gripes aside I’m psyched to finally be on a Mac and look forward to the improved UI and configurability and security and multimedia processing prowess it provides.
My friend Bill said my iPhone was a gateway drug. Heheheh.
