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“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.

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.

After a lifetime of standing on the sidelines watching the stock market (other than my 401k’s mutual fund allocations and Upromise/SLM employee shares) I decided it was a good time to learn more first-hand. So I set up an ETrade account and made a small investment spread across GE, CVX, GOOG and JNJ. I’m not expecting to see any gains for several years but I’m hoping the analysis I’ve read is right and this is a relatively cheap, relatively sane time to get started, in the grand scheme of things.

Guest shopping is a new feature at Upromise — the college savings program — where I work. The idea is simple: if you are not a Upromise member, but you want to help me to save money for Abi and Harper’s college funds, you can follow their guest shopping link and earn contributions for them when you shop online. It’s free and there’s no registration. Upromise doesn’t collect any information about you, rather you follow a special link that makes your shopping session behave as if it were me. You also get access to free shipping and other Upromise offers, which benefit you.

So, if you’re not a Upromise member and you feel like helping Abi and Harper as you do your holiday shopping online, please use this link:

Guest Shopping Link for Abi and Harper

Thanks!
=)

P.S. If you do this, I will eventually see some extra contributions to their account, but I will NOT know who was responsible, as the guest shopping service maintains your privacy. So, thanks in advance!

A couple years ago I composed and recorded a custom score for a short film by my good friend Ben Pugh. My music isn’t going to win any awards, but the film is as warm-hearted and funny as its creator and it was a fun and rewarding project. Ben recently posted an edited version (6 min, instead of 11) to youtube, and I’m referencing it here. Some of the audio work I did timed scene cuts and moods precisely, so the audio is a bit rougher in this shortened version… but it is still a great little story told by my good friend and I’m psyched to have been part of it. Let me know what you think!

For my home’s internet connection I used to use Comcast cable. Its connection speed was reasonable for cable but its DNS service was unreliable. For a while I used my company’s DNS servers as I trust the sysadmins there, and it worked fine. Then I switched from Comcast to Verizon FIOS (more than quadrupling my connection speed, and costing about $70/month less for the total package of net, phone and tv). I’ve been mostly very happy w/ FIOS, it feels good to have fiber to the house and 802.11N WiFi inside. However a blazing fast connection does you no good at all if negotiating DNS takes a long time; I was consistently unable to connect on the first try to such obscure sites as google and wikipedia. So I did a little research and decided to give OpenDNS a try. This is a free public service for using a 3rd party other than your home ISP for DNS. Well, it works. I haven’t had a problem w/ it yet, and everything is just much faster now that the DNS problems are gone. I don’t know why Comcast and Verizon have such a hard time maintaining their DNS service but I’m grateful OpenDNS exists to make it moot for me.

See http://www.OpenDNS.com for more information.

Enjoy!

YES!!!!!!

AP just called it.

Sipping Caol Ila and toasting President Obama and the huge number of Americans who worked to make this historic moment reality.

With victory in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, it appears to be academic now, and I am VERY PROUD that the next President of the United States will be Barack Obama. After months donating time, money and energy I really didn’t think I could afford, with campaign contributions, phone calls for get out the vote efforts, writing, emailing, talking, hoping and working, it looks like we finally did it. It looks like our country has finally come to its collective senses and decided to chart a different course. I feel an enormous sense of relief.

There are huge challenges ahead but I feel like we’re in a position where it is conceivable that we’ll be able to meet them. Here’s hoping.

That felt good. Just a 5 minute line. Took the girls (and Shawna, of course). I’ve got high hopes for this one but I won’t rest easy until it’s really over.

FYI in MA we also are voting on three initiatives, here is my take:

(1) Halving the state income tax: NO
// We need to invest in our infrastructure and schools etc.

(2) Reducing sentencing for possession of small amounts of pot: YES
// Good start, to end the waste and hypocrisy of modern Prohibition.

(3) Ending dog racing: YES
// Racing dogs leads to institutional animal abuse.

I really enjoyed this
great, brief writeup on major civil liberties issues of our modern times.

Pay attention, people!