moonlee.org

Well, I finally got a chance to put the Weller soldering iron and Panavise that Santa brought me for Christmas to use today by assembling the tvbgone kit that I purchased from the Make store. I have to say, after using several crappy soldering irons, that using a quality iron makes a huge difference.

I don’t know if I’ll be using it very much (probably not), and certainly not to the grand effect that the folks at Gizmodo recently did, but it was fun and an opportunity to work on my soldering skills.

Of course, Zoe, after some consideration, suggested we go try it on a wall of TVs at Best buy…

For those in the know, Arlo had his surgery today and he did just fine. From the way he was wolfing down dinner and banging his toys around later this afternoon, you wouldn’t think he had been in a 3 hour operation this morning, knocked out cold, intubated, with an IV hanging out of his little arm. Other than being a bit insecure for the rest of the day (understandably), he seems to be coping pretty well. Perhaps it’s the codeine elixir that we’re giving him for pain management that’s cheering him up. Zoe and I, on the other hand, have been up since 3 am, and it’s been a very long day… He’s got about 6 weeks until he’s healed up if all goes well.

Well, it took some time to settle, but I’ve been offered a full-time position with Trackvia as Chief Software Architect, which I’ve accepted. It’s been a few years since I’ve worked a full-time position, but I think it’s the right opportunity at the right time and I’m looking forward to it.

I’ll be telecommuting from Chicago for the time being, but it looks like a move back to Denver to work on-site sometime in the spring is pretty likely. For those of you in CO, I look forward to seeing you sometime soon!

Best wishes to everyone for the New Year!

Well, a short hiatus in between a couple of trips.

First Arlo took his first plane ride to NYC, where he spent some time with his grandparents, then went to Pennsylvania to meet his grand aunties and uncles and his great grandmother, and then up to Ithaca to spend some time with yet more family, and finally, a 2 day roadtrip back to Chicago, topped off by a visit from Max here from Boulder for the weekend (Good to see you Max!). It was a lot for an adult in 7 days, let alone a 5 month old. He held up admirably well, but he was a bit freaked by the end of it all. Well he’s settled out a bit now, just in time to visit more grandparents in Minneapolis for Thanksgiving. Well, at least we’ll all be spending a nice, quiet, relaxing Christmas at home.

And now, I must change my hoodie since Arlo woke up, and in the process of rocking him back to sleep he promptly barfed on my shoulder. They don’t tell you about this stuff… like waking up at 6am… Everyday…

While walking through the Target parking lot a while back with Zoe and Arlo, Zoe noticed some film negative on the pavement. So I stuck it in my wallet and forgot about it.

I scanned it the other day and here it is. Looks like the kiddo was born at Northwestern like Arlo. They look happy…

A while back, I wrote about Synergy, a neat free tool that allows you to control multiple computers across multiple monitors with a single keyboard and mouse. I’ve been extremely happy with that setup, working almost seamlessly among 3 different machines and dual monitors using a single keyboard.

Now I say almost because I occasionally found myself wishing I could simply drag a window from one monitor to another, which synergy doesn’t allow me to do. The screens remain isolated spaces unto themselves. While it is nice to have the flexibility of multiple machines to work with (especially if one is churning away doing something processor intensive), sometimes you just wish all that screen real estate was somehow physically connected too.

Now of course, if you have the ability to stick another video card into your PC, no problem. But since I swore off bulky desktops several years ago, my Apple laptop and mini don’t have that option. There are hardware breakouts that might work, like dualhead2go, but those are less than ideal for a variety of reasons.

Well, yesterday I stumbled across a software product called Screen Recycler, which has finally let me have my cake and eat it too. It’s a driver for macs that basically creates a virtual external display which is then accessible using any vnc client. Too cool! So, fire up screen recycler on the host mac, connect using a fast vnc client on the second computer in full screen mode, and voila, it’s basically a seamless dual head setup. It even works pretty well with Synergy. And, since it shows up as its own display on the host’s displays preference pane, you can position it, change its resolution, wallpaper, etc., just as you would a normally connected display.

The only caveat is that for nice response times on the vnc side you do need decent bandwidth between the two – terrific on GigE, probably fine on fast ethernet, but 802.11g was definitely not cutting it.

Granted, this probably isn’t generally useful technology, but for those of you with multiple computers and monitors on your desk, hey, it might do the trick.

So last week CG tells me that he’s decided to make the jump to the Mac as a development platform from Windows after a lengthy period of soul searching. I think that’s pretty cool – the Mac is a wonderful development environment for so many reasons. And it has that magic combination of Unix and an elegant GUI to appeal to both developers from both the Windows and Linux camps. While obviously not all the same development environments are available across platforms, there are quite a few packages on the Mac that have made my life much better:

• Locomotive: A self-contained ROR container, with packages for various versions of Rails that lets you start developing right away. Just drag and drop into your Applications folder. Provides ruby, rails, some choice gems and dependent libraries so you don’t have to install/compile them yourself.
• MAMP: Basically the same thing for PHP4/5, but goes a step further and gives you a full stack with MySQL and Apache as well. This is nice because getting Tiger’s stock PHP4 install to play nice with the MySQL binary install is kind of a pain.
• TextMate: A very wonderful and powerful text editor, with bindings and macros for more languages than you can shake a stick at.

There are of course many more tools out there – stuff that I use the shell for, but you could substitute with GUI applications, like FTP clients and the like. If you have any personal favorites, definitely let me know – I’m always on the look out for better tools.

So I’ve discovered having a newborn adversely impacts blogging frequency (not like it was that frequent before… ;-) No real news to report – Arlo is 2 months now, becoming more interested in the world and interactive, which has been a lot of fun. It’s been really fascinating watching him grow and develop. Despite all the long hours involved, having him beam a huge grin at me is probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced.

Zoe’s had a whole bunch of friends and family visiting to help us out with the baby and life in general, and that has been really great. Thank you!

Well, it’s been just over 10 days now with the little one and what a time it’s been. Calming a fussy Arlo, feeding him, changing him, watching him nap… it’s a full-time job man. It’s definitely been a bit rough with the sleep deprivation and things have certainly been up and down as he keeps his own schedule, but it’s been really nice getting to know the little guy.

For anyone who’s interested, Arlo now has his own site where he’ll be posting some pictures and deep thoughts (well maybe that will come later). You can get the lowdown at www.arlolee.org.

Great news! Arlo has finally decided to join us out here in the world. Yesterday morning at 10:34 am, after about 12 hours of labor, Zoe gave birth to Arlo Henry Lee, weighing in at 7 pounds 9 ounces.

We’re in the hospital now and he’s busy learning how to breastfeed, getting measured and examined by the nurses here with lots of cuddles from Mom and Dad in between. It’s been pretty exhausting, it seems like Arlo really isn’t into the whole sleeping for 8 hours uninterrupted thing. Darn those small stomachs!

We get to go home tomorrow. Here’s a pic of Arlo just a few minutes old.