Jefflog

I’ve put up a new movie I’m pretty proud of. It’s a 17-minute collection of photos and video clips from Maggie’s first two years, sync’ed to the song “When the Water Breaks” by Liquid Tension Experiment. I had to reduce the quality somewhat to get it down to 21MB, and I used Quicktime and the H.264 codec. This means that if you’ve not on a relatively speedy computer, your playback might be stuttery. The Quicktime Player will play it, but so will VLC if you have that installed. If you have 17 minutes to spare, check it out on the movie page or download it directly.

Note to family members: a better quality version of this will be on the next family DVD.

I know it’s not healthy to do, but I watch my stock portfolio go up and down all day long. I’ve got a sidebar with my stocks displayed in my browser, and I can see how much I’ve made or lost today updated every five minutes.

I had gotten to thinking, though, that there’s no reason those quotes couldn’t be auto-updating using the latest AJAX technology. I toyed with the idea of writing my own portfolio tracker using Ruby on Rails, but to be honest I never really had the time to delve into the framework. The idea has been languishing on my hard drive for six months.

Today I noticed that Yahoo has implemented this feature just about everywhere a stock quote is displayed. The Yahoo Finance home page is a good place to start. It’s cool to watch the numbers change on the fly.

Of course, there have been Java applets that could do this for years, but I hate waiting for the Java applet to load not to mention the extra memory it eats up.

My sidebar is still only updating every five minutes, but I may have to see if I can put Yahoo Finance in my sidebar instead.

Considering how much Hong and I like books, it’s not surprising that we’ve imbued a similar love of books into Maggie. She’s got a collection of books downstairs that are mostly picture books and of the “look and find” variety. She likes to peruse through these books and talk out loud when she sees things she identifies, or wants us to sit with her and explain what the pictures are.

She’s also got a stack of books she keeps on her bed. One time we tried to take the books away, but she got so upset we decided to leave them there. In the evening, we already read between one and three books in bed before she goes to sleep. For her afternoon naptime, she likes to be left alone so she can read the books on her own. While she doesn’t know how to read yet, she’s memorized the words to most of her shorter books, and we can hear her behind the door flipping pages and reciting the words.

Posted six new movies on the movie page today. It’s been almost four months since I last had the chance to update it.

It’s been a rough three months with the new kid. His incessant crying has caused us both at times to be frustrated, tired, and given us reason to cry ourselves. The only time he was content was when he was sleeping, which thankfully he did a lot of, up to 16 hours a day. There was no sense of fun to offset the general burden of caring for a baby.

That’s fully changed now that he’s nearly three months old. He likes to sit down and be entertained by us. Sometimes we sing to him, and his favorite songs will elicit a fat smile from his fat face. Sometimes we’ll dangle a ball or other toy near his face, and he’ll stare at it intensely through crossed eyes and make feeble attempts to grab it. Mostly, though, we like to show him picture books. The fat smile is accompanied by gurgles of delight.

We’ve heard that it’s unusual for a baby of his age to respond to books. We’d like to think that it’s a sign of intelligene, although all it really means is that he likes pictures. We’ll see if Oliver ends up sharing the same love of books that Maggie has.