Flickr

So I'm trying out Flickr for uploading my photos to instead of Picasa-slash-Google; linking to photos in Google and placing photos in the blog is a PITA, so I wanted to see if Flickr would be easier.  Seems odd that blogger and Google photos would be integrated so poorly, seeing as they are both Google tools.  Here is the link to my new Flickr account.

For starters, I uploaded two albums.  The first is when a couple of ex-co-workers visited.  Ooh, neat, I just put the picture right there (click the pic to go to the full album).  OK putting pics in the blog is much easier than Picasa.  That's insane.  It's your own tools, Google!  Can't they play nice?

The second album is of Teh Emm3tt, of course (click the pic for the full album).  There's some good shots of him and Xander laying next to each other on the bed, some shots of him sleeping, me sleeping, me and him sleeping, him playing Super Baby, and ... mom playing Wii.  To calm him down one night, we did a sing-a-long to Fountains of Wayne which we streamed through the Tivo.  Technology's swell.  When it works.

But now its time to say
What I forgot to say
Baby baby baby
Come on, what's wrong
Its a radiation vibe I'm groovin' on

Captain Fussypants

So what kind of 2-month old doesn't calm down in the car? Our kind. He's gone on two car rides today. The first one it took him about 20 minutes to calm down. The second one he was happy and smiling as I put him in the car seat, after 10 minutes (on my way back from Blockbuster returning Dan in Real Life and Into the Wild), he cried his poor little eyes out.

Our usual trick is to bounce him while holding him in a sling, which is convenient because it frees my hands up to type this.

Here are some updated pics. We had a pediatric appointment on Friday, and Em is 101/2 pounds! So he's put on almost 4 pounds which, and I really have no frame of reference but, I think is a good thing. And he's outgrowing some of his newborn clothes already. Doc says we can expect about another month of The Fuss though. Yay.

...

I started this blog 6 hours ago. It is now 9:20 and he finally went down for the night. I so look forward to the day when I don't put him in his crib, slink away, and then have a desire to celebrate when I don't immediately hear him start to fuss.

Resurrection

OK, OK. I give. If the fans want more blog, well then, I guess I can prolong the death of this one at least a little longer.

Next, they'll want cake. Anarchy!

Here are some updated pics of Emmett. For the prior albums, you can always click on the "Brian's Public Gallery" link at the top. Feel free to explore, Dora.

So, here's some of the highlights of what's been happening in the PalmerRaineyan house:

• I watched Em by myself quite a bit this weekend. I survived. The long-lasting impact on Emmett's life remains to be seen. He is being monitored for laziness, fast-food cravings, and twitch reflexes that will tell if he has been over-exposed.
  
• We finally closed on the house in Columbus. Rawk.
  
• We watched the movie Once, and liked it. I bought Ash the soundtrack.
• We got crap reception with Verizon, so we switched to AT&T. I got an iPhone, and I'm loving it so far. When we decide we are keeping AT&T for real, we'll send out new digits.
  
• Ash is addicted to nonograms, after I bought her Picross for the DS for Christmas. You can try a few yourself here.
• I am still addicted to oGame.

We need ideas for good movies to rent. The writer's strike couldn't have come at a worse time. With Emmett here are watching more TV than ever, and even with Tivo suggestions that are recorded, we are running out of stuff to watch at 3 in the morning while one of us is up with the little man, bouncing on an exercise ball, trying to get him to go to sleeeeeeeep.

Almost Home

A lot's happened since Oct. 11th (last post). I started my new job on the 15th (love it). It's mostly been spent shaking my head back and forth going "eeb-adee-eeb-adee-eeb-adee" like that one robot (Lost in Space?). Bit that's normal.

I've been traveling back and forth to Charlotte about once a week. Charlotte's a decent town, unless you're craving some takeout hibachi, in which case you have to settle for mediocre kung pao chicken. I did get to have the best burger-and-fries I've ever had though, at a chain joint called Five Guys. Holy sh'pocky. Good burgers and they literally give you a bag of fries. Remember the large size brown paper bags used for lunches - not the small ones, the larger ones - now fill that about 2/3rds the way to the top with awesome tasting fries. O' Snap.

We found a house in Gastonia, here are some pictures. We close on the house Wednesday and move Friday. Going to be a craaaazy week next week. But we are very much looking forward to getting moved and settled and to have this all behind us.

That's about it for this week. The hypnotic din of the heating unit here at the Marriott Courtyard is putting me to sleep.

Fall TV

Quick post on what we are watching:

First off, my favorite new show is Reaper, hands down. This show is very funny and what I like about it is that unlike in most shows where one character is there for comedy, in Reaper pretty much all of them are. And I guess it's just one of my guilty pleasures that I'm always drawn to slacker shows. Could it be...oh...maybe...because I'm a slacker?

Honorable mention goes to Big Bang Theory. I guess it's another truth that I am drawn to nerds. Could it be...oh...maybe...because I'm a nerd? But I do find myself laughing out loud at some of the lines in this show.

Chuck is a good show, not great. We still have a season pass for it and so long as we have the time to keep watching it, we'll keep recording it. But if we ever run low on TV time then I could see this getting cut.

The only other new show we added is Pushing Daisies, which we haven't watched yet. But the only reason I added it was because I couldn't remember which show about death was the funny one, when I was setting up the season passes. Turns out the show I wanted was Reaper, so I don't expect we'll keep this one. I haven't heard good things about it anyway.

Other than that, a lot of our favorite shows returned: Office, It's Always Sunny, How I Met Your Mother, and Biggest Loser to name a few. Yes, I like to watch Biggest Loser. I can't explain it. There is something innately impressive about what they accomplish. The guy that got voted off this week lost something like 130 pounds. On the contrary, I can't stand shows like Extreme Makeover, where not only do the people do very little themselves, but then they end up all looking the same (same nose, same teeth, same hairstyle, same boobs...).

Other than that, two of our other favorites are just finished up - Psych and Eureka. Look forward to those coming back.

I'm probably forgetting a few shows without the TV in front of me.

Sudoku-Masochism

I heart Sudoku. I got hooked on it back in 2004, and I bought book after book of sudoku and would do about 2 hours a day as Ash and I watched TV. After a while I started doing harder and harder puzzles.

When I moved to Columbus I often found myself bored at work, so I would take a 3x5 index card and draw lines on it to make a sudoku grid, then go to websudoku.com, pull up an Evil puzzle, and copy the starting numbers onto the index card. I would hunker over the index card on my desk and as someone would come up behind me, I would just slide it under my keyboard. The index card was folded in half so I could do two puzzles on one card, and also so I could put it in my pocket and take it with me places (yes, I took them to meetings and also the bathroom). Those evil puzzles would take somewhere between :30 and 1:00 to do, every now and then I could do one without pencil marks.

This latest book I bought is called The Ultimate Sudoku Challenge, subtitled "Warning: This book contains 200 of the toughest puzzles!" Riiiigghhhtt. Easy. But anyway at the end of the book are 10 "megasudokus", 25 by 25 grids with numbers. I started one and quickly realized I was in way over my head. Holy crap are they hard. Not only are they 25x25, but I think they are also a very hard level to boot.



The one on the left above (you should be able to click on it for a larger image), I have been working on for over a month, generally about an hour or so a day. They don't give you very much room on the page, so it's almost impossible to do pencil marks (especially since more than half of the numbers are two digits). Instead I look at possible numbers in each column, row, and box. Possible columns go at the top, rows to the right, boxes at the bottom of the page.

This is my fifth one and I was only able to finish the fourth. The first three I messed up so badly that I scrapped them. I since learned to look in the back before I place a number just to make sure it is right. I don't consider that cheating because the puzzles are just too hard not to. It saves me from screwing up the puzzle. I don't look at any other numbers and if I do, I don't place a number until I figured out why it goes there. I only look at the solution to make sure I'm right. Doesn't do any good if you screw up a number then 10 hours later realize it; it's not like you can just erase everything and start over.

I have gone 2-3 hour sessions without placing a single number. But I love it. I love a good challenge. Ash thinks I'm bonkers. I can't disagree.

If anyone wants to try their hand, let me know; I can try and scan in a grid and send you the image. But good frigging luck.

Amazon Offering Non-Protected MP3 Downloads

I'm not exactly mp3-savvy, but my forays into the music download space have been frustrating; ever since the heyday of Napster's (albeit illegal) peer-to-peer application, in fact, digital music has quite gone to shite. Yahoo's music player = teh suck! MTV's Urge (now Rhapsody) = slow. Napster = slow. iTunes = don't know because I don't have an iPod, nor am I interested in downloading a media player when I already have one on my machine. It's one thing to have users install a plug-in for a media player that they already have on their machine, but to have people install your own player is ballsy...that player better be really freaking amazing (yeah...I'm looking at you Yahoo and MusicMatch). So I'm always on the lookout for better alternatives or open to suggestions.

Amazon is now offering non-DRM MP3 downloads at or below the industry standard .99/9.99 price point. I like this for several reasons. 1) First off, I've always been a fan of their website...fast and easy to use, and I'm already a member with one-click payments on file and everything. I even go to their website and listen to their 30 second song snippets to sample new music, instead of whatever WMP plug-in I happen to be using at the moment; searching for music is generally faster than within WMP. 2) I like the burnable & transferrable non-DRM format that doesn't come with any usage restrictions (e.g. 3 burns or 3 sync devices). But 3) (and this is my favorite) I like that it doesn't come with their own p.o.s. Windows Media plug-in. They do have a download manager applet that sits outside of WMP, but it's a small download and un-intrusive program.

Obviously my ultimate, ideal, perfect-world dream would be if there were an affordable subscription service with non-DRM downloads, but since that is not realistic, I'll take what I can get. I canceled my Urge membership a few weeks ago because I was never actually using it. I don't have the time, patience, or interest to just sit and listen to new music and sync up my mp3 player all day. Once in a blue moon I want to listen to an album before paying for it, so I thought the subscription route would be cool. Instead I just ended up paying $15 a month for music I never listened to.

I just bought a mess of songs by The Decemberists, mostly singles and compilation tracks. Now, I don't normally shop for or buy CD singles, but the ability to d/l a non-DRM mp3 of songs of a band that I already know I like, is pretty damn awesome. From what I've read, Amazon's library is not the most extensive, but they had several tracks that either were not on Urge or were not easily find-able on Urge; either way gives Amazon the edge.

Ultimately I guess what I'm doing is getting away from subscription-based DRM files, to just buying music that I hope I will like in a burnable format that is cheaper than, say, going to Best Buy. If you actually want to possess an actual retail CD, then I still highly recommend LaLa, especially if you were like me and had a library full of embarrassing CDs that I never listened to anymore, that I could then "trade-up" for just $1.79. When I first started using LaLa, I had several hundred CDs, but over 100 of which I never listened to anymore (and I could always rip them to my computer if I wanted to keep them anyway); now I have several hundred CDs that I actually like. Then to help in discovering new music, I have been a subscriber of Yahoo's Launchcast for a couple of years now and I'll keep that going for like $4 a month, I think it is. I was disappointed when Yahoo's music purchase system turned out to suck, because I was already a member and I like their radio station functionality, the way it recommends new music. But they made you download a whole new player, not just some WMP plug-in, and it ended up being quite painful and it had very basic functionality at that. I remember I submitted a bug on it through their website, never got a good response nor did they ever fix it; so I lost interest in it.

I've gone on quite long, but as you can tell, I like me some music. I just don't know how to really manage it all. I'm fixing to go uninstall Urge. The fact that it scans my library constantly to come up with Auto Playlists while hogging my CPU the whole time, with no easy means to disable said functionality, irritates me to no end. Shame on you MTV, didn't you learn that lesson from Sony? I want digital music, not a virus.