Hanging Out With Dad 40/365
Originally uploaded by bump

I'm really enjoying being a Dad.

 

I’ve been working on a new “of the week” project since the beginning of the year.  At the end of last year, I was tired of taking a picture every day, as much as I enjoyed the 365 Project.  I didn’t want to commit to the same daily level of things this year, partially because of the impending birth of the baby (codenamed Smallz) and partially because I was just tired of being a servant to the project.

At first, I was thinking that I would try and do a single picture each week, but really work on the technique and quality of each picture.  Then I was thinking that I would do that and start a 365 for the first year of Smallz' life.  (I still plan on doing that.)  When our January issue of Bon Appetit arrived, it had a recipe for a Bahn Mi sandwich that I really was interested in making.  I ended up making it, and taking pictures while doing it.  Making these sandwiches gave me the idea to make something new each week, and learn how to cook and take pictures of food better while doing it.  Here’s a collection of the recipes I have made so far.

In the first nine weeks, I have learned that it’s not always easy to find something I want to make.  I have also learned that I know far less about cooking than I realized.  A lot of my inspiration so far has come from Serious Eats and Tasty Kitchen.  Both are awesome resources for the home cook.

This is more than a test post. Well, actually, it’s a test post because I haven’t been able to update this site due to some server problems. I am working on changing hosting companies. I need to do this for two reasons, first I am paying way too much for what I am getting with the current hosting company. Second, I have been updating this site using Blogger since 2001, and Blogger are phasing out support for ftp updating. So if you aren’t hosted on their infrastructure, you really can’t use their tools. This is lame for all manner of reasons, but I think it’s the kick in the ass I needed to get this site going again in some meaningful manner. Current working theory is moving this site and all the other domains associated with it over to Media Temple. This is time consuming, not because of the moving of files, but because of the moving of all the domains. It means a lot of phone calls, and I want to make sure that I don’t lose them. So just a test for the moment.

It’s been an amazing year in my life, and this blog has suffered as a result. I don’t feel guilty about it at all, but I am sure I will wish I had more writing from in between some of these large gaps in time.

Since the last post here, let's see, some things have happened in my life. I got married, that was in September. I turned forty, that was in October. We launched League Pass Broadband, the product I had been working on since June, that was in late October/early November. We also adopted a lovely little pug, named Puka, in November. Each of these things deserve multiple posts here. I learned so much this fall. I have so much to be thankful for, and every day I hope I don't find some way to screw it up.

I don't think I will mothball this site, but I am much more active on Facebook, and Twitter, both of which are linked from this page. It is likely that I will update more here now that I have broken the seal, but you will get a lot more volume over at each of those places.

• Some great music to check out from Ian. The Ratatat remix of Party and Bullshit is the most listened to item in my whole iTunes library. I am checking out the rest now.
• Chandler 1.0 ships Interesting. I am wondering how it compares to the ones I use. Email integration seems like a great idea that other ones don't have.
• Datacase Launches. I still maintain that this is something that the iPhone should do natively.

I’m updating Twitter, when it decides to be up, more than this blog right now. Between my guild’s pursuit of finishing Sunwell, my work on this NBA project I am on, and getting married in September, I have very little time to write, even though I want to. Today’s winner links worth sharing:

• Everyone likes the newest Apple Keyboard. Me included, literally.
• Sad to hear that Randy Pausch passed away. As I have said to anyone who would listen, you should read The Last Lecture, and watch the video. Make sure you have tissues around, I cried more than once.
• I am going to be up in Manhattan next weekend. Ping me if you want to grab a cup of coffee, or a bite.

• These game screenshots look amazing. Sign me up for lightsaber fighting Yoda.
• Radiohead catalog finally on iTunes. I already own it all on CD anyway.
• Turning 40 by SBJ. I met him at SXSW this year. He was scarfing down a muffin inside of Starbucks in an effort to get to his keynote on time. Nice guy. Messy muffin speed eater.
• Books to read box
• Keynote-esque Presentation Editor on the Web By itself, not super exciting. However, read the post for this "The most amazing thing about this is happening under the hood: the developer wrote a library that abstracts browser rendering engines using Canvas, SVG and Flash (on a per-need basis) into a unified language – Objective J which is – as the name suggests – a mapping from Objective C to JavaScript." Want.
• The Evernote Widget: Notebooks To Go

• Mini_Review: I have started using Plurk some. For the most part, I like it, but it needs an API, and other visualization options. Mobile Interface It supports more contact granularity than Twitter, and even groups. Flickr integration is decent, although they don't link to the photo page, just the raw picture.
• Finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union last night. I was entertained by it, but I guess I don't connect well with Chabon's writing style or something, it was a 3/5 for me.
• Mac OS X SVN users have a new choice today, Versions is in beta. Looks really nice, I will have to give it a shot this afternoon.
• Great Tip: Extract Icons using Preview.app

So, as I think a lot of people know, Super Deluxe is being “folded into Adult Swim.” I feel like Super Deluxe was based on a fundamentally good set of ideas. I also think that we were learning as we went, and had demonstrated a great ability to learn from our audience, and make good decisions from that learning. However, companies as large as Turner make decisions that they have to make, and they make them based on a variety of reasons, not all of which are apparent or logical to someone outside the decision making process. I am sure that, for the senior management team, this was the right decision to make, and that’s their job.

I do, however, lament the fact that my amazing team of developers was dissassembled. For those of you who were on that team who might be reading this, you guys/girl were some of the finest people I have worked with in my career. I honestly felt like we could have built anything we were asked to. I wish that the senior management understood the value of keeping a development team intact, regardless of the product that they were working on. This is water under the bridge now, and I can only hope that I might teach my superiors to value development teams more in the future. Building a team, building process, and learning how to work with a large team of bright people is a challenge, and starting from scratch is a little discouraging, but I have so much learning to apply that it is also exciting.

I am working now for Turner Sports. I will be working on technology related to the NBA.com licensing deal. It's a pretty exciting project, with agressive deadlines already, and some new technology that hasn't even been created yet. There are going to be a lot of new faces here in the coming weeks, and I am looking forward to making the most of this opportunity to learn and do more.

Finally, to my Super Deluxe peoples, you folks are really unique interesting people as a group, and I just hope that I get to work with all of you again at some point in the future.

• I can't believe that the Ugly Doll store still has these red Kaiju Ice Bats. They only made 100.
• The Illumanati Awesome series of photographs. via
• Spreadshirt Test Lab 01: How much does that t-shirt shrink - The American Apparel T-shirt With pictures too.
• George Steinmetz takes insanely good pictures from his paraglider. Prints also available at his site. via
• I'm currently reading The History of the Hobbit, Volume 1. It's somewhat academic, but utterly fascinating. It's a true peek into Tolkein's writing process.
• I know most people only use Quicksilver as an application launcher, but it's so much more. 5 handy Quicksilver triggers is an excellent example of this.
• The Guardian tries to find out more about Pystar, the would be Mac cloner. Hilarious. The address changed?

• I have been trying out the Evernote beta today. As a long time user of DevonThink and Yojimbo, and someone who has tested a variety of other options, I think it's great at the simple end. The advantage of being able to access all my notes via my phone is insane. Too many information managers. I still have a couple of invites, shoot me a note on Twitter.
• Video: Using Skitch with Evernote
• I spent some time today learning more about OpenID. This article, which is over a year old, helped me quite a bit. It's a lot simpler than you would think, and I am going to start using it for everything.
• This video had me laughing quite a bit on Friday. "Just two men, cruising the Castro for delicious, salty nuts."
• Rafe's Analyzing Git piece was along the same lines as I was thinking at the time. Hoping to get a chance to do a "deep dive" on Git this week. More importantly, I discovered The Thing About Git from the article. It's an excellent read.
• You Look Nice Today is my favorite new podcast this week. It's definitely an acquired taste, based on me testing it in the car while Sue was with me.

• Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning via the ever awesome Anarchaia
• Crave: MacBook Air verdict: Seminal computer, five reasons. I don't agree that these are good enough reasons to call it a "Seminal" computer. He doesn't even mention the multi-touch support, which is probably the legitimate argument. Again, the Duo was in this space a very long time ago.
• The Tospom: A camera that plays catch I love this idea.
• Lots of net chatter about http://pitchfork.tv/. If you like Radiohead, you must check out this Bangers and Mash video. Must.

• Leonard gets PownceFS working on the Mac. Leonard is smart.
• MultiClutch is a multitouch input manager. That means on the new Multitouch Macbook Pros and the MacBook Air, you can map custom gestures to a keyboard shortcut. That is pretty frickin awesome.
• I hacked up the start of our Wedding Web site this weekend using Wordpress and a theme I found online. It's not impressive, but it's a start. I need to replace that default grapohic in the top left corner with something. I wish I was more artsy.
• Funny to see posts about the Flip. I just won one at SXSW from Adobe, and it's pretty fun to play with so far.
• 8 Powerful Features of Safari That Few People Know About. I'm not few people I guess, but this article has some useful features I didn't know about in it.

• The new Ben Stiller movie looks good. At least the trailer does.
• Blizzard: we're working on OpenGL patch for Diablo II for Intel Macs. Sweet.
• The Vulture's weekly take on American Idol has become on of the high points of my week.
• popurls enterprise edition Already was using his good iphone version as my default iPhone time waster.
• Kil'jaedan iPhone Edition I made an iPhone wallpaper from the desktop wallpaper that Blizzard posted yesterday.

Tidbits: Should Mac Users Run Antivirus Software? “I do not recommend desktop antivirus software for the average Mac user, but you need to take other precautions.”

I don't run antivirus software on any of my Mac OS X machines. In reading through the other things he says, I think that this article is something that Mac OS X users of all levels need to read. Most of this stuff is common sense to me, but it may not be common sense to you. The single most important thing to keep in mind, which he does not come out and explicitly say, is that you should not immediately trust anything online. That email that seems to be from your bank, or ebay or paypal probably is not. Look carefully at links before following them, and don't trust any source of information or software without first verifying that they are legitimate.

This can sometimes be very hard for a non-technical user to figure out, but I recommend that you err on the side of caution.

• John Malkovich. I think this might be big for Super Deluxe.
• New Gnarls Barkley today. As good as the last one, but without the Crazy style breakout hit.
• Mashable: 19 Tools For The Best March Madness Ever I'm getting ready.
• Amazing digitzed VHS tape about the Internets from 1995.
• Aquos A gorgeous Vista theme.

The bump clubhouse was spared this weekend. It’s amazing how much damage the tornado did to downtown Atlanta and the neighborhoods directly East of it. Here’s some Monday surfing links:

• Weekly Resolution: I am going to try and make a weekly resolution every week from here on out. This week's is to swear less.
• Video: Internet Commenter Funeral Funny funny stuff.
• The Pitfalls of Your Constant Complaining and How to Stop It
• Things updated to 0.9. This has become my todo list manager, and this update added recurring tasks, which I really appreciate.
• My Favorite new band of the week: Grand Archives
• Return to Dark Castle Released The original Dark Castle game was one of the first really addictive Macintosh games in the late eighties. I am very tempted to buy this just to relive those dorm room days.
• Pro Tip: Use Gmail to filter out that unwanted spam from your non-Gmail POP account. I was getting 900+ spam messages a day at my oldest active pop address. It's as easy as going to Settings: Accounts in Gmail and adding your account information under "Get mail from other accounts." So far Gmail's spectaculor spam filter is batting 100% on filtering out the spam.