avablog

Ava seems to be doing a bit better today, though she spiked a fairly high fever last night.  This is when it really gets rough to have her in bed with us.  It’s not necessarily that we want her in bed with us, but since she’s still breastfeeding, she tends to wake up at least […]

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Of the three hard disk drives I have sitting around running at any one time, the one I’m most worried about dying is the one that holds my photo archive. We had a thunderstorm last week that caused a power outage at the house.  Everything came back up just fine, except for the drive that […]

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And it goes like this: Everyone I know signs up for a Gmail account. That’s it. The end. Web-based, so you can get to it anywhere. Plenty of storage, so you never have to worry about whether some IT heavy is going to show up and tell you to empty your inbox. The way in […]

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What do you get when you put up to 2GHz of pure Intel Core Duo power, an iSight camera, Front Row, iLife ’06, and a 13-inch glossy widescreen display into a sleek case? More than you thought possible for less than you thought possible. Meet MacBook, starting at $1099.

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It irritates me when it rings, and at our house, it rings a lot. Leah’s a phone person, which is fine. She likes to talk, period, but she’s also very close to her family and friends, most of whom live out of town, so she’s frequently on the phone. I prefer e-mail or even IM. […]

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It was a busy one. Our friend Judy was in town to receive some instruction on using her new 15″ MacBook Pro. It sure is a dandy little machine. I’m really looking forward to seeing what Apple comes up with for the iBook replacement. Judy really caught on quick. She was coming from an old […]

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And Steve was still sporting a turtleneck (note the hole in his right shoulder).  Woz looks sleepy.

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I’m going to try something new with the comments on this blog, and it may not last. Up until today, I’ve allowed comments only from logged in users, which has kept my daily spam average pegged right at 0. It’s nice. My Webalizer logs tell me that there are a lot of people reading this […]

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In deference to my in-laws, most of whom have a fairly low tolerance for technology (with one notable exception), I don’t make too many computer-related posts on this blog. But Apple did something today that stands to change the way people buy and use personal computers, and that’s big news. Starting today, you can officially […]

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We had a nice weekend in IL. The two basketball games we watched weren’t very good, and George Mason’s improbable bid for a national title has ended. Too bad. So sad. I’ve got new pictures up in the gallery, which, as it happens, has been updated to version 2.1. I’m not sure I love the […]

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Listening to the radio on the way in to work this morning, I learned that Iowa’s largest free municipal WiFi network is now up and running for the communities of Iowa City, Coralville, and Cedar Rapids. Pretty cool. Take that, Des Moines! Tomorrow I’m going to bring my iBook to work and head up to […]

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Rachel, you can stop reading now. I’ve been working with our family friend Judy to set her up with a new computer. We’ve been telling her for years that she needs to dump her pokey old Windows laptop and come on up to the Mac, but she only recently broke down. Her budget for the […]

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How’s that for technicalese?! Standing on the shoulders of giants, I got the FAlbum plugin working under WordPress. What’s it do? Well, see that instance of “flickr” over there in the menu on the right? Click it. It’ll take you to a page hosted at this site that is populated with images from my flickr […]

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No, not one of those afternoons; it’s one where everything goes right. I finally got VNC set up on my mom’s wireless iBook, which was a test run for our friend Jude’s computer when she gets her new MacBook Pro next month.  It took some doing and some help from Greg (as usual), but it’s […]

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If you’ve taken the time to scroll this page down a bit, you may have noticed the rather prominent male sex organ pictured over in the menu on the right (the art aficionados among you may even recognize it). I’d encourage you to give the image a click (if you can bear to) and see […]

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I heard from one of this blog’s silent readers last night that I’m too light on Ava content and too heavy on irrelevant, uninteresting content.  Other than Leah’s constant harping about tech-related posts, I think it’s the first feedback I’ve had on the site’s content.  I sure do appreciate it! In response, I guess I’d […]

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For the last couple days I’ve been messing around with coComment, which is a neat service that lets you track all your comments at various blogs. I don’t make a ton of comments in any particular place, and I don’t visit all my favorite blogs every day, so having a place like coComment is a […]

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It’s time to dismantle my mom’s dead iBook.  We never did determine just what was wrong with it, so it’s possible that I could get a good HDD out of the thing.  At the very least, we’ll get a working Airport card (first gen); those are going for over $100 on eBay now.  The HDD […]

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I just installed the latest update to WordPress and thought I’d take a minute to document the process I use for anyone who’s in the same boat as I am (and also to have these notes saved somewhere when I invariably forget what I did). The official upgrade instructions are here. The important bits are: […]

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Huge, huge entertainment industry news.  Keep an eye on how this changes the face of Apple’s video content offerings at the iTunes music store.

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