This week has just drifted by so casually. Amy and I stay around the house, take visitors, watch the baby, take turns finding new ways to make him happy. I cook and clean, take care of things that have been hanging… We talk on the phone to friends and relatives a lot. When I have time off work, I’m usually either on vacation or I stay home and work obsessively on my own stuff, freelance projects, etc. This time is so different - we’re not doing anything but figuring out how to be a family together.

Miles is a different boy every day. We’re beginning to wonder if we spoke too soon in declaring him to be quiet - he’s seeming to cry a bit more every day, and starting to get harder to calm, unfortunately. When it’s not the diaper and it’s not the milk and it’s not the burping… it doesn’t leave a whole heck of a lot to try. We scratch our heads and look all concerned, but it always works out.

Put up another set of images — Miles Week One (click):

While I was at it, moved the sonogram/doppler audio loop into the miles dir.

We obsess over things that would probably look small from the outside - whether his eyes are opening quickly enough (one of them has seemed kind of “sealed,” but seems to be getting better on its own), whether his breast-feeding habits are “normal,” whether he’s pooping too much or not enough… I suppose it’s common to be a bit obsessive as you figure this stuff out for the first time.

We’ve had three outings so far - a walk around the block to get some sunshine on him and to see how Amy is faring (excellently, but not out of the woods yet). Then a pediatrics visit on the 3rd day (all is well) and a trip to Rockridge Kids today to spend some of the gift certificate we received from the J-School.

Amy’s friend Sarah made a gorgeous mobile for us — hand-folded origami birds hanging from backyard apple tree branches (because Miles used to be Appleseed). It’s lovely. Will hang that over the crib tomorrow.

For those who read this blog for something other than endless baby tales, don’t give up on me yet - the newness of all this will wear off after a while and we’ll return to the regularly scheduled blah blah woof woof.

Just so you don’t think I’ve lost my mind entirely and become driven by nothing but baby for ever and ever, a few quick hits for the week:

ComputerWorld reports that if you type “go to hell” (using the quotation marks) into Google’s search engine, the first result served up is Microsoft.com. So is someone at Google tampering with the database for fun and profit, or is this an actual reflection of the sentiments of the web at large as manifested through Google’s usual bubbling process?

I usually cringe when someone invites me to a party using eVites rather than an invitation of their own device, but I had no idea the world’s leaders were using the service to arrange the war on Iraq!

Yet another Unix/Linux pundit/guru has made “the switch” - again, not from Windows to OS X, but from Linux to OS X. It’s starting to look like OS X is getting more “switch” traction from the *nix camp than from Windows users… raising the question of where the next round of Switch ads might tread.

Hooptie Goo’s Haiku, like you’ve never read before (for example):

I spilled brake fluid
Let’s get some sucking action
And clean this damn floor

At the site, hit Cartoon Classics, then Hooptie Goo’s Haikus — this is one reason I hate Flash-based web sites - rather than dropping a direct link, I have to sit around describing how to navigate… but in this case it’s worth it ;)

Albums Miles has heard so far in his life:

William Parker - Raining on the Moon
Sex Pistols - Nevermind the Bollocks
Nora Jones - Come Away with Me
Orchestra Baobab - Pirate’s Choice
Raymond Scott - Soothing* Sounds for Baby

*Yeah, right

Miles is coming along so well. Watching him experiment with the eyes he’s never used… we’re aware of exactly when his eyes are open, how wide, and for how long, but unsure of whether he actually “sees” anything. He does seem to turn his head toward our voices, following with eyes.

All of his parts are brand new, untested. These lungs have never been used - how to turn them on? These eyeballs have never seen anything. And they work, right off the showroom floor! These limbs have barely moved, not with this much range of motion anyway - but this elbow does flex! These lips do lick! He’s got to figure out how each and every part works. Doing great so far. Grasping motions are already seeming slightly more focused, more coordinated.

Amy’s milk came in yesterday - the real deal, not colostrum. The milk knocks him right out - amazing soporific powers. Breast-feeding has gotten easier since last post - mom and baby have both learned the tricks. Wide mouth, tongue down, chin down, lips flanged. His sucking is so incredibly strong - put a finger in there and be amazed.

Filing his nails every other day to keep his face from getting scratched. A and I are learning the diaper thing as we go - it’s not too hard.

He sleeps with us in the bed, between us. No, you don’t have to worry about rolling over them any more than you have to worry about falling out of bed - you just don’t.

We’re floating in love - melting several times daily.

What an amazing birth, amazing first days of life for little Miles. After hearing a thousand birth stories, we had braced ourselves for 12, 24, 48 hours in labor and delivery, so the speed of everything took everyone by surprise.

Here’s the “unclipped” story of Miles Hacker’s grand entrance.
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A collection of images from Miles’ first 24 hours on earth, and of mom and dad’s time in the hospital.

Before Miles was called Miles, he was just Appleseed. We tried to take a profile shot of Amy’s belly each week during the pregnancy (although we missed a few), then morphed* them all together at the end.

*Technically, this isn’t a real morph since I didn’t map point to point, just iPhoto’s built-in Slide Show output.

Our baby was born on the 23rd day of September, 2002.

So maybe there was a good reason why Miles arrived a week late — September 23 turns out to be a very auspicious day. For one thing, it’s the Autumnal Equinox, so there’s a nice seasonal/celestial connection.

The 23rd also turns out to be John Coltrane’s birthday - who better for a child sharing a name with Miles Davis to share a birthday with than John Coltrane?

And then there’s the 23 connection - in the works of William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, much is made of the significance of the number 23. We’re not numerologists, but Scot and friends have always taken pleasure in uncovering the strange preponderance of the number 23.

• Homo sapiens are given 46 chromosomes from their parents: 23 male and 23 female.
• The human biorhythm cycle is generally 23 days long.
• It takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate through the human body.
• There are 23 vertebrae in the human body.
• Geosynchronous orbit occurs at 23,000 miles above Earth’s surface.
• A full turn of the D.N.A. helix occurs every 23 angstroms.
• The tilt of Earth’s axis is roughly 23° accounting for the changing seasons and the procession of the Zodiac.
• The Dog Days of Summer begin on July 23 when Sirius the Dogstar rises from behind the sun.
• 23 Skidoo

Technically a Libra, Miles was born on the cusp between Virgo and Libra. Like we care ;)

Too overwhelmed to write right now, need time to process all these thoughts. Such a day, such a fantastically beautiful day. Our baby was born less than three hours after Amy went into labor. It was an intense labor, very pure and very fast. We now have a dark-haired boy, six pounds 12 ounces, 19″ long, blue eyes (we think - so far he’s barely squinted up at us out of them). We don’t have a name for him yet - that will come soon enough.

The birth was so incredible. More tomorrow.

At 2:15 pm, Scot got the call at work from Amy, who had just gone into labor during lunch with Stacia, our doula (perfect timing!). Scot rushed home to find Amy having contractions a few minutes apart. We packed her bag, dug out the birth plan, and got ready to head to the hospital.

This is it: the axis upon which the rest of our lives turn. More later.

Found a note folded up, sitting in the ivy, on the way to breakfast the other day. Junior high came rushing back in a flash of memory:

(click)

I love the way the sentence ends w/o question mark, the way an entire sheet of notebook paper is used for four lonely words, the minimal expressiveness of the note, as if it’s a statement of fact rather than a question.

Ack packet via Dylan Tweney: Just how far has the art of magazine covers declined in the past 50 years? This plays like a microcosm of all modern aesthetics - engaged in an ongoing and unstoppable slide from care to crap.

And speaking of MSN, they’re promoting a “New Bread of Secret Agent.”

Just finished titling and encoding Weblogs — Challenging Mass Media and Society in QuickTime format for our Darwin Streaming Server. Posted both Sorenson3 and MPEG-4 versions (but no modem-friendly version, sorry).

We’re sort of testing the waters with MPEG-4 here, so let me know how the viewing experience is for you. Was kind of suprised not to get better filesize savings with MPEG over Sorenson. For example, the 2nd segment is 43 minutes long, at 320×240, 15fps, keyframe every 12, QualComm Purevoice 22kHz 16-bit mono. The Sorenson is 181MBs, the MPEG is 140MBs. I had hoped for something like a 50% size reduction. Hmmm…

In Talk like a pirate — or prepare to be boarded, Dave Barry reminds us that this - today! - is Talk Like a Pirate day - and here I’ve let half the day slip away without talking like a pirate, damn. He’s recruiting lots of celebs, but :

I see no need to recruit President Bush, because he already talks like a pirate, as we can see from this transcript of a recent White House press conference:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Arrrrr.

Thanks Howard Berkey for pointing out the unsanity of KOMPRESSOR :

We do not use a macintosh
instead we use a tandy
KOMPRESSOR break your glow stick
KOMPRESSOR eat your candy

Now let’s all take a magical journey upon Harry Potter’s vibrating broom.

Cool fog guns!

Far out — the author of Kung-Tunes has released Kung-Log, an OS X client very similar to iJournal for posting to MT from the desktop rather than via web forms. This fills in a big missing hole for me in the LJ-MT transition. Hotkeys and music detection would make my life complete.

Our weblog panel discussion was tonight - turned out to a great event, a full house. I’ll encode it and put up a streaming QuickTime tomorrow, if I have time. Very interesting.

Wow - folks at work got together and put up a collection to buy Amy and I a gift certificate for Appleseed - extremely generous, too. A true collaborative effort - thanks everyone, you’re all the best. Grabs set up a fake staff meeting, all assembled, and he started it off claiming there were some serious problems with our intranet… I got weirded out for a minute there…

Ex-Be employees with blogs:

Adam Haberlach
Frank Boosman
Adrian Ziemkowski
Mike Popovic
Mike P’s HipShake
MikePop via HipTop
Daniel Sandler
Wendy Hall
Deirdre Saoirse Moen
Joseph Palmer
Leigh Ann Hildebrand
Michael Alderete
Duncan Wilcox
Adrian Ziemkowski

Others I’m missing?

Whoa: BeOS icons for OS X. See also: Daniel Sandler’s BeOS screensavers for OS X.

Interesting… more than 500 emails on the BeOS Refugee articles, and for the first time someone has pointed out an embedded puzzle in my thinking:

On one hand I talk about how I believe in the open source philosophy, benefit hugely from the fruits of open source efforts in my daily work, and always support collaborative development as a general concept.

On the other hand, I know from experience that closed source development models under a single control structure, with a single unified vision, are capable of producing a better user experience, more cohesive design, etc. more quickly. Despite best intentions, open source efforts are inevitably tripped up by fragmentation or bad communication resulting in a “cobbled together” atmosphere in the user experience.

The email I received subtly implied that there was a hypocrisy in my thinking here, but I see it more as an irony. And on further thought, this probably has something to do with my attraction to OS X - it’s the perfect blend of open and closed source development models - closed at the desktop level, where the user experience matters, and open at the command line level, where collaborative efforts work best. Hmm….

Quite amazing piece of video collage / editing from the Guerrilla News Network in this piece S-11 Redux : Surfing the Apocalypse, somewhere between art and politics. Hits hard. Did me, anyway, especially the “Deliverance” bits.

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Two-headed turtle found in Florida — ” …. said the two-headed creature likely is a natural occurrence, not caused by chemicals or any other outside influence.”

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Dan Gilmor writes 10 choices that were critical to the Net’s success for the Mercury News, an excellent primer not so much on the history of the Internet, as on the decisions that were or were not made that allowed networks to proliferate at the right places, be reigned in at the right places, and to multiply everywhere else.

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Attended Andrew’s opening at Richmond Art Center, purchased one of his pieces, a dark + green upward slurping thick acryclic piece, to be delivered in November. Party at their house afterwards. Babies everywhere, except for ours and Gina’s, which haven’t popped out yet.

Music: William Parker - Hunk Pappa Blues

Read a piece today over lunch about a Yoko Ono exhibit in SF. During installation of the piece, Yoko saw a white phone for the museum guards. She put up a sign over the phone: “Wait for Yoko to call,” making it part of the exhibit. When the show opened, a visitor grabbed the phone when a guard wasn’t looking and called his own cell with it, so the number came up on his display. Now he had the #.
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For all those who hate the made-up sound of the word “blog,” it looks like the Oxford English Dictionary is considering making the word official.
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UN Secretary General Kofi Anan has warned the United States not to act alone against Iraq. Bush is apparently unphased by the warning. How can a serious, official warning from the rest of the world mean nothing to us? Are we really so righteous? Do we know something the rest of the world doesn’t know? Is war entirely about politics now? It’s as if war isn’t even taken seriously by the world’s most powerful leader, like it’s a trifle to be played with for rhetorical purposes. I’m so afraid we’re heading for WWIII, right on the brink of Appleseed’s birth.

Speaking of which, when we first learned Amy was pregnant, back in January, we calculated that the birth could end up being very close to Sept. 11. We hoped it wouldn’t come on that day (yes, superstitious), and were glad to have gotten through yesterday’s tickertape without her going into labor.

Amy reminded me today that the kid will weigh around 7-8 pounds. Our cats weigh 11 and 15 pounds respectively. A human smaller (much smaller) than a cat. Can you get to that?

Music: A Certain Ratio - Loss

Archaeologists have discovered what appears to be one of the first 404s created by humans:

View image

(OK, I admit I’m a bit enthralled by MT’s image upload feature - it even creates all the HTML embed or javascript pop-up code for you - no more passing through BBEdit, no more FTP… most excellent).

Amanita.net offers a LiveJournal to MovableType import/export script. I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to make the jump with all my old content intact. Unfortunately it required a bunch of perl modules I didn’t have. Started compiling those, only to find that one required the expat lib, which refused to compile. Realized I hadn’t upgraded to Jaguar’s devtools - that brought the compiler back, and I did get expat compiled, but the perl module dance took another hour. Anyway, finally got it all happening, and the script worked perfectly.

Amazingly, Amanita offers to do the conversion for you if you can’t make it happen. Send them a batch of zipped LJ XML files and you get back a zipped pack of MT backup files to import. People who rock are so cool.

The Large Hot Pipe Organ is the world’s only MIDI controlled, propane powered explosion organ. The LHPO’s pyro-acoustic explodo-rhythmations will throbbatize your earholes and dance-ify your booty and make you realize what “Industrial Music REALLY means! .”

Get one of the MP3s playing and look through the picture galleries, or watch one of the movies. When is this coming to my town?

Fairly impressed with the first release of iCal, but disappointed that you can’t publish to a single calendar from more than one location. I would have expected a calendar to be attached to a single .mac account - instead it’s attached to the computer you’re on. That means you have to, say, publish your work calendar from work and subscribe to it from home, and vice versa. Amy and I are both publishing our own calendars and subscribing to each other’s even though we’d rather just have a shared calendar (you can’t edit a subscribed calendar). This is a possible disappointment for landwater, who I want to move off phpWebCal and onto iCal. I would expect Apple to figure out that this is badly designed for groups soon.

Now setting up for the next big J-School webcast, this time a week long panel on Food and the Environment. Will take place while I’m probably out for paternity leave, so teaching students to run the whole thing. This time will be using Apple’s free broadcast software under OS X, rather than the pricier stuff we used under OS 9 last time around.

I’m becoming addicted to AmphetaDesk, but am open to suggestions on better RSS aggregators (besides Radio).