almost

This is Kate after she got ahold of a waterproof disposible camera that I brought to NJ (useful for taking photos of the sailboat while swimming laps around it!). Look closely... she almost figured out how it worked.

Stickers in the mail

This weekend, I poked around on amazon's mp3 download site and ended up building two CDs for Kate, almost entirely from downloads from here. And I fell in love with this song: Mail Myself to You by John McCutcheon. It has a gorgeous harmony, and I thought it was fitting as an opener for the first CD, since it's being mailed off to Kate. (Other downloadable songs by him are here. He has a lot of great ones.)

Kate has figured this mail thing out a little bit too well- pretty much every time I write her a letter, I include a little pack of stickers for her to play with, since she adores stickers. (I do too, as anyone who's seen my ibook can tell you. She's obviously related to me.) So I mailed a package to her and her mom last month with some baby clothes for the new baby on the way and two books for Kate. But no stickers. Heather called me up after they got the package, and put Kate on the phone. Our conversation went something like this:

Kate: I couldn't find the stickers.
Me: Hi Kate! I miss you!
Kate: I looked, couldn't find the stickers.
Me: Stickers?
Heather, prompting from near the phone: Tell her we got her box.
Kate: I looked in the box. Where are the stickers?
Me: Stickers?

At which point Heather started laughing at my confusion and came on the line to inform me that Kate had unassembled the box and was shaking it upside down, trying to find some stickers. She'd learned that mail from me always meant stickers and was determined to find them in the box. Oops. I've bribed her into loving me again with a couple more packs of stickers since then.

my grandma

That's my grandma a few weeks ago, on the steps at her house. Now I wish that I had taken a photo of her and my grandpa together - I took a picture of each of them, but not together. Next time I stop off at their house, I'll have to get one. Possibly it will be near Halloween- I hear through the family email grapevine that my neice is having a Halloween party, which could be much fun to attend.

Yum

Bakeries around Seattle on my current list to go check out:

Cheap Eats: Greenwood Bakery and Cafe
New Grand Central on Eastlake
Le Fournil

Ginger Ale

This is yet another "I might live here for years and never really understand some things about this place" post. I like drinking ginger ale when I go out to dinner. I'm not a fan of most sodas, I don't really drink wine very much when I'm out at restaurants, and so ginger ale is kind of what I fell into ordering out of habit. I like the flavor, and on the east coast at least, almost every single restaurant has it, unless you're in the PNW. Sometimes if they have a bar, they mix up fake ginger ale, but I can only think of two restaurants that I've eaten at in Seattle in the last 8 years that had ginger ale available. I've been to fewer places in Portland, but so far none with ginger ale. It doesn't seem like an inherently east coast thing, in the way that, say, good Italian bakeries are. It's baffling. Grocery stores carry it (and ginger beer, which I also love), so clearly people drink it out here... just not in restaurants.

Dear Summer

My two favorite songs this week are Dear Summer (Jay-Z on Memphis Bleek's album) and Nas's Just a Moment, both downloaded from iTunes (one is a Slurpee free song, the 40 oz Slurpee with a song is such a better deal than a 99 cent small Slurpee!). I finally heard the Edan album, and it's ok. Not amazing. The Common album is going on 3 weeks, I think, in the shrink wrap. I should really open it and listen to it at some point, but I can't be convinced yet that it's worth struggling with the plastic wrap and stickers. This is why iTunes is genius. Besides the fact that I just get the specific song that I want, you click and then get a song. No icky stickers to remove, no trying to start a big enough tear in the plastic wrap, no almost snipping off your fingers when you stab at the plastic with an open pair of scissors. Anyway, the Nas song is also genius. I'm not the biggest Nas fan, but this is a sweet hook.

New York's City Island

Another item to add to my August trip to do list, visit City Island. I'd never heard of it until a few weeks ago, but it sounds incredibly interesting. Directions to New York's City Island: "If you're coming from New Jersey:Take the George Washington Bridge towards Manhattan...."

bunny

That's Kate with her new bunny rabbit toy, her birthday present from me. She has such a cute smile... and I love how she mugs for the camera. I need to bring a second camera to see her some time, and take a picture of her playing with my SLR. She puts it up to her face and tries to look through it, and turns all the knobs. She managed to get it into 'multiple' mode on me once, and it took a couple minutes of playing with settings that I never touch to reset it. Sneaky kid!

I'm going home and to PVD soon, and I've made a list of things that I want to do during that week:

1. Eat a bagel from Adam's
   
2. go to the Matisse exhibit at the Met
   
3. swim with Kate
   
4. lots of sailing
   
5. hang up a hammock over the brook in the backyard
   

sleepy

I'm in Boston with my just-turned-2-years-old neice this weekend. I've been taking care of her while her parents attend a wedding and see some friends who they haven't visited since Kate was born. So this evening, I put Kate into her stroller, stopped off to buy us both vanilla milkshakes, and walked all the way down Commonwealth from the Public Garden to Mass Ave. It was a beautiful evening- we went out just as the rain cleared, and the light was amazing. The trees were still dripping a little, and it was a wonderful, quiet walk. Then we looped back up Newbury St, and... KATE FELL ASLEEP! I've never, in the last 2 years, been able to get her to go to sleep. She needs her mom for that. I felt so happy and so proud, walking down the steet with her snoozing in her stroller. She's now snuggled up in her crib, still sleeping. Awww.

mix v3

The end of the mix CD project is at hand, for the moment at least. I ended up with a 2 CD set (tracklisting below, and I'm in LOVE with O.P.P again- what a genius song). I pulled a couple of the old songs off compilation CDs, which reminds me of something that I spent a lot of time dealing with this week:
??????

If you can read kanji, that should (I say should because I know fewer than 10 kanji characters myself, and when this post comes off my webserver, it's turned into ???s, looks like somewhere along the way I'm sending pages as ascii) say 'Various Artists'. I spent much time this week transforming a bit of code that recognizes when an album or book or movie is by Various Artists or Unknown Artist or Not Available or No Data into localized code. Hey, now I somewhat know the kanji for Various.


1979 - 1989
Rapper's Delight - The Sugarhill Gang - 1979
The Breaks - Kurtis Blow - 1980
That's the Joint - Funky Four Plus One - 1981
Making Cash Money - Busy Bee - 1982
The Message - Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel & The Furious Five - 1982
Sucker M.C.'s (Krush-Groove 1) - Run-DMC - 1983
Boogie Down Bronx - Man Parrish - 1984
Roxanne, Roxanne - UTFO - 1984
Rock the Bells - LL Cool J - 1985
Slow and Low - Beastie Boys - 1986
Rebel Without a Pause - Public Enemy - 1987
Dedication to all the B-Boys - Schoolly D - 1987
Microphone Fiend - Eric B. & Rakim - 1988
Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun - Beastie Boys - 1989
75 minutes

1990 - 1999
100 Miles and Runnin' - N.W.A. - 1990
O.P.P. - Naughty By Nature - 1991
It Was a Good Day - Ice Cube - 1992
C.R.E.A.M. - Wu-Tang Clan - 1993
Who Am I? (Whats My Name) - Snoop Dogg - 1993
Fantastic Voyage - Coolio - 1994
NY State of Mind - Nas -1994
Protect Ya Neck - Wu-Tang Clan - 1994
Survival of the Fittest - Mobb Deep - 1995
Real Hip-Hop - Das Efx - 1995
California Love - TuPac & Dr. Dre - 1996
Pony - Ginuwine - 1996
Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See - Busta Rhymes - 1997
Los Angeles Times - Endo, Xzibit - 1997
Nigga What, Nigga Who (Originator 99) - Jay-Z - 1998
Still D.R.E. - Dr. Dre - 1999
68 minutes

The second CD was the hard one, in particular 1993-1994. Such a great period, and incidentally, the year I really started listening to rap music. 36 Chambers is tossed around a lot as an album that changed everything, and with hindsight, I can hear that now. So much was left out of this set, though- and in particular, the lack of any Eminem stands out to me. This ended up the way that it did by my just tossing in songs, sorting by the Year in iTunes, and copying to my ipod. Then it went on a week's worth of bus rides, evening walks, morning walks, afternoon bug closing sessions, whatever, then pulling tracks off it a few at a time. So no "G" Thang, which is sad, but it didn't fit. No Summertime, but it couldn't hold up its place against O.P.P.

Ajax Mistakes

Ajax Mistakes - link from SvN.

mix cd tangent

1. start making that summer mix
2. put The Message and Summertime onto it
3. burn a rough copy and give to friend
4. get in discussion of good old hip hop and rap tracks.
5. go home and raid CD shelf and iTunes Music Store and notice that playlist has roughly 1 song for every year from 1980 to 1990
6. organize tracks by year, remember others to add, watch playlist grow

it currently looks like this:

Rapper's Delight - The Sugarhill Gang - 1979
The Breaks - Kurtis Blow - 1980
That's the Joint - Funky Four Plus One - 1981
The Message - Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel & The Furious Five - 1982
Sucker M.C.'s (Krush-Groove 1) - Run-DMC - 1983
Roxanne, Roxanne - UTFO - 1984
Rock the Bells - LL Cool J - 1985
Slow and Low - Beastie Boys - 1986
Rebel Without a Pause - Public Enemy - 1987
Dedication to all the B-Boys - Schoolly D - 1987
Microphone Fiend - Eric B. & Rakim - 1988
Hey Ladies - Beastie Boys - 1989
100 Miles and Runnin' - N.W.A. - 1990
Summertime - DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince - 1991
O.P.P. - Naughty By Nature - 1991
Nuthin' but a "G" Thang - Dre & Snoop Dogg - 1992
Who Am I? (Whats My Name) - Snoop Dogg - 1993

That's at least 4 minutes too long for a CDR right now, though, so I need to yank something. I don't know what to pull, though, none of these songs sound 10 or 20 years old. A lot of them I haven't heard in years, and quite a few I heard last night for the first time, like Rapper's Delight.

summer mix CDs

I listened to The Best of Ride today, and fell in love with shoegazing all over again. Like I ever fell out of love with it, really. The last two months have been one band on repeat nonstop. So it was a well needed break to go with something that sounds completely different for a little while. Drive Blind is still looping my mind; out of the all the songs it's the one that sounds most like Curve to me, which is my personal shoegazing ground zero. This evening I played Demon Days on my laptop. I've blogged this before, but I was raised on a heavy diet of vintage Beach Boys (look at my name... yes, you'll find it on the Little Deuce Coop album. thanks dad). So I'm walking around, Gorillaz's playing in the background, thinking about how cute some of the songs are, and Don't Get Lost In Heaven comes on, and I thought my laptop had coughed up a long lost Pet Sounds track for a moment. Damon's voice, singing Beach Boys- it's just weird. I love it, but in a skewy, 'i never thought i'd hear something like this' kind of way. Feel Good Inc, which was the first single, is the best track on the album. I bought the single a month ago, and it was a good choice for them. The B-side to that single was even better than a lot of the album tracks.

All this has got me partaking in a summer music ritual, one month late. I make a mix CD on my birthday almost every year, but I forgot (was in NJ, working 13 hour days, dead ibook, everything) to do one this year. That's usually the soundtrack to the first part of my summer, so I'm putting one together now. There will likely be a Gorillaz song and a Ride song on there, and Hey ladies. Now I need to pick out about 12 more songs to fill it out.

Apple - iBook G4

My sister's iBook G4 arrived at the Geek apartment today to be set up & configured before being sent off to New Joisey. I wanted to set up a screensaver of Kate photos and some rotating desktops for her, but the photos that I use for mine are scattered across a bunch of photo CDs.

Option 1: find all my photo CDs, locate good photos on each CD, upload them, color correct them, and so forth.

Option 2: set my ibook and the new ibook down on the floor, enable sharing on my ibook, go to Network in one of the finder windows on the new ibook. And there was my ibook- connected, copied over Desktops folder, copied over screen saver photos folder, disconnected.

Awesome. I just about did a small "I love Bonjour" dance around my living room rug.

More workers do business on a global schedule

In the Seattle PI yesterday More workers do business on a global schedule - This is actually a really good article about the odd hours that post-geographical (oooh buzzwords!) work entails. Despite years of video conferencing hype, it's really instant messaging, SMS, and email that make the 3 continent world I work in actually function, so the article is right on there. Maybe not surpisingly, the reporter missed the biggest pain of working like this. It's not being paged at 2 AM to help out Tokyo. It's lag- if I fire off an email in the AM to an office in Europe, I most likely won't see any answer for 24 hours. When you have 6 week product development cycles, 24 hours is a big bite of time. Really, I love my job, I love working crazy schedules, but even in college I did weird stuff like wake up at 6 AM one day and noon the next, so it works nicely for me. I wouldn't switch to a group that didn't work with people in our other offices, since it makes things so interesting on a lot of different levels. Not just technical ones, although parsing XML with kanji in it isn't exactly something I thought I'd be doing ever in my life. I got a huge grin on my face the first time one of our JP editors used "-san" in an email to me- it's really all the little things. I hate to think about doing it with kids, though.