I went to the gym last night, and took William to the indoor playground. After we were done there, we headed out shopping, trying to find a birthday present for Erin. William brought up all kinds of interesting topics, from that time that he was sick, to him feeling guilty over not blowing out Julia’s birthday candles fast enough (she subsequently grabbed them, and cried when the hot wax hit her hand - she was ok, but for some reason William decided it was his fault that she was crying.) I still have no idea what to get for Erin. I was initially going to try and order a book from that Blurb site, but I don’t have access to it, so that’s out the window. I saw some things last night that were mildly interesting, but were out of the question because of the fact that Erin’s not eating dairy products right now.

Oh, and Julia realized that she knows how to walk last night. It won’t be very long before she’s tearing around after her brother.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Marge, with todays gasoline prices, how can you afford not to buy a pony?!” - Homer

The water situation seems to be under control for now. It seems that my laptop has decided it doesn’t like being neglected though. Apparently it no longer can pick up a wireless signal. The thing is a lemon, and I will never buy another Toshiba laptop again due to the lemony-lemonness of it. Needing to have the motherboard replaced twice within the first year of ownership is a sign of a design gone horribly wrong. I’m sure the latest problem is also hardware related, but I’m not going to spend any money on getting it solved. For what it’s worth, when we got the motherboard replaced last time, we briefly considered the extended warranty, but decided that it was such a lemon that we’d rather not be constantly getting it repaired “for free.”

It’s a real shame, because our previous Toshiba laptop was really good. High build quality, felt solid, and ran like a tank until it ran into it’s nemesis - the spilled water glass. I don’t know what we’ll do when the lemon finally dies for good. The first laptop was among the cheapest we could find at the time, and the second one was in the same relative range (though cheaper overall, still occupying the same area of laptop pricing) Maybe we’ll have to spend more money to get a better quality laptop next time. It won’t be a mac though - just so you know - nothing against Apple, but I don’t want to tie myself to the prices of Apple laptops, when there are so much less expensive options that have higher build quality than the Apples that I’ve seen.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Lisa cried. Then I cried. And Maggie laughed. She’s such a little trooper.” - Homer

With all the melting, we had a lot of water in the basement. :( I thought I’d addressed the cause of last year’s water problems, but apparently I had not. This year’s water problems were a lot bigger than last year’s too. Way more water. We got out the shopvac and moved a whole bunch of water out of the basement, and away from the side of the house. I think we have it under control now, but that’s no guarantee. Not a fun way to spend an evening anyway.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Cool…a Ruckus!” - Bart

Apparently the Intel Macs are a little too cutting edge yet. This time, all I wanted to do was playback some DivX encoded video. Nope. Not going to happen. There is an alpha version of the divx codec for Intel macs, but it didn’t work for me :( Oh well, Linux to the rescue again (Gentoo this time, I converted them to DVD on the server.)

This past weekend, we had company. Julia turned 1. The snow started to really melt. It rained. Montreal won two games. William and I went to my parents’ place, and while playing Bomberman, William said “Oh. Everybody got baked.” after a draw.

We’re looking at preschools for William right now. I know, we’re like 4 years too late - if you haven’t registered before the child is conceived, you’re out of luck. Who knows. There are a lot of things that need to be taken into consideration, and not a lot of preschools out there.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “There’s only one thing to do at a moment like this…Strut!” - Bart

As you may have noticed, this site experienced a bit of an outage yesterday. Apparently the combination of the ISP doing maintenance and the cablemodem failing made the server completely inaccessible from the internet. I got the cablemodem replaced with a new one, and we were off to the races.

I’m making progress with getting used to the Mac, but it’s still not feeling like “home” to me. I have no intention of abandoning Ubuntu at this point. I may have found a solution that will allow me to run windows apps in an emulated environment for those few applications that I haven’t found satisfactory replacements for yet. I have gotten my Thunderbird/Firefox profiles shared between the laptop and the mac - it’s neat that it works, but since it’s unsupported, I feel like it’s not 100% stable. Every now and then one of the boxes loses the profile information and I have to tell it where it’s located. Not a big deal for me, but Erin gets understandably frustrated. I think I read somewhere that a sharable profile is in the plans for Thunderbird at least. Firefox’s profile stuff probably doesn’t need to be shared for me, now that I think about it - there’s not much in there, bookmarks and some saved passwords…Maybe I’ll undo my sharing for that.

I have tomorrow off, so I won’t be posting here. Erin’s Mom, her brother Ian and sister-in-law Laurelle are coming for a visit this weekend. Ian and Laurelle haven’t been to Saskatoon very often, and haven’t met Julia yet, so that should be fun. Meanwhile, Sunday is Julia’s birthday, and Erin’s is next Friday. I still have no idea what to get for either of them.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “The alien has a sweet heavenly voice…like Urkel! And the alien appears every Friday…like Urkel!” - Homer

I’ve been sick since the weekend. I actually had a big long post written up yesterday, and thought I’d posted it, but accidentally closed the browser before hitting the “Publish” button. Sorry, you’ll just have to use your imaginations as to what I said.

Speaking of publishing things…I told Erin about this site, but apparently it’s invite only at this point. Blurb lets you self publish professionally bound books. It’s certainly not the only site on the internet that does it, but for some reason I liked their site better than the alternatives.

In unrelated news, there’s a new version of Memories On TV - the software that I used to create the kids’ slideshow DVDs. I was excited when I learned that I qualified for a free upgrade, and the new version lets you create flash videos for posting on the web…Then I saw the “Pro version” next to that feature (notice that I don’t have the pro version.) The other hitch is that I still don’t have a Windows machine at home with which I can run the software. I should be able to create the same sort of DVD using iPhoto and iDVD, but it certainly won’t be as easy. The interface for doing what I want to do using iPhoto is less usable than the interface in Memories On TV.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Simpson, you idiot. You spent your entire years budget in a month. Your department’s broke.” - Mayor Quimby

You may have gotten the impression that I’m not a complete convert to the camp of Apple, and this is true. I continue to run Linux (both Gentoo and Ubuntu) and at some point I’ll get windows installed on the laptop again so that I can run the few windows apps that I still haven’t found a replacement for.

Last night, Erin brought out the scanner. Expecting it to “Just Work™” I told her to plug it in and see what happens. As it turns out, nothing happened. Ok, no big deal, I’ll just go to the Canon website and download the drivers and software. Joy of joys, they have Intel OSX drivers and software listed. I downloaded. I tried to install the software. I got permissions errors. I tried to install the drivers. I got permission errors. I found out which directory it was failing on, changed the permissions, and got the software to install (note that the software has to be installed before the driver.) I still haven’t gotten the driver to install though. Apparently Apple’s modern OS approach has been to throw out backwards compatibility as a target. These drivers which were for OS X.1 or X.2 or X.3 will not install on OS X.4. Oh well.

Here’s the kicker. Erin plugged it in to the laptop (running Ubuntu) and it “Just Worked”

Simpson’s quote of the day: “It may not be glamarous, but it’s good, honest work.” - Apu