Uncle Fred!

Got word from my Dad yesterday that I'm officially an uncle. How weird is that? According to my sources Leo David Yingling arrived at 1:58 PM on July 28, 2009. Weighing in at 7 lbs. 0.5 ounces and 19.5 inches long.



That brings me to some weird questions. Why do they say "x inches long" instead of tall? I suppose it's because the kid isn't vertical yet, but when do you make the distinction between long and tall? Call me a noob when it comes to babies, but seriously, what gives? I'm 5'8" tall, I'm sure that if I had pondered this during my single, bar-going years I probably could have gotten a few more dates if I had just told drunk women I was 68 inches long.

Also, (in fear of sounding like Jerry Seinfeld) what's the deal with the weight thing? From my understanding they use it as some kind of measure for how healthy the baby is. That's all well and good, but here is my suggestion: let's use some kind of relative scale with things we know are heavy and can be envisioned to an approximate size.

Example:
About the size of a bread box; weighs less than a watermelon but more than my cat.

Any thoughts?

I hate iTunes

So I have an 80 GB iPod Classic. I don't have an obsession with Apple or anything like that. Steve Jobs is not my personal hero, but at the time it offered the best mp3 player capability to me. On a daily basis I bring my iPod to the office to listen to music and I choose not to sync it to that PC. Rarely do I have any problems with the exception of the occasional iTunes crash. Being as it was Mac software that was ported to Windows, I just shrug it off and restart the application. However, today not only did iTunes crash, it would not respond to even ending the process with Task Manager. WTF? I actually had to reboot so that I could kill the dam process so that Windows could eject my iPod cleanly. When my PC came back up I didn't bother plugging in my iPod since I still had a few TWiT podcasts on which I had to catch up. On my way home around 5 PM I found nothing good on the radio and plugged in the iPod so that I could rock out to 21st Century Breakdown only to find that during the crash, iTunes decided to wipe out 40 of the 60 GB worth of data on my iPod. Sometimes I hate technology. At this point I hate iTunes enough that my next mp3 player might be a Zune. Yeah, it's that bad.

Movin' Along

Just finished moving from an office upstairs to one downstairs. I personally like the move as it gets me away from the noisy kitchen and into quiet corner. Still get a window and now I have a desk that faces toward the door so no one can sneak up on me. I just have a few more things to set up in here and then it will start to feel like home. Is it bad that I just referred to my office as home? I suppose it is where I spend 8-9 hours per day. If I split my average week day up into three 8-hour periods, I spend one of those sleeping, one at work, and one at home. This excludes driving and miscellaneous other things but this is just an estimate. So I guess my office is almost as much of a home as my actual home.

So I was just messing with my phone about 5 seconds ago trying to get the camera to work so I could take a picture of my new office (the camera on my Samsung SGH-A747 has been slowly dieing) and the thing rebooted. Not only that, when it came back up it told me I had missed my 8 PM appointment for tonight... which is actually an appointment for tomorrow. I can't wait until I am eligible for a new phone. AT&T has me listed at Sept. 27th (which is Ashleigh's birthday) and that is about a month before my wedding. I'll probably just wait until after we get back from the honeymoon to get a new one. I am looking at an iPhone since you can get a 3G for $99 but being the cheapskate that I am, I don't want to pay $30 for a data plan on a device that has WiFi. The other tempting entries are the Nokia e71x and one of the many RIM Blackberry devices. I think if I could get the Pearl 8120 it would be a done deal since that one has WiFi, but apparently AT&T only carries the 8110 for non-business customers. Either way, look for an unboxing/crappy review of whatever I get in about 2-3 months.

More stuff

Just put up a new Set on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/internetattic/sets/72157621752934088/
It's basically random pics from my phone, but there are some pretty neat ones on there. Also, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, here is a picture of an actual Saturn V rocket that is on display at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL.

I feel strangely motivated...

Somehow this "blogging" thing has motivated me to organize my Web 2.0 life. I may actually start using my Flickr account and should I somehow end up with a phone that can do video, YouTube here I come. Don't look for that one any time soon... or most likely ever since my motivation to do such things will probably drop off before I get such a phone or portable video camera. We'll see how this goes though. Stay optimistic, I may catch up to the trends yet!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/internetattic

First!

I thought it would be most appropriate to make fun of internet forum trolls with the title of my first post. Yes, it's the first, but won't be the last. Like most people these days, I figured I should start getting into this "Web 2.0" thing before it becomes obsolete.

For some more tasty internet nuggets:
http://www.twitter.com/fredyingling