• Talking about your new baby will only cause your blog readership to plummet.  I think it’s now official that I have more people reading my Twitter account than this blog.  Rebrand or die.  Or, wait it out.  The baby talk will slowly recede.  We’ll be talking MacBooks and Wii games I don’t have time or money for soon enough.  (Update: Ironically, my RSS readership just hit a new all-time high this morning. Perhaps you’re all just switching?  That’s OK by me and my ego. . . )

• Babies can sense when you’re leaving them to go back to work and they’ll rip your shoulder off before letting you go.  Or, at least, they’ll squeeze their hand’s might on your pinky finger that they can grasp.  The rest is in your head.

• I’m not sure I like being a housewife.  It’s odd to run errands during the day and just not seeing men in any store I go to.  It’s all housewives and mothers with younger children. Or, it’s the fact I work in IT where 90% is male that being back in the real world is such a shocker.

• You’re going to need a bigger hard drive. I just got my new 750GB jobber.  The 300GB that held my iTunes and pictures couldn’t take anymore.

It’s a pretty cool week. I can’t complain:

• The Incredible Hulk

Ed Norton takes over the green role this time around, fighting the Abomination (from what I’ve read) and doing a better job than the noble failure that was the Ang Lee/Eric Bana version a few years back.  I enjoyed that movie, though I thought it tried a little too hard in places to be an artsy movie.  The Hulk is not high art, folks.

In any case, I hope to see this one someday. The box pictured above is for the three disc release, which contains all sorts of bonus scenes and behind-the-scenes stuff.

• James Bond, Blu-Ray
  

Six of the original Bond movies are out on Blu-ray this week.  In case you haven’t tired of buying these movies from their three previous DVD releases, here’s your fourth chance!  (I’m guessing at three, but I don’t think I’m far off.)

The boxes pictured above will give you all six Blu-ray movies for $112 at Amazon.

• Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, Volume 6

This is the last release in this format, but there are some choice shorts in here.  We’re all waiting to see what they’re planning on for next year now. . .

It dawned on me the other day that children Follow the Microsoft Windows Model.  Pay close attention to how well kids’ behavior maps to Windows’:

Windows 3.1 - At birth, they’re most celebrated for being new.  As such, they’re automatically cute and exciting, and a little tiring.  They’re fun to play with, but a little slow and not terribly responsive.  They’re the best we’ve ever known, but there’s a long way to go.

Windows 95 - Once they hit their first birthday and they’re walking and learning words, they become a full-fledged interactive operating system.  They’re capable of going anywhere.  They can say anything. Suddenly, they’re easier to use, seem fully functional, and enter an age of innocence that ignores their own safety.
Windows ME - The Terrible Twos.  They seem the same, but they aren’t as functional anymore.  The party is over.  You wish you could go back to Windows 95, but that’s the past and this is supposed to be the future. Despite having an excellent foundation, there’s only heartache and pain.

Windows XP - Then they make it out the other side.  They’re fully-formed children, still capable of trouble, but much more secure and very functional.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 - Now they’re in school, doing homework, making new friends, getting things done.  They’ve learned enough to be dangerous, but they also know a lot about what they shouldn’t be doing.  The only question is how much they choose to do wrong, willingly.

Windows Vista - Now they’re teenagers.  You don’t want to deal with them. They’re terribly concerned with how they look and not how they run.  They shun their pasts, their parents, etc.  They think they’re big and bad, but they’re not.  They’re what you were hoping for, yet there are features that didn’t make it into their teenaged packaging that you thought you were coding for.

Windows 7 - Safe, secure, learned from their past.  Realize the errors of their way. Ready, at last, to evolve into a new model.  This is the end of their college years.

Windows Cloud - Now they leave the nest and move into the real world, out of your clutches.  They’re on their own, for better or worse.

Just for kicks:
Mac OS X 10.5 - He’s the good looking, smart kid next door that does most things right out of the gate.  Every year he gets better, smarter, stronger. His friends are cooler.  All the cool kids gravitate to him.
Linux - The slow kid down the street whose parents let his extended family raise him, confusing him as to the guidelines of human behavior.  No two adult role models can agree on his limits or his future course of action.  He’s capable of going in ten different directions and often does, just all at once.  Still, he started as a command line system, and eventually grew to copy that Windows Vista kid next door that has all the friends, even if none of them are very cool.

• Now it can be told: How a “National Geographic” story is created.

• Automatic Photo Tagging and Image Search.  Imagine loading your picture into your image catalog program of choice and letting the program set up all the tag for you.  ALIPR attempts just that.  I tested it with a few images (and even a comic book cover or two) and it’s awful.  But I like the concept and hope someday we get there.

• Lightroom 2 suggests tags right now. I’m most looking forward to the release next week of the Lightroom 2 Adventure book.  You can see the cover in the sidebar to the right at the moment.  The first book was my favorite instructional manual for Lightroom. I have high hopes that this one will teach me the new features of the great program.

• The Digital Photography Show is one photography podcast I’ve listened to since I got serious about my photography just over a year ago, and began saving up for a dSLR. Sadly, it’s toast. Its hosts have left the show. Its parent company has refused to air their farewell show and is looking for new hosts.  Clearly, something ugly happened behind the scenes here. The owner of the podcast network and the host of the photography podcast once hosted a podcast together about making the world a better place. Now, it would appear they just aren’t getting along.  Sad, but funny.  There’s likely a lesson in here about the value of owning your creations.  As one whose podcast is basically owned by a larger company, though, I’m hardly the one to make that point.

• Somewhat photography-related: XKCD brings the Google Maps humor!

Tech Crunch wasn’t as thrilled with eBay’s recent earnings statement.  In fact, they found really only one point of hope for the company:
As eBay’s Core Business Hits Hard Times, Skype Begins To Shine

Another eBay business that is holding its own, surprisingly, is Skype. Revenues for the third quarter were $143 million. Although its growth rate is slowing, at least it is still growing, both on an annual (46 percent) and sequential quarterly (5 percent) basis. Its total registered users grew 51 percent to 370 million, and those people used up 16 billion minutes of talk time.

Ah, good ol’ Skype! Love it.

Tim McGraw Apologizes to Fans for Third Greatest Hits Album

Country singer Tim McGraw apologized to his fans for his latest greatest hits CD, criticizing his label for not releasing a record with new material, People magazine reported Tuesday.“I am saddened and disappointed that my label chose to put out another hits album instead of new music,” People quoted McGraw as saying.

Even the artists don’t like the recording industry.

• The most relieving sound in the world is that burp a baby makes after sucking down an ounce of formula.  Makes you feel like you’re doing the job right.

• The ickiest feeling is when the kid craps while sitting in your arm or leg, and you can feel the impact of it through her diaper.

• The most painful thing so far has been my penchant to hold her in my right arm to put her to bed at night for far too long.  My right bicep didn’t see her coming. She may only be 8 lbs., but after 15 minutes in one arm, she starts pulling you over.  Lesson to be learned: If you’re planning on having a child, start doing curls.

Tea Leoni is now on the market.
David Duchovny & Téa Leoni Separated ‘For Several Months’

David Duchovny, who recently left rehab for sex addiction, and wife Téa Leoni released a statement Wednesday saying they have been separated for some time.

Though they were very careful to point out his addiction was to internet materials and not other real world women, you can’t imagine that the marriage was long for this world once that news leaked out.  Turns out, it’s been done a while.

eBay Inc. Reports Third Quarter 2008 Results: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

eBay Inc. today reported financial results for its third quarter ended September 30, 2008. The ecommerce company posted third quarter revenue of $2.12 billion, up $228 million from the same period last year.

There’s no accounting for taste on the internet.

Today is a special vocabulary edition:

• Colostrum - The key ingredient in early breast milk

• Meconium - Baby’s First Poop (warning: there are pictures at this link you don’t want to see while eating)

• Ravenous - How everyone describes my child’s appetite. She takes after Daddy.

Quick hits this week:

• The Magic Garden: Carole & Paula in the Magic Garden

Wow.  Talk about lost childhood favorites. 10 episodes on 2 discs, plus a half dozen songs on CD.

• The Unit, Season 3

Lost track of it during season one, but enjoyed it. I have that first season on DVD.  Anyone still watching? Is the show still going?  I’ve lost touch.

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Overdone in spots, predictable in others, but I still enjoyed it for what it was.

Welcome to a new series exploring all the craziness that has been the last week.

So let’s get straight to the first Thing I’ve Learned in the last week:
I’m glad I’m not a nurse.  For starters, 12 hour shifts are insanity. Due to staffing shortages, you might get sent to a different department on a short day. You might not get a weekend, or two consecutive days off.  And you’re dealing with sick people. By the looks of it, you’re also required to wear colorful crocs and loud Hawaiian shirts that look like scrubs.
That brings us to the second thing I’ve learned:

Hospitals are no places for healthy people.  I came back from being in a hospital room with my wife for four days with a sinus headache, a sore throat, post nasal drip, and goodness only knows what else. Antibiotics are my friend.

Let’s face facts — iPhone developers don’t drop their prices for a day or two to celebrate anything. They do it to get coverage on Mac news sites and to artificially boost their sales numbers to, hopefully, achieve a top ranking on the App Store.

Not that I’m saying you shouldn’t take advantage of a $3 app that’s now $1 or anything, rather that we need to stop lying to ourselves.

Also: I have neither an iPod Touch nor an iPhone, so none of this melodrama affects me directly.

10/08/08