The Anderson Column

The harddrive in the machine hosting this website was old and miserable. So much so that eventually it decided to just crash on me. It’s taken a while to get everything back up and to restore data from the grumpy old disk, but it’s (I think, hope, knock-on-wood) all been recovered now.

Few other updates:
a) August is eight months now. He can stand on his own (with help from crib railings, etc). He’s a happy baby who is just awesome.

b) I’ve started a company – more about that later once everything is a bit more concrete. The best people are involved and I’m looking forward to it.

c) Tennis is a lot of fun. I should practice more, though.

d) My wife’s at the Zoo. I hope they take lots of pics.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been stupidly busy with a lot of things lately.
a) The baby has started to crawl/creep around a lot and demands a LOT of attention
b) The baby has started to teethe and this is pissing him off. Also quite a lot.
c) I’ve been trying to teach myself codeigniter – it’s going well
d) I’ve been trying to learn database design – also going well.

The good news is that I’ve been pretty disciplined about reading before sleeping and watching/reading tutorials online – so it’s been a productive few weeks.

I hope to be able to write juicier posts soon, but for now I’m on a strict learning mission.

Man, I don’t know what to think about it, but I did it. I submitted my son’s pictures to a couple of agencies and we’re waiting for replies now.

We were approached in a mall about it, the first time and the little guy was apparently cute enough to warrant an audition, but I found out at a later stage that this agency covered their costs by demanding money for photo shoots before any progress could be made. In other words, I felt they were exploiting people ever so slightly, even if it’s just their business model.

But anyway, since everyone keeps telling us we should, I did. And if anything comes from it, good. I’d love to be able to put more aside for him so that he can have a relatively easy time later on instead of having to juggle with student loans and so forth. I don’t expect him to be the next face of the Disney channel, but a few shoots would be good even if it’s only a few thousand dollars.

In the end, I might just be biased because I think I have the most adorable kid in the world.

And I’m just wondering what other people do to celebrate this scam of a day. I don’t mean to sound like a grump, but waiting in line with the rest of suburbia to get a seat at the Cheesecake Factory sounds neither romantic nor fun to me.
I don’t know what the solution is, but fortunately I have a wife who doesn’t seem to care that much about Valentine’s day either. This is good, because I hate roses and I can’t eat chocolate (I guess I don’t really understand the concept of -giving- all that well).

But I’m planning on cooking a nice meal at home and putting a movie on after the little guy goes to sleep. It’s not all that much different from some other days, but then again I’m not sure Valentine’s day should be – at least not if it means sitting with a black disk in your hand waiting for someone to call your name an hour later.

I really couldn’t be happier with the outcome of the Superbowl.
There’s not much else to write in this post, although I might add that the spectacular way in which Manning managed to throw a touchdown to the Saints was the best way to end that game.

In other Superbowl news – apparently Megan Fox had to use a thumb double for her sexy commercial – I’m speculating that it’s because there were issues with Manning’s agent.

That thing looks distinctly like Peyton Mannings head.

Work for my wife. Staying at home watching the little guy for me. So I guess it would be fair to give it a little evaluation, mmm.

It’s been pretty great all in all. We’ve managed to play together a lot and although he’s also been crying a lot it’s never really been push-the-panic-button bad. I’m pretty optimistic about the next weeks going forward especially since his verbal communication seems to develop at the speed of Usain Bolt right now. He’s spitting, he’s finding new sounds, he’s (still) screaming like a pterodactyl – at least the way I imagine they would scream if I ever met one and he’s starting to discover consonants. It’s not throwing a football around, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun anyway.

I think he’s doing OK and I think he’s generally pretty happy. We do a mix of play-time, story-time, August-in-his-jumperoo time (usually watching sprout tv or listening to daddy read aloud from random books) and nap time. It’s hard to gauge what the proper amount of stimulus is, to be honest, but I guess it’s good to just try and see whatever works. At least I can tell when he’s fed up with Mother Goose, cause he’ll start looking at something else, yawn, sulk and then usually fall asleep.

As for me, I’m not getting a damned thing done. I thought I was going to be able to be fairly productive since I read that babies sleep 14-16 hours per day, but this has not been the case. Granted, some of it has to do with my attention deficit disordered personality, but focus is hard to keep when there’s a diaper to be changed every half hour or thereabout. That, too, is just fine though – he’s an important piece of work and it’s not like I have any deadlines to meet on anything right now. All just ideas and concepts – all of which I’d like to work harder on, but nothing concrete anyway, so we’ll see how it goes.

Not working has turned out to be a great decision and a great experience. I wonder if other people have alternate views..

He's a pretty happy guy - And not just when Mommy comes home.

As my first blog post established, I’m really lightyears behind the trends when it comes to the Internet. I started blogging late and I’ve been stuck using the same version of AOL instant messenger for the last five or so years.

So it shouldn’t surprise you that I am hopelessly incompetent when it comes to modern internet phenomena like twitter. I’m not old or anything. I’m not a technophobe either, in fact I like nerding around with stuff a lot. It’s just that with these Internet memes turned amazing new technologies, I’m usually late to the hunt. I mean, it took me a long time to get facebook and I don’t have a myspace. Facebook happened because my wife thought I should have one.

Now I do have a twitter account – as you can see on this fine blog – and I am on facebook. Facebook has proven somewhat useful, I might add, because several people I don’t even remember going to school with have added me as their friend, so I am able to see what they’ve been up to. And that’s interesting. Beyond that, I’m still not sure what facebook is for if you’re into Mafia Wars or if you don’t have a desire to spam other people with your farming exploits. Twitter is a different beast. I think it provides a good challenge to write things in a limited format, but I have a feeling that twitter outgrew itself and became something that is too big to be what it was intended to be. Communication dies or becomes extremely one sided if the amount of participants is either too small or too big. I don’t know. I just keep posting random stuff there and as a result I get a lot of SEO spammers following me. Seems like a fun way to spend your afternoon.

In closing, I’m pretty sure my approach to social media is almost exactly the same as my father’s approach to PC’s in general. It’s complicated and I don’t really want to.

That would be me....

Not much to say really.. Just thought I’d share how happiness looks in 6megapixels.

Rattle, Dad's funny faces - My day is made!

It’s official that Mrs Anderson has a new job now. She’s been working Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week which has left me at home with the little guy from 7am until roughly 4-5pm every day. And it’s been great. Not to say that I haven’t been exhausted from suddenly having to give him my full attention 100% of the time, but overall it’s been fantastic.

He’s starting to bond even more with me and smiles a lot more – probably a result of getting older and more sociable. He’s also taken quite an interest in football and we’ve been watching both the senior bowl and pro bowl practices today. He liked the senior bowl more, but who can blame him. I think he favors the North team – some might call that conjecture though.

In other news, Apple presented the iPad, which I’m sure will mean more vividly colored clowns on TV. So far around 4% of my facebook contacts have come out with praises such as “amazing,” “fantastic,” “pretty” and so forth. I don’t think it’s anything special given the fact that we already knew the design of the iPod Touch, but it certainly isn’t ugly. I don’t really have an informed opinion on the device itself, but from a quick study of the specs, I’m going to go with “I have no idea what the heck I would use it for.” This might mean that I’m devoid of imagination or it might be that the device itself and the application centered future for it shows lackluster vision from the company that put this device up as revolutionary. So far it seems as revolutionary as a Che Guevara t-shirt.

Revolutionary iPad

I’ve been using Linux or Unix in some form or another for at least 10 years now, but before I delve into the specifics of for what and which distributions, let me just stop and get to the point.

The point is that I setup a home media server, because I figured it would be awesome. A machine to stream and play music and movies and that would generally be pretty awesome. So I bought the hardware, put the pieces together and started to look around for solutions.

My machine is currently powered by Ubuntu and XBMC.

However this is probably about to change soon for the plethora of idiotic little headaches this machine is giving me. Let me assure you that I have RTFM’d (is that even a phrase anymore?), I’ve exchanged hardware, I’ve compiled and recompiled and all to no avail. The black shuttle box in my living room is not the two tons of awesome I set out to build (so that technically makes two black boxes in the living room that are not living up to expectations).

Over the last few months, I’ve had help fixing the machine from a friend, but through a misconfiguration, I accidentally ran an automated update which broke the sound on the machine once more. I’ve spent the better part of three weeks trying to restore it now and feel that I am close to the goal line. Sound works now, except in video playback in XBMC. So hopefully soon I’ll be good to go and will be able to watch a movie or two. I can’t wait to stress off after all this Ubuntu induced nonsense.