Courtney’s World: Morning Ritual

January 30, 2009 by

The best part of my day over the last few months has been 15-20 minutes somewhere between 5am and 6:30am each morning. My wake up time depends on when baby Courtney decides to start rolling around in her crib. She used to cry when she woke up to get our attention; because she knows that there is a fresh warm bottle on the menu. Cameron and Courtney each have their own room, and their doors pretty much face each other. So when Courtney starts making noise in the morning, She needs a fresh diaper and a bottle to avoid waking up Cameron (and sometimes mommy).

Over the past few weeks, Courtney has (with some exceptions) not cried when she woke up, but instead asks for Dada. We have a video monitor in our room, so every little peep gets played, and acts as my alarm clock. She’s not yelling, but just in a nice quiet voice puts a bunch of noises together, with some "da’s" in there, and to me it sounds like "mmmmmmmm dadadad , mmmmm dada". Music to my ears.

I get up and make my way downstairs to the microwave, heat up 6oz of water (in glass; 🙂 no plastic in the microware please) and make her bottle. Sometimes I have the forethought to prepare this setup the night before, but mostly I have to make it on demand. Flip on the coffee pot, and get back up stairs to feed Courtney.

This has to be one of the best times not only of my day, but of my life. I really look forward to it every morning. Things are a little crazy with work, the current bad economy, yesterday I got a traffic ticket, blah, blah, blah. None of that matters for this 15-20 minutes. Courtney is so peaceful, happy, smiley, and (the best part) clingy, that I can’t help but ignore the daily stress of life and just enjoy her company for a few minutes.

While she’s drinking her bottle, I can give her a fresh new diaper, which just takes about 45 seconds. When she’s done with her 6-7 ounces, she politely hands me her bottle (ok not really, she just pushes it away and I’m ready for it) and then rolls over to snuggle up. I love this part, and she does it every day. When she’s drinking her bottle, she’s laying on her back across my lap, with her head in the crease of my left elbow. When she’s done with her body, she rolls towards me, and lifts her head up. Now she lies down with her head on my left shoulder, and our bodies are parallel. She get’s a little burp out, and I can tell she is perfectly content.

Cameron is 3 1/2 and it seems like just yesterday we found out we were pregnant with him. Time goes by fast, and I’m sure that someday soon my morning ritual with Courtney will change, but for now, it’s the greatest way I can imagine to get my day started.

Filed Under: Family Tagged With:

Broken Gravatar in GraffitiCMS and the Solution

January 29, 2009 by

Somewhere along the path of setting up my blog using GraffitiCMS, I found that you can enable gravatars in the comments. The sample code I picked up looked like this.

$macros.gravatar($comment.Email, $comment.Username, $comment.IPAddress, "%{size ='60'}")

and it was working great for me until today.

I knew Rory had a gravatar setup, but it wasn’t rendering. He suggested (on twitter) that I wasn’t asking for his gravatar with a lower case email, which I wasn’t. A quick script change (adding ToLower()) to the code above fixed the solution.

$macros.gravatar($comment.Email.ToLower(), $comment.Username, $comment.IPAddress, "%{size ='60'}")

Lesson 1: Gravatar’s require lower case emails.

Lesson 2: Graffiti Chalk allows for string calls inside the $() methods, like the ToLower() call. While I didn’t try the others, I imagine that ToUpper(), SubString() and others will work just fine.

Filed Under: Technology

Cox Cable Redirecting (Stealing???) Microsoft Live Searches???

January 29, 2009 by

This has been driving me nuts for a few months, and I finally got to the bottom of it. I have Live search as my default in Internet Explorer 8. To be honest, I use both Live and Google on a regular basis, they both do great things for me.

Anyway, if I search from the search node [CTRL]+E everything works fine.

If I search from the Address bar [CTRL]+D and I have Live search as the default search provider, then Cox hijacks the search, and shows me a Yahoo search, that is branded by Cox.

There isn’t anything in me that thinks this is ok. Is it possible that Microsoft and Cox Cable have an agreement that let’s them do this, or are they just being shifty?

If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then this video is priceless.

UPDATE:

This only happens in IE. I’ve tested Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. All do native searches. ONLY IE, and ONLY when Live Search is the default provider. Other searches go throguh just fine and return native results. Sure seems like Microsoft is being targeted here. Microsoft customers rather, since they’re going after all the default users.

Filed Under: Technology

#35 Details on Outlining in Visual Studio

January 29, 2009 by

Onlining,Onlining,Onlining. You know the little [+] in the left margin of your code in Visual Studio? That is called outlining, and if you click the [+] your code region will expand, and the icon changes to a [-]. Pretty straight forward. But did you know you can do all of this from the keyboard, without using the mouse? Check out video trick number #35 to see how it all works.

[CTRL][M]+[CTRL][M] Toggle Expand|Collapse region section

[CTRL][M]+[CTRL][L] Toggle Expand|Collapse document

[CTRL][M]+[CTRL][P] Turn off outlining

[CTRL][M]+[CTRL][O] Toggle Expand|Collapse to definition

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Filed Under: VSTricks

What’s new in jQuery 1.3? Drew Douglas Answers

January 28, 2009 by

This is well worth your time, Drew Douglass spends a few minutes creating a very detailed post about what’s new in jQuery.

http://nettuts.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/everything-you-need-to-know-about-jquery-13/

This post (well he was already but …) puts Drew Douglas on the map.

Great Job!

Filed Under: Technology
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