It’s my impression that by the time Lennie was Finn’s age, she was already speaking a ton of words, mostly the names of animals from an animal book we’ve also shared with Finn (though probably less often — having two kids is harder than having one, and you wind up short-changing both in lots of ways that make you feel really bad). Finn is turning out to be a little more sluggish with words (it’s pretty common for boys, I believe), but he’s finally started to show an interest in words and other linguistic feats. For example, he’s pretty good for saying “dog” now. He routinely says “mama,” but he tends to use it in a pretty general sense, usually barking it whenever he wants something. After some work with the animal book, he’ll volunteer “neeee” if you ask him what a horse says, and with a little prompting, he’ll do a chicken sound. The most impressive thing at the moment is that he’s picked up “bite, please,” which is what we croon at him when he’s insisting “maMA” and reaching for food. He’s not terribly consistent about it yet, but it’s not uncommon for him to say “bite, please” when he wants food or drink, though it comes out more like “Bobby” with a big pause in the middle.

Not to be outdone by her little brother, Lennie has started reading and writing on a limited basis. She’s been increasingly curious about letters, and we’ve been helping her learn their sounds and doing the old “duh, ahh, guh” drill to show her how to string them together to make words. The other morning, she had written “cat,” and neither of us had explicitly drilled her on that one. When we asked her how she had come up with it, she said that she had just worked it out based on the sounds. I’m not entirely sure I believe her, but it’s certainly not beyond the realm of what’s possible.

She continues to be a good little artist as well, picking up things like perspective without any prompting. The other day, she drew one fish at sort of an angle and some other fish from the side; the sideways ones had only one eye (they were not flounder). This sounds lame and obvious if you don’t have small children, but it’s a pretty neat thing to watch happen.

I was poking around at technorati today and discovered that a Wired blogger had written a bit on kites and linked to a 4-year-old blog post of mine about my discomfort around kites. In his words: “being afraid of kites doesn’t make you a huge honking pussy: it makes you smart.” Nifty.

I’ve flown Lennie’s little kite a few times recently, admittedly just in our little street and not higher than 20 feet or so, but it’s a step, yes?

Reading the original entry and the comments (it’s probably the most commented non-techy entry of mine) made me want to give it a little bump. Whether it’s vanity or an inclination toward public service I’m not entirely certain.

Word seems to be getting out that we’re releasing an eco edition of the Flock browser for Earth Day. I haven’t tried it myself yet (we’re doing final QA on the build to make sure it’s in good enough shape to release), but I do know that it comes with all sorts of green-related links and feeds built in (it’s not clear to me whether these will be dumped in along with your existing ones if you’re already a Flock user; back up your profile first just in case) and that it has a green theme (complete with a recycle button in place of the reload button, which is kind of nifty).

Flock makes money when people use the search widgets built into the browser to search through Yahoo, and we’re opting to donate 10% of the money we make through this edition of the browser to some green cause (to be determined later by user voting). It kind of makes me think of the free rice game: Play a fun little game and give rice to starving people just by playing. Keep your search engine set to Yahoo and use our product to actually do your searching and save trees at the same time. Who knows? It could be your search for Paris Hilton that enables an ecologist to rescue a baby panda from the clutches of a poacher bent on selling its organs to a far eastern natural medicine dealer.

I’ve been using my 3-year-old gmail account more and more for things lately. I created it back when gmail was still in invite-only mode because I could, but I’ve never had much use for it because I’ve preferred to have my mail stored locally in an email client that didn’t necessitate that I keep a gmail tab open in my browser. But I’ve been more and more irritated by spam lately and have even thought about changing my email address. Problem is, my personal email address is old enough that it’s attached to accounts and lists I can’t even remember that I might still need to get info from. I had noticed that spam control on my old gmail account seemed to be pretty good. So this weekend, I looked into hosted gmail for my domain. It was actually very easy to set up. Within a half hour of starting my investigation, I started getting mail at my own personal instance (for all practical purposes) of gmail. And I’ve been lonely ever since. Only one or two spams have actually gotten to my inbox (and some 500 were successfully blocked in the past day), and this paucity of spam has actually helped me to garden a few other emails I get but am not interested in. I’ve just continued to delete them along with spam for however many years, but now that I get no spam, I’m finding it easy to weed out these other annoying messages (e.g. from lists I no longer care about). The result, of course, is that now I’m lonely. My old email client (Thunderbird) caught mucho spam, but mucho still got stuck in my box, so there was always something of a clatter simulated by the clutter. Now that’s gone, and I’m rattling around in my own inbox, listening for the whisper of footsteps, peeping out the front window for visitors.

We have an old laptop whose AC adapter in is busted. It’ll stay powered on for just a minute or two before shutting off. This means of course that we can’t keep it on for long enough to charge the battery. Unfortunately, we have a year’s worth of photos of Lennie on this computer’s hard drive. This week, I went in search of a hard drive enclosure that would allow me to pull photos off the drive and then go on to use the drive as a portable external disk. I’ve bought two so far, and neither one has hardware that’ll accept the pins on my drive. This is where I hang my head in shame and admit that I don’t know very much at all about hardware. ATA vs. IDE vs. SCSI? It’s all Greek to me. Here I implore my friends who do know about hardware to help me out. Drive specs follow, along with photos of the pins.

Some strings from the back that look like model numbers:
HDD2188
MK8025GAS

Cylinders: 16383

Compaq P/N: 312954-001

Update: A coworker took a quick look at the images and said he guessed the piece pictured was a connector that could be removed. Sure enough, I gave a slight tug and the thing wiggled. So I tugged a little more, and there was a regular old IDE connector plugged into it. I currently have the drive mounted and am yanking pictures off of it. Whew.

I tried making a brioche again this weekend, but this time I dispensed with the fancy pan and just made regular loaves that would be better suited to sandwiches. One of my loaf pans is a little smaller than the other, but I let the dough for both rise the same length of time. So the smaller one rose a bit too much and has a big air pocket in the top. It’s kind of neat, actually, but it makes (correction: made) it difficult to cut the bread without smooshing it down. The extra rising also made the bread less densely structured all around, so it’s not as firm a previously. I’d like it a little firmer than the small loaf came out, though there’s something to be said for having it a bit less firm than before. I suspect the second loaf will be a near-perfect denseness. There are a few spots in the bread where I didn’t get the butter fully integrated, and around these, yummy gooey buttery air holes formed. We ate the small loaf within a day. I’m hoping the larger loaf will last a few days, at least, as I’ve got a pile of salami and turkey for sandwiches.

Brioche is thought to be the bread Marie Antoinette was referencing when she (the story goes) said “let them eat cake.” My bread book has recipes for three grades of brioche, broken down into the classes “rich man’s,” “middle-class,” and “poor man’s” brioche. The primary difference among them is the quantity of butter, which was harder to come by (and keep) a few hundred years ago. Antoinette’s plea, then, was basically an attempt to swap a little butter for her own dear neck. I’ve made the middle class version so far, with its two sticks of butter and five eggs (the rich version has double the butter!). I’m not sure I have the nerve to make the rich man’s version. You can probably see why this bread translates into cake. And come to think of it, the bread actually looks a bit like pound cake.

I had a dream last night that I was working on location on the coast in a new office (it felt like I was in Victoria, but Flock HQ in Mt. View is actually moving a way down the road to Redwood City, so this is probably a convergence of my recent trip to the Victoria office, which is just a couple of blocks off the water, and the impending move, neither of which actually affects me very much because I work remotely 95% of the time). We were out on sort of a pier, pretty far out. The office itself was, I mean. I could look out a big window (parallel to the pier) and look to the left to see that our office was easily 50 or 100 yards out from the shore. We began to notice some pretty heavy rolling waves. Oddly enough, they were originating (or more like bouncing back from) the shore. They started getting bigger and bigger. At one point, a heavy wind blasted along the shoreline and did some damage to the buildings (also on a sort of pier) running perpendicular to our pier. The buildings sort of blew over sideways but mostly recovered. It was as if they were made of tin or corrugated plastic or something — a substance that would flap in the wind but would go more or less back to its original position once the wind stopped. Then the rolling waves started getting really big, with both a fairly long period and a high amplitude, to the point that they were nearly at window level. Finally, one of the reverse rollers (remember that these are coming from the shore!) flipped over itself to show a little whitecap, and the next wave broke less than halfway to my window, gathered momentum shockingly quickly, and burst through our building at around chest height. It made a great hollow, roaring, shrieking, exploding sound, and its force was sufficient to physically take my breath away. I literally could not draw breath as the wave was passing through, almost as if the rush of the wave was drawing the oxygen out of my lungs and keeping me from refilling them. Oddly, I don’t think I felt the water or was tossed about by it very much, though it had very definitely burst through our office. And that was it.

The Casatiello bread I made a week or so ago turned out wonderfully. It had a great texture, a nice yellow color inside, a crisp crust, and a very nice flavor. It was yummy on its own and also made great sandwiches. This weekend, I moved on to a brioche, which is very similar to the Casatiello but is often made in weird shapes, as depicted below. I bought a pan for the occasion. Basically, you get this special pan and stick a big ball of dough in it; then you stack a second ball on top of it. I think I made the top ball too large, and I must have distributed its mass unequally, as it shifted substantially during baking. The next time I make it, I may do one ball in the fluted pan but skip the snowman look and use a regular bread pan for the remaining dough. The color of this bread is lovely, and it tastes great. I ate a bunch of it by itself today, but it also made a tasty roast beef sandwich of some leftovers from last night. Pictorial following.

This is the initial batch of flour, milk, and yeast, which ferment for less than an hour to start pulling flavor out of the flour.

Here I’ve added the rest of the ingredients (including a stick of butter, which accounts for the yellow color) and stuck in the fridge overnight.

This is the view from above after forming the shape of the bread. Looks kind of like a flower.

This is a better view of what the bread is likely to look like post-bake if all goes well.

And here’s the final product. The top ball slipped over to the side, so it looks kind of weird. The ball in the picture in my book has slipped a little bit, but not nearly this much. The ball in the book is also much smaller, and I think the weight of the risen dough had something to do with the slipping. The bread is tasty, in any case!

On a connection in Seattle on the way home from Victoria, I dropped by the restroom for a quick pit stop, and I noticed on the wall of the urinal something that looked like a little sticker, sort of a crudely drawn spiral shape roughly the size of a quarter in diameter. It struck me after my initial puzzlement that this was a target designed for gentlemen to aim at, probably in hopes of keeping them from peeing all over the floor (which is really bad for floor finish over time). I’ve read of this trick before, though I think the example I had been exposed to in print was a fly.

Although I was conscious of the intention and had a contrarian urge to break with expectations and pee anywhere but on the target, I found myself unable to resist the temptation. Even while considering things like the possibility that I was part of some filmic sociological experiment the privacy ramifications of which would be hairy to say the least, I trained my stream almost proudly on the little spiral, striving never to miss the mark (quite literally).

Needless to say, the trick was effective and my aim impeccable.

When I visited the urinal in Chicago, I found myself a little disappointed to have no particular target to aim for.

This is the sound me trying to swipe the wrong part of my virgin passport through the bar code reader (to be fair, there were two barcodes).

This is the sound of me negotiating the single-row seat with a couple split across the aisle of my small plane out of Knoxville.

This is the sound of me sprinting a half mile through the Houston airport to try to make a connection I’m sure I’ve missed (luckily, it was delayed by a few minutes so I made it).

I make no sound on the flight from Houston to Seattle because I’m wedged in the middle seat and have to sit upright and still as a statue for 5 hours to keep from bothering my neighboring passengers.

At first, there is no sound at midnight in Seattle. Then there’s a periodic annoying cell phone ring. Then the sound of a janitor unfurling garbage bags. A gaggle of would-be passengers cheers when their tardy plane arrives, and they commiserate good-naturedly when they learn there’s icy fog at their destination and they may have to turn around and come back when they finally get there. Now I’m nearly alone in the airport. Two gate workers talk about a new boyfriend, and then they leave, and then I am alone, the shops long closed, my stomach gurgling. This is the sound of me crinkling open some crackers and trail mix, slitting open a vacuum-sealed spread of little beef sausages, peeling back the foil lid of a tub of parmesan cheese spread. These I got on the first leg of my trip (Continental’s pretzel upgrade, I thought, though I received the bounty only on my trip’s first leg) and thought to save for the long, shopless night in Seattle. This is the sound of my reaction to the cheese. The other things were ok. This is the sound of my finding a bench to lie down on and rolling my jacket up under my neck and looping my leg through my backpack’s straps. This is the sound of me sitting up to read instead. And finally, the sound of the nothingness of a nap.

Interrupted by the pock-pock-pock of sudden herds of flight attendants going staccato to their early gates. This is the sound of an empty airport bathroom, and the quiet of another little nap. This is the sound of more pock-pock-pocking flight attendants, and then some laughter, pairs and trios of people beginning to stream into my terminal. Morning has broken.

This is the sound of the cappuccino machines at Starbucks and of my ordering a chocolate chip muffin. This is the sound of a Mt. Dew I’ve paid to clunk from its machine, another bribe to the caffeine gods so that they may keep my eyes wide and my brainwave somewhere north of flat for the workday that starts in 4 hours.