blog

Whew!

Video | | patmcg

This blog, among many other things, took a back seat while I finished up my first iPhone app, Santa Scan.  The app should be fun for kids around Christmas.  When I finally showed it to Claire, she loved it even more than I thought she would.  She went crazy when she finally found Santa and heard him say, “Ho ho ho!”  Claire became a little obsessed and kept yelling, “I can’t believe I heard Santa on Daddy’s phone!”

It was a tough push to get the app submitted to Apple, and I had spent the previous three weekends and a late night almost entirely dedicated to the app, while Kit and/or her mom watched the kids and generally took care of things around the house.  I could have never finished the app in time for Christmas if it had not been for their extensive help with the kids.

You can follow news of the new app on the Round Trip Software website or on Twitter.

Art Portfolio

Aside | | patmcg

The short-lived art-samples feature has been converted to a portfolio.  The new format seems to make more sense for art samples.

Check out the new portfolio page for the girls’ art.  The portfolio will be continually (if intermittently) updated with their latest work.  It also has some other cool pictures that the girls did not do, but you can pick to see Claire and Molly’s pictures specifically.

Resolution for 2012: Less Blogging

| patmcg

In 2011, I wrote 90 blog entries.  That is up from 2010 (68 entries), 2009 (52 entries), and 2008 (35 entries).  Normally, increasing productivity is a good thing.  If I were a professional blogger, it would be a really good thing.  But I am not a professional blogger, and there are too many other things in life to do.  When I step back and think about it, I need to get my blog numbers down!

I keep finding myself at the computer late at night blogging instead of doing other things that need to be done (paying bills, sleeping) or would be restful or relaxing to do (say, watch a movie).  If something interesting or funny happens with the kids and I don’t put it in the blog, I felt vaguely bad about it.  That is kind of messed up.  I mean, if something interesting or funny happens, that is a good thing in itself, and blogging about it should only be icing on the cake, not an extra burden.

This blog started out with the idea of tracking the kids’ big milestones and occasional anecdotes, but it has turned into something more like a twice-a-week journal of the major things going on with the kids.  That is a good thing, and I actually love doing the blog.  The kids are always doing something interesting, and I really like to write about it.  I especially think this stuff will be interesting for us and the girls to read about in 10 years, 20 years, or hopefully longer.

But with time being so precious every day, I am going to make a conscious effort to keep the blogs fewer in number or at least shorter in length.  Kit has suggested that I rely more on quick bullet points and pictures, and I like that idea.  I have actually been trying to do that, but that’s not how my brain naturally wants to do it.  It wants to write a story.  But I think it’s time to retrain my brain, set a timer, and just whip out some quick notes here and there.  And just let more things slide into the cloud of memory like everyone else.

By the way, our photo library will help fill in any blanks in our memory.  I kid you not, we just topped 10,000 photos, mostly of the kids.   That is another number I need to get down.  Who would ever look at 10,000 photos of anything (even something as precious as our girls)?  It turns out that deleting the photos takes way more time than taking the pictures, but that is a fight for another day…

See, there I go again, this is a long blog about the need to write shorter blogs.  Oh, the irony!  For practice, let me rework this one in the new, crisper style…

  • Must cut back on the blogs
  • Love the blog, but time is too precious
  • Must write in shorter style, ie like this
  • We have 10,000 photos of the kids, and that number will only go up
  • Goodnight

Catching up

| patmcg

The last couple of months have really gotten away from Kit and me. It has been sort of a perfect storm. Being chief resident at Emory takes up lots of Kit’s time on top of her regular demanding work. Plus she is constantly studying for various massive tests to complete her residency. My job at Verizon got out of hand trying to deliver an especially difficult project (“Option 4 IP Provisioning Automation for MLFR”) under tough circumstances. And we are trying to get our house cleaned up and remodeled to sell this spring, as well looking into our upcoming living situation in Dallas. Fortunately, we had many visits and a ton of help from the grandparents, which really helped save the day. My parents came to Altanta and watched after Claire for the better part of a weekend while Kit and I scrambled about. And among many other things, Joyce even painted our whole kitchen all by herself.

Of course, this is a blog about Claire, not about Kit and me. But it is interesting to note that this has probably been the most challenging few months in our lives. Fortunately through all of this, we have managed to keep Claire mostly happy and healthy, although she did have a runny nose through most of January.

But niceties like this blog fell out of the routine. Now things have cleared up for me at work for the moment, and it is time to catch up on this blog. I am afraid I have missed a few funny / interesting / cute things that Claire has done lately, but I am now going to backfill some things I still remember. Plus I had some written down in rough draft but never published all the way back to last November. I will probably not catch up on everything, but as I get these finished some entries will magically show up “before” this one.

Demarcation

| patmcg

This is my first actual blog post.

Every post in this blog before this one has been copied here from an awkward, terse text file on my Palm Pilot, where I had been keeping rough notes on Claire’s various milestones and adventures. “At least,” I thought, “this way I can record stuff about Claire when it happens, and someday I will go back, clean the text up, and put it somewhere, uh, better.”

Well, behold… the future is now! I have just realized, only a few short years into the blogging craze, that a blog is the perfect place to chronicle Claire’s early years.

I had completely forsaken blogs until recently. Blogs do still make me think of slanted and ugly political non-journalism, meaningless rumor sites, or blogs about other bloggers. But after using a blog at work to track how to charge my time, I realized that a blog is the perfect place to chronicle Claire’s early years (until she can handle this herself) because:

  • It’s a date-based record.
  • I can add a few notes from anywhere with internet access.
  • It’s automatically backed up (somewhere).
  • It’s free.
  • I already had an account through google; no new account necessary.

Anyways, this is a blog about Claire, not about blogging. Man, this is the absolute worst kind of blog post, the lowest of the low… a blog about blogging. Excuse me while I slap myself.

In my defense, I just wanted to add an entry to sort of demarcate the “old stuff” and the “new stuff”. So here you go. Now back to Claire and the fun stuff.