How is that possible???? Time is really flying. Pretty soon she’ll be in Kindergarten. Then dating. And driving. And going to college. AAARRGGH!
She’s doing great. Finally made peace with her swing. She didn’t like it at first, but now she seems okay with it, although she’d much rather be in someone’s lap or lying on her dad’s chest.
It was the first day Eliza and I spent the day all alone, just the two of us. Jason had to work, and we didn’t have any visitors. It went very well, and I really enjoyed having her all to myself! She was wonderful. Slept, ate, pooped and peed like clockwork, no surprises. And spent lots of time just hanging out peacefully in her Bjorn chair or her Moses basket. It was a good Eliza day.
Eliza now weighs 7 pounds, 7 ounces! She has gained more than a pound since birth. We’re thrilled with this, even though she is only in the 25th percentile for length (still 21 inches) and 50th percentile for weight. She is also in the 25th percentile for head size. She’s still tiny but the doctor says she is doing well. Her little belly button is slightly herniated, which is apparently no big deal and should go away by the time she is 2 years old. All in all, a good report from the pediatrician today, and we’re relieved!
There, I said it. Zotero should warm the heart of any academic, but somehow it escapes me. I’ve been loath to admit it for a long time, especially since I was part of the beta, and tried it for a long time. Plus, it’s exactly the sort of tool that I should really love.
Except I don’t.
Why not? Well, after examining my prejudice, I came to one conclusion: I no longer have any patience with applications that are local. Unless the application I want AND my data live in the cloud, I just won’t use it. I’ve found myself, over the last 6 months to a year, moving nearly everything I do online. Documents are created with Google Docs, I prefer Gmail to any local mail client I’ve tried, heck, I’ve even started using Flickr’s editing deal with Picnik to do my photo edits, and I luuuuuuurve me some photoshop.
What’s up with this change? I really only use two computers; my work PC and my Macbook. It wouldn’t be that hard to use local programs, and sync my documents. The problem is that it’s any effort at all. Syncing my documents shouldn’t be something that I think about, it should just happen…Mac nearly has it right with their .mac syncing, but the PC world just doesn’t operate like that without some serious effort on the user’s part. If Apple would move hard into this space, perhaps with Google as a partner…I think they could revolutionize computing yet again, especially if they leveraged their media power as a part of the cloud storage.
But I digress…
After using Zotero for awhile, I found myself cursing the fact that I had two different databases of information…the “macbook” stuff and the “desktop” stuff. This is why the third lobe of my brain is del.icio.us…I don’t have to think about where I might need that information. It just goes to the cloud, and I pull it down no matter where in the world I may be. I know that Zotero has listed on it’s homepage:
Remote library backup
Shared collections
Access your library from anywhere via the web
Give me that, and maybe it becomes a tool that is useful to me. But until then, local just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Today Eliza is wearing her first outfit that doesn’t have feet. That’s because she can finally wear socks without them falling off! She was so tiny when we brought her home (at one point, she weighed 5 pounds 7 ounces). It’s great to see her growing and her cheeks getting so chubby. And her feet getting big enough for socks. 🙂
Three weeks ago today, I was in the hospital recovering. Seems hard to believe. In some ways, it feels like she has always been here. In other ways, it still feels really new.
Milestones so far: she has outgrown her first outfit! She had not one but TWO dirty diapers today already. She is now drinking 3 ounces at a time instead of two. So many exciting milestones to come. I can’t wait until she smiles.
Eliza now officially has a library! Thanks to the generosity of my good friend Tim, Eliza is now a proud Lifetime member of LibraryThing! So if anyone out there has thoughts of getting her books in the future, now we have a way to double check to see if she owns it…and boy, is she going to own some books.
So I started “wearing” Eliza yesterday in a sling and she really loved it. She fell asleep in there, all snug, while I took the ornaments off the Christmas tree. It looks uncomfortable to see her all squished up in there, but I guess it feels like being in the womb. I’m going to try and use it for a little while very day to get her used to it. That way, hopefully I can take her with me to some meetings and such, and she’ll be content to lie against my tummy. I’m lucky I have a job and work in a department where bringing my baby is okay (at least, once in a while). My department chair has even joked about getting a pack n’ play for her office. 🙂
I’m a bit worried about what will happen when Jason has to go back to work (Monday). He’s much better at calming Eliza down than I am. He also gets her to sleep at night, even though it takes a couple of hours and doesn’t happen until 1:00 a.m. or later. He won’t be able to do that once he has to get up at 6 a.m. to get to work on time. We’ve settled into a routine, but that routine will have to get altered in just a few days. Luckily, I don’t have to go back to work until the 15th, so we have a little bit of transition time. It’ll all work out, I’m sure. Time is seriously flying, and Eliza is now 18 days old.
As a part of having a new Eliza around, we went camera shopping for a new digital camera. I asked for feedback from a bunch of friends as to what digital camera they used and liked, and took those suggestions and matched them against my list of requirements. I wanted something that would do both still and video well, preferably HD video for future-proofing, and had a decent pocketability.
After a failed attempt at locating the Sanyo Xacti model that I wanted, I discovered the Canon TX-1. We’ve loved our Canons from the past…our last two cameras were Canon; one of the original Elphs, back with they were APS film based, and then our immediate past digital, a 4 megapixel Elph. With our history with Canon, plus the TX-1’s optical image stabilization, we decided to give up on the Xacti and just go with the Canon.
But that’s not the product I wanted to sing the praises of in this post. No, I’m beyond thrilled with the memory card I bought to go with the TX-1. Yep, the memory card…if your digital camera takes SD cards, you should immediately buy one of these:
A brilliant little piece of tech, the Eye-Fi combines a 2 gig SD card with built in wifi, giving any camera the ability to automatically upload pictures that you take to your computer, to any of dozens of web photo sites, or both. The card comes with a little USB dock, and has the software necessary to tie the card to your computer and website on itself. You plug it into your computer, and it walks you through linking the card, your wifi point, the computer you’re on, and the website in question.
Once it is set up, the process is simply take a picture, and…that’s it. You take a picture and as long as your camera stays on it will upload your pics to your computer and to the web automagically. Now there are limits, and ways that I would love to have the product behave that it doesn’t.
For one, the card attaches itself to your wifi point…not to your computer. I would vastly prefer the card to attach via an ad-hoc network to my computer, and then have the computer do the heavy lifting to the web. That way it would work even when I was traveling, without having to logon to the Eye-Fi manager website and manually change the settings. You can make it work now, but it’s less easy than I’d like.
Still, if you do most of your uploading from home, it doesn’t get any easier than this.
