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…and possibly a few to one side or another.

It’s been a busy week, really.

No, we haven’t had kiddo #2 yet.  My wife is still very…very pregnant.  We’re just shy of one week from the due date today, but who knows if that will mean anything.

In the past week we’ve gotten around to addressing our kitchen faucet and upstairs shower situation left from our installation of a tankless water heater.  We found some nice hardware and had it installed.   It improved our situation immensely really.  We not only got rid of some truly horrible hardware left over from the previous homeowner, we took the opportunity to embellish.  Instead of a straight up swap from one kitchen faucet to another, we upgraded to a tall, goose-necked version that had a sprayer built into the handle.  We’d been living without a sprayer for two and a half years now, and I cannot stress how much we missed it.  Plus the goose-neck allows us to get all of our taller pots and pans good and clean.

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So right after I plop down a little bit of money to upgrade my Flickr Account to Pro status, Google goes ahead and slashes the price of storage for its products like Picasa web by 75%.  Figures.

Actually, I’m not really all that saddened or irritated by the news.  Although it’d be infinitely easier to use Picasa and Picasa web from a sheer upload and management aspect, the promise of unlimited storage as well as a decent suite of online editing tools is still the better deal in my mind.  Plus Flickr has a HUGE community, especially in the amateur photography circles.

On the other hand…par for the course.

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So the picture to the left links to my first big photo set on Flickr.  Now that I’ve made the decision to start creating galleries over on that site I’m starting to explore the options available to me.

Flickr confuses me a little bit.  Or at least how they organize things.  Sets and Collections and Groups and what not.

But it’s got some neat features.  The online photo editing suite looks pretty cool, even if you have to pay for the best features.

[UPDATE]:  Yeah, I forgot about the Shadowbox feature in my blog.  I’ve included a link to the photo set directly in the text above.

I was trying to upload some new images to my gallery last night.

It didn’t go well.

For years, I’ve believed that self-hosting is the way to go, as opposed to uploading pictures to something like Picasa Web or Flickr.  Back in the day when I maintained my own webserver, I was practically rabid about it.  The long and the short of the argument was that in the end, I owned my pictures.  They were in MY gallery, to do with as I pleased.  You don’t have to go back too far in time to find stories of people losing all of their pictures being hosted on this site or that site or the other because the hosting company changed its policy or just plain screwed up.

Now, however, I don’t run a web server.  This site is hosted on 1 & 1.  Though I think that 1&1 is a GREAT value for service, running a photo gallery on their site is a bit of a pain.  The issue is that I’m running open-source software on a more-or-less grey box.   If something goes wrong with the gallery software, I can only pursue it to a certain point before my privileges run out.  Plus, who has the time to do that?

So this morning I’m making a choice and putting down some money.  And I think I’m going to end up with Flickr Pro.

I’ll keep you posted, especially as I move pictures around.

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Ok folks, here’s the drill…

We’re…just a little more than two weeks out from the official due date.    This means, of course, that I’m a little…tense.

I’m going to attempt to keep people updated via this website, or possibly by Twitter.  You know…when things go down.

Just so you know.

In the meantime, posts in the evening may be a little more sporadic. The plan is that should my wife last past Thanksgiving, my mother-in-law is bringing her Turkey Day celebration to us.  And that means that I’m going to be putting in a little effort to upgrade our household from the scene of a toddler-spawn tornado into something slightly more presentable.

Ok….time to get cleaning…

When we first moved to our first home, one of the first things we did was to prepare the list of things we needed to take of…first.

It was a long list.  This is an old house, and the previous owner hadn’t done much to update it.

Everything started as a number one priority…and then we saw estimates and bills.  We reprioritized.

Today we finally got around to replacing our water heater.  Out went a huge12 – 14 year old 50 gallon water heater.  In came a sleek, new tiny tankless water system from Rinnai.

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Halloween 2009

[UPDATE] Now the link goes to the Flickr photo set

So I’ve suffered a setback.

For the first time in three years our three years in Wisconsin, there was candy left in the candy bowl.  If I had to guess, it was somewhere around a quarter of the candy left over.  And when  you start with somewhere between 600 and 700 pieces, that’s quite a bit.

I should say that we ended Saturday with about a quarter of the candy left over.   Two days later…a dent in the pile has mysteriously appeared.

I’m still working on uploading the pictures.   I think I should have everything in place by tomorrow.

The conversion from Windows Vista to Windows 7 continues. (Thank you Windows Restore Utility!)

I will get to putting up Halloween stories and pictures.

In the meantime:

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