Sorry excuse for parenting...

I never, ever would have imagined Chuck E Cheese was a hot bed for assaults against persons... Apparently on a nationwide basis - read the story here.

All they needed to know they learned - or not - in kindergarten.

I don't think the CEC around us serve alcohol. And I don't think they should.

He's here!!!

Starting...

Hopefully we will fill this later today...

Lovely...

way to spend Sunday.

Parenting and the Internet

As a parent of a young daughter with one more on the way I've long intended to do something about protecting them from the darker side of this wonderful thing called the Internet. I had searched around for a product to install on my network of Macs at home and every time I looked over the reviews for the candidates the number of problems reported stopped me in my tracks. So far my daughter is young enough I've been able to get by with using the draconian methods that are part of Leopard (10.5). But the sweetheart is growing up and we also have older kids visiting regularly who want to use the computer so I recently took another look at options.

I had heard of OpenDNS a number of times but the only feature association in my head was it's claim to providing faster resolution times. I've never had a problem in that area so tended to always skip over any mention of the service. However in my recent search I found several blog entries on its usefulness to parents. Moving at the Speed of Creativity had one of the most direct discussions.

In my case I changed my 2Wire router to point to OpenDNS rather than using the ISP's servers. Once done I selected the Customize option to allow me to set some site filters based on a categorization of the site content. All of this setup took less than 5 minutes and has worked flawlessly. I like the fact I can customize the filters as well as "vote" on categorizations for various sites. I haven't needed to but you can block or open individual sites as well.

This scheme doesn't provide the same level of filtering and control as some commercial products but it is also less intrusive with essentially zero overhead. For my particular situation and approach to controlling Internet access this is an excellent free solution.

Note we do not allow children access to a computer in a "private" location in our home. The only one they can use is adjacent to the kitchen in full view. If this weren't the case I would probably opt for one of the more draconian commercial products.

Woo Hoo!

Here is a mosaic from yesterday's oath ceremony. Click on through to see some commentary I posted on Flickr. It was an exciting and event and very well done.

A very special day!

The Princess and I are now in the family and friends seating area for
the BH's Citizenship oath. A major life event making us all proud! As
you can see there will be a lot of new citizens today :)

More pics and info to come. But there are around 650 new citizens at this oath ceremony and it is the second session of the day!

Now for Something Completely Different

Today was my wife's second major sonogram. Like the first one everything turned out to be normal and healthy. The big news was that the baby has shifted around make a c-section unlikely. This is a big relief to my BH :-)

The photo was snapped while we waited for the doctor. Can't wait for the delivery date!

Life Poster

I've seen life posters around and found them intriguing. A few years back someone posted instructions on how to create them manually in an old version of iPhoto. With the passing of my mom earlier this year I embarked on a project to scan in a bunch of old photos, mostly B&W, to share with family members to help in remembrances. It struck me as I was working on this that it was going to be a bit of a shame for all of us to look at those memories only to file them in a folder to, in spite of best intentions, be forgotten. Or to be forced to only pick a couple to frame and leave out. A Life Poster project seemed like the perfect solution.

I recently did some searching around and after looking at a number of approaches including scripting, Picasa, and shareware tools I settled on a nifty little commerical application called Posterino. I liked the convenience of its UI plus its ability to create irregular posters. Unlike Posterino a number of the tools force you to have every photo the same size and aspect ratio.

I downloaded the demo version of Posterino and in not much more than one hour I learned the program and populated an irregular poster with nearly 100 images. Posterino allows you to individually resize each image to fit its spot in the poster as well as repositioning each one so the proper portion of the photo is being shown. Another key feature is the ability to simply drag a photo from one part of the poster to another - when you drop the photo in the new location the application automatically swaps with the previous photo in that spot (this is configurable behavior). Since I already had all of the old photos in a project in Aperture the fact Posterino could directly access my photo library was a big plus in quickly finding and placing the images.

Once you're done you can transfer the resulting poster image into iPhoto for ordering via its Kodak interface, upload it to Flickr, or export it to a file for other uses or for transmission to other printing services.

I am normally quite hesitant to spend money for software to automate a task I will do only infrequently. However in this case I think the money was well spent in ensuring a high quality result in an amount of time I could afford to spend on the project. Plus the license fee is about the same as the cost of one large poster print and so a misfire in creation of the poster to print would eat up any license fee expense. The demo is fully functional but does place a large image over the top of exports until licensed. This means you can give it a complete dry run to see if it will meet your needs before forking over your hard earned cash. Wander over here for more information.

Not wanting to completely leave out the Windows users, I found a nice blog entry at HelpMerick.com describing some options for you. Click here to give it a read.

Let's Make Cookies!

The Princess, Aunt and a cousin making mom's famous oatmeal raisin
cookies for the gang.