Monthly Archives: March 2004

No Quiet Squirrel

Kaija has decided to break her vow of silence. Okay, so it wasn’t silence exactly, since she did cry to let us know when she was hungry, etc. But within the past few days she’s been exercising her vocal chords a little bit more than usual… so much so that she kept Jennifer up all night with her “chattering”. Fortunately I was oblivious to it all until about 6 a.m. when I awoke to loud baby noises coming from her bassinet. *sigh* Parenthood continues.

Filoli

While Jennifer’s mother was in town visiting Kaija… I mean us… we took a trip to Filoli Gardens since she enjoys going to formal gardens. It proved to be a fairly photogenic place, considering the majority of the flowers weren’t even in bloom yet.I’ve made a few changes to the photo album templates, most of them behind the scenes. Let me know if you have any problems.

A Matter of Perspective

Jennifer is probably going to seriously hurt me for posting this bit, but I got such a big kick out of it that I just had to share.We recently received a video camera from our parents so that we may share the experience that is Kaija with them over the many thousands of miles that separate us. When we were done shooting the first hour of video, we transferred it to VHS and shipped them to our parents for Valentines day.Since I was home for quite a while after Kaija was born, I did much of the video work on the first tape. Now that I’m back at work, Jennifer has started to record Kaija with it.Earlier tonight, I had Kaija in the bathroom “standing” on the countertop and looking at herself in the large mirror behind the sink. Jennifer brought in the video camera and started recording because she wanted to get it on tape. Well, at one point, she turned the camera on its side. It’s one of those cameras with a flip-out LCD view screen, which she was using. I asked her what she was doing. She said that the proportions weren’t good horizontally. She couldn’t get all of Kaija standing on the screen that way, but she could if she turned the camera on its side. That might work for still photography, where you can just rotate the print or digital image, but video is a different story (unless you have the right equipment). I stared at her for a few seconds then asked her if she planned to turn the TV on its side when that part of the video came along. Her eyes got big as she realized what she was doing, then laughed but didn’t say much more.We just filled up the second tape and reviewed it tonight. Let me just say that cocking your head to the side for some shots might be okay, but it can get painful when done several minutes at a time. As it turns out, tonight wasn’t the first time she had turned the video camera sideways to get more of the subject in. There were at least 4 or 5 different occurances of substantial length sideways recordings.Oh, well. At some point when I have the time and a faster desktop machine, I’ll probably transfer all of this video to the computer, cut it up into clips, rotate the sideways segments (and crop to get the correct width/height ratio), splice them together and put them to some tear-jerking audio track. In the meantime, Kaija’s grandparents will just have to deal with stiff necks for a few days.

Lone Cloud

Okay, so I decided to go with a larger overhaul than just the right hand column. The site probably looks a bit different than the last time you visited.I was starting to get a little tired of the old look and wanted something a little lighter. I got the idea for this theme from a mix CD that I put together recently. I made a cover for the CD from a photograph of a lonely cloud I took on a hike in the Sunol Regional Wilderness this past fall.The name “Invisible Elevators” came from the fact that the songs on the mix CD were mostly uplifting (though not necessarily in a traditional sense) and because they are songs, you hear them but don’t see them. The name described the cloud in that photograph, too. Somehow it was just suspended up in the sky by invisible forces. That’s all well and good for a collection of songs, but it doesn’t really translate to the web, as it is mostly visual. But I liked the name anyway and I’m sticking to it for now. 🙂

Speaking of Change

I’m working on a new look to the web site. One of the things that I was getting fed up with was how the sidebar on the right would get too long and end up spilling over to the left under the blog entries. Well, in addition to fixing that spill over, I’ve thrown a little JavaScript and CSS at the problem so that different information is available on the right by clicking the different links at the top of the column. I got the idea from Dunstan Orchard’s site.