Charlotte Turns Two

Charlotte Turns Two

Charlotte turned 2 years old on November 27. She was very excited. Charlotte's favorite thing in the world is dogs, so Carol made a special doggie cake. Charlotte understood exactly what to do with the candles: she started blowing them out as soon as they were lit, while we were singing. She extinguished them in two tries.

For a long time, Charlotte's "transitional object" or "lovie" has been a beanie baby dog named "Ploppers". But whenever we go to see Thomas the Tank Engine at Barnes and Noble, Charlotte always wants to play with Plopper's alter ego "Puppers". Carol bought a Puppers for Charlotte's birthday. It was love at first sight. Charlotte immediately abandoned both her Ploppers and now Puppers is the apple of her eye. Charlotte will tell you that she got Puppers for her birthday. She'll hold him up to you and blow.

Charlotte's language is coming along all of a sudden. She learned the word "No" one day. I was surprised to see that as soon as she learned the word, she stopped shaking her head to say no. I would have expected there would be a period where she would do both, but there wasn't. A few weeks later she said her first sentence: "No, Mine!"

In other news, Audrey went to the dentist for the first time last week. I had been feeling really guilty thinking we should have taken her a couple of years ago. But the dentist told Carol that this was a fine age for a first visit. And the best news of all? He said her teeth look great and her home care is just fine. Both girls brush their teeth every night before bed (often with our help), but we weren't very consistent about it for the first two years of Audrey's life. I was relieved to learn that she is doing fine anyway. And she was very cooperative with the dentist.

I have two more days of work this year. I'm taking Friday off. Then on Christmas Eve we fly to Tucson to visit with Carol's parents. On the 28th we'll borrow their car and drive to Palm Desert, CA, where my parents winter. Their 50th wedding anniversary is December 28th. They are having a big party on the 29th. The next day we'll drive back to Tucson to stay with Carol's parents again until we fly home on the 4th. We're really looking forward to the trip. Carol in particular is looking forward to 70 degree temperatures in Tucson and even warmer weather in Palm Desert.

Our New Toy

I have a loose rule I follow with expensive gadgets. If there is a gadget I think I really want, I wait a year and see if I still want it. The rule has served me pretty well - there are several items I ended up not buying because the lust dissipated.

I've wanted a high definition flat panel TV for at least three years now. Coincidentally, I got motivated a few weeks ago to make another attempt at selling a bunch of china and crystal from my previous marriage on eBay. This time I was fairly successful. Se we had the cash to match the desire. Add that to the fact that Sears had a TV on sale that was highly rated by Consumer Reports and we had the perfect storm. I went to the local Sears and bought the thing.

We bought a 42" Vizio LCD TV. Vizio, it turns out, is one of a new breed of electronics company. They don't actually build anything, and they only have about 70 employees. They contract the manufacuturing to Taiwanese OEMs. But like I said Consumer Reports has rated them well for the past several years so we took a chance on a company that isn't a "big name". I found out after the fact that Vizio sells more LCD TV in the US than any other company.

Shortly after we bought it, I ordered a Peerless wall mount. Last Friday night we reconfigured the TV room and mounted the new TV on the wall at eye level when sitting on the sofa. Perfect.

Our cable box has the capability to make "favorite channels" lists. I made one with only the HD channels (we get 15). When I watch TV now, I go to that list first. I find I'll watch almost anything if it's in HD :). (I'm sure that will wear off in a while). Football, in particular, is visually spectacular in high definition even though I'm not a football fan.

A Note for Email Subscribers

One detail I forgot to mention in the farewell message on the Wordpress blog: the email notification on the new blog only works in "digest" mode. Every day at 5am, if there are any additions or changes to the blog in the previous 24 hours, email subscribers will get an email message. You'll get at most one message per day. Typically I only post 2 or 3 times in a month (meaining you'll get 2 or 3 emails in a month).

If you absolutely must have the latest Methot family news hot off the presses, figure out (or ask me!) how to read it via RSS.

Welcome to the new Methot.net!

I started this project back in March. My geek friend Alex is my tech idol. He moved all of his photos to Picasa Web Albums and his blog to Blogger because it simplified his life. I wanted to be just like Alex. Then I signed up for the Bioinformatics Certificate program and my spare time for projects like this went away. But, as is my habit, I thought a lot about how to do it on my mind's back burner.

Finally, after my Biostatistics final exam on December 8th (I think I aced it, grades aren't posted yet) I had time for personal projects again.

The first order of business was to get the photo albums moved. The blog posts all contained links to the albums in the their old locations at methot.net/gallery. I spent some time writing a program to move them, but then realized that those albums all originally came from iPhoto on our Mac. So I had the bright idea to just re-export them to Picasa Web Albums. That took a few hours but was, as Alex would say, easy peasy.

Then I had to update the links in all the old blog posts and make their formatting consistent. Wordpress uses MySQL. I dumped that database and made a local copy. Then I edited the MySQL export script directly and updated all of the photo gallery URLs to point to the albums' new homes at Picasa Web Albums. Once that was done I imported the modified Wordpress database into my local MySQL server.

After that it was a fairly simple matter to write a little Java program that read the posts from MySQL and used the Blogger API (Google published great APIs to a bunch of their tools) to post them to Blogger, complete with their original post dates. Viola! You can read every post since I started blogging at the new location, and all of the album links in the posts point to the photo albums' new locations.

The final steps were to redirect my Feedburner RSS feed to the Blogger version of the blog and set up email notification for my readers who live in the dark ages :). I think that's all working now.

The only thing missing is the photo captions that I had entered by hand in Gallery. But I can write a program to go find all those and transfer them to the Picasa version. And if I want to get really ambitious, I'll transfer all the really old albums at http://methot.net/photos to Picasa Web Albums. That's a much more difficult problem because they were created using an old photo editing application (LView Pro) that emitted very dirty HTML that's hard to parse automatically.

Anyway, here we are. Thanks, Alex, for the inspiration (and always for the geek advice and guidance). Welcome, everyone, to the new methot.net!