Spring Fun

Spring Fun

This is somewhat of an experiment. I'm in the process of transitioning the infrastructure I use to manage this blog and related photo albums. I still have a lot of work to do to transfer all the existing content, but I can't keep you waiting forever for new photos! But the image link in this post may or may not work the way I hope.

The new photo album system (Picasa Web Albums) has several advantages. The main ones are the nice slideshow, and the fact that it scales the photos to whatever screen resolution you are using to view them. I know some of you use smaller screen resolutions - with the new albums you will never need to scroll to see an entire photo.

In family news, everybody is doing fine. Audrey is talkative as ever. She can entertain herself for long periods making up skits for her little fairy dolls. She also makes up her own languages. Charlotte continues to communicate better all the time. She comprehends many, many words and can answer a lot of questions with vigorous head nodding or shaking. She's starting to vocalize more and sometimes even strings sounds together with something resembling sentence cadence.

Carol is in the process of creating her third annual hand-painted children's furniture for the Co-op Preschool auction. We'll be sure to post photos when it's complete. And we now realize that after she finishes she has to paint a table and chairs for our own kids! Carol's been hitting the gym more and is enjoying that.

My contract at Rosetta Inpharmatics has been extended through the end of 2007. I still hope to get hired full time by then. I'm enjoying the rich scientific environment immensely. I continue to commute to work by bike almost every day, rain or shine. A little more shine these days, thankfully. Bike season is gearing up. I did a 70-mile ride a couple of weeks ago and a 62-mile organized ride last Sunday. I'm schedule to do my first century (100-mile ride) of the season on May 12 in Richland, WA (and spend Mother's Day with Carol's parents). The goal every year now is to get in plenty of miles before July when I do the Seattle to Portland ride with a bunch of friends: 204 miles in one day. I'm well on track this year.

For the technically curious, the current blog is managed using Wordpress and the photo albums using Gallery2. Both require maintenance (by me) to keep up with security patches and new features. I learned a lot doing it that way, but now I'd rather spend my time on other things. So I'm switching to Blogger for the postings and Picasa Web Albums for the photo albums. Both are Google products and all the infrastructure is managed by them, not me.