Liam is so busy! Here he was playing with the door – going in the door and out of the door and through the curtain and around the curtain and under the curtain. It’s easy to see why he sleeps so much: if i burned that much energy I’d need as much sleep as he does!
Today was his first genuine, extended trip to the beach as a biped. He had a great time playing ‘let the waves chase us.’ Though I daresay that he seemed to want the waves to catch him more often than not!
Here are a few photos from last night’s evening expedition to the beach. E-mail me if you’d like a copy of any of then printed really large on canvas (and signed by the artist)!
I’m reading three books concurrently. I’ll give you some hints, but I want guesses from you, fair readers, as to the exact titles.
Hints:
What other clues would you like? The setting for the opening scenes for the works of fiction? Some not-too-obivous plot detail? The titles worked into anagrams? Just let me know!
Lisa, Liam, baby X and I are at the coast until Friday. We’re meeting with and shooting high school senior clients here. We’ll also take some time and do a little reading and relaxing. Look for a few good blog posts, including:
Enjoy!
Here’s an interesting story from the New York Times: Iran’s state news agency apparently Photoshopped an extra missle into a threatening-looking picture they released of a recent missle launch. There were four missles, but only three of them fired. What a horrible dillemma! What a PR failure! Iran’s answer: just use Photoshop. Never trust anything you see, folks!
I set up this chair in front of a studio background and Liam hopped up there with a book. He knows when it’s picture time!
I read him to sleep last night. We’re reading from the Amelia Bedelia collection (moral of the story: be careful about your use of colloquialisms), Frog and Toad (moral of the story: good friends are important), and Danny and the Dinosaur (moral of the story: a big dinosaur CAN, in fact, be a fun friend).
This was last weekend. Enjoy the photos, and happy birthday Greta!
When we tell people we’re execting a child, they ask a few questions:
1) Are you going to find out the child’s gender? and 2) Do you have any names picked out?
Here are our answers: 1) We’re not sure yet and 2) Not really.
While we don’t have any names picked out, we DO have a list of names we won’t be using. Here’s our list, but feel free to leave a few of your own “please don’t use that name” names.
Mike Fast called me on the carpet for my recent lack of blogging. He’s absolutely right. Here’s a post I started and hadn’t finished:
I shared this in conversation with Lisa and my parents the other day, but I think it’s an original enough theory to blawhg. Here goes:
I think e-mail forwards are an internet newbie’s natural way of dealing with the huge amount of information now available. You don’t agree? Let me explain:
You, Shinnfans, are internet users from way back. You have experience: you send and receive emails, you read blogs, and you sell stuff online. Some of you even book airline tickets and hotel reservations online. But it wasn’t always that way. Remember back to your first e-mail account? Your first encounter with the internet? What was one of the first things you did? You checked your e-mail, right? Here’s the scenario:
This internet thing is new (to you: you’re not Al Gore). You know there’s a lot of information out there, but you really don’t know where to start. You mentally set aside the hugeness of the internet, because there’s only so much you can think about at once. You receive an e-mail. It’s funny! You laugh. What a clever, um, thing. It may be a story about a lady who paid way too much for a cookie recipe, or a clever little poem about friendship. You know the kind: the one with animated angels floating alongside. So you forward it to some friends. They respond. Their responses flow along a few lines:
“Haha, that’s a good one!” These friends are also internet newbies. They probably send you forwards back. Theirs is not the only response:
“Um, thanks for thinking of me, but please stop sending those.” These friends are internet teenagers. They’re not trying to cope with the huge amount of data available. But they have tired of receiving the same e-mail forward several times from different friends. Then there are the internet’s adults, mature e-mail users:
“…” These friends don’t send anything back. They either delete your e-mails without opening them or they have your messages filtered into their e-mail trash can because you don’t send enough worthwhile content. These people don’t just act differently: they think about information differently. They don’t just wait for new stuff to come their way: they seek out things they want to know. Their tools:
Search is a tool for people who deal effectively with information. They ask Google questions like: “Why is MySQL not working on my Mac?” and “How do you remove cat pee from a comforter?” What other tools do mature info-users employ? Try:
Gatekeepers. There are people out their whose whole job (or role, function, passion, whatever) is to arbitrate and aggregate information for you. Sound weird? It’s not. That’s the blogosphere, and you’re part of it right now. (I appreciate you reading this far. I know it’s a bit abstract. Are you just seeing how many times I can : ?) Try these blogs on for size: www.thecoolhunter.net: This one’s all about fashion trends and such. www.lifehacker.com: My favorite blog, these guys cover handy tips for all aspects of your life with a decidedly geeky slant. www.nytimes.com:
Fooled you with this one, didn’t I? Yes, newspapers are a classic form of content aggregation. They collect stories so you don’t have to. Smart (forward-thinking, mostly big) newspapers have followed this digital trend hard. Others are trying to catch up. What’s your point, Andrew? Here it is:
Forwarding funny e-mails is just an internet newbie’s way of dealing with the vast amount of information newly available to him. I’ve outlined a few other ways of dealing with information, so if you send forwards, please consider both search and gatekeepers as alternate (maybe new) ways of dealing with information. And if you still receive lots of forwards (and no longer care to), every e-mail program has a way of dealing with that:
filters.
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