It's late.
Tune in next time.
What should we report on next time?
November 6, 2008
The S Report
This is Lucian and Mommy reporting to you from Seesmic on The State of the Nap.
It's late.
Tune in next time.
What should we report on next time?
It's late.
Tune in next time.
What should we report on next time?
November 4, 2008
O Yes We Can!
Congratulations, United States of America!It will take some time, but my bootstraps are thick.
Just a couple more months of that miserable old
Yes we did.
Yes we will.
And, Yes — I just did.
November 1, 2008
Finding Halloween
We had a great Halloween this year with Lucian. He only ate one little lollypop despite the huge "facebucket" of candy he collected. (He carried a little orange jack-o-lantern bucket and because it has a smiley face on it, he called it a facebucket. Sounds like some new social media application, doesn't it?) Aside from a few pieces of chocolate (I'm only human) we'll be donating the rest to Mr. Davis' science class for, um, science, yeah, that's what we'll call it.
Instead of going to the mall or trick-or-treating door to door, we went to something called Trunk 'O Treats which was held at the Picture Rocks Community Center. Several families volunteered to dress up their vehicles stocked with goodies (as well as themselves) to line the perimeter of the parking lot. Picture Rocks Fire Dept., Trico Electric, the A&W Great Root Bear, C4PR and Arizona Youth Partnership were there to support the event. There was a decorated Sheriff's car where a male and female officer handed out badges and coloring books.
Our favorite part was the Picture Rocks Fire Department's firetruck. Lucian and all the other youngsters got to climb up and tour the firetruck. We had to pry Lucian out of it. He really loved sitting inside of it. No surprise as his Great-Grandfather was a Fire Chief once upon a time. (I just know my Grandpop was smiling down on us from Heaven that night with pride. If only he could have met Lucian. I really miss you Grandpop.) The firefighters were so awesome and entertaining. They were always willing to answer any questions. Lucian really loved inspecting a fireman's hat. He couldn't get enough of the flashlight attached to it.
Inside the building they had face painting and coloring supplies for the little ones.
There were also drinks, stickers and cookies for everyone. There were about 10 vehicles all decked out with some amazing decorations, music and special effects like a smoke machine. Everyone was dressed in costume and all the kids were adorable and pleasant.
We met up with some new friends and their two little boys as well as some other parents and their children. It was nice because everyone knew someone there and it felt like a very safe and secure environment. Lucian and his new little buddy held hands as we walked around visiting the different families at their cars. We brought our own bag of goodies and helped replenish a someone else's stock so we could feel like we too were sharing.
After that event, we headed over to Oma and Opa's house to Trick-or-Treat with them and they were very much delighted to spend the holiday for the first time in person with their grandson. Oma took Nemo by his little fin and walked him to a couple of doors around the block to say hello to their new neighbors and show off their little pride and joy. Daddy and I took the opportunity to teach Lucian a lesson in saying thank you and having patience while people answer the door.
I always have mixed feelings about Halloween because it's not the way I remember it and I'm still not certain about what I want my son to experience. I really don't like the idea of kids consuming so much candy. I don't mind the idea of the tradition and celebrating it, but I don't see why it has to be all about candy and unhealthy snacks. When I purchased treats this year, I got pencils, playdoh, bubbles, etc. I didn't go wild on the candy because we never get enough kids to hand it out to and then it sits in our house for us to deal with.
I just re-read my post on this from last year and I still feel the same way.
I wonder what you think about Halloween and how do you explain it to your kids?
I don't know. Maybe I'm the mean mommy and things will change as Lucian gets older and starts hanging with his friends. I don't care for the kind of mixed messages kids get when it comes to this event so that's why I was grateful for the opportunity to go to the Trunk 'O Treats event where Lucian got to meet Police Officers and Firemen. It gave me a chance to start introducing him to these services as part of a broader family emergency plan. Part of an emergency plan is preparing your child by introducing them to things like the sounds and lights of police cars, ambulances and firetrucks and also the people who provide these services so a child knows what the uniforms look like and who they can go to for safety. I got the idea from the Sesame Workshop. This is one treat I hope you'll check out. There are great links on the right side of the site where you can download printable PDFs of some important information to keep handy. There are also tools to help you communicate these concepts with your child. I really like the page that has the large phone keypad on it. I think it's a great tool to help a young child learn his/her phone number. If you click here it will download the PDF so you can see an example of what I mean. (Tip: I had to physically rename the file to add the dot pdf extension on it so my computer would open it.)
From our family to yours, we hope you had a very Happy and safe Halloween!
Instead of going to the mall or trick-or-treating door to door, we went to something called Trunk 'O Treats which was held at the Picture Rocks Community Center. Several families volunteered to dress up their vehicles stocked with goodies (as well as themselves) to line the perimeter of the parking lot. Picture Rocks Fire Dept., Trico Electric, the A&W Great Root Bear, C4PR and Arizona Youth Partnership were there to support the event. There was a decorated Sheriff's car where a male and female officer handed out badges and coloring books.
Our favorite part was the Picture Rocks Fire Department's firetruck. Lucian and all the other youngsters got to climb up and tour the firetruck. We had to pry Lucian out of it. He really loved sitting inside of it. No surprise as his Great-Grandfather was a Fire Chief once upon a time. (I just know my Grandpop was smiling down on us from Heaven that night with pride. If only he could have met Lucian. I really miss you Grandpop.) The firefighters were so awesome and entertaining. They were always willing to answer any questions. Lucian really loved inspecting a fireman's hat. He couldn't get enough of the flashlight attached to it.
Inside the building they had face painting and coloring supplies for the little ones.
There were also drinks, stickers and cookies for everyone. There were about 10 vehicles all decked out with some amazing decorations, music and special effects like a smoke machine. Everyone was dressed in costume and all the kids were adorable and pleasant.
We met up with some new friends and their two little boys as well as some other parents and their children. It was nice because everyone knew someone there and it felt like a very safe and secure environment. Lucian and his new little buddy held hands as we walked around visiting the different families at their cars. We brought our own bag of goodies and helped replenish a someone else's stock so we could feel like we too were sharing.
After that event, we headed over to Oma and Opa's house to Trick-or-Treat with them and they were very much delighted to spend the holiday for the first time in person with their grandson. Oma took Nemo by his little fin and walked him to a couple of doors around the block to say hello to their new neighbors and show off their little pride and joy. Daddy and I took the opportunity to teach Lucian a lesson in saying thank you and having patience while people answer the door.
I always have mixed feelings about Halloween because it's not the way I remember it and I'm still not certain about what I want my son to experience. I really don't like the idea of kids consuming so much candy. I don't mind the idea of the tradition and celebrating it, but I don't see why it has to be all about candy and unhealthy snacks. When I purchased treats this year, I got pencils, playdoh, bubbles, etc. I didn't go wild on the candy because we never get enough kids to hand it out to and then it sits in our house for us to deal with.
I just re-read my post on this from last year and I still feel the same way.
I wonder what you think about Halloween and how do you explain it to your kids?
I don't know. Maybe I'm the mean mommy and things will change as Lucian gets older and starts hanging with his friends. I don't care for the kind of mixed messages kids get when it comes to this event so that's why I was grateful for the opportunity to go to the Trunk 'O Treats event where Lucian got to meet Police Officers and Firemen. It gave me a chance to start introducing him to these services as part of a broader family emergency plan. Part of an emergency plan is preparing your child by introducing them to things like the sounds and lights of police cars, ambulances and firetrucks and also the people who provide these services so a child knows what the uniforms look like and who they can go to for safety. I got the idea from the Sesame Workshop. This is one treat I hope you'll check out. There are great links on the right side of the site where you can download printable PDFs of some important information to keep handy. There are also tools to help you communicate these concepts with your child. I really like the page that has the large phone keypad on it. I think it's a great tool to help a young child learn his/her phone number. If you click here it will download the PDF so you can see an example of what I mean. (Tip: I had to physically rename the file to add the dot pdf extension on it so my computer would open it.)
From our family to yours, we hope you had a very Happy and safe Halloween!
October 28, 2008
Grandma.app
Let me elaborate
I finally updated my website so I could integrate my blog into it. Now I can just tell people to go to 'themacmommy.com' and I don't have to worry about whether or not they'll remember the dot blogspot dot com part. The only thing I'll have to worry about is if they remember the 'the' part of the address.
(PITA, but macmommy.com is already registered so I had to put 'the' in front. Just in case you thought I was really that conceited.)
I've tried to lay out my home page as a sort of one-stop virtual business card. (Inspired by Dave Taylor, thank you Darling.) I'm still tweaking the rest of the site and pages, but the bulk of it is done. I'm pretty happy with the layout despite the fact that I barely know anything about building websites and that I made the whole thing in iWeb. On the blog I just kept tweaking numbers and code and previewing it till I figured out what changed what. My OCD must have kicked into overdrive and this probably explains why my eyes are so dry lately. I still wonder sometimes what would have happened had I studied web design in college instead of print graphics and advertising. Oh well. I'm having fun now and that's all that matters, right? There are lots of cool things I'd like my site to do, but this will suffice for now until I learn more. Baby steps. Goo goo ga ga.
(What baby ever says that anyhow? Just wondering.)
<--- You can use the page links on the left hand side of the page to explore other pages on my external website and social network.
It's always a work in progress because I love to tweak. It keeps my mind off of my allergies and gives me something to do (instead of cleaning the house) while potty training my son. (not that it hasn't been just so much fun hanging outstuck in my living room with a nekked kid running around who isn't me) Eventually I want to create a better page on my site to display some of my artwork and creative photography. I just have stupid links there for now. Don't click them. It's more of a reminder or placeholder for myself as to what I'd like to put there. I have all of my older photography all backed up on archive and I just have to dig it out and arrange it better. (An OCD attack for another time perhaps.)
I could never be a good scrapbooker. Thinking about it just makes me twitch.
And it's not like I don't have all the supplies sitting in my closet either just in case all the computers in our house ever break down and I have a nervous breakdown along with it.
I've also added some enhancements to my blog here. I hope you like them. You'll notice there are little icons after outgoing links. If you roll your cursor over those tiny icons, you'll get a preview of what the website looks like without even having to click over and leave the spot where you're currently reading. I find this helpful for those times when I may add a link that points to an image to illustrate some vague concept inside my head. Like this one.
I've also added a new commenting system called Disqus. Now you can leave me text comments as well as video. (go ahead, I double, dog dare ya!) If you don't have a Disqus account, you can still leave comments, but Disqus is pretty cool and free to sign up. So is seesmic. Just sayin. Sometimes it's a bit funky to be able to read everyone else's comments to each other — kinda like you're spying on them and reading their mail — but I suppose you could be all ninja about it and leave yourself annonymous or "unclaimed" somehow so no one would know it was you who talked about your mother-in-law out in the open. I'm looking forward to seeing comments using this new feature. I hope someone leaves me a video comment sometime. That would be a lot of fun. If I could get my friends and family on board with these free services, it would be a really great way to keep in touch through my blog. Ahh, the power of web 2.0 — if only I could get people to use it now! (Hint: the more people who participate with me on my blog, the more examples I'd have to show them.)
Thanks to help from friends on twitter, I FINALLY got the favicon thingee working on everything including my spot on the Alltop Moms page. (Tip: there are lots of awesome blogs on that page, so if you are looking for someone specifically, just press command-F and type in parts of their blog name and Firefox or Safari will highlight the link for you. If you want to search for me, for example, type 'the' 'mac' 'mommy' with spaces and it will take you right to it.) w00t! Thanks for all your help guys! You rawk! (and contribute to my OCD, thankyouverymuch)
The only time the favicon doesn't load is if you type the url into the browser. For example, if you type 'themacmommy.com' and load the pages, then the favicon doesn't load and the url locations don't change either. This has to do with the fact that I'mcheap/poor, take your pick a stubborn frugalista and trying to stretch the outer limits of free content hosting wherever I can. My blog is hosted for free here on Blogger. My website is hosted for free with Cox, my ISP. All of my photo and movie sharing needs are hosted for free with services like Picasa, YouTube and Vimeo. I've taken all of these free services and stitched them all together using a combination of embedded code and links on my blog and website; you know, "internet glue." Google is my favorite type of "internet glue."
So, to professional web designers, I'm sorry if all the under-stitching looks like crap, but the fact is, my 80-year old Nana who lives 3000 miles away — doesn't care. She just likes to click on stuff and I like to imagine the smile that melts across her face when she sees her great grandson in movies and pictures that she doesn't have to fumble with in her mail program. (So long as her Windows box loads the correct plugins - I keep my fingers crossed or walk her through it over the phone.)
I guess you could say that my grandmothers are my driving force when it comes to doing what I do online and how I create content using my Mac. My paternal grandmother, Nana, has a computer and is pretty savvy when it comes to being organized. She knows how to check her emailand forward virus hoaxes, because she cares about me, ya know and respond to messages. She can navigate the web. She finds joy in simple things and that really inspires me. My maternal grandmother does not have a computer and is a traditional artist. (She would rather put ink to paper and I don't think she's ever even touched a mouse. She only knows of the mammal kind and would keep it as a pet if she could.) I respect her unwillingness to embrace technology and it challenges me that much more to find simple tools she might possibly consider. I get the creative influence from her. Both grandmothers are in their eighties so anything I create online or offline has to be easy to use.
My sole motivation for learning how to use iMovie is so I can someday create a collection of videos and make a DVD using iDVD to send to my grandmothers so she they watch it on their TVs. Now I just need to get my optical drive fixed and I can move forward with that project.
Every time I sign up for a new social networking service, I have my Nana and other family members in mind. I always wonder if it would be something they could use or would like. Most of the time, sadly, the answer is no for several complex reasons. I continue to look for ways in which families and friends can network and keep in touch using the web. Just a few days ago I walked my Dad through the installation and setup of a Skype account and the result was awesome and we had so much fun. (iChat is fun too, but has been having some quality issues lately.)
Most of my friends and family live on the other side of the country. The distance always keeps me reaching out to them in new ways.
So far, the best way I have found is to try it all out, use it for a while and then incorporate the best parts of it somehow into my online space in such a way that I can just email one simple link to a friend or family member. That's what I'm hoping to achieve with my website and blog and I hope it will inspire others.
I finally updated my website so I could integrate my blog into it. Now I can just tell people to go to 'themacmommy.com' and I don't have to worry about whether or not they'll remember the dot blogspot dot com part. The only thing I'll have to worry about is if they remember the 'the' part of the address.
(PITA, but macmommy.com is already registered so I had to put 'the' in front. Just in case you thought I was really that conceited.)
I've tried to lay out my home page as a sort of one-stop virtual business card. (Inspired by Dave Taylor, thank you Darling.) I'm still tweaking the rest of the site and pages, but the bulk of it is done. I'm pretty happy with the layout despite the fact that I barely know anything about building websites and that I made the whole thing in iWeb. On the blog I just kept tweaking numbers and code and previewing it till I figured out what changed what. My OCD must have kicked into overdrive and this probably explains why my eyes are so dry lately. I still wonder sometimes what would have happened had I studied web design in college instead of print graphics and advertising. Oh well. I'm having fun now and that's all that matters, right? There are lots of cool things I'd like my site to do, but this will suffice for now until I learn more. Baby steps. Goo goo ga ga.
(What baby ever says that anyhow? Just wondering.)
<--- You can use the page links on the left hand side of the page to explore other pages on my external website and social network.
It's always a work in progress because I love to tweak. It keeps my mind off of my allergies and gives me something to do (instead of cleaning the house) while potty training my son. (not that it hasn't been just so much fun hanging out
I could never be a good scrapbooker. Thinking about it just makes me twitch.
And it's not like I don't have all the supplies sitting in my closet either just in case all the computers in our house ever break down and I have a nervous breakdown along with it.
I've also added some enhancements to my blog here. I hope you like them. You'll notice there are little icons after outgoing links. If you roll your cursor over those tiny icons, you'll get a preview of what the website looks like without even having to click over and leave the spot where you're currently reading. I find this helpful for those times when I may add a link that points to an image to illustrate some vague concept inside my head. Like this one.
I've also added a new commenting system called Disqus. Now you can leave me text comments as well as video. (go ahead, I double, dog dare ya!) If you don't have a Disqus account, you can still leave comments, but Disqus is pretty cool and free to sign up. So is seesmic. Just sayin. Sometimes it's a bit funky to be able to read everyone else's comments to each other — kinda like you're spying on them and reading their mail — but I suppose you could be all ninja about it and leave yourself annonymous or "unclaimed" somehow so no one would know it was you who talked about your mother-in-law out in the open. I'm looking forward to seeing comments using this new feature. I hope someone leaves me a video comment sometime. That would be a lot of fun. If I could get my friends and family on board with these free services, it would be a really great way to keep in touch through my blog. Ahh, the power of web 2.0 — if only I could get people to use it now! (Hint: the more people who participate with me on my blog, the more examples I'd have to show them.)
Thanks to help from friends on twitter, I FINALLY got the favicon thingee working on everything including my spot on the Alltop Moms page. (Tip: there are lots of awesome blogs on that page, so if you are looking for someone specifically, just press command-F and type in parts of their blog name and Firefox or Safari will highlight the link for you. If you want to search for me, for example, type 'the' 'mac' 'mommy' with spaces and it will take you right to it.) w00t! Thanks for all your help guys! You rawk! (and contribute to my OCD, thankyouverymuch)
The only time the favicon doesn't load is if you type the url into the browser. For example, if you type 'themacmommy.com' and load the pages, then the favicon doesn't load and the url locations don't change either. This has to do with the fact that I'm
So, to professional web designers, I'm sorry if all the under-stitching looks like crap, but the fact is, my 80-year old Nana who lives 3000 miles away — doesn't care. She just likes to click on stuff and I like to imagine the smile that melts across her face when she sees her great grandson in movies and pictures that she doesn't have to fumble with in her mail program. (So long as her Windows box loads the correct plugins - I keep my fingers crossed or walk her through it over the phone.)
I guess you could say that my grandmothers are my driving force when it comes to doing what I do online and how I create content using my Mac. My paternal grandmother, Nana, has a computer and is pretty savvy when it comes to being organized. She knows how to check her email
My sole motivation for learning how to use iMovie is so I can someday create a collection of videos and make a DVD using iDVD to send to my grandmothers so she they watch it on their TVs. Now I just need to get my optical drive fixed and I can move forward with that project.
Every time I sign up for a new social networking service, I have my Nana and other family members in mind. I always wonder if it would be something they could use or would like. Most of the time, sadly, the answer is no for several complex reasons. I continue to look for ways in which families and friends can network and keep in touch using the web. Just a few days ago I walked my Dad through the installation and setup of a Skype account and the result was awesome and we had so much fun. (iChat is fun too, but has been having some quality issues lately.)
Most of my friends and family live on the other side of the country. The distance always keeps me reaching out to them in new ways.
So far, the best way I have found is to try it all out, use it for a while and then incorporate the best parts of it somehow into my online space in such a way that I can just email one simple link to a friend or family member. That's what I'm hoping to achieve with my website and blog and I hope it will inspire others.
October 27, 2008
Installed Disqus
Well, I think I installed Disqus, but I told it to apply to new posts since I didn't want to lose comments from prior posts or at least that's what it sounded like would happen. I'm a wuss, what else can I say. Maybe that cool chic Mattie will come back here and tell me if Disqus is working on my blog ;) and why do they call it Disqus with a 'q?' I guess Discuss was already taken or it was just a kewler name perhaps. hmmmm.
I'm still tinkering with the favicon image formats in my blogger code because it still looks like crap on alltop. Reminder to myself, right now I only have .ico and .png formats listed in the code. I removed the .gif and that didn't help so now I'm removing the .jpg format to see if it's the .png that alltop prefers. I also wonder if the order listed has anything to do with it. I have .ico listed first in the code because if I put anything else before it, my favicon has a little white border around it and it looks like crap in the new version of FireFox where the favicon is now on top of a silver background. Mozilla could have left that part alone in my opinion! Plus you can no longer click on the favicon to highlight the entire url address which is a trick I had been showing my clients in FF and Safari. I've now gotten trained to press command-L to highlight the url box and command-K for the search box, so I suppose it doesn't matter so much to me personally because I'm a quick key type of girl. For those who's muscle memory is trained to click the little ball or favicon, this will be hard to unlearn.
Anyhow, that's my current state of rants at the moment!
Now, blogger blog! I command you do add in Disqus commenting and obey the new template I just pasted in! Do it!! Listen to me!!
I'm still tinkering with the favicon image formats in my blogger code because it still looks like crap on alltop. Reminder to myself, right now I only have .ico and .png formats listed in the code. I removed the .gif and that didn't help so now I'm removing the .jpg format to see if it's the .png that alltop prefers. I also wonder if the order listed has anything to do with it. I have .ico listed first in the code because if I put anything else before it, my favicon has a little white border around it and it looks like crap in the new version of FireFox where the favicon is now on top of a silver background. Mozilla could have left that part alone in my opinion! Plus you can no longer click on the favicon to highlight the entire url address which is a trick I had been showing my clients in FF and Safari. I've now gotten trained to press command-L to highlight the url box and command-K for the search box, so I suppose it doesn't matter so much to me personally because I'm a quick key type of girl. For those who's muscle memory is trained to click the little ball or favicon, this will be hard to unlearn.
Anyhow, that's my current state of rants at the moment!
Now, blogger blog! I command you do add in Disqus commenting and obey the new template I just pasted in! Do it!! Listen to me!!
Comment Back
Just wondering something. When you leave comments on other people's blogs, do you expect people to comment back? If so, how do you prefer getting that comment delivered to you? I comment on lots of other people's blogs and I usually don't expect a comment back, but occasionally I do wonder what they thought of my comment. There have been some blogs I've visited that allow you to be notified when someone comments on your comment. Some I like, some are just annoying because then your inbox gets filled with a bunch of comments unrelated to my comment so I end up unsubscribing to that comment thread anyhow.
I'm going to try enabling a commenting service called Disqus and see how it goes. Let me know if you like this once I add it. I'd love to see some video comments too! (hint hint, no pressure or nuthin!)
I'm going to try enabling a commenting service called Disqus and see how it goes. Let me know if you like this once I add it. I'd love to see some video comments too! (hint hint, no pressure or nuthin!)
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