Ever get that feeling that you’re on the treadmill of life, and it’s set just a little too high for you to be comfortable? That you’re always sliding backwards? I finally have the feeling that I’m caught up again, and it came from the weirdest place. Normally, I post pictures to my photoblog in advance, keeping me from having to scramble at night to get any image up, just to have one for the next day. I just finished uploading the picture that will post on November 13th, which is almost 6 weeks away. I realized that I can now spend the next month looking for things I want to shoot, and spend the time to get it right, and not have to scramble to get something up for awhile. (Of course, the cost of this is my stock of ‘almost’ ready pictures has been totally depleted.)

It also made me think about other things. I’m actually in a really good place in regards to my projects at work – people seem to understand what I’m working on and more importantly, think it’s worthy of time and attention. It’s always good to feel appreciated, and it is comforting to know that I’m free to work on the jetpacks and moving sidewalks for the next phase of the project.

Further down the path of feeling good about life – things with Charlotte and Qais are wonderful. I can’t imagine being happier with my home situation than I am now. I’m sure there are small things that we would all like to change – most notably Q’s sleep schedule – but honestly, I’m really happy where we are and with the direction life seems to be leading us in. In all, I’m just happy with progress. It feels like we are making some.

We spent some time over the weekend at Duke Gardens. I had been dying to get out there again with my 70-200, and by the time I was done, I was dying to get a new camera bag. I’m not kidding. That lens is almost 3 lbs by itself, which hanging around your neck for 3 hours feels like a millstone. I had to switch off the zoom by the end, in favor of the 10-20mm wide angle lens, part due to weight and part due to hand shake.

So I’m looking at the Think Tank Digital Holster 40, a camera holster bag, and the corresponding belt system to attach the bag and other gear to. About $100 all told. About ¹⁄₂ the time I’m using the extra battery pack for the camera, and I don’t want to get a holster that will prevent me from using it. Honestly, the whole thing will make me look more like a dork than I currently do. Especially as I’d still carry the Crumpler backpack around for cleaning supplies, lunch and a laptop, possibly. But, it will take almost all weight off my neck, which will make long photowalks a lot more pleasant.

Dropbox has released their iPhone application. That is all.

I had been ignoring the ‘hey, upgrade to splunk 4.0’ message I’ve been getting, as there isn’t a free license that I could find in the 4.0 release branch, and splunk 3 was doing everything I needed. Little did I know, splunk is working on a new free license, due out in Q4 2009. I’ve been playing with the new enterprise release at work some – and it’s totally worth the upgrade. If you already have log monitoring up and running, this may not be the tool for you, but it’s still pretty wicked, and it’s worth looking at.

Download the free demo.

I’ve been meaning to post an update about Qais for awhile now, but haven’t gotten around to it. If you’ve missed it, there’s a lot of pics of him on flickr and on facebook.

He’s starting to talk a lot. He’s not saying anything we can understand, but he says it very often, and damnit, he means it! Very vehement at times – quite entertaining to listen to. I’ve been trying to catch some of it on my iPhone with the voice memo feature, but so far I’ve not been pleased with the results. His other favorite sound to make, when he’s not trying to talk, is what we have started to call his ‘dinosaur noises’. He’ll open his mouth really wide, and hold it open, and then make a single sound that goes on for as long as he can exhale. He’s not playing with tones or notes or syllables. He’s just going for “how long can I make this one noise”? It’s really quite endearing. I’m not sure the other guests at the restaurant thought that the other night.

Which leads me into the next bit. We’re totally out of the phase where we can take him out to nice places. A few weeks ago, he surprised us by grabbing the lip of my water glass at a restaurant, and pulling the whole thing over on the table. Luckily, it was well before the dinner rush, so nobody got mad at us. Still, he’s getting to be a danger to the public order. We knew this day would come – when we wouldn’t go out anymore because of him – but it’s still sad to know it’s here. It’s time to gear up with the baby sitters/grandmothers to arrange our quiet times, I guess.

He’s also on the verge of crawling. We keep thinking he’s about to do it, but he never quite makes it into forward motion. He’s able to turn himself around (full 360s), get up onto his hands and feet with his belly fully off the floor, and move backwards. Just no forward movement. He also never bothered with rolling over. He can, if he really wants to, but doesn’t seem to care much about it. Charlotte and I have both read a lot that it’s normal for a large percentage of kids to skip that stage, and honestly, I’m happier without it. The thing he really has mastered recently is sitting up. He can’t get himself into the position, but once he’s sitting, he’s hard to knock over. He’s got amazing balance, and it takes a strong push to overcome his center of gravity. (We only push him over when he’s sitting on the bed, not to worry).

I’ll let Charlotte cover the food he’s been eating recently.

I finally got motivated this weekend to load up the old laptop with XMBC, dig out the Apple Remote, and hook everything into our mostly unused television. We now have a proper interface to watch our movies and television shows (legally purchased and format-shifted), without having to dig out the actual disks. I’ve even started boxing up the disks we’ve already re-encoded to save bookshelf space.

The only problem I’ve run into is the configuration of XBMC itself. Much like a lot of open source projects, it assumes you already know how to use it, and that the more features, the better. It took me an hour of futzing about to finally get all my media sources defined in the right places (in the Video section, not in the File Browser, for example), and to get all the folders tagged and imported properly so the Library functions would work. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a cool package – but it could benefit greatly from an improved setup/installation guide.

I guess it’s time to finally bite the bullet and learn launchd. It’s rather more complex than crontab, though it is more flexible and extendable. The real problem, however, is that Apple simply deletes the file /etc/crontab when you upgrade to Snow Leopard. Which is pretty hostile, but gets the message across that we should stop using it.

It should also be noted that the developer of Lingon, the launchd plist creator, has decided to stop development. Which isn’t fun for us – it was an incredibly handy tool. Now I need to find (or write) something similar to the Solaris 10 SMF Generator, which I can’t find just now.