And then here he is playing games on Gram’s iPad.  He’s got his “thinking-eyebrows” in full effect

He’s pretty lucky, born into an age where the user interface can be controlled directly by digits, rather than through an intermediary (like a mouse).  There’s no learning curve.  In fact, he gets pretty mad when put in front of a non-touch screen (and so do we, having to wipe off fingerprints galore).

Ted’s not always glued to a screen though. He does occasionally read to cats:

Still a few pieces to pick up, but I’ve recovered all the posts, pictures and comments.

Regular toddler-oriented posting will resume soon.

Instead of backing up our photos on just a hard drive, or just DVD discs, I had started pushing them up onto the Amazon S3 online storage service.  (It’s like a hard-drive on the internet.)  While a little technical in nature, it offered lots of reliable storage for about two bucks a month.

Fast forward to life today – we have this little boy who is awesome, and not one but two digital cameras snapping away the moments.  Backing up photos online has been relatively easy, and I’ve been able to keep up with it.   The only downside to this is that in 2008 we took nearly 3000 photos, and we’re on track to take more than that this year.

So – the cost to store them has been increasing (as Amazon S3 charges you more the more you upload).  Instead of paying 25 bucks a year (pre-Ted cost), we’re now on track to pay 50 or 60 bucks a year, and it will only get more expensive.   We had to switch to something more affordable.

Enter Flickr, which has been around for a while, and offers lots of online photo storage.  In fact, for 24 bucks a year you can get unlimited photo storage.   Its also much more easy to use, and keeps track of all the photo’s meta data (like the date it was really taken, the camera used, and lots more) and allows you to organize everything in interesting ways. It also keeps copies of the original photo, which means no weird resizing or compression.

This past weekend I finally finished uploading the full lot of our photos. It took about two weeks of uploading them at night to get them all up there, and from here on out its just the occasional upload of photos as we take them.

Flickr offers privacy on a per-photo basis – meaning we can keep embarrassing photos under wraps, while allowing us to share the good ones.

The only real downside compared to Amazon S3 is that I can’t back up non-photo/video files with Flickr – so documents, freelance work, and music files will still have to be backed up somewhere else.

Sometimes I think I overthink all this (and thinking about overthinking… well that’s a lot of thinking), but we now have more than 10 years of digital photos, detailing our lives.  Keeping them around is important.

Conclusion:

Amazon S3 is hard to use for most folks, stores any file type, gets more expensive the more you use.

Flickr is easy to use for anyone, stores only photos and some video, maintains a fixed price.

Whatever you use (there are many backup options) make sure you have at least one backup method in place.   Lightning strikes, hard drives burn out, DVD’s get turned into coasters.   You just don’t have the negatives anymore.

A short list of things I would have written long blog posts if I wasn’t so into the whole parenting thing*.

1. The iPod Touch.  I picked this up as one-last-toy-for-me before Ted was born and can’t seem to not have it with me, ever. It’s like the iPhone, but without the phone part (and without the $60/month fees). Music, movies, Gmail and wifi internet in a tiny little package.  It’s awesome all around and has totally changed the way I think about the mobile internet and UI’s.

2. The new Portishead album called Third.  I listen to it all the time now, it’s great at-work music.  It’s been nearly a decade since they put out music, and the wait was well worth it.

3. The inevitable and long overdue demise of the giant SUV as daily driver.  Unfortunate that it comes with the price of declining economy, soaring food prices and a certain sense of dread every time I fill up.  It is exciting that the capitalism around it is spurring innovation and futurist thinking though.  Ted will no doubt fly his jetpack over homes made from recycled Tahoe’s.

4. Web technologies I’m learning about.  The past few months at work (and in freelance work) have filled my brain with new exciting knowledge about web design and the construction of websites.  I’ve spent a bunch of time learning about WordPress (the system that powers this blog), Drupal, and the jQuery javascript framework.  Learning is good, and I feel more confident about my skills with each passing week.

5. Fatherhood as subject matter.  I like writing and would like to write more about being a dad to Ted.  It’s the new highlight of my day, coming home to a family and hanging out with Ted on the weekends.  He’s high-maintenance, but every time he smiles at me I know what we’ve done is totally worth it.  I also know that its probably also diaper-change time.

Hopefully going forward there will be lots more posts on fatherhood.

* Full Disclaimer: I took a two hour nap after coming home from work today. Clearly there’s some time out there, just not as much for blogging.

Ted wanted to help me with my web design work.  At first, he just couldn’t concentrate.  He kept throwing pencils into the ceiling tiles.  Not productive:

Then he told me about this really big idea he had for a website.  Something about social networking or something, but for babies.

I was pretty happy that they all came to have lunch with me.  I found that hanging with the family around lunch time is way, way better then working.

One new feature they’ve added in metro areas (like Raleigh) is Street View.  Google actually paid some people to drive around all the streets in a given city and photograph everything.  They then stiched it all together and tied it to Google Maps so you can not only see an overhead map, you can actually see what’s there at eye-level (or what was there when the camera-car drove by).  For a long time they only had big, big cities like NY and LA, but more recently they’ve added medium sized cities like Worcester, Massachusetts and Raleigh, North Carolina.

I checked out the street where I park my car most days for work, and saw the Celica right there!  It’s a nice feeling to have my ride semi-imortalized on the internet.

They haven’t driven through our town yet, but maybe some day they will. Sometimes it feels a little big-brotherish, but for the most part it’s exciting stuff.

Many of our photos will not be eligible to win awards because they’re the kind of photos everyone takes. Camping trips, parties, super-hot silver cars, and maybe one or two of the cats… but they’re our photos and are important to us.

In days gone by we’d take printed photos and put them in the (relative) safety of a shoebox or photo album. Now we hardly print them out, only to fill the occasional album or photo frame. Many of our photos will remain bits and bytes forever.

I use to be fairly obsessive about backing up our pics onto shiny metal discs. This gave me the good feeling of knowing that should hard drive failure occur (it has, it will), our data would be tucked away somewhere safe.

That somewhere might even be your house. I’ve been stealthily leaving CD-R spindles of MP3 music files with friends for years, and leaving DVD-R’s of photos at my folk’s place whenever I got the chance. The thinking being that should wherever we were living be sucked into a black whole, I wouldn’t have to worry about our photos and data.

This was all well and good for then. The reality of now is that the allotted time I’ll have to burn discs will mostly likely be shrunk down considerably. The reality of the next few months is that we’re going to have this new life around here who will no doubt be attracting copious flashcubes, increasing the number of photos we have exponentially.

Dealing with the Ones and Zero’s
So here’s how I’m handling this. A few months ago I met up with a few co-workers (including DJ Sipe) and went to a local nerdy user group meeting to hear a guy from Amazon.com’s Web Services group come and speak about all the very nerdy things they offer web folks such as myself.

One of the things they offer is online storage. Cheap, plentiful online storage. And not just any old storage, backed-up backup-up storage. Whenever you upload a file to them (say a photograph), they automagically make backup copies of it at remote locations around the world. Should meteors strike down one of their server farms, our photos will be safely backed up at another.

And its cheap, too! It costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 a month to keep all our photos on their servers. I compare that with the $30+ a year I was spending on blank CD’s and DVD’s and then add in all the time it took me to burn them and, for me, it’s a moderate no-brainer. The only real downside is that the setup was a little complicated, and uploading all the photos took almost a week… but being able to set it and forget it makes it all worthwhile.

But
I wouldn’t recommend Amazon’s backup system to most folks… it’s complicated to set up and not very user friendly for day to day use. There are plenty of other online backup options that make it fairly easy to backup your data online. Picassa Web Albums and Flickr are good places to leave your digital photos, and Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword allow for online document storage and editing.

Save yourself from tears! Back up your data somehow!

You Have Betrayed Me for the Last Time
Oh man, what a strange and painful situation it’s been on the tubes. The full story reaches a level of nerdery that continues to hurt my head, but the short story is that you get what you pay for.

Here’s the medium-story: Once upon a time (way back in 2002) we registered Rockland-ave.com from the equivalent of the Building 19 (or Ocean State Job Lot if you’re from RI) of web hosting companies. Twenty five bucks a year seemed like a good deal for both the dot com name and the hosting space.

Five and a half years of poor service, frequent outages and slow response times lead me to almost switch hosting companies numerous times. My hand was forced last week when they deleted the database that held all our blog postings. No warning, no error message, just Error establishing a database connection.

I emailed the hosting company, hoping it could all be restored. The only reply from them I received was an error message stating that their email service had been turned off. Fantastic. I viewed this as a bad sign.

We very much wanted to hold onto the Rockland-ave.com domain name, as it was almost a like a brand for our micro-corner of the web, but it was not meant to be.  All my requests to transfer the domain name went unanswered.  Trying to set up the site again on their servers seemed like a bad idea, fearful it would disappear again.

But here at Rockland-ave AfterVictory.com, we adapt.  So here we are, new domain name, fresh new name-brand hosting service, plus I managed to recover/restore almost all our old posts and comments. I still have to plug in a few comments, but that’s more of a next weekend kind of thing.

Timely
Pushing aside my anger for the DMV-like service we had, and looking at this from afar, it’s not a terrible thing that we’ve changed domain names, and the timing seems sort of appropriate. AfterVictory.com (although a reference to jobs we held almost a decade ago) comes at a time when our lives are about to change significantly. It’s cool that we’ll always have the posts from the Rockland-ave days, like a digital scrapbook of sorts, but it’s also cool that we’re starting something new when we’re about to start a new phase of our lives.

That said, we’ll be keeping this site for a while. Update your bookmarks.

I also found time to finally fix our broken photo gallery here on Rockland-ave.com. It lives again, with all the old pics still in place. Apparently the hosting company upgraded their software, which screwed up our installation, resulting in me having to uninstall and reinstall the gallery a few times. We use the super-sweet open-source software called Gallery, by the way, which is great if you’re into the whole hosting-photos-on-your-own-website thing.

Friday night we went to Kat and Matt’s place where we were served Sukiyaki. It was tasty food, and good to see them again!

Saturday we hung around, did some Ted’s-room related crafts, and then at night went out to see the movie Juno. It was a good movie, filled with quality actors and actresses. The soundtrack was also excellent, as we picked it up on our way home the movie.

Today was comparatively lazy. I slept in, then went to visit DJ at his place. He got a Wii for Christmas, so we played some Metroid and some Super Mario. The Wii remote controller is great, it’s such a departure from traditional gameplay with its waving and pointing and whatnot. I bet Ted would like it.

Quite a week. Next weekend will be exciting as we’ll be back up in New England!

Once upon a time (~1998) I picked up a hotmail.com email address.  For a long time it was my only address and served my needs well.  It was easy to remember (first initial + last name, no numbers) and easy to tell others. It’s web-based interface made it easy to check from any old place that had the internets.

Hotmail has some downsides though.  It’s spam filtering is weak, and I get a lot of special offers from microsoft that I’m just not interested in.  For a long time they only gave you a very small storage space so I was constantly deleting old messages to make room for new messages and I had no way to save the old messages that I was deleting.  Some say that email is temporary and shouldn’t be saved, but some messages you just want to hang onto.  Perhaps that’s another post topic entirely.

Side story: In 2003ish I started using a second email address for freelance work. This was good because it kept all my freelance stuff seperate from my personal email.  It was bad because it was another address to remember to check and sort of confusing if the same person had both my addresses.   

I counted and think I’ve had (between work and life) around 8 different email addresses since I started college.

Anyhow, in 2005 I picked up a Gmail email account.  The kids at Google decided to sorta rethink the way people delt with and stored email.  No longer was I restricted to 10 measly megabytes of storage space like hotmail (Gmail offers 5+ gigabytes of storage) and now spam was esentially a thing of the past.  Almost everything about Gmail’s interface made silly tasks like attaching a file not such a herculean multi-screen effort.

Here are some of my favorite pieces of Gmail:

Gmail Supersweet Feature #1: Check other email account messages

I can now send and receive my freelance email account messages from within Gmail, saving me lot of time.  Gmail automatically picks up the messages from my freelance account and then sends selected messages as if they were coming from the freelance account.  This lets me keep seperate accounts still seperate but easy to access from a single account.  Gmail even automatically labels messages from other accounts so they’re easy to spot.

These labels (instead of traditional folders) let you assign short desriptions to messages that come in.  Gmail can even be set to assign them automatically.  For instance, every email I get from our credit card company gets the label of the card name and another label for finance.  Messages from my parents, sister, and Kate’s family all get automatically assigned a family label. 

I also have a filter set up that automatically pulls my work email, gives them a label, and then quickly removes them from my inbox into the account archive.  That way I can always get at my work email if I need it, but I never get bothered by/reminded of it at home. 

Gmail Supersweet Feature #2: Mail in the browser, mail in the client, all synced up (aka IMAP)

I use to use Outlook to check my freelance mail messages, and then I switched to Apple’s Mail.app client. I liked the email client feel of things, but hated backing up email and really despised not having my sent messages in Mail.app stay when I checked the messages in a web browser.

Along comes Gmail and their support for IMAP email syncing. Whatever I do in the web browser on the Gmail website automagically shows up when I use the Mail.app client, or Thunderbird or Outlook. Sent messages are always in a sent message folder, and labels are preserved (or displayed as folders). Thunderbird is excellent if you’re not tied to an Outlook office enviornment. It has nothing to do with this kind of Thunderbird though.

Gmail Supersweet Feature #3: Google Apps for Domains

Any time you sign up for a new domain name (say Rockland-ave.com, Firepizza.com, or even Northwoodsanimaltreats.com) you receive some kind of web-mail support.

The web-mail setup that came with Rockland-ave.com was particularly awful. It had no room for saved messages, leaving Kate with a lame email setup despite my best efforts. Along comes Google and their Apps for Domains offering. This, for free, runs all your domain’s email through Gmail.

This means that Kate gets to keep her email address and gets all the benefits of using Gmail (lots of space, spam filtering, etc).  I also have a Rockland-ave.com email address that I have automatically feed into my Gmail account.

So what does it all mean?  The kids at Google are working hard at making Email much easier on me.  With the impending birth of our first kid coming up in the next few months, I can’t wait to spend more time emailing news and photos to people and less time dealing with with the administration and technical details of email.