Pinky Gone Driving Little tidbits not meant for human consumption

Here's a sneak peek at some of the songs that we sing to Rose at various times. Big, Big Girl comes out often at bathtime, Sweet Pea is an all-around favorite and High-Needs Baby was this morning's hit after nursing to sleep for a solid 30 minutes and then waking up to play with the cat. Enjoy

Big, Big Girl (jazzy)
She's a big, big girl. She's big as can be.
She's a big, big girl. She's almost bigger than me.
Big, Big girl, honey B. I. G.
She got that way drinking Mom's boobie tea.

She's a big, big girl. She's as big as can be.
She's a big, big girl, movin' big and free.
Big, big girl, honey me oh my
My big, big girl's got Michelin thighs.

Sweet Pea
Sweet pea, sweet pea
She's so sweet and she is my pea
Sweet pea, sweet pea
Sweet as a pea is sweet as can be
Sweet pea, sweet pea
I'm so happy that she's sweet on me

High-Needs Baby (bluesy)
She's my high-needs baby
Uh huh, uh huh
And I don't mean maybe
Uh huh, uh huh
She loves to munch and chew and groan<
All night long she rolls and moans

Spent some hours the past couple of days reading Practical Common Lisp about a computer language called LISP. One of the things about LISP that really appeals to me is the facility for macros. This allows one to write functions that return code and then use that returned code in a program. I often find myself writing nearly identical function definitions in a variety of places and it would be great to replace that stuff with a macro that produced the nearly-but-not-totally identical definitions automatically. I will have to keep LISP in mind next time I have a little project that could be a testbed.

Other helpful resources include SLIME, Emacs and OpenMCL which all conspire to make a great LISP environment for Mac OS X.

This post offers some food for thought on why geeks make good dads. The ones that I most identify with are

3. MATH. A huge plus here. No matter how old they get, Steve can still help with the math homework. My ability to be of assistance is going to last another few years before *I* end up throwing the math homework across the room in disgust.

for obvious reasons and

9. SMART IS COOL. Having a Geek for a father instills the message into your children that smart is cool. They idolize Daddy. Hopefully, they'll want to grow up to be just like him.

because, gosh-darn-it being idolized ROCKS! It makes up for just about anything during your day to get a toothless smile from that chubby pink face when you get home. I'm a proud geek dad today.

Have you always wondered who you would be if you were a sports car? Take this short quiz to find out the answer. "Me?", you ask. I'm a Porsche Boxster, which they describe as

You're stylish, nimble, and good-looking. When it comes to having fun, there are few who can surpass you. And yet, you suffer from a lingering inferiority complex. Maybe it's because you have an older relative who is always in the limelight?

It's hard for me to argue with that.

I must have found more free time than I really should have, because I am posting this from the little desktop blogger app that I whupped up in less than a day using Cocoa, Python and the deliriously wonderful Python-to-ObjectiveC bridge PyObjC.

The app is called GolbPy and currently supports only one blog using the Blogger API and you can't go back and change your mind, so be careful what it is that you're posting. It has no features and is all future, but hey, what else is software development for?

Here is the illustrious product

This is a test of the non-emergency PyBlogger system.

I posted this from a Python session using Drupal's XML-RPC interface by way of a Python module called PyBlogger.

I anticipate that in my copious free time I will dream of putting together a simple Cocoa/PyObjC application to leverage this module into a free blogging app for MacOS X, which doesn't currently exist, to my knowledge.

This post was also helpful in getting me on the right track.

I have been working with a new computer code this week that outputs its results as HDF files. These are a standard format for scientific data, but they are opaque to the "naked eye". Because it is a binary, compressed format, it isn't possible to look at the files with a text editor and see what they contain (say, to learn the inner workings of a new program). But, lo and behold, I dug up a Python module called PyHDF that exposes the data as Python objects. So, since I enjoy using Python I can now poke around in these HDF files at will. This is primarily the reason that I love Python: object-orientation and a shload of contributed modules to do just about anything.

After reading this article on typography for the web, I've switched the font on Pinky Gone Driving. Typography and graphic design have always been interests of mine, ever since I was the editor of our high school's newspaper. Desktop Publishing (DTP) has always interested me ever since it became possible. The first time that I saw Quark Express I nearly crapped my pants. (Having a 4 month-old makes you talk like this.)

I've been making web pages for various purposes for a long time (HTML 1.0 anyone?) and I've tried to keep things as readable and visually interesting as I can. I have been teaching myself CSS for a while now and am just about to redo my ugliest current web page. Stay tuned. You'll be seeing more Sans Serif fonts, two column layouts and CSS styling.

I had an odd weekend marked by two unusual occurences. First, I saw Sy Safransky, the publisher of The Sun leaving the co-op the other night. I knew that The Sun was based in Chapel Hill, and that Sy was a local (his name's even in the phone book!) but I had yet to see him in the flesh. Thanks to a picture of him on the cover of some other magazine in the checkout line at the co-op I knew what he looked like and that resulted in my pleasant double-take on that fateful night. I considered going after thim just to say "Love your magazine, man" but decided against pestering him. Although, I probably blew my chance to see myself referred to by Sy in print as "some guy outside the grocery store".

The other unusual experience was an exceptional hand of cards. The game was Pinochle, which Lara and I have recently started playing at night after Rose goes to bed and we get our chores done. (It supplanted cribbage which was our previous nocturnal card game.) For the first time ever I got the double book, the highest possible combination of cards in the game. Diamonds was trump and I melded 166 points on the hand. Pinochle fans, you appreciate how cool this was. Everyone else will have to trust me on how rare this is. It was indeed an exceptional weekend.

I upgraded my laptop to Mac OS 10.4 today and I feared that I would not be able to listen to most of my music, since it is encoded as Ogg Vorbis files and the Quicktime Components project that did make this possible had gone stale. Their latest version did not work with the newest version of Quicktime that was a part of the newest version of MacOS. But, the time had come to upgrade the OS on my laptop, after I had done it on my desktop and gotten hooked on Dashboard.

But, lo and behold, there is a new project to update the quicktime Ogg support and it works with Quicktime 7. So now I'm listnening to Ogg music files, and looking at the status in Dashboard