I posted a bunch of new pictures on Flickr from August. They include shots from yesterday when we had some fun in the rain with umbrellas and rain boots.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:43 PM | Permalink

I can't explain a sudden jump in my flickr stats from the past couple of days. I was uploading a lot of videos from the past 3 weeks which would have provided new content but nothing too interesting. I think their stats tool is broken. It says I jumped from 2-3 visits per day to over 5,000. All the links to it were "direct" which also seems odd.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:16 PM | Permalink

I finally updated some of the recent photos onto Flickr. Among my experiments is to tag the photos that I like with a tag called "POD" so that I can filter down the library to a set of good pictures. I looked back over it tonight to get some perspective on 2008, the year of the Zack, so far.

This is the POD slide show that mainly includes 2008's best pictures from my cameras since Zachary was born.

Life lately has been generally hectic. The start-up is doing well but always feels like we teeter between break-out expansion and risk of collapse because we are such a small group. With the stock market tumbling and the debates rolling towards the elections times appear to be changing in some direction. Hopefully prosperity and confidence will return to the world soon. I'm off to Beerse for a business trip next week so it will be interesting to see the world on the other side of the Atlantic.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:17 AM | Permalink

With the new eye-fi card from Yuval's company I have the capacity to instantly publish photos. I looked into integrating this with my world and came to the conclusion that instant publishing to web sharing sites is a good thing for reducing overhead on my side in publishing pictures. I reviewed the policies of Picasa Web albums and Flickr and came to the conclusion that Flickr was a better deal. Flickr offers unlimited file posting (we'll see how they like how many photos I want to publish) and has a free bandwidth restricted model (100MB per month) which is pretty much useless or a "Pro" model where you pay $24/year for unlimited bandwidth to Flickr and unlimited storage. Google/Picasa offer a disk space model where you pay for a block of disk space annually and for about 500GB it looked like it would come to $500 per year. I opted for Flickr's model so they have me locked in for 2 years while I try them out. I figure if it doesn't work out after 2 years there will be a new model by then for how to share what appears to be ridiculous amounts of photos today but in reality is just the amount you can generate with 2GB or 4GB flash cards and easy access to offload them to a network. My limitations are really on the storage local side which for now is about 1TB.

Anyways with all that said I basically started a new photo library at Flickr that I will soon link or RSS integrate with the existing archive I have on my site. The new library will be at http://www.flickr.com/photos/danhousman/archives/ and hopefully it will be self explanatory for how to wander through Flickr to find whatever photo you want to see. One big adjustment for me is that I have had to group photos by date ranges to keep them straight on my side. Flickr can use the EXIF data from the camera to automatically group photos by day so I will try to stop organizing in that way and let Flickr figure out where in an archive to order the photos. One confusing thing for me will be sorting out what a public viewer vs. me the publisher sees. I just don't know what that looks like but I am trying to make pictures public for viewing where I can. The new library picks-up in late January and has most of time through March 4th.

Posted by Dan Housman at 01:17 AM | Permalink

Yuval's company Eye-Fi has been doing great work these past few years. I remember when Madeline was not even born chatting with Yuval about his original concept that looked like some device to attach to cameras to snag photos off of them and how he was considering leaving Cisco to pursue it. Last week on Friday a day before Zachary's arrival was rapidly approaching he asked about when I would get one of his wireless cards and start using it to get my photos out faster. Meanwhile he was heading out to the Consumer Electronics Show to achieve his destiny to win the CES award for best gadget, a nerd of the year type honor. I am hoping to receive my new Eye-Fi card in the mail shortly to help get photos online a little more effectively than in the past. As step one I have purchased a LaCie 2 terabyte RAID network storage drive where I will move all my photos and media to. Step two will be to upgrade one of my PCs to make it a modern machine to speed photo editing and other things I do in the office.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:35 PM | Permalink

I finally got around to posting pictures from September through December. They are in the photo library.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I finally got around to posting the photos from this summer. I was aghast to see that I had photos from our trip to Disney World in May that I hadn't managed to post. They are all in the photo library with a bunch of new dates.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:18 PM | Permalink

It's been so busy these past few months. I finally got around to taking the photos on the hard drive and put them up on the web. The photo library was getting rather busy so I dumped anything before 2007 into an archive.

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I finally got around to posting the late November and December pictures. I guess my routine has moved to taking a month of pictures and then jamming them through. They are in the photo library.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:59 PM | Permalink

I finally noticed that Dave K. had posted the pictures of our trip to Kilimanjaro. I was looking because his sister Ranu just had triplets and I was checking because he had those photos up. Any time Sarah and I feel a bit overwhelmed with one baby we should imagine three all at once.

Congrats to the four new babies in the world that I know. Dave's sister and her husband Mike had three and Jeremy's sister Amy and her husband also had a girl. We are looking forwards to meeting two or three new friend babies in the upcoming year.

In honor of all of this Sarah and I watched the Hugh Grant movie Nine Months last night. The credits roll and show all of the actors in it as babies. You could tell who was who (Robin Williams, Hugh Grant, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Arnold, Julianne Moore, and Joan Cusack) without the titles.

Madeline is pretty excited and dancing around daily to the tunes of Sesame street and multiple versions including my own made-up one of "The Wheels on the Bus". If I could just find another song as long as Wheel's on the bus and as easy to remember that has equal entertainment value I would be psyched. The beauty of that song is that it lasts forever when I want to quiet an angry little girl in the back seat. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, and Row-Row-Row Your Boat can be sung as a medley and it still only seems to work for about two or three minutes.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:18 PM | Permalink

I took an excessive number of pictures of Madeline wearing her Baby Style turtle Halloween outfit during our walk in the arboretum on Sunday. Here are the pics.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:42 AM | Permalink

Today is some heritage foundation event in the UK where they are trying to collect a day in the life of the UK. I heard that on the radio while driving towards Needham this morning. They are planning on getting non-bloggers to write what they did today and submit it to their archive so that historians have the content in 100 years to learn things about how we lived today. It reminded me that I haven’t been able to write lately given all of the business of shuttling through life. So I’ll attempt to get back into the groove of things for the Brits. I might even send them some info from across the pond.

The last two days have been marked by a choice for movies that involved some depressing thoughts. The first was Interview with a Vampire. It was a pretty bad movie in terms of the acting or directing. It left me with the impression either that the book by Anne Rice must be much better than the movie OR that the book itself must be melodramatic and stupid. I just didn’t get into or feel any empathy for any of the characters. Then last night we watched Kids. Sarah had originally stated that we needed something less dramatic and a light comedy but changed her mind for whatever reason. Kids was the kind of movie where towards the middle of it I started to think to myself – I can’t wait for this to end. For me, the father of a soon to be one year old baby, watching children in New York with various drug usage and abusive sexual situations was very traumatic. I may have been better off watching a horror movie like Saw, Hostel, or some other graphic disturbing piece of content. Jeremy had asked me why I wanted to see it a few weeks back but I wasn’t dissuaded. I won’t try hard to dissuade other people from seeing it but it is quite a traumatic experience to watch it. In the interest of dissuading people from watching a movie I recommend that nobody rents the Butterfly Effect II. I saw the first one and when I saw that a sequel had been made at Hollywood Video I nearly went berserk running along the aisles knocking DVDs onto the floor or pulling the tape out of VHS cassettes. I refrained.

The main delay and hubbub causing my writing stoppage were the two weddings from the past two weeks combined with a trade show, marketing activities, and taking on some new work with Peter. Madeline hasn’t become the ideal sleeper that Ozzie and Harriet had yet. Last night she threw a little party for us at 11 PM to 1 AM. I got a chance to watch some TV on the recently hooked-up HD antennae on the roof. I don’t get channel 7 so I couldn’t watch Monday Night Football. Instead I watched some awful night version of a daytime television show where a video game developer was in love with some woman (good looking) about to marry a man (also good looking). The story had something to do with cheating on New Year’s Eve but I was mainly just trying to get Madeline to calm into sleep. Madeline is mobile enough to open doors and she opened the door to our bedroom while Sarah was trying to sleep. So Sarah went to nurse her as Seinfeld came on in the living room. I decided to go back to sleep rather than watch Seinfeld as a sign of solidarity with Sarah in our fight to achieve a regular sleep balance.

Saturday night was Hattie and Jose’s wedding. They were married at Trinity church in Copley. Madeline was sent out to Bedford for the night. The main result of that was a question from Sarah’s mother to ask us if we knew what “DaDaKiDa” meant. We don’t. But Madeline has picked-up some new language tricks. My favorite one is that the sign for time to go is to do the basketball traveling penalty sign followed by a tapping on an imaginary watch. I noticed when Madeline is a little bored or ready to leave where she is she will tap her wrist impatiently. It’s quite endearing to see and better than the normal squawks and shrieks we hear most of the time.

Today Annie Leibowitz was on the radio hawking her new book of photographs including a large number of personal photos of her family and Susan Sontag dying. It reminded me when Kate told me at the wedding that as a graphic designer that she shouldn’t be using stock photography but instead should use original photo art. At first I thought she felt that I should show her how to use a camera at which point I told her I could teach her everything I knew in a few minutes. Then she clarified that I should do some artistic photography and send her the photos as possible art for her graphic design work. I told her my main work is focused on countless shots of family members growing older and that I was less of an artist than someone who struggles with the concept of passing time, aging, and who clings to the positive or emotional memories of life. Maybe that’s what a photographer is anyways. I did let her know that I felt the plain blue stained glass with a shadow threefold of gargoyles at Trinity behind the pews would have made a good photograph if I had remembered to bring my camera into the church. Maybe I’d benefit greatly from some photography classes or to read a book about photography. I could benefit from almost anything to escape the humdrum of my regular routine.

My brand new Canon Elph camera broke only a day after I got it in the mail. It is already on it’s way back to Canon-land for repairs. It may not have been a great idea to take it out at Lisa and Dave’s wedding while partying hard near the dance floor but I’ll stick by the story that they should fix it because it is under warrantee and I didn’t even jump into the Colorado river or go caving with it.

Lisa and Dave’s wedding was a beautiful sunny fall day. The ceremony was in the Newton Centre Playground. Having it there made it hard for me not to raise memories from being 10-18. I basically used that park as a backyard for those years and remember meeting girls I had crushes on while sitting on a bench only a few feet away from where the ceremony was across from the hut where I had gone to camp one summer. We had swung on the swings cross country skied over jumps on the sledding hill. I ran home sweaty in my father’s button-up shirt after singing “Cheese glorious cheese” with the chorus of the Mason Rice School. I walked both alone and with friends on fences . Ray, our German shepherd jumped over the fence repeatedly. Some Chinese kid threatened to make me eat a worm. So I was thinking of these things along with random thoughts of what to say during my role as a toast giver during the backyard reception. The reception did borrow my well crafted and invented description of the meaning of the Chuppah.
…..
As always.. I ran out of time to chronicle things. Maybe next time…It’ll all be clear in the pictures of the weddings as soon as I can get them out.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:39 PM | Permalink

To whom it may concern,

The camera (PowershotSD 700 IS Digital Elph) that I purchased on October 1st has a problem where the lens will not retract. I had placed the camera into my pocket and the lens extended while in my pocket. When I then went to retract it by turning the camera off the lens would not retract into the camera. It gives a message like “Lens error”. I am unable to do anything that eliminates this error or allows the camera to operate.

I spoke with a customer service representative who suggested that I send the camera to this address for repairs or replacement as it is still under warranty. Enclosed with this letter is the camera with its original accessories, the sales receipt, and a copy of the warranty card. Please call me to confirm receipt of the item.

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April was filled with many events including the marathon, easter, passover, hikes to Dover, Madeline meeting her great aunt Nancy for the first time and lots of time at home just hanging out around Brookline to enjoy some spring weather. The last half of the month's worth of pictures are up now in the photo library.

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:27 PM | Permalink

Yesterday at the arboretum I made the discovery that I could reliably make Madeline smile when doing a raspberry with my tongue. This was a useful thing for photography since she often doesn’t smile when I am looking through the camera and I can do whatever I want with my tongue to get her excited. The funny thing was that the consequence or coincidence of my doing repeated raspberries to get her attention is that she now also has started to make spitting noises with her lips buzzing in the form of a primitive and very cute baby raspberry.

We had Leelin the pug dog for the past couple of days and Madeline found that watching Leelin fetch with one of her toys may have been the funniest thing she has ever seen. This was measured in giggles sustained over a period of a half of an hour.

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:47 PM | Permalink

I finally got around to posting the Easter and Passover pictures in the photo library. The challenge with the camera lately has been that with better light I don't have to wait for the flash to take each picture. So now we have a little too many shots to choose from. So instead of spending time on that I just posted them all. Maybe later I'll make another series of my favorites.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:57 PM | Permalink

I posted more pictures in the Photo Library. I also have been playing with my RSS feeds from the photo recognition site. I only loaded a couple of people onto the People page but I ought to be able to create a page for any person I have photos for that have been recognized on the face recognition software through a simple link.

Hattie knit the cool sweater in the photos from 03/20/3006 and Madeline was having a great time trying to get spit-up on it. Madeline has been happy to see the great weather the past few days and is getting very good at grabbing anything in sight including things she shouldn't grab like glassware, computer mice, and important tax documents.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:50 PM | Permalink

I got an email from the folks at Riya letting me know that the water, while very beta, is safe enough to venture into for face recognition. It's not like I'm an insider there - I just signed-up for the beta out of curiosity for a better way to organize my thousands of photos by person. So I installed the first beta and connected it to my computer. The first thing it asks you to do is to upload thousands of pictures. This is a fair request but it could use some enhancements on the specificity of the folders to upload. It basically by default will upload your My Pictures directory. Unfortunately not all of these pictures are meant for sharing and I believe I posted sub-sets of pictures from directories using Picasa. But I gave it 2005 to play with and I don't think anything terrible will happen as it goes about uploading the pictures.

The next step is the recognition. I like the recognition utility for manual tagging to train the engine. It crashed the first time I tried it with only two pictures but then when I tried it again with about eight pictures from the Superbowl party in 2005 it managed to find the individual folks who were there. I think that it did a good job of getting people separated out. But after training it on about six people and then submitting it the system went into a strange GIF image that was doing something for twenty minutes and appearing to show that something was happening recognizing faces. This was annoying because if something is going to take more than a few minutes then just let it happen in the background and then email me to login when it is done. I don't want to look for hours at some animated graphic that doesn't do anything waiting for it to prompt me to identify an ambiguous face. That's as far as I got for now because Riya needs volumes of images to recognize much and tag things automatically.

They suggest that 1000 images is a good minimum to work with and ADSL speeds lead me to believe that I'll be waiting about 60 hours to get that many images uploaded. Among my concerns with their upload tool is how it handles interrupts since not only does my DSL go slowly I believe it sometimes gets slow and I restart the router to resolve problems. In this case I'm not sure what the uploader will do.

I also noticed that they are planning on "exporting" the tags out to Flickr or "Desktop organizer". My hope is that the desktop one they are planning is Picasa although they didn't mention it. It would make sense for them to go for the two big players for interoperability. Else there would be nobody to acquire them. The integration ought to be interesting although I am still not sure about Flickr when it comes to thousands of photos. Don't they charge for posting photos. They had all sorts of limitations on volumes for "free" posting back when I first tried it so I didn't go back given that I know I'll be posting tons of pictures given the infancy ga-ga phase of Madeline and me. Maybe I'll check back with Flickr to see what their deal is with volumes of photos now that they are owned by Yahoo! I still am not sure why they don't just build the photo recognition and tagging tools into the desktop photo organizers (so I don't need to upload everything just to recognize things) but it could be a scale thing for them. I would prefer starting out to just install a Picasa plugin or something that runs on the desktop as an independent organizer utility that could let me do what the web application is doing without uploading all the images but uploading them doesn't stop me from wanting to test/use/play with the technology.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:34 AM | Permalink

I was reading through some ZDNet articles and happed upon a reference to Woophy, a photo sharing mapping site that provides the location of photos as they are loaded, etc.. I placed a couple of pictures onto it but it does require some thinking and manual work to do so. The Woophy site is quite similar to the ultimate vision of the gnome quest site, dedicated to mapping the world's lawn gnomes and other lawn ornaments including walking tours of neighborhoods with high lawn ornament density.

How long will it be before something like this is baked into Picasa or Flickr? But it is good to see something thriving on it's own merits before the big fish get into the water.

On the gnome quest front I did look into the Google Maps API quickly this weekend and didn't get the warm and fuzzy feeling that the mapping API would allow people to map a gazing ball, mary in a shell, or gaudy santa claus down to the indivual house without some help from other data sources. I suppose I could buy the Google Maps hacks book and it would give me what I need to know. Maybe it's time for a trip to the book store.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:46 PM | Permalink

I posted some new pictures in the photo library including these.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:26 AM | Permalink

This week in my flash class we learned how to use the "trace image" feature to convert a picture into a cartoon. Actually it converts a bitmap to a vector image. So I traced my baby and a scene from Beacon street for her to stand in front of.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:01 AM | Permalink

While this is still not very cool because I haven't added any interactivity to it yet so that people can do fun things by interacting with the photos but I now have a database driven flash file that is pulling each image using an XML file generated in PHP to query a database and the database can be loaded one directory at a time by running a PHP script on any directory of thumbnails (provided it is in the same base path - bimages in my case). Next I'll try adding some menus and a way to look at the larger version of the thumbnail.

The code is as follows:

Flash
PHP code

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Nothing keeps me from sleeping like one of those dreams where a giant cockroach the size of a large rat tries to climb-up my pant leg and then refuses to die even after it is split in half while still inside of my pants. The smell was something like bean dip. The dream was likely spurred on by the return of our unwanted guests in the kitchen. The mice are back and partying harder than ever. We are in dire need of another cat and I intend to use the promised Christmas gift from Nick, Sarah’s sister’s husband, which was to use his household tools and knowledge to block the open mouse holes in the kitchen. We also will be investigating our options with regards to borrowing cats again in case anyone is going on vacation and needs a cat sitter for a month.

On Monday I took care of Madeline by myself for the day for the second Monday since Sarah has returned to work. When Yuval told me that they hired a nanny to watch Gabriel when he worked from home I had at first thought that I would not have a problem multi-tasking between my work and a sleeping, quiet, and easily distracted by shiny objects young being. I was very wrong about this. Wrong enough to eat my computer screen. It is not just difficult to get work done while watching a baby it is nearly impossible. At least it is nearly impossible to design a web site including graphics, text, and messaging. I was working on a new site to talk about the healthcare data warehousing that we are doing and made some progress but about as much as had I been working during hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. I don't think it would be frustrating to just watch Madeline but to try to work and watch Madeline is a constant challenge. So I will need to concede that watching a baby for a day is a full time job and try not to get frustrated if I don't get as much work done while I am spending the day with her. I also want to avoid singing that Harry Chapin Cats in the Cradle song.

I did get some good quality smiles out of Madeline during the day. The smiles are almost impossible for me to get snapshots of. They happen mainly when I do things like talk in the language of Jabba the Hut and then swing my tongue around wildly. Then when I get the camera out to take a picture her eyes roll up into her head when the red focus thing fires and she looks like a shocked mammal rather than a smiling baby. It is my new goal in photographing Madeline to capture more smiles. I have enough non-smiling pictures now and am willing to go on a smile photo safari with her.

The Superbowl is this Sunday. Here is my prediction. Steelers 24-Seahawks 17. Go AFC. I am a Steelers fan and if the Patriots were to be carted off to another city then I would be a Steelers fan over any other random team. I like the teams that wear black and seem mean. That is what a football team should be. I like the old style Madden Raiders. The Steelers have some of that hard hitting style. I also always love the irresistible force running back and not just some tall guy but a man like Jerome Bettis who charges right into a stack of people and moves them backwards or at least they think to themselves – this is really going to hurt when he hits us. Bettis is the guy who would win at Red Rover-Red Rover and he is a nice guy too. This is in contrast to a team like the Colts who showcase a quarterback who gets paid more than anyone else in the league and waves his hands in the air to change plays at the line of scrimmage. I wouldn’t be a Colts fan even if I lived in Indianapolis. I don’t have a big problem with the Seahawks and they even have the son of Mosi Tatupu playing for them but I am rooting hard for the Steelers on Sunday and despite seeming not to care about the game because the Patriots aren’t in it I’ll still be able to pay a lot of attention to the game.

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I found the blend tool in Illustrator to my liking. I also enjoyed making the outer circle using the custom brush feature by making one of my circles into a brush.

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We have returned from our journey up the coastline in California. Since it was mainly a computer free trip I am backed-up completely on email. Email doesn't seem to be working right on one of my machines at home anyways. Whenever I send a message it gives some error that the person isn't on my recipients list. But I shouldn't be trying to go through email at 4 AM. I did finally manage to put-up some pictures from the first couple of weeks of January. (20060109, 20060106, 20060103, 20060102). We have plenty of pictures from the trip but I've been too lazy to pull them off the memory cards to turn them into web stuff.

Quick take on travelling the Pacific Coast Highway with an infant: Triple any estimate of time you might make for an activity. Unfortunately this includes driving times such as - It ought to take 3 hours to get from San Simeon to Monterey means it will take you 9 hours. There are also clear inexorable realities to travelling with an infant like the sleeping baby problem. Basically from 5PM - 6:30 PM Madeline was an absolute terror in a reliable way. We managed to be driving in the car whenever this happened which made life complicated since breast feeding a baby while driving on windy roads (luckily I was driving since it would have been superhuman to do it while operating a stick shift) presents major logistical problems. One solution is stopping the car and this can add to the commute to the relaxing hotel where you can enjoy a comfortable bed and alcoholic beverages. Did I mention that Sarah gets stressed out in the car to begin with? Now add the crying inconsolable but darling Madeline. But then upon arriving at the hotel we can be so lucky as to get Madeline to sleep at 7PM. This is where the sleeping baby comes in. Now that she is sleeping in a hotel room what do we do?

Option 1 - Take her out with us? This worked one time when we went out to dinner with Eddie and Bonnie and for whatever reason Madeline went to sleep and stayed asleep. But when we took her out with Liz, Ami, and Ilana we were passing her back and forth during dinner and rocking while at a beach restaurant in San Diego.

Option 2 - Stay inside and eat room service food. This is actually the more relaxing option although it does make you wonder what you are doing on vacation hiding inside of a hotel room that has a mini-bar instead of your own nicely stocked fridge and bills for $41 for a chicken sandwich, fries, and drinks (including 2 beers).

Anyways we had lots of fun and the best thing was that we got to spend some time with Liz, Ami and Ilana, Yuval and Molly, Eddie and Bonnie. Liz asked me today what the highlight of the trip was for me and I think it was a hike that we took at Torre Pines with a big crew of people and Ami stashed in the back of our urban assault rental vehicle (the Pontiac Torrent). The hike was picturesque. I do have pictures of it just not transferred off those memory cards yet.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:07 AM | Permalink

I finally got around to posting all of my pictures from the summer to my photo library. I remembered as soon as I started it why it was such a pain. Pictures are so hard to deal with because they are big and I had tried to move the site into Dreamweaver but the pictures could never make it from the web site to my desktop and the library link is in the same directory as the pictures. So I hacked it for now but it is a bad long term solution. But the summer is all there with plenty of weddings and Sarah's belly growth.

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My Canon PowerShot S410 broke while I was at the wedding this weekend. Just as we walked into the church at exactly the time the wedding was supposed to start and we sat down the zoom lens made an awful crunching sound and then proceeded to get stuck halfway between out and in. The camera suffering from an unfortunate priapism then squawked in pain with a beeping sound that was fine before the processional music began but was then deemed unacceptable once the violinists started to play. I tried forcing the lens back into it’s home with some pressure and it went inside again but upon attempting to get it back out it had erectile dysfunction and only peeped out a few inches. It was impossible to get it into the discernibly turgid state necessary to take a photo and instead offered me the consolation of the error code E18 on the screen on the back of the camera. I then pulled at it to get it out of the position but the tiny peeping eye didn’t give much room for yanking on. So I declared it dead for good, pushed the lens back into it’s socket and declared to Sarah that we would have no pictures of this wedding from my camera. Luckily they had a full paparazzi gallery of wedding photographers complete with a man wearing a women’s suit and bleached blond hair working to focus the flash bulb above the bride and groom.

But for me it is a painful and effeminizing feeling to have a camera that can’t shoot so I was not feeling myself for the whole weekend. So this morning I decided to call the Canon corporation to ask them whether they had a little blue pill that could make my camera work better. Apparently Raphael Palmeiro’s blue pills have been working well this weekend as he hit three homers in three games for a 3 of 4 win rally by the Orioles over the Red Sox. So I called and quickly got through to a service representative. The first question I had expected was to identify the camera by the serial number. I don’t have any idea where the serial number would be. This wasn’t their question. The man asked what the problem was and I then told him that the lens wasn’t protracting and retracting normally. He told me to pull the battery out, wait a few seconds, and then try again. I didn’t do this but instead just pressed the power button to turn it on. Of course, without all the pressure to film a wedding, my camera had overcome the stage fright and the lens extended normally. I then went through the paces to try the zoom and this worked well. Next I tried turning it on and off ten times and the lens worked like a champ opening and closing.

Now I am certain that it is broken and this is a short lived phenomena since this lens problem has been happening off and on for a long time with the camera. But if I mail it into the shop without the problem being apparent they will likely mail it back telling me I suffer from a common mental disorder potentially leading me into ruin rocking in the corner in a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So, despite the fact that the camera will celebrate it’s one year anniversary in mid-August and thereby be ineligible for repairs of blue pills, I am not yet able to send it back to the Canon Corporation. It is probably for the best. I couldn’t find the receipt in the half hour routing around the apartment that I did. It is also good to know that cameras operate by the same principles of most sickness and injuries that I suffer from. When I invest in fixing it by going to show it to the doctor, dentist, electrician, mechanic, or editor - it mysteriously goes away.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:13 AM | Permalink

I somehow bumped into the new Synch Magazine site today. They had created some imaginary IT products for gangsta's.

I think I know enough about Photoshop to start creating my own similar photo inventions. That is what I have been doing with trying to build an OEM channel at work. The work is mainly taking the existing product, other products, and photoshop to show how they would work together. It is a fun activity and is generally received well because people are able to appreciate the visual prototype more than the conceptual one. They can look at it and go... "oh that is exactly what we need to have." once they see it.

I personally want the gun remote control or the low-rider laptop. My only problem with the gun remote control is that it didn't appear to have the universal remote buttons that I need.

On the entrepreneurship side I was talking to Bijoy Goswami who started a group called Austin Bootstrap that has been steadily growing. The bootstrap mantra at some level is one that most people don't intuitively trust but is very important. It is sell, build, market. You have to find some customers willing to pay for the product and then build it for the ones who pay for it. You can then market the success to other folks with the same needs. At least that is among the solution to the problem of getting out of the cycle of needing capital.

Bijoy wrote a book that he self-published and talked me into being the leader of Bootstrap Boston, the wing of his organization. He also had made a keen observation about the differece between east coast entrepreneurial culture and west coast culture. The west coast culture provides a greater degree of respect and importance to the entrepreneurial activity of evangelism while the east coast is still focused on the technologist who can build the solution.

As a convert to the religion that the problem with technology is that people try to make products but don't know why anyone needs the technology or how to convert a generic tool into an actual business solution I was happy to hear about it. It filled my head with crazy ideas including that schools teaching technology (ahem MIT) should also teach courses in evangelism to give the students a real edge. Evangelism is different from marketing and even the generic entrepreneurship although they go hand in hand. Maybe I can mention this to folks around MIT like Ken Morse and see what they think.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:22 AM | Permalink

Wedding Memories
I got up early on the wedding day around six thirty. I had been playing with the music downloads from Yahoo! Unlimited down to my media PC and was trying to get some key staples for dancing like Baby Got Back and Milkshake in case we were able to pull off the dancing side of things. I also was simultaneously working on the photo slideshow by arranging the pictures into a more logical order for chronology.

I kept clicking on and off at the Weather.com web site to review the strange predictions for Bedford. According to the forecast it was a 20% chance of rain for the whole day but hour by hour there were supposed to be 60% chance of showers every hour until a mysterious clearing between 3 and 6 AM. So when Jeff, our justice of the peace, called on the phone to check with us on any potential edits to the ceremony I told him that we might have to push the ceremony back a bit to catch the rays of sunshine since we preferred the outdoor setting. He told us that he had to leave at 3PM to make his next appointment so we realized that we were going to have to go with whatever nature dealt us in the cosmic rain or sunshine shuffle. Sarah considered praying for good weather and I told her that she should be responsible for that since I don’t believe in God.

At around 9 we began to gear-up for the wedding in Brookline. I called my dad to let him know that I had a sudden vision of guacamole from Whole Foods for the wedding and since Sarah and I aren’t near a Whole Foods that he might have a better shot at getting it. I had made arrangements with Zaftigs for a deli platter for 20 to be ready for us that would be ready at 9:30 AM. At first we had been thinking that it would make sense to get the deli platter first and then return to load the car but since we were wide awake we got to loading the car with the various things we needed to take in the car. The contents included the Media PC from the living room, a giant 19” monitor (not a flat screen), the old Dell Latitude laptop, a mouse, a keyboard, a camera battery charger, a set of computer speakers, a tripod that didn’t have the top to it, a card table, an overnight bag for the bed and breakfast stay, a recently printed copy of the ceremony, a tuxedo, and my recently dry cleaned suit in case my tuxedo either didn’t fit or spontaneously combusted.

We had recently taken a bunch of boxes and removed the peanuts from them and taken them apart so I couldn’t find a box suitable to carry the small stuff. I tried to reconstruct one of the boxes but there was only scotch tape to hold it together so I figured I would just be careful with it. As I went to place the components into the box and rushing I knocked a Medieval Manor glass over that had survived many purges of glassware and it shattered on the floor after cracking on the lower lip of the coffee table. I yelled Mazeltov and kept gathering goods to stuff into the car.

By the time we got to Zaftigs at exactly 9:30 AM the deli platters were tricky to cram into the mix. The Zaftigs platter was more types of food than I had intended to get. I probably should have just gotten deli meats because it came with cole slaw and potato salad in a huge bowl. Sarah was worried that my mad quest to add more Jewish food would offend her mother and it had been somewhat subconscious. I had asked my dad to pick-up a bunch of bagels with lox and cream cheese and to grab a lot of deserts and pastries from the local bakery the day before.

Throughout the ride to Bedford passing through sunny patches and deep rainy patches the contents of the back of the PT Cruiser needed to be carefully monitored to not fall through the edge from where the seats folded down allowed items to fall into. So I was driving slowly through the country roads in Bedford. We arrived finally around 10:15 expecting to see a bunch of folks soon to run through the rehearsal of the ceremony around 11AM but in general it was a quiet day in Bedford where not much was going on.

Sarah’s dad was carting the rented folding chairs into the yard to a back corner where the ceremony could point. He did this by attaching his gardening cart to the back of his John Deere mower with a full stack of chairs held on the back of the cart. Since I wasn’t dressed yet I helped to move the chairs from the cart along with him to make some rows starting in the back. We quickly realized that we were going to be wrong about the chair arrangement no matter what we did so we just kept unloading the chairs. Eventually Sarah came over to help us and we built our own little rounded seating system with an aisle down the middle with the chuppah that Matthew had built as the stage in the center that we used to orient the chairs to.

I also was responsible for Canon in D and Dance Me to the End of Love to play in the background during procession and recessional walks. To do this I had placed both of these onto my laptop and was planning on hooking-up the laptop to the speakers. Matthew, Sarah’s brother, retrieved a power strip for me that he hooked through a window. He was exhausted at having worked on a new bathroom all week and having MIT finals. Upon setting-up the laptop I learned that the laptop wasn’t that happy with playing the Dance Me version I had loaded because it had some form of protection on it that prevented it from playing. I hadn’t anticipated this and I started cursing myself for not having picked-up an iPod shuttle when we were at Costco buying liquor. But someone had mentioned that they were getting Sarah and iPod for the wedding so I had been reluctant to get a second one. The laptop was better designed for playing the slide show so I decided to make the switch to the full set-up with the media station PC, full 19” monitor, mouse, and keyboard in a station behind the aisle of chairs. Matthew helped with it and we covered it with some plastic to keep the monitor from rusting from the rain. The music played a bit but it had been choppy all night on that machine when I was loading it with music. How does an MP3 skip? But at least it played the right version of the songs.

I then went inside to set-up the slide show but now I needed a monitor to connect to the laptop. Matthew was moving back into Bedford for the summer and hadn’t set-up his computer and he had a great Dell wide screen flat panel monitor that I could set-up in the living room with the laptop. But as soon as I set it up I realized that it didn’t work very well with regards to staying live and the screen was stretching pictures to make them look very unappealing. At that point my dad had entered with my mom and Rosie. Lisa and Dave had arrived and were in the yard worried about the effects of the rain on the amplifiers they had brought since if either broke or even a microphone broke they would be out a thousand bucks. My dad wanted to fix my mom’s memory card with the laptop so I set it up for him to play with the memory card but that didn’t fix it.

When Jeff, the JIP, came he arrived at 11 instead of 10:30 and didn’t arrive with his partner as he had suggested before. He wanted to know if we wanted the two hundred pound trellis behind the chuppah. I thought it was worth a shot so we dragged it over. We could hear children playing the yard behind us after having heard what sounded like a leaf blower having made noise all morning. My dad walked over to ask them if they could do something to keep things quiet during the wedding but the reality was that the neighbors had planned a birthday party for a group of four year olds where they had rented a Spiderman trampoline.

I had asked Sarah ask Nick and Christina to bring their wireless router to see if it could give us a network to download a fix for the music onto the laptop but that wasn’t something I could focus on since the time was ticking towards the time for the rehearsal run through. Lisa and Dave were looking for a screw driver which I asked as a relay for Nick to bring and by the time he brought it they said they didn’t need it. Then the trellis fake flowers weren’t lined-up correctly so Jeff asked for a staple gun. I asked Nick to find one of these for me which he did but by the time we got back with it Jeff had fixed the trellis himself somehow without the staple gun.

With things stabilized with a stage it was time to rehearse. I couldn’t rehearse and fix the slide show so Nick worked on the slide show with some vague instructions while I started to corral the crew for the rehearsal with Sarah. We did OK trying to get the crew together to rehearse but were unable to get Matthew because he was taking a shower and we kept looking for Falkoff who had decided to take a nap in his car and was nowhere to be found until I saw his profile in his Volvo. The herding cats then led to the who is in charge problem as we went to line-up for a practice of the processional. Lisa and Dave were still working on the sound set-up. We decided to make some changes to the ceremony as printed including placing Matthew on the start button for Canon in D and the processional. This meant Nick was to take his place. Jeff, who was being a little anal about marking everything on his chart of the procession slowly took out a pen to mark the various aspects of where people would stand and then proceeded to call me David a few times as he talked. During the rehearsal we realized it was already past 1:15 and we were running out of time but that didn’t stop Jeff from trying to read long paragraphs very quickly (as if that would have helped him) or my dad from stating that a light bulb would make a loud popping noise. I snapped at my dad that now was not the time to debate the physical results of a light bulb vs. a wine glass. After that we ran quickly through the procedure again while guests began to arrive and key guests in the know were instructed to ferry them into the house instead of the backyard lest they get confused that they were late and missing the actual ceremony. The whole time as we practiced the entrance, ceremony, and exit, Robert was following us with his camera to either take practice photos or to plan the shots he would take.

So Sarah and I went upstairs to get dressed and Sarah was already miffed because she wasn’t going to have enough time to become beautiful in her dress. I went to put my tuxedo on and realized that I have great difficulty placing a cumberbund and bow-tie on even when they both include simple latches. Robert tried to capture this for posterity as the wedding photographer. At this point we also needed to get flowers placed on us and there were some friends of the Carvey’s with the flowers. I got mine pinned onto my lapel and was ready to go downstairs. On the way I asked someone whether drinks were already being served since I could see a hungry and thirsty crowd gathering downstairs. I was told that it was my option to drink so I figured I could forgo the drink if nobody else would have one. I then was put in charge of locating Falkoff so that he could get his official flower as the best man but he was once again nowhere to be found. So I kept bumping into guests to quickly greet them and then ask them if they had seen Falkoff anywhere. One woman figured out who Falkoff was when told that he was Zoe’s husband and they got him pinned.

As I wandered about it was already about twenty minutes past two so I could feel the time flying by with Jeff needing to leave at 3PM. We couldn’t start until Sarah was ready since a wedding doesn’t start without the bride. I looked around downstairs for Molly and Yuval and found Ami and Ilana instead. Ami had said they wouldn’t be able to make it for the ceremony and I suddenly worried that folks had come all the way from California and wouldn’t be there to make the wedding. It made me remember how Ami and Ilana had missed a part of Yuval and Molly’s wedding because they drove down to Connecticut too late.

I was trying to figure out where I was supposed to see Sarah since I apparently wasn’t supposed to see her until a certain point but we all needed to process together. Assorted in the know Carvey family helpers gathered the guests into their chairs and we gathered behind the back deck in our little phalanx attack procession formation. Sarah finally came down looking beautiful in her wedding dress through the back patio door. I asked her if she had the rings and she had forgotten them upstairs. So someone went to get the rings for her and Christina held onto them by placing them on her fingers. There was a rush to do this since Lisa and Dave started playing as soon as Sarah was sighted in the doorway and we didn’t want to leave a lot of time in the middle.

The music queued fine by Matthew and since I was first-up with my parents I took a good look at Matthew as we passed by. Canon in D didn’t do too well with the Media PC by skipping. I learned this Tuesday, two days after the wedding, after I took a look at it that the media PC was infected with a spyware worm that was probably causing all of the performance trouble. Headline: Hacker screws-up backyard wedding. Sarah was calm once she had walked down with her parents and her father offered her properly. Things went silent for a moment and we could hear a very loud cardinal enjoying the break in the rain to call for mates and the children giggling and laughing as they bounced on Spiderman. A plane flew overhead and low coming from Hanscomb airfield that we credited ourselves as having hired to do a flyby. I did a duck and cover in the chuppah to protect myself and Sarah from the plane.

The wedding ceremony itself was lighter than expected. It was hard not to be silly with all of the serious stuff going on. Mom read three pieces of poetry and Bruce Nickerson read a passage from the Song of Songs. Jeff seemed more nervous than anyone else on stage and had trouble reading the ceremony as he rushed through reading it. Lisa and Dave sang a customized version of Wherever You Go with the lyrics changed based on Sarah and me. Sarah and I sounded like the cone heads during the part where we had to speak together. At one point during the vows I sounded like Darth Vader claiming all of hers would be mine or something like that.

Finally the ceremony drew to a close as we were announced as Mr and Mrs. Daniel and Sarah Housman and we tried to go out slowly to Dance me to the End of Love but it was very jumpy music and we were excited to be married so we did a little dancing in the aisle on the way out. That lasted until the music crackled out because the media PC wasn’t very healthy and Matthew quickly drew the song to a close.

We then were greeted with the long receiving line which seemed to take about an hour. It was nice to see and meet everyone in the line but I could see people wandering about with glasses of champagne slowly fizzing. I was worrying that we wouldn’t get to see Ami and Ilana but they cut into line to say hello.

After the receiving line Falkoff gave his toast. I remember that he was happy to not have me interrupt him and that we would probably debate what he said for quite some time. He also thought that Sarah was the perfect woman for me since I am such an optimist, exemplified by a tennis game at 5:30 AM on a summer morning when Falkoff told me to meet him first thing in the morning for tennis. What Sarah had to combine with this was that she had chosen to get married outside in May. Falkoff’s toast was well received and then folks started to wander off to the bar and eat the food.

Sarah and I got a chance to mingle with guests but we were quickly separated and wandered about saying hello to everyone present. People knew where to go, where to be, how to have fun, and we just hung around with them. Sarah’s feet were cold from having stood in the wet grass as were many of the guests. Kate had invented in her mind a tool to place on the bottom of a stiletto heel to prevent them from sinking into mud during receptions in May.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:40 AM | Permalink