Sofia has uttered her first sentence: "All Done."

OK, so both the subject and the verb are understood, making it more of a phrase than a sentence, but I beg you not to ruin my fun. It's so exciting to see her putting words together. She seems to know that it's a big deal, too. She says it slowly, with great relish, and she gets a giant grin on her face when she's finished. She should have no trouble figuring out nouns, verbs and punctuation before NaNoWriMo starts.

  Hello! I have some more photos for you. I think I only have one more set to go, and I will be done with the summer photos. Enjoy!

More Summer Fun

Camping

  I have the greatest cell phone ever made. It runs Windows. It runs Java programs. It has Internet access. It syncs with my email and my calendar. It plays music. It plays video. It shoots video. It shoots pictures. It stores files.

It can also occasionally make telephone calls. I usually have to reboot it first, because the telephone application crashes a lot, but that's par for the course. You guys have to reboot your cellphones, right? Why are you looking at me like that?

*sigh* The truth is that this device (the Audiovox SMT5600) is without question the worst cell phone I've ever owned. Not only is it incredibly complicated, the UI is terrible. I'm not even going to bore you with the details. Let's just say that I go to bed dreaming about a small, simple cell phone that can successfully dial telephone numbers.

I'm fed up with convergence. I'm all in favor of devices that do 20 different things, but we need to start by making devices that do at least one thing well and then work our way up. For a long time I've felt like I'm the only one who feels this way, but apparently it's spreading. David Pogue's blog entry today gives me some hope:

Basic Cellphones Lack Simplicity

Unfortunately, most of the phones that Pogue mentions aren't really very good. He doesn't mention the phone I really want: the Motorola MOTOFONE F3. Yes, the dreaded Motorola, purveyor of some of the worst UIs ever inflicted upon man, has devised a fiendishly simple cell phone. No email. No texting. It doesn't even have a color display. Best of all, it only costs $50, and no annual contract is required. Finally someone is speaking my language.



Come to papa...

  Sofia finally has enough control of her fingers to operate a crayon, so last weekend we had a little coloring session. The floor did not escape unscathed, but she ended up with something I find rather charming. She did this whole thing herself - all I did was hold the paper and hand her crayons.



Nice, huh? That's my girl! Here's a desktop image version I made for myself, which you are welcome to use.

  Just do yourself a favor: go to this guy's site and buy some of his songs. You may have seen this video for his zombie song, but that's only the beginning. I cannot begin to describe the beauty of his cover of "Baby Got Back". Is that worth a dollar? It's worth an army of them.

  Nicole and I went to see the musical Wicked at the Paramount in Seattle last night. For those not familiar, it's a stage version The Wizard of Oz told from the Wicked Witch's point of view. It's based on the book of the same name, which I greatly enjoyed.

I'm pleased to report that the musical is a good adaptation. It's definitely different - much of the complexity of the book has been left aside, which you would expect. It's a little goofier, but it still retains a bit of the book's darkness. Think "Into The Woods" with munchkins.

The songs were a mixed bag for me. I found some to be very average musical fare ("Defying Gravity" and "As Long As You're Mine", for example) while other take your expectations of average musical fare and subvert them (e.g., "What Is This Feeling?") The good definitely outweighed the bad - Glinda's performance was the highlight for me - and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The fact that we got to have a night out without Sofia had nothing to do with it.

Now, let's talk about the crowd. They were wired. There are no italics italic-y enough to express how hyped this audience was was. As soon as the curtain came up, they were roaring with approval. My friends and I kept looking at each other: were we missing something? Everyone but us was acting like they'd already seen the show ten times. This built to a crescendo that peaked when the show ended. The crowd was on its feet screaming as soon as the ensemble hit the stage to take their bows. When Elphaba and Glinda came out for the final bow, I thought the audience was going to blow the roof off of the place. I saw Bruce Springsteen play in 1985 at the height of "Born in the U.S.A." fever, and I am here to tell you that even he did not get that kind of standing ovation.

I later found that the actresses that played the leads were both from the Northwest (Portland and Bellevue, respectively), so our joke that the actors had filled the theater with family members was probably not too far from the truth.


Site Changes, Explain'd
I made the bold statement the other day that "you may have noticed some changes on the site". The fact that no one seems to have noticed means that either a) my changes were so brilliantly executed that they seemed perfectly natural or b) I am the only one who cares. I know what my guess is.

Anyway, for the curious, the problem I was having with the old layout is that the posts were being swallowed up in all of the extra bits that surround them: the date, the comments, etc. I changed the layout to make the posts more prominent and the page (hopefully) more readable. Specifically:

1) Posts now have titles, which are the biggest text on the page (except for the word "Fishsuit".)

2) The date of the post is now in gray and is very light. I figured that no one really cares about the date anyway; it's mainly there to provide a visual grouping for all posts made on a particular day.

3) The byline at the bottom of each post is now lighter and less prominent.

4) I tweaked the spacing between the posts to make the page scan better.

These changes, although minor, should make the page easier to read when there are a bunch of short posts right in a row.