My three year old (and oldest) son, Connor, had a very rough time as an infant and toddler when we tried to transition him to his own crib.  It terrified him, and my wife and I didn't see a need to traumatize the poor kid, so we let him sleep with us in our bed.  We always figured it'd be easier to transition him to his own bed later with a carrot-and-stick approach, e.g. "Now Connor, if you want to borrow the car this weekend, you need to sleep in your own bed."  :)  Seriously though, our approach to parenting has largely been one of watching our kids for signals that they're ready to try new things and encouraging that development as it happens.

Sure enough, a few weeks ago Connor flat-out asked us for his own bed.  We were floored.  We moved his toddler bed from his room into the nursery (which is right across the hall from our room) and got a new toddler bed for our younger son, Cade.  We set up both beds next to each other.  We also installed a wall-mounted TV.  I realize that may be controversial, as a lot of people have a problem with exposing kids to TV at a young age.  Nevertheless, watching a Disney movie or some Blues Clues on DVD has been something he can focus on to relax in bed and dose off, and we still read to our kids frequently.  Their TV doesn't have a satellite receiver and we only use it for watching their favorite DVDs.  (Side note:  Eventually, I plan on getting a digital media player for their room so we don't need to mess with DVDs anymore.  We've already eliminated DVDs in the den and living room.)

Tonight, as I was tucking him into his bed, he asked me to read him a story.  On his mom's suggestion, he selected The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  After I finished reading it to him, he asked me to read him another book.  I asked him what he wanted, and he replied, "Star Wars."  I grabbed the Golden Books rendition of the Battle of Hoth and started reading it to him as he pointed out characters like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

After I read to him the story of Luke Skywalker almost being eaten by a wampa, and Darth Vader and his army of snowtroopers storming Echo Base, I asked him if he was ready for me to put on a movie for him.  "Watch a movie!" he exclaimed in the affirmative.  "What movie?" I asked, expecting Cars or Toy Story. 

"Star Wars!" came the reply.  I asked if "Return of the Jedi Star Wars" was a good choice.  "Watch Jedi Star Wars," he replied.  So I put on Return of the Jedi, kissed him goodnight, and closed the door.

I've never been so proud.  :)

My mom emailed me complaining about getting the following error when logging into her Google Calendar:

Oops.  Another calendar has been created for cams.mom@moms-isp.net (not her real address).
Each calendar needs its own email address so friends can send you invitations.

My mom couldn't figure out what this error meant or why she was getting it.  She'd been using Google Calendar for over a year, using the Google account she created with her ISP-provided email address as a login.  And she even contacted her ISP (Wild Blue satellite Internet) at one point, who had no idea what she was talking about.

So I took a look, and I pretty quickly managed to figure out what the problem was.

Her ISP decided to provide Google Apps for Domains for their customers.  They just created user accounts in Google Apps for all of their customersone weekend.  As a result, there were two Google accounts with cams.mom@moms-isp.net as their login - One that was a standard, run-of-the-mill Google account with access to Calendar, Docs, etc., and one that was the domain-specific login to Google Apps.

So the only way she could resolve this was change to a different email address as her login for her standard Google account.  Not a huge deal, since she has a couple different email accounts, but definitely an inconvenience. 

Still, I have two issues with this:

1. Was this scenario not anticipated by Google?  Why not work around it?  Why not merge her old, "standard" calendar into her new, domain-specific calendar?  For what it's worth, that's why I haven't migrated from my Google account to Google Apps for Domains.  I'd love to have my own camthegeek.com Google Apps, but it'd be an all-out migration for my Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar.  Why can't they just tie my Gmail and camthegeek.com addresses together as some sort of alias, so if I'm logged in to Google Calendar as me@gmail, I'm also logged in as me@camthegeek?  That way my friends wouldn't have to change their Google Talk settings to keep in touch with me, and I wouldn't have to migrate my Gmail and Calendar.
   
   
2. What the hell is wrong with Wild Blue that they couldn't train their tech support to anticipate this and properly guide their customers through it?  I understand the allure of Google Apps.  If I were an ISP, I'd put my customers on it.  It's a major value-add.  But in their pre-migration activities, did they really not anticipate that, out of their thousands of customers, one of them might possibly have endeavored to create a Google account with their wildblue.net email address?  Give me a break.

I've got a grab-bag of information to talk about, but none of the topics is enough to justify a full post.  So I'll just rapid-fire these tidbits of news in a single post...

• I've had my mid-year review at Corillian.  It was a positive experience, and I'm feeling much more comfortable in my role with the company.  Between this review and a fruitful meeting with a client, I'm really excited about the opportunities I have to accomplish some really cool things.  And telecommuting is getting easier, too.  I daresay I'm more productive than I've ever been.
  
  
• I picked up a Garmin nüvi 200 GPS.  For an entry-level GPS geared toward car navigation, I couldn't be happier with it.  My only complaint is it seems to make some weird route suggestions occasionally.  For example, I'll be driving to San Antonio later this spring.  Google Maps says the quickest route is I-35 all the way from KC to San Antonio, which seems pretty reasonable to me.  The nüvi disagrees, and has me taking a route that, while technically shorter in distance, is also an hour longer in terms of time according to Google Maps.  Meh, it'd still get me there eventually.  That's the most important part, I think.  I drove to Omaha, NE for business last week, and it performed beautifully in getting me to the hotel, around town, and then back home.
  
  
• I'm an ergonomics nut.  I love ergonomic keyboards and mice.  My current keyboard is the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000, which I think is the best MS Natural Keyboard since the original (which I still have in my closet).  I was using a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000, which was mostly comfortable but was causing some  minor discomfort in my first and middle knuckles and my wrist.  When I was in Omaha last week, a colleague introduced me to the Microsoft Wireless Laser Natural Mouse 6000.  I ordered one for myself immediately.  While not as alien as a vertical mouse, your hand is elevated and rotated in a position that, while extremely natural and comfortable, is a little weird at first.  Give it a day and you'll never turn back.  I cannot recommend this mouse enough.
  
  
• If you have multiple IM clients running, you owe it to yourself to try a unified client.  I use Pidgin (nee Gaim) to log onto my Windows Live and Google Talk accounts, as well as CheckFree's internal Sametime server.  Very handy.
  
  
• My brother-in-law (and close friend), Bruce (aka Unknown Echo), started Basic Military Training for the US Air Force a couple weeks ago.  He's a remarkable young man, and we're all very proud of him.
  
  
• I wish my old friends at Commerce would quit blowing off my lunch invitations.  I'm looking at you, Joel.

I don't have a traditional landline.  I have Vonage.  Originally, switching to Vonage was something I did to save a few bucks, as the monthly cost of Vonage, which includes unlimited calling anywhere in the US, was still less than just local service from the phone company.  Over the past year, they've added services that make them even more of a value.  Most of these are "beta" features, ala Google, but they're still cool as hell.

Vonage Contacts:  More than a simple online phonebook, this is a full fledged six-way conference call system with a slick AJAX interface.  Very useful for the telecommuter.

Vonage Me:  A "click to call" feature that allows your contacts to initiate a toll-free call with you without dialing direct.  I've added the URL to my email signature.

Vonage Fax:  An outgoing fax service.  I've really, really needed this service for a long time.  I've tried a few pay services on the web, but this one is included with the cost of my Vonage subscription.

Vonage Talk:  A softphone interface for your primary Vonage line, combined with an IM client.  For some reason, I couldn't get this one to work.  It kept erroneously telling me my password was wrong.

I've loved Vonage for as long as I've been with them, and their willingness to explore new features like this makes me love them even more.  It's too bad they've been having financial problems.  They deserve a far better fate than to be sued into oblivion by the traditional telecom industry.

I took this picture at the intersection of MO-169 and 188th St. in Smithville, Missouri, not too far from my house.  Somebody lost control in an ice storm and took out the stop sign.  The county (or would this be city or state?) replaced the sign quickly.

Perhaps a little too quickly.

My mom and her husband run their own business as artisans.  They sell glass and copper pieces, mostly hummingbird feeders.  It's really beautiful stuff.

My mom surprised me a few weeks ago by announcing to me that they'd started a blog.  She wanted to know what words of wisdom I had to offer, so I sent her to Scott Hanselman's 32 Ways to Keep your Blog from Sucking.

So, now I'm confused about the nature of blogging.  Does it mean that blogging is no longer cool when your mom starts to do it?  :)

Seriously, though.  If you're shopping for a unique gift or you just like hummingbirds, please do check out my mom and step-dad's shop and blog.

Back when I accepted my current job with Corillian/Checkfree/Fiserv, I stated that a job like this where I could telecommute was my holy grail.  Over the last few weeks, I've been putting a lot of thought into whether or not I still feel as excited about telecommuting as I did when I wrote that.

It's a mixed bag, really.  I enjoy being (mostly) free from distractions, free from micro-management, and I especially enjoy my respite from the daily rat race of commuting. 

On the other hand, it's easy to get lonely.  You don't realize how much you miss "water cooler" chats until you don't have them anymore.  And, as much as I love my kids, the noise they make occasionally gets to be a nuisance. 

Overall, I still love it, to say nothing of the job itself (which is also great).  I am starting to get a touch of cabin fever, and that contributes to an over-exaggerated feeling of missing my colleagues at Commerce, but overall, this is a great working arrangement.  I'm just going to have to make a concerted effort to keep active socially, I think.

With the most recent system update for the Xbox 360, Microsoft added support for my favorite video codec, DivX, and its open-source equivalent, XviD.  I decided that, with modern inexpensive storage, the time was right to build an online video library, as I already had for music several years ago.

I've divided my media folder into two sections:  Home Movies, where I keep captured camcorder tapes, and Entertainment, where I keep my DVD movie collection.  I use different processes for each.

For the camcorder tapes, I capture the digital video over Firewire using WinDV or the video import tool built into Vista.  I take the raw DV AVI (about 13 GB per hour) and run it through MediaCoder.  I encode using 2-pass XviD at 1500 kbps, using VBR MP3 for the audio.  I set the output to resize to 720x400 (my camcorder shoots 16x9 video) and pass it through the yadif 0 de-interlace filter.  The final result is about 700 Mb per hour, and looks reasonably good on both the PC and the Xbox 360.  MediaCoder is a little tricky to learn, so I recommend reading the forums and FAQs on the website.

For the DVD movies, I rip the DVDs to my hard drive using well-known tools.  (Disclaimer:  It is my belief that this legally falls under the doctrine of fair use, as I only rip movies that I own.  I do not advocate pirating movies in any way.)  I then use the Auto Gordian Knot to encode the movie to XviD, specifying a custom file size that I calculate using the rate of 700 Mb/hour.  This process is well-explained in the AutoGK tutorial.

So far, I've got about 40 movies, the entire run of Firefly, the Band of Brothers mini-series, and 30 hours of home video stored on my server and instantly available on my Xbox 360.  This is definitely a convenience that I find worth the time investment if you're so inclined.

I've been doing a lot of video editing lately, capturing digital video over firewire from my digital camcorder.  Unfortunately, I'd noticed that every so often, I would drop a bunch of frames.  Like, hundreds, all in one pop.  Dropping one or two frames here and there is normal.  Dropping hundreds is not.

I also noticed that occasionally on playback, the video would freeze and the audio would stutter.  This seems strange, because my current rig is no slouch:  Dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, with 3 GB of RAM running Vista Ultimate (alas, 32-bit.  I'm not brave enough to move to 64-bit yet).   I noticed that the stutter/freeze had a tendency to occur  whenever there was hard drive activity.  Just try to get Vista to stop all hard drive activity.  Especially when you're capture full-frame uncompressed video.  (Side note:  I originally tried to blame Vista, so I tried to fix it by installing Service Pack 1 RC1.  While SP1 gets my seal of approval as being chock full of win, it didn't fix my issue...)

A little Googling led me to the general understanding that this is a known flaw in this motherboard, requiring a BIOS update.  Okay, let's update the BIOS.  Umm...  Where's the new BIOS?  Searching on Foxconn's website seems to indicate there is no such motherboard.  Great.

Luckily, Google came to the rescue again.  You can get the latest BIOS here.

Next problem:  How to install the damned thing.  They have a DOS-based flash utility here, and they expect you to make a bootable floppy to execute it.  I ask you, who the heck actually builds a system with a freakin' floppy drive these days?  Luckily, these folks have the answer.  I downloaded their bootable CD image, and followed their instructions to add the DOS flash utility and BIOS binary to the ISO, which I then burnt to disk.

One more problem:  When I booted up into the DR-DOS CD, I was presented with my old friend, Pause.exe, who said, "Strike any key to continue . . ."  I struck a key.  Nothing happened.  I struck another, and still nothing happened.  Seems I forgot that DOS wasn't going to support my USB keyboard.  D'oh!

Thankfully, this motherboard has PS2 ports.  I dug out an old PS2-based Microsoft Natural Keyboard, plugged it in, and struck a key.  That took me to an A:\> prompt. 

One note for anybody who may be playing along with the home edition of our game:  In case you don't notice when the CD driver loads, the CD gets mounted at R:.  So switch to the R: drive (by typing R: followed by enter), and then type the filename of the flash utility followed by the full name of the BIOS binary, e.g. AFU860H.EXE 58GW1P34.BIN followed by enter.  Then just follow the prompts.  Note that you cannot save a backup of your existing BIOS, because the CD you burnt is a write-once media.

So I installed the new BIOS, and I'm happy to say my encoded video and audio is much smoother.  Big thumbs down to Foxconn for making me play Internet scavenger hunt, though.  Supposedly, their boards come with a Windows-based BIOS utility called SuperUpdate, but, like any self-respecting the geek, the first thing I do when I get a new piece of hardware is throw away the disk full of crapware and get the latest and greatest drivers off the web.  And of course, Foxconn doesn't have SuperUpdate available for download.  Grrrr.

Dear Mom/Mom-In-Law/Grandma/Other,

Please stop using Internet Explorer 6.0.  Just...  Stop.

I know you're comfortable with it.  I know that's what came installed on your computer, and you're not even aware that it sucks.  But trust me, it does.

"But Cam," you ask, "If it isn't broken, why should I fix it?"  Ah, but that's the point.  It is ridiculously broken.  It's the Yugo of web browsers.  Aside from being ridden with security vulnerabilities, and lacking innovations such as tabbed browsing, its CSS standards support is horribly broken and will never be fixed.

My point about security and tabs should be self-explanatory.  The CSS problem, in layman's terms, means that, just this week, a simple web page which should have taken me about four hours to design and develop took me over two days because I had to work around Internet Explorer 6.0's CSS flaws.  That's just...  obscene.  It wastes Corillian's time.  And worse yet, it wastes my time, which I could be using to post videos of your grandkids.

So what can you do to help me?  Convert to a different browser.  A more modern, more standards-compliant browser.  Just about all of them will automatically convert your favorites or bookmarks, history, cookies, and saved passwords.   They're all free.  All you have to do is download them and install them.  And then get your friends and relatives to do the same.  Here are a few suggestions.

• Internet Explorer 7.0.  Microsoft fixed a lot of the problems Internet Explorer 6.0 had, as well as adding some useful user interface enhancements.  I know it looks a little different, but if you try it, you might just like it.  Pros: Microsoft was aware of all the issues with IE 6.0 and fixed most of them.  Cons:  Slight learning curve with the new user interface.
  
  
• Mozilla Firefox.  This is the second-most popular browser right now.  It's very fast, reliable, and secure.  It has a really neat feature called extensions, which allow you download free add-ons for the browser that perform any number of useful functions.  For example, I run an extension called Ad Block Plus, which filters out banner ads from my web pages.  In many cases, I never even realize they were there.  Pros: Insanely active open-source community backing, which means frequent security updates, new features, and extensions.  Cons:  There are still a few web pages (very few) that were designed specifically with non-standard features of Internet Explorer in mind.  These sites don't deserve your traffic anyway and whoever told them they should design their site like that should be fired.
  
  
• Opera.  I honestly don't know a whole lot about Opera, but its users are very vocal about how much they like it, so maybe you will, too.  Pros:  I've heard it's really quite good.  Cons:  Same as Firefox.
  
  
• Safari.  This is Apple's browser that comes pre-installed on Mac computers.  They make a Windows version now.  I wasn't overly impressed, but again, this letter is about giving you options.  Pros:  Um...  it's free?  Cons:  Nothing overly compelling about it.
  

With just five minutes of effort, you can take a step toward a better browsing experience for you, and, as others follow your lead, a better development experience for me.  Thank you.