Ken: 4/10
Dana: 6/10
I've updated the design of our photo site at photos.kenanddana.com so that it better matches the blog page at www.kenanddana.com. I also finally got around to uploading some pictures from the past couple of months, including some fun shots of Ben on a swing in our backyard, like this one:
Hope everyone is having a great fall.
Ken: 5/10
Dana: 5/10
Ken: 6/10
Dana: 6/10
Ken: 4/10
Dana: 5/10
Ken: 6/10
Dana: 6/10
Ken: 7/10
Dana: 8/10
This weekend we celebrated Jessica's 3rd birthday. There is a gallery of pictures from the party on our photo site.
On each of Jessica's birthdays, we take a picture of her with a pink puppy toy, which was gift to her at her baby shower before she was born. Here, together are the pictures from birthdays 1, 2, and 3:
Back in January, I posted a brief summary of all the iPhone apps in my iTunes library on on my iPhone. At the time, I had exactly 100 apps in iTunes, meaning I had downloaded 100 apps from the App Store. I recently crossed the 200 mark for downloaded apps, so I thought it might be time for another look at how those numbers break out.
Here's are the numbers from January and from today.
| January 2009 | August 2009 | |
|---|---|---|
| Default Apps Pre-Loaded on iPhone | 19 | 21 |
| Apps Downloaded | 100 | 202 |
| Games | 39 | 82 |
| For Jessica's Amusement | 19 | 29 |
| Icons Currently on my iPhone | 92 | 116 |
| Icons that are Web Shortcuts | 10 | 10 |
| Seasonal (Halloween, Xmas, etc.) | 5 | 5 |
Again, 21 pre-loaded apps and 10 web shortcuts still leaves 85 apps on my iPhone that I downloaded from the App Store. That's around 42% of the apps I've downloaded, which means nearly 60% of those are currently unused. Of the unused apps, many I probably shouldn't have downloaded, but others were at least useful at some point: some games were fun but are played through, there are a couple of apps I downloaded to help track of contractions when Ben was about to be born, a handful are seasonal or holiday apps that might get loaded on the phone again when the time is right. Still, I think it's fair to say that downloading apps can be something of a hit or miss. Sure is fun, though.
Still waiting for an improved way to manage all these apps in iTunes and on the iPhone. The easy search that came with iPhone 3.0 software update is a great step in the right direction, but there's still a need for some easier way to customize and organize.
On a trip to New York for the weekend to visit my sister, Jessica (nearly 3) was playing with some wooden trains.
She held one up. "These ones are subway trains." (No surprise; she'd been impressed with our trip on the subway earlier that day.)
"The yellow ones are subway trains?" my sister asked, clarifying.
Jessica paused. "I will check on my phone." Her empty hand suddenly grasped an imaginary phone. With her other finger she touched it once or twice, then she just looked at it. "Yeah, yellow ones are subway trains."
Her Mommy, Daddy, Aunt and Uncle all use iPhones. She's apparently observed some things about how we use them.
Couple of new galleries on our photo site. One gallery is all from our day at Disneyland, and the other is from the birthday party of Jess' best friend from the old neighborhood. Click on one of the following pics to link to the galleries.
This kind of thing makes physics fun. Plus, it's Richard Feynman.
(Via kottke.)
I'm personally a fan of calculus. I really enjoyed it in high school and college, both in theory (in most math classes) and in application (in physics). I tutored calculus for some time afterwords.
Still, Arthur Benjamin makes a pretty good point in this 3 minute video from TED.
Ken: 10/10
Jessica's reaction to the arrival of her baby brother has been interesting. She asks lots of questions about him and about what we're doing with him, though of course these days she asks lots of questions about everything. (She's in a "why?" phase.)
She hasn't shown any interest in holding Ben, or touching him or helping us change his diaper or interacting with him much at all. She has, on a few occasions, imagined that she can guess what he would be saying if he could talk; she then acts a bit like an interpreter, explaining to us what it is he means by his cries, sighs, and murmurs.
What she has done is taken a brand new interest in her baby doll. She's loved to play with her menagerie of stuffed animal friends for quite some time. We've had this particular baby doll since before she was born (it was actually something we got so we could acclimate the dogs before we brought a baby home). Until recently, she'd shown very little real interest in it.
Over the past week, though, she has begun to carry it with her all around the house. She acts out things she needs to do to take care of it, some of them reasonable and nearly accurate, others far fetched. It seems that one way she is dealing with the changes in her life is to simply be like her mommy. (Or, in the picture below, like her aunt.)
Ken: 10/10
There are a couple of galleries of photos now up on our photo site. One gallery is all from Ben's first day, and the other is from his first week. Click on one of the following pics to link to the galleries.
Ken: 6/10
Dana: 6/10
Ken: 6/10
Dana: 5/10