resistance to persistence

earth hour is this saturday at 8pm. register online at wwf.ca/earthhour or earthhour.org to let them know you’re participating so estimates can be kept for those involved.

i plan on turning out the lights, lighting some candles and relaxing. i’m going to try turning off as much electronics as possible, even turning off the computers. maybe i’ll do some battery-powered PSP gaming.

I bought a MacBook Pro on the weekend (post to follow soon) and I’m moving my life from my PC to Mac. Previously, I did everything on my Mac Mini, except for all my email and surfing which I did on my PC laptop. Now that I’ve got a portable Mac, all of my life is going on there.

I use Thunderbird for email on multiple accounts (blainekendall.com, Gmail, a few Yahoo accounts, a few other domains,etc). I managed to find some tutorials on easily moving mail accounts from the PC to Mac. But there was just one problem…Yahoo POP access. A few years ago, Yahoo started charging for POP email checking. They want you to go through their web pages (for advertising revenues). Thus YPops was created to continue giving POP access by running a small server on your local machine and screen scraping your email out of Yahoo. Sadly, it was Windows-only although the source was available for those who wanted to try to convert it to Mac/Unix/Linux,etc. Not being able to check my Yahoo mail except for on a webpage was just a hardship I’d have to deal with.

Until today. I did another search and found something that claims to solve the problem. MacFreePops looks to do the same thing as YPops, yet runs on the Mac. I’ll definitely be giving it a shot tonight. It’s the one remaining thorn in my side keeping me from a complete transition.

my baby is my newest gadget

so it’s been an exciting February and an exhausing March. our little baby arrived at the end of Feb. as we both suspected, we had a baby girl. we decided to keep it a surprise for ourselves but we both had a dream that we were having a girl. very strange but i had a strong feeling.

i foolishly stayed up until 1:30am and had just drifted off to sleep when J woke me up and told me her water broke. labour isn’t like it is in the movies…you don’t have to jump in a cab and speed off to the hospital immediately…unless if you’ve had a couple kids it might happen very fast. but the next few hours consisted of getting the bags ready, last minute packing, laying around, dozing between contractions. I fell asleep for an hour at 5am and J continued on impressively without waking me. at 8:30, we got a bit anxious and headed to the hospital. inspection and monitoring for a couple hours and we were given the option to go home for a few hours to rest while J continued with contractions and dilating. we drove home again to relax in a more comfortable environment and for me to catch a bit of sleep. J’s mom came over to help with the painful contractions and I caught an hour of sleep.

we quickly drove back to the hospital an hour later…J’s contractions were intense and she wanted an epidural pronto. we got checked into a large birthing suite and started the process. hours of contractions and breathing exercises. J finally got an epidural a couple hours later and made things much more bearable for her. i caught another hour of partial sleep when i could. around 1:30am, we finally reached 10 cms dilated…the key point to start pushing. an hour of pushing later, our baby girl arrived looking beautiful and with all the required toes and fingers.

a few more adrenaline filled hours spent with the baby and we finally tried to get some sleep at 6am but it wasn’t possible…every 15 minutes a nurse came in to check J or check the baby. exhausting. no sleep for 2 days. time to wake up and get the day started with the baby. we learned all the stuff needed…washing, feeding, etc. we coasted on a lack of sleep and lack of food for a long time. exhausting, but it was a good preview into what the following weeks would be like.

2 weeks later, the baby is doing great. she’s gained a ton of weight, faster than most babies the doctor said so we’re feeding her well. every 3-4 hours, round the clock, it’s feeding time. 8 feeds a day minimum. by the time you change her, feed her, dress her and get her to sleep you have about 1-1.5 hours of time until you do it all again. sleep comes in small intervals and you try to nap when she does.

sadly, i have to go back to work in a couple days and i’ll miss the daily interaction with her. she’s changed so much already and each day is a new adventure. she’s definitely the best thing to happen in our lives.

yvonne of longoverdew.com just pointed me at a new online music listening service. i’ve seen a lot of these, but this one’s different.

listen to music and see graphical relationships at musicovery.com

you can select your musical genres, what kind of mood you’re in (energetic, calm, dark, etc) and the service will select music related to that. it also shows songs related to the song playing. you can narrow the music to a time period when it was released and even discover new music you hadn’t heard before. i’ve had it going for the past half hour and keep hearing new songs or old songs i’ve forgotten about.

i’ll keep this service in mind if i’ve forgotten my ipod or want to find some new tunes.

i’ve been checking out a lot of inspring photographers lately since i haven’t had much time to actually do any shooting. jill greenberg (manipulator.com) has a very specific look and i really like it. i’m going to try to shoot some work like this. lighting isn’t cheap, so i might have to be very creative instead. check out some of jill’s great work. you’ve likely seen some of her commercial work already.

jason lee, shot by jill greenberg.

i noticed this watching Reggie Miller at the NBA All-Star Weekend events. He looks a lot like Barack Obama. I’m obviously not the only one who thinks so as a quick google turned up some results.