| 04.27.2004 | Sing, Sing A Song

Our little Emma has bloomed into quite the music lover. Mornings generally start these days with "Listen to mmyouuusic!" followed by Emma running to the CD changer, turning the power on and hitting play.

She's also started singing on her own and I recorded a few samples tonight on my aging iPaq:

Chewy Bubble Gum                 Love Grows

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star       Zoom Zoom Zoom

@ 9:34 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (1)

| 04.26.2004 | Emma's First Egg Hunt

Emma's first Easter Egg hunt was at a city park in lovely Rancho Santa Margarita. This was the first of three during the week leading up to Easter.

As you might expect, she had a blast. We arrived a little bit late and missed the egg hunt for her age group. Not to worry, though. Several folks from her playgroup were there and were kind enough to share their booty with her. (We snuck in to hunt with the 3-4 year old group, so all was not lost.)

After the egg hunt died down we went and visited the Easter Bunny. It doesn't look like it in this picture, but Emma love the bunnies. The grimace on her face is her straining to get the lollipop the nice lady was holding up to try and get her to smile.

She finally got that lollipop (another first) and was happy to share the evidence later on.

@ 10:11 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (1)

| 04.24.2004 | Shave and a Haircut, 20 Bucks

Well, no shave, actually. Miss Emma had her first haircut today and Mommy and Daddy are proud. We took a trip to A Star Is Born in Mission Viejo, a "salon" specializing in kids, for the big event. Little did we know that the owner of the salon used to style the hair of children in movies.

Grandma Northcutt has been politely suggesting a haircut for quite some time, but Marla and I weren't convinced. It's been getting longer and longer and finally we had to admit that being able to see was a little more important than having long, gorgeous locks.

I think we were more nervous than Emma ("Gonna get a hay-er treem.") going in. Of course, we shouldn't have been. Emma was an angel and had a smile on her face for most of the session. The highlight of the event was when the lady cutting her hair let her play with the water bottle and Emma ended up spraying them both in the face.

Once all was said and done they saved several locks for us and presented us with the dandy certificate you see above. Emma left with flowers in her hair and a smile on her face!

UPDATE: I finally have all of the pictures from the day online in the "Emma's First Haircut" gallery.

@ 9:37 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (3)

| | Farewell Silverdawn, Hello Lawnmower

With heavy hearts we took our friend Joost "Silverdawn" Loijens out for a farewell dinner a few weeks ago. He's moving up to IGN/GameSpy HQ in Brisbane, CA. We checked out the new Fox Sports place at the Irvine Spectrum (tasty).

There was a field of ice plant (?) near the parking lot that was in full bloom. I'm really glad I had my camera! The three shots of Emma and Marla among the blooms are some of my favorites from this year.

The next day Emma discovered her new love: her wonderful new lawnmower from Kohl's. I tell you, it's a wonderful world.

@ 3:20 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (0)

| | Matthew Rogan's First Birthday

Getting back into the swing of things after "taking a few weeks off" to put together a new computer and a new website. Only 3 weeks of photos to catch up on...

Our good friends The Rogan's had us over for their son Matthew's birthday party a few weeks ago. We all had a great time. Margaret made a cool puppy dog cake and Matt had a great time stuffing it in his mouth.

@ 2:35 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (0)

| 04.22.2004 | Thunderbird for Email

Marla and I have been using Thunderbird for our e-mail since spam became such a huge problem a few months ago. We suddenly started getting 6-8 spam mails per day after getting none for such a very long time. Thunderbird's groovy junk-mail-protection is pretty good. (Nowhere near as good as SpamBayes for Outlook, but that's a different story.)

I mention it as I spotted some new iconography for the Mac version of Thunderbird that's up on // hicksdesign. I can't tell you how I lust after Apple's amazing design asthetics. The fact that this port looks better than the native Windows version hurts me deep inside.

Speaking of new design... we have a new one. What you think? XHTML 1.0 (transitional) compliant with the exception of a few missing ALT tags on images. Not a single table in sight! Except for those pesky old archives. Not sure if I'm up to the challenge of recoding a few hundred picture galleries. Time will tell.

@ 9:52 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (8)

| 04.21.2004 | Ooops

As you may be able to see I kind of jacked up the design of the site. Been working on a redesign and hit SAVE when I meant to hit CANCEL. Such is life!

At any rate, look for a new design soon. Not to mention the return of the <P> tag.

@ 6:01 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (0)

| 04.13.2004 | Emma Speaks

It just blows me away how quickly Emma is picking up words and concepts these days. I came home from our home owners' board meeting (I'm the secretary and treasurer, apparently) and Emma couldn't wait to tell me about her trip to the grocery store.

EMMA: Daddy! Emma get b'lloon too-day.
DADDY: You did?
EMMA: (smiling) NO! Lallow b'lloon forty dollar. Too pensive.
DADDY: (laughing) Forty dollars?
EMMA: NO! Lallow b'lloon five dollar. Too much.
DADDY: Emma you are too smart. Did anyone ever tell you how smart you are?
EMMA: Yes. Daddy told to Emma too-day.

Like I said, amazing. Marla did indeed tell her that the yellow balloon (shaped like a butterfly) was too expensive and they'd have to wait and get one another day. They've gotten $1 balloons before, so I guess that's our spending cap :)

She had a few other choice comments tonight. I have to remember to bring that iPaq home and record it.

@ 10:32 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (0)

| 04.11.2004 | Gurus vs. Bloggers - Fight!

I'm in the midst of redesigning this site and have been using lots of tips (not to mention design ideas) from many of the bloggers that appear in the first round of Gurus vs. Bloggers at Design by Fire.

Herasimchuk pits many of the usability gurus I praise at work against many of the designers I follow from home. Check it out - you shouldn't be surprised who wins!

One last bit: since I've started using Bloglines to keep tabs on several friends' websites I thought this opinion on "syndication as misnomer" was interesting.

@ 10:10 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (0)

| 04.09.2004 | Page 23 Meme

Here's something fun:

  1. Grab the book nearest to you.
  2. Open to page 23.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal (or in this thread's comments) along with these instructions.

Here's what I've got, from Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals:

As the storyline would already be known to many of the players but not all of them, the game would have to work and play well irrespective of the players' knowledge of Tolkien's world.

This entertaining entertainment brought to you by Ben Turner.

@ 6:02 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (4)

| 04.07.2004 | Pudding is Yummy

Ain't pudding yummy? Emma sure thinks so. She had a blast sampling a batch Marla made the other night. Thankfully none was spilled on the nice dress her Aunt Jessica gave her.

There's also a shot of her taking her first nap in her Big Girl Bed in this group. It's been almost a month since she moved from her crib to the bed. The crib, of course, only for babies and Emma certainly isn't one of those if you ask her.

@ 10:03 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (0)

| 04.03.2004 | Emma at Play

Emma loves to play. (Who doesn't?) It's amazing to me the number of ways she can entertain herself with in just one day. The gallery below is a great example. From being a ballerina, to watering plants outside, to having a tea party, to playing under a sheet in just under 8 hours. Whew!

@ 1:35 PM by TNorthcutt | Comments (0)

| 04.01.2004 | Definition Lists - Who Knew?

Wow. Who knew there was such a thing as definition lists? I certainly should have, but didn't. Shame on me!

In other news, I'm giving TopStyle Pro a whirl. It's written by Nick Bradbury, the author of the original Homesite (pre-Allaire, pre-Macromedia). It feels almost like home!

CSS Layout Techniques is a beautiful list of layouts and how to accomplish using CSS vs. tables. Yowzah. This, along with a much needed redesign, is going to be my next big web project.

This is REALLY clever and neat use of border-left in menus. Swiped from milov.nl:

ul.menu li a
{ padding-left: 10px; }
ul.menu li a:hover
{ border-left: 5px solid orange;
padding-left: 5px; }
ul.links li a
{ padding-left: 0px; }

More theft from Randy Peterman via TopStyle news group:

There are a lot out there, in no particular order, places I've learned include (but in no way limited to are)
  1. www.csszengarden.com - view the source on the various style sheets
  2. www.meyerweb.com - explore this site, you'll find good resources here
  3. www.mako4css.com - a great tutorial here for getting started
  4. www.alistapart.com - maybe more advanced topics will be covered here
  5. www.htmldog.com - a great beginner's source for HTML+CSS
  6. texturizer.net/firefox/ - look at the bottom of the page for their style switcher - this will show you a locked menu (that works in Mozilla & other standards compliant browsers, but not IE, since it really misses the boat on the "position: fixed" CSS rule). This is what you're asking for above.

@ 9:13 AM by TNorthcutt | Comments (0)