Sunday, January 21, 2007

Gratuitous Baby Shot


Several days ago, Lochlan started pulling himself up to a standing position. Today, he started cruising from chair to table to high chair in the kitchen. The crazy thing is, the kid just turned eight months on Thursday! Here's a shot of the wee lad after he pulled himself up to plunder the toy box.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Two Cool Tools

Every once in awhile I find some really cool tools that make my job a lot easier and/or interesting. Here are two, one from last week, and one from this week:

The first is Light Box, a bit of javascript that does really neat stuff with images on the web. Thanks to Jon Stahl for bringing it to my attention. I used this for the portfolio section on the CORE GIS site. It's kinda hard to explain what it does, just go check it out.

The second one is a very handy GPL PDF splitter called PDF Split and Merge. I often have cause to generate large PDFs, which need to be split into individual pages or chunks of pages for layout using InDesign or some other graphics software. I am somewhat mystified by the exclusion of this apparently obvious feature from Adobe Acrobat, but thank goodness someone solved the problem--for free!

Maybe there are others out there who would also benefit from these handy tools.

Friday, January 12, 2007

A "Cronkite Moment" for Global Warming?

On Monday morning I was listening to NPR on the way back from the Ballard Pool (yes, this was one of those rare occasions where I was actually driving a car, which only enhances the substantial irony of this post). They were interviewing Bob Seger, who has just released a new album. I'm not exactly a fan of his music, but I share a certain working class affinity with the man. I was born in his home state of Michigan, and many of my extended family members worked (or, in some cases, are still working for) one of the Big Three automakers in Detroit and the surrounding cities. But what really caught my attention was the subject of one of his songs, "Between":

World keeps getting hotter
Ice falls in the sea
We buy a bigger engine
and say it isn't me.


This is a pretty significant statement coming from the guy who wrote the song "Like A Rock," which became one of Chevy's most famous advertising slogans. What's more, Seger gave major kudos to Al Gore for spreading the word about global climate change, and it was right about that time my jaw dropped completely to the floor.

If Bob Seger, American Classic Rock Icon, has seen the light, perhaps there's hope for the rest of the country?

Wednesday, January 03, 2007