Monkinetic Weblog

Jodi and I got to spend Saturday at an adoption-prep seminar/training put on by the agency we're working with - Adoption Journeys of Arizona. Lonore and Tina, the social workers, were really good, they led various activities, and spoke about the many challenges that adoptees face, physical, emotional, and social developmental delays. Not only did they help us understand to a greater extent the problems we may face, but they spoke encouragingly about ways to approach those issues. Also, getting to meet other families that are adopting or have adopted was awesome. The stories shared over lunch about past experiences and future hopes were enough to make it worth it.

|WordPress| got a mention on Adam Curry's Daily Source Code on Sept. 15. Find the MP3 here (mention occurs around minute 23), in the context of enclosure support and the users that are working on adding it to WordPress.

Ok, I'm going to geek out for a minute here... I've been listening to Adam Curry's feed of audio posts today, and noted that he often mentions links to other's sites on the "show" (he is a blogger, after all).

Frugal Baby: Fun Nursury Ideas.

So... Jodi and I had our first home visit today by a social worker from the agency doing our home study. I was really nervous, though Jodi did not seem too bothered by it all. Tina (our social worker) arrived around 1 o'clock, and just left at around 4.

NEW R.E.M.!

ongoing: Report From the Intel Community >...if I were going back to do it again, I'd seriously consider trying to get into the intelligence business. I could seriously spend a few decades working on technology for pulling important little facts out of oceans of raw data and never, never get bored...

around-the-sun tags: "" tp_commentcount: "1" tp_favoritecount: "0" tp_urlid: 6a010534988cd3970b0120a55ce34e970b

NEW R.E.M.!

The iTunes Music Store has a 3 minute montage of track snippets from R.E.M's upcoming album, Around The Sun. I can't wait.

>Get a free taste of R.E.M's new album, Around The Sun, with an iTunes-exclusive album sampler. This world premiere, "Around The Sun Redux," packs snippets of "Leaving New York," "Around The Sun," "Wanderlust," "Electron Blue," and "I wanted to Be Wrong" into one 3-minute melodic treat. Get it while it's hot, only on iTunes.

The album is due for release Oct. 4-5.

Jodi and I went to Sedona with her parents (who were in town for the weekend) and went hiking up to Cathedral Rock. Now, the nice lady at the visitor's center told us about the 1.5 mile hike to Cathedral Rock, along the treeline next to Oak Creek... she neglected to mention the hot barren .75 mile stretch before you get to the creek, and the barren .5 mile stretch after the creek. Or the .6 mile 600' technical ascent to Cathedral Rock at the end. I think she was trying to kill us.

I've started my first photo gallery site: Photomonk. It uses Pictorialis II, a gallery app built on |WordPress|.

Via bbum: Cooking For Engineers.

To re-read and consider: |Mezzoblue| -- Fitts' Law > On the web that means the bigger your link area, the better.

|Jodi|'s parents are in town for the holiday weekend, and last night we watched Miracle, the story of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team and their quest to beat the indomitable Soviets in the Lake Placid games. All in all, a good story, a classic underdog story.

Ok, so I signed up for the iTunes Music Store affilliate program to see what all the hoopla is about. So far I'm not impressed - the only options for links that are available are an iTunes logo that links to the iTMS. I'm hoping that they will add a way to link to specific products, like you can with Amazon's affiliate program. This would make so much more sense in the context of a weblog site, what with all the "what I'm listening to" links out there.

Well, everyone else is going to be pointing to the all-in-one marvel, so I might as well too.

Man, I should have posted this on our anniversary - this is a picture that our good friends took the night Jodi and I got engaged, while in Altensteig, Germany. March 6, 1998. As of this picture, we had been engaged for, oh, about 20 minutes. :-D I sure love you, |Jodi|!

A good friend, Don, introduced me to a couple bands last week, and I've been listening to them ever since.

Morbus Iff, and a cast of thousands (for a very tiny definition of 'thousands'), have released a new GameGrene site, Ghyll. Ghyll is a RPG where players take on the role of a scholar documenting the history of an imaginary world called Ghyll. Based on the concept documented here, I think this is a really cool idea. Hypermedia rules.

Sorry for the short outage, had to re-install mysql and reload the data.