CHESTER MCLAUGHLIN

January is off to a great start. Corin is taking more steps more confidently, although it’s still a far cry from what I’d call walking. Before he was born I was made aware of a statistic that said babies who crawl longer are often more coordinated than babies who walk sooner. Based on that statistic I had resolved to knock Corin down when he started walking in an effort to make him more coordinated. I have since found that it is not necessary for me to knock him down. He does it well enough on his own.

I can’t give Corin much grief for not walking yet since I’m not exercising my own walking skills as much as I should. I have walked to work a few times, however the walk doesn’t raise my heart rate nearly as much as the soft shoe shuffle I do every time I slip on the ice covered roads. Corin and I have gone on several walks together too. We’ve been up to the Water Source twice now. It’s a 2.25 mile hike round trip with a 600-800 foot elevation gain. The first time up I wasn’t sure how Corin would do seeing as though it was nearly freezing out and we’d never had him outside in those conditions for longer than 20 minutes. He did great until we started heading back down. I don’t know if it was the additional jostling of going downhill, or just the prolonged exposure to the cold. He started whimpering and crying. I can now say that there is no better motivation for speed than a crying baby on your back in freezing weather! The second time we hiked out I bundled him up superbly so he was pleasant and happy the whole trip. He really enjoys being outdoors. He points out the moon whenever we’re outside and it’s visible. I’m trying to teach him the difference between the moon, planets and stars.

It’s been fun watching Corin learn how to play with other kids. Hudson is already walking quite proficiently, but they still manage to play well together… and get into stuff they’re not supposed to together.

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From now on if you want tech support ask for Corin, not me.

Work is going well. The reorganization that happened back in November is still in the process of going into effect. I hoping that I’ll soon find out if there’s a middle ground between tyranical leadership and absentee leadership. Either way I’m moving forward with several web projects in addition to providing IT support for the charter school and the graphics department. My personal focus for the new year has been to get my workflow and backups nailed down. I’m almost there. I’m doing my development locally using Parallels to run CentOS on my laptop. I’m using SVN to publish changes live, and I’m using a combination of TimeMachine and Rsync for backups.

Others additions to my workflow include using Google Calendar’s new Calaboration tool to sync my iCal calendars with my Google calendars. Brilliant. Also I switch from OmniFocus to Jumsoft’s Process because I love the ability to create new fields and create ’smart projects’ based on those fields. OmniFocus may be more flexible, but it comes at the expense of complexity. Another recent tool I’m using to improve my workflow effeciency is SLife, an application which tracks not just your application usage, but which documents you’re using within those applications. You can then categorize different applications and documents into specific activities. They say it’s like Google Analytics for your computer use. They’re not wrong.

And finally, if you haven’t seen our facebook videos check them out here and here. You can also follow Chester’s reading habits on Good Reads and Elisa’s knitting on Ravely. You’ll need an account for both.

A coffee connoisseur from birth