I just added one new voicemail and one recorded conversation to the Voice Mails page and I also updated a third. I am hoping to go back through the page and add comments or desciptions to the voicemails. If I remember that ones was left for a particular reason i will also add that. I am still working on trying to get videos uploaded and a page configured for that too, but it is late now, so I am going to bed.
Category Archives: Site Info
New Pictures Up
I finally uploaded some new pictures to the gallery including the end of Kylie’s year 4 pictures and the start of year 5. I think this brings everything up to date. Of course as soon as I post this I will find more that I need to process and get up. There may have been others added in random places so if you are really interested you will need to browse through and see what else there may be to find in the gallery.
Fairy Door Hunt
A while ago Melissa came home from work with a piece of paper talking about Fairy Doors and how they are scattered around Ann Arbor. We had talked about it being a good way for us to do some more adventuring around Ann Arbor, something we have wanted to do for a while but never have the time, and then forgot about it. Last night Melissa found this piece of paper again and found there was a link on the paper to Urban Fairies. We checked it out and decided that today, after she got done with work, we would go on a hunt. It was rather interesting and we got to adventure around Ann Arbor and visit stores we otherwise would not. We had a very yummy iced Chai Tea at Sweetwaters Cafe, and I would like to go back there one day. We took a lot of pictures of the doors we found as well. Though we did not get to see the one located inside the Ann Arbor Google office because they were closed, it was still a very nice and fun day.
Children’s Art Showcase
Yesterday I had the opportunity to go view Kylie’s art gallery exhibit at school. Each year the children of the Children’s Institute supply art for the Children’s Art Showcase. Each child has at least one piece of art that they created, and most of the rooms (maybe all, I am not certain) have a piece that all the children of that room helped to create. This is actually the first showcase that I was able to make it to, and it was very nice. All of the artwork was very interesting and unique, and I am very happy that all of the children have the opportunity to express themselves in this fashion. I only took a few pictures, but they can be found here. I did, of course, make certain to get pictures of the piece of art that Kylie created, which I think is beautiful and expressive. She seems to enjoy doing art work and expressing herself artistically, through painting or dancing or even playing music. I look forward to encouraging these activities as much as I can as she grows.
Backups really do pay off
Last night I performed an update for wordpress, and promptly broke the web site. At first i wasn’t sure what the issue was, just that it was something with the way the site was parsing the layout information. Fundamentally the site was working, but not displaying everything properly. I was able to go back to last months full backup and pull out the core files that I expected to be the culprit. After running comparisons on those files I was able to find the one that was causing the issue. The culprit was one file, formatting.php, located in the wp-includes directory. Thanks to running the monthly full backups I was able to bring back a working copy of the file and fix the issue. This is just one very good example of why performing routine back ups is so important. Kind of interesting that this very thing, ensuring proper backups of data, is one of my core responsabilities at work.
Touring Ann Arbor
Today Melissa and I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and go take some pictures of the University of Michigan campus, mainly around the Law Quad due to how much I like the old stone buildings. We didn’t realize that this was also the weekend that they were having there open house for incoming freshman. This was actually a good thing, as we realized that the Michigan Union was open and got to go in and walk around the union as well. It was a nice time and I think the pictures came out pretty nice too. I took a couple of sets to try and make some more HDR images, and I like the way most of those came out too
New pictures!
A Visit with the Easter Bunny
Today Kylie went to the mall so she could visit with the Easter Bunny. She knows he will be coming to the house soon, and knows she wont be able to see him when he does so she was really happy that she got this opportunity to go talk to him. She even sat in his lap and had her picture taken!
This image has been added to the gallery and can be found either by clicking the above image, or by clicking here.
Post Print Functionality Implemented
For a while now I have been looking for an easy way to potentially print the posts in the blog individually. This desire was brought about by an idea that would possibly require me to print individuall posts at a later date for a project. Tonight I finally found a way to implement it. Now up above the post body but below the post title a printer icon like this one: 
will be visable. Clicking on it will open the given post in a printer friendly view. The printer view even lists out links within the post in a foot note format. Not sure how often I or anyone will use this functionality, but I am glad to have it implemented. And who knows, if my project comes to pass…..
Plymouth Ice Photos
Took me a little longer than I hoped it would, but I finally got the pictures from this years ice festival up in the gallery. They can be found here.