As you’d imagine, the last few weeks have been pretty busy. At some point, I’ll pull together a coherent set of pictures and video, but for now, here’s a quickly shot this morning of Lucy, Sadie and me. Thank goodness for the webcam on the kitchen laptop.
Your crying is very important to us. Due to unexpectedly high child-cry volume, we are unable to attend to you right now. To help us serve you better, please choose your desire from among the following options. Please listen closely, as the options have recently changed.
Press one for “Boob”
Press two for “Send the baby back to the hospital”
Press three for “No, seriously. Boob!”
Press four for “Alleviate generalized sibling angst”
For all other requests, please hold on the line and continue wailing.
Your crying is very important to us….
They asked the children at Sadie’s school what they want to be when they grow up. The other girls want to be mommies, or ladies or mermaids; my little girl wants to play football. Hell yeah.
Maybe she’ll be the next Adam Vinatieri. I think she’d rather be the next Junior Seau, though.
Lucy likes posing for the computer.
Turns out that, like Sheena, Lucy is a punk rocker.
Day three of the Butler foursome went very well. Sadie is becoming very protective of her little sister.
In one of the most anticipated meetings since Obi-Wan met Anakin, Sadie and Lucy were introduced today. They seem to like each other, so far. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Lucy Holcomb Butler
Born 4/2/2008
8 lbs, 11oz
Everyone is happy and healthy. And excited!
No more sippy cups at meals!
So far, we’ve only had a couple of spills. I’m glad we have lots of rags in the kitchen.
Have you signed away your right to sue?
Yet another article about how mandatory-arbitration clauses are bad, this time in employment law.
Be it ever so illogical — drop the price of your home, already
We’re not looking to sell our house for a couple of years, at least. I hope that when we do, we’ll be able to accept reality, and price our house to the market.
Do open houses sell houses?
Shill! I really like our Real Estate blog. This entry is on open houses. It’s fun to watch people fighting in the comments.
Should it be free?
Outstanding article on whether software should be free or not. Even if you’re not in the industry, you should read this.
Jason Butler - Twitter
Because it’s important that I have an outlet for 140-character updates on my life through the day. Follow at your own risk.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to post about Sadie. We’ve had tons going on, but I want to take a quick break to tell you all how she’s doing.
Sadie is incredibly active, running around the house until she’s nothing more than a blur.
She loves sitting in the living room, where the sun comes in and make her hair all glowy. She likes that.
She loves coloring at her table. She’s graduated from sheets of paper to coloring books. Art school, here we come!
We spent some time yesterday coloring Easter eggs. We have to start with a nice snack first, though. Everyone likes the milk.
We started out with the hard-boiled eggs. You need to drop some vinegar into the cups. Be careful!
While you’re waiting for the eggs to color, it’s fun to play with the basket.
Easter morning: It’s time to search for the eggs. Found one!
So much fun. Sadie ended up with a full basket of eggs. She didn’t like the jellybeans, though.
Baby should be coming in the next ten days or so, so I suspect there’ll be lots more pictures coming soon.
All hail Universal Hub
Excellent article in the Phoenix about Adam Gaffin and Universal Hub. I’m not stealing all our hyperlocal community ideas from him, but maybe a couple…
12 practical steps for learning to go with the flow
February was a trying month. March has not started much better. I need to learn to go with the flow a little bit more.
Beat the long tail with 1,000 true fans
Incredibly interesting article about how to survive as a creator without having to rely on the blockbuster. Must read.
Bank Julius Baer: allegedly money-laundering; unquestionably moronic
Robert X. Cringely expains why attempting to shut down the whistleblower site is the stupidest thing an (allegedly) money-laundering bank would want to do.
Why it’s good to include the tourist hordes in your travel photos
Philip Greenspun shows why including your fellow travelers in your shots can sometimes make them far more interesting.
This week’s TWIT was their best
This week’s episode of “This Week in Tech” was their best. Jason Calacanis and Molly Wood add a ton to the panel, and I hope they become regulars.
Wow, I’m way behind on my website postings; impending baby and multiple launches at work are conspiring against me.
Today we did our “stock up on everything you can think of” run to BJs. Now, both freezers are full, and we should be able to live for a couple of weeks without leaving the house when the baby arrives. I’m wracking my brain for other baby-prep tasks I need to do.
Anyway, on to the links…
AngryJournalist.com
Anonymous journalists tell us what they’re angry about today. Quite a bit of inside baseball, but not too different from what I see from time to time in the newsroom.
This is also a good example of what happens to the signal:noise ratio when the social-news hordes descend on a site.
Yet another reason to boycott Best Buy
I have never had a good experience at Best Buy (or their not-at-all-missed competitor Comp USA). They take advantage of the non-technical customers and outright lie when they are caught. I hope that a more activist Congress will reign in some of the corporate excesses.
50 tricks to get you more productive
It’s always good to remind yourself of little ways to keep moving the chains. I’m pretty good about most of these, but I really need to work on a couple of them — especially working on the important things, instead of just the pressing things.
Learn to demo
Good advice from Antonio Rodriguez on how to prep yourself for demoing your product.
We told Sadie this morning that I was going to take her to the high school tonight to vote for president.
She said, “Vote Duck.”
Perhaps we’ve read this book a few too many times:
Sadie, Sadie, jumping all around. Jumping up and down from the bottom of the stairs is one of Sadie’s most favorite games. We spent eleven minutes this morning climbing up and jumping down. Great fun!
Not safe for work: so, what happens when Google’s parents go away for the weekend? That Snopes girl is such a buzzkill.
It probably won’t mean much if you’re not a web geek, but it’s pretty funny if you are.
I’ve really joined the cult of the ice melt this year. I laid out forty pounds on the driveway last night, and this morning went far more smoothly for the effort. My latest bout of shoveling was only 45 minutes, as opposed to the 90 minutes I expected.
We haven’t been able to come up with a name for the impending baby yet; I’m going to nominate Calcium Chloride Butler.
Shill Alert!
This is pretty neat: the Globe’s Wesley Morris and Ty Burr sit and talk about the movies they review in the paper. It’s Ebert and Roeper with a Boston mindset. Plus, they get to go off on the movies they don’t like, as in the case of “The Bucket List.”
Edit: killed the embed for technical reasons…
Also, in case you ever wondered what the Globe’s auditorium looked like, you can see it here. Now, imagine yourself in a two-hour business-review meeting there…
It’s been a while since I’ve put up any new Sadie pictures. Sorry about that. One of the new year’s resolutions is to take new pictures of her (and impending baby) at least once every three days. I hope this discipline will let me keep more up-to-date with her changes. In the meantime, here’s some new pictures to keep everyone happy.
Sadie is looking pretty small outside in the yard.
Sadie is getting really good at feeding herself and taking control of her milk intake. She knows that if she asks nicely, she’ll always get some more milk.
The week before Christmas, we got together and decorated a gingerbread house. Sadie liked putting on all the candy.
Sadie had a very nice Christmas. One of the highlights was her very own tricycle. She doesn’t quite reach the pedals yet, but we’re all looking forward to summer, when she can ride free.
One of her other favorite toys from Christmas is the ever-popular Play-Doh. Spending an hour with the Play-Doh is one of our new Saturday-morning traditions.
That’s all for now. More pictures in a few days!
You finish wrapping the present with her, then when you turn around, she gleefully rips open the paper.
She’s not quite getting the concept yet.
The coach on how to make proper peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Ahh, YouTube.
I was reading the Fort Point article this morning when I read this nugget:
Archon/Goldman, the former owners of 316 and 322 Summer St., had initially envisioned converting the two properties into luxury condominiums, launching [Fort Point’s] transformation into a community where people live, work, and play - a local version of the Soho and South Beach neighborhoods in New York and Florida[.]
I’ve been coming into my Fort Point offices for the past two and a half years, and I can guarantee you this: Fort Point Channel is NOTHING like South Beach. Trust me.
Bill Keller’s speech
New York Times editor Bill Keller gives an incredibly insightful speech, talking about the future of journalism and newspapers.
Ten steps to close down an open society
A scary checklist — one we’ve almost completed.
Does your customer service just want people to go away?
Seth Godin has a smart idea here: measure your customer service people by the amount the customers buys after the call as opposed to before it.
Talent Wars in Boston
Xconomy does a nice write up of the current state of the technology labor market in Boston. It’s a good time to be a techie on the Red Line.
How to be a consultant
Long, insightful article. I faced many of these same issues back when I was consulting.
Top 10 reasons we deleted your comment
The Times’ City Room blog describes how they handle blog comments. Seems quite reasonable, though some in the comments disagree.
The treadmill desk
Shimon Rura has a great article talking about how he set up a treadmill desk. I read my NetNewsWire on the treadmill in the morning, but I’ve never looked at trying to type. I’ll have to see if I can improvise something around this.
Having an iPhone doesn’t qualify you to fly the plane
“Some guy with an IPhone says the weather is good, and wants to know what the real reason is for the delay. Is something wrong with the plane?”
Accident victims face grab for legal winnings
If you are hurt in an accident, you might not be able to get any relief by suing the responsible party. If you win, the insurance company may swoop in and claim the judgment you receive. I can see both sides of this argument, but it still sounds all sorts of wrong.
Misgivings rise with Antarctican tourism
I regret not having been able to see Antarctica while still single and able to travel. In light of the rise in tourism and last week’s sinking of a cruise liner, I worry that it won’t be feasible when we’re ready to travel again.
Rise in holiday call strains mall cops
Nothing heats up the old police blotter quite like the holidays. It must be great fun to break up fights at the mall.
Renting ideas to Fortune 500 companies
Really interesting post from Tim Ferriss about how you can license your ideas to large companies and collect royalties. Beats working, but you have to actually go out and think of useful stuff.
Travel Basics: Moscow
I was trawling our sister site at the International Herald Tribune when I came across their travel blogs, written by the correspondents stationed in each city. The Travel Basics are great primers, not that I’m going to Moscow, or back to Bangkok any time soon.
Fresh pain for the uninsured
Important article from Business Week. Hospitals are outsourcing their collections from the uninsured.
3BR with a mall view
This article about the new condos at the Natick Mall annoyed me in many different ways. This is my favorite quote: “Their $1.6 million, 2,200-square-foot penthouse overlooking JCPenney, the DuGallys said, suits the lifestyle they want for themselves and their Chihuahua, Jasmine.” I always wanted a view of the JCPenney.
The Predatory Lending Association
Outstanding parody site. Ha ha, only serious.
An interview with the author of Programming Collective Intelligence
A highly-readable discussion of a highly-useful book.
“Sadie, stop it. Cream cheese is not a hand lotion.”
China’s deadly pollution
The Times has a long investigative piece this morning on China’s growth policies’ impact on the environment, and the growing blowback. The air was ugly when I was there in 2001; I can only imagine how bad it is now.
Walking scores
This is a neat site that calculates the walkability of any location. My long-time Cambridge apartment gets a 100 out of 100 score; everything you need is within walking distance. My current address only gets a 5. Damn suburbs.
The nerd handbook
s/nerd/geek/g, but otherwise pretty close in a lot of ways.
Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s image
Marc Andreessen on how the talent can overthrow the studio system.
Ok, so the Patriots rolled up 56 points on the Bills last night. Amazing.
And we don’t even hate the Bills. How many points will we score on Shula’s “Asterisk” Dolphins? On the “You cheated, so you didn’t really beat us all those times” Steelers? On the Jets? Can the scoreboards roll triple digits?
Grammie and Grampie gave Sadie an easel for her birthday last week. She’s been coloring like a fiend ever since.
She loves having her own whiteboard. Now, when she wants to know more about a subject, we go to the board for a deep dive. Here, we’re dissecting and analyzing her Sunday breakfast: biscuits go in the oven, eggs in the frying pan and bacon in the microwave.
She really feels like she groks it now.
We’re so proud.
So, we were waiting in the room at Holliston Pediatrics this afternoon, and I’m showing Sadie pictures of herself on the phone. In under 15 seconds, she saw how I was doing the flick to advance the photos and she started doing it herself.
Egads. I’m not sure I want her anywhere near my computers; she’ll probably optimize them when I’m not looking and I won’t be able to find anything again.
Sadie is two years old.
She’s a real little girl now, with very little of toddlerhood still around. She’s talking all the time. She takes care of her things. She understands when we’re talking to her. She even has her own whiteboard now.
She’s starting to learn some useful life lessons. Here, she’s playing with one of her balloons. Soon, she would see what happens when she decides to roll her whole body onto the balloon. Sorry, but we obey the laws of physics in this household, missy.
Even if the balloons don’t always bring joy, Sadie still gets the high of wearing a crown. She would like every day to be crown day from now on.
What’s a celebraton without cake? On Sunday morning, she helped prepare the birthday cupcakes. She knows that one starts with the muffin cups.
You can’t make a cupcake without breaking eggs, so Sadie helped Mommy incorporate the eggs into the batter.
When it’s all done, you get to blow out the candles. And this year, no unfortunate cupcake incidents!
Happy birthday!
Over the past couple of weeks, I rewrote my gallery-building engine in Ruby, making it much more flexible and easy to use. So now, I may actually be able to put up some of the old galleries I did, but never published, like this one of a Red Sox vs. Yankees game from 2004.
Here are the pictures:
I now know with complete certainty that we will be having either a boy or a girl.
We had a scheduled ultrasound yesterday, during which we were hoping to be able to find out whether the baby would be a boy or a girl. Unfortunately, the little baby wouldn’t cooperate, demurely crossing its legs. We’re going to have to wait until the big day itself to find out.
If it’s a boy, I hope he likes pink, because that’s what we got.
Shill alert!
I like the new Things to Do widget on the Boston.com homepage. So far, it’s done a really good job surfacing interesting events happening around town. Of course, I can’t go to any of them, but it’s fun to see how the rest of the world lives 
The very expensive reality of chasing reality TV
I never knew how far people would go for their chance to be on Survivor or Project Runway.
Curt Schilling announces he’s coming back
Hooray for Curt using his blog to break news. Hooray for the Red Sox getting him for one more year.
How to coast your way to a writing career
Paul Boutin with some good advice.
Ten signs of incompetent managers
I don’t think too many of these apply to me, but, of course, I would be the last to know.
Holliston Beavers
It seems that no one wants to save the Holliston beavers. On behalf of my water supply, I don’t really care what happens to them.
At 2:30 this morning, our carbon-dioxide detector started beeping. Nothing was wrong — the reading was still 0 — but the battery was starting to die. I got up, walked downstairs and replaced the batteries.
If only I could have gotten back to sleep.
Grr.
On the plus side, I got to catch up on my email, watch an episode of Firefly and walk on the treadmill. All before 5:00am. So productive!
I spent all morning today out in the yard raking up the leaves. Sadie helped, rolling around in them and getting them all over herself.
p.s., The iPhone takes some spooky pictures. Other than cropping it, I didn’t touch this one up at all.
If you read this on the site, you might notice that I’ve moved a little of the furniture around, dusted the shelves and repainted the walls. Let me know what you think.
Also, if you haven’t had a chance, you should check out my newly re-prettified travelogues and galleries: Tanzania, New Zealand, A Night in the Monster Seats and a day at the Franklin Park Zoo.
I have a couple of other pieces in the works. I hope to have them out by the end of the year.
Sadie was a big hit in her Cindy Lou Who outfit this Halloween night.
Pretty good likeness, if I do say so myself.
She went out with the pumpkin, soon filled with a dozen or so candy bars she’ll never see.
We let her have a little bit of a lollipop. She was pretty excited by that, but was all done after only a couple of licks.
I felt bad a little later, though. We let her answer the door when one of the neighborhood trick-or-treaters rang. The ten-year-old boy was dressed up in a skeleton mask, and poor little Sadie screamed. She was so scared — and the boy was petrified. It took me fifteen minutes to calm her down at bedtime.
I hope Thanksgiving isn’t quite that exciting.
Hooray!
This was a fun team to watch, and, with Ellsbury, Pedroia, Beckett, Matsuzaka, Lester and Buchholz, next year is looking pretty good too.
It’s fun to live in the city of champions.
P.S., damn you, Fox. Let’s try starting the games a little earlier next year.
Technorati Tags: Red Sox
Literary style by the numbers
Steven Johnson — author of Interface Culture, Mind Wide Open and other excellent books — does a quick analysis of sentence length and word complexity for several prominent authors. Interesting conclusions.
The Comcast fiasco
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Passive voice is redeemed for web headings
Interesting! This is what happens when search-engine optimization comes up head to head with principles of good writing.
Programming lessons from Sales — sharpen the saw
I’m always trying to find new ways of looking at old problems. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but it’s almost always worth the time investment.
I was a pre-teen Glicknick
Tales of Larry Glick with lots of links. (Via Universal Hub)
America’s most important issue for 2008 (with a little bit of salty language)
The lottery industry
BS is also prevalent in the business world, as you can see from this entirely content-free quote:
W. Bruce Turner, the chief executive of Gtech, puts it another way. “Gtech has played a key role in fostering the success enjoyed by lotteries today,” he says. “We have grown to be the world’s leading solutions provider to the lottery industry because we focus on creating the greatest value for our customers, which results in higher returns to the good causes they support.”
If you feel a wave of bliss flowing in from Holliston this morning, you can thank Sadie. She decided to sleep until 6:30 in the morning, instead of the more traditional 5:00.
Everyone else in the house applauds this update to our schedule. The sun is shining and the birds are singing. Hallelujah.
We have a good article today on what the World Series means for hundreds of local businesses. It’s a good time to be in the hospitality business here in town.
We don’t benefit in this particular way from the World Series, but we certainly aren’t going to turn away all the additional people reading the Globe and hitting the site for the next couple of weeks.
Oh yeah, it’ll work out pretty well for those who bought furniture from Jordan’s, too.
Some exciting news to report! Towards the end of March 2008, Sadie will become a big sister. We’ll know boy or girl within a few weeks; that should help with the planning. We’re all pretty excited, though I think I’ve blocked out some of the uglier realities of the first couple months with a new baby.
And, who knows, maybe within a couple of years I’ll be find myself a nice comfortable rut — my first since late 2002. Since then, I’ve had at least one major life thing in flux at all times. It keeps you on your toes.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before — I’m going to be better about updating the blog more often. Here’s some linky goodness to get us back on the right track.
ZipSkinny for Holliston
Neat little application giving you a visualization of all the census data for a given zip code. It’s good info; we’ve dropped all the Massachusetts ones into the crawl.
Oh Joy! Breakfast with the boss
How do you manage work/life balance when other people try to schedule you for breakfast or dinner meetings? I’m going to steal the “buy you lunch to pick your brain” responses.
Asking “why” can be dangerous if your father is a professor
Sadie has started asking “Why?” all the time. I’ve started answering her. She may come to regret asking.
Opening night of the Bruce Springsteen tour
Jimmy Guterman gives his thoughts on the opening night of the Bruce Springsteen tour. I went to my one and only Springsteen show in 2002. Geez, over five years ago — hooray for the blog archives!
Tips for making your tech resume less awful
Not relevant for me at the moment, but always good to keep the resume up to date — and not awful.
I’m doing a bit of housecleaning around the site and realized that I have a bunch of pictures from the Philadelphia Zoo that I never got around to posting. Check them out:
Balloon
Bearded pig
Cheetah
Flamingoes
Giraffe
Hippo
Kangaroos
Lion
Meerkat
Peafowl
Red panda
Rhino
Tiger
Tortoise
This Columbus Day wasn’t a total washout; Sadie loved stomping in the puddles.
I probably should have put her in boots, though. I’m not sure the Mary Janes are in real good shape right now.
We’re spending the weekend in fall-cleaning mode. The air conditioners come out of the windows and the down comforter comes down from the attic.
If only it weren’t 85 degrees right now….
Now that Sadie’s all mobile and filled with energy, we’re constantly looking for new and interesting ways to entertain her. Last Saturday, we went to the Roger Williams Zoo in Providence, about 45 minutes away.
It’s a pretty good zoo, with one of the highlights being the brand new baby giraffe. He was very cute:
Sadie mentioned that the crowned crane should really try putting some ponytails in her hair. That will help with the slight sticking-up problem.
You’d be surprised how many things you can climb on at the zoo.
It’s all a lot for a little girl to take in. Sometimes she just needs to sit and ponder.
Sadie’s school has a perfectly appropriate playground for toddlers. Sadie continues to pine for the big kids’ playground on the other side of the fence, though.
I’m not sure I’m happy about her literally climbing the walls.
Sadie and I visited the McGilvrays on Sunday and found, yet again, that everyone loves playing with a cheerful toddler. Sadie especially liked playing catch with the soccer ball. She pretty much has heading down, as Auntie Karen captured in this picture.
Welcome to Jason Butler's Home on the Web.
During the day, I'm director of search and community products for Boston.com, a division of New York Times Digital. My opinions here are, of course, strictly my own.