The little-girl-ification of my house is proceeding in full throttle this weekend. Yesterday afternoon was the the big run through Babies ‘r’ Us. Today, we’re putting together her room.

Starting with her little nightlight…

Only a few more weeks until we get to meet her.

Wow, I have a lot going on right now, with the new job, the impending baby and the 2.5 hours of daily commuting. My writing schedule has suffered.

I’m still going to keep writing, but I need to figure out how to fit the time into my new reality. It should be an interesting juggling act.

I was very cranky when I couldn’t get ViaVoice to work on 10.4. I installed it and followed all the instructions, but no matter what I did, the system wouldn’t recognize the microphone.

Here’s how I fixed it:

* Go to System Preferences

* Choose “Speech”

* Turn “Speakable Items” on

* Go through the ViaVoice Setup program again. At this point it worked for me.

I hope this helps you, Dear Google-visitor from the future.

I’ve been using Tinderbox for years for managing all my information, planning and GTD work. It’s an incredibly powerful piece of software for knowledge management.

If you’re on a Mac, you should go check it out, especially as it’s on sale now.

I’ve been playing around with Ruby on Rails over the past week or so. It’s pretty amazing. If Rails had existed last year, I’d have implemented Life Times Voice in it instead of in PHP. Rails automatically generated plumbing code that ended up taking me about a month to write last year.

I need to redesign JPButler.com soon; maybe I’ll do it in RoR.

I’ve been playing with Pandora for most of the afternoon; it’s really pretty neat.

Pandora will take any artist or song you give it and generate a radio station based on your selection. For example, I created a channel based on “Tangled Up in Blue” and Pandora has given me “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Friend of the Devil,” a couple of Neil Young songs and one from Townes Van Zandt, an artist I’d never heard before but liked immediately.

They give you 10 hours for free; after that, it’s $36/year. I’m not sure I’ll pay that, but it’s an intriguing alternative to the uber-mix.

Haven’t posted in a while, blah. Lots going on. I’ll start again now.