I’ll be at BarCampBoston this weekend. It looks like it should be a fun gathering, and I look forward to learning from my fellow campers and sharing my own experiences (for what they’re worth…).

If you’re going to be there, drop me a line and we’ll try to sync up.

[tags]BarCampBoston[/tags]

Sadie had a big moment today. Sitting in her exersaucer, she swung her arms, spun around, looked interested in some things, bored at others. In short, she behaved far more like a little kid than a baby.

I don’t know whether to be happy or sad.

The Netflix queue is a fluid thing. Sometimes it holds chick flicks, sometimes 80s nostalgia, and sometimes it contains the movie we watched last night, a heart-warming tale of a boy and his cheetah.

Duma is a little predictable, but it’s still a very good family film. My only quibble: I wish they’d had more wacky country-cheetah-in-the-big-city moments.

Sadie got to go outside today, meaning she got to wear her fun pink hat.

At some point I’ll learn the art of holding the baby and taking a picture at the same time. She got a little chopped off in this one, but the eyes were too pretty to toss.

She’s getting much better at eating her food, and, as her bib says, she is far too cute.

Finally, she’s branching out from eating her teddy bear. Now, she’s started eating the stuffed lamb.

Wow, such a fun link from Boing Boing: a reel of 70s toy commercials on YouTube.

These toys look like so much fun.

Today I broke out the Briggs and Stratton for this year’s inaugural mow. I added oil, added gas, wiped off the blade, then fired it up.

After a few minutes of running, the mower started belching white smoke. I turned it off, let it cool and tried again. Again, after a few minutes, it started blowing smoke. I kept it running, and made it all the way through the yard, but I’m still a little worried, as I can’t imagine free-flowing smoke is a sign of a well-tuned mower.

I’m not a handyman, so I’m pretty clueless about the cause. I wonder if it’s related to my “anything on the ground can be mowed over” theory of yard care.

Sadie is all better after her two weeks of illness. She was in such a good mood that I couldn’t resist taking some pictures once I got home.

Sadie looking in her mirror:

Sadie in her bath:

Sadie after her bath:

And again:

I really like the last couple of pictures. I had both of us in front of the bathroom mirror, and I held the camera in front of me and off to the side. I then turned off the flash to get the super-soft lighting. I think she’s beautiful in any light, but this golden light is especially pretty.

Antonio Rodriguez and team launched Tabblo this morning. It’s a great tool for putting together combinations of pictures and words to tell a story.

I’ve built my first Tabblo. It’s pretty easy….

I look forward to playing with it more tonight. It’s great to see local Boston startups doing interesting things.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there, including the fabulous A. Today is a special Mother’s Day, because our little girl is six-months old!

A lot has happened in the past month. One thing that hasn’t changed is how cute she looks when sleeping in her car seat, especially when she’s wearing her little cardigan.

Sadie is growing incredibly fast — as she likes to put it, “I’m a good eater.” Sadly for us, her growth forces us to keep retiring our old-faithfuls, first the swing, then the bouncy seat, and this morning, the bumbo.

She would squirm in the bumbo trying to see what was going around her. This morning, she squirmed right out of her seat; thank goodness I was there to catch her before she slammed into the counter-top (or the floor).

Sadie has graduated from taking her baths in the kitchen sink to taking them in the bathtub, and she no longer screams and screams. She’s found out that she can play with toys in the bath, and that makes her ever so much happier.

The biggest change this month was her graduation to day care. She has been a rock star, but she’s gotten two viruses (at least) so far in her first two weeks. So, most of the past couple of weeks have had us in an “I’m trying, Daddy, but I just don’t feel so good” kind of mood.

Two icicles of mucus have run down her face nonstop for the last two days. I have a fun picture of this, but I’ll spare the web from it. As she kept telling us, “Nothing makes me happy. Everything makes me cranky.”

But she’s getting better. We’ll see what she gets this week. By the time she starts school, she’ll have an immune system of steel.

She’s really starting to master her motor skills. Sitting in her exersaucer, she’s no longer just dropping her toys, she’s willfully tossing them aside.

She’s sitting up very well on her own now, and we’ve minimized the thud factor by laying down a foam floor in the family room.

She’s *this close* to crawling. She can sit. She can roll over and roll back. Next step is crawling, a step for which we’re hopelessly unprepared. Child-proofing? Egads.

Regardless of her mode of locomotion, the goal is always the same: stick something in my mouth!

She’s also getting wicked smaht. She turns the pages in Goodnight Moon at the right time. She looks at the cat when we say “kitty-cat.” She amazes us every day.

Happy half-birthday, sweetie!

Back in the day, I lived in a pretty obscure part of China: Yantai, in the eastern Shandong province. Not a lot of news comes out of that part of town, so I pay attention when something interesting crosses my wire.

In Penglai, a town we went to visit with our Huaying and Nanshan kids, they apparently get very impressive mirages. You should click through and check out the pictures.

Here’s a picture of me in Penglai, with one of my Nanshan students:

Here was the rest of the class:

By now, all these students should be just about ready to graduate.

More China.

Well, it was bound to happen, though I had three weeks on the over/under, not one. Yes, a mere seven days after starting daycare, our little girl was home today with a 102 fever. She has officially started her career as a plague-monkey (tm Kurt).

I got the first stay-home-with-the-sick-baby shift, but I was able to work in a couple of conference calls and a trip to the pediatrician between bouts of fussiness. You be surprised how quickly you can boil down an advertising model when a six-month-old is screaming in your ear.

Vitamin
Many of the web’s leading lights get together to write a magazine-style site about web design and development. Upon quick review, it seems similar to A List Apart or Boxes and Arrows. The authors make it worth reading, though.

Will your web app make money?
One of the first articles from Vitamin, working through the calculus of running your own web apps.

Massachusetts Politics Coverage
Our news team put together a nice overview of the political season here, including candidate profiles, issue overviews, etc. This should be a good reference throughout the gubernatorial campaign.

Cute Overload
Several pictures each day of cute little baby animals, serving as a little break in NetNewsWire each day.

Steve Jobs in front of the Cupertino city council

This is my first time embedding a video in the page. We’ll see how well this works for everyone.

If you haven’t already incorporated Wikipedia into your daily workflow, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s 9:20am, and as I’m reviewing some financials from the mothership, I’ve already used it to look up two different terms of art for which I didn’t know the precise meaning, EBITDA and CAGR.

It is really quite handy to have all the world’s knowledge freely available at your fingertips.

Sadie starts daycare today. In a few hours, I’ll pick her up and see what trauma her first day’s experience has caused. Of course, knowing her, she’ll be perfectly happy and will have charmed all the daycare workers. She’s far more social than I’ll ever be, and after an initial “it’s all new” screaming fit, she’ll be fine. She’ll get into a comfortable routine.

And maybe I’ll get one, too. Today, for the first time since the autumn of 2002, I’m not in the middle of a major life transition. From the job to the girlfriend to the engagement to the wedding to the new business to the new house to the pregnancy to the baby to the new job to A. going back to work, more than a thousand days have passed since I’ve seen steady state.

I’m kinda looking forward to it. It’s about time for a nice good rut.