This is a nice colloraboration: We at Boston.com have included “Save to del.icio.us” links on all our stories. I hope our customers will find this useful.

If you ever want to read my mind a little, you should check out my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Ok, seven months and sixteen days. Did I mention this has been a busy month at work?

She’s still not crawling, though she’s ever-so-close. She’s good at getting herself up, into position:

But that often just leads to the faceplant:

Sadie has decided she really likes to talk, or at least babble. And now she’s babbling continuously. I’m told that won’t change until she reaches sullen teenhood.

I put some foam on the floor in the living room to ease the pain of the random faceplants. Sadie likes ripping up the fringe around the floor, and putting in her mouth to ease the teething pain. Or, what I assume is teething pain. Sadie’s been the little girl who cried “teething” for several months. Yet, no teeth.

She’s good at spinning around, doing 360s on the foam floor. She can do it sitting; she can do it crawling.

She’s still far more social than I will ever be. She’s the hit of her daycare at the gym. All the ladies in the babysitting room at Gold’s Gym coo “Sadie” when she comes in.

We’re getting better at interpreting her gestures as tokens of love. When she raspberries us, she gives us droplets of love. Her spastic arm clobberings are smackings of love. Her random lunges while trying to eat my leg — lunges that leave ample remnants of goo — are her coveted slimings of love.

She goes absolutely bananas when I pull up Cute Overload on the screen. She loves looking at the pictures of the animals.

She can clap. We’ve gone from waving arms randomly to actually clapping. Whee.

She can play peek-a-boo. For weeks, after I would pull off her pants I would brush them over her face. Now, she’s playing peek-a-boo with them herself. She’ll pull the pants over her face, then she’ll pull them off, laugh, and put them back. It’s very cute. Here’s the stop-action photography (thanks to burst mode on my camera.)

Pull the pants over my eyes:

Sit there for a second:

Start waving my arms…”Where’s Sadie?”:

There she is!

Ok, that’s a lot this month. I can’t wait to see what next month brings.

Here is an insightful tale of a conservative blogger’s visit to the Globe, well worth the several minutes to read.

I learned some appreciation for the Globe’s esprit and for that of the whole newspaper business – a business that worries deeply about disruptive competition from the Internet in ways that remind me of the automobile business during my youth in Detroit, when today’s automotive climate of heavy government regulation and global competition was just beginning. The newspaper business has real concerns about competitors from the Internet. Yet the Globe and newspapers have at least two sustainable advantages. First, they deliver their product daily to my doorstep before breakfast in a form that, while venerable, is quite satisfying and will remain so. Second, they can marshal a relatively large group of talented people to create their product. If they do their reporting jobs well, they may even be able to support an insular Op Ed board that seems to believe their target market is the Harvard faculty, and others who react with hostility when ideologically challenged.

It’s interesting. I walk through the lobby several times a week and I’ve never really noticed the stone map of New England. I’ll have to check it out next time I’m over on Morrissey.

I can’t wait for Pedro Martinez’s return to Fenway tonight.

In his prime, Pedro was electric. Every Pedro game was an event — you went in *expecting* a no-hitter, expecting to see something special.

I doubt we’ll ever see another pitcher like him.

Previously:
Red Sox Opening Day - 3/31/2003
Pedro! Pedro! Pedro! - 4/18/2003
The Full Moon at Fenway Park - 10/12/2003
Do you belieeeeeeve? - 10/16/2003
Grr. Argh. - 10/17/2003
Yub Yub - 10/19/2004

So, I’m 34 today. Another year. Another set of adventures.

I’m not sure how 34 could possibly top 33 (or 32) (or 31, for that matter). I can’t wait to find out.

Friend and fellow ex-Abuzzer Antonio Rodriguez’s company Tabblo is profiled in the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.).

We’ve been playing with Tabblo for the past week, arranging digital shots into collages — some with text descriptions and some without. Katie made a tabblo of pictures from a friend’s graduation party, and Walt made one of photos from the Journal’s recent “D: All Things Digital” technology conference.

We used various background colors, photo sizes, style arrangements and image effects, and got results that required very little effort on our part yet still looked professional and polished. An 11×17-inch Tabblo poster that we ordered turned out to be an attractive keepsake that displayed a bunch of photos all at once, eliminating the need to leaf through stacks of prints or scroll through hundreds of digital files.

This is a massive coup. Few startups get the Mossberg treatment.

Congratulations, Antonio!

(Previously: Tabblo launches.)

Friend and fellow ex-Abuzzer Jay Brewer is profiled in the Wall Street Journal, talking about his success in building out the Blogpire.

[S]ix months after he launched singleservecoffee.com, traffic and revenue had both more than quadrupled, Mr. Brewer says. He realized he could make the blogs a full-time job, but he had to make sure the performance in that fourth quarter of 2004 was not a fluke. He set up a forecast for the first quarter of 2005 for the blogs to maintain half the traffic they had in the fourth quarter, with the notion that if the sites met or exceeded his expectations he would quit his job. He began looking for more writers for each blog, while rolling out more at the same time.

By March 2005, Blogpire had outperformed his forecasts, he says, and he quit his job.

Congratulations, Jay!

(Previously: Jay’s week of Internet Fame.)

So much for a picking a real — yet reasonably rare — name in the hope that Sadie would be able to be the only one in her class.

Last weekend, a Sadie showed up in the gym’s babysitting room. Yesterday, another Sadie showed up at our regular daycare.

Alas. Here’s a fabulous toy to spend a few minutes with, the baby-name voyager.

When I was at Amazon.com in 1999, I worked on the launch of the toys and electronics stores, and part of my responsibility was checking out the sample toys manufacturers sent us. I fell in love with the huggy buggies. They were fun, and huggable, and when you are alone, 3,000 miles from home, working 90+ hours a week, you grow attached to the oddest talismans.

“Green” — as I named the green one — was the first item ordered off the Amazon.toys beta site, and it has followed me around for years, from Amazon to Abuzz to China to BostonWorks to LTV. I’ve gotten quite attached to this little ball of felt and rubber.

I gave it to Sadie last weekend. She seems to like it so far.

I don’t normally envy others’ success, but this is one damn fine AdSense check.

Great article from Dan Shaughnessy about his son in the METCO program. Very heartwarming.

This is an interesting article with Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post about the intersection of programming and journalism, an intersection I often find myself exploring.

The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:

1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It’s reporting.

2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant.

3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the distilled information into a format that is accessible to the readership. Some examples: writing style (inverted pyramid, etc.), photo color-correction, newspaper page design.

“Doing journalism through computer programming” is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible.

6/6/6 can’t scare me. This month is already hell.

Sorry for the posting paucity. I’m in a whirlpool of strategy and product planning at work, and, at the same time, someone who shall remain nameless has been awfully fussy the last couple of weeks.

I’m happily awaiting the fourth of July.