Second test from a phone

Okay, this appears to be much better. Instead of sending in a post via SMS, I'm using the phone's browser to post through the normal web interface. A little more effort, but worth it for the extra features available.

And yes, this is just practice. No baby yet...

Blogging from my mobile

This seems like it might be a handy feature in about a week, so let's give it a try!

(Posted from a phone)

(and then edited from the web...)

New: Reactions

Oh, by the way, in case either of the people who stumbles across my site hadn't noticed...

If you don't want to comment on a post, you can now leave your reaction with a single click. At the end of each post is a "Your take" section, where you can click on one of the available choices. C'mon, how hard is that? At least throw me a bone and let me know someone is reading the site...

Ding-dong, the server's down

It's official.

My Linux server that at one time or another faithfully hosted a number of domains, including this one, 02victor.com, carolynjoe.com, pecks.org and hewletts.org, is now powered down. Now that all the domains I have a hand in have been moved to other hosting solutions, I'm able to free myself of running a server at home.

It was a good run!

I've had that machine for just shy of 11 years, and the last 7 it had been on 24/7, except for maintenance, hardware issues, and the occasional power outage! The processor, power supply, video card, sound card, memory, and hard drives had all been either replaced or upgraded over the years, but everything else (let's see... that would be the motherboard, NIC, optical drives, and chassis...) were the same!

I'm going to give it a few days of rest to verify that I don't need anything else off the hard drives than what has already been backed up, and then the hard drives will come out, and the server will be no more. *sniff*

A moment of silence please...

Ok, enough of that. Time to go outside and play with the kids!

Daily Post Challenge

I've just decided I'm going to post something on this site every day until our little one arrives. Why? As Peter would say, "I-unno..."

Maybe THAT will cause Amy to go into labor...

And if nothing else, maybe it will get people to visit each day and see if he has arrived. I'm sneaky that way.

So, some things are broken...

It appears I lost all my followers when I changed around the domain so that www.bredenbergs.com points here. Alas... hopefully they will find me again.

FYI - photos from more than 4 years ago will not appear, as I am still working on updating all those old links to point to the new storage location. I may start on that in my "free time" (cough, cough), so don't hold your breath.

UPDATE - Thanks to Blogger's "missing files host" option, the vast majority of photos included in old entries should now be working.

Site fully converted

I said when we first set up this Blogger site that I would eventually convert my blog from my old home-hosted Wordpress site completely to this site. Well, guess what! It's not as easy as it might sound... Ok, it might not sound easy either...

Anyway, it's finally done. I found a utility that converted most of the posts (and most of the comments, but a few went missing along the way...) into a format that could be imported into Blogger, and I manually filled in the posts that would not convert for some reason. You should be able to see any of the posts back to when I first started posting on ye olde worlde wide webbe, though I can't guarantee many of the links from back then will still work.

I still have to move the images and other attachments off of my server and put them somewhere Blogger can link to them, but that's another step on down the road...

Enjoy!

Let's Give it a Go!

Ok, new trial starting today. If you tried to hit www.bredenbergs.com, you should have been directed here. For now, this is the site we will be using to post updates, particularly with respect to the upcoming adoption (see below). If all goes well, I'll tie this back to the bredenbergs.com domain name, but I'm not ready to do that just yet.

Come back often!

Peekaboo!

Hey... what am I doing on Blogspot?!

I used to maintain my own website...
on my own server...
that I built...
all by myself...
and kept running...
and had to maintain...
and had total freedom with...
and had to maintain...

Oh yeah, the maintenance thing.

*Sigh*

It has finally driven me over the edge. I'm tired of upgrading software, applying security patches, dealing with internet connectivity issues, and all that stuff. So here I am...

...on Blogspot.

Yes, that means most of our old posts are no longer accessible.

Yes, that means you have to look at a fairly generic template for now.

Yes, that means the URL is harder to remember, at least for now.

But look at the upside - with less maintenance to do, I can spend more time on actually posting.

Or at least, that's the idea...

Cheers!

What, you’re still here?

So I think that with this last 2-month silence on our site, most of our readers have probably headed for greener pastures. I may be writing this for my own benefit…

But if anyone is reading this, know that we have lots of stories to tell from the last two months, and that we fully intend to post them and try to get caught up.

In the meantime, I’ll give you a teaser of what has been going on. Yesterday evening, we signed a contract to sell our house! Anyone who has gotten their house on the market and sold it will appreciate the time demands of that kind of effort. I’ll provide more details soon, but we were truly blessed in that we only had four showings in the three days it was on the market before an offer was made and accepted, and three of those four were visits by the party that ended up making the offer! The inspection is happening today, and if all goes well, we’ll be homeless soon. Well, in a manner of speaking… obviously we’re looking for a house to buy…

We’ll miss our first house and all the work we lovingly put into it over the years. It is very gratifying to see it snapped up by someone who loves it and likes the way we painted/decorated/landscaped. Small as our backyard is, we will miss the welcoming environment it became over the years with loving care and our collective green thumb.

It is exciting, though, to go out looking for something bigger to hold our family as it grows. And yes, both Sydney and Peter are growing. We have not found a Pause button anywhere on Peter to keep him infant-sized, and he’s already making great strides in flipping himself over, making noises, reaching for toys to put into his mouth, etc. His lungs are also developing well, as is the temper he graces us with from time to time for seemingly unknown reasons. For the most part, though, he is an easy little guy who loves to smile and who, Amy swears, laughed the other day for the first time.

Meanwhile Sydney is learning and watching everything and wants to have every conversation repeated so she can understand it. She is the most social little girl I have ever seen, and she had a blast directing the painters who came to do some work we didn’t have time to get done before our agreed upon deadline for putting the house on the market. She is still in that rough stage between taking a nap and really being able to make it through the day without one, but since a nap causes her to stay up until 9 or 10 before she can fall asleep, it is the rare day that we end up turning her “quiet time” into a nap and dealing with the ramifications.

We are still proceeding with a second adoption for a third little Bredenberg, but at this point the most accurate we can be on the timing is “sometime next year.” Our paperwork has been in China for over a year and a half, but the process has slowed down so much that we’re just waiting and watching to see when a referral might be coming our way.

Well, that’s about all I can say without spoiling some of the individual stories we want to tell here soon. Now that the house preparations and showings are over, we hope to have a little more time to sit and relax and think about things we’ve been neglecting for a while, so come back soon for more!

Open Season on Comments

Now that WordPress is in place, I have two plugins to protect against junk comments (i.e.- SPAM!). As a result, all posts on the site are open to comments again!

Under MovableType, I simply closed each post to comments after 14 days because that was about how long it took the SPAM engines to find them and start littering them with objectionable material. With WordPress, it says in fine print that we can use a little less brute force and a lot more finesse to achieve the same result.

Keep reading for more details...

Read more »

Wordpress in Action

Ok, that's it... we're giving this a whirl. I still have not worked out all the kinks to get things "Just right", but finding time for that gets less and less likely each passing day, and I want to get this going!

So, welcome to my site on Wordpress! I decided to do a "makeover" at the same time as the cutover from the no-longer free MovableType to the open-source Wordpress, hence the new look. Let me know if you hit any snags. I had to patch a few files to fix some odd behavior that was killing my Apache server for reasons unknown, but the latest version of the affected functions seems to be working. I'll keep making tweaks and adjustments in the near future, but about 90% of the work is done.

Enjoy!

New Look!

I can already hear the oooh's and aaah's coming from people who frequent this site (all three of you!). I've been thinking of freshening up the place for a while, but never had the impetus to actually do it. Those two black and white photos you see of Sydney provided the stimulus needed. We had a professional photographer (and friend) take photos of Sydney when she turned two, and they turned out superbly! The two shown at the top and left of the site are two of our favorites, and we decided that in order to do them justice, we needed to change up the look of the site.

They were taken by a photographer named Debbie Klawetter, and we highly recommend her. She took these (and many others you may have seen if you've been to our house recently) at the Dallas Arboretum. Both the black and whites and the color shots are beautiful and did a great job of capturing Sydney's personality in fun ways. I'll be adding a link to her site soon, but in the meantime, she has given me the okay to post her phone number along with permission to use these two photos:

Debbie Klawetter Photography, 972-675-9959

She designed a few collages for us in addition to the "regular" prints she did, and if you are ever in our home, make sure we show them to you!

On a side note, I was hoping to combine the transition to the new style with a move to WordPress, but gave up on being able to do that in a timely fashion. This was more important, so WordPress will have to wait. I think I first downloaded Wordpress in early 2004 but never got far enough to cut over. I downloaded it again a few months ago and toyed with it, but didn't have time to do it justice. Hopefully it won't take another two years to make the change for real!

Please leave us feedback on what you think. If you have any problems with the new look in your browser, let me know that too. I checked it in IE, Firefox, Opera, and Netscape, but every browser is different, so it's possible I missed something.

New Banner

Hopefully you have noticed the site's new banner. Sydney and Dad were hanging out Saturday morning and Sydney wanted to wear Dad's "at". She was having such a great time hiding under the hat and putting it on and taking it off that Dad grabbed the camera and started snapping. The shots above are some of the best.

Once I saw the finished shots, I decided it was time to replace the old banner since it had been almost a year since we took those pictures. If anyone still wants to see the old banner, I have it below.

Read more »

Vonage!

I know most folks check this site for news and pictures of the family, and especially Sydney. Amy and I have committed to sitting down this weekend and putting together some new photos and updates on that front, but until then, I just have some geek speak...

Years ago, before seeing a movie with my wife's family, I heard a couple of her siblings and her father discussing VOIP. Not being fully up to speed on the whole shabang, I kept my mouth shut. After the movie, as several of us were making use of the facilities prior to hitting the road, I turned to my father-in-law who was standing next to me and asked "So, is this what they call Voice Over I P?"

For those that don't know, VOIP or Voice over IP (IP referring to the Internet Protocol, not the bodily function) is, from a consumer's perspective, a way to make phone calls over the internet. Numerous companies like Vonage have started making use of this ability by offering phone service that runs over your broadband internet connection with no need for a traditional copper phone line.

Why do I mention this? Because Amy and I have switched to Vonage, and I love it!

Read more »

Fios

Weeeeeeeeeee!

That's my response to the newfound speed of Verizon's Fios. I had it installed yesterday and went from a 4.5Mbps/384kbps connection with Comcast to a 15Mbps/2Mbps connection over a fiber optic connection all the way to my house. (The fiber optics stop at the garage, where Verizon's equipment connects to a regular Cat5 cable to the rest of the house.) The added upload speed will be especially nice when uploading photos and other things to the website.

There were a few growing pains along the way, but only because I like things "just so." In the end it was worth it for a faster and cheaper internet connection. Yes, I did say cheaper! I went from $52.95/month with Comcast to $49.95/month with Verizon, while more than tripling my download speed and quadrupling my upload speed. If I wanted to, I could drop down a notch to 5Mbps/2Mbps and save another $10, but I thought I'd give the higher speed a try first.

My recommendation: If Fios is available in your area, GET IT! This is particularly true if you are currently using Comcast, who is not likely to drop their prices to compete with Verizon, based on this article. I have relatives who just signed up with Comcast and got a great deal on the first six months of service, but there are no such price breaks for existing customers. Based on the article, it seems that Comcast's assumption is that users will find it "too inconvenient to switch," so most users will stay despite their higher prices. Based on my experience, Comcast may be in trouble because it's a breeze!

Picasa

I recently decided that my current software package for managing my digital photos was not meeting my needs. In my search for new software, I cast about to see what other people were using in the hopes that there was indeed better software out there. My father-in-law passed this question to a friend of his who has spent time looking for exactly this same type of software, and the recommendation that came back was Picasa, which is owned by Google and is freely (as in beer) available for download. While a very small download (much smaller than the software I was using, which came from the manufacturer of my camera), it has already sold me on its usefulness and easy interface.

Read more »

New Features

I've been told recently that I need to be better about updating my site. With that in mind, I thought I would post several links to areas of the site I've been working on but have not linked to the main page yet. I hope to add them to the sidebar somewhere soon.

First (and covered previously though not with much fanfare) is a webcam I have set up in the office. The scenery is pretty boring, but I just might be convinced to get a longer cable and move this into the nursery after we complete our adoption! There is a button you can click on to refresh the picture, though I'm still struggling to find time to work out the kinks. You will probably have to click the button and then force your browser to refresh if you want to see the updated image. Did I mention that not much happens in the office, so the scenery will be boring? Ok, just don't say I didn't warn you...

Next, as mentioned once or twice previously, I have set up a package on my site for storing photo albums from which visitors can order prints through several services. As you'll see, I have added a gallery of Amy's photos from China. They are unedited in quality and quantity at the moment, so viewing them all may take a while! The software behind this project is found at the Gallery homepage.

Finally, I set up this nifty little area for managing recipes. Amy and I have only entered a few so far, but it's a start, and I am working on a script to import recipes from other electronic formats, so check back soon. If you want to be able to enter recipes, let me know and I'll set up an account for you. The more, the merrier! For more info on the software behind this part of the site, visit the Recipants site.

Well, that's all I've got, at least until I find another fun way to expand the site....

Google SMS

As evidenced by my earlier post on Lookout, I am always interested to find new techie stuff to make life easier. In that vein, I think Google's new Google SMS service is outstanding!

To elucidate (a word I looked up via this service) I'll give an example of how this changes things for me. I have a Treo phone that is able to browse the web. Up until now, when I have been out and about and needed to find an address or phone number, I have navigated to a search page and eventually (some number of clicks later) found what I was looking for. This process usually takes several minutes as I wait for Sprint's system to respond and my phone to load the pages needed.

Now, however, all I have to do is send a quick message (via SMS) to Google, and their service will reply (very quickly, so far!) with business listings, residential listings, current product prices, or even a definition of a word! You can read their page for more information and complete instructions, but I'm already liking this!

Lookout!

If you use Outlook for mail, and have a large body of saved or archived messages, you probably know the pain of having to search them using Outlook's search problem, er, feature. I certainly do, and I have found what seems to be the greatest thing since the ability to synchronize Outlook with my PDA!

You ask "What is it?" Lookout!

No, that's not a lead-in, that's the answer! Lookout!

I downloaded this yesterday (thanks to Joel's entry on the subject) and already I love it! A search through years of old email takes less time than it takes me to blink and realize it's done. For those who regularly search Outlook, you'll know this is orders of magnitude better than the built-in search capabilities of Outlook. Not surprisingly, Microsoft purchased Lookout recently, but you can still download the software. I try not to be too pessimistic about Microsoft's business practices, but I would recommend downloading it soon, before it disappears or ceases to be a free download...