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A couple of Sundays ago, the wife ran off to a baby shower — probably the 100th baby shower she’s attended since getting pregnant herself — leaving me in sole possession of our child. I was a little worried. Sunday in the fall should really be referred to as Football Sunday. The Ravens were suiting up. The kid was asleep. I worried about my ability to watch 22 men fight over an odd-shaped ball and entertain my child at the same time.

It turned out that he was a welcome addition to my Sunday ritual. The kid slept for much of the first quarter. When he did wake, he was as good as gold.

Outside of a request for some Baby Einstein, he didn’t seem to mind that dad was watching the game. He played on the floor. He visited me on the couch. He learned to signal touchdown. For a just a little while, he watched some football. He and dad managed to get some pigskin bonding in between commercials.

Afterwards, we walked around the block. His tiny legs and distracted eyes made the short jaunt a longer, but enjoyable, trek. After all, the sun was shining. The sky was blue. My little boy was keeping me company. Sometimes parenting is all it is cracked up to be.

I’ve been watching a lot of TV lately. The fall season is in full swing. My TIVO is back from its summer vacation. The wife and I often settle down for the evening and catch some rays from the boob tube. The only odd thing about this is that I’m often watching alone. The wife is there in body but not in spirit.

She’s mailing in her attention. After a day of carrying around quite a sack behind her belly button and chasing the previous contents of her uterus around the living room, she’s ready to relax. This relaxation normally includes her eyelids. I can’t blame her. I’m glad I don’t have a bowling ball clamoring around in my insides. I only worry about the content of the TV she watches. It’s incomplete and, in some cases, disturbing.

For example, Monster House is a show we watch a lot. To me, it’s a home improvement show with a guy’s twist. To her, the show is about a group of contractors that start an ambitious project only never to complete it. What a mess these folks make! At least they could clean up.

Her vision of CSI is even more disturbing. Apparently, CSI is a show about horrible crimes that forever remain unsolved. Heinous acts are committed and no one ever figures out what happens. The nightmares must be awful.

The thing is she doesn’t care. Only my compulsive desire to watch more TV than is healthy and my compulsive need to see everything to completion drives TV to a realm where it might be considered important. She’s just happy to find any place and any position that allows her even the shortest moment of shut-eye. More power to her.

I think BabyCenter rocks.
Outside of the occasional advertisement in the mail (hey, they have to pay the bills), their weekly updates on both my little boys, born and unborn, provide some of the best email I get.

They say
Cambell is learning new words. They aren’t joking. New words sprout
from his tongue every day. Pete and RePete are pretty good friends.
Occasionally he takes time from his work with linguistics to surprise us
with new abilities. Today, he grabbed the wand from me as I was blowing
bubbles in the backyard. Before I could instruct him, he put it to his
mouth and blew. His bubbles chased mine into oblivion. There’s a lot
of that “guess what he did today” going around lately.

They say
the baby in the belly is growing at a rapid rate; muscles and lungs
are forming. My wife will attest to that, along with the heartburn they
mention. Those muscles are fueling the poking and prodding she feels
inside.

If you are have a young one or, better yet, one on the way, check them
out. Their weekly factoids are easily
digestible, sometimes offering a quick peek at progress and sometimes
giving you a peek into what is going on in there. Who knew?
This internet thing is pretty cool.

The chase for the NASCAR championship gets under way this weekend. The sport that goes around and around enters the playoffs for the first time in a test of skill and consistency.

Before things get started, I thought I’d take a shot at guessing the win, place, and show positions at the end of the year. Much to my delight, this list happens to coincide exactly with my current list of favorite drivers. Now, they just need to deliver.

1. Jeff Gordon

Gordon remains, along with Dale Earnheart Jr., the most exciting driver on the track week in and week out. The fact that he led the regular season point standings — and, by virtue of that fact, also leads the playoff standings — makes him the favorite to win it all. It also helps that he has four other championships under his belt. I’m voting for Gordon, who has been my favorite driver since I took interest in the sport.

2. Dale Earnheart Jr.

Dale, my wife’s favorite driver, has had an interesting year. He led the point standings a majority of the year, displaying a level of consistency that he hadn’t matched to this point in his career. Then a near tragedy happened. He found himself in the middle of a non-NASCAR race trapped in a Corvette enveloped by flames. His Sundays became a struggle that forced him to the sideline for a large portion of each race. The sideline was an uncomfortable place, a place where he could only watch as his position in the standings sank. The good news: he’s all better. He showed as much by winning both the Busch and NEXTEL Bristol races a little while ago. He’ll be in the mix in the end. There’s no doubt in my mind.

3. Jimmy Johnson

I became a fan of Jimmy’s for two reasons. One, Gordon owns his car. Two, I needed someone to root for when Gordon was knocked out of a race. I’ve been a fan of his since he was a rookie and he’s surprised me. I didn’t expect him to be so good, contenting for the championship not only this year but in the years past. This year might be the year he finally breaks through, beating his boss at his own game.

?. Mark Martin

I don’t know if Mark really has a chance, but he’s the sentimental favorite for both a majority of fans and myself alike. He’s an old-timer, someone who represents what the sport is really all about. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a nice guy. I’m glad someone with grey hair made it into the mix.

I promise to revisit these predictions, good or bad, at the end of the season. I should note that I’m not going out on a limb here. These guys currently lead the standings, albeit by a very small margin. But with the small margin of error afforded these drivers in the coming weeks, nobody has a real clue how things will turn out. That’s almost exactly what NASCAR had planned.

I lost a tooth on Monday. This was not a surprise. I knew problems were on the horizon when pieces of tooth were ejected from my mouth last week, leaving a sharp edge and scratched cheek in its wake. After a bit of jaw pain, I was on the phone with the dentist.

Come to think of it, perhaps “lost” is a bad word. I didn’t misplace it, although I can’t tell you its location at the moment. The dentist removed through a surprising quick but forceful move. The resulting crack still echoes in my skull.

The removal itself reminded me of shaking a tin can with a penny inside. You hear the dentist rummaging inside but the effects of novacaine leave you a little detached. Snap. Crackle. Gone.

For a moment and about the 2 hours afterwards, I had time to compare the effects of novacaine to that of Bell’s Palsy, an affliction I suffered about a year ago. With Bell’s Palsy, a side of your face becomes paralyzed. It stops working. Feeling goes away. In some respects, novacaine acts in much the same matter. Things go numb. That snapping sound made me flinch, but not from pain. It was the sound.

But novacaine is really much different. Novacaine makes you feel numb. A slight tingle warms your face. Bell’s Palsy doesn’t feel at all. Things just go away – frightenly away. You don’t feel numb. You don’t feel at all.

I found this incredibly comforting. I wanted the two to be different. That desire is less about dredging up nasty memories. It’s much more about keeping my nerves straight about what’s going on. This isn’t a relapse. It’s something different. Novacaine is good, especially when bone is being removed from your skull.

And good is how I felt when I left the dentist. Yes, I was minus a tooth, a tooth mostly forced from its home by an unruly wisdom tooth. As I understand it, it’s gone forever. That’s a bummer. The good news is that the unruly wisdom teeth in question aren’t the problem. An issue with my impacted wisdom teeth means surgery, a surgery I had hoped to put off permanently. I’ll trade a tooth for surgery, at least this time. Procrastination has a strong foothold in my psyche.

Now I just need to wait for the tooth fairy. I don’t have the tooth. The dentist kept it, a bit to my dissapointment (let’s think penny in a glass jar this time). But I swear its gone. She missed me last night but that’s almost certainly an oversight. Mom, give her a call. Will you?

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded Movable Type. That little number beside the words “Powered By” on the bottom left used to say 2.6 something something. Now it displays a number greater than that.

Much like any upgrade, this one was driven by irritation. It’s hard to get these fingers moving along an upgrade path. I procrastinate. I’m a big fan of the status quo. But annoy me long or bad enough and I can demonstrate change, barely.

My happiness of the status quo was easy to come by. After all, Movable Type 2 dot something did just about all I needed. I don’t look at blogging, and the tools behind it, as rocket science. The job is pretty simple. Take some text and create a running list of this text. I once even thought of home brewing my own blog-like tool, undoubtably underestimating the effort involved. Movable Type does a wonderful job as a replacement. It makes the simple things simple while adding so many bells and whistles that my inner programmer shines with pride. Not only does it do a wonderful job, it did a pretty good job just a week ago.

I also feared some of the changes that version 3.0 of Movable Type would bring. Well, “some” is probably overestimating. Two is a more accurate number. The first of these involved changes to the licensing of the product. Movable Type used to be free. You could donate if you wanted. The authors appreciated it and, if you asked me, deserved the rather low asking fee (No, I never paid for it. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have done so. MT rocks!). Now, all that has (mostly) changed. You are now more than encouraged to pony up some dough. “Free” is now version of the software as opposed to a price. This version is limited, albeit in ways that really don’t affect me, especially in the short term.

(I should be clear that I don’t want to bemoan MT’s authors from shaking the cash cow. They’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into one of the most used pieces of free software I don’t really own. I just worry when the meaning of free is altered a bit.)

Second, I was worried about their solution to comment spam. Somehow I was under the impression that TypeKey would be the only option for comment registration. TypeKey is a registration system designed to fight comment spam. Basically, grab a TypeKey account and you are considered a trusted user. It’s a global account, in that you can use it for all blogs that support it (i.e. any Movable Type powered blog version 3 or higher). The registration process stops most spam efforts in their tracks and spammers that do manually register (yes, manually register thanks to some well-established safeguards like initially entering a code displayed on an image) are easier to sniff out and ban. Apparently, this impression was wrong — the old Name, Email, URL standbys are still around — but it was still a worry. I didn’t want the same registration process designed to hinder spammers to hinder casual readers alike. I didn’t want my already low comment count to dwindle to zero.

But, like I said, irritation pushed me forward. I love MT-Blacklist, a MT plugin that wrestles comment spam to the ground. Without it, a spam attack I suffered in January would have made me cry. Dealing with the rapid rise of comment spam in my coffers since that event would have been a major pain in the ass without it to light the way.

Still, it wasn’t perfect. For some reason, I never got one of its most touted features to work. Namely, I couldn’t get it to reject comments at the point of entry. I could use it to search for spam and eliminate it — it was pretty obvious when I received a good round of crap — but I wanted a process that didn’t require manual intervention. I was happy (mostly; see status quo above) but not as thrilled as I would have liked.

Then, my comment incident. happened. As I mentioned, something nasty got into my special sauce. Some comments went AWOL and, given my relatively low number of comments, this is considered a bad thing. Those things are precious. So, I upgraded.

And I’m happy, even though that happiness was delayed a couple of days while I dealt with some technical problems with said upgrade (note to self: don’t accidentally overwrite your configuration file) as well as my fantasy football draft (note to self: go LaDainian Tomlinson).

Movable Type appears better than ever. The interface is cleaned up. Mechanisms for dealing with comments — like some special configuration options, a screen that lets you view comments in mass, and the aforementioned addition of a TypeKey option — are great additions. Best of all, the upgrade of MT-Blacklist is not only better integrated, it works like a charm. Want to chat about penis enlargement? Too bad!

Version 3 is up. I still have some work to do, mostly in the form of some new templates that need to be updated, but the upgrade is complete. If anyone notices any wierdness, let me know. I’m getting comfortable in these new shoes.

Damnit! I’m probably one of the biggest fans of MT-Blacklist out there but I’m going to have to be more careful with my left mouse button. A good friend of mine stopped by the other day and left a rather wonderful comment regarding Doom 3. Unfortunately, in my haste to remove my spam from this weekend, I somehow removed his comment as well.

Argh! I’m guessing this has something to do with yahoo.com sneaking into my blacklist. MT-Blacklist always gives you the option to add URLs discovered in comment spam to your blacklist. I normally choose this option, blindly ignoring the list itself. Apparently, this can backfire, leaving innocent links to fend for themselves among correctly incarcerated.

Bummer. If you come by and notice your comment gone (you may know who you are), I apologize. Like everything in life, blame spam.

Like a lot of folks, I was pretty impressed by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech at the Republican National Convention last night. I was surprised to find myself watching the television coverage of the dog and pony event and more surprised to find myself a little entertained.

And Arnold was entertaining. His speech was engaging. His delivery, despite his accent, was strong. His speech was, dare I say, inspirational. It had the words and conviction you want to get behind, even if you don’t necessarily agree with its content. It was an interesting pick for a speaker — I certainly wouldn’t have chosen Schwarzenegger to stir emotions — but a good one. Arnold got an opportunity to prove he’s more than an actor. Apparently, he’s a legitimate politician.

It also continued a trend of positive messages coming from the convention. What I’ve witnessed to this point is a message that stands in contrast to the negative message offered by that other convention held not so long ago. The Republicans want you to believe everything is rosy. The war is going better than reported. The economy is an inherited problem rather than a creation of this administration’s policies. The Democrats want you to believe the opposite. The war is a failure. Our economic problems are the fault of the current president.

I don’t completely agree or disagree with either position or party but, like most everyone, I lean one direction. Like many, my mind is already made up, making wonder why I spend any of my time watching these standing parades of like-minded people.

But I can’t help myself. I’ve yet to check out the DNC speech of State Senator Barack Obama that caused a bit of buzz but I will. I’ll be sure to read the RNC speech of Maryland’s Lt. Governor Michael Steele to see if a local boy did us proud. But my expectations are low. I don’t expect to hear words that could change my vote. I only hope to glean a couple details from the personalities that stand at the podium.

The conventions, like my mind, present a decision made up long before the crowds gathered. Let’s get on with the interesting stuff. Let’s debate. Let’s start pulling levers.