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March 31, 2005

Fugitive Baby

For the 'this is not going to happen to us, right?' category, CNN.com reports this morning on a woman who gave birth in her car at a gas station, then went on to drive herself to the hospital. Due to a mixup with the dispatch officers, police pulled the car over and ordered the mother out at gunpoint. When they saw the baby still attached by the umbilical cord, they got her to the hospital. Yikes!

And on a more personal note - no news on Baby Trotz. Today was to be the day, but no activity yet. A big storm blew threw Atlanta this morning, and we hoped that either (a) the powerful thunder brings on labor or (b) the lower atmospheric pressure helps things along. Or we can wait until tomorrow, when Amy's cousin Miriam was born!

Posted by jetrotz at 08:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 30, 2005

The Penultimate Day

I've been partial to the month of March for our baby's birth day, but April is good too. My family is anxious for the actual day because the longer this goes on, the greater the possibility of coinciding with my cousin's Bar Mitzvah in Rochester, school vacations, Passover, etc. Hey everyone, I'll see what I can do to accomodate, but won't make any guarantees!
Amy

Posted by amy at 10:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

24 hours and counting!

Not too much to report. Amy is doing fine, but baby doesn't seem to be in a hurry. It's certainly cramped in there at this point - it's clear that the baby tries to stretch out and pokes and prods Amy's belly so hard that you can see/feel a foot/heel at times. We're getting used to the fact that the baby is going to take its sweet time. My next task is implementing a countup script to replace the countdown clock at the top of the blog tomorrow.

Posted by jetrotz at 09:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Songs for Silverman previewed

As announced on the Ben Folds mailing list, the Attacked by Plastic website now has samples of all eleven tracks from Ben's upcoming album, Songs for Silverman. There is also a spiffy custom media player, but that only lets you hear four of the samples. The new disc comes out on April 26th.

Posted by jetrotz at 07:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Future of Mac

The mainstream media rarely dives this far into speculation about our favorite computer manufacturer, so this is something of a treat. Business 2.0 has a long feature story on the past, present and mostly the future of Apple. The story includes a great gallery of conceptual product images produced by design firm Pentagram and a breakdown of how likely they are to exist. This is a must read for all you Mac lovers (and haters).

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March 28, 2005

Two

So, we have TWO days left until the due date. But, we have a feeling that 'b-day' may come and go. Gotta get used to the idea of an April baby, I guess! Amy's visit to her doctor today went smoothly. Baby is fine, but very little to report otherwise. We'll see our main doctor next Wednesday, which will be six days after the due date. We'll probably have a better idea of what's up at that point. But then again, we might have the baby this weekend (which would be great, 'cause Amy's doctor is on-call)!

Posted by jetrotz at 07:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 27, 2005

Trois

It's raining cats and dogs in Atlanta this weekend, so Amy and I spent our time mostly indoors making sure everything is just so in the Baby's room. As I mentioned earlier, we had a set of nine photographs of mine taken at the Atlanta Zoo framed in groups of three for the room, and we spent Saturday afternoon hanging them. It looks great, IIMSSM (if I may say so myself!). Amy has managed to get in a few long walks between storms, and we hope this helps the baby decide 'now is the time!'

Posted by jetrotz at 08:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 26, 2005

Six, Five, Four

We are getting very close, people! Amy is still doing fine. No sign yet that this little one wants to arrive anytime soon, though. I had a dream that the baby was hugging me around the neck last night. And sister-in-law Abi called to say that she dreamt someone was having a baby (looked like Amy) and the baby was laughing. She thinks today is the day. I don't know that the baby agrees, however! Pictured at right is Amy's belly on Thursday.

And since the baby hasn't arrived, Amy and I took advantage of the delay and went to the Atlanta Symphony Friday night. First, right across the street from the Woodruff we checked out Shout, one of Tom Catherall's string of succesful 'see and be seen' restaurants around town. Woah, nelly! The place had throbbing house music, pappadum flatbreads, sushi, and a nice tagine. Yummy. Our dear friend Laura Najarian was subbing for one of the basoonists with the ASO, and it was great to see her onstage performing Maurice Ravel's Alborada del gracioso (1905), Mozart's Symphony No. 39 in E-flat Major, K.543 (1788), and then the amazing Petrushka by Igor Stravinsky. This may have been one of our last outings to a venue like this for a while, so we made the most of it, getting snacks and drinks with Laura post-show at the nearby South City Kitchen, watching all the hipsters arrive on Cresent Ave. for an evening of drinking, etc. Heading back to Shout to get our car, it was a whole new variety of people watching as the urban crowd filled the restaurant to overflowing. Most entertaining.

Posted by jetrotz at 09:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 23, 2005

7 Days....

Today you, dear reader, have a NEW blogging author. The one with the belly! Look for more posts from Amy in the future. Anyway, today was one of my favorite activities - my twice weekly water aerobics for preganant ladies at the YMCA. The water always feels so good no matter how tired I am. Besides getting exercise, it's a wonderful opportunity to meet other women in my condition and to share stories and ideas for what we're all experiencing. And for those of you keeping track, the 10 kicks arrived by 11am, a 1 and 1-half hour improvement over yesterday! Woohoo!

Posted by amy at 08:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

8 days

We're at T-8, and we have settled on a pediatrician. Last week, we interviewed a highly recommended doctor, and looks like we'll stick with her. She's Dr. Debby Pollack of the Dekalb Pediatric Center. Unlike when I was a kid going to Dr. 'Buddy' Portman, they now have separate sick and well waiting rooms. Makes sense, no? I like their practice most of all due to the panda bear theme. It's close (Decatur), convenient (no highways), and they are on call 24/7. More updates tomorrow.

Posted by jetrotz at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Moblog & My New Treo 650

Yesterday, I became the proud owner of a Cingular Treo 650. This is an upgrade from my 2-year-old Sprint Treo 600. The biggest advantages of the new device is the muchly improved screen and backlit keyboard. The other advantage is that I'm on Cingular/AT&T's network. The GPRS network from Cingular already seems to trump Sprint's CDMA technology. And Cingular actually has an SMS system that works in timeframes of seconds, not hours. The other great feature is the higher-resolution camera. Shutterbug that I am, I had tried and failed to setup my old phone to transmit photos to my blog. But with the new phone, Versamail setup with my Trotz.com email, my account at Flickr.com, and good ol' reliable Moveable Type, my mobile photo blog is now up and running. The picture quality won't be great, but think of this as a modern take on Lomography. And it will probably be the first location we post pictures of Baby Trotz when that blessed event occurs!

Posted by jetrotz at 08:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 21, 2005

9 days

Today was a good pregnancy day. Amy had a doctor's visit (Dr. Fisch) this time), and baby and mom received clean bills of health. This was Amy's first visit with Dr. Fish, and she spent quite a long time. We now have a 'kick-sheet' to keep track of the baby's activity - ten movements in ten hours or we call the doctor. So far, that doesn't look like it's going to be a problem - Amy gets punched and kicked every few minutes or so it seems. It would have been cool to have the baby today - the new baby Trotz could have shared my brother Seth's birthday, the first day of Spring!

Posted by jetrotz at 07:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

FireFox Goes Madison Ave

Not clear if this is a student project or ad creative Firefox.org plans to actuallly buy ad time to show, but Screenhead (via Waxy.org links), seems to think it's legit. Not bad, but then again, it's not too direct about what the heck Firefox actually *IS*. Watch the Quicktime clip here at the Savannah College of Art & Design's student website before the management yanks the clip for sucking too much bandwidth.

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Kudos to CNN

Nice to see my employer, CNN, getting a tip of the hat from USA Today. CNN has created the first regularly scheduled segment on the blogosphere. Seen weekdays during Judy's Wooruff's Inside Politics, the brainchild of new CNN head John Klein launched on February 14th. Klein is quoted:

"We want to demystify blogging," Klein says. "We want to peel back all those layers and also do a reading of the blogs that our audience doesn't have the time to do."

I couldn't agree more. Yeah, if you're reading this blog you probably have already heard most of what they talk about each afternoon - but the segment goes a long way toward educating the other 99.999% of America what blogging is all about. PS - They are using a couple of spiffy Macs for the segment. What's not to like! ;-).

Posted by jetrotz at 07:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 20, 2005

10 Days and Counting

This is it. Ten days till Baby Trotz is due. From here on out, I plan to try to blog daily as we enter the final stretch. And stretching we are - Amy feels like it's a whole new ball game recently - the baby's new head-down position has made the last few weeks a whole lot more interesting. We bought a large inflatable birth ball to help ease the stress on her pelvis. Amy loves it. As for other preparations, we picked up the glider from The Baby's Room on Saturday, and it looks great in the room. We also had to visit our new neighborhood Target on Moreland Ave (Yay! No more trips to Buckhead for Target!) and picked up a CD/ClockRadio/Nature Sound Machine for the room. And I've finally found a good use for that old Lava Lamp - it'll make a groovy night-light. We also picked up one part of the artwork we were having framed for the room on Saturday. As you faithful readers know, we're going with the animal theme for the room. Amy saw a nice idea where three book illustrations were matted together into a bigger piece, but we've done something similar, except with photos of mine from the Atlanta Zoo. We'll have three of these in the room, and the first set featuring a lioness yawning, a zebra looking over his shoulder, and a giraffe stretching his neck looks great! We used a spiffy brown glossy burlwood frame and safari-esque pale green rice paper for the matte. Come on by and see it sometime!

Posted by jetrotz at 07:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Yahoo! picks up Flickr

Flickr, that bastion of open source, creative commons, you show me yours I'll show you mine photo service has been acquired by Yahoo! Rumoured to be on the trading block for a while, parent company Ludicorp confirmed the deal today. Flickr's own blog put it this way:

Flickr will be continuing on the path it's on -- to Flickr 1.0 and beyond. We'll be working with a bunch of people that Totally Get Flickr and want to preserve the community and the flavor of what is here. We're going to grow and change, but we're in it for the long haul, with the same management and same team.

I sure hope so. This site has a great concept, and should do well for a long time to come.

Posted by jetrotz at 07:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 17, 2005

TalmudPod

For the Torah-studying scholar on-the-go, 23-year-old entrepreneur Yehuda Shmidman has created the ShasPod, a 20GB iPod filled with the equivalent of 2,700 pages of the Talmud as read and commented by Rabbi Dovid Grossman of Los Angeles. The $399 price is one hundred bucks over the price of the iPod as shipped from Apple. And while the lectures by Rabbi Grossman are available for free at dafyomi.org, some Orthodox Jews will not use the web for non-work purposes. Timing is key here as well. As the New York Times reported (free registration required), Jews worldwide recently celebrated the completion of the seven-and-a-half-year cycle of Talmudic learning called the Siyum HaShas, where students learn one page per day. Here's a sample file about the s'hma.

Posted by jetrotz at 07:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2005

Brothers in Arms out, Gets High Marks

The first review of the PC version of Brothers in Arms is out, and there are high marks all around. IGN.com offers up a 9.1 rating, and this closing paragraph sums up their take:

Like most of us here at IGN, I'm still a huge fan of Call of Duty and Battlefield 1942. While those games have their own unique strengths, Brothers in Arms takes some of the best features of each and adds an entirely new tactical dimension. Offering up engaging, squad-based battles and presenting it all in an authentic yet undeniably cinematic setting, Brothers in Arms is a game that, to borrow a phrase from General Patton, "grabs you by the nose and kicks you in the ass."

Fedex.com reports that my copy arrived in the Atlanta sort facility last night, so there's gonna be some Nazi-killing on the ol' XPS 2nite!

Posted by jetrotz at 07:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Anderson Cooper by Diane Arbus

As featured in last Friday's New York Times (free registration required), there is a new retrospective of Diane Arbus' spooky photography currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum after touring several other US cities. Baby-rearing blog DaddyTypes points out a centerpiece of that collection is a portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt's infant son, Anderson Cooper. Yes, CNN's own Anderson Cooper.
The portrait, shot for Harper's Bazaar, is described in Patricia Bosworth's Arbus biography:

"To dispel the growing myth that [Arbus] only took pictures of freaks, she made up a list of elegant people she wanted to photograph...As if to prove her point, she took a remarkable portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt's sleeping baby son, Anderson Hays Cooper, for a Harper's Bazaar Valentine issue. In this truly astonishing picture, the infant resembles a flat white death's head -- eyes sealed shut, moth pursed and moist with saliva. When Gloria Vanderbilt saw the photograph, she forbade Bazaar to publish it, but eventually she changed her mind and this stunning image opened Diane's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972."

A current photo of Mr. Cooper can be found here.

Posted by jetrotz at 07:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2005

April Fools?

The outlaws at ThinkSecret are reporting today that Apple will release Tiger on April 1st, the next major upgrade to the OSX operating system (full feature rundown for v10.4 here).

Apple will officially announce Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's release at an event in early April and will begin shipping the operating system within two or three weeks afterwards, Think Secret has learned. Apple has previously only stated that Tiger will ship during the first half of the 2005.

I'm hoping this new release helps out my Mom with the promising set of new disability features built-in.

Posted by jetrotz at 07:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Xcellent XPS

It's taken a bit of time to get around to blogging this, but Amy and I bought a new home PC recently. My old Dimension 8100 was showing it's age (bought in 2000), and Dell had a great sale on President's Day a few weeks back. All told, I saved almost 50% off the normal price on a brand-spanking new Dell XPS Gen 4 machine. Yes, that's the one with the glowing faceplate, aimed at the gamer market. And yes, the front panel backlight can be changed to any of eight diferent colors. Silly, but cool nontheless. It's a sweet piece of machinery. The specs:

P4 650 w/ hyperthreading (3.4 GHz, 800 front-side bus)
2GB 533MHz dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM
ATI Radeon x850XT/256MB Video Card
250GB SATA/7200RPM HD
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
16x DVD/CD Burner, Double-Layer write capable

Anyway, the machine absolutely rocks. Most of the settings were fairly easy to migrate from the old machine (although some of our email seems to be lost to the ether), but boy oh boy - games run like butter on this bad boy. I've cranked up Far Cry and the Half-Life2 Demo to their absolute maximium, and there is no lag whatsoever. Battlefield Vietnam is a new-found joy to play. And I cannot wait for Band of Brothers to be released this week.

Related: AnandTech XPS Review
Related: Dell.com XPS Page

Posted by jetrotz at 07:03 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

An angel sent from God

Atlanta breathed a sigh of relief after Brian Nichols gave himself up on Saturday. He added another victim to the death toll - a US Customs agent he surprised working at his home in Buckhead. The Atlanta Journal Constitution interview with the woman he held for seven hours Friday night into Saturday morning is amazing. The single mother who lost her husband in a knife fight several years ago knew exactly what to say and do, and even chose to delay tipping off the police when she thought a confrontation would ensue, believing instead that he would let her go on Saturday morning. Read the story here.

Posted by jetrotz at 07:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 11, 2005

Courthouse Shooting

Today's shooting that killed three took place about a half-mile from CNN Center where I work. I drive by the courthouse on Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive every morning on the way to the office, and would have likely been right there at 9am when the gunman fired six shots across MLK and killed one of the victims, a sherrif's deputy, right outside the courthouse.

I had an a 9am meeting today, and came in early to prepare, avoiding the scene.

The brazen gunman wrestled the weapon away from one of the deputies in the courthouse while in a holding area, then shot and killed Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rowland W. Barnes and his court reporter, 43 year-old Julie Brandau. After he'd escaped the building, he shot and killed the other officer (Sheriff's Deputy Hoyt Teasley), and carjacked at least two or as many as three vehicles in his efforts to escape, and currently remains at large. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter was pistol whipped and carjacked in the mayhem by the suspect.
UPDATE:CNN is now reporting (and showing) video of the suspect carjacking the AJC reporter in one of Turner's parking garages, caught on a security camera. Not the one I routinely park in, but right next door. Really quite frightening.
Photo by The Associated Press

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Fable Goodness

Gamespot today is reporting that there will be a PC version of Fable coming to us soon. Screenshots, story here at Gamespot.com. I really enjoyed this game on the Xbox, and look forward to this version on the PC. Gamespot's report below:

Microsoft today announced that the popular Xbox game Fable is headed for the PC this fall, under the name Fable: The Lost Chapters. The much-hyped game was released on Microsoft's console last September and was developed by Big Blue Box, which is owned by Black & White developer Lionhead Studios.

My guess is that the PC will make for a better experience with this game - the controls were quite obtuse on the Xbox version, and this type of role-playing game should be a perfect fit on the PC.

Posted by jetrotz at 07:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 10, 2005

Turn Around

The ECV this morning was successful! After a dose of terbutaline (which relaxes the womb), Amy took a deep breath and the doctor proceeded to knead her belly, gradually pushing first the head, then the feet, into a head-down position. It took two attempts, but the baby finally turned. Amy showed incredible strength during what looked pretty darn uncomfortable. We then stayed in the labor and delivery room to monitor the baby. The expected outcome is a fairly active baby after the procedure, but Baby Trotz stayed very quiet for quite a while. An IV sugar drip was one attempt at kick-starting activity, and then, a small drip of petosin, to see how the baby would tolerate actual labor. If they saw anything negative at that point in the baby's heartbeat, they would have induced right then and there! While we were mentally ready for a Cesearean, we had no concept we might have a vaginal birth today. Obviously, things turned out fine, and the doc was happy with Baby Trotz's reactions to mild contractions, so they fed us some yummy hospital food and sent us on our way. Stay tuned!

Posted by jetrotz at 03:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 09, 2005

Time to Rotate

Just a quick note - we're going in at 9am tomorrow for the ECV to see if this stubborn baby will turn or not. The doctor says it's 50% effective - and we'll know quickly. And, reassuringly, less than 1% of ECVs result in fetal distress, so Amy and I are both reassured. It's a very slim chance baby Trotz will arrive tomorrow from complications. But if the ECV doesn't 'take,' we'll will likely schedule the Cesearean birth between March 21st and 31st. Mark your calendars!

Posted by jetrotz at 01:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Breech Baby, Breech Baby

So, we're in week 37. Can you believe it? But baby Trotz has decided that nestling transversely across Amy's pelvis is the place to be. We are heading into the doctor's today to determine if a external cephalic version (ECV) is in order - that's when the doc tells you to take a deep breath, and manually pushes the baby around in your womb to try to get them head first. In preparation for this, Amy has been lying more or less on her head (supposedly makes the baby move around to a more comfortable position). But any slight moves by the baby in the right direction seem to go away as soon as Amy starts playing her horn. Baby Trotz seems to want to turn their head right back to the bell! A budding musician, I guess. Did I mention that our house smells like an opium den now?

Last night Amy broke out a Chinese herbal 'do it yourself' solution. The heat from burning moxa sticks can also be used to stimulate the baby's movements and encourage it to turn. There's a great site which explains the procedure, and the basis for the process in Eastern medicine.

Traditional Chinese medicine uses moxibustion (burning herbs to stimulate acupuncture points) of acupoint BL 67 (Zhiyin, located beside the outer corner of the fifth toenail), to promote version of fetuses in breech presentation.

The process involves burning these sticks less than 1" away from the little toes on either foot (see photo). I hope it works, cause they stink up the house something awful! Anyway, this treatment is succesful with approximately 70% of patients.

Posted by jetrotz at 07:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New Aimee Coming Soon

More good music news. Aimee Mann is releasing her latests CD, The Forgotten Arm. This will be her first 'concept' album (although one might argue that her soundtrack to the great film Magnolia was also a concept disc). This is her fifth solo release, and an email to her fans describes it like this:

a dozen songs that tell, rather loosely, the story of John and Caroline as they meet, fall in love and road trip across America.

Best of all, you can listen to three new tunes from the disc for the next four weeks, released on AimeeMann.com

Posted by jetrotz at 07:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 08, 2005

Ben Folds gets Phat

Ben Folds has released his own take on Dr. Dre's seminal 'B*&tches Ain't S&%*t'. Unlike the throbbing beat from Dr. Dre, this version features a falsetto backing chorus, moog-like synthesizers, and Ben's usual light touch on the keyboards. Hope this one makes his pockets 'phat.' It's a busy late Winter/Spring for Mr. Folds, with his new album Songs For Silverman due April 26th, and a 7-inch single from the disc, 'Landed' due on March 22nd. Also On March 22 -- The special expanded edition of Ben Folds Five's Whatever And Ever Amen remastered with new liner notes from alll the original band members and 7 bonus tracks: Video Killed The Radio Star (studio version, previously unreleased), For All The Pretty People, Mitchell Lane, Theme from "Dr. Pyser" (studio version), Air, She Don't Use Jelly, Song For The Dumped (Japanese version).

Posted by jetrotz at 07:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 02, 2005

Wallace & Gromit

Two of my favorite animated characters will soon be featured in their very own full-length film, Curse of the Wererabbit. Their official site reports a release this Autumn, and explains that the film has been in development for four years and will take over 18 months to shoot. A crew of over 200 people are involved in the production covering every aspect of the film making process, from the modelmakers and animators, set dressers and art directors to story artists, directors of photgraphy and editors. This is very funny stuff. Take a look at this video showing behind-the-scenes production. It's amazing how painstaking claymation remains with current technology. And visit the BBC to see another hilarious short - Wallace's take on Soccer, 'Soccomatic'.

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