August 2005

Kyla has made a full trip around the sun! On one hand, I can't believe that it was an entire year ago that she was born. On the other, Kyla has become such an essential and indelible part of my life, I'm starting to forget what life was like without her.

Walking continues to make life more interesting. She zips back and forth from place to place making protecting her more difficult, as well as protecting things from her. Falling down is a common occurrence, but Kyla bounces back quickly and never shows fear.

She becomes more and more entertaining everyday. Recently she has begun clapping and giving high-fives. At the park she loves going down the big slides, though it really freaks Becky out... which is half the fun for me.

On her birthday I took the day off and spent it doing a lot of what Becky does on a normal weekday. We worked out at Stroller Strides, played with Kyla's buddies at an indoor playground, and did some shopping at Babies 'R' Us with Kirsten and Rylee. Her party will be on September 10th.

One of Becky's friends asked if we were sad that Kyla was no longer really a baby. I can honestly say no because a toddler is far more fun to play with than a baby, and a little less work. Every day she does something new, so why dwell on the past?

I Give Up

Something had to give. When I originally started working on the website, Hovenkotter.net, it was a lot of fun building it and hosting it myself. After a while, it became a major pain in the butt and you may have noticed some serious lag time between updates.

First of all, resizing all of the images took quite a bit of time, though this was improved once I started using Photoshop batch operations. Both the photo album organizer and the blog required me to write a fair amount of XML by hand. I thought of ways I could automate some of the mundane activies, but it would require some up front work, and I wasn't all that motivated.

Then someone introduced me to Flickr (the 'e' is left out intentionally) and I immediately thought, "what am I doing spending all of this time maintaining my own site when I could use something that is obviously far superior to anything I could develop." Now it is really easy to upload pictures as soon as I pull them from my camera, so I plan on updating my Flickr site several times a month.

If I'm going to let another service do the heavy lifting for my pictures, then it made sense to offload the blog to a third-party service as well, which is where you are now. Blogger is a service owned by Google, and again is much better than anything I could come up within a reasonable timeframe. You'll notice that all of the pictures incorporated with this blog link to Flickr.

I have to admit that it is a tiny infliction to my ego that my once glorious (at least I though so) website is now being pulled apart into third-party services, but this will allow me to spend more time with Becky and Kyla... and maybe on some other hobbies as well ;)