Bay Area Discovery Museum

We trekked up to Sausalito with the Kees to visit the Bay Area Discovery Museum. It was a bit gray and windy -- but not enough to dampen the kids' day.

See all the pics at Smugmug, but here are a few of my favorites.

Awesome video

I love this video (which I found on Digg) because it shows:

• The world is flat.
• If you have a great idea, you can just do it.
• Simple is good.

Go ahead and watch it. I dare you not to crack a smile while doing so.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

More fun with Photo Booth

Um, are you supposed to do anything productive with the built in camera? If so, someone should let us know what that is because we haven't figured that out. :-)

Gap bear outfit

Despite the heat wave earlier this week, Cameron thought it was oh-so-fun to put on his Gap bear outfit and pose with an actual Gap bear. Katye, of course, wanted in on the pictures.

One month with our iMac

Alas, I don't get to go to Apple's developer conference next week. I heard they sold out pretty early, and I couldn't really justify HP sending me since (1) I'm not a developer and (2) my products don't run on Macs (sigh).

But I do have some observations after living with our iMac for a month:

• It's a delight to use. It does the same things as a Windows PC, but it does them faster, more consistently, more beautifully, and more thoughtfully. There's something about the visual design of the OS that makes nearly every application pop -- even the cross-platform ones such as Firefox and Thunderbird.
  
  
• The iMac is very, very quiet. We still have our Dell and hadn't realized how much noise its fan and other components were making until we starting running the whisper-quiet iMac.
  
  
• It was relatively straightforward to switch, but definitely not "free". Most documents came over without a hitch (including Microsoft's new Microsoft Office 97 file formats like .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx -- Apple iWorks and TextEdit open these files just fine), but it was a bit of a pain converting from Picasa to iPhoto. They store and search photos differently, and unfortunately you have to fuss with this a bit to convert. Also was more of a pain converting to sync my iPod from my iMac rather than my Windows machine than I had expected it would be.
  
  
• Windows runs fine on my iMac via VMware Fusion. I still use Windows for a few things: (1) Quicken, (2) watching videos from Netflix, and (3) Outlook for work emails (via the work VPN). For (1) and (2), there are no known substitutes (don't get my started about how pathetic Quicken for Mac is). For (3), I haven't been able to get OpenVPN working though some of my coworkers have.
  
  
• The on-line help + Mac community are very helpful. I've been able to find answers to my questions very easily. The on-line help answers my questions about half the time, and Google delivers the balance. In fact, the info I need is typically the first or second search result in Google. Try that on Windows.
  
  
• The OS still matters. In this Web-centric world of ours, I was surprised at how much the OS still matters. How?

1. Rock solid. No random reboots, no blue-screen-of-death, no super long boot or go-to-sleep cycle, no cryptic error messages, no strange lags where all of a sudden the GUI becomes non-responsive.
2. Search works. It helps me find files because its built in search (Spotlight) is fast, useful, and completely transparent.
3. It's consistent, which encourages its applications to be consistent. Consistency helps me be more productive. The OS and its apps are consistent in the big things (like application installation and removal), the medium things (applications typically store their preferences in the /library directory) and the small things like keyboard shortcuts: cmd-w always always closes a window, cmd-comma always opens preferences, cmd-m always minimizes an application.
4. It lets me use the computer. MacOS lets me use the computer's resources rather than consuming them to scan for viruses, clean up the registry, defragment its hard drives, index documents, and more. You don't notice how much time you spend on the care and feeding of your PC until you start using an OS where you don't do it.
5. Time Machine just works. I've used it twice already. Once was to rescue my Thunderbird address book after an accidental sync with Plaxo completely erased all my contacts. It's slick.
   

A few things I don't like about the Mac:

• You can only resize a window from the bottom right corner instead of any edge of the window.
  
• Keyboard shortcuts for cursor movement and copy, paste, undo, etc. are different from their Windows counterparts. I've remapped the keyboard, but the problem is that the Mac uses a different modifier key to skip words (option + right/left arrow) versus copy, paste, undo (command-c, x, and z) -- whereas Windows uses the same key (ctrl).
• I miss the Window-E key to open Windows Explorer and Windows-D to hide all apps and show the desktop. I use Quicksilver to do something similar for the Finder, but it doesn't always work the way I expect it to.
• My Mac sometimes forgets its modifier key mappings, a well documented problem with external USB keyboards. To fix, I have to open the keyboard preferences and "remind" it. Lame.
• The .mac service is a missed opportunity: over-priced and under-powered. Maybe Apple will announce a more useful feature set with lower pricing next week. Apple should either make .mac competitive or make it easier for the native applications to integrate with the winning services such as Flickr, Smugmug, and regular Web hosting services.
  
• Fusion slows the machine down quite a bit. Hopefully this is because it's a beta and the production version will speed it up. Also it's not quite fast to run even old Windows games.
  

A visit with my grandparents

My grandfather is pushing 100 and mostly stays at home now. But he's still well enough to see his great grandchildren once in a while. Here we are with both my grandparents. Not sure what Cameron finds so fascinating about Katye at this moment. :-)

Colin: nearly a 3rd grader?

How is that even possible? Katye is onto kindergarten and Colin will graduate from 2nd grade next week. Here Colin poses with his 2nd grade teacher. He had a great year learning to read books without pictures, write legibly, do some research -- and even sing a song and dance a Tahitian dance. (Though like me, he wasn't a big fan of performing either the song or the dance.)

Build a Bear

We took the kids to the Build-a-Bear franchise yesterday. We've been stockpiling gift certificates from various birthdays and it was time to build our bears. Since the kids have plenty of animal friends already, we had them select a friend to donate in order to build a new one. Colin opted out since he couldn't decide on an animal friend to cull from the herd.

So Katye and Cameron got their new friends selected, stuffed, dressed, and tagged. Did you know they stick a barcode inside each stuffed animal so they can retrieve the tag in case it gets lost? OK, so it's not an RFID tag -- but still plenty high tech for a stuffed animal!

Here, Colin poses with the bear he won at Legoland last year.

I imagine this will be one of the last years we can get all three kids to pose for a picture with their bears.