A blog post from our upstairs neighbor Lizz Winstead.
Author: fish1964
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CitiBike
This could be nice. New York is starting a bike share program. Imagine bike stations all over the city. You can get a bike at one spot and drop it off somewhere else. Sign up for a $100 annual membership and you can grab a bike anytime for 45 minutes for no charge (longer rentals will cost more).
They are putting in the bike stands right now. The program is supposed to start in May. The program can only be useful if those stations are in lots of convenient locations. Seems like there are going to be a lot of them.
It turns out that there is one about a block from our apartment and there’s another one right in front of my office. So I can just hop on a bike and ride to/from work (that trip would be 10 minutes tops).
I’m looking forward to trying it out.
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Separate Rooms
We live in a three bedroom apartment. One of the two kids bedrooms is small, so we have always used that as a toy room and Danielle and Victoria share the larger bedroom.
But Danielle is 10. She’s been lobbying for her own room for a while. It’s time. But the thing about a toy room is that you can accumulate a lot of stuff. We have high ceilings so there’s basically crap stacked 10 feet high. So we knew that doing the split would involve getting rid of a bunch of stuff.
Last weekend was the time. The mission for Saturday:
- Pull everything out of both rooms
- Repaint the toy room and touch up the paint in the other room
- Move Tori’s bed and some furniture into her new bedroom (second child gets the small room, live is not fair)
- Throw out as much junk as possible
Sunday was the “figure out what stuff is going in what room” day.
My wife went on a throwing out rampage. She went through every toy in the place. I lost count of the garbage bags. The girls have actually been pretty good about it. They are both excited about having their own rooms.
We weren’t totally sure how Tori would handle sleeping by herself. The first night she came to get me. “Papi, I had a bad dream”. This line is generally a fib, but on her first night in her own room I indulged her and stayed with her for a bit. Sunday night she was a champ, and Monday morning the first thing she did at school was tell her teacher she has her own room.
It was an Advil kind of weekend for me and my wife, but definitely worth it.
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I Installed Facebook Home
For about 30 seconds…
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Robert Ebert on Twitter
A good post from a great writer with some good advice:
My rules for Twittering are few: I tweet in basic English. I avoid abbreviations and ChatSpell. I go for complete sentences. I try to make my links worth a click. I am not above snark, no matter what I may have written in the past. I tweet my interests, including science and politics, as well as the movies. I try to keep links to stuff on my own site down to around 5 or 10%. I try to think twice before posting.
Think twice, what a radical concept…
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Sea Lion’s Got Moves
The first non-human mammal shown to be able to keep a beat. There are so many white guy dancing jokes available at this point, I don’t know where to start…
Sea Lion Grooves to Earth Wind and Fire -
A Too Short Vacation
Puerto Rico was fantastic. The weather was 100% perfect. We basically lived by the pool. As my previous post mentioned, this was a repeat of last year’s vacation. And you really can read last year’s post to understand what we did. This was a carbon copy with even better weather.
One difference is the flow of vacations as our girls get older. Day 1, they want to do everything with me. I’m in the pool with them 100% of the time. Day 2 they meet some other kids. They want me around, but not as much. By day 3 the kids are best friends and I am superfluous, which works for me because by then I want to relax by the pool with a book.
Tori (now 6) has become an excellent swimmer, so we don’t have to worry about her in the pool at all. So the days were pretty much:
- Breakfast
- Pool
- Lunch
- Pool
- Dinner
- Pool
Throw in the occasional visit to the beach and a trip to Old San Juan and El Morro and you have our entire vacation.
The girls basically did this for 6 days:
And the obligatory pictures:
Tori took this. She thought the palm tree shadow looked like a star in the pool. 
My three girls at El Morro 
Victoria and Danielle at El Morro 
Danielle (right) and her new friend Jessica 
Victoria with her new friend Clayton -
Vacation
We had a great time last year so we are going to the exact same place. I’ll be posting similar pictures with my girls a year older in about a week.
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Congratulations, we just broke the Internet
A great post on usability. Points out that a simple settings checkbox in FireFox can kill the Google home page. Kind of bad.
Design by committee often looks like a row of checkboxes
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 