I promise this blog won’t turn into a shrine to Declan, despite my every desire to do precisely that.

However, this picture I couldn’t resist sharing. Though I need to establish some context first.

Normally when a child is born, the child is placed directly onto the mother’s bosom. Shortly thereafter, the child breastfeeds for the first time, if he or she will be a breastfed baby. When Declan was first born, he was placed on Erin’s chest, but almost immediately, he was taken away to be examined.

Declan’s breathing was clearly labored and he wasn’t wailing like he should have been. Naturally, both Erin and I immediately started freaking out, though I tried to lock it up as best I could. Seeing a little newborn gas mask on Declan, and eventually a tube placed down his trachea to clear the fluid out, was challenging.

Welcome to parenthood.

As it turned out, Declan had inhaled a lot of amniotic fluid during labor. A visit from two NICU nurses, the aforementioned mask and tube, and an hour later, he was breathing better and was placed on Erin’s chest for “skin to skin”.

This picture was taken seconds after Declan was returned to Erin.

If you look closely (or click to enlarge), you can see the tear running down her cheek.

For the rest of my life, I don’t think I’ll be able to look at this picture without crying. It is, and very likely will remain, the best picture I’ve ever taken.

A few days ago, /. (yes, I still read /.) linked to a wonderful remembrance of HyperCard. It is a lovely article, that brought back quite a few memories.

Despite being an ardent Apple user today, I wasn’t until 2008.

Before that time, as a child of an IBM’er, I grew up on ThinkPads. Some of the machines I had as a kid I still remember extremely fondly. The “butterfly” was a gimmick, but a wonderful one. My T30 was my home server until I got my Synology around a year ago. Erin rocked my T60 until I recently bought her a MacBook Air.

This post isn’t about ThinkPads, though. It’s about HyperCard.

When I was in grade school, it was the time of Oregon Trail on the Apple ][. Moving on to middle school, the Macintosh was the de rigueur computer of the time.

Those Macs came with HyperCard.

As a kid with a keen interest in computers, but who had — at most — written a few lines of BASIC, HyperCard was amazing. I remember being mesmerized by it. As a middle schooler, I was able to write seemingly-complex programs stacks, all because of how easy and logical HyperCard was. The choose your own adventure games I wrote in HyperCard were surprisingly complete and pretty. (Later, I’d repeat the process using new tools with new friends.)

HyperCard was the perfect way to dip your toe into the pool of writing software. From the article:

HyperCard represented perhaps the bravest part of this ‘computing for the people’ philosophy, as it enabled users to go past the pre-built software that came on the machines, and to program and build software of their own.

Not to be pigeonholed into being a tool for amateurs, HyperCard was used in many professional settings. One of the most popular games of all time, Myst, was written in HyperCard.

If I were to pinpoint the genesis of my career as a developer, fumbling about with HyperCard may have been it. Well, that or reading the PC-DOS manual and then making bitchin’ menu systems in batch scripts.

It makes me very sad that either there isn’t a modern equivalent of HyperCard, or if so, it’s so well hidden that no one really knows its name.

Declan is nearly a week old today. Erin and I are surviving and quite enjoying parenthood. By most measures are sleeping way more than can reasonably be expected, but, of course, less than desired.

Some thoughts:

• My patience has gone through the roof.
• I’m more comfortable with my baby than I’ve been with anyone else’s. That feeling of confidence started the moment I set eyes on him.
• Everyone in the world has advice for you; sometimes solicited. Sometimes not.
• Everyone’s advice — including healthcare professionals’ — tends to conflict in minor or even major ways.
  • Speaking of advice, don’t look for advice on the internet
• I’m taking a lot of pictures. 474 in six days; 80 pictures a day. At this rate, by the time he graduates high school, there will be:
  • Half a million pictures
  • 4.25 terabytes of photos, assuming we never upgrade our camera
• Resisting spamming Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with baby pictures nonstop is more difficult than I expected.
• Every new thing Declan does, and every new discovery of something that reminds me of Erin or myself, is a gift worth cherishing. Every day brings more of these gifts.
• Fatherhood is awesome.

Declan James Liss. Born early yesterday morning. He weighed in at 8 pounds, 6 ounces and was 20 inches long.

Finally.

Mom and Declan are doing well.

I’m over the moon. Eventually I’ll be able to look at him without weeping, right?

What with due any time now, Erin and I thought it was about time we got ourselves a proper camera. Since we only have one chance to grab pictures of baby-, we wanted to ensure we did so using a decent camera. I consider this purchase an insurance policy against hearing or saying “Gosh, I wish this picture was clearer” in the future.

After much deliberation, we settled on the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Micro Four/Thirds camera — the kit version — and the Panasonic 25mm f/1.4 lens. The camera came highly recommended from not only professional reviewers, but also my friend Shawn Blanc.

Having had the camera for a little while now, I’ve noticed a few things I’ve not seen called out obviously elsewhere. Like my iPhone 6 quick impressions, these will be brief.

WiFi

As Shawn discussed in his review, the WiFi connection seems super janky at first, but quickly becomes a very useful feature. The E-M10 does not allow for connections to a network; rather it is designed only for peer-to-peer connections with a phone. Once you’re connected, you can use the Olympus OI.Share app to control the camera, download pictures, or add data to existing pictures.

Having the WiFi connection is actually super handy simply for downloading pictures, as you don’t need a $30 cable to get pictures off the camera while on the go. While not necessarily a common problem, it’s great to have the flexibility.

GPS and EXIF

Part of the reason I settled on the E-M10 is that it supported semi-automated addition of GPS coordinates to the photos it takes. The camera doesn’t have a GPS radio within it, but it can have a WiFi connection to a phone that does.

However, the process was not terribly obvious to me. I had assumed that you would connect the camera to the phone, and then snap away. As it turns out, that’s almost exactly the opposite of the actual procedure.

Instead, the procedure is:

1. Open the OI.Share app.
2. Turn on GPS logging by turning on the switch at the bottom of the screen.
3. Take a bunch of pictures.
4. Connect your phone and the camera via WiFi.
5. Use the app to add GPS coordinates to the pictures on the camera, using the log you generated in step #3.

As you can see, rather than adding the GPS data as pictures are snapped, you instead add them in bulk when your session is over.

Bokeh

I never realized how much I want to have bokeh in all my pictures until now. Bokeh is, without question, my new favorite thing.

When I heard about Yosemite back at WWDC, I was overjoyed and then devastated. At first, I was thrilled about Continuity, which would allow my iPhone, iPad, and Mac to work more closely together. I was devastated to find out, however, that Continuity requires Bluetooth Low Energy, which my Mac is too old to have.

Then I saw this tweet:

@tapbot_paul @iconmaster Handoff/Tethering/AirDrop: proximity (BTLE) SMS: both on active network Phone: same network (WLAN, LAN)

— Michael Jurewitz (@Jury) October 21, 2014

I cannot effectively describe how excited this made me.

Here’s how you turn on “SMS Relay” with iOS 8.1 and Yosemite:

1. On your iPhone, Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding
2. On your Mac, open Messages
3. Back on your iPhone, turn on the Mac you wish to enable
4. Wait a few seconds for the confirmation message to show up (shown to the right)
5. Enter the code on your iPhone

I tried it immediately after enabling it, and it worked no problem.

Last week I stepped out of the tech bubble and slipped back on a pair of comfortable shoes that I hadn’t worn in a while. I recorded a car podcast.

The folks at White Roof Radio, a Mini-themed podcast, asked me to be their guest on this week’s episode. On it, we talk about some of my history with cars, my thoughts about Mini, some industry news, and more.

I had a ton of fun recording with them, and it was a blast to stop thinking tech and start thinking like the car-obsessed guy I’ve always been. If you were at all a fan of Neutral, you’ll probably enjoy this.

This past weekend, Erin and I went on our annual pilgrimage to Carter Mountain Orchard to pick apples. This is a tradition Erin and I started 9 years ago when we were living in Charlottesville. Since then, we’ve returned every year without fail, in order to celebrate our year together, and remind ourselves of where things started.

This year, our dear friends the _s came down to visit. Their visit was largely to share in the experience, but also to take a few pictures of in utero, with an actual camera and not a phone, while we still can.

The weather, unfortunately, was awful.

Despite that, Dave took some great pictures both that morning, and the next, at home. I wanted to highlight a couple.

Erin is, as I write this, 36 ½ weeks. It’s crazy how this post seems both so long ago, and also just yesterday. We’re so very, very lucky.

I got a lot of helpful suggestions regarding my post on Camel’s drawbacks. I wanted to highlight them here for both interest’s and posterity’s sake. There tended to be themes around what was recommended, so where possible I lumped responses together. Those that would require a serious rewrite to Camel are not shown.

• Use continuous integration to push to somewhere (probably Github) and then it pushes to Heroku (@barelyknown, @segiddins, @ghoppe, @codydehaan, @wezm, @developingchris)
• Use one or more tools on my home Mac to do it by way of file uploads to Dropbox plus folder actions or Hazel (@stedwick, @robmathers)
• Use Git Mongo to push to a Git repo from iOS (@grouchal, @willhains) or wait for someone to write something similar (@OndrejMirtes)
• Rather than caking Git into Camel, simply shell out to the command line to accomplish the task of committing and pushing. (@indirect)

I also got a lot of recommendations that I am not interested in. Unsurprisingly, the most popular was “grow up and get a VPS”.

I haven’t decided how I’m going to move forward, but this has definitely given me lots of excellent ideas to think over.

As prompted by Brent Simmons’ investigation into alternative blogging engines, I started thinking about some of Camel’s pain points. This includes both what bothers me, as well as what would bother others. As it often turns out, what bothers me is what bothers others.

One of Camel’s biggest benefits is that it uses the filesystem as its data store. Camel does not use a database; it does not (knowingly) use Dropbox. All the posts in Camel are simply in an expected directory structure within the project. Convention over configuration, you see.

This reliance on the file system, however, is also Camel’s biggest drawback.

There is no native way to upload a new post, say, by way of an iOS device. Since I’m currently hosting this blog on Heroku, I must commit and push a new post using Git in order to see it on the web. That’s not possible using any iOS app I’ve come across, and doesn’t strike me as something terribly enjoyable to code myself.

The obvious and easier answer is to have some sort of API within Camel to accept Markdown file uploads. This, too, runs into a snag. Heroku has an ephemeral filesystem, so even if I can get a file to Heroku, there is no guarantee it will stay there.

Which begs the question, how do I upload a post from iOS?

I see no obvious answer.

This does, however, give me an excuse to start digging into Azure. Perhaps there are options there that aren’t available on Heroku? Perhaps Azure doesn’t have an ephemeral filesystem; can I easily point it to some “external” filesystem that isn’t ephemeral? At a glance, this doesn’t seem to be the case — I see no obvious indication that Azure is any different.

I know Azure has a robust web interface; I’ll have to investigate and see if that interface would be allow me to add or edit posts in a pinch.

Am I missing any other obvious answers? Specifically, ones that don’t require me to rewrite Camel to use a different data store? I know I can go the virtual private server / self-hosted route, but I have zero interest in taking that on. What’s left?

While I don’t think it necessary to call attention to every Analog(ue) or ATP that is released, I do like to call out when we record particularly great ones. With Analog(ue), that generally means when we have a guest joining us. They really tend to, well, class the place up a bit.

On this week’s Analog(ue), Myke and I were joined by the internet’s own Faith Korpi, of IRL Talk fame. She joins us to talk about her side-side project, how to make an existing audience aware of new work, and why Myke and I really need to exercise more.

Myke and I had a lot of fun with this one. I’d love it if you had a listen.