WARNING!!! These videos have very explicit lyrics.

Miracles

Halls Of Illusions

Hokus Pokus

• I’m removing the tweet digests. These tweets can be found on Twitter and they don’t really add anything to the site.
• I’m shortening up the list of categories. The new list of categories will be:
  • Me: About me.
  • Family: About our family.
  • Work: About my work.
  • Around: Issues around the house.
  • Media: Photos, Videos, Books.
  • Editorial: News, rants, and editorial content.
• Each post is getting cleaned up. I’m removing any hard coded styles on photos and videos and using classes to size them instead. Tags are getting added to each post also.
• To make things easier to update in the future, I’m removing my modifications from the theme and using plugins to replace the functionality. A list of the plugins I’m using are:
  • Disqus comments: The DISQUS comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by DISQUS. Head over to the Comments admin page to set up your DISQUS Comment System.
  • Executable PHP widget: Like the Text widget, but it will take PHP code as well. Heavily derived from the Text widget code in WordPress.
  • Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
  • MyOpenID: MyOpenID plugin allows you to use your blog as your OpenID identity by delegating it to an external provide such as myOpenID, myVidoop, and claimID.
  • PuSHPress: PubSubHubbub plugin for WordPress that includes the hub
  • ShareThis: Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.
  • Twitter Tools: A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Show your tweets in your sidebar, and post tweets from your WordPress admin.
  • Ultimate Google Analytics: Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.
  • wp-cache: Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.
  • WP Simple Adsense Insertion: A simple Wordpress plugin to insert Google Adsense into posts, pages, sidebars.
• Even with these plugins, there are still things on the site that require me to modify the theme. Instead of modifying my new theme I’ve picked I’m going to use theme inheritance and put all the modifications in a child theme.

That made me curious if this was an overall trend or just localized to our immediate group of friends and family. The most recent data I was able to find on the subject came from a 2007 Gallup Poll. Different articles I’ve read that reference this poll and others state that two is still what people believe is the ideal number. However, there are some interesting trends.

Professional moms have twice as many kids at home, on average, than their high-powered counterparts did back in 1977, according to a 2002 report from the Families and Work Institute. And in a 2000 study, sociologist Martin found that college-educated women who put off motherhood until their 30s are suddenly having families almost as big as everyone else’s. “That’s historically unprecedented,” he says. babycenter

Americans also had different opinions depending on what generation they belonged to. A larger part of Americans (61%) between 35 and 54 years of age responded that having 2 or less children was optimal. Interestingly, less than half (48%) of 18 to 34 year olds agreed with this idea. associated content

Since Rachel and I fit into the 18 to 34 year old group it may explain why we are seeing larger families.

The graph below from the article Trends in ideal family size really illustrates these trends.

So what do you think. Is three the new two? Are large families making a comeback? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Things like these have all kinds of hidden cost, but here is one you might not think about. Most modern equipment needs an internet connection to function properly. What many people may not know is that lots of Blue Ray players and DVRs do not come with built in WIFI. You could wire you house for Ethernet to get these online, but who really wants to do that? That means you have to buy a proprietary USB network adapter. An adapter you can only get from the manufacturer. These adapters usually run between $50 and $80 dollars.

If you do consider getting one of these "Home Entertainment" devices just make sure you know how it connects to the internet and if you will need one of these adapters.

** Update ** Chris Finke suggests purchasing an apple airport express instead of a network adapter. It doesn’t cost much more and gives you the opportunity to network some speakers.

Apparently two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. With that fact and our musings about divorce I wanted to ask these questions: What shifts in society need to occur so that women are happy in marriage? What can be done to help combat the Twilight Effect, Princess Syndrome, and Unrealistic Marriage Expectations?

In an aside. While researching this post I thought I coined a new term "Princess Syndrome". A quick search proved me wrong though.

  function getBackgroundPage(id, src) {

    // get the firefox hidden window
    var win = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/appshell/appShellService;1"].
                   getService(Components.interfaces.nsIAppShellService).
                   hiddenDOMWindow;

    // if the iframe was previously loaded store it and callback
    var iframe = win.document.getElementsById(id);
    if (iframe)
      return iframe.contentWindow;

    // create the iframe
    iframe = win.document.createElement("iframe");
    iframe.setAttribute("id", id);
    iframe.setAttribute("style", "display:none;");

    // load the source
    iframe.setAttribute("src", src);
    win.document.documentElement.appendChild(iframe);

    // return the content window
    return iframe.contentWindow;

Now you can access your background page by including the script in your overlay and doing:

  var bgp = getBackgroundPage("id for background page", "url of the background page");

** UPDATE **
instead of setting the style to display:none you should instead set the attribute “collapsed” to true. This causes docshell errors in some cases.

iframe.setAttribute(“style”, “display:none;”);
iframe.setAttribute(“collapsed”, “true”);

This was big year for the family. Back in May we found out we were going to have another child. In August we found out we were having a boy and at the end of December Jackson was born. Both Noah and Wyatt are loving being big brothers. Noah turned four this year and started preschool. He goes three afternoons a week and he is really loving it. Wyatt is also enjoying every minute of his brother being gone. He turned three this year and is getting very big. Rachel continues to become more involved in the community. Along with her deaconess duties, she has also become a member of the Warren County Child Abuse Prevention Council. This year was my fifteen year high school reunion. Planning was much smoother than the ten year reunion and we had a pretty successful turn out.

Even with the recent layoff announcements by AOL, I am still gainfully employed with them and really enjoying my work. KwiClick development continues to go well and has gotten quite a bit of good press recently. Although Forecastfox has slipped slightly in it’s ranking on Firefox, we were able to rewrite the code from scratch this year and get a version out for Chrome (which has been very warmly received). This new code base should allow us to iterate faster and get versions out for Firefox, Fennec, and others. I started the company Web Tech Studios this year to cover the contract work I do. To celebrate the creation of the company I created the "Near Me" add-on and entered it into the Extend Mobile Firefox contest. It was chosen as one of the winners and I received a Nokia N900 as the prize.

Now with three sons and lots of work to do, 2010 looks like it’s going to be a very exhausting happy year.