It’s funny: why does what seem to pass for the height of digital cool mean taking an analog “thing” and making it usable on my computer? What’s wrong with me? (Note how I ask this on the blog so Deb has a maximum of a thousand characters to answer that question.)

Goodbye iTheme, hello WooTheme! What you’re looking at now is a brand new theme for ellsworthlink.net!

I’m sunsetting the long-time template of ellsworthlink.net—shown here, to the right—for a newer, slightly-more-fun(-for-me) theme called FreshNews. In that process I’m making a number of changes to the back end that will make it either easier for us to maintain, better for users, or just “different” because I wanted it to be different.

One of the big changes is subscriptions. The quick story is that I removed all the subscriptions so we could try a new subscription service. This new service is much (!) more reliable and I think we’ll see folks who stopped getting emails a long time ago start to reliably receive the emails if you recreate your subscription by following the link at the tippy-top of the page on the right-hand side. [Hmm, it is a link, Ellsworth, just give it to them: Subscribe to Alert Emails.] The biggest difference you’ll see here (well, aside from them working) is that you’ll only receive one email per day at the most, even if we post multiple times—they’ll all be included in the every-morning-at-5am email.

Lots of cosmetic changes, and lots of stuff will continue to change, but Deb keeps making fun of me that this isn’t up yet, so here it goes…

Deb and I went to the Newport Centre Mall this morning to get our eagerly anticipated “his and hers” iPhone 3Gs… We were 35th or so in line but had heard that the AT&T Store we were stalking was expecting 100 phones, so we felt pretty good.

A scant two-and-a-half hours later we walked out with a white 16-gig and a black 16-gig iPhone. The line was wrapping around the hallway outside of the store and Colin was having great fun being alternately really entertaining for the others in line or really bashful. What he never lacked the whole time was energy. He must have run 2+ miles with all his racing back-and-forth and darting around the corner trying to make a break for it. I think he had a lot of fun! He shouted “iPhone!!!” at the top of his lungs when the manager finally invited us into the store.

He was a really good kid the whole time, though—as was his sleeping sister—so I let him show off the boxes in this picture.

It should probably be mentioned that we’re totally smitten with these phones. LOVE 3G! But I think even more than the increased speed is the new Applications we are getting to play with. Truly mobile handheld computing, not just mobile phones.

Once I’ve got all the back end stuff set up, I’ll post about some logistics, like getting set up with a working email alert whenever I post and some other stuff like that.

With the changes, I am not making the effort to migrate the 325 posts from the “old” site over here to the new one, but I am keeping that site live as an archive at:

old.ellsworthlink.net

Given how often both Deb and I have referenced old posts to find out a different piece of information (how old was Colin when he got his first tooth? or how many different towel animals did they make for us on our babymoon cruise?), it was obvious we needed to keep that bad boy alive—we just needed to move it into cold storage.

In any event, if you run into any wonkiness in the near future that would be why!

The Street: “Mac Owners Are Snobs”

For the record I got six, as long as I can count the station wagon(s) I drove growing up…

I’m going to level with you. I’m worried. A friend from work showed me this video of young Hannah at age two if we don’t sell our condo and have to end up renting it out…

Also, if you’re curious about how well the great folks over at Iconize Me did (we’ve talked about them before), you can see the original picture of Colin we uploaded for them to use here.

Of course the other big issue is how we’ll get a workable icon from the ultrasound pictures of Hannah (that presumably Deb will be posting shortly)…

2. Figuring out how to spend the $100 Apple store credit I got for being an early adopter/purchaser of the iPhone 2 months before they reduced the price by $200.

(For those keeping score at home, yes, that means I’m still down $150 on the phone. $100 for the price difference and another $50 for paying the college kid to wait in line for it. On the plus side—and we weren’t sure this was going to be the case—I did get the rebate. We wondered if the college kid would get that, too, since he has the original receipt…)

1. The AT&T Store on Washington Street in Hoboken didn’t have one.
2. The AT&T Store in Jersey City’s Newport Center mall didn’t have one either.

__

UPDATE: Nevermind. I have one now.
UPDATE #2: Was taught how to spell by brother-in-law (see comments).

In any case, it isn’t going to stay this way. There will hopefully be significantly more functionality once things settle down, but not so much more that you can’t find your way around.

You also probably noticed that you did not get an email alert about this post. That functionality also broke with the site migration from IMHosted to HostGator. I’ve still got a list of who was on the updates before and I will send you all a note about how to “re-up” your subscription. And if you were annoyed by the emails, this will be a good time to not bother renewing. Or, if you’re a bigger geek than me, you may be subscribed to the RSS feed and reading it from your newsreader. (I’ve only just subscribed to the RSS feed as a part of this whole migration/upgrade exercise.)

Just sayin’…

Anyway, this video features:

• Colin saying two different 3-syllable words
• Colin demonstrating his almost incalculable intelligence by pointing out a difficult shape (after being prompted by his mother)
• Expert usage of a computer keyboard
• A very redneck-sounding laugh-track

One is an opinion piece from AdAge magazine envisioning a world in which Dow Jones folds the print version of The Wall Street Journal in favor of an online-only edition.

The second is an article from Mediapost announcing topline findings from a recent Pew Research Center for The People & The Press survey that basically states that the web is still a secondary medium for news.

One article seems to contradict the other—although, admittedly, the AdAge article doesn’t give a specific timeline of this imagined conversion to Online-only and the Pew Research study shows an unmistakeable flight to the web from “traditional media”…

In any event, back to the question: how do you get your news?

In any event, this particular posting has kept me chuckling all morning.

(In an interesting aside, several of you had noticed this posting was posted, yanked and then—now—reposted again. Turns out that the posting at the above link was itself misconfigured and the link went to a blank page listing only the title. So I yanked it until it was fixed. Apologies for any confusion. Though I will tell you this whole thing has kept me happily chuckling into the afternoon. Which is saying something given we close on our condo on Thursday. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!)

I send 160 emails a day. Am I a bad person?

Of course reading this article forced me to go back and take a look at my email habits, which I sometimes feel can be a bit obscene. Take Monday of this week (and I should point out this week has not been one of the busiest in recent memory), I sent 55 emails between 9a and 5p. That’s significantly more than the InformationWeek blogger, but I only had a total of 107 recipients, averaging only about 2 recipients per note.

Not sure what all this tells us, but it is a bit interesting to evaluate the extent to which we are clogging up our colleague’s emailboxes… I think I’m okay.

I will also be working to enable the functionality we had before the upgrade such as email alerts and recent comment listings—and hopefully some new things as well. In the meantime, please let me know if you see something that is flat-out broken. I may have missed it.

EPIC (the evolving personal information onstruct) is the eventual amalgamation of such indsutry giants as Amazon.com, Google, Blogger.com and Friendster, and represents a guess about how we may be consuming media in 8-10 years.

Take a look. I’m curious what you think. (My favorite line: “In 2014, The New York Times has become a print-only newsletter for the elite and elderly.”)

It does make some interesting points about feeling “tired and lethargic” from being constantly interrupted—I can see that. Since reading the article, I’ve tried to be very conscious about not interrupting my workflow each time I hear the new email chime and I have increased my productivity twelve-fold. Okay, not really, but it has seemed to have an impact.

Also interesting to me that this research was sponsored by HP, which has long touted it “always on internet infrastructure;” I wonder if the gentleman who signed that research check still has a job…

The long answer is much much much much much longer, but can be summed up in a single—clickable—image.

DAMN those MMORPG’s anyway!

It is wonderful! Very easy to use interface, beautiful maps, real-time updating (at least on a high-speed connection). Goodbye MapQuest!