I know I’m late to the party with my iPad post. So I’ll just list a few quick thoughts, a few of my favorite name jokes, an interesting quote, and a link to Doc’s extremely interesting and eloquent post about the iPad.

First I must admit that I have not been paying too much attention to the product, its features, the keynote address, or the hoopla surrounding its release. My 14-month-old ball of wiggle and scream has been taking up the spare brain cells, time, and energy that I normally would have devoted to a new Apple product release.

My first thought was that it is really just a giant iPhone without the phone part — and what’s the point of that? After a while, though, I realized that there are definitely good uses for it. For instance, I have my iPhone with me pretty much 24/7, but I can count on one hand the number of phone calls I make in a typical week. I use it for social networking, email, games, reading news, keeping our home calendar, storing grocery and to-do lists, showing off photos of Jamie, listening to podcasts, music, and radio, looking at webpages, calculating tips, …. oh, the list goes on and on and on. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do that stuff on a screen that is bigger than 2″x3″?

YES. Yes, it would. There is a lot that I DON’T do with my iPhone, because typing on it is such a pain in the butt. Not that the iPhone’s keyboard interface is bad; rather, I am about ten times faster typing on a full-sized keyboard than I am typing on a tiny pad with my thumbs. So having a large screen with a closer-to-full-sized keyboard would be fantastic.

Secondly, reading text would be SO MUCH EASIER.

But I love my iPhone’s ease of portability. The darn thing fits in my pocket, purse, and on my nightstand. No way the iPad will. Also no way to surreptitiously pull out the iPad in a meeting to check email or Facebook.

But I’m talking like the iPad is supposed to be a replacement for the iPhone. It’s not.

I guess I’m still trying to reconcile the fact that I have an iPhone, and I have a MacBook Pro. Where would an iPad fit into my life? Maybe it wouldn’t. Not yet, anyway.

On another note, here are some of the best jokes about the name that I have heard:

• Are the apps cardboard or plastic?
• Are you there, God? It’s me, marketing.
• The iPad is the best-ever Apple product. Period.
• iPad: 30% thicker, for your heaviest computer usage days.
• Yes, the iPad is small, lightweight and slim. But can you swim with it?

But according to CNN,

Andy Ihnatko, a tech columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, said Apple could call its new gadget a “mangled baby duck” and people would still buy it, both because Apple has sex appeal and because the iPad is a good product. “With the right device, marketing doesn’t really matter,” he said.

I have an infant son. And I have a blog. Does this makes me a “mommyblogger?” Maybe not in the traditional sense of the term (and it is weird to think that a term coined so recently can even have a “traditional sense” yet), but I am a mom who blogs about her life and her family.

So… in what I call Reverse Mommyblogging, I shall now take you through a day in my household, and list by name and brand all the products I typically use, BEFORE I get paid to mention them!

I am not affiliated with any of these companies, and they have not paid me or sent me free products… YET. In these trying economic times, though, a few extra bucks or free products would sure come in handy, so all offers will be entertained. Do you hear me, Procter and Gamble? Get me on that free products train! I can be a corporate shill, too!

• Safety 1st baby monitor
• Apple iPhone
• Pampers Baby Dry or Cruisers size 4 diapers
• Pampers Sensitive baby wipes
• Aveeno Baby Soothing Relief Moisture Cream
• Triple Paste diaper ointment
• Gold Bond medicated baby powder
• Baby clothing by: Gymboree, Baby Gap, Carters, Circo
• Avent pacifiers
• Enfamil Nutramigen baby formula
• Gerber 2nd foods baby puree
• Healthy Times brown rice baby cereal
• Dr. Brown’s baby bottles
• Gerber Soft Bite baby food spoons
• Baby Orajel toothbrush and toothpaste
• Tom’s of Maine toothpaste
• Boston Simplicity contact lens solution
• Aussie Moist shampoo and 3 Minute Miracle Deeeeep Conditioner
• Infusium leave-in treatment
• Garnier Fructis Sleek & Shine 
Anti-Humidity Styling Cream
• Dove moisturizing soap
• Noxzema Daily Exfoliating Cleanser
• Cococare cocoa butter
• Kiss My Face Liquid Rock Patchouli deodorant
• Burt’s Bees Radiance Day Cream
• Burt’s Bees Chemical-Free Sunscreen SPF 30
• Cover Girl Trublend pressed powder
• Almay Intense I-Color eyeliner  in Raisin Quartz
• Maybelline Great Lash mascara in Black
• Burt’s Bees Lip Shimmer in Champagne
• Millstone decaf caramel truffle coffee
• Saturn SL2 automobile
• Gasoline from 7-11, Exxon, Shell, etc.
• Apple MacBook Pro
• Logitech MX Revolution wireless laser mouse
• Apple 23″ Cinema Display
• Coke Zero
• Mirado Black Warrior pencils
• Adobe Creative Suite CS4 software
• Calphalon Stainless Steel cookware
• Cascade 2-in-1 Action Pacs dishwasher detergent
• BabyGanics foaming dish and bottle soap
• Dr. Brown’s bottle brush
• Tide Free laundry soap
• Target brand baby laundry soap
• Target brand infant ibuprofen
• Target brand infant gas drops
• Aveeno Baby Soothing Relief Creamy Wash
• Sony television
• Mac mini
• Playstation 3

Over the past nine days, I have received 455 spam comments on my blog. That’s more than 50 per day. These “comments” are just huge long lists of links to porn sites or prescription drug sites or the like. Luckily my blog is set so that comments have to be approved by me before they can be posted, so none of them actually made it through. But for two days, until I had the bright idea to install the Akismet filter, I had to wade through piles of comments to weed out the spam.

So. If you are a friend or a real live non-robot non-spamming stranger and you plan to leave me a comment, do make sure that you don’t include more than one or two links or your comment may be filtered out. And with the volume I’m getting, I don’t have time to sift through them all to check for legitimate comments that might have been caught.

That is all. Thank you.

Yesterday I successfully transferred my blog to Wordpress! It was quite easy, in fact. I’d say the setup and transfer took all of 30 minutes. Formatting my template was the hard part and I still have some tweaking to do. Now I can post from my iPhone, which was one of the major factors in my decision.

I am in the process of switching my blog from Blogger to Wordpress. Hopefully I can get this done before Mr. Baby arrives. So there might not be much activity here for a few days (not that that is anything new) while I try to switch everything over. If I can’t get my custom template working in Wordpress then I might just use one of their standard templates for a while… so if the look of this blog suddenly changes on you, that’s why!

It’s awfully warm for November. I don’t completely mind it, since we’ve had mostly very hot or very chilly weather lately. Today is a nice inbetween kind of day. It’s about 78 and I’m sitting on the patio being all wireless and cool and shit.

My dad was in town today and we went out for pizza for lunch, and now Doc and I are making a list of things to do over the next few weeks, as well as baby things that we still need to get prior to kiddo’s arrival in the world. We have a pretty extensive list, but truthfully if we were to get none of it done before the baby arrived, it’d be just fine. I’m trying to be all zen and calm about everything now.

We have our bags mostly packed for the hospital; mostly we are bringing toiletries, jammies, clothes for ourselves and the baby, and snacks. It’s early still but I like to be prepared, so we can just grab our bags and go when it’s time, rather than worrying about whether we have everything together or not. One thing I’m not sure about bringing is valuables; things like my purse, wallet, wedding ring, phone. I suspect that especially during labor I’ll be in and out of my room a lot and so will Doc and Kathryn, and I sure wouldn’t want to leave my valuables unattended. Maybe I’ll ask my doctor’s advice on that.

I have my 36-week doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I expect it’ll be a slightly more comprehensive exam than the past five or six. I don’t really have any major complaints or worries; just the usual tiredness, back pain, and pelvic soreness (it feels like a giant severe bruise across the entire groin area). My doctor is so funny; every time I’m in he asks me if I’m having leg cramps. I say no. He asks me if I’m taking calcium supplements. I tell him yes, I take the little chocolate chewy kind. He says good, take them three times a day, it’ll help with leg cramps. I tell him I don’t really have leg cramps. He says that the calcium will help with them. I give up and say OK. Next appointment: same conversation. Ha! But actually lately, when I stretch out my legs late at night I can sense the beginnings of leg cramps. I have to be careful and quit mid-stretch lest they develop full-on.

I feel like I’m rapidly running out of room in my gut. I haven’t had much of an appetite for the past two weeks, and I’ve had more heartburn than I’ve ever had in my life. I can’t eat much at one sitting, and it’s really hard to take a deep breath. When I sit, I have to maintain good posture because slouching hurts. Sleeping is uncomfortable as well; I have to be on my side and have a pillow behind my back and a body pillow that I can hug from the front. If I need to roll over in the night (and apparently I often do), I actually have to wake up to do that, because it’s really hard to roll over without it hurting.

Doc has been helping me a lot with getting into and out of the car, standing up from a sitting position or from being on the floor, getting out of bed; things like that. My balance is off, my strength is down, and the pelvic soreness makes it painful to move in pretty much all ways. Every step I take, every move I make, my pelvic region protests. His extra strength and assistance is really helpful, but I am looking forward to a time when I can move normally on my own again.

Some of the pregnancy clothes that I was wearing even just a few weeks ago are too tight now. I might be wearing largely the same few things for the next few weeks!

I can’t believe I only have one month to go. Wow!

I’ve been seeing Kathryn every week for massage. She’s helping with the lower back pain a lot. A couple of days ago Doc came along to the session and the three of us talked about how we an all work together during labor. Doc and I learned positioning and breathing techniques in our childbirth class, and several of them, especially the super-comfy ones using the birthing ball, can provide Kathryn with good access to my lower back. I think that massage will be a good pain control technique for me. Plus, I’m grateful for the additional physical, emotional and moral support she’ll provide to both Doc and I while I’m going through labor. I hope things aren’t too gross or icky or overwhelming for her, but I would totally understand if they were. It really takes a true friend to go through labor and childbirth with you, I think. She’s pretty awesome for even agreeing to my crazy plan in the first place!!

I’m trying to prepare myself to stay calm and not panic at the lack of control I’ll have over what goes on while I’m in labor; I just hope I can keep my wits about me enough to not get angry or irritated or snap at anyone. More zen: learning to roll with the punches, ride the pain waves, accept and not tense up. My biggest fear is that something so intense (though normal) will happen that I’ll be convinced that something is going horribly wrong and that will bring on a panic attack.

Maybe not, though. I was pretty sure I was dying while I was having the miscarriage, and I think I managed to stay calm throughout that. I wonder how much of that was my inner willpower, and how much of it was Doc’s presence… probably 30/70.

I’m having more noticeable Braxton-Hicks contractions (practice contractions) lately. They’re usually not painful, but sometimes they are accompanied by what feels like mild menstrual cramps. It goes away within a minute or two, usually. Again, totally normal. My body’s just practicing its baby-squeezin’ techniques.

I feel like this pregnancy is all I talk and think about lately. I guess that’s to be expected; my life is changing — and about to change even more — in pretty much every way possible. Change can be strange and scary and exciting, and I guess thinking and talking and writing about it a lot is helping me process it. I promise that I am still the same Katy; I just now have this extra layer of things to think about on top of everything else! I suspect that in a few months, once we get into sort of a routine with the baby, I’ll be able to go back to participating in more of the sorts of things that I normally do.

And I will try my hardest to talk about things other than the baby in this blog. I just haven’t had the energy to regularly update lately; if I did I am sure that there would be a lot more talk about everyday, normal, mundane things here. As it is, though, I feel like I have to write long catch-up posts and of course, that’s taken up mostly by pregnancy issues.

So, non-baby related things:

1. We early-voted last week, doing our part to help turn Texas blue! The lines were unbelievably long. Doc had a really interesting conversation with someone in line. I can’t wait for Tuesday night to watch the returns come in.
2. I thought I had sold my G5 to a friend in Georgia, but it turns out that she wanted to upgrade it to an Intel processor and you can’t do that. So, no sale. I’m kinda bummed ’cause I thought it was all easy-breezy-taken-care-of, but I can probably sell it on eBay instead. Unless you want it? I’m prepared to make you a seriously good deal! E-mail me!
3. Doc changed out the two broken motion-sensor light fixtures on the back porch. They were probably 25 years old, hard-wired to the wall, and the wiring and openings looked pretty much MacGyvered together in the first place,  so it wasn’t exactly an easy switch-out. I helped by holding the flashlight and being available to call 911 should it have turned out that the master switch in our breaker box did not, in fact, cut the power to the fixtures.
4. Doc is trying to switch the cats to using corn-based litter instead of clay. Clay is so dusty and sweetly perfumed; that stuff gets everywhere. So far they still prefer the clay box to the corn litter box, but he’s got a gradual switchover plan in mind.
5. We moved the catboxes and food out of the upstairs guest bathroom in time for the Halloween party last weekend, and we think that we’ll probably just leave that bathroom cat-free. It’s nice and clean now and since that’s going to be the kiddo’s bathroom, we’d have to eventually vacate the kitty stuff anyway. Why not start now? So, food and water goes in our master bathroom; litterboxes in our studio workroom. I really really wish we had just two more rooms in this house; a dedicated laundry room and a small bedroom or den area. Or, a basement.  But we don’t. So we’ll make it work.
6. I had a meeting at the Richards Group yesterday, and while I was there I stopped by Joel’s office. He actually has one of my paintings hanging in his office! That’s just seriously cool. He’s got a really nice office, too, with low incandescent lighting and wooden furniture.
7. Ohmygosh, did I even write about the baby shower?? I don’t think I did. BAD KATY!! Kathryn threw us a fantastic non-traditional baby shower; it was at her house and we invited both men and women. Brett made some awesome barbecue (the shower invites said “Meat the Fetus”). We laughed, talked, stuffed ourselves silly, ate cupcakes, and opened gifts. Everyone was soooo generous!! We were pretty overwhelmed and hopefully were able to communicate our thanks well enough. I was really tired afterwards because it’s hard for me to be the center of attention for that long (although luckily Doc was there to help take some of that off me). We had a blast and we’re really glad that we did not have to play any horrifying baby-shower games, like “guess what type of candy bar has been melted in this diaper” and “guess which kind of baby food puree this is” and “let’s all guess how big around Katy is and then measure her.”
8. Ack. I guess that last entry IS baby-related. Oh well, I tried!

I have finally achieved a major leap forward in my technological coolness… I am now mobile with a laptop! I bought a brand new shiny MacBook Pro last week and currently I am typing to you from a table inside a Schlotzsky’s sandwich shop. See? Here is a photo I just took with PhotoBooth using my Mac’s built-in camera.

I brought my computer to the office today because I had a few things I wanted to finish up, and even though I brought a brown bag lunch today, I was so excited at the prospect of being mobile that I left my food in the office fridge and took my laptop out to lunch. This is a novelty to me still. :)

I got the new laptop not because there is anything wrong with my 3-year-old G5 — it’s still a fantastically fast perfectly working machine — but because the thought of having a baby and being tied to a 50 pound boat anchor at my desk every time I wanted to check email or write or work or make art seemed kind of limiting. Being able to work wherever the kiddo is will be very freeing. I’m a good saver, and am quite lucky in that I found myself able to afford a new computer right now.

So, do you know anyone that would like to buy a nearly-perfect condition 3-year-old Apple G5 computer? I’m in the mood to make you a really good deal on it since it’s taking up space on my floor that I just don’t have anymore. I’m quite serious about wanting to sell it, so shoot me an email if you are interested!

A co-worker forwarded a really fantastic article from Smashing Magazine, about new standards in web design. The good news is, I appear to be doing a lot of things right in my design work. Although the survey analyzed large blogs, I think the results can apply to any type of site. Here is a summary; the percentages in parentheses indicate the percentage of surveyed sites conforming to the standard:

• large blogs require a multi-column layout solution (usually 3 columns suffice) (58%);
• layouts are usually centered (94%),
• layouts usually have a fixed width (px-based) (92%),
• the width of the fixed layout varies between 951 and 1000px (56%),
• 58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content,
• CSS-layouts are used (90%),
• the background is light, the body text is dark (98%),
• the most usual (not necessarily most user-friendly) line length lies between 80 and 100 characters,
• Verdana, Lucida Grande, Arial and Georgia are used for body text (90%),
• the font size of body text varies between 12 and 14px (78%),
• Arial and Georgia are used for headlines (52%),
• headlines have the font size between 17 and 25px.

 

I’m glad the rumors of the MacBook Air were true. It is a thing of beauty, albeit an expensive thing of beauty.

Many things were announced, including updates to the iPhone and iPod Touch (including GPS! Freakin’ finally); a new version of AppleTV, which I believe is merely a software upgrade to original boxes, that is everything that the original AppleTV should have been; TimeCapsule, which Doc and I might want to explore; and of course the rumored ultrathin notebook.

I’m looking to get a notebook computer some time this year, but I have never been an early adopter of new products. I don’t think I can justify the $1800 for this (or $3100 for the version with the flash hard drive).

But damn, it’s sexy!

Yes, I am a geek. I am excited about the Next Great Thing to be announced in 33 minutes. What will it be? I will report back later today.

As a professional designer of web sites and e-mail communications, I think it’s very important to adhere to standards. Any designer worth her salt uses the best tools for the job and keeps up with the evolution of standards as defined by the W3C. That’s why I’ve spent years learning to write beautiful, lean, mean, efficient standards-adherent CSS and HTML.

One of the thorns in designers’ sides is having to write “fixes” into our code to make up for Internet Explorer’s failings. With the recent release of Internet Explorer 7, a number of those failings were corrected and so we had hope that perhaps Microsoft was finally coming around and using W3C standards and stopping the crazy cycle of developing “standards” of its own, the equivalent of taking its toys from the Internet sandbox and going home.

HOWEVER. Oh, and do I mean HOWEVER. With the recent release of the Outlook 2007 e-mail program for PCs (and by recent I mean January… yes, I am a little behind), Microsoft decided not to include the newly developed Internet Explorer 7 HTML rendering engine and instead to use the Word engine to render HTML in emails. The non-standards-compliant, circa-1997-ish Word rendering engine.

A huge percentage of people use PCs, and a large percentage of those users use Outlook as their primary e-mail program, and that means that Microsoft has effectively taken e-mail design back a decade. How can designers NOT comply with these arbitrary rules set by the maker of the most popular email program on the planet? We have to. We are forced to play their game, and write bad code to accommodate this brand new, horribly crippled e-mail program, otherwise a majority of our users would receive e-mails that look like shit. And e-mails that look like shit make users think poorly of your brand and your company.

What this means for me and countless other e-mail designers is that, because Outlook no longer supports a number of extremely basic HTML and CSS tags, we will now have to begin using outdated bloated code to assure that our e-mails display properly in Outlook 2007. It does not support, among other things, background images in divs and table cells, float positioning, and ALT TAGS. Yes, you read that right: it does not support alt tags. You know how when you get an email and the images don’t load, but a little bit of text displays in their place so you can tell what it’s supposed to be? That little text bitlet is an alt tag. And they’ve gone bye bye. And since background images are no longer supported, our emails will become much plainer and less attractive.

Microsoft’s reasoning is, apparently, that since the majority of their business users use Word to create HTML emails, then Outlook needs to use the same engine to display them.

I say, bullshit. There is NO REASON why Outlook should not make use of modern, standards compliant code rendering. If anything, they need to fucking update the craptastic Word rendering engine.

In both my professional and freelance lives, I am now going to have to begin redesigning everything I do to accommodate Outlook 2007. It will be more work for less payoff. We designers are used to having to write CSS that will degrade gracefully in older browsers; I never thought I’d have to write code that will degrade gracefully in the newest version of the most popular email program made by the largest software company in the world.

Way to go, Microsoft.