Brainspill

As she’s getting older, she’s getting my sense of humor. And that frightens me (figuratively, at least for now).

Yesterday I got home to a crabby Sarah, and while she was in her mother’s arms, I thought I’d play with her a little, and maybe cheer her up. So I let her watch me looking at her…

Then I moved in closer…

Rah! Maybe I was a little too loud with it, eyes bulging, mouth open wide, hands up in the air. For a moment, she looked a little unsure of how to react. Penny started saying ‘Oh, Daddy, that was too loud, too much’.

I moved in again to give her a kiss and tell her I was just playing – I was starting to feel a little bad for the startled look on her face.

rah! She tried to scare me back!! She even jumped a little in Penny’s arms, just like I’d done when I first scared her. And here’s where confusion sets in. Was she angry at me? Or did she get the humor in it?

She answered the question a second later, when she started laughing.

rah! rah! rah! And by now, every time she did it, I jumped and feigned horror. 88| It wasn’t long before she was looking at the dogs, trying to make them jump, too.

She’s got a new 2nd favorite game – it makes her laugh almost as much as her #1 favorite (The Race for Freedom). This morning as I was getting dressed, she watched me, all beautiful with her blue eyes and light hair, and I kissed her cheek, and then she looked at me and said…

rah!

Other Recent Favorite Things
I’m A Turkey: We went to Cabella’s the other day. It’s turkey season, so all through the huge store you can hear videotapes of turkey calls, and kids (of all ages) playing with different kinds of turkey calls, and distinct ‘ARR ARR ARR ARR’ sounds echoing around you. Not too long into that trip, she was making the ‘arr arr arr’ noises herself. :))

The Race For Freedom: I imagine every kid does this. Set her down in the middle of a room, when she wants something (or just to be) in an adjoining room, and you’ll see the fastest crawling action achievable on earth. She goes that fast, just to the edge of the room, and then turns around to see if we’re chasing her.

If we chase her, she takes off again, giggling, and then laughing outright when we catch her. If we’re not chasing, she’s quite content just to sit there and wait for us to move.

Let’s Put Funny Things In Dad’s Mouth: I think I started this… kinda wish I hadn’t. She’ll pick up any of her toys (or my socks, or a dust bunny, or dog food…) and if I’m holding her, she wants to see it in my mouth. It started when she put a pacifier in my mouth (she likes to share!) and I growled at it and shook it side to side like a dog with a sock. I was bored. She thought that was hilarious, so now it’s just a contest of seeing how big (or disgusting) an object she can make me bite. We’re up to bath toys, hair bows and dress socks now.

Here’s my favorite of her most recent pictures:

This isn’t even an April Fools joke. Although I did a cool one of those, too.

On the way to work this morning I had to blow my nose. I’ve been struggling against a nasty head cold for a week now, and am used to this. I drove with my knee, and used both hands to hold kleenex to my nose so I could clear my nasal passages.

I blew my brains out. I didn’t think I would, but I apparantly blew hard enough to pop both my ears simultaneously – immediately and completely losing my balance in a fast moving vehicle, controlled by my knee.

I almost yakked during the ensuing nasuea. I could see the road passing by, and I knew the world wasn’t spinning, but I felt like I was tumbling sideways.

It’s not like I could have closed my eyes for a few minutes to regain my composure.

I managed to slow down and make my way to the far right lane and drive very carefully for a few minutes until my ears gradually clicked back into order, but man, I was scared to death for a moment there.

A while back I posted that I *hate* Adobe’s PDF concept. Here’s a little re-cap of why:

It’s a dead end. You can’t mark it up for revision except in printed form.

It’s restricting – you can’t get halfway through a 10 page form, decide to save, and come back later. Can’t save the form at all, actually (not without an elaborate server-side process).

It’s defacto. PDF this, PDF that. For publishing a whitepaper, sure, it’s not bad. For creating a usable form/document/interactive experience, it sucks.

The saga continues: I spent 26 consecutive hours at work last week creating HTML/CSS/Javascript versions of the PDF forms I’m working with so that the data and form can be stored in a single document. CSS handles formatting the data well, Javascript handles filling the form fields, numbering the pages, etc. They’re pretty cool HTML forms. But they still print poorly (footers aren’t really at the foot), and different browsers still display them differently.

And then Saturday, out of frustration with no good answers, I flexed my search term imagination and discovered the best solution I can imagine…

Here’s the competition, and IMHO, the clearly better alternative: Formatta Filler. The Formatta software, like a PDF, presents a form that the user can’t alter (except to fill in fields). BUT, the user can save his data – combining the form with the data, and preserving it’s ability to be edited later. It handles submission via http better than Reader does (more formats, easier to use), and it’s also free.

The designer app costs more than Adobe Acrobat, I’ll grant you, but it’s still just $1,000. That’s not a bad deal for such a great improvement over PDF’s.

There’s not much about them on the internet, so I’m posting here so others will notice. They ought to put the PDF in its grave.