As I expected Augie posted pics from our photo session on his blog this morning. Check them out -- I'll paste in one pic below (mostly because I'm lazy and a bit slammed w/ work today) - but we'll post more later when we get the full CD of pics from him. Although I'm sure he's already selected the best ones.
Today we did another photo shoot with Augie for some pregnancy photos. As always it's great to work with Augie. We met at his house in the morning and drove to an area near San Ramon that is still pretty rural - fields, horses, animals. We did some shots near a huge old tree, some in an open field with blue skies, along a fence with horses in the background, and some fun shots.
He sent us a teaser blue sky photo which has us excited to see the rest of them. I'll post a few more when we get them, although I wouldn't be surprised to see a few more appear on Augie's blog very soon.
Shameless cross post to support Baby Cheapskate and to enter into a raffle for cloth diapers. Interested in entering?
http://babycheapskate.blogspot.com/2008/07/giveaway-12-bumgenius-30-diapers.html
And so there is some content here - have any of you tried cloth diapers? wash yourselves or use a service? basic cloth diapers or all-in-ones? Tried but stopped, why?
Give me your insights in the comments!!! At this point, we are planning on giving cloth diapering a go (after the first couple of weeks - hoping we can skip the need for newborn sized cloth diapers and go straight to the all-in-one Bum Genius diapers).
The latest home project was a remodel of the stair railings. We've been thinking of what to do with our railings since moving in two years ago. We wanted something a bit more contemporary, and we needed to make it safer for Baby G once he starts running around. The current verticals have a 7 inch gap; large enough to fit MY head through.
This is the only pic I could find of the original railing - although it is from when the house was for sale, so it's old.
We're very happy with the end result.
The project started with removing the oak wood top rail. I stripped the old stain, did two coats of new stain, and two coats of clear. This only took two weekends of work. Then I had the stainless steel cables made by a rigging shop in Southern CA - 22 cables for the sloped railing and 33 cables for the flat railings.
A coat of black paint was also needed. With a pregnant wife in the house I needed to find a zero-VOC paint - an industrial zero-VOC, self-priming paint for metal did the trick (but was expensive at $60/gallon).
The fun then started - drilling 110+ holes into the steel railing. At 4 minutes per hole plus changing bits, resting, and general cleanup you can see why this stage took three long tiring days and about 10-12 drill bits. Cleaning up the tiny metal shavings wasn't very fun either.
After the drilling and clean up, it was time to drop in the cables, tighten them up, and put the wooden top rails back on.
See the full Flickr set for more pics.
I haven't used Shutterfly in a long time, so I decided to use one of their Free Print offers and give Shutterfly a spin again. But it's a bit hard to use the service when you can't upload pictures!
The text on the pages of their Add Pictures flow refers to buttons that don't exist! If you don't put a BROWSE button on the page or a NEXT button you can't really finish the Add Pictures flow. No Added Pictures = No User Engagement.
I tried it in Firefox 2. This is the page I received when I clicked Add Pictures (highlighting added during screen grab). I couldn't find the Browse button. Somewhat hard to load an image if you can get to the file on your PC.
So I tried it in IE6. After a few pages of errors because it couldn't load the page. But I got past the login and clicked Add Pictures.
Well, now. It's a different page layout. But once again, a button is missing. This time it's the NEXT button. As a guess, I hit Enter and it worked.. took me to the next page in the flow.
But no dice. Once again, the page refers to the mystery BROWSE button.
So what should I do? Maybe it's time for me to completely ditch Shutterfly completely, which I've pretty much done over the last year or so. The occasion email offer and looking at friends shared albums is all the gets me to their site anyways.
And for this problem to happen the same day that Multiply releases some brand spanking new features! Omen?
