Is the Baby Breathing?

Call it the most basic responsibility of fatherhood, your raison d'être: Keep the Baby Alive.  Let's face it, most species have little use for the male after the act of procreation.  Once you pass along your genes, you're history.  Only a tiny percentage of the earth's beasties have realized we are more than our choromosomes.  We can hang around to make sure everything goes all right.

In my case, the primal instinct was more like an compulsive obsession to check Benjamin every five minutes while he slept -- one that has only abated (slowly) since he turned one.  I got to thinking that baby clothes should have geometric patterns on them to make it easier to see slight movement, like the delicate rise and fall of the infant diaphram-lung-ribcage ensemble.  Failing that, some kind of blinking light or beep every few seconds to let you know "all systems are functioning within normal parameters."  I think my son's angelic little face is just about perfect...but a little blinking LED on his forehead would have made me feel a lot better during those early months, when my thoughts were constantly haunted by horror stories of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, escaped boa constrictors, and alien abduction.

Sure, there are other improvements I'd make to the human larval stage -- the whole diaper situation comes immediately to mind.  A simple on/off switch would go a long way toward preserving the pre-child sleep patterns my wife and I once enjoyed, and breastfeeding would be completely done away with -- speaking of things I once enjoyed.  Honestly, though, I'd trade them all for that little blinking forehead light that says: "I'm okay, Dad."

10:28:30 PM    

Worth the Cover Price

So my sample copy of the new SYNC magazine finally came -- after two demands for payment on a full-year subscription.  They had me mightily peeved, but the good news for them is that the magazine more than makes up for the foibles of their subscription department.  Somewhat reminiscent of George's attempt to combine pop culture with politics, this is a dose of gadgets and gossip for the geek-chic set.  The writing is suitably cynical for my taste while maintaining the oooooohhh of proper gadget-worship.  Basically, it's Gizmodo in print form delivered to my mailbox once a month.  At $19.97 for a year's subscription, that's a dip into the analog world I can easily justify.

A few more quick recommendations.  Microsoft's .mht file format has finally spawned a crop of applications designed to take advantage of it.  If you've ever tried to save a webpage to your hard drive so you can view it later, you know what a mess it can be.  Windows downloads the HTML in one file, then creates additional folders for graphics and other ancillary files and saves those separately.  The .mht format solves all that by saving a page as a single file.  So, if you're surfing around and find a page (an op/ed piece in the Times, for example) you want to read later, click on the file menu and choose save as.  When the Save File As dialog appears, go down to the file type and select "Web archive, single file (*.mht). 

Even better than this option for collecting information from the web in a new app called OnFolio.  The bad news first: the full version is $80.  I'm pretty sure it's worth it, though.  I'm still playing around with the demo, but I may shell out the bucks for my own copy very soon.  The OnFolio website has plenty of cool flash animations to explain what the program does, so I won't go into too much detail here.  Basically, OnFolio lets you capture web pages as links or local copies (mht files) into a "collection."  You can add all kinds of other files to your collection, too: graphics, videos, PDFs -- even snippets of text plucked from a page.  You can then -- and here's the cool part -- generate a "report" that shows all the stuff you've captured.  You can add in your own comments, files off your hard drive, etc. and send the whole thing as an email or post it to your own site.

 So go ahead, shell out the bucks for OnFolio, and it will be one of the more useful applications in your start menu.  Start culling the web and making it work for you -- think of it as TiVo for your browser.

10:15:23 PM