Anna has taken to telling jokes lately, but I was getting a little tired of the punch line being “bootie butt” or “poopy!” I figured she was a little too young for “Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?¹” or “What’s brown and sticky?²” which are my favorite kids’ jokes. She has learned the knock-knock joke sequence, so I googled a couple jokes and told them to her, which she asked me to repeat approximately 784 times. At this point she has learned them pretty well, and I’m sure will be repeating them at school.

¹ It was dead.

² A stick.

I find it really interesting how the Internet, and particularly blogs, has allowed people who have never met each other to bond. The blog phenomenon, I believe, has enabled this bonding even more than before, and I can only imagine what’s next. Blogs have on one hand become like “reality TV,” in that they give you a peek into the life of another, with all its ups and downs, in some cases exotic, in some cases tragic, but interesting more often then not. The core of a blog’s power, I believe, is that it becomes a hub in a self-organizing community, as blog readers post links to other blogs that they like. The blogs I read are of people whom I can identify with: people with kids, people who take pictures, people who cook. There are some really good writers out there, and if their parallel lives weren’t compelling enough, their writing certainly is. Some of these people link back to me, and other fans of there work have arrived here.

New readers of my blog should probably start with the Best. Post. Ever. category, which are the posts that I personally think are the most funny or poignant. If you go back far enough, you can also find the “real time” posts from when our second daughter was born.

In addition to reading blogs, I have also started listening to “podcasts”, which are essentially the audio equivalent of blogs. Podcasting is fairly new, but it’s growing tremendously. Some of my favorites are The Croncast, who are the midwestern, funnier version of our family, and the Tim and Tony Show, which is primarily a raunchy humor show, but one of the guys on the show has recently moved, married, and is now expecting a second child. Tony mentioned my blog on the air because of how much he could identify with the experiences I’ve published as a father of two.

I’m flattered to have people coming to my blog, reading it, liking it, and saying so. While I originally set this blog up as a something functional, I can’t deny that I really like to be complimented¹ for my writing. More than being flattered, I am just staggered when I get supportive comments, from complete strangers, or people coming back day after day because they identify with what’s happening in our life. That sense of community make the internet something more personal and powerful than I had ever imagined, and I’ve been at this for a really long time².

I have to admit, that with the increase in readership, I do feel a pressure post more often, to be humorous, and to be interesting. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s not, but it is always a good feeling to go through the process of sitting down, laying out my thoughts and experiences, even if nobody ever reads them. It’s just a bonus that people do.

¹ Of course, so does everybody else–I just like it more. Seriously. I’m not kidding. I insist that you compliment me right now. Ok, I’m kidding. But not really.

² In fact, I invented Al Gore.

I have gotten into the habit of letting Anna watch a Dora the Explorer video in the mornings as her sleeping-through-the-night reward. This gives me enough time to make her lunch, lay out her clothes, get breakfast ready, and whatever else needs to be done first thing in the morning. Anna then begs for another video, and lately has taken to say “or I’ll die,” which is something I think she has picked up from Beatrix Potter’s awful “The Pie and the Patty-Pan.” It’s funny, of course, but it really should serve to warn others: you cannot reason with a three-year-old.

I was able to schmooze my way into an exclusive interview with area baby Tara Jane, or “T. Diddy” as the members of her posse call her. She met with me in my office between bouts of eating, sleeping, and pooping, but I was privileged to have her attention for all of about thirty seconds. Get out a fresh tape and hold it close to your speaker, you’re going to want to pop the tabs out on this one.

After tinkering with the SanDisk MP3 player a little more, I decided that the voice recording functionality is nearly useless, and I put it up on eBay. However, I discovered the Neuros Audio II, which is a bit large for a flash-based MP3 player, but it has terrific recording capability (up to 160 kbps MP3 or 48 kHz WAV), and it should be more than adequate for my purposes. It will also take an external mic.

Why all the fuss about mobile recording? There are a lot of instances where I would like to capture audio, most of them involving the things Anna says. Mind you, a lot of the things she says are things Jennifer and I say, but things like “How about a big bowl of nothing?” or “Tick-tock, sister, move it along” are much cuter when a three-year-old says them. I try very hard to capture precious moments in still images, but even I have to face the fact that life is a multimedia experience.

I just got a new gadget which is in theory an MP3 player, the Sandisk MP3 256MB. I say in theory, because my intended use is the voice recording function. It can record 17 hours of audio (though I’m sure the battery will die long before that) to its internal memory from an onboard microphone. Unfortunately, most reviews of MP3 players don’t cover the voice recorder functionality, so I had to buy this without having heard the quality, which it turns out mostly stinks. Oh well, it’s good enough to get the gist of things, and with some postprocessing, it’s listenable. Here’s the catch. I’m going to be postprocessing to OGG format, which I don’t think Windows will play right out of the box. Why OGG? because it’s a open format that I will be able to read years down the line, and it sounds much better when you’re starting with the junky 4-bit 8khz audio from the MP3 player. I now have the recorder at my bedside, so hopefully I’ll remember to record some typical morning behavior. It’s pretty amusing, sometimes I think a Starbucks opened in her closet.