the ridlehoover family blog

Dad & Lynn gave the kids a fantastic DVD for their birthday. It’s video of marine life doing what marine life does to the music of Brent Holmes. The music is so catchy that it’s got Jill and I singing right along. And, now, I can’t get one of the songs out of my head. But, I only know some of the lyrics, so it’s rather annoying. In an attempt to get the lyrics out of my head, or to at least teach me the rest of the song, here are the lyrics:

When You Find a Manatee in Your Bathtub by Brent Holmes

• When you find a manatee in your bathtub, playing with your toys,
• making lots of noise and causing trouble;
• And, he’s washing his big flippers; and using all your soap;
• and filling up your tub with giant bubbles; Say...

• Please, Mr. Manatee, don’t tickle me,
• ‘cause I’m as ticklish as a kid can be.
• I won’t tickle you, if you don’t tickle.
• And, we can play together.

• Please, Mr. Manatee, while you're in my tub,
• we should sing a song that goes rub-a-dub-dub.
• Rub-a-dub-dub, a manatee is in my tub.
• And, life couldn’t be much better.

• Repeat with sea lion instead of manatee

• Reapeat with walrus instead of manatee

There, now.  I feel so much better. If you’re interested, the album is called “Sea Tunes for Kids.” You can find both the DVD and the CD at Amazon.com.  I’ve also seen the CD at iTunes.

Oprah has her favorite things.  Martha has her good things.  These are a few of the things that have made our lives with twins a little easier...

The Happiest Baby on the Block DVD Without this DVD, I would still be pulling my hair out trying to calm Gracie.  She knows how to cry.  But, thanks to this DVD, I know how to calm her down.  I cannot recommend this product highly enough - especially to first time parents.

Dunstan Baby Language DVD Believe it or not, our two month old twins are already talking.  They speak fluent infant.  And, thanks to this two DVD set, Jill and I understand enough baby language to be able to tell the difference between "I'm hungry!", "Burp me!" and "I'm tired!"  Highly recommended!

Boppy Nursing Pillows Ever try feeding twins by yourself?  Just place two Boppys back to back and away you go.  (See picture below.)  They also work great for positioning a baby on your lap for feeding.  Absolutely essential!  (And, it makes a nice hat, too!)

Ever since purchasing my iMac several months ago, I've been searching for decent OS X desktop blogging software.  After test driving several of the products on the market, including both MarsEdit and ecto, I have yet to find anything that I like as much as good old Windows Live Writer.  So, I'm going to keep using WLW.  I just got it running in "Unity" mode under VMware Fusion on my iMac.  So, now, it appears on my dock right next to all my other favorite programs.  Yeah!

After a couple of full days of using Flock, I've come up with a couple of niggles:

1. Flock seems to prefer it's formatting to the formatting on my blog.  I wish it didn't.  I don't want to have to use my control panel to "fix" every post I write.
2. Flock seems to prefer Technorati tags to the tags built into my blog engine.  I like the idea.  I just wish it would use both.

On the plus side, the blog editor did correctly handle the Categories used by Graffiti.  I wasn't expecting it to.  But, as it stands, these issues will probably prevent me from using the Flock blog editor for any serious blogging.  But, the rest of the browser is pretty darn cool.  I especially like the "my world" view for the sheer volume of information it presents.

Flock is a very cool new browser based on the same Mozilla bits as the more familiar Firefox browser.  Why should you care?  Flock integrates the Web 2.0 experience of sites like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube directly into the browser in an incredibly intuitive way.  I've only been playing with Flock for about 30 minutes, but it has already earned a spot on my dock.  In fact, I'm writing this blog post using Flock's integrated blog post editor.  This after importing my feeds from NewsFire and scanning them in about 15 minutes - unheard of, for me. Tags: technology

About once a year, or so, I redo the family web site.  It gives me a chance to pretend I still write web code.  And, it keeps me off of World of Warcraft, of which Jill is not so fond. Now that we're at home with the twins, I thought this would be a perfect time to update the family site.  But, frankly, I wasn't looking forward to it.  I'd been using Telligent's Community Server.  And, while it worked.  It sure seemed like overkill.  And, skinning the site wasn't exactly easy.  To get the look and feel I wanted, I was about to make the switch to Wordpress. So, I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled on Telligent's new GraffitiCMS - a product built for small sites with a focus on blogging.  And, now that the transformation is nearly complete, I can heartily recommend Graffiti.  It does everything I need out of a content management / blogging engine.  And, it's extremely simple to setup and use.  Graffiti's mix of ASP.NET, simplicity, and the very cool Chalk templating language kept me from having to learn everything from the ground up.  Kudos to the Graffiti team for an excellent product!