Major milestone in child development has occurred - Declan has taken his first two steps by himself at age 9 months and 13 days!

We've been noting his ability to walk around when supporting himself with furniture, etc., and in the last few days, noticed that he can actually stand up unassisted and balance himself. Last night, when I went to show my wife how long he could stand, he surprised everyone by taking two steps towards me and falling into my arms!

Great news is he's taken his first steps. Of course, the counter to that is that now he's going to be tearing around everywhere.....

So I've been having this little issue with the latest Apple Battery Recall. Frustrated, I posted my comments to a well known Apple support site - http://www.macfixit.com.

Well, I made the big time....if you call macfixit the big time....look at the bottom of the image....



Turns out, Apple had the affected serial number ranges posted incorrectly at their website. They've since fixed that.

But you heard it from me first, sports fans!

I installed the latest version 1.1 Boot Camp update on my wife's MacBook over the weekend.

In addition to the addition of iSight camera support in WinXP, that time jumping thing is now a thing of the past. Yipppeee!!!!

When my wife and I moved to Maryland, I took advantage of my company's (Sun Microsystems) Work From Home program. I use the office in my house as my primary work place. It's great for me. Traffic in the morning is passing my 7 year old son on the stairs, and lunch and meeting breaks give me time to play with my 9 month old son. It's a great break during a stressful day.

With all these benefits, I usually loathe having to go into the actual office. It's a nice office, really, located in a town about 20 minutes from my house - a direct shot via highway. I love the folks in the office, but there's really no motivation to go in to sit in a check out office and do the same thing (sit on conference calls, work on projects) as I could do at home. Yesterday, however, I had to 1) Pick up two packages from the office, 2) Get more expense reimbursement envelopes, and 3) Copy about 2 dozen pages worth of stuff. Enough things that pretty much added up to, "James, you need to go to the office."

What a day to drive into the office. I started off at 7:45a. It was a wonderful 72 degrees, fairly low humidity (for Maryland at this time of the year anyways), light breeze. Put the top down on the Mini Cooper S. Cranked up the iPod. Ahhhhh.....

I started off first driving 20 miles in the opposite direction. Had to deliver my wife's bag to her office (she accidentally left it at home). Almost no traffic. Very few trucks (trucks are intimidating in a convertible to begin with - compound that with the small stature of the Mini and it's really an experience....). Perfect temperature. No one cut me off on the road. It took me about 25 minutes to cover the 20 miles.

I quickly dropped the bag off, hopped back in the car, and headed up to my office, now approximately 35 miles away. Again, everything was great - no traffic, perfect temperature, pulled into a nice space in the parking garage in 35 minutes. Turned off the engine and sat for a moment and thought, "What a great way to start off the day - a one hour cruise in the Mini with the top down at true motoring speed." I grabbed my laptop bag and headed into the office with a smile on my face.

Could only have been made better if I had commuted in via scenic Highway 1 on the California coast instead of Maryland State Highway...but I won't complain.

Since I bought my refurbished Apple PowerBook G4 a few months back, I've been plagued by a sticking trackpad button. It would occasionally crunch, not respond to clicks, and or do other odd things. Previous trips to the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store resulted in a diagnosis of a loose screw in the trackpad assembly, and getting it tightened up.

After bringing it in for the 3rd time, the folks at the Genius Bar determined the contacts on the trackpad button itself were sticking. The extra force I guess was causing the screws to come loose. So Monday, I took it in for a new "Top Unit" (which contains new keyboard, etc.). I was happy about this since I had always been experiencing intermittent keypress drops on my keyboard as well....

I got the unit back. Ahhhhh.....I love having a working trackpad button. And, the keyboard is definitely more responsive now.

Would have been perfect had they not given me a heart attack when I noticed the system only has 1GB of RAM instead of 1.5GB. Turns out the 512MB module wasn't fully seated. Fixed that up in a jiffy, but....

Thanks to Apple nonetheless for good customer service and doing the right thing by replacing the defective part instead of repeatedly applying band-aids....

For my personal phone, I recently decided to upgrade my Blackberry 7230 (which had survived a dunking in the toilet) with a new Blackberry 7290. I decided on the 7290 because it was 1) Cheaper than an 8700 model, 2) Same form factor as the 7230, 3) Had a brighter screen, 4) Bluetooth, and 5) Quad-Band GSM support. My carrier for the phone is T-Mobile. Cost me $49 from T-Mobile (plus tax of course and after mail-in rebate with new contract....).

I love this thing.

First, it resolved a number of issues that made me dislike my 7230. It stays synced with the network time. It has a much brighter backlight so those with early on-set far-sightedness (me) can read the display better.

Second, all my old accessories work with the phone, and still syncs with PocketMac to my Mac.

But the unexpected fun came with the upgraded Blackberry OS loaded on it. This unit has decent theme support, and I was able to get the MacBerry theme which makes my Blackberry look like a Mac. Whoo hoo!

Another fun app I've discovered is Google Maps Mobile. If you've not tried this little application, it's great. It's just like Google Maps except smaller (obviously). It can give you step-by-step directions between two points, pan and zoom, and even use the same satellite imagery that Google Maps uses. An added feature is real-time traffic displays for 30 metropolitan areas. Very, very nice. Reportedly supported on any Java J2ME enabled handset. Highly recommended (but only if you have an unlimited data plan on your device - it does download a lot of stuff).

So there seems to a consensus that the real estate market is cooling off. Though, no one really seems to be calling it a bust (yet).

I just can't wait for the banking crisis to follow.

Why?

I'll take my neighborhood for example. A year ago when my wife and I moved into our house, people were lining up at the sales office every month to get a chance to purchase one of four homes (on average) that our builder released per month. There were no homes for sale in our neighborhood. Those that went on sale stayed on the market for a week before being sold. People were coming in with adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), mortgages that were short-term fixed which converted to ARMs, and even negative-amortization loans where the monthly payment didn't even cover the interest on the house. Greater than 100% financing. 2nd mortgages to cover down payments on the 1st mortgage. Etc. etc. We qualified for our house with my income alone (which isn't a trivial amount, granted, but the mortgage payment would have consumed 75% of my take home pay...) incredibly enough.

My point? People literally begged, borrowed, and cheated their way into these very nice homes.

Now I think people are starting to pay the price. They're not lining up at the sales office anymore, and there are 8 or so houses in our neighborhood for sale. Some have been for sale for at least a couple of months. Coincidence, perhaps. But you wonder how much the recent interest rate jumps have started putting the pinch on people who took out ARMs or other adjustable rate mortgages. And if that's the case, how long before the banks start owning these houses? Which have been negative amortizing and are now worth less than their outstanding mortgage? And how long before those losses begin to add up, especially in overheated markets like mine?

And I am sure this isn't just our neighborhood either.

Might be some good buys coming up soon....but too bad that will be at the expense of the appraised value of my home....

American Express has the most screwed up mailing databases in the world.

In a previous residence, they kept sending applications for business credit cards to my address, because I happened to have been the unfortunate recipient of the previous phone number of that business.

At my current residence (and by the way, this is a new house so I'm the first owner), they send me credit card applications for the person I bought my previous house from (in another state). And now, they send me credit card applications for my mother who has been dead for over 11 years, and whose credit report I'm sure is marked with the fact that she's deceased.

The good news is I found this number: 877-370-0976 -- it's an American Express "Stop these incorrect mailings" phone number. They took the information from the mailing and committed to removing the incorrect entries from their database within 6-8 weeks. We'll see....