Time flies

As I write this post, my oldest daughter turned 3 last week and my second one is 8 months and already crawling all over the place. Between work, traveling for work the kids and taking care of the house, time always seems to just fly by with no chance to do anything outside of our routine.

I still manage to write a DVD review once in while and watch a couple of good TV shows, but time always seem to be something that I could use more of.

Traveling has been relatively light through the summer but will be picking up again in the next month.

There is not much else new happening these days, which explains the lack of postings. Looking forward to the next break during the Christmas holidays.

Another version of wordpress, another update to Link Library

With the release of WordPress 2.3, I had to make a few small modifications to my plugin. The main one being that they have removed support for link sub-categories. The latest version can be found on the wp-plugins.org site.

Airlines have stooped to a new low

As most of you know, I travel a lot for work. I am actually currently in Philadelphia visiting a customer. When I flew in on Monday, I saw something that completely astonished me: adversiting inside of the little foldable trays! How could they stoop that low!
Here is an idea of what it looks like. This is not the ad I saw and I did not take this picture but it gives you a good idea:

As you can see, this is quite invasive. After all of the ads that we see on the airport walls, did we really need this?

I will try to post more of my travel adventures soon since I have been neglecting my blog a bit.

Jumped to Linux and not looking back

I’ve been thinking about making my home computer completely use open source or free software for a long time now. After finding open source alternatives for the majority of the desktop applications that I am using on Windows, I have made the final leap and converted my machine to use Ubuntu Linux.

Before starting down on this path, the first thing that I did was to download the Ubuntu Live 6.10 CD. After downloading and burning this CD image, you can boot your computer in Linux straight off the CD-ROM without making any modifications to your system. This virtual computer automatically recognizes your internet connection, contains a ton of applications like a web browser, office suite, image editor and hard disk partition manager.

Once I was satisfied with what I saw, I made some space on my hard drive and performed the Ubuntu installation. This went very smoothly and I was up and running very quickly. All of the applications that I mentioned in the previous paragraph were automatically installed (OpenOffice.org, Firefox, GIMP and many others) so I did not have to worry about setting all of these up like I would have to on a Windows system.

Once I was up and running, the next step was to install other tools that I need that don’t come as part of the base installation. Ubuntu is great for this since it contains a tool called the Synaptic Package Manager. This tools connects to the internet and gives you a list of applications available for download and installation. You find the tool you are looking for, select it and the operating system takes care of installing and configuring the tool for you. It even keeps track of updates to all of your installed software and tells you when new versions are out! Windows and Mac OS should follow in these steps.

Of course, Linux is still not for everyone. I had to struggle to get my TV output activated on my video card where such an operation would have been trivial under Windows. A few other tools also had their quirks to install and run. But overall, I’ve been able to get everything running smoothly.

Here is a picture of my desktop so you can see a few application that I would typically use and what it looks like.

Already 9 days

At the end of the 9th day of Gabrielle’s life, we keep saying that we don’t remember Évelyne being so fussy or being so much trouble to feed. Then again, the human mind is probably designed to make you forget these kinds of things.

Yesterday was a very good day where we got some decent night the previous night and then Andrée was able to nap in the day. Today is the other hand was a very hard day since Gabrielle woke up very often to get fed last night and then again all through the day. Maybe she’s going through a growth spurt…

We just sent Évelyne off to spend a couple of days at hergrand-parents place. That should give us a bit more time to recuperate and some time for Évelyne to sleep as well. Although she does not seem to wake up when the baby cries, I think it still bothers her sleep because she has been getting cranky (although jealousy might also be the culprit there).

On a different note, as my birthday is coming up (yes, the big 30), I am planning on getting a My Book 250 GB external hard drive to store a bunch of stuff. That will make my life around the PC much easier.

Now that everyone is sleeping, I need to try to take a nap… More to come. Oh yeah, for those who are not aware: in Quebec, fathers get to take a 5-week paternity leave when their children are born. The first week of this is finishing today. So I have four more weeks to help out around the house as we get used to having this bigger family

Back home

A bit less than two days after leaving for the hospital, we are back home. As promised, I have uploaded a few pictures of our daughter Gabrielle, as well as a nice picture with the three women in my life

The pictures are inside this post as well as in the photo album section on the left-hand side.

A new addition to the Lefebvre family

For all those who have been waiting for the news, you’ll be happy to know that our daughter Gabrielle Josée Lefebvre was born on February 15 at 11h51pm. Weighing in at 8 pounds, 5 ounces, Gabrielle is a healthy baby. She was also quite tall at 21 1/2 inches. Mommy is also doing quite well after the natural delivery (helped with some great epidural). I just came back home to take care of Évelyne and Andrée and Gabrielle should be release from the hospital tomorrow.

We’ll get pictures and updates posted as soon as possible. For now, Andrée kept the camera with her at the hospital.

Still writing reviews

Although I have not mentioned it for a while online, I am still writing DVD reviews for UnePorte.net. Some of my recent texts published have been reviews of Mission: Impossible III and Battlestar Galactica 2.5. I also submitted a text on Bon Cop, Bad Cop, a very interesting bilingual movie that was released in Québec last year and am currently working on reviews of The Illusionist, Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Special Edition and the new collector’s edition of A fish called Wanda.

As for Québec Micro, I have reduced greatly my number of contributions to that computer magazine. While I enjoy writing for them, I have not always had enough time to do both in the last few months and will have even less time now that our second daughter is right around the corner.

So keep an eye on UnePorte.net if you’re interested in reading some of my work.

LinkedIn: An interesting professional networking site

A colleague of mine showed me this very interesting professional networking site called LinkedIn. The idea is to create a list of contacts and then create your personal network through these contacts and their own contacts. I just opened myself an account on there and started networking.

The beginning of a new phase in our lives

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am extremely sorry for not taking the time to post some news here. I just can’t believe how incredibly busy the last couple of months have been. The first source of business has been all of my traveling. I have been to Detroit (4 times since September), Chicago, Phoenix, Houston and Orlando.

At home, we have been busy getting Évelyne’s big girl room ready and preparing her old room for Gabrielle (who should be born in the next two weeks!). Add to that a few more home renovation projects and the holidays and life just became very hectic.

We had a very good holiday season and Santa was very good to me. I got a copy of Final Fantasy III for my Nintendo DS Lite, along with some Swiss Army perfume, a new leather travel case and an iPod FM transmitter. All of these are great but I ended up giving the iPod transmitter to my brother-in-law since our new car has a built-in CD MP3 player. Some of the other gifts I got were the Children of Mana game for Nintendo DS and the music CD End of the World Party by Medeski, Martin and Wood.

Finally, while I was in Detroit this past week, I ended up picking up a second-hand copy of Super Mario 64 DS. That seems like a really well-done port of the Nintendo 64 classic that I will enjoy playing in the weeks to come.

I will try to start posting regularly (how many times am I going to say that) and will definitely let you all know when our second daughter is born.