Recent batch of awesome videos at Cute Overload

In the past couple of days there have been several great heart-warming videos at Cute Overload:

• A story with pictures about how a guy helped a family of newly hatched ducklings make their way safely to a river in downtown Spokane.
• A team of people rehabilitating several sea lions by acting like the sea lions' parents
  
• A video of a guy singing a litter of puppies to sleep
  

On the search for a good movie review RSS feed

With two young children, I don't go out to see movies very often, let alone ones that I want to watch. And with there not being much time to watch movies at home either, I don't spend money renting movies and instead get them from the public library, so I can have the movie anywhere from 3 days to a week. With the entire Milwaukee County public library system at my disposal and searchable online, I can choose more than just what's available at my local branch. So with limited free time, and a fairly extensive collection available, how can I effectively plan which movies to watch?

I used to have a paper-based method for both movies & music, writing down titles of new releases with good reviews from Entertainment Weekly, to which I don't subscribe anymore, so that I could then keep track of things to watch & listen. For music this worked pretty well, because the library system was pretty good at ordering new & current music. But because of the delay in a movie being in the theater to when it actually comes out on video, I never did very well at keeping track of current movies to watch ("current" meaning within the last 2 years).

Having been using Google Reader now for a year or so, it finally dawned on me that if I had a good movie review feed, that I would be able to star new movies that I want to see, and then after doing this for 6 months to a year, I would be able to go back in my star archive for that feed in Google Reader and have a list of movies to request from the library.

So I started searching for movie review RSS feeds. At first EW's feed looked perfect--the title & score is in the post title. Unfortunately the feed contains many duplicate entries, which is unacceptable because it would annoy me to no end. So, I searched for more feeds, and each one I came across wasn't good because it didn't put the score in the post title or content--too inefficient to have to go to the original site to get the rating. After about 5 more minutes of searching, I found RogerEbert's which is not perfect, but ok--the movie title & score is in the post title, but the feed contains more than just movie reviews. It also has repeat entries in it, but not at the rate EW's does. Also better than EW's, it actually contains a little bit of the review in the post content.

Lastly another plug for Google Reader - their database contains posts from Ebert's feed all the way back to October 2005. So I can star movies I want to watch back a few years to when I stopped using my paper-based system.

Synchronizing Thunderbird Address Book to Palm

I maintain my master address book in Thunderbird (my personal email client). So, I would like to have it automatically pushed down to my phone, but I had problems getting the Palm sync extension for Thunderbird to work under TB v2 (always gave errors about not being able to open the Mozilla address book). Although I could spend the time trying to fix the sync code, I basically have given up on the sync extension and resigned to having to manually sync periodically.

The only import/export format in common between Palm Desktop and Thunderbird was CSV. I did a search and couldn't find any existing script to convert between the two, so I downloaded the Text::CSV perl module and started writing a script to read in a CSV-exported Thunderbird address book and save it with fields reordered per Palm Desktop's expectations. I had it half-way written when I discovered there's a un-indexed extension to Thunderbird that can export an address book in vCard format called More Functions for Address Book.

So I tried it out and found that it works fairly well. The caveats to this approach besides the manual aspect to it are:

1. Palm Desktop doesn't import birthday
2. The extension doesn't export anniversary
3. Palm Desktop imports duplicate cards as new entries, so have to delete all entries, and then import

I didn't test to see if the picture field gets synchronized or not.

The first two are not a big deal but the implications of #3 is that attributes associated with entries in my phone, like custom ring tones, are lost, which sucks because I'd like to take advantage of that feature of my phone. I may have to switch my mode of operation and have my phone/Palm Desktop be my master address book, but so far I'm resisting that because:

1. I don't want my address book to be controlled by proprietary software
2. I like Thunderbird's interface for managing address book cards better than Palm Desktop (although neither of them are great).

I also found out there's a method for defining a custom ordering for fields for CSV import in Palm Desktop, further eliminating the need to write a CSV converter script in the first place.

A few more pictures from England

Barbara Farrar who we stayed with for a few days in England, and helped tote us around a bit, just sent a few pictures. Enjoy!

Norah's spring of 2008 school pictures

Norah's Spring 2008 school pictures are her best yet.

Saturday, March 29 - Trip to England Day 8

The morning was filled with another hearty breakfast, running Norah down to the hairdresser, and delaying Dejaquan from wearing his tux as long as possible. Barbara was kind enough to put together a pack of non-staining snacks for the kids knowing the moment we sat in the car Dejaquan would complain about being hungry. Click went his seat belt and he said it just as we had predicted.

We got to the wedding 1/2 hour early, and as soon as the other young kids in the wedding party arrived, they hit it off with Norah & Dejaquan. Joe, the other ring bearer, just turned 6 two days prior and Emily, 8, loved taking charge of Norah. A few minutes before the wedding began, I took Norah back to the bridesmaids, and thought everything was okay until she through a fit that she didn't get to have a bouquet of flowers like the others (she got to carry a fancy light-up Tinkerbell magic wand). I somehow managed to console her enough to have her get in line with her wand just as they started marching down the aisle. (pictures)

Surprisingly, both kids were well behaved during the ceremony, Dejaquan only getting up twice, once following Joe who was being mischievous and once to have his tie fixed, and Norah once trying to get the other flower girl, a toddler/young preschooler, to sit down with her (who had been wondering around the whole time).

We found out later that at one point in the ceremony Dejaquan and Joe, sitting in the front row across the aisle from the bridesmaids, were making faces at them, causing the to laugh. Verity & Stuart thought that the bridesmaids were laughing at them, because they were sitting with their backs to the boys.

It was drizzling when the wedding finished, and Keith took us to the reception while Barbara delivered our luggage to the hotel, bless her heart. The reception was fabulous (pictures), and had a good time talking with the Joe & Emily's parents during dinner. We left while Stuart & Verity cut the cake, Barbara again being overgenerous running us to our hotel in the rain.

We had got the kids to leave without much fuss, promising them they could swim when we got there (7:30), but kids weren't allowed in the pool after 6pm (can you believe that?), so there was quite the melt-down in the hotel room. We compromised by letting them take a bath together (supervised). Norah was still sad about not getting to go swimming the next morning.

Friday, March 28 - Trip to England Day 7

I finally got to eat porridge for breakfast and it was delicious.

We went with Barbara in her car to Stoke-on-Trent to visit the potteries. First we went to Emma Bridgewater Pottery Cafe and let the kids paint their own cups. Then we went to the Gladstone Pottery Museum, ate in their tearoom and took the tour of the museum (pictures)--one of the last preserved working pottery factories from the 19th century. Both kids got to mold their own clay bowls on a flywheel, and Norah got to make a clay flower while Dejaquan made a vase on an electric wheel. We ran out of time and had to leave the tour without seeing the toilet exhibit.

Back in Cheadle Hulme, the Farar's made another fabulous dinner of shepherd's pie with vegetables, including a good portion of peas which was about the only thing Norah ate. We finished in time to get to the rehearsal right at 7pm when it was supposed to start, but we were the first ones there.

The wedding rehearsal went smoothly and quickly, then we headed over to Nuela's for the rehearsal party. Unfortunately, Sarah wasn't feeling well, so we left soon after it started. Sarah headed to bed and Barbara put together a quick snack for the kids. The kids watched the rest of the movie they had started watching earlier, and once it was over, Barbara & I played cards with the kids until they were tired enough to go bed.