Don't Wake the Baby

Dada is still asleep and I'm now awake enough to actually do a blog post. Nei Nei (Gran Judy) is here for a while, which is lots of fun. Julie and I are actually going to go to a movie tonight! Woo hoo!.

Lot's going on. Dada is growing like a weed, our house is starting to be built. The weather is getting hot. The usual.

Here is another family's China adoption blog: Our Journey to Baby Sipes. Their daughter is from the same orphanage as Dada (the Maonan District Welfare Institute). They are just about to start their trip to China.

I have started using a new photo sharing and community servce called Flickr (www.flickr.com). It's a pretty cool site, much better than Ofoto (Kodak Gallery). For example, you can download the original picture at its full resolution, something you can't do with Ofoto. You can also create RSS and Atom syndication streams of pictures with specific descriptive "tags". This makes it easy for people to know when you've put new pictures up. It also has a nice slideshow feature.

Anyway, I've started putting up pictures of Dada and pictures of the house construction.

The house construction photos are public and you can see the construction time sequence here: 2704 Wilson Construction Time Lapse Pictures. View it as a slideshow with the delay turned down to 1 second to get the (admittedly weak) timelapse effect.

You will have to register with Flickr, but it's free and pretty much free of advertising.

To see Dada's pictures you'll need to be added to our friends and family contacts list. Just let me know or add me as a contact once you've registered with Flickr (my Flickr ID is "drmacro"). I've also been sending out Flickr invitations to everyone I can think of.

You can use any RSS or Atom feed to subscribe to any tag such that when new pictures are uploaded with that tag, you get notified. You can use your MyYahoo home page to subscribe to feeds, most mail readers, or a web-based site like BlogLines. I've been experimenting with Bloglines and it seems to work pretty well. (Note to Grandpa Bill: This is what will work best with WebTV, I think--we'll talk when we're in Tacoma.)

I've also created a private Flickr group called "Dada Watchers" where you can post your own pictures of Dada, should you have some, and also comment about the pictures.

I'm hoping this will reduce the amount of baby spam email I have to send out and provide a better level of service to those who expect regular baby pictures....