Brian Alvey

Welcome to Earth

1641 days ago

Yesterday morning I called Jack to let him know that his little brother Victor was no longer inside mommy. At 9 pounds, he was nearly 50% larger than Jack and his delivery took only half the time. I think they call that Moore's Law of Birthing. If we have another child, I am expecting that he or she will be a 12 pound baby delivered after only 2 hours of labor and 20 minutes of intense pushing.

Niki was amazing.

When Niki gave birth to Jack, I helped coach her breathing and held one of her legs. After they took Jack away, I took a step back (out of striking distance) and told her, "I don't know if I could go through that again. That was rough!"

So this time, after they took Victor away, I leaned over and said, "Do you remember how last time I said I didn't think I could do this again? Well, I did it!"

I'm sure she's proud of me too. ;-)
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Who doesn't love Justin?

1644 days ago

No, not Justin Timberlake, Justin Biamonte. He was headed down to Mississippi to help out one of his company's offices and offered to be a mule for anything we needed to get to our relatives in Hattiesburg. Justin rules like that.

This totally makes up for him getting Walter's Yankees/Red Sox tickets yesterday instead of me and that Queer as Folk drinking game he made me play a few years back.
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Red Cross button updates

1648 days ago

It's great to see all of these Red Cross buttons appearing on other peoples' blogs. One thing to note is that GIF images are rectangles. So even though it looks like a triangle and only the triangle part is clickable, people cannot click on anything covered by the invisible part of the image. On almost all of our blogs we have a leaderboard ad at the top of the page and that frees up a bunch of space for the Red Cross button, but my site was missing that leaderboard until this morning. Now as long as there's a Google leaderboard available my Red Cross button will stop covering half of my search button.

There were other ways to do the image, but each had drawbacks. Flash and SVG can do more than GIFs, but SVG requires a plug-in that not everyone has. The GIF could have been made from a bunch of smaller image files, but my goal was to get it online quickly.

If the Red Cross isn't your preferred relief organization or if your name is Brent Yager, then you might ask how about getting one for The Salvation Army? Andrew Ferguson made one for the top left corner of your blog in case you want to run both at the same time. Brent also adjusted his down a little to leave room for the Blogger strip at the top of his site.

If you need one in Japanese, you can snag the one I added to Engadget Japanese (thanks Liam!) or you can get the combination Japanese/English one from Kristin Wenzel.
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New Orleans: Gone With The Water

1649 days ago

I haven't seen this one mentioned anywhere in the blogosphere. A National Geographic article one year ago opened with a detailed account of a hurricane hitting New Orleans and wiping it out:
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however-the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level-more than eight feet below in places-so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

At the time, they followed up this doomsday preview with a poll asking readers "Should the federal government spend billions of dollars to stem the tide of wetland loss in Louisiana?" It had several responses before lapsing into one of those unmoderated free-for-all forums. But the forum has had a resurgence as post-Katrina readers have rediscovered it.
The forum comments included a link to a Civil Engineering Magazine article from June of 2003 which asks "If a storm of category 4 or 5 were to hit New Orleans before the city was adequately prepared, what toll would it exact?" Now we know.
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Adding the Red Cross

1651 days ago

A few days ago we began our internal drive to raise a group donation for the Red Cross to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. This afternoon we took another step and added those Red Cross corner buttons you see on all of our sites. They all link straight to the Red Cross with no click tracking and no landing page in between. We debated converting our ad slice or one of our other existing ad positions to a Red Cross ad, but people get a little immune to positions after a while and ad blocking software blocks standard IAB ad dimensions, so I decided to go with the upper right corner.

You can add the same buttons to your own site. We added a simple JavaScript document.write to the end of every one of our pages:

<script type="text/javascript">

</script>

You can add the same thing to your site, just download the image you want, upload it to your site (we block most image hotlinking) and change the path for the image source.

English:

Spanish:
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Katrina and the waves

1657 days ago

When Niki and I were dating, we loved going to New Orleans. We had both been there a bunch separately before we met, but together we saw a bowl game in the Superdome, ate at Acme Oyster twice a day and had a blast in the French Quarter. So my thoughts are with my friends that live in New Orleans and my relatives in Hattiesburg who just called to say they were okay. They hadn't yet ventured out to inspect the damage because it was still incredibly windy, but hundreds of trees are down in their neighborhood, the power is out and the gas is out too.

I tried to explain where the hurricane's eye was in relation to them at this point and I think I did a good job, but just in case I've snagged a picture of it for them to check out once they get online again.

Of course it's no surprise that the Acme Oyster site is not loading. I'm sure they are hosted by a local ISP. They had a web cam that would let you watch people eat at the bar, but web cams don't work when you're underwater and without power. I hope they're okay and I can't wait to go back and visit them again.
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I love the ad slice, I love to boogie

1660 days ago

It's impossible for me to read every single post that appears on our network. There are more than 80 blogs and if the content wasn't overwhelming enough, a handful of them are in Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. Even my feed reader doesn't get much use unless I'm testing how changes I am making to our feeds look in it. So every now and then I surf the ad slice.

The ad slice is that little strip at the top of all of our pages and it used to be edited by people, but it was too easy to let a few days pass and have it go stale so we switched to 100% automated. It pulls the most recent headline from each of around 30 blogs and we rotate the list of blogs every week or two.

Yesterday, when I was surfing the ad slice and clicking on random sites in our network to see what bloggers were talking about I found a post on The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog called How Photoshopped Can They Get? which linked to a pretty novel -- and maybe even a little disturbing -- portfolio by Glenn Feron.

He shows before and after version of celebrity photos he has retouched. You click thumbnails to view the finished work and if you place your mouse over the photo, it reveals the original photo he started with. Some of them are subtle changes and some are more drastic.
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The Harder They Come

1660 days ago

I always liked the Jimmy Cliff song The Harder They Come, but if you asked me to name great reggae songs I doubt it would have come to mind. So this morning my Yahoo! Music Engine served up the Willie Nelson version from his Countryman album. I had downloaded it weeks ago, but I hadn't listened to any of it yet. It's a great song.

Then a few songs later it played the Joe Jackson version of The Harder They Come from his greatest hits album I had downloaded. It was strange to hear the same lyrics and a different arrangement so soon after hearing Willie's. I wonder how many songs I have different versions of like that. I never got into the whole Napster thing back when it was big, so this Yahoo Music service is probably more entertaining to me than to most teenagers.
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Seminoles will be Seminoles

1663 days ago

The NCAA removed Florida State's "Seminoles" from the list of team nicknames that was banned from post-season use. Originally, they had deemed the nickname hostile and abusive, but upon reviewing Florida State's unique relationship with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, they decided that it was not offensive. Wahoo! I mean, Osceola!

Ticket scalping, however, is still forbidden. Nice.

I'm glad this NCAA thing was reversed. First, I've been to a bunch of FSU games and it wouldn't be the same without Renegade, the tomahawk chop or the flaming spear. Second, this p.c. movement might have spread to other non-American Indian nicknames which are equally hostile and a few years from now I'd have to watch the FSU Debutants play the Florida Bunnies and the Miami Sprinkles. Where's the fun in that?
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A List Apart 4.0

1663 days ago

So ALA is done with their "regrouping". Congratulations to Jeffrey, Erin, Jason and Dan on the redesign and relaunch of A List Apart!

The 3.0 version had a widely copied fixed-width layout. This one looks a little more difficult to steal and I love the illustrations from Kevin Cornell (Bearskinrug).

Also on the ALA horizon is A Book Apart. That sounds intriguing.

Why not A Podcast Apart?
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