Baby Dylan Makes Three

On Thursday, October 15th we welcomed Dylan Eddie Mayne, a healthy and beautiful baby into the world and into our family. He’s very happy and content and seems to only cry when he’s hungry or getting his poopy changed. And he smells so good I could eat him. We named him after my father Eddie (Ed) Mayne.

Dylan

More photos of Dylan on Flickr.

— October 28th, 2009

Summer Off

I seem to have unintentionally taken the Summer off from my blog. I hope to get more consistent with posts written about interesting topics I think are worth sharing. I have a long list, just need to jam them out on my keyboard. I continue to be very active on Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious but often don’t compile my thoughts into a formal post.

It’s been a great Summer, I golfed at least once a week (and sunk a hole-in-one*), played in a fast-pitch adult baseball league (hit a home run), attended a ton of fantastic live shows with good friends and went on a couple family trips. The boys seemed to have become obsessed with Legos, so we’re often building and designing new ships and castles, it’s a lot of fun to see how creative their little minds are. We’re all very excited to welcome another little dude into the mix next month. Jana especially, she’s a bit tired of waddling when she walks.

brb.

— September 7th, 2009

Letterpressed Cards

I designed some new cards for networking and personal work and had them letterpress printed. I’m currently gainfully employed, but I wanted a separate card for non-work related use. I didn’t want to spend a lot, but loved the look *and feel* of letterpress printing. My friend Ben Webster runs the amazing Mandate Press in Salt Lake, (see a sample of their beautiful work on flickr) and informed me of a killer deal they currently offer: 250 letterpressed cards for only $95.

Letterpressed Business Cards

And yes, I put my Twitter handle on my business cards.

Fonts used: Garage Gothic and Archer

— June 1st, 2009

OS X Clean Install

I’ve been running a Macbook Pro machine for one year now, and first of all I’ve got to say, my switch to Mac (from Windows) has made my computing experience fantastic. I have a 15″ MacBook Pro, the final revision before the current black-bordered unibody design. It’s got a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of memory.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed many slowdowns in opening and closing apps and doing simple tasks. Enough that it was becoming a huge annoyance, at times I even had to close large apps for iTunes to play music without skipping.

Being new to Mac, of course I’ve installed nearly every app I hear about to evaluate and decide if it has any use in my personal work flow. All these apps and my semi-massive iTunes library (which I can’t bring myself to store on an external drive), I was constantly battling to keep at least 10 GB of hard drive space free.

Coming from the Windows world, where it’s common practice to perform a clean install at least once a year to rid all the gunk and junk and spyware that get’s stored in unknown places and runs in the background to eat up valuable processor and RAM. When I brought up the idea of clean install to my Mac friends, I was told, it’s not necessary, that on Mac you can manually remove apps and control everything that is running. That may be true, but the fact is, I had 50+ apps installed that I had no interest in running again, and to manually remove all those (ideally using AppZapper) would take some effort.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been weighing my options and time trying to decide if it’s worth the time and effort to backup and clean install. This Friday was slow, so (in addition to my Time Machine backup) I manually backed up all my User directory files to an external drive. I performed a clean install of OS X 10.5.6, downloaded and installed my favorite apps, manually copied over preference (Application Support) files and I was up and running at 100% in less than 5 hours.

As I expected, my machine is running at lightning speeds. Apps open and close fast and everything is snappy like it should be. Clean install For The Win.

— April 25th, 2009

Restaraunt Black List

This is my ongoing list of personally banned restaurants. Each place has resulted in a bad experience due to poorly prepared or poor quality food that was enough to qualify for a personal lifetime ban.

  1. Burger King
  2. Artic Circle
  3. Carl’s Jr – I caved yesterday morning and gave Carl’s a chance to deliver a decent breakfast sandwich and I really regretted it. Food poisoning. 10 hours later I was floored in pain. If you must go here, DO NOT eat the sausage. (06/13/2009)
  4. Dominoes Pizza
  5. Taco Bell – I loved this joint in college, but for whatever reason now, I just can’t stomach the low grade chicken and meat.
  6. Cobblestone Grill (pizza) – the newest item added to the list that spurred the idea to post the actual list. I’ve had some good experiences here, but I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to something in the sauce or dough. That’s something I can live with, but my pizza on Monday was poorly prepared and under cooked, doughy pizza. (04/20/2009)

— April 24th, 2009