Son And Heir

Ethan Edward Kenny made his arrival at 6:14 on Monday evening, weighting in at a co-incidental 6 pounds and 14 ounces. More information forthcoming once my frazzled brain restarts itself.

Elemental Particles of the Web

Time was when the fundamental unit of the online experience was the web-site, then it was the web-page, and the ‘post‘ is now angling to become our dominant paradigm. Well it looks like things may be being granulated to an even finer scale again. I have been reading up on microformats, which is one of those ‘so-simple-its-obvious’ kind of ideas. (Onwards towards the semantic web and all of that.) I know that my Web-Fu is not up to the task of hacking together any complex microformat implementations into this blog. But I imagine that I may not have to wait too long for these to become an integrated feature of the major blogging engines. I could see myself using hCards and hCalendar from today.

I might see about embedding an hCard into my contact page on my work site. I will put one up here too. But, in the true spirit of cart-before-horse I have gone ahead and designed the icon first.

Technorati Tags: microformats

Arrival delayed

Well the nineteenth has come and gone (more or less, there are still 1.75 hours to go) and Aiden jr./Valerie jr. has declined to make her/his grand entrance. So we are officially into overdue territory. The due-date is a major mental milestone and now that it has passed all we can do is still wait and see. Watch This Space.

Critic at Large on the Interwebs

My old buddy John Magure has taken the plunge and started his own movie-related blog. On balance this can only be a good thing for the Internet, if not for humanity as a whole.

Check in there for his unmediated opinions on all things movie-related – as well as whatever else wanders through his mind. A good starting point is his recent post on sequel-itis. The one where he described Patrick Swayze an ‘elbow-faced meat puppet’. John has a unique way with words.

Kenny Family Photo History

We were in Ballinasloe for the weekend, attending Cora’s surprise sixtieth meal. I came upon a long-mislaid facet of our family’s photo archive.

During the latest phase of the, now ongoing, de-clutterization of the parental attic, Claire discovered a box of old transparencies from the seventies. They were stored away with this battery-powered, magnifying, handheld viewer, which was still stored in its original, hippy aesthetic, packaging – groovey or what?

Some of the benefits of analogue kit like this viewer are its simplicity and resilience. Once we stripped out the ancient corroded batteries, cleaned up the inside and bended some pliable metal pressure-sensitive connections, we were good to go.

The transparencies were a mixed lot from the mid-seventies. They are particularly interesting as they fill a lacuna within the family photo albums where transparencies were popular for a brief period in the seventies.

I intend to clean them up and scan them, so that Cora has digital archive copies and I can get some new prints made for her. You never know, I may even post some of the less mortifying images on my Flickr page...