We have upgraded our family yet again. Adding Nora to our little family has been great so far. She weighed in at 8 lbs. 4oz. and seems to be quite content to eat, sleep, and poop. A picture of Nora and then the upgraded Sergent mob. Look out world!

One of my good computer savvy friends told me I wouldn't stick with Flickr or Picasa very long. They were right. Though it was a lot longer than I even thought I would make it. The reason for the change? Not sure. Could be the very uneasy feeling I get about their license agreements, or just a big case of hubris. Not saying they are bad. Maybe it's just not as much fun? Who knows.
The short of the short is I started experimenting with Amazon's Web Services. Particularly their Simple Storage Service and their Simple Database. Really easy. Lots of fun.

So the new pictures will be located on the pictures page from now on. Not sure what kind of organization there will be if any. As time permits possibly.

Is this thing on?
While we're sitting here waiting for baby Nora to make her appearance I thought it was at least time to throw a new picture out. This was taken using good old Photobooth while Sam and I were just hanging out in front of the computer one lazy afternoon.

Looks like we're having a girl! Exciting times indeed! Here's her first photo! She's already a looker.

Dad, I'm going to need my old double barrel 20 gauge back if you don't mind. Thanks.

Not a lot of time to post antics and musings lately, so pictures will have to do. The darn phone cameras really aren't so bad so long as you hold them really steady. This is from my afternoon walk with Zoe under 77 in one of our numerous Minnesota state parks.

Hunting pheasants with GPS (Grandpa Sergent).
Mowing the lawn with Sam.

Further evidence located on my flickr photo page

Good news in the Sergent household (Minneapolis division). Sam is going to have some company! He's got something to say about it.

The Minneapolis chapter of the Sergents is all present and accounted for. Immediate family and friends are all okay too. Thanks for all the phone calls! It's great to hear from everyone. Sad it's surrounding such an event.
Most of us in this neck of the woods drive over that bridge at least once a week. Many people daily. Not much else to say.

In 17 minutes I was able to post an ad on craig's list, send out a W9, take 2 phone call, and put this little Sam clip together. It demonstrates the various stages of the being known as Sam all taking place within several minutes of each other. I'm a terrible editor when it comes to video of the little guy. Should probably be a lot shorter than 2 minutes, but I can't seem to cut out any more. You'll just have to suffer.

Now if only all my 17 minuteses could be that productive!

After many hours of hand wringing and tooth gnashing I finally managed to cobble together some form of a working mail server. It should be mostly working now. Receiving messages should most definitely be working. Sending might be a little hairy and scary right now.

The problem all started yesterday morning while trying to upgrade the spam filtering system on our Virtual Private Server. It was already a bit of a hack - qmail, spamhaus rbl, and spamassassin. Somewhere along the way stopping spam stopped stopping, so I had the bright idea "Hey, just upgrade everything" as if that would fix it all. bzzzzzzt wrong answer. Ended up making things way worse. So bad in fact qmail would no longer give any helpful error messages. Since being on the VPS I haven't been a huge fan of qmail. Too many pieces. Too many things to break. Too hard to track down. So I ended up installing my old standby Postfix. There's something to that name.
The installation went smooth enough. A few minor problems dealing with all of my virtual domains and users, but nothing a little google help and a whole lot of trial and error couldn't figure out. The biggest problem with smtp has always been authenticated relaying of email. So that people at Cryogas can freely send email through my server to anywhere and still not open it up so spammers can blast their warez out to the universe. In the end I was able to get dovecot and it's SASL implementation working. It's a bit of bubble gum and bailing wire right now, but that will improve shortly.

If people are having any problems whatsoever with their email - and they are hosted on this server - get in touch with me through appropriate means. Sorry for the headaches. That's why we love technology. Right?

Something happened while I was attempting to fix the spam filtering. I'm working feverishly trying to get it back up and running again. Sorry to everyone for which I host mail. Hang in there..

I forgot how much I don't like Internet Explorer. In fact, I dislike it so much I rarely even test my own site with IE. So, as many of you probably know - and I just found out, IE7 doesn't really care for what I've done with my YUI menus and all the javascript.

Have to give credit to the engineers at Microsoft for the great and descriptive Internet Explorer cannot open site operation aborted error message. That really helps a person figure things out. Thanks!

Google to the rescue - http://www.technovelty.org/code/web/yui-rendering.html - For me it turned out that I had activated the menu in a way that IE doesn't like. I had

YAHOO.util.Event.onContentReady("mainmenu", YAHOO.thesergents.loadmenu);

I thought that would be really cool to use the onContentReady, but IE doesn't like how that modifies the DOM while the page is rendering. Or something. What I actually needed to do was

YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(window, "load", YAHOO.thesergents.loadmenu);

which waits until the window load function is triggered after the page has loaded. That's cool. So at least that cleared up the annoying error. Now the submenus stopped working, but I'll live with that. That was enough personal hacktime for one day. Time to get back to work.

Oh - and this kid likes turtles - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y
Had to end on a happy note.

Just a quick Sam update. Mostly because we have the technology. I am a geek after all.

A few years back this video was all the rage. For some reason we've played it quite often in the office over the last year or so. If you've never heard the Numa Numa song or seen the video now you can to both in one shot. This was one of those poor souls like the lightsaber kid who become famous for fairly innocuous pieces of video. Still, the song is catchy. And if you hear me singing it you'll at least know where it comes from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc9EC1sLehA