kief.com

Charlie has posted pictures of his gigs in England and Switzerland. We didn't get to see him play this time around, hopefully we will next time!

The very latest pics of the Erelmania 2006 tour.

No, it's Erel's grandmother, 57 years ago. Erel degil, Erel'in babaannesi, bebekken.

If you liked The Big Lebowski, you'll love the F_cking Short Version. Not for the easily offended.

It's been a while, and we've had lots of demand from the family, so we've uploaded a new bunch of pictures to flickr. These are mostly taken in the past week or so, and include a trip to the park with Jonathan, Hacer, Uzay, Evrim, Olcay, and Edita. Uzay and Evrim really love their little buddy!

I've started uploading new pictures of Erel to Flickr. You can see them by clicking on that link, they are tagged with "erel". There are also lots of nifty tools you can use with Flickr, for instance I've put a feed of pictures on the side of this site.

I won't be posting any more tech stuff to this website, I've set up a new site, Azedi Tech, which will be my professional/technical site.

kief.com has always been a weird mix, there is a small but loyal audience of friends and family who check it for information about what we're up to, and then there are those people who find one of my sporadic technical posts via search engines or blog aggregators.

The frequency of my posting on any subject is hardly enough to need two blogs, but I feel more comfortable having the separate places to post. I often feel self-conscious about boring people who subscribed to my feed because they saw a technical post if I post things about my family, and most of my family would be equally bored by my ramblings on Java, Unix, and similar gearhead topics.

So if you're interested in techie stuff, you'll probably want to unsubscribe this feed. This site is probably going to become a monument to my obsession with my newborn son, which I would find painfully boring if I were in your shoes. But please consider subscribing to the feed for Azedi Tech. That site probably won't be much heavier in traffic than this one was, but that's probably a blessing.

Thanks for your patience!

Introducing Erel Solon Morris. Born 1:15 AM 16 May 2006, 3.51 kg, 52 cm, in London. It's a boy!

These are the raw pictures from my phone, no doubt more will follow!

I gave some wrong data in the email I sent out, and originally in this post. Erel is 3.51 kilos, not 4.51, and he was 52 cm long at birth, not 36 cm (which was his head circumference).

I won't be sending out more emails generally, instead I will post pictures and information on this website, so those who are interested can check back when they like.

We've started using skype to chat with friends and family, mainly ones in Turkey, the US, and Switzerland. I think the coolest thing is not just that it's free, but rather the open nature of the experience.

We put the call on with the PC speakers a desktop microphone, and usually a camera, and we sit around the living room. So the call isn't a person to person call, but group to group. The fact that it's free adds to the relaxed, leisurely experience of the call.

Technically it's a bit fiddly. Setting up Skype is a snap, but the production aspects of the call, especially with video, take a bit of effort to get nice. It's too easy to have echoing, since most people don't know how to position the speakers and microphone to avoid it. Lighting and positioning can be a problem for the video. The quality of the voice and video connections are also an issue, it's quite choppy.

But these don't really slow people down. The thing that strikes me is the non-techie people in my circle love it, and are enthusiastic about taking it up as a regular habit. As open-room audio/video sessions like this become more widespread, people will become more sophisticated about

I think as this type of thing becomes more popular, whether via skype or other services, people will get more sophisticated about production values. If end-to-end network capacity continues to grow, the audio and video quality will improve with it.

I wonder how long it will be before we're routinely plugging these calls into our wide-screen, HD televisions, gathering people together from multiple locations to share family events.