Real Life Dad

Massive car trouble on a long road trip with my wife and baby: A cautionary tale. (AKA Change your timing belt.)

Christopher — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 19:44:09 +0000

So we loaded up the our 1998 Honda CR-V with 172,000 miles on the clock and headed out for a long road trip from Florida to Chicago. I thought I had all the bases covered and was ready for a smooth trip. Even with all the preventative maintenance I had done before the trip, things didn’t quite work out as planned.

With all the trouble we had, it ended up being one of the best and worst trips I’ve ever taken. I learned a lot about myself and it gave our new family an amazing bonding experience. I’ve also learned just about everything there is to know about our CR-V. She will rise again and with this new found knowledge for what makes the Honda tick, I would find it very hard to get rid of the CR-V.

The baby is walking! My 1 year old is on the move.

Christopher — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 01:46:37 +0000

Our 1 year old is starting to walk. Before too long we she will be chasing us around and then before we know it she will be running off on her own.

Shit My Kids Ruined: A strong visual birth control.

Christopher — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:30:38 +0000

So I found this site and thought I’d share it. My daughter is not at the age where she is destroying my stuff yet but from the looks of this site I am in for a rude awakening.

Shit my kids ruined. The site is a little easier to browse though by using the archives http://shitmykidsruined.tumblr.com/archive

Picasa Web Albums just made my life much easier.

Christopher — Thu, 06 May 2010 07:27:18 +0000

I just made this collage in like 5 minutes using Picasa.

So, I’m a little behind the curve on this one. Google’s Picasa is nothing new. I’ve heard of it, seen people use it, and even used it myself briefly. The problem was, at the time I didn’t see a use for it. I didn’t know what to do with it. My windows image viewer seemed to do a fine job of browsing though photos and being a Real Life Graphic Designer, I have image editing software for cleaning up images.

Well I just organized, beautified, and uploaded 90 something images to power the random image function you see to to the right. I did this all using Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. I did not once open any other program. Once I figured out which way was up, I was off and running. Now if I want to add new images to the random image spot on this site, all I do is copy that image in to a designated folder on my computer.

As I am working on the images, Picasa is uploading them to my Web Albums because I have marked this folder to be synced. If an image is already uploaded before I have a chance to adjust the shading or color, Picasa and Web albums will sync the images to over-wright the one that it already uploaded. This all happens in the background while I work on removing red eye and cropping images. It even adds a little “RealLifeDad.com” tag to the bottom corner of the image. If you click on an image it will go to the album. This is going to come in handy for sharing photos with family. Just click share in Web Albums and you can send a link to the album via email to multiple recipients. Now I just need to get my grandparents on the internet and I’ll be set.