Many of you may know that the wife and I have our first baby due this Spring. One the things I've been researching since I found out the wife was pregnant has been IP cameras. I really like the idea of being able to check in on the baby at any time to make sure she's ok—without actually walking in and risking waking her up.

I looked at a lot of various wireless cameras, from baby-specific video monitors to IP cameras, but the features that were key for me were:

• Night vision—this is a must to check in on a sleeping baby
• Viewable from my iPhone—the wife and I both have iPhones and this makes the perfect remote video monitor
• Remote pan/tilt
• Audio monitoring (2-way audio would be a bonus)
• A way for the Grandparents to view in on the baby

After looking at some baby video monitors (which didn't meet all the above requirements anyway) I realized that they're all over priced and most got pretty poor reviews. I was leaning towards getting an IP camera anyway, so this made the decision easier.

After looking at many different models, I ended up purchasing the Foscam IP Wireless/Wired Camera (Model: FI8908W). I looked at a few Axis cameras, which are great cameras, but really more expensive than I wanted to pay and really way more than I needed. I also seriously considered getting Astak Mole IP Camera—it met all my requirements, but just was a little more than I wanted to spend. Then just last weekend I stumbled across the Foscam camera. It met all my needs and I could get it shipped for around $95.

After playing around with the camera a bit last night, here's my findings:

• The camera uses MJPEG for streaming video—which doesn't natively support audio. There is an ASF streaming URL you can access (which supposedly includes audio,) but I haven't found the necessary codec to view it with Windows Media Player. Supposedly VLC will play the stream fine, but I don't want to install another app if I don't have to.
• Terrific night vision—I was really impressed with the quality in a pitch black room.
• Pretty straight forward setup. While I found it easy/quick to setup, someone without good gadget skills might struggle a bit.
• Decent integrate web-interface. While it has lots of options, it's not particularly user friendly. Fortunately, you can give out URLs straight to the stream for family members.
• Multi-user configuration. You can have up to 8 separate user accounts. Users can either be an Administrator, Operator or Visitor. An Operator can do everything but change configuration—including changing the camera pan/tilt. A Visitor can only view the picture.
• The picture quality is a little washed out, but seems to do well in low lighting. I've heard that replacing the lens can improve the coloring, but I think it's sufficient for monitoring purposes—I don't need exact color matching.

I would definitely say the camera is well worth the $100. I'm still playing around with it, but there's a nice iPhone app called Foscam IP Control for $1.99 that allows you to remote view the camera and alter the pan/tilt (it does lack a full screen mode.) Since I'm still not sure how I'm going to expose the camera to the world, I may end up changing apps but it works well.

If you decide this camera, you must watch out for Foscam clones. Apparently there are a slew of online resellers selling clones of the Foscam (same box, same design) that use a different firmware. Foscam has a list of authorized resellers on their site. I ended up using an eBay reseller named usahitec. I ordered the camera on Saturday for $95.60 (w/free priority shipping) and it got here yesterday (Wednesday.)

If you want more information on the Foscam camera, check out Gadget Victims has several really insight blog entries:

• http://www.gadgetvictims.com/2009/07/foscam-ip-camera-part-two.html
• http://www.gadgetvictims.com/2009/08/third-party-software-for-foscam-ip.html

So far this seems like an excellent way to monitor my sleeping baby and give the out-of-town grandparents a way to keep up with the baby too!

For Christmas this year, the big family gift was a new Samsung PN58B860 58" Plasma TV. Our old TV worked fine, but with the baby on the way I we wanted try and reclaim some living room space—much of which was being taken up by our old Mitsubishi 55" rear projection TV.

We absolutely love the picture, but from day one we started running into a problem with the TV in which it would just randomly power off and then immediately back on. I went through a battery of tests trying to determine if it was a power issue, cable issue, etc. I tried replacing the HDMI cable, hooking the TV up directly to the cable, changing outlets, etc. Nothing I did resolved the issue. Since the problem was random (on average, probably happened once an hour, but we might go a couple of hours with no issues or it might happen several times within a few minutes.) It didn't matter what we were watching—could be cable TV, a DVD, playing XBOX, etc. The TV would just turn off and then turn right back on.

After talking to Samsung and HH Gregg everyone seemed to think it was the power supply on the TV and since the TV was less than a week old, HH Gregg delivered a replacement TV. However, the new TV was having the same problem. So, once again I started going through my battery of tests trying to figure out what was wrong.

After testing tons of things, I finally found the root case—the Internet connection.

Newer TVs are now coming with Internet connections. Being the tech guy I am, I immediately hooked my TV up to the Internet so I could get firmware updates, view Flickr photos, etc. To get up and running quickly, I had plugged my TV into the wireless bridge I was using for my XBOX 360—which I had the IP configured as the DMZ in my firewall (which I had done to resolve some issues with online play.)

Since now the TV was acting as a DMZ, all unrecognized traffic was being routed to the TV. I suspect what was happening is various ping and exploit attacks on my IP address was causing problems with the TV, so the TV would just shut down and power up again. I just never thought that the Internet connection would be the root casue of the TV rebooting.

Anyway, if you have a Samsung TV that's recycling the power, try unplugging your Internet connection and see if that improves the situation. Also, never run a device as a DMZ unless you know what you're doing!

Today started off horribly. But before I get into today, I have to backtrack a bit.

While I haven't blogged about this yet (because it's still very early,) my wife is pregnant. Getting pregnant has been a long process for us and something our family and close friends have known about. Because so many people have known what we've been going through, we announced it to close friends and family a little sooner than we'd probably have liked.

Last Monday at 5am, Jenn woke me up and she had passed a clot. From the look of things, I was really afraid things were bleak. Jenn continued to spot all last week, so I was really worried that something went wrong w/the pregnancy. The doctor's didn't seem overly concerned and we just needed to wait out our appointment which was scheduled for today at 10a.

Needless to say, last week really sucked. We were trying to stay optimistic, but I was preparing for the worst.

In February 2008, our black lab (then just 4 years old) was in pretty bad shape. Both of her rear knees had gotten so bad she basically could no longer walk. We decided to proceed with a bilateral TTA (tibial tuberosity advancement) in both her hind legs. It was a tough decision for us, because it's not a cheap procedure and we weren't sure how we'd manage to keep her constrained for the 11-12 week recoup time.

I've blogged several times about how successful the operation was. She's really done excellent and there are no real hints of her knees ever bothering her. She'll occasionally get up slowly, but I can't say that's because of the surgery. What I do know is the dog still loves to run and jump. The knee surgery has not slowed her pursuit of climbing trees one bit, so I know she's doing well.

The other night my wife was playing around w/our new iPhone 3GS that we're trying out and I thought it was a good idea to post a video of her running and playing fetch in our yard. Well the video is not terribly exciting, I thought it might be useful for someone debating on whether or not it's worth the investment of the bilateral TTA procedure. I know in our case w/out the surgery we would have had to put her down—because she was just in too much pain and it was only going to get worse. So, seeing her run around today still thrills me to no end.

I try to play ball w/my labs for at least 30 minutes every day (weather pending.) I've run Nikki (our black lab) pretty hard this year and she's held up great. She'll run for as long as I'm willing to throw the ball and I've seen no side effects from the surgery at all. So here's she is doing her favorite activity in the world—playing fetch:

Ok, so on Friday I decided to pick up an iPhone 3GS to try it out. My Verizon XV6700 really has issues and just is a horrible phone (I can't see the display when outside and also have always had problems hearing the person on the other land if there's any amount of background noise.)

I've been eligible for my "new every two" for almost a year, but Verizon still hasn't put out a phone I'm completely happy with. Every time I think they might have a winner (like the Storm) it fails.

So on Friday I was supposed to play golf, but due to some severe storms in the morning my party cancelled the outing (although I did end up playing a round later by myself.) Since I had the day off and nothing to really do, I thought I'd see if the local AT&T had any of the iPhone 3GS' in stock. Sure enough they had several still in stock, so w/my 30 day guarantee, I thought I'd sign up and see how it goes.

The biggest thing that's held me back from the iPhone is the lack of physical keyboard and AT&T's network (which I keep hearing bad things about.)

So, over the weekend I did a lot of playing around w/the iPhone. Well there's a lot of stuff I really like, I'm still a bit wary about AT&T's network and I really dislike the software keyboard—especially since the iPhone seems to require a lot of password typing (I'm sure the whole App Store password re-entry is for security purposes, but when you have a very secure password it's very cumbersome to keep re-typing the password in. Instead of constantly re-typing the password I'd rather be able to disable iPhone access to the App Store via the Preferences in iTunes.)

Anyway, is AT&T's network really that bad? So far the coverage has seemed ok, although when playing golf Saturday while my bars showed full, the conversation with my wife seemed to be breaking up a lot.

Should I go ahead and move the wife and me to iPhones and move off VZW?

On Monday the wife and I just got back from a short trip out to Denver. We flew out last Thursday to surprise my cousin for his high school graduation. While we weren't able to make it out for the actual ceremony, we had it worked out to surprise him at the restaurant for dinner.

I had worked out plans with my aunt to keep things as a complete surprise. When he was standing in line, I snuck up behind him patted him on the shoulder and said "I hear congratulations are in order!" The look on his face was priceless when he turned around. You could see the confusion of "Who is this person that looks like my cousin? That can't be him. Why would he be here in Denver?" A true classic. He was speechless for like the first 10 minutes.

It was a great trip. I've been out to Denver a number of times in the past 25 years, but this was my wife's first trip. In the 5 days we were there we put on 700 miles on the rental car—but those miles pretty much all came on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We drove to Boulder a couple of times, Breckenridge, Estes Park and just explored Denver a bit.

On Saturday, we drove up to Boulder and had lunch at the Walnut Brewing Company—and they had one of the best fruit salads I've had in a long time. The fruit salad was mixed with a combination of cinnamon, honey, lemon juice and sour cream—it was really quite tasty.

After lunch, we drove back to Denver for my cousin's graduation party. My cousin is considerable younger than I am (19 years younger,) so there were always a ton of pictures of the two of us where I'm holding up. Anyway, since he's 6'1" and growing, I figured I better take one last picture before I can't pick him up anymore. :)

It's so hard for me to believe the baby I remember feeding and playing with is now on his way to college to play Hockey.

On Sunday we went up to the Rocky Mountain National Park. While the park isn't completely opened up yet, we were able to make it up to 12,000 ft—so we had a decent view (we couldn't quite make it to the gift shop, the road was closed right before the last leg.) I knew the road would most likely be closed since it wasn't scheduled to be opened up until May 22, but I kept hoping we could make it to the Continental Divide. Alas, it just gives us something to do next time we're in town.

Anyway, here are a couple of panoramic photos I took and stitched together with Windows Live Photo Gallery—which does a wonderful job of stitching photos together.

It was a great trip and I'm so glad we were able to make it out to see my cousin.

While my current monthly download usage is pretty small, TimeWarner's decision to implement download caps really irritates me. They want to implement caps of 1 GB, 10GBs, 20GBs, 40GBS and 100GBs based on different tiered packages and then charge you overages for every GB over your limit (with the a $75 cap of overage charges.)

They've been facing a backlash about this decision and rightfully so in my opinion.

As I stated earlier, my current download usage isn't very high, but one of the immerging Internet markets in downloadable movie rentals. When the XBOX360 introduced it's Netflix interface for watching streaming movies online, I thought that was a huge jump forward in downloadable movies. Well the Netfix streaming library is still too sparse and doesn't include enough new movies, that will change over time. I certainly see a time in the near future where you'll be able to rent movies purely online.

This is why I'm so irritated with download caps. We're seeing more an more Internet based services succeeding. We're seeing more SaaS applications having success, streaming video taking off and of course iTunes has seen great success. All of these services share one thing in common—they require downloading content to use the services.

If TimeWarner really needs a way to help recover costs, don't limit how much I can download, limit how fast I can download it. TimeWarner has kept bumping up the bandwidth transfer rates, but most people don't need 6Mbps or 8Mbps sustained xfer speeds. I'd much rather see them keep the tiered xfer rate pricing and keep the uncapped download speeds. Let the people who need the higher transfer rates (because their transferring tons of data simultaneously—which is where the real problem lies anyway) and let the rest of us just download the data we need without having to worry about our download usage.

This really makes me hope Verizon bring FiOS to Central Ohio sooner, rather than later. Verizon currently has no plans to cap their download usage and the xfer rates are already much higher than TW. If TW does implement download restrictions, that will be the straw that broke the camels back.

Not only will they lose me as a RoadRunner customer, they'll probably lose me as a Cable subscriber as well.

One thing that really irks me about Google's implementation of IMAP is that when you "delete" a message in Outlook, it doesn't move the message to Google's "Trash", but instead just removes all the labels. Since Gmail doesn't have a good way to view just unlabelled messages, it makes it a pain to clean things up. The only thing I've found that really works is to build a huge search filter excluding all my labels—which is horrible.

Google would make my life easier by implementing too small changes:

1. Provide for a single search filter for find all unlabeled messages
2. Move unlabeled messages from IMAP into the Trash can (or at least make this an option I can configure.)

Well, I logged in to my Google Apps mail tonight and Google finally decided to roll out "Themes" to my Gmail. I'm not sure why it took them so long, but at least it's hear. What's really weird is most of the other "Lab" tools seem to arrive pretty much in sync with everyone else—but they really waited to give me access to the Themes.

Anyway, I can finally change up my Gmail mailbox!

[UPDATED: Sunday, March 29, 2009 at 9:03:32 PM]

Well, I spent some time this afternoon upgrading my version of BlogCFC. This was a bit of a task, because I had fixed a number of issues I've come across in the past few years. However, Beyond Compare 3 made this task relatively painless—a bit time consuming, but painless. I was able to merge my version to BlogCFC v5.9.004 in just a couple of hours.

I really need to send Raymond my lastest merge since it does address a number of issues—a couple with the Administration section (regarding enclosures/images and I added a "Comments" tab to the "Entry Editor" pages) and a number of issues with the XML-RPC code (which seems to be pretty rock solid now—even allowing for editing of saved, but not published entries.)

Anyway, if you notice any problems with comments or any errors in general, please let me know.

This really irks me. Sirius has forced the guys at NiceMac to shut down their services and pull their applications from the web. I think I'm more irate by this announcement than when I head that they were getting rid of their free basic streaming service for members. In my opinion, they should offer some form of streaming to all customers. There are still too many situations where you can't get an antenna in place in order to listen to your radio. My office is in the basement and the streaming option is really the only decent solution. Every attempt to get an antenna working well in my house has been futile—I just end up with very flaky audio.

However, for the past 4 years or so (or whenever their streaming went online,) I've been very happily listening to their streaming service via the Internet. My only complaint was their native interface. Since I really only listen to talk radio, the 32Kbps stream is more than fine for me. I don't need a high quality stream—I just want an interface that doesn't make me keep clicking buttons to keep the stream open.

This is where 3rd party applications come in. For the longest time I was very happy with Tanner's original Sirius Yahoo! widget. As a matter of fact up until two weeks ago, I was still using the widget. However, when I was forced to move to Vista, I decided not to load the Yahoo! widgets engine (since I really only used it for the Sirius tuner) and instead installed StarPlayr. While not perfect (and many ways I prefer the simplistic interface of the Yahoo! widget) it makes online listen a breeze. Just start the app and listen away. No annoying pop-up windows, no having to re-login in every morning and most importantly no need to keep clicking a button to keep the stream alive.

Well, this morning when I loaded the application, I was sadden to see the following:

So, it looks like as of tomorrow the stream may stop. I'm hoping the application will continue to work. I hate to spend time hacking together a solution that works. I may also try loading up the Yahoo! widget in a VM to see if it's still working when Sirius goes online with their new service.

If anyone knows of any good Windows alternatives, let me know. If I find one, I'll try to share. I prefer something that works outside of the browser—since frequently restarts of my browsers are often required as a web developer. I want an application I can run in the background and keep enjoying programming like Howard Stern and the NFL Radio.

If Sirius continues to make it difficult to listen to their service, then I really won't have a need to continue using their services. I know there are plenty of other people who feel the same way. I've already seen a lot of people who are shutting down their service because Sirius is no longer offering the free stream. I know Sirius' finances are hurting and losing customers is the last thing they want to do.

A year ago today our Black Lab, Nikki, underwent surgery to have her canine cruciate ligaments repaired in both rear knees after having ruptured them. It was rough day for the wife and me and I'm glad it's well behind us.

Nikki's been doing excellent since the surgery. Other than a slightly strange gate (which is only really noticeable if you're looking for it) you would never know she had both knees replaced. Last summer she enjoyed many a days running and playing ball in the backyard. Occasionally the knee would "give out" on her when she'd try to make a quick cut and she'd come up limping, but I think she limped only because it felt foreign because within minutes she was back to running and jumping at full speed.

It's amazing to me everytime I see her run around the backyard or jump around that a year ago she could barely walk. While the surgery was costly, we're just glad we got our dog back. :)

Just last week I sent in my final car payment and I just received the title in the mail. This leaves Jenn & I without a car payment (as Jenn paid off her car earlier in the Spring.) It's a nice feeling to get out from having a monthly car payment. I guess the timing of paying off the car comes at a pretty good time, as I can know put the bulk of that money away each month. It'll also help me to pay off all the Holiday bills next month in a more timely fashion.