Some of the pictures we took this year during the Christmas Season. Click on them to view more detailed information and comments.
Christmas 2006 Pictures
Reply
Machine wash warm, tumble dry on medium
A few weeks ago Becka left her Razr V3c in her jacket pocket and put it through the washing machine. After about 15 minutes she realized her phone was in the washer and stopped it. The phone was completely soaked and had soap all over it. She immediately took the battery out, and then we washed it off with regular water. Becka wanted to just go and get a replacement, but I wanted to try and dry it out. I took a few pictures with my camera phone of what we did.
Becka’s mom has a food dehydrator. We were able to get the internal temperature at a constant 150 degrees fahrenheit. I was hoping the hot, dry air would fix the phone.
For most of the drying we had the phone open on its front or back, with the lid on the dehydrator. But at the end I left it open with the phone on its side.
For about 4 hours we let the phone dry out. Then we took it out and put the battery back in and turned it back on. It booted up fine and everything seemed to be working. The screen was not damaged and displayed everything properly. However, a few buttons did not work. The round “ok” button and numbers 5, 7 and 9 didn’t respond when you pressed them.
Unfortunately my experiment in drying out a phone was a failure. Luckily I pay for the insurance so we were able to get it replaced for fifty dollars.
iChat, you chat?
Ever since Tyler got his new Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro, we’re been dying to do a three-way video conference using iChat. For some reason our first couple of attempts were unsuccessful. However, last night we were able to pull it off and here are the results.
I love my mac. 
In our previous attempts, it would only allow one-to-one video chats. The option to add a person to the chat was grayed out. We discovered that the key to being able to do multi user video chats was that you had to have the “multiple video camera icon” (
) next to your name. At first only Tyler had it, but then it showed up on Dylan’s as well. But for everything we tried, it wouldn’t show up on mine. Then all of a sudden last night mine displayed the icon and we were able to video conference. It seems that iChat detects your bandwidth and only shows the multiple person video chat as an option if you have a fast enough connection.
Manhattan Trip
A couple of weeks ago Becka, Emry and I took a trip to Manhattan to go shopping. Becka wanted some new clothes for her interview and for the upcoming holiday season. I snapped some pictures with my camera phone on the car ride up there. We let Emry watch Beauty and the Beast on my laptop. It keeps her entertained. I’m creating new Mac users at an early age.
The Beginning
I finally broke down.
I joined the millions.
I made a blog.
I had been going back and forth in my mind concerning the domain ‘JeffBaier.com’. I’m still not sure whether I like the vanity domain names, especially the email addresses – ‘jeff@jeffbaier.com’. However, I’ve had a notion to start writing in a blog for some time now. It seems everybody has one now a days.
I’ve also been working on a photo/video blog for Becka and Emry at EmryGrace.com. Originally I had been writing my own blogging software using PHP and the CakePHP framework. I really like using Cake, and I will probably continue using it for any of my future web programming projects. But after the basic post/edit/delete/view blog functions, I got to the point where I felt like I just kept re-inventing the wheel. I was putting lots of effort into something thats already been done well. Thats when I decided to try out WordPress.
I have been very pleased with the features and configurability of WordPress. Previously I had been biased against WordPress and blogging software in general. Most blogs you see are not very well done and don’t stand up to lots of traffic (like the digg effect). But now that I’ve used it for a while, I’ve seen that WordPress allows you to code your own features into it, have nice looking themes, and optimize the blog to be able to stand up to lots of traffic.
This is getting long for a first post, so I’ll wrap up. My goal is to blog about mostly computer related stuff, with sprinklings of my personal life. I have some projects I’m working on now that are linux/server related and I hope to post some writeups about them.