kirkwinters.com

contrary to what some may think, i haven't abandoned this blog. I've been meaning to post something for several weeks but haven't had the time. Work has been off the hook crazy the last two months and baby keeps us quite busy at home. I just haven't had the time or energy to post stuff.

It also doesn't help that my life has become quite one dimensional now that I'm a parent. I'm not complaining, I just don't think it makes for interesting reading. Nobody wants to hear non-stop gushing over how great someone else thinks their kid is.

And I think abby does a better job at posting everett stuff so I'll leave that to her. Suffice to say, he's been awesome. he has established a bit of a personality over the last couple months and he's become alot of fun to be around. Exhausting, but lots of fun.

The one thing I'm really excited about right now is our technology situation at home. As someone who works in, and is very interested in geek-type things I've always been burdened by having the knowledge/ability to implement just about any option available. In more than one instance I've been paralyzed by choice. I've never been truly happy with our home technology implementations in the past.

But We've made a series of acquisitions in the last year that have really worked well.

First, we bought a new projector for the home theater in the basement. We've been enjoying this much more than I anticipated when buying the house. It has become a place of escape for me and a great exercise tool for abby.

Next, I got a PS3 to hook up to the projector (facilitated by a Sony video switching receiver). I got the PS3 because it was, at the time (and arguably still is), the best bluray player at that price point. I'd be lying if I didn't also get it for the video games, but as my game playing time has been greatly reduced this wasn't the driving factor.

The PS3 has really impressed me. The user experience is silky smooth and intuitive (even abby praised its usability). The PS3 really does make the Nintedo Wii feel like a second-class system. The experience is just more immersive.

Lastly, Abby gave me the go-ahead earlier this year to buy a Readynas Duo. With all the digital media we're capturing (photos and video) I really wanted something reliable and redundant to keep it safe. We had a 300GB external hard drive but I didn't feel comfortable using that as an endpoint for all our datas because it wasn't backed up.

I had had my eye on the Readynas NV+ for several years (when it was still infrant) but always considered it too pricey to be a realistic option. Then Netgear bought Infrant and released the Readynas Duo which was essentially half the hardware and much cheaper. The Duo offers transparent redundancy along with some other really nice perks (networked printer sharing, afp sharing etc.). I jumped at it.

I got an empty Duo along with two 1.5TB Seagate drives. The installation and setup was cake. Moving data over from all my various places took a couple days but was likewise easy. AFP sharing (apple's network file sharing protocol) was flawless and required no special setup on the macs. The printer we have wasn't officially supported by the Duo but I was able to get it sharing just fine to my mac. The Duo just worked. It's an amazing product and I can't sing its praises loudly enough.

But then it got better.

The PS3 has a native UPnP client. This allows it to consume media streaming from a server computer. The Duo has a built in UPnP server. Suddenly all this digital video that I've had stored for years was consumable on demand without any burning of DVDs, moving to USB devices, etc. I immediately set out to rip our DVDs (mostly our TV shows on DVD) into digital files stored on the readynas. So now we have an expanding digital library of tv shows and movies available in our home theater on demand. This is unbelievably cool. Even abby has found this feature useful and she's hard to impress.

But wait there's more!

Netgear recently released a firmware upgrade to the Duo enabling networked Apple Time Machine backups to the device. For those of you not familiar with the Time Machine, it's a transparent and automated incremental backup utility built into Mac OS X (in my opinion it's one of the best features of macs).

We recently bought a new 15" macbook pro to replace our aging 12" powerbook. I moved our photo library to the new mac and set it up to backup to the readynas. No hassle, no worries. just awesome.

To make wireless backups more feasible I put my birthday moneys to a new Linksys 610N simultaneous dual band wireless router. It should arrive in a few days. I know Abby won't ever plug in the macbook for backups so I'm hoping that the new 802.11n at 5Ghz will be fast enough that she won't even notice Time Machine running. I'm also looking forward to the gigabit ethernet since all of my wired devices (readynas, PS3, macbooks) support it.

As a geek it's always fun to get new toys. But when you can actually put those toys to a practical and intended use it's even better. And while each of these devices has been great in and of themselves, what I'm really happy with is the synergy that we've achieved in getting them to work well together.

We knew this would happen sooner or later, but I guess we expected just a little bit later.

The other day we were searching and searching and searching but we could not find his pacifier. We ended up abandoning our search. Guess what Everett did with it without us realizing it? He put it through the cat door down to the basement and dropped it. Kirk found it on the stairs leading down to the basement.

Funny kid.

I think Kirk has abandoned his blog. He has not confirmed this yet, but his lack of posting makes this pretty obvious.

Everett is now 8.5 months old. Since my last post end of March (6 months old), he has become a master sitter (6.5 months) and now a master crawler (7.5 months). He also can pull himself up to a standing position, using either a person, his play table, or the couch.

So, he's now been crawling for about a month and he now owns our first floor. He's also figured out how to maneuver over the step between the family room and the kitchen. Needless to say, the boy has become quite a handful. Don't get me wrong - he's still a happy baby and he's (normally) a pleasure to be around. But he is non-stop moving which makes watching him a bit challenging. It's a good thing we got a cat door for the basement. However, he's been sleeping through the night for a couple months now (YAY!) and eats three meals, albeit pureed, a day. And he's found himself into a nap schedule, which allows Mom to get a nap on weekend afternoons. I also love that he doesn't scream bloody murder when he wakes up in the morning and sits and plays/coos in his crib, which allows me to get ready for work at a normal pace.

Let's see...what else...
Everett's babytalking quite a bit - his favorite word lately being a simple da-da-da-da-da. It's adorable.

Grandma & Grandpa Winters have been visiting Everett what I believe to be every third Friday and Everett's been enjoying their visits.

Everett wants to play with cats. Unfortunately, they are not to point of wanting to play with them. Sid tolerates him most. Roger, second. Banky, not at all.

My favorite part of the weekday is when I get to pick him up from daycare. Because he is now mobile, usually the minute he sees me, he makes a beeline for me, throws himself into my lap, and pulls himself up into a standing position and hugs me. Or grabs my necklace - but still, and again, adorable.

Lately, E has been fighting bedtime so it's been making nighttime more challenging. Thank goodness for Kirk bc I think Kirk does the best job of getting E to sleep.

The past few mornings I have walked into his room to find E standing in his crib. Time to lower the mattress!

Everett still has no teeth. It seems every few weekends, we think he might be teething, but apparently not. I love his gummy smile, so I'll enjoy it while I can.

As for me and Kirk, we have a family vacation planned for the end of August to TN. This is our first vacation since 2007 and I seriously CANNOT WAIT. Kirk's sister Missy hooked us up with her timeshare and we are sincerely grateful. Other than that, Kirk's work has been a little crazy so overall, we haven't been doing too much. We saw my brother and his family mid-May before he got deployed. We see my sister and her family on a regular basis. Kirk and I both made separate trips to Cincinnati (me in May, Kirk on Friday) to visit friends. We have been taking walks around the neighborhood and have done a couple hikes in the the area.

That's it from the Winters household. Over and out.

Instead of bothering Kirk to post something on his blog, I decided to step up. It was time to give an update as to what's going on with us.

Everett: the most important topic to update on.

It's been a busy month and a half. He's still loving his daycare. This makes us happy. It feels like a big family there. The couple that runs this daycare has three girls themselves and all of them love E. As Kirk says, he's a fan favorite. Each of the girls hug and kiss him goodbye and anytime the oldest is helping, I usually find her holding or hanging out with E. E also has a buddy who he hangs out on the floor with who is a few weeks younger, another baby who he spends most of his time grabbing, pulling at him, or pushing off of him. And the times I have seen the two of them looking at each other, they are all smiles (or all gums). All in all, I love the amount of socialization he is getting and think that our current providers are doing a fabulous job.

Everett has pretty much been in a constant state of having a cold, and we had a bit of a situation mid-March, when we ended up taking him to the ER. He had been fighting off a fever for a few days and on this particular night, he was breathing at least a breath a second. We started out at urgent care, who very quickly sent us to the ER. We were in the process of getting him admitted to a room, when his fever broke and the steriods and breathing treatments he had gotten there finally kicked in, so we ended up going home. We were surprisingly not super worried being at the hospital, bc if Everett isn't well, that's exactly where we would want him to be.

We got his 6 month pictures today (can you believe it's been six months?!?) and they turned out so incredibly well. He was such a ham and the photographer did a great job. We had a hard time choosing. It was also nice to get a set of shots in which the boy wasn't all excema-y. And I don't know if they do this a lot (but I'm going to tell myself they don't), but the photographer asked us to sign a waiver (and gave us a coupon) so that she could submit some of the photos in a contest.

Other than that, normal baby stuff. He's been eating solids (obviously pureed) this past month, loves being on his tummy, and can for the most part sit up on his own. Loves his jumperoo & his fake baby cd player, changing time with dad, his bouncer in the bathroom, and is starting to dig bathtime. He's also super talkative. His favorite word is mmm-bah. I think he's really trying to say MMM-bop, bc he's a huge Hanson fan. Normally, he wakes up once around 4am, which is still good for his age. But he slept through the night twice this week, which keep your fingers crossed that he can keep it up!

As for me and Kirk, we have managed to furnish the office and the sunroom in the past couple months, which we are pretty stoked about. Kirk went to the NCAA regional games last night and is going to go tomorrow - he's been having fun doing this with his friend Ben. As for me, I have been a nut about frugal shopping lately, watching sales and using coupons to get stuff for super cheap or free. I feel lame doing this, but it's so addicting and you get so proud of yourself when you come home with a product that is normally $9-10 that cost you $1. In correspondence with the crazy shopping, I have been doing a lot more cooking at home too. It hasn't been so bad - and it's been more of a necessity too since it's not as easy to go out. We have to do dinner time with E anyways, so we might as well eat then too.

Kirk and I are pretty tired today, bc he was out late at the game and I am thinking I'm fighting off a cold, so we are laying low for the most part.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading up. You are truly a loyal kirkwinters.com reader. :)

We changed Everett's daycare provider last week. We made the move because the former provider was over-extended and we felt Everett wasn't getting adequate care. We think he spent most of his time in a swing or chair in order to be kept out of the way of other kids. As a result he wasn't getting much floor time in which to progress his motor skills. As of the time of the change Everett wasn't rolling much and hated being on his belly.

After a week at his new daycare (at which he spent the majority of his time on the floor), Everett was a totally different baby. This weekend we could hardly hold him because he wanted to be on the floor. We could barely keep him in a papasan, bumbo or swing because he was always straining to move around. Once on the floor, he would roll in both directions on his own and at one point even fell asleep on his stomach.

He's also grabbing at stuff now. His feet, our faces, bottles, whatever is in reach. He's to the point where he's putting his hands on his bottle while eating and can remove it from his mouth when he needs a break and will put it back when he wants to continue. He can't hold the bottle entirely on his own, but that's still pretty cute.

I'm not sure if we can completely attribute these changes to his new daycare, but I think it's safe to say that alot of it is because of the change.

I haven't posted much on IU Basketball this season and I don't want yous thinking that it's because i'm not as interested since they're losing. That couldn't be further from the truth. Ask Abby, I'm still scheduling our lives around games (as much as I can).

I've really enjoyed watching this team compete and, in particular, seeing how Tom Crean has righted the ship after Sampson's tumultuous exit. It's refreshing seeing a well-coached team again. That hasn't happened in bloomington since Bob Knight was fired.

But now the season is mostly over and fans are naturally starting to look towards next year. A frequent topic of conversation is how many players from this year's team will see the floor next year when they're competing with next year's heralded freshman class for playing time.

A common opinion is that the current players won't play much. But I think that's silly. Though next year's class is collectively great, there aren't any blue chips. I think the highest rated recruit is somewhere around #35 in the class (Creek). In most cases, the only freshmen that come in their first year and start consistently are in the range of 1-20. These are guys like DJ White and Eric Gordon. And even they usually struggle at times.

My point is that starting next year's entire class right away will likely result in the same type of inconsistent and unproductive play that this years freshmen laden team displayed. So to think that next year's crop will come in and save the day by themselves is folly.

That's not to say that they won't contribute. With IU's lack of depth they will play alot of minutes. But I think that this year's freshmen will play a dominant role next year.

Here's a list of each of this year's freshmen (and JuCo junior Dumes) in order of playing time I see them getting next year:

Tom Pritchard
For much of the year Pritchard was the focal point of this team. Since the start of Big Ten play, however, Pritchard has struggled. He'll need to continue to improve his 15 foot jumper and develop some back-to-the-basket post moves before he can really be the inside force that the team needs.

IU will still be lacking size next year so Pritchard will get minutes regardless of how much he improves.

Devan Dumes
Dumes has been IU's best on-ball defender this season and is shooting 49% behind the 3pt line in Big Ten play. He has been the go-to guy on this team when the chips are (frequently) down. But he's erratic, brash, and prone to making a bone-head move. He may do better next year when he's not being asked to do as much. He will be a senior leader and, hopefully, a little wiser. As long as he doesn't throw more flagrant elbows, I don't see how you can't start Dumes next year.


Nick Williams
Nick Williams has been a mostly unnoticed but very consistent contributer this season. He's been a very good rebounder for his size and has shown a decent mid range game. He's not explosive enough to get to the rim consistently so he needs to start looking for his 3 point shot more. He hit two big threes early in yesterday's loss to Illinois but has largely ignored the long range shot this season. Once IU gets more size inside he'll be asked to play at the perimeter more and how well he adapts to the new role will decide his playing time next year.

Matt Roth
Roth was the member of Sampson's last recruiting class that I was most looking forward to. He has always been billed as a one dimensional player but when you're so good at that one dimension it doesn't matter (he set the Illinois record for 3-pointers made in High School).

Roth has really hit his stride in Big Ten play, hitting 43% of his 3pt shots. But Roth has really shown progress on the defensive side of the ball. If he can prove he's not a defensive liability, he has to play, even if only as a (significant) role player.

Also, if he can develop a dependable shot fake/mid range shot, Roth will be a great player. He may end up being #3 on this list when it's all said and done.


Verdell Jones III
Here's where things start getting tough. The point position is the hardest position to play well in basketball and is the hardest to transition to at each level. Jones has been ineffective at running the offense and has often been careless with the ball. He's not a terrible scorer for a point guard and he has good size but has not shown an ability to use it well on either side of the ball.

It's a foregone conclusion that transfer Jeremiah Rivers will start next year at the point and then it's between Jones III and incoming freshmen Jordan Hulls to back him up. Jones will likely get the nod early in the season, but unless he matures and learns to play the spot efficiently, I can see Hulls, as more of a true point guard, getting more and more minutes as the season progresses. But that's just a guess based on nothing more than vague impressions I have of Hulls thus far.


Malik Story
Like with Jones III, I really want Story to succeed. They both show great attitudes but things just haven't clicked for them yet. Story has some real potential offensively. He's a bulldog getting to the rim and has a decent long range shot. But he has been a liability on defense often picking up fouls on the perimeter. With the glut of players at the 2 and 3 spots next
year, Story will likely be the odd man out.



Depth charts in college are a little tricky because most teams don't have the roster to fill out 5 specific positionis. The best you can do is distinguish three roles. But here is my (very) early look at the 2009-2010 IU Basketball team:

Point Guards
Jeremiah Rivers (Jr)
Verdell Jones III (So)
Jordan Hulls (Fr)

Wing Players
Devan Dumes (Sr)
Maurice Creek (Fr)
Nick Williams (So)
Matt Roth (So)
Malik Story (So)

Post Players
Tom Pritchard (So)
Christan Watford (Fr)
Derek Elston (Fr)
Bobby Capobianco (Fr)
Bawa Muniru (Fr)
Tijan Jobe (Sr)



Man, looking at that list alone and not even considering the 2010 class, this team is going to be great in two years. Mark my words: IU will be competing for the Big Ten championship in 2010-2011.

Everett had his 4 month checkup last week. The doctor diagnosed him with Reactive Airway Disease which is a broad term used to describe a set of symptoms such as coughing and wheezing. Apparently this is often used in young children because asthma can't be accurately diagnosed until they get older.

This isn't a huge surprise considering I've had asthma my whole life and he'd developed a case of excema which the "internet" told us often accompanies cases of allergies (which i also suffer) and/or asthma.

We have to perform "breathing treatments" twice daily that include him wearing a breathing mask attached to some kind of air compressor thingy. Everett isn't a huge fan. But hopefully it will help stave off asthma later in his life.

Other than the breathing and the excema (which cleared up quickly with some skin stuff) he's great. still 50% in weight and length between 75 and 80 percent for head size. He's talking alot now. and by talking i mean making any noise he can--most recently, high pitched squawking. it's pretty cute.

He's showing an increased interest in floor time. He spent several hours contentedly rolling, grabbing and kicking yesterday while abby and I cleaned up the office.

He's also pretty aware of what's going on around him. He can recognize us from 10 feet away and will smile accordingly. He's a pretty happy kid.

So that's about all i got for this post. nothing too interesting, just documenting Everett's progress for posterity.

Here is a list of my favorite/most listened to albums of 2008. (most favorite first)


















































My favorite album not released in 2008, but was new to to me was:

It has the potential to be one of my all time favorites.