KidWonder, MomWonder and I just returned from a trip to St. Louis, where we spent a week celebrating Christmas and our engagement with family. We didn’t get to see the sights as much as we’d hoped, but did get to spend some good quality time off the grid with loved ones.

Christmas Day was spent at the house of MomWonder’s mom and grandmother, and much food and merriment was had by all. Friday, KidWonder and a few cousins visited The Magic House, a highly recommended children’s museum in the city — the First Impressions exhibit was the favorite. Saturday MomWonder’s mom threw a great engagement party for us, where all enjoyed the DJ’s selections while eating to our hearts content. Sunday morning we spent time with one of KidWonder’s namesakes in the hip Delmar Loop section, near Washington University. Sunday night we enjoyed a house warming dinner of sorts with pasta, shrimp, wine (and wine!) and conversation. Monday came too soon for us, and we grudgingly packed up and returned to chillier New York.

Here are a few photos of the boy and one of cars at night:

Set one here is the boy interacting with a mechanized Care Bear, I call these “Dance Dance Revolution”, “Clap”, and “Goodbye”.

Set 2 is KidWonder’s executive stance — he could model for RIM!


Finally, I-70 at night, on our last night in town:

In honor of the new X-Men Origins movie (trailer below), KidWonder graciously agreed to pose as various X-Men in tribute. Here he is:

As Magneto:

Cyclops, missing the glasses:

KidWonderine:

KidWonder X — DON’T look too closely at his eyes:

Trailer (129 days and counting!):
X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE HD

I decided I would try out the new Google Friend Connect today, to compare the experience with yesterday’s test drive of Facebook Connect.

Wow, Google Friend Connect was so much easier. I downloaded 2 files, set up my Google profile, configured my sidebar widget and installed it as a Wordpress plugin. It took 5 minutes, and I was left with a functional module. Very nice. I would say more about it, but frankly, I didn’t have any problems to report. And it is now perched on the top of the right column of this blog (please, please connect with me so it looks like I have a big friend network!)

The video in question was posted by Mashable, and has 2 of the Facebook engineers talking about how easy it is to integrate Facebook Connect onto your blog - only 8 minutes!

I tried it, and it didn’t take 8 minutes. Here were the steps for those people who don’t want to pause the video 500 times in 8 minutes to follow along (might be a bit out of order from the video):

Note: references to comments.php, header.php etc are references to my Wordpress install. If you are plugging this into a plain website (non-blog) or another blog system, YMMV.

1. Add FBML for a login button (in comments.php):
<fb:login-button></fb:login-button>

2. Add JS include (to comments.php):
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php"></script>

3. Add a JS block with an action to perform when the login button is clicked, with a last line to tell the Facebook XFBML to reparse the DOM tree:
<script type="text/javascript">
function update_user_box() {
var user_box = document.getElementById("fbconnectuser");
user_box.innerHTML =
"<span>"
+"<fb:profile-pic uid='loggedinuser' facebook-logo='true'></fb:profile-pic>"
+" Welcome, <fb:name uid='loggedinuser' useyou='false'></fb:name>."
+" You are signed in with your Facebook account."
+"</span>";
FB.XFBML.Host.parseDomTree();
}
</script>

4. Code the FB.init call - this needs you to go to the Facebook Developer page and create a new application to use for this. Also, you need to create a xd_receiver.htm call so that the Facebook app will know that your domain has agreed to participate in cross domain authentication with FB.

This is the part that I screwed up on, as I went to the Facebook developer wiki site and found an example xb_receiver.htm file to use, except that it was a debug version from v0.2, vs. the v0.4 they refer to in the video.

Here is a xb_receiver.htm file you can use:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Cross-Domain Receiver Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<script src="http://static.ak.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/XdCommReceiver.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</body>
</html>

When you have created that file, go back and add the following call to comments.php:

FB.init("“, “relative path to find your xd_receiver.htm file”);

The Facebook developer wiki will tell you that you can’t use an absolute path to the xd_receiver.htm file, but you can.

5. Add an additional xml namespace to your opening html tag (in header.php):

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

6. A nicety, add this line below your FB.init line to allow for login status to be checked upon page load, instead of having to click the connect button each time (to comments.php):

FB.Connect.ifUserConnected(update_user_box);

update_user_box in this case is simply the JS function you wrote to fire off when the visitor is found to be logged into Facebook.

And that’s it! It took me more like a half hour to put it together, but it does do what the engineers say - it will show you that you are logged into Facebook.

But that’s all it will do. There is no automatic integration into your blog. There is no sense as to how it should work on a Wordpress blog with regards to people submitting comments who don’t have a Facebook account. I couldn’t find an easy way to extract the Facebook user’s e-mail address, so that’s out, and I would have to lower my comment security settings to allow Facebook comments.

Also, it seems that the nicety here is to have the Facebook avatars next to their comments … well, most people didn’t write their Wordpress template, and a lot of them don’t have placement for an avatar. Without the avatar with the little “f” on it, what’s the point of having Facebook Connect on your blog?

So, I would have to lower my blog security to allow comments without e-mail addresses, then somehow save a token to signify that this comment was posted by a Facebook user, so that when I cycle through the comments on a post, I will know to fire off a Facebook request to resolve the avatar. I can’t do this when posting, as wp-comment-post.php in the core Wordpress install doesn’t allow for saving an avatar reference when I save a comment, so I would need to save some token and figure it out when displaying comments.

The comments themselves are still stored in my local store, so there’s no benefit on the Facebook side there. There’s not much in common between this and the Gravatar setup, so I can’t gain any efficiency by having the same process handle avatars regardless of source.

I’m just not seeing what the 8 minute integration effort is supposed to prove. Maybe I’m just missing the boat - please, clue me in on what I’ve overlooked in the comments. Please note that there will be no Facebook option on the comments - I verified that it worked, but have since removed it.

KidWonder is seen here playing with a brand new Little People train set, an early Christmas present from his great aunts. He is actually saying “Choo Choo” in the picture, as you can see. Without further a-choo:

I spent some time over the past week watching the 5 part PBS series The Machine That Changed The World and watching the “Mother of all Demos”, the 1968 Doug Engelbart demo. We definitely take a lot for granted with the capabilities of today’s computers. Watch these if you want to see the smarties that came up with stuff.

My personal faves are part 3 of TMTCTW (”The Paperback Computer”), with Xerox PARC, Apple, Osborne, Bill Gates + Microsoft and more, and the incredible innovation in the Engelbart demo (multitasking, networking, video conferencing, text editing, macros, the mouse, high level programming languages). Thanks to Andy Baio over at Waxy.org, here are the links:

The Machine That Changed The World (PBS, 5 parts)
Part I, Great Brains
Part II, Inventing the Future
Part III, The Paperback Computer
Part IV, The Thinking Machine
Part V, The World At Your Fingertips

The Mother of All Demos

Highly recommended for computer nuts out there.

Update (December 9th): As it turns out, today is the 40th anniversary of the Doug Engelbart demo. Slashdot celebrates.

Once Upon A Win is a new entry into the lolcats family, and like lolcats, failblog and graphjam it is an instant winner. My favorite post so far, Bo Jackson in Tecmo Super Bowl. Bo Jackson was far and away my favorite player in Tecmo Super Bowl. When handled correctly, he is unstoppable in that game. Witness:

One thing I really like about our President Elect and his transition team - they are internet literate. For updates on his team, you can subscribe to his RSS feed. Here is the latest address from the PE:

At the beginning of the year, MomWonder and I had to rush KidWonder to a local hospital because he was having trouble breathing. We had called our pediatrician in the morning, explained the situation, and were told to bring him to the emergency room.

When we got to the ER, we were asked about our health insurance. No problem, I said, our family is covered under United Healthcare. Great, they said, and allowed KW to see a doctor. As it turned out, he was diagnosed with bronchiolitis, which is what they say when your child has asthma but is too young to be declared to have asthma. Weird stuff, but whatever.

The attending physician had the nurse administer 3 doses albuterol via a nebulizer, and afterwards KW breathed easier, and we were so much happier.

Then, the bill came. The attending physician, who spent a total of maybe 10 minutes with KW, charged us $691. We waited for United Healthcare to pay for the visit - they did not. As I investigated, it turned out that the attending physician was not in network. The hospital neglected to tell us this when asking for our insurance. As I probed further, I discovered that the physician’s group practice was in network, even though the doctor himself wasn’t. Puzzled, I pressed on with this line of logic, and was told by UHC that we could resubmit the claim to the group practice. This time, it worked! A network discount of $470 chopped the total down to $221, which UHC paid. Hooray!

And yet… that was just the beginning. I received a bill now for $470, the original $691 minus the $221 UHC paid. I was confused as to why the discount wasn’t being recognized by the doctor’s practice. Continuing, I was told that the practice was in disagreement with UHC as to how much the procedure should cost. UHC thought $221, the practice thought $285. I asked if I could just pay $64, the difference between the 2 discount amounts. No, I was told.

At this point, several months had passed. I called again and again, hoping to get this matter resolved. UHC considered the matter closed, and even sent a letter to the physician asking him to leave me alone, that this procedure had been paid for/covered, and the matter was closed. Still I kept receiving bills.

I called UHC again, went through first line, second line, rapid response groups. Finally, exasperated, I was told that UHC’s Network Management would get involved. I was assured that when Network Management gets involved, things get resolved. The doctor would be called personally, and be told to knock it off. I thought this odyssey might actually be at an end. I thought wrong.

Yet another bill arrives, still asking for the $470 difference between the original amount and the $221 paid by UHC. Calling for the 15th time, I got in touch with a UHC rep and was told the bad news. Network management called the doctor. The doctor told UHC to buzz off, that he’s not in their network. Since he’s not in the network, the Network Management group have no mojo over him. There’s nothing they can do to him, since he has nothing to lose with them.

At this point, all I want to do is to be this soccer player and make the doctor the defender:

A week ago, 10 months after our little KidWonder had trouble breathing, I wrote a check for $470 to stop a collections agency from getting involved. And I feel a little sick about the whole process. I spent extra time on the phone with the last UHC rep, making sure I asked what was on my mind: What am I supposed to do when my 8 month old child can’t breathe and the only doctor in the ER isn’t in network? I got the highest level of insurance that I could, the PPO coverage, and yet it didn’t seem to make a lick of a difference.

Well, I guess that’s the whole rant. I’m still raw from the whole experience.

This is truly amazing — Google Image Search is now hosting millions of photos from the Life Magazine photo archive (front door here). There’s tons of good stuff there, all of which is available for sale from Life. I’m still sifting through all of this great stuff, but had to take a pause for the cause and thank the heavens that this image is now frozen in time forever:

Word to your motha, Google.