TylerWelch.com

The new short film by Blu
an ambiguous animation painted on public walls.
Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche)

Considerable progress has been made on the porch this week. If the weather holds out, it looks like they may wrap up by the end of the week.  Then it will be our turn to paint and stain over the weekend. The more I get done now, the more time I’ll be able to spend watching The Euro Cup.

Over the weekend, Annie and I continued the molding project for the doors that were replaced upstairs. While doing this project, I decided that the framed arches in our living room needed to go. While I’m normally against ad hoc projects as things always go sideways when working on an old house, this one ended up to be rather simple. I can’t claim total victory as we’ve only completed one of the two arches but I’m confident that we’ll have this little side project wrapped by the weekend.  Be sure and check the images

This are coming along nicely on the with the porch remodel. At this rate we should be 95% complete by the weekend. I’ve uploaded some additional images to the gallery if you’re interested in seeing what has been accomplished.

I should call out that Annie and I did the front door staining and molding over the holiday weekend. It’s amazing what two novices can accomplish with the correct tool set and a double bevel miter saw

A couple of months back my wife was on the way out the door for a overnight business trip. She’s a minimalist traveler and prides herself on fitting everything  in an overnight bag including clothing, laptop and other business related paperwork. On this particular day, something struck me as odd.  As she was leaving I noticed that she had a very large book under her arm that was almost as large as her bag.  Reading is one of her favorite things to do so when the idea of getting her a Kindle came to me, it was really a no-brainer. Waiting 6 weeks for it to arrive was a little painful but when it did finally show up on the door it was it well worth the wait.

I got to play with it for about 10 minutes until she laid claim to it by logging onto my Amazon Account to begin the de-registration process.  I realized that she had done this only after I cycled the power on the device and the text in the upper corner of the screen read "Annie’s Kindle".  Her subtle but effective approach made me realize that my time with this new toy was short and I better enjoy it while I could.

After a couple of months of watching her read comfortably on the couch, I decided it was time to get my own. Yesterday the DHL driver dropped my package off and we’ve become a "2 Kindle Family".

One of the issues that we quickly ran into was the concept of sharing books that we’ve purchased. Amazon’s solution for this requires that both of our Kindles be registered under the same Amazon Account. Unfortunately this would also mean that I would be getting recommendations for the books she reads and vise versa. Hopefully Amazon will address this issue in the future and allow multiple accounts with the same billing information to be tied together. For now we’ve decided to keep our accounts separate.

While watching this video I came to the realization that the biggest impact that we can have is on the children around us.

After months of delays due to Seattle weather, the front porch remodel got underway on Tuesday morning. I’ve been told by Ed, our GC that the project will takes 2 weeks, but I think that is the standard response that is given by any GC when asking how long it will take. I’ll update the photo site throughout the project.

Update: Sleepwalkers beware, if you walk out my front door you’ll fall into the downstairs closet.

I’ve been waiting for this one for some time. Say Hello to genre filtering, videos via Zune Marketplace and more. Check it out over at Zune.net This may be the update that I’ve been waiting for to finally switch from Windows Media Player.

The 2008 MVP Global Summit has begun! The last two days have been packed full. I’ve uploaded a few of the good images from the event so far and will continue to add to the gallery as the  week goes on. It’s been a real pleasure to connect with members from the Windows Mobile, Xbox,Games for Windows, Windows Live, Zune, Digital Media, Live Mail,Windows Media Center and Movie Maker Communities that I’ve had the opportunity to work with over the past two years.

Over the past several months I’ve become more enamored with Twitter as a method of communication. I’m not fully convinced that it will be widely adopted beyond the tech enthusiast circles on the Internet, but I’m warming to the idea. Here’s some of the best definitions of why Twitter can be used as an effective communication tool.

#1 Hacker News Ask YC Do you believe in Twitter philosophy?

New technologies and ideas like Twitter have a habit of appearing completely useless at first, and then suddenly catching on. I remember the first time I saw the ICQ "pager" on the internet in the mid 90’s. My thought was "WTF is this stupid thing good for?", now (like most people) I have multiple IM accounts and do a good bit of my daily communications via IM.

I was having a conversation this weekend with my wife about Twitter. She is way more technical than the "average" wife, but doesn’t really "socialize" online much (her IM client has only me as a contact). Anyway, I was trying to explain Twitter to her, and some of my summary points were:

1) Twitter is the evolution beyond IM, which was the evolution beyond email. 2) Twitter is (likely) best suited for 1-way status updates (I’m at X, doing Y) to close groups of friends vs. "micro-blogging" which seems (to me) like "micro-attention-whoring" most of the time. 3) Twitter is useful when you don’t need or want a response, just a way to keep friends/family in the loop about things where the value decays over time (ie: you wouldn’t post your vacation summary via Twitter, but you might mention that you landed safely at the airport) 4) Twitter took a new approach, trying to embrace some of the Web2.0 methods, where it’s NOT a closed client-server system as IM is. Instead it seems more like a framework that is waiting for the true killer app to be built around it (or, some might say a solution looking for a problem).

#2 http://www.commoncraft.com/ Twitter in Plain English