Author Archives: Peter

Thirty-first at the Ninety-nine

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For my Thirty-first birthday, I went out to dinner with Rebecca, Catherine and Esme at one of my favorite restaurants, The 99. Or, I guess just “99” as it’s apparently called now. In addition to a delicious dinner, I enjoyed the company of my three favorite girls, and received some great presents.

Birthday Boy

Birthday Boy

Rebecca bought me a used copy of 1000 Places to See Before You Die. We’ve always looked at the book together in bookstores, thought about all of the places we’d like to go, and reviewed all of the places we *have* been. I’m looking forward to reading it and dreaming of future adventures. As an added bonus, she created a personalized quiz to help guide me through the book. And, she inscribed the book, but it wasn’t the first inscription! It was already inscribed by the previous person who gifted it to the previous owner! Who knows what happened between those two… 😉

I also received an apron designed by Catherine. She did an original drawing and wrote out my name, and then Rebecca turned it into embroidery on the apron. I’m very excited to finally have my own apron, and it’s now hanging up in the kitchen beween Rebecca and Catherine’s aprons.

Papa and Catherine and the Apron

Papa and Catherine and the Apron

When we got home, there was more fun awaiting, as Rebecca and Catherine had made angel food cupcakes for me! They were covered with homemade peach jam… so delicious.

Mmm... cupcakes

Mmm... cupcakes

Thanks to Rebecca, Catherine, and Esme for making it such a great birthday. Thanks to all the other folks, too, who wished me a happy birthday. Hoping this will be a great year!

You can see all of the photos from my birthday events.

Squeezing out the last drops of Summer

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With Summer slowly winding down to a close, we’re trying to squeeze out all the outdoor goodness that we can, particularly in terms of outings with the whole family. There is no better way for me to unwind after a day at work than to come home, jump in the car with the ladies and head to a park, beach, or other destination. I wanted to share a few photos from some recent outings.

Papa and Esme at Winagaersheek

Papa and Esme at Wingaersheek

Wingaersheek Beach is a terrific beach up in Gloucester that is normally pretty pricey. But get there late enough in the day, and the ticket booths are closed, so you can go for free. Above, Esme and I pose for a photo on the beach. She loves riding on my shoulders! See more photos from Wingaersheek.

Catherine at the wading pool

Catherine at the wading pool

Bradley Palmer State Park has a very nice wading pool and play area. It’s extremely popular with the kiddos on hot summer days, and the cost is $5 to park, if you’re lucky enough to get in before the lot fills up. Kids can have a ball in the pool while mom and/or dad relax poolside, or join in the fun if they so desire. And there is a playground in the same space, so your little ones can go wild and run from the water directly to the playground and back. We took a picnic up there and had a blast in the pool. See more photos from the Bradley Palmer Wading Pool.

Catherine climbs a tree

Catherine climbs a tree

Today we took a trip up to Manchester-by-the-Sea. Our intent was to visit Coolidge Reservation and the Ocean Lawn, but the 10-slot parking lot was filled up, so we turned around and went back to downtown Manchester where we had a picnic at Masconomo Park. The park is situated right on the waterfront, and has a great grassy area, a nice playground, some really cool climbing trees, and views of the Manchester harbor. It’s also dangerously close to Captain Dusty’s, a local ice cream shop, to which we made a delicious trip. Try the “Groovy Smoothie” if you go there. It’s $4.99, but worth every penny for its deliciousness. See more photos from Masconomo Park.

There are still a few weeks of summer left, so who knows what adventures we may still have?

Nikon SB-600: The Missing Link?

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Perhaps some people think I’m the “missing link” between Gorillas and Photographers:

Gorilla Photographer

But for me, the missing link in my photography kit was a good external flash unit. This weekend I finally had the opportunity to purchase one.

SB-600

I purchased a Nikon SB-600, Nikon’s middle-of-the-line flash. It currently sells for a little over $200 and sits in between the ~$450 SB-900 and the ~$100 SB-400. This flash provides a great deal more power than the flash built into my camera, can be rotated and angled to many degrees, and can even be positioned off the camera and remotely controlled. One of its greatest features is the ability to bounce the flash off of a wall or ceiling. This provides much more flattering light for portraits than a direct flash.

On top of being a lot of fun and great for personal use, this flash will be a great asset for Peter R. Wood Photography and will allow me to offer more creative options to my clients. Head on over to photo.prwdot.org to check out my services and pricing.

You can also see some samples of other shots I’ve taken with the SB-600 in the Test Shot Gallery. (Also wanted to let people know that for some reason, SmugMug is making my photos look a bit darker when viewing them in the resized versions. To see what they “really” look like, you’ll need to click on the “Original” link that appears when you are hovering over the resized photo in the gallery. I’m working with SmugMug Support to figure out what’s going on.)

Esme is Five Months Old!

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Smiley Esme!

Smiley Esme!

Holy cow! I can’t believe it! “The small one,” as we sometimes call Esme, is five months old! She is truly delightful. She is a lot of fun to play with, is very “talkative,” and in these photos can be seen doing one of her favorite activities… chewing on something. 🙂

Catherine is doing great as a big sister. She loves to hold Esme (supervised, of course) and is very attentive to Esme’s needs and moods. Esme has even worked her way into Catherine’s bedtime routine, which I usually handle. I will often give them a bath together (Catherine’s idea!) and will read them both stories. If I’m really on fire, I can even manage to get both of them to sleep (though not simultaneously).

Now she’s hanging out on a quilt on the floor, making all of the right baby noises. I just remarked to Rebecca, “She must have read the baby textbook before she was born, the one that says babies are supposed to say ‘ga ga goo goo!'”

Oh, and there are more photos here!

End of an Era at prwdot.org

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For the past six years, I have offered several of my friends free web hosting via my own personal web hosting accounts, under the prwdot.org domain name. I have set up and configured Movable Type blogs, Gallery installations, kept the software up to date, helped troubleshoot issues, mitigated the occasional security threat, and paid for the web hosting (which included storage space and bandwidth) that these folks used.

However, over the past few years, with the growth of our family, I’ve had less and less time to devote to running and supporting free web hosting. Though I enjoyed the opportunity to serve my friends, I found that I just wasn’t able to provide the same level of quality service that I once did. So, I’ve recently made the decision to end the free web hosting service, which will hopefully give me a few less things to think about.

In thanks to these friends for hosting with me, I’ve set up gone.prwdot.org, a domain to which their old websites will continue to redirect, and which contains links to all of their known sites, social networking profiles, or other pages. Thanks Will, Amy, Josh, Nathan, Jon, and Corey.

As a side note, this will also help out our family budget, as I’ve moved us from a slice at Slicehost to an account at NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Though I still will recommend Slicehost for folks who need a beefy, dedicated-virtual server with great support, we’re moving to NFSN because of their pay-as-you-go, bill-by-the-penny model. Web hosting will cost us around $5/month, possibly less, as we’re billed on a daily basis for exactly how much storage and bandwidth we use on that given day. I may write about NFSN in depth at a later time, but suffice to say for now I love their pricing and philosophy. While they aren’t the cheapest if you’re hosting large files or doing a lot of traffic, they are certainly very reliable, responsive, knowledgeable, and fair, and they have a business philosophy that I admire.

Happy Mama’s Day!

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Happy Mama’s Day to my wife Rebecca and to Mamas, Moms, Mommies, Mothers everywhere!

Mama and her girls
Mama and her girls

From managing the cooking and grocery list, to hunting for bargains, to getting all kinds of great free stuff, to wrangling a feisty nearly-three-year old and a hungry two-month-old all day every day, Rebecca deserves much credit for keeping this family and house running in tip-top shape. She does it all while staying true to her beliefs in honoring God, protecting the environment, nurturing our children, and saving our pennies.

Thank you for being the best Mama and wife that we could hope for! By the way, since mothers are always busy, it’s important to treat their skin once in a while to keep it healthy and glowing. For instance, if they go to Dr. Andres Bustillo‘s clinic, they can take facelift surgery.

My Twitter Rulebook

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I’ve been using Twitter for a little over a year now. During that time, I’ve developed a few internal rules that help me use the system to my best advantage. These rules stem from three guiding principles:

  • Trust Your Friends
  • Time Is Precious
  • Ideas Need Exposure

In the following article I’ll discuss the guiding principles and then I’ll talk about the rules that help me stick to the principles.
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Nasal Allergies and the Neti Pot

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I’ve had nasal allergies for most of my life. From first grade up through now, I’ve bounced back and forth through various types of medicine, a variety of symptoms, and unpredictable outcomes.

My most recent regimen of meds was Flonase, Zyrtec, and, added just before Esme was born, Astelin. Together, These three seemed to take care of my symptoms pretty well.

However, one day recently I was playing around with Google Health. I had imported my prescription records, and it popped up some notices for me that the three medicines I was taking were from the same family, and that it didn’t recommend taking more than two at a time.

I also started reading about some side effects of the medications, particularly Astelin, and began to think about some things I’d recently been feeling: lethargic, grumpy, unmotivated, gaining weight. I had written these off as post-baby situational stress and symptoms. However, I realized that they matched up pretty well with the symptoms that other people had been reporting.

At that point, I made the decision to go cold turkey on my allergy medicines. Within a day or two, I felt that I had more energy and was not as grumpy as I had been recently. But I was still feeling my allergy symptoms. So I started to look into an option I’d been thinking about for a while: the Neti Pot. My friend Amy Walton had recommended it several years ago, but in my pride I asserted that modern allergy medicines were the best way to go and that I wasn’t going to have anything to do with pouring salt water down my nose.

Well, I’ve been using a Neti Pot for almost two weeks now, and I have to apologize to Amy: you were right. This thing is amazing! After the very first time using it, my nose felt better, and my symptoms went away. I used it two or three times a day the first week, and since then I’ve cut back a bit. I actually haven’t used it since last Thursday, and I still feel fine!

The real test will come this summer, when my allergies have typically been in full bloom. I suspect that I’ll need to use the Neti Pot more often to get things cleared out. But I’d much rather do that than take drugs that have potentially undesirable side effects! And it costs less, too! The Neti Pot kit I got was only $10 and came with 30 packets of saline mixture. You can buy a 100-pack for under $15, which should last a couple months. Or you can make your own solution at home! In any case, it’s cheaper than the $55/month I had been paying for my allergy medicine, and thus far, it seems to work even better!

So to all of the nasal allergy sufferers who haven’t yet tried the Neti Pot… give it a go! I think you’ll be glad you did.

Reflections on “The Survey”

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A List Apart recently published the findings of their 2008 Survey For People Who Make Websites.If you’re in the web design, development, or other similar fields, you might find it interesting to read to see just where you fit into the demographic spectrum of web developers.

Much of the survey didn’t surprise me: most respondents were white males from the United States. Most had personal websites. Most worked around 40 hours per week. But there were a few things that I thought were notable enough to share my observations:

  • I work for a company that’s larger than 78% of respondents’ companies (around 500 employees)
  • I’ve been in the field for longer than 75% of respondents (nine years).
  • I’ve been at my current job for longer than 95% of respondents (nine years).
  • I get more paid vacation than most (about five weeks).
  • I get about the same paid holidays as most (six days… I assumed most people got more).
  • My salary is better than the average (gentlemen do not divulge their actual salary figures).
  • Freelancers really don’t have great salaries (and I suspect that many of them are not sole providers for their family, something I’d like to see covered in a future iteration of the survey).
  • If you want a killer salary, be a creative director or UX expert.

So those are my thoughts. If you’re in the field, what did you find interesting about the survey?