Michelle's growing more beautiful and clever every day. She has quite a baby-vocabulary now and as of yesterday pronounced "cheese" for the first time. She loves playing in the backyard and exploring every nook and cranny of it. She especially enjoys sampling the fragrances of our various plants and trees (*photo below of Michelle smelling a leaf from our lemon tree). She's very inquisitive and proves this by occasionally sampling dirt and other outdoor elements when she thinks mom or dad aren't watching. ;-)

She became an official "kid" a few weeks back when she fell on her knees and scraped both of them for the first time. Fortunately, she was having too much fun to notice and just carried on.

Indoors, she's sampling all sorts of new foods. Two weeks ago she tried her first 'California Roll' and last week she finished off a complete 'Corn on the Cob' all by herself. She loves fruit especially grapes.

Each night she reminds us that it's time for night-night by gesturing for her favorite bedtime book.

As many friends and family have remarked, it does indeed get more challenging *and* fun as they grow. In short, we're having a great summer and we hope you are too.

Lots of new pictures on her site:

Nasa just released a very cool shot of the Earth at night.

Check out the Nile!

If you have a toddler may I suggest Michelle's favorite bedtime book, the classic "Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown.

I read it to Michelle every evening before bedtime and she just loves it. In fact, Michelle will usually point to it in our bookshelf to indicate that she's ready for bedtime.

The poem and illustrations are simple and pleasent. Each time I read it to Michelle she seems to find something new to enjoy.

Back in June, I posted a bash script I use weekly to backup my Powerbook onto my Linux server. Basically, the script went through two steps. The first step created tarballs of various text based configs in places such as /etc and ~/Library and the second step went on to 'rsync' or mirror various directories over to my Linux box.

Beyond this, I also set up Josie's Windows XP box to sync over her 'My Documents' folder to my Linux box on weekly basis. To do this, I had two options. Either install Cygwin and configure a cron to perform the task via rsync or make use of a Windows-friendly GUI-based application. I decided to go with the later and found Rundegren's Instant Backup to be perfect for the task. "When in Rome..." ;-)

Once everything was backed up from our personal machines to the Linux box I was happy. My final concern revolved around the files that were only stored on the Linux box, such as our massive photo collection. Clearly, these files needed to be mirrored onto another drive on some routine basis. So with this in mind, I made use of yet another bash script and this time, the mighty Crontab.

Here is the backup.sh script:

#!/bin/bash
######################################################
export buDir="Now backing up..."

echo -e "\n$buDir '/etc'";
sudo tar -czf {destDir}/etc_$(date +%Y%m%d%-H%M%S).tar.gz /etc;

echo -e "\n$buDir '/var/log'";
sudo tar -czf {destDir}/var_log_$(date +%Y%m%d%-H%M%S).tar.gz /var/log;

echo -e "\n$buDir 'pictures'";
rsync -a --delete {sourceDir} {destDir};

echo -e "\n$buDir 'your external web site'";
wget -q --mirror ftp://{username}:{password}@{site_ftp_url}/ -P {destDir};

echo -e "\nNow repairing permissions..."
chmod -R 751 {destDir}/backup;
chmod -R 750 {destDir}/pictures;

echo -e "\nAll updates have been completed!";
######################################################
# end of backup.sh

Beyond just backing up local files, the great thing about this script is that it also performs a wget mirror of my external sites and then wraps thing up with some handy-dandy directory permission clean up. :-)

Lastly, I setup a cron job to run my backup.sh script every Friday at noon.

% crontab -e

00 12 * * 5 {path_to_my_scripts}/backup.sh



Enjoy!

Michelle's latest outing was to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach on Wednesday, August 4th.

Michelle encountered all sorts of aquatic life including jelly fish, sea dragons, sea lions, sea turtles, sting rays, and sharks, to name a few. She even helped us feed nectar to a few exotic birds.

She was very excited and proved this by continually running throughout the aquarium. Honestly, I hadn't realized she was so quick!

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Great new clock replacement for Mac OS X!