Makena joins the jetset

I must admit I was worried about having a 4-5 hour flight to toronto with Makena, but she did great. She slept for probably 3.5 hours off and on. She only fussed for 10-15 minutes which was quickly overcome by pacing the aisle a few times. To be fair, Air Canada also made it a bit easier because they have a few more inches of leg room and on demand movies and TV for each person (awesome).

Makena walks on to the Husky Basketball team

Ok, not really, but here are her updated 4mo stats:

Length: 97th percentile
Weight: 70th percentile
Head size: 30th percentile (pea head!)

Makena meets Anna Lynn

Last night at 11:30ish PM Anna Lynn Millikan was born. Why is this significant? Well, Anna is Makena's new best friend, though they might not know it yet. Here's the proof:

Sharing iTunes Library (and iPhoto) between local users on a Mac (OS X)

As any married man knows, you need to have separate accounts on your home computers. I'm fairly picky about how my computer is organized and I don't let people messing with it (hmmm... maybe an only-child thing).

At the same time, it's important to be able to share media (particularly music) between accounts for ease of use. If I buy and song on iTunes, Erika should be able to listen to it easily from her account and vice versa. The same with photos.

To that end, I went on a mission configuring the macbook to do exactly this. Here are my findings:

For iTunes:

User A is the iTunes master (ie: the one who actually has the music)
User B is the iTunes slave (ie: the one who will be sharing the music)

1. Create a new user group call "music" (you can do this from the Account system preferences window). Add User A and User B to the "music" group.


2. Go to User A's home directory in Finder.


3. Navigate to /Users/<user_b>/Music/


4. Set the permissions on iTunes to include read & write access for the "music" group (you can do this via "Get Info" or from the terminal with 'chmod -R g+rw iTunes'.


5. Next, create an alias to iTunes by hitting Apple-l (lowercase l). That will create a file called "iTunes alias". (NOTE: you must be an admin to do this)


6. Now log out and log back in as User B


7. Remove User B's iTunes directory (/Users/<user_b>/Music/iTunes


8. Now copy the "iTunes alias" file from User A's Music directory to User B's music directory.


9. Rename the file to just "iTunes". This will fool iTunes into thinking it's library lives in the normal, default location for User B.

Fire up iTunes as User B. The library should be exactly the same as from User A's perspective. Any changes made by User A will be reflected in User B's view and the other way around. This includes purchased music - no authorization required.

For iPhoto:

The process is effectively exactly the same, except instead of using the iTunes directory, you use iPhoto (in Pictures).

59 degrees and dropping

Welp, 13 hours until the furnace gets installed. Which is good because I don't know if I can handle another night by myself in here. It reminds me of living in 1100 before we decided to turn the heat on... except I don't have a space heater (other than the Hun).

Busted Furnace

It was 61 degrees in the house this morning, which makes for a cold transition out of the shower. Erika and Makena have been living at her mom's for the week since the furnace gave out on Sunday. It could be the thermostat, could be the furnace. Either way we were planning on replacing the old oil furnace with an electric one in November, so this just bumps up our time table (hurray).

Rich is coming over to help me run a couple 240 lines to power this sucker tomorrow. Should be good times. (Don't worry mom, he knows what he's going). The new furnace gets installed on Friday, so I only have two more freezing nights alone with the Hun. I might wimp out and head over the Leanna's tonight though...