New Squeezebox design out. That should look nice in the new TV room, once we get the renovation done…

This site turned seven-ish around a month ago (depending on what point you’re counting from). Somebody else celebrating a “blogday” prompted me to mention that…

Back in early September, I said I’d figure out what to do about the ads in the sidebar. Kept meaning to write that up, but work got really busy, and the teaching really put a crimp on the spare cycles. I finally ended up pulling them out of the template this morning.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with running the ads per se — I’m firmly in the “if you’ve got PageRank and want to sell it, that’s your lookout” camp on that issue. I just finally realized that, much like I wouldn’t wear a free T-shirt for a product that I didn’t like or use, I don’t want to advertise or plug things I don’t like or use. If it were economically viable for me to have adverts for O’Reilly books, Dogfish Head Brewery, or the Squeezebox, I’d be perfectly okay with taking that advertising dollar. As it is, that’s just not going to happen — so, no more ads here, at least until the economics of the web change quite a bit or I become insanely popular. (ha!)

The AAP has come out against co-sleeping. I’m not a physician, but I am a happy co-sleeping father, so it seems like I’m qualified to have at least a tiny opinion on this…

Co-sleeping was a big, big win for us — all of us got more sleep during TheChild’s first year as a direct result. We’ll have to wait to see how some of the more extravagant claims about the benefits of co-sleeping hold up, but so far the signs are good. So I’m disappointed that the APA is discouraging the practice — especially when the basic idea doesn’t pass the smell test: what they’re saying is that in order to cut “crib death”, you should make sure to put your kid in the crib. Yeah, mmm-kay. Maybe there’s a reason why the colloquial name for SIDS isn’t “co-sleeping death”.