Ok this post isn't so much about Ben as it is about Rebecca and I, and our life with Ben.  Sure, I am a naive, first time dad.  I didn't exactly know what to expect after we brought our son home from the hospital.  Well, he's almost 6 weeks old and I am starting to figure it out.  The biggest challenge so far seems to be time management.  I can't believe how much time this guy takes up.  Anyway, on to the point of this post...

I've always heard that when people have a baby, their friends send over dinners for them.  I thought that seemed nice enough, but hardly all that big a deal.  I figured that when we came home with Ben we'd be sitting around a lot (since he can't to much) and we'd have time to cook.  Also I thought, that the gift of food thing must be great for families where "dad" can't cook.  In my case, I can cook, and love to.  So I wouldn't mind making dinner each night for Rebecca since she'd be busy feeding Ben.  WRONG!!!!  Wow was I wrong.  And luckily, my friends and family knew better.  They sent over food.  Lots of food.  Not only was I too busy to cook for the first few weeks, but I was just too exhausted to do it.  One little child can be completely draining.  So these meals are a very kind gift and I am thankful to everyone who helped us out.  If you are in a position to bring dinner to a new family, please please please do it.  They will love you for it.  In addition, my advice to any expecting parent - cook in advance and freeze food.  We froze chicken cutlets, meatloaf, soup, and more.  Combine that with all of the great meals our friends sent over and we didn't cook a meal for the first 3 weeks.  And we had a few in week 4 too!  I'm not kidding.  Rebecca and I realized that, except for picking up some essentials like milk, we didn't go shopping for a month!

THANKS to all of our friends for the help and support.  Also, here's a picture of us with Ben - he's one month old here.

For those of you who were at the last Philly.Net meeting, Marc promised you his slides.  So here they are.  Enjoy.

Marc gave me two power point decks.  Interestingly, the 2007 version is much smaller.  I've noticed that with other presentations too.  They must have done something cool to keep the files smaller in the newer version...neat.

Mix Summary for Power Point 2003 (.ppt) 

Mix Summary for Power Point 2007 (.pptx)

You really need to take a minute to watch these two videos.  This guy is a genius.  Johnny Lee takes a Wii remote and uses the existing technology to do some amazing things.  In the first video, he creates an interactive white board for a fraction of the cost of the real thing.  In the second video, he creates a head tracking system that gives an incredible 3D effect.  I wish I was this smart!

On Saturday, Feb 16th, at around 4:30 am Rebecca woke me up.  While she told me that "something was going on", she also told me that we shouldn't get too excited.  This could pass and it could easily be another week before child birth.  A half hour later she told me she was hungry.  I got her some snacks and after a few minutes she decided that this wasn't hunger pains, she was having some minor contractions/cramps.  Still, we knew this could this could pass. 

Before long, the small contractions seemed to be at a regular pace, maybe 12 minutes apart and we figured that, just in case, we should get a suitcase together.  We knew that the longer we stayed home, the happier Rebecca and I would be.  Sometime around 6:30 (I think), we called the Dr's office.  As expected, they told us to relax at home.

I took this picture of Rebecca around 7:30 am.  She was acting pretty funny and decided that she needed to clean and vacuum the house before we left!  At this point her contractions were around 5 minutes apart!  Another call to the doctor.  Since we live only 5 minutes from the hospital, she told us that we could come in if we want, or stay home for a while longer.  Eventually we left and around 8:30 we got to Bryn Mawr Hospital.

Upon arrival, we met our delivery nurse, Karyn.  She also introduced us to Carissa, a student nurse who would help out for the day.  Karyn checked out Rebecca and warned us that we could be there a while, she was only 1.5 centimeters dilated.  We immediately questioned if we came in too early.  Around an hour later, Rebecca was really starting to complain about the pain.  The nurses and I calmed her and kept her on track.  But even the nurse was getting concerned about Rebecca's pain level.  During the next examination, Karyn's face lit up and she said (I am paraphrasing) "No wonder you are in so much pain, you are 7.5 centimeters dilated!"  That was an unexpected change in about 1 hour!  At that point, things got pretty busy and exciting.  Rebecca's contractions got pretty intense but she was really strong and I was very impressed.  Pretty soon Karyn informed us that it was "now or never" for the epidural.  One or two contractions later and the decision was obvious to us!  "Bring on the epidural" (I won't repeat what Rebecca really said!).  I have to say that I think the epidural was a good idea.  Things really calmed down after that and in about an hour, Dr Craparo brought  Benjamin Harry Schwam into the world. 

It was a pretty fast delivery (we were at the hospital at 8:30 and he was born at 12:22) and we had a great experience.  I can't say enough good   things about our team.  They were very helpful and caring.  Karyn took care of Rebecca all morning.  She is an awesome nurse and we are very thankful to her.  Carissa told us that Benjamin was the first baby she ever saw delivered naturally.  No matter how many deliveries she takes part in after this, we know that Ben will always be her first.  The doctor is kind of like a closer in baseball.  The nurses play the whole game and in the last inning the doctor comes in to win the game.  Don't get me wrong, Dr. Craparo was terrific and did a great job. she is very warm, skilled and confident and that is very reassuring to expecting parents.  We owe them all our gratitude...THANKS!

It's hard to believe that little Ben is 3 weeks old today!  I don't know if this is cool, but I'm going to quote myself (someone has too!).  Years ago I wrote a song for my friends called The Good Times.  The last verse is as follows:

Sometimes it seems like years since the first day we met.
Years full of memories we never will forget.
Sometimes it’s like I just met you yesterday.
But time goes by so fast we better not let it slip away.

I think of that verse a lot, including now.  Ben is so tiny, he's just a little guy at the beginning of his life.   But sometimes it seems like he's been with us forever.  Already he just feels like a regular member of the family. 

Ben's a pretty cool kid, if I do say so myself.  I think he cries a lot, but from what I have heard from other people, we are pretty lucky.  He actually sleeps a lot too.  Unfortunately, he is still a little confused and wants to party all night and sleep all day. We are working on that.  Since he arrived, he's had lots of visitors and many friends and family have sent gifts and warm wishes.  I find the expressions of love from so many people very touching.  It's a great feeling to know that so many people care. 

I am really surprised (yes, I was warned) about how little time I have to get things accomplished these days.  I really expected to have more "down time" when I could do day to day things and keep up with my blogging.  But I find that mostly during the down time, I just want to take a nap.  This little 7 lb guy can really drain you!

In the next few blog posts, I'll be sharing photos and stories about Ben.

I am proud to announce that our little boy has arrived.  Benjamin Harry Schwam was born on Saturday Feb 16th at 12:22 pm.  He's 19 & 3/4 inches and he was 6lbs, 5 oz.  He's totally cute and he has red hair, which is awesome but was quite unexpected.  Not only that, he's got a lot of hair and I'm a little jealous.  He's doing great and so is his Mom.  Rebecca did a great job! 

So now I'll have lot's of "Daddy" stuff to blog about.  Until I find some energy to do so, check out these pictures...

Here's a picture of Rebecca and me, with Ben.  It's just after he was born.

Here's a close-up of Ben.  He's been with us for a few hours in this photo. 

This one shows off his hair pretty well.

I just finished a little snack and it made me think.  My wife and I make a great team.  She likes to make cookies and I like to eat them.  Awesome!

Hold on, hold on.  My wife and I are still expecting our son in about two weeks.  But yesterday my sister gave birth to a beautiful little girl named Grace! 

Yes, it will be a busy few weeks for my family.  As for us, we are getting excited and waiting for our big day.  I'm trying to get a lot of sleep in advance.

I've already written about trying to choose a camcorder, selecting the Canon HG-10, and problems with shipping.

Now that the camera has arrived, I've had a little time to play around with it.  Here are some of my first thoughts:

First, this may be obvious but, this camera is small.  It's not even the smallest camera out there but but I like the size.  Most of the controls feel good, especially the zoom rocker control, which was mentioned as a highlight in reviews.  When recording and playing back HD video with the 2.7in LCD, the picture is really awesome.  For the most part the camera seems pretty easy to use.  I did notice, immediately, that the scroll wheel that is used to do a lot of the menu navigation is a little weak.  I read about this in some reviews.  Everyone seems to agree that this is a cool attempt by Canon and a step in the right direction but it needs work.  Basically, the scroll wheel feels like a cheap plastic toy that could break easily.  I certainly hope it is stronger than it appears.

Unfortunately, I had some problems watching the video off of the camera.  First, the HDMI cable I purchased is the wrong size (see below).  So my only TV hookup was "low def".  The pictures looked good but not spectacular.  But I hope a new HDMI cable solves that.  So it was off to the PC for me.  I easily and quickly uploaded the files via USB to my PC's hard drive.  However, when I tried to playback the video using the included software, Corel Intervideo WinDVD SE, the picture was was a little choppy and was not synchronized with the audio!  I know HD video playback is hard on the processor but I have a dual core 3.2 GHz processor with 3GB of memory.  Plus my video adapter is an NVIDEA GeForce 7600 GS, which I thought was supposed to be pretty good.  I even used a 1 GB ready boost thumb drive and I turned off the Vista Aero features to try and help but no luck.  I am really surprised at this performance problem.  I expected it for editing but not playback.  This was a really big disappointment.  Could the problem be that I need to upgrade the software?  I also tried editing with the included  Ulead DVD Movie Factory SE but that didn't work very well either.  First, the PC couldn't keep up very well.  Second, I am not impressed with my first look at the software.  Again, maybe I need to upgrade.  The free software is probably not the best one on the market.

I also wanted to complain about some accessories I purchased at Best Buy.  I should know by now to trust my instincts and not listen to the people there.  First, I already mentioned the incorrect HDMI cable.  They told me that was the correct one, even though I said I thought the connector looked too big.  Second, they said that the camera bag I purchased would hold the camera and the accessories.  I was interested in a slightly larger bag but they told me not to bother.  Strike two.  Why do I listen to them?

I expect that I'll be very happy once I get my HDMI cable and can view my home movies on my 46" High Def TV.  Then I'll need to figure out how to edit these videos.

In my last post, I wrote about my decision to purchase a camcorder.  So here's what happened next.

So I ordered the device at around 11:30PM on Tuesday 1/29 from TigerDirect.com.  Since it was pretty late, the item would ship on Wed.  Since I splurged $3 extra, I got 2nd Day Shipping which meant I have my new toy on Friday.  Now I've ordered from TigerDirect before and I've had problems with them, so I know what to expect.  Still, I trust them because even when there are problems, they seem to be genuinely nice about it and are pretty accommodating.  And don't forget, the price was right - about $350 less then Best Buy!  So starting Wednesday I got my tracking information from TigerDirect and started following my package on UPS.com.  Yet another cool benefit to the Internet, I can watch my package get closer to its destination.  OK, it left the factory, good start.  It's headed to Philly, this is going well.  Thursday night I checked and it arrived in town, this is good!  Friday morning it is listed as Out For Delivery - this baby is on the truck!  It was raining that day so I left a note on my door for the drive to leave the package on my covered porch in the back.  Early afternoon I checked UPS.com again and low and behold my package was listed as...Delivered!  I was so excited that I even called home on my way from work to make sure.  Rebecca assured me that the package was on the back porch when she came home and now it was in the house!

Upon arriving home, I immediately opened the box and started checking out my new Canon HG-10.  Wow, this is small.  Cool, I can plug it in and test it without the battery being charged.  Wait, what is this!  Why is there a door covering a DVD burner on my HG-10?  Wait, why does my HG-10 say HV-20 on the side?  I was so excited to check it out that I never noticed that the box said HV-20...TigerDirect shipped me the wrong unit!  Arrrrrrgh.  So I called up TigerDirect and, like usual, they were cool about it.  They can't ship me my model until I return the old one, or they can temporarily charge me for both on my credit card.  I can understand that, they don't want me running off with both of them.  And they promised to send the correct model next-day.  Since it was Friday at 5:00pm, next-day means Monday.  I still need to send the wrong one back and get my credit.  But I'm expecting that to go well.  If not, I'll be sure to blog about it!

Oh well, no camcorder for the Superbowl party.  Now all I really needed to do was convince my wife not to go into labor until Monday night at the earliest! 

OK, it is getting late.  Tomorrow I'll write about my first thoughts on the Canon HG-10.

About a week ago I posted on my struggle to choose a camcorder.  Well after lots of research, conversations with friends, and a little bit of "oh, what the hell", I picked a camcorder.

I selected the Canon HG-10.  It's an HD model that uses an internal Hard Drive for storage.  The web site CamcorderInfo.com has a pretty thorough review of the model, its features, and issues.    Here's what lead me to choose the HG-10...

Storage - Hard Drive:  All I read about the cameras that record straight to DVD is that they are a pain to edit.  Since I plan to do some editing, that was ruled out.  The mini-dv tapes are still popular and seem to actually have the highest quality video due to lower compression then the other formats.  But, you can't quickly access portions of video and transfer to the PC is a pain.  The hard drive model has pretty good video quality (I think it is in the middle between dvd and min-dv) and offers some other features, like quick access (mentioned above) and the ability to record large portions of video without changing tapes of dvds.

Format - High Def:  This was a tough call too.  The quality is obviously much better, that's easy.  But it is quite a bit more expensive.  Also, I was concerned about editing (you need a strong PC).  Another factor is that I don't have a way to burn DVD's in HD.  So I can only watch the videos off of the camera in HD.  Well, I'm hoping the prices come down soon on those HD burners.  In the mean time, I'll save up my footage, and wait for prices to drop.  I'm told editing won't be too bad since my PC is Dual Core 3.2 GHz, with 3 Gigs of Ram.  That left price.  After some research, I got a good deal, so HD was the way to go.

After doing a lot of research, I settled in on the Canon HG-10.  Basically, I thought it had a great feature set, excellent video quality, and was rated well in low light conditions.  That's fairly important because in video terms, most conditions except outside are considered low light!  A few things I was disappointed about with the Canon was the manual focus (not a ring, it's menu driven) and no mic adjustments.  But everything else looked good.

I started looking at BestBuy.com where the price was listed around $1100.  I think Circuit City had it for about $50 less.  At some point it went on sale at Circuit City for around $850 and I started to get excited.  Some more research on the web and I found it for about $835 at Buy.Com, $800 at J&R and then $717 at 42nd Street.  There were a few other places that were pretty low too. But Tiger Direct had the camcorder for $759!  Bingo.  This was a little more then some a few of the others, but I have done business with them before and I don't mind paying a few bucks extra to a company that I trust (that's not too say I don't trust the others, I just don't know them).

It was around 11pm and I was pretty excited to find a good price on the model I wanted.  I went to sleep, figuring I'd sleep on it and order it the next day.  A little while later in bed I thought to myself...What if the deal ends tonight at midnight?  What if they run out of stock?  So around 11:30 pm I came downstairs and ordered the Canon HG-10.  As a bonus, I found out I had a $50 credit from a previous purchase!  Plus, shipping via 2nd day air was only $3 more than the standard, so I could get the Camera by Friday!  Sweet. 

This is getting long so I'll end the story here.  To read about a few problems that came next, along with my first impressions, read my next post.