Ellie drew this in kindergarten today. Her younger siblings, from left to right: Claire (curly hair, 4), Maddie (1), Micah (2), Ellie (5), Abigail (3), and Bekah (4 months). I love how she drew Bekah lying down, since she can’t walk yet, and how everyone else is in height order.

Suzanne and I are pleased to announce the birth of Rebekah Elizabeth Smedberg, born 18 April A.D. 2009 at 12:43 a.m. 8 lbs. 3 oz., 20 inches. All are well.

Suzanne and I are pleased to announce the birth of Madeleine Young Smedberg, born 7 May A.D. 2008 at 12:26 a.m. 7 lbs. 4 oz., 20 inches. All are well.

Suzanne and I are pleased to announce the birth of Micah Wilkes Smedberg, born 3 February, 2007 at 1:34 p.m. (EST). All are happy and healthy.

This is our fourth child, but our first boy. For those interested, take a look at Ellie, Claire, and Abbey‘s birth announcements.

I will be taking two weeks of paternity leave. While I may not be able to stay away from email entirely, I won’t be actively engaged in Mozilla activities. Here are some alternate contact points while I am away:

Build system

Ted Mielczarek (luser) or Mark Mentovai (mento)

Firefox partner builds

Dan Mills (v_thunder)

Toolkit

Gavin Sharp (gavin) or Mike Connor (mconnor)

Unit testing

Robert Campbell (robcee) or Robert Sayrer (sayrer)

Embedding/docshell

Boris Zbarsky (bz)

We’re in the process of moving to our new house!:

At bc’s and my grandmother’s prodding I have finally put together some pictures of the new house. I’d like to note, cryptically, that it I am extremely relieved that we hired a buyer’s agent realtor… he ended up saving us a boatload of money, time, and grief.

Suzanne and I are pleased to announce the birth of Abigail Porter Smedberg, born at 3:38 p.m. EST on Tuesday March 7^th: 8 lbs. 1 oz., 19 inches long. All are well. (more…)

I’m expecting a new baby tomorrow (she will be induced if she doesn’t come out naturally), so starting today I will be taking a two-week paternity leave. I’m not going to disappear completely, but I don’t expect to be doing any serious coding or reviewing for the next few weeks. The following peers are around to do urgent reviews in my absence:

• Build-config: Mark Mentovai or Bryan Ryner
• Embedding: Boris Zbarsky or Darin Fisher
• gtkmozembed: Crispin Persch (chpe@gnome.org)

I promise, I’ll post pictures of the new baby when she arrives!

Merry Christmas everyone! I will be away on vacation until Jan. 3. I may be checking email early in the week, but don’t count on it. If there’s anything emergency-like, my Mozilla Corporation coworkers have my cell phone number. Blog comments may be moderated until I get back.

I was avoiding saying anything about the “Intelligent Design” debate, but I’m just fed up with the inanity of it: I believe that God created the heavens and the earth; maybe He used a Bing Bang, and allowed the natural laws that He created to govern evolution of life. Maybe not. There is plenty of empirical evidence for adaptive evolution within species/genera, but not a whole lot of evidence for macro-evolution.

So, we now have a school district or a teacher saying teaching a dull and vague concept like “perhaps the evolution of species wasn’t totally random, and an unnamed Force guided evolution”. How could this statement possibly be offensive? It is at least as scientific as “perhaps the evolution of species was totally random, and was not not guided by an unnamed Force”. We can’t go back and observe the process! At best the question is philosophical-scientific, not empirical-scientific (until we invent a time machine).

I used to think that when I read the Constitution, I would be able to get a fairly good grasp of what it actually means. The Constitution of the United States includes the following sentence in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. What have we done to our Constitution since that sentence was written? This sentence doesn’t say anything about state governments or the local school board! In fact, many states in the U.S. retained official religions or anti-Catholic laws well into the 19^th century. The first amendment doesn’t even say “the federal government shouldn’t believe there is a God”: the amendment is very carefully written to prevent the federal government from becoming explicitly sectarian, and it was actually promoted by the state of Maryland and the Catholics in it to prevent the U.S. government from enacting anti-Catholic taxes or laws.

Judicial activism, congressional ignorance, and misinterpretation of our founding documents has run so far from sanity I hardly believe we live under the rule of law any more. When our current president infamously ignores the rule of law and spies on his own citizens, and a lone judge can arrogantly assume the responsibility for banning the mere mention of intelligent design in a local classroom, it is time for weeping and outrage.

A not-atypical winter weather forecast for Johnstown: “3-6 inches of snow; 10-12 inches in the higher elevations.” Suzanne and I live on the highest elevation in town: