Category: Daily Life

Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Science!

As I held infant Amy, rocking her to sleep, I’d talk to her and tell her how much I looked forward to having conversations together. You know the joke: We spend the first part of their lives teaching them how to talk and the rest of their lives trying to get them to shut up. As I held infant Evan, rocking him to sleep, I’d have the same discussion. Eventually they did learn to talk and we’ve had some fascinating conversations.

Today Amy, 7 years old, asked, "What is radioactivity? Is it bad?" So I proceeded to talk to Amy about radio waves, the visual spectrum, light, ear drums, we drew an atom, and a water molecule. She listened and questioned and conjectured. That was fun!

Parenting Tip #423: Use a tape recorder to record a minute of your infant’s sounds every week. Their noises change from week to week and you will enjoy listening to the tape when they are older. Also, they love to hear their own noises so that tape in a Playskool tape player (vintage? Okay.. get a digital recorder) is good for about 20 minutes of babysitting or so I am told. This was some advice from a friend that I failed to follow with some regrets.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Free milk!

This family used to drink roughly 3.78 liters of milk a day. We are down to about 7.56 liters every 3 days. I used to buy our milk at Weigel’s because of those wonderful square milk jugs. Wonderful is a bit double-edged. The milk was impossible to pour unless you bought a special spout and for a time the spouts were unavailable because the factory that produced them burned down. The spout also did not seal the milk leaving it exposed to air in the refrigerator which apparently just doesn’t matter. The good of the square milk jugs was primarily the fact they recycled. You’d return one jug for a discount on your next milk purchase. That program ended and Weigel’s Farms started using the same yellow plastic disposable jugs that the rest of the world uses. To retain customers, they issued loyalty cards so that after every 17th milk purchase, you receive one free and each 17 milk purchases gets an entry into a drawing for a year’s supply of milk…er, 52 milks…a year! bah. Frankly, this card kept me as a Weigel’s milk customer. For that matter, most of my Weigel’s shopping can be directly attributed to that card.

They’ve done away with the punch card and now use a magnetic swipe card. I no longer can glance down and see how close I am to a free milk although it is printed on the receipt. Today I walked in to buy 2 gallons of milk and receipted both free! It was a very odd feeling to walk out of the store having paid nothing. Thank you Weigel’s!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

I juggled last night

I enjoy entertaining with juggling. I also enjoy teaching juggling. Last night I had the pleasure of doing both for a small group of wonderful people, about 15 or 20. The audience makes the show as much as the performer. A tough crowd can be an awkward show. This audience was very receptive as such the show sped by. I normally watch the clock to time the show just right. This time I failed to look at the time. I had a good time that at the end of the show, I became concerned I’d spent to little time performing (which wasn’t the case). I finished by teaching two children to juggle. The joy and happiness from the eight year old girl at learning to juggle is beyond description. Her smile and hug brought this season’s spirit to my heart.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

From the mouths of babes

Dad: "Have a good day!"
Noah, walking to the door: "Will do."
Dad, noting that Noah is wearing a thin long sleeve shirt and no jacket: "Stay warm."
Noah: "I hope so."
Dad: "You do understand that staying warm has less to do with hope and more to do with attiring yourself appropriately in layers, right?"
Noah, continuing to walk to the bus stop: "Yup."

This feels familiar almost like an 8th grade winter ritual.

If you’re gonna to be dumb, you gotta be tough. [Source]

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Dear Dharma and Evan…

Dharma, I know you are a dog and I recognize that your brain may have a short circuit or two so let spell this out for you. Pooping in the walking path is not allowed! You are very funny and obviously have figured my gait out perfectly because your landmines are batting 1000. See if your doggie mind can read my human mind because the mental image I have right now is of a cold, outdoor kennel. Molly knows where to poop in this yard. Follow her!

Evan, I know you are four years old…four and a half to be fair…and the antique, crank out windows in this house have a particularly rewarding feeling to their almost steampunk mechanical opening action. However, when the temperatures at night are dropping to -1.6°C*, sleeping with the window open is inadvisable and does not lend to a friendly electric bill. If this behavior continues, I will have to increase your rent to offset the cost of heating this house. Oh, and you may catch a cold.

*Temperature conversion provided by Onlineconversion.com.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

We used to call it The Internet…now it’s just Google

We’ve been living in the Wild West of The Internet. The Internet used to mean Gopher, Veronica, Archie, Usenet, MUDs, IRC (Fall ’88), and telnet, none of which used a graphical interface. Everything was done from the command line, UNIX’s equivalent of the DOS prompt. Today my children, as most people, live on a tamer Internet and feel that The Internet is something you look at with Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. Chrome users know better. In the past, using a search engine did not mean using Google. Google. How about that Google? Google is doing so well that we have started to aggregate all our services into Google. I know I have. I use GMail, Google Voice, Google Wave, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and so on. All my data is slowly finding its way to a single company, one which I don’t control. That should scare the pants off of us!

In today’s world of collaboration and information sharing, url shorteners are all the rage. A URL shortener takes a long web address and shortens it to as few characters as possible for sending in SMS messages or making the address easier for someone to type. Bit.ly is the forerunner having secured the default url shortener position with Twitter and Seesmic. 3.ly is my favorite. Despite being essential tools, Dave Winer makes a good argument for why these URL shorteners are bad for the Internet and offers a fix to their inherent problem. The concept of a URL shortener is simple. You could make your own URL shortening service and WordPress users could make a URL shortener plugin. If you made your own, you’d be in control of your data; a principle I highly encourage despite housing so much of myself in The Cloud.

Today, Google enters the URL shortening scene with http://goo.gl/ Expect this to take off. Expect some struggling shortening services to close doors causing waves of link rot across the Internet. As Google consumes another popular activity, url shortening, do we take one more step to losing The Internet to The Google in the way that online activity prior to The Internet used to be known as CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL? In 5 years, will there still be An Internet or will we simply connect to The Google?

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

  • Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
  • Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
  • Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

The Google privacy policy applies to the Google URL Shortener. Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.

Update: Interestingly enough, yesterday, Bit.ly announced Bit.ly Pro, a service to use Bit.ly’s software but with your own domain name. Take note, this is still giving your data to a 3rd party (The Cloud) but it is a proven service, with a system with very interesting feedback (statistics), and probably far more scalable than something you could build from scratch. Dave Winer revisits his concerns with Bit.ly in Build to Flip?.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Noisy Bleeping Sheep

It’s 1am and I’m fighting a bout of insomnia. I had a friend years ago who was an insomniac. Sounded great! Stay up all night learn, juggling, and doing. It wasn’t until years later that I learned insomnia doesn’t mean energy. Insomnia can be zombie. Too tired to do anything yet still unable to sleep. That’s pointless because nothing gets done at night nor during the day. I’d rather be awake and alert…all the time. Now where’s my rejuvenation pill that substitutes for a good night’s sleep?