Reality Me

Blog

  • Do the children of today need the OS of the future?

    So how cruel would it be to give a 10 year old boy a computer with Edubuntu instead of Windows? Would it actually be beneficial to him? I think back to my Atari 400 and the numerous Apple ][es and DOS boxes that I came up on and I played games and created databases and understood the basics. I believe Linux will be influential in their lifes and they should be exposed to numerous significant operating systems. In part, that is why I want the children to have a modern Apple in the house. They need to know that Windows is not the only option and they need to know how to navigate each OS. But is it cruel to give a child a machine that does not play the games his brother’s computer plays?

    And yes, I’m thinking dual booting the machine with Edubuntu as the default and Windows as a secondary OS.

  • Facing fears – open the email

    Due to Christmas, illness, and visitors, I have not looked at my email in a week. I am afraid to open it. My gut tells me that it will take me days to catch up and that it will be litered with angry emails wondering where I have been. Honest answers and no overcommitments is the trick to facing these fears. What is the true source of the fear? Opening the email? No. Reading a disparaging email? Perhaps a little. My feelings do get hurt but that’s not really it. Losing a client? Somewhat. I really don’t need to be losing clients. Letting people down? Definitely. I can’t stand not pleasing everyone. Having to face that perhaps I made bad choices in not forcing myself to type between stomach purges and family needs? Yes! That would admit weakness!

    Moving on…

  • Update your marks!

    Incase you missed it, Latte Man has come over from the dark side and converted to WordPress! Visit him at http://tripleventi.com/, and add his rss feed and his comment feed to your readers. Talk to Jon about feed readers.

  • From the mouths of babes

    As part of last week’s aftermath, when we change Evan’s diaper:
    Evan says, "EEeeeewwww!" (before we even remove the old diaper)

  • Welcome 2007!

    So, we had Christmas. It was a great Christmas! We had vomiting. We had fever. We had diarrhea. We had visitors. May our visitors not have our stomach bug.(update: too late) All things considered, that was our only major sickness of 2006. Way to go out!

    Recap:

    • Friday-Sunday- last minutes, wrapping, and cleaning.
    • Monday: Morning of happy children. Visit Great Granny at nursing home.
    • Tuesday: Play.
    • Tuesday night: inverted stomaches. First Noah. Then Amy. Then Evan. The look on Evan’s face as everything came out the wrong way for the first time since infancy was almost precious. Sorta like, "what the h*ll was that!" I spent the night jumping out of bed on the hour to make sure the children weren’t choking in their own vomit.
    • Wednesday: Exhausted. Can’t tell if I’m fighting the bug myself. Tending to sick people and cleaning for Friday’s visitors. We learn that 4 or 5 elderly from the nursing home, including Great Granny, went to the hospital with an intestinal bug.
    • Thursday: Evan and I spend the afternoon at the pediatrician. He sleeps in my arms and I force him to drink 5mm of Pedialyte every 5 minutes for an hour. As closing time approaches the doc shortens our hour and declares Evan on the mend.
    • Friday: Grandparents from Ohio visit. Nanny and Aunt Kelly avoid the stomach bug but Pop gets it. More people from the nursing home to the hospital and CDC style cleanup begins.
    • Saturday: The stomach bug hits me with a vengence and I sleep for 12 hours while Cathy cries upstairs with a migraine cursing my existence.
    • Sunday: Everyone mended, we leave the house for the first time since Christmas and attempt exchanges and returns. Toys R Us says, "Can you jump through Geoffrey’s hoop?" We attempt to purchase missing parts for Tommy’s long awaited computer upgrade (I forgot about the cpu fan (ouch..it is overpriced locally by $10) and he needs the new "standard" psu of 24 pins instead of 20 pins (so naturally we run out and buy a new 20 pin psu…doh!). We all stay up too late playing Monopoly. My wife is mean Monopoly player!
    • Monday: 2007 begins. I start off wanting to feel behind, carrying 2006 baggage but catch myself and refuse to start 2007 on a crabby, unhappy note. This is our New Year!

  • Christmas Eve Is Upon Us – Really?

    It’s going to be a comfortable 13°C today. The sun is shining and there is no chance of a white Christmas this year. We will have rain! So perhaps if we can get this global warming thing under control we can return to having white Christmases!

    Do you have the spirit? Seeing Santa last night was great! The children certainly are ready. I am excited and we have been blessed this year.

    Our tree is a bit barren in comparison to years past at this time. We have only a few packages under the tree for fear of Evan opening them prematurely. So far, only one present has been opened. That was Molly’s doing. She was unhappy that we left her alone last night. The item isn’t damaged and the package was rewrapped unawares to the children.

    Time to do some last minute tiddying up!

  • Santa Lives in Westmoreland

    So being a dad, I had the sudden urge to torment the children with a long drive home so that we could look at lights. I turn into Westmoreland and suddenly see Santa running up his driveway with candy canes in hand for each of the children! As he opened the door to the van Evan puckered up but quickly became contented as a candy cane was presented to him. I think Evan figures Santa is alright.

    This guy was great! I look forward to one day being as creative and taking time to bring such magic to people’s lives. Thanks Santa!

  • unlawful photography

    In Tennessee, you can end up with a Class A misdemeanor for taking a photograph. Now if you disseminated to others it becomes a Class E felony. So, if you take someone’s picture in TN and put it on Flickr you could end up spending one to six years in prison and be fined up to $3000.

    Class E felony
    Not less than one (1) year nor more than six (6) years in prison. In addition, the jury may assess a fine not to exceed three thousand dollars ($3,000), unless otherwise provided by statute
    Class A misdemeanor
    not greater than eleven (11) months twenty-nine (29) days in jail or a fine not to exceed two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or both, unless otherwise provided by statute

    [Source]

    According to of the Tennessee Code Title 39, Chapter 13, Part 6 "It is an offense for a person to knowingly photograph, or cause to be photographed an individual, when the individual is in a place where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, without the prior effective consent of the individual…" This law seems ripe for abuse. I am no lawyer but I find it difficult to accept language like "Would offend or embarrass an ordinary person if such person appeared in the photograph" as definitive. Some people are so shy you could take a picture of the back of their head and they would be embarassed. You could photograph me losing my swimsuit on a dive at the pool and I would not take offense. Two extremes and the law should apply to neither.

    What happens if this law is enacted on a person?

    (c) All photographs taken in violation of this section shall be confiscated and, after their use as evidence, destroyed. [Source]

    I suppose if you were an elected official, or crooked law enforcement agent, and someone snapped a less than complimentary picture of you in a public place, you could enact the law and have the evidence destroyed.

    I also suppose that if my daughter didn’t like her picture on Flickr, she could have her mother arrested and the picture would be destroyed.

    Now, we are on camera all the time! Your bank ATM has a camera that films you picking your nose. Certainly you could expect privacy in your monetary transactions but often this camera is clearly broadcast to a television visible to patrons inside the bank. Retail store security cameras abound. I bet you are unknowingly on hundreds of cameras just walking through the mall. Our lives will become even more filmed as time goes on.

    Allow me to share a not too distance future. Eventually cameras will become so small and cheap that we will have them available as "dots" on a strip of paper not unlike candy buttons. Once peeled from the paper strip the camera’s adhesive backing could be stuck anywhere..a tree, a lightpost, a backpack. The camera will seek out a nearby wireless network at communicate its network ip address to your home server from which you can start monitoring the camera. Children will be able to go to a friend’s house to play and the parents will be able to check in on their child. Video art will change. Privacy will be limited to wireless proof, privacy rooms where signals are blocked, negated, or otherwise cannot get out. Yes, the abuse potential will be huge but the opportunities such technology will create will far outweight the abuse.

    Our paradigm of privacy needs to change. We should not give up our right to privacy but we should not be uptight about having our picture made when we are in public. Instead of trying to create privacy in public or define public spaces as "not really public" we should change our attitudes and accept that when we leave our houses, we will be on film like it or not. We should change ourselves and make sure we are behaving as we should in public instead of crying foul and declaring that your inappropiate behavior should not have been able to be seen on film.

    I had to lookup "unlawful photography" after reading about a peeping tom arrested in TN who "hid a camera inside a binder and targeted women." When I was a teenager, I had this really cool camera lense that took picture at a 90 degree angle to the actual camera. I could be on a balcony and look like I was taking a picture of the ocean while I was really taking a picture of the bikini babe sunning at the pool below. (Yes, I thought it but never had the guts to try it. I was certain they would see the mirror.) I suppose my lense could have landed me in prison! I was too embarassed to photograph people so all my pictures before the age of 20 or so are of buildings and scenes with no people. Maybe our peeping tom was took embarassed to openingly point a camera at people in a public place but really wanted to capture a sample of life at the mall, er, but only the pretty women. Yes, I doubt his innocence. See some interesting comments at the Nashville Scene.

  • Person struck by car at Bearden Middle School

    News status: Unconfirmed. Ambiguous. Second-hand.

    I just received a phone call saying someone (non-specific…may or may not be a student) was struck by a car at Bearden Middle School.

  • One hour and still going

    So yesterday I delivered the client’s machine expecting to quickly pull in the old data. I was hoping for 1 hour and alloted 3; it took all day. We had to get a child to an appointment at 4:30 and at 4:00 I was still downtown watching the progress bar on a data file conversion slowly tick away. The client called at 6pm to say it was still going. Just to add to the fun, their network quit pulling up websites for a machine as I was trying to leave. Guess where I’ll be today!

  • Quote of the Day

    Meter reader: "Wow! Your electricity usage is high. I mean like, this is what a mansion uses!"

  • Bad customer service begets bad service

    So one of my clients call Friday, "Doug, our network is down!" So I drop everything and rush over there as quickly as possible to spend the afternoon tracing through knotted cables resembling a plate of spaghetti and a cluster of switches and routers with extra routers thrown in as leftovers from the previous technician’s troubleshooting attempts. See, everyone always wants to pull in the lowest dollar solution first because any upstart techie is going to say, "sure, I can do that." which has this rippling effect of rising costs and client doubts. When the lowest dollar solution fails, they call in the next higher yet lowest dollar solution who now has to not only solve the original problem but fix any problems created by the previous low dollar solution. The result is that the higher lower dollar solution has to bill more than if they were the first on the job. If that person fails and another person has to be called in, the costs only escalate.

    I still have moments when I will tell a client "I’m not the right person for the job." My father-in-law cringed recently as he overheard a phone call in which I did just that. That said, I also subscribe to the philosophy of "never turn away a sale." The two statements are in obvious conflict. The way to keep the sale and do the right thing for the client is to say "I’m not the right developer but let me run project through someone I trust." That is not always plausible but gives you a billable while knowing that your client will be taken care correctly since you will be managing the work.

    After resolving Friday’s network issues, the client sent their company’s financial computer with me to get a new version of Peachtree installed. After spending the better part of the weekend removing spyware, malware, and viruses, I proceeded with the upgrade only to find it consistently failing. My first round with Peachtree technical support sent me retracing my steps through possible solutions already researched via Blingo. Slowly I began to think I had a bad compact disc.

    I have visited one of the plants that mass produces cds. A cd is created much the same way an LP record is produced. A mold is created. Little plastic pellets are melted into gooey platter. And the data is pressed into the plastic. Yes. I said, "the data is pressed into the plastic." That sounds weird and inconsistent with the cd burners you have in your home computer. A cd writer uses a chemical process. Mass produced cds use a physical process which includes creating pits and lands that reflect the light from the laser differently. When the cd reader detects a change from pit to land or land to pit it tells the computer that a 1 was read. If there is no change, say pit to pit or land to land, it tells the computer a 0 was read. Your cd burner at home removes some the dye in the cd and causes light to reflect or not reflect thus emulating a pit or land. This chemical is prone age which is why a "burned" cd has a shelf life.

    You’ll note the reflective metal (aluminum or gold) of the CD is on the top, under a thin layer of acrylic which is just under the label. The bottom of the cd has 1.2mm of polycarbonate plastic. This is why I cringe when I see someone lay a CD down upside down to "protect it from scratches." The laser focuses beyond the surface of the bottom of the CD and minor scratches on the bottom have no effect while a minor scratch on the top can destroy the reflective surface. Scratches on the bottom can be buffed out while scratches on the top cannot be repaired.

    The odds of getting bad pressed CD are pretty slim. The Peachtree installation disc was just that. Because the odds are so slim, technical support is alway hesistant to send replacement CDs. It took some doing but they finally gave in. There was only 1 file I could not copy from the CD. They would not give in and put that file online for download. That I consider bad customer service. My client understands what has happened but it does not negate the fact that I told them they would have their machine before business opened Monday morning and I still have it on Wednesday.

  • Nice

    A niece

  • Squirrels in the Attic

    Last year we had some unwelcome guests, two squirrels in the attic. I ran us out of the house by converting our home into the sweet smell of my grandmother’s closet. By the end of the summer, the moth ball smell had final dissipated and the critters had not returned. When this year’s cold came, so did our boarders. Eventually I will get them out of the attic.

    All day today I’ve heard scampering in the bedroom. I finally figured it out! We have squirrels in the woodstove! My solution? I grabbed a string of firecrackers, lit it and threw it in. Unfortunately, I have to come realise that my woodstove is more of a crab trap for squirrels than a home. Now I have a trapped and very frightened squirrel. It is Christmas. Maybe I’ll name him Ches and simply light a fire…

    Update for clarity’s sake: For the record, a Fisher wood stove will comfortably house two crazy squirrels and contains a fist full of fireworks very well but will not keep the smell of gun powder from permeating throughout the house.

  • I hurt my wife

    but I got the splinter out.

    So, like, she has been glaring at me most of the day and once barked at me, "are you blogging?!" Obviously something was wrong. So I turned on my super mind reading powers and got nothing. I inquired. I got nothing. I reviewed the day. I got nothing. Finally, I found the instant messenger window that was hidden away that had a message from an hour and a half ago, "would you get a splitter out please?" Note to self: Check that more often.