revmatt

Fragile indeed.

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My daughter is sometimes too much like me. I've written in the past about meaningful names. I am something of an organization junkie so the naming thing sort of goes right along with that. I edit all my MP3 files to list the artists names with their last name first. It's a sickness.

Point being: as we were getting in the car today Boo was carrying one of her many stuffed penguins (not all Tux, but that's how it started) and I asked what his name was.

Boo: Penguin
Me: Like Petey Penguin, or Paul Penguin?
Boo:No, just Penguin. That's his only name. He only has one name: Penguin.
Me: That's easy to remember at least.
Note also that her favorite stuffed animal of all time that she cannot be without is a pink rabbit named Bunny.

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Three days into our vacation the laptop started freezing. Since the whole reason we brought it with us to the beach was so that my lovely wife could be among the first to register for sessions at a conference I placed getting it working high on the priority list. So during naptimes and after the babies went to bed I spent some time working on it. I quickly reduced it to being a hard drive problem of sorts. Fortunately we were vacationing in San Diego, in the Land of Fry's Electronics.

My brother and brother-in-law had ventured there on day two in order to get an Airport Express so we'd have wireless connectivity instead of a single hardwired network link. See? I'm not the only geek in my family. I will also note that my nephew was spending his downtime learning PyGame, which I was rather pleased with as Python is my language of choice.

Not having any tools or install media with me I picked up Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) as well as a multi-head screwdriver with torx bits and an 80G PATA drive. For good measure I grabbed a USB/IDE adapter in the hopes that I could recover my profiles from the dying drive. I at least was able to back up the critical user files to a jump drive.

Taking apart an iBook is not for the faint of heart, as I discovered. I followed the 13 pages of instructions at ifixit.com and managed to only end up with some ugly dings to the case, a dozen ...

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I take a back street into our complex at work that is called, I kid you not, Planned Industrial Drive. It snakes through several blocks of abandoned warehouses in various states of decay as well as a number of active warehouses. While driving past one particularly unpleasant looking building I noted a group of smokers hanging out desultorily on the loading dock littered with discarded office furniture. I thought "Man, that has to be a miserable place to work." As I pulled up to the security gate I realized it was my building.

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My eldest daughter is quite a character. She sings and dances and concocts elaborate stories that her dolls then act out. So a fairly typical 4 year old girl. One thing she learned (FROM ELMO!) is that 'shake your booty' will invariably get a laugh from adults. The other day when she jumped up on the play table and started shakin her booty, I asked "Where did you learn that?" She stopped, looked innocently up at me, and said "Uhm, internet?"

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Last night an old friend and a new one stopped by for a few hours en route to their next adventure. The wonderful conversation reminded me of how much I miss hanging out with the guys from Colorado. Doug has been a mentor and inspiration for me since we first met. He has an amazing ability to distill complex ideas into a few simple sentences and always points me to some interesting new uses of technology. Talking to him and Rebecca all evening I felt a certain sense of ease that I don't often feel in dealing with a lot of people in the midwest.

We talked about a broad range of things, from music to movies to art to politics to family to dreams and it seems we just barely scratched the surface. But as usual Doug has inspired me to be more active in my intellectual pursuits. He would make a good cult leader, and I mean that in a nice way. He's charismatic, grounded, and conveys a sense that everything you are saying is important. Mae and I are working on several different medium term plans that will probably take us out of the midwest and one of those paths could well end up where I would be able to work with him again, which would just be great.

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My lovely wife has managed to put up with me for 10 years today. Happy Anniversary, hon.

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I've been listening to the Chinese Learn Online podcast for about a month now, in my first steps towards learning Mandarin. I did learn a little from a different podcast before we went to China last year, enough to ask a few basic questions and say "thanks" and the like but I had very little ability to understand it when spoken to me. I spen quite a bit of time sampling different podcasts over the past few months trying to find one that really clicked with me in terms of teaching style and variety of accents. A lot of them, like the BBC one for example, are meant to get a business person or tourist through a short trip to China. I'm more interested in really learning the language with essentially narrowed it down to CLO or Chinesepod. I felt like I was getting more out of CLO quicker, so I'm sticking with that one though Chinesepod is quite good as well.

A few things about it that I particularly like:

• they bring in different people with different regional accents
• extensive use of 'listen to this conversation and try to keep up'
• notes, tips, and worksheets

In preparation for my upcoming birthday, I can now say my birthday in Mandarin. It's a mouthful...

wo de shung rì shì liù yuè san shí hào

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The big national exam in China was earlier this month, analogous to the SAT. Millions of students took it and several large national papers highlight the top scoring students on the front page. This is what it looks like when a country values education.

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Historic Photos of St. Louis by Adele Heagney and Jean Gosebrink

As a transplant to St Louis from California I'm not as familiar with the past of my new home as those who were born and raised here. With a background in history I of course sought to rectify that as quickly as possible. I've read several very good books on St Louis and Missouri history and feel comfortable discussing the city with the natives. While I don't have a coffee table, I greatly enjoy a well done coffee table book. I can get lost in photos for hours and was thrilled when the Missouri History Museum had a collection of old photos on display back in 2004. When the publisher offered me a review copy of this book I jumped at the chance.

This book presents a broad look back on over 100 years of life in St. Louis. It is, as a coffee table book, very well made and of high quality in print and binding. Each page presents a sole picture with some descriptive text, enough to stir the imagination and let the viewer get lost in what life was like decades ago. There are of course pictures of the iconic buildings and events but there are also quite a few of the wonderful everyday milieux that make history truly interesting to me. The section introductions are jumpy as they try to describe a decad or two of history in a few sentences. Setting the context for the subsequent set of pictures is tremendously important and it would have been nice for them to be ...

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There are many tools around these days to help the busy person remain organized, taken to the OCD extreme with the GTD movement to which I've aspired and failed. My downfall is the reminders. They pop up to let me know it's time to do something and I have a remarkable capacity to ignore these pop ups. I have scheduled all sorts of routine maintenance tasks as reminders in iCal as well as various important events and projects. A notification pops up and herein lies the real problem: I hate being interrupted when I'm doing something.

I have always hated distractions when I'm trying to focus. Having kids means that's pretty much a constant. So I'm trying to learn to adapt to an interrupt driven life. Step one is I block out time for tasks after the kids go to bed. That eliminates the major class of interrupts though it does constrain those tasks to being things that can be done after dark. It's a start. I'm not sure what step two is...

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Just more proof that Metallica REALLY doesn't get it any more than they did when they went after Napster and alienated huge swaths of their fanbase. Let's see: the going price for a new album on iTunes is $9.99 so Metallica decides to charge $25.99 for digital delivery of the album and $37.99 (including shipping) for physical CD. Right there they are high on crack. Doesn't affect me either way, as I've hated everything they've done since Cliff died.

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As my eldest daughter was leaving the room to answer nature's call I hit the pause button on the TiVo for her. She stopped, turned around and said

Dad, don't do anything stupid.

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A new security/ID card system is imminent (again) so the powers that be are gathering a bunch of our personal info for no readily apparent reason. The PM asked me things like SS#, first name, middle name, last name, address, place of birth, etc. All stuff that should already be on file, but OK.


PM: Is there a suffix on your last name?
Me: No. But my prefix should be Reverend.
PM: raises eyebrow, moves on: Any aliases?
Me: Yes, Reverend.
PM: So that's a no. Address?

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IVR System: What is your destination?
Me: San Diego
IVR System: I heard Binghampton, is that correct?

What. The. Hell. IVR's suck.

*IVR: Interactive Voice Response. Anytime you call the bank, airline, phone company, utility, etc and get send through their phone tree, it's an IVR.

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