I was bringing a chair downstairs into our basement. The lass was already down there practicing with her new jump rope. She asked me what I was doing, because bringing a chairs back to where it normally resides definitely needs an explanation.
After telling her simply “I’m putting the chair back” she replied “OH! So you can watch me practice my jump roping.”
Yep. That was it.
About a week ago, I discovered that my primary hard drive was starting to enter its death throws. I was consistently receiving I/O errors and in one case, I had to reboot the system and perform an fsck on the root file system to repair the errors. Fortunately, the system was stable enough for long enough that I was able to come up with a replacement drive.
Yesterday, I set about migrating everything to the new hard drive. FWIW, it’s a 500GB, 3Gb SATA Barracuda from Seagate. Searching around, I came up with 2 articles (here and here) to guide me a bit. The hard part ended up being getting GRUB2 installed properly.
I’m happy to report that I’ve got everything running. After the jump is the process I used. The advantage for this process is that everything is done from the shell. There is no need to separately run an install program on the new drive or to figure out esoteric grub commands. If that sounds good to you, then let’s proceed…
I blogged this from my new Nook Tablet using Connectbot to ssh into my desktop and use my command line blog client, which relies on vi. Yes- I used vi with the Nook Tablet. Seriously, how cool is that?
That said, I won’t be doing it much. Just this short post was an exercise in tedium. The Tablet isn’t made for typing documents. Still, it’s useful enough.
More on that later.
For a change of scenery this week, we took the kids out to an indoor activity slash fun-park place. They’ve got little carnival type rides; games; inflatable slides; games; bumper cars; and games. It’s also got a ticket system where playing the different games earn tickets. The better the game is played, the more tickets are earned. When everything is done and said, the kids can redeeem all their tickets for junk. YAY!!!
But this isn’t about all the games they played or the good time they had or the rides they were on. Actually, it’s not even about the fact that we were at one of these indoor fun parks. It’s about the boy and his inability to accept that he’s going to suck at something the first time he tries it.
Now, to be clear, the Wife and I have no problem with him sucking at things. I suck at knitting and house cleaning. The Wife sucks at woodworking and bread baking. It’s impossible to go through life without sucking at things.
The boy seems to not get this rather banal concept. It was brought into HD-like focus yesterday when I introduced him to ski-ball. Now, you might be wondering how anyone could not have fun at ski-ball. Frankly, until yesterday, I just wouldn’t have thought it possible. That’s why I took him over to play it for a bit. The whole point is IT’S FUN! And just as importantly, it’s fun even if you suck at it.
But the boy proved me wrong yesterday. After showing him how what to do, I gave him 2 tokens to plunk in another machine and play a game. I plunked 2 more tokens into my own machine and started a 2nd game for myself next to the boy. Half-way through my game, I became aware of the fact that the boy was whipping the balls up the ramp at the speed of light, in the process agitating himself into a severe sobbing fit. I stood in amazement and watched him complete his game with tears rolling down his cheeks yelling at the game that it “was STOOPID!!!”
While dealing with his ridiculous tantrum, I came to realize that this is what he does with new activities. He does it regularly in karate when new self-defense techniques are introduced. (I spent this morning working with him on shoulder rolls- he was nearly in tears at several points and nearly quit on me. Fortunately, he finally had some success which led to more success and then suddenly it wasn’t “too hard” and he did 5 on his own. Total elapsed time from start to (successful) end: 10 minutes.) He does it with games on his DS and Wii. The Wife and I can oftentimes hear him upstairs in his room screaming/crying in frustration when Mario keeps biting the big one. He did it when first learning to skate and to play hockey and baseball (No- you can’t hit a homerun with every swing). He did it while learning to read and he’s done it with math as well.
The bottom line is, if he can’t be awesome at “it” right from the word “GO,” he descends into this state of denial, where the game or activity is to blame for his deficiencies at it. Frustration takes care of the rest.
What’s more, unless it’s a DS or Wii game, he will typically choose to avoid the activity for the rest of his life. That’s the point where the Wife or I have to intercede and provide some form of course correction.
The tantrum aside, the most frustrating aspect for the Wife and I is that he’s had enough examples of succeeding after practicing or sticking-with-it that we feel like he should recognize he doesn’t have to act that way. It’s one thing to try something and decide “Meh- not my thing. What’s next?” and quite another to have repeated mental breakdowns because stunningly, he wasn’t perfect on his first try.
It’s tempting to chalk this behavior up to his age and I’m sure it contributes. But he’s been doing it for so long now that I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s just who he is. I’m sure that time will temper his emotions, but more important he needs to learn that first, he won’t be great at anything the first time he tries it; and second, that’s OK.
Thus, his New Year’s resolution. And if he doesn’t learn it this year, well, I’m sure you can guess the rest…
We were out of the house for a bit today and took advantage of the outing by giving the lass an early birthday present: she got her ears pierced.
Via John Gruber, some kind of Twitter-feed compilation of people who were… disappointed with their Christmas gifts.
On my first reading, I thought it they were attempts as sarcasm. By the end, I realized I was wrong. Time to cancel Christmas for these folks.
I’ll be pretty pissed if the kids end up on a list like that.
One gift the boy received was a woodworking kit. It consists of a motor which can be oriented 3 ways, along with necessary supports parts, to operate as a jigsaw, a drillpress or a lathe. Woodcutting capacity is small, as would be expected. The wood that comes with it is pine and it’s all very thin stock. The lathe can handle pieces probably as much as 6 inches or so, though that’s pushing it. Oh, almost forgot, it has a disc sander as well. So make that 4 tools.
Regardless, it’s more than enough to make some simple woodworking projects like small tops, model airplanes, jigsaw puzzles and those wood projects that are slatted together to make dinosaurs or cars or planes. Simple stuff that probably takes an afternoon of effort. (He was wondering if it’s the sort of equipment that “professionals” use- an amusing question considering the table saw and so forth in the garage.)
The boy had some initial enthusiasm for it, but it seems to be waning quickly. We turned a simple top together yesterday, took about 15 minutes to do so, and he liked that. But then we tried to make a slatted plane project and he lost interest in it after an hour or so. We’ve got most of the pieces cut out, but there are some holes to drill before we can start fitting it together. He wanted to finish it tomorrow. Guess we’ll see.
Hard to generalize things like this, as every kid is different when it comes to the whole deferred gratification phenomenon. I’m sure that video gaming doesn’t help in this regard- nothing much more immediate than pushing a button and watching Mario jump. I don’t like to push him about things I’d like to seem him do more of because I believe in the soft sell approach. My assumption (hope?) is he’ll pattern off of me and at some point will come to enjoy the building of a project more than the completing of a project. But I’m also aware that many of the things I enjoy are time consuming and certainly beyond his current attention span.
But more and more, I wonder if that’s just something that is innate to a child. In other words, they can’t be taught to like building stuff; it’s either a part of who they are, or it isn’t and the amount of exposure to it matters not.
Just one of the many unknowns of parenting.
Don’t know if I should be excited the kids made it to 5:45AM before finally screwing up the courage to check out the tree this morning, or if I should be horrified. I’m too tired at the moment. The boy came back up to let us know the big guy had done his thing.
At least the kids are making us coffee. And they’re in a good mood.
For now…
Merry Christmas! To you and yours.
UPDATE:
The presents are opened, the Sun isn’t up yet, 2 cups of coffee…
Megan McArdle links to an article in Slate on the decline of spanking in the US. Both make for interesting reads. Probably the most interesting tidbit is that most doctors and “experts” don’t actually believe that spanking has long term negative effects on kids. Surprisingly, these people often cite themselves as examples of kids who were spanked yet turned out OK. Why isn’t that more common knowledge?
Anyway, I’m familiar with the type of “reward” parenting discussed. We’ve engaged in it a bit, but more I know other parents who employ the technique. I think it has it’s uses, but it definitely has its limits.
For one, I don’t like the idea of setting a paradigm of rewarding behavior that they should do. Kids should help with cleaning up after dinner and gathering laundry and putting clothes away. Brothers shouldn’t beat up on their younger siblings (well, not too badly…). Kids should brush their teeth after breakfast.
Why? Because these are all things they’ll have to do later on. And no one is going to be rewarding them for it, nor is it the sort of thing that is rewarding in and of itself. Life is full of chores. Chores aren’t particularly fun and they never go away. That’s why they’re chores. Rewarding this sort of behavior as a regular thing makes them less willing to do work, unless there’s something in it for them.
Which brings up my next problem with rewarding mundane behavior- the presumption that everything can be negotiated. Or worse, they discover the ability to blackmail. I’ve witnessed on a number of occasions a child work their parents over when the request was something really taxing, like putting on their shoes and coat. Before you know it, the child’s sucking on a juice box and eating a chewy while the parent is putting on their shoes and coat. What lesson was learned do you suppose?
Rewarding does have it’s place, but in measured doses and for truly notable positive behavior. For example, the boy has a temper and the Wife and I have rewarded him a number of times when he’s actually exerted control over it. But for everyday sorts of behaviors, we avoid rewards. Instead, we expect it (the behavior) and make it known that we expect them to behave that way. If we need to nag them, or worse, so be it.
The Wife and I are expecting our gold stars any day now…
The shelf elf’s final observation post for the year. After today, he’ll “mysteriously” disappear until next December.
So, this past Monday I went to take a look at the relatively new KitchenAid 7 Qt Mixer. They’re only available at Williams Sonoma stores for the time being and we have one not too far away. The folks at the store were kind enough to pull out a unit they use for demonstration purposes and allowed me to play with it a bit. Unfortunately, it’s too new to know much about it and I couldn’t mix anything up with it. So seeing it in person is of little utility to rendering a judgement on it. Somewhat ironically, the salesperson helping me revealed she owns a Bosch Universal for her bread baking “kneads”- according to her the unit can handle 5 lbs of flour with ease.
That was the comment that kind of cemented in my mind I’d have to take a chance with the KitchenAid. The Bosch is designed for larger batches of dough, and I typically don’t make such large batches. Most of my recipes are in the 3 to 4 cups of flour range. I do have a white bread recipe that uses 6 cups at a time and a bagel dough that’s similar, but that’s it. (My disappointment in the Pro600 series becomes more evident.) Thus, a mixer after the KitchenAid style is really what was appropriate. Throw in the cookies and baking that the Wife would use it for and that makes even more of a case for sticking with it.
So I walked out of the store with the 7Qt KA. It has a 90-day “no questions asked” return policy. Thus, I figure I’ll put the sucker through it’s paces ove the course of 90 days. What’s more, having un-boxed it, it has a 2-year factory warranty. A sign of confidence in the product I’d say. Either that or they’ve really dialed in the MTBF.
The boy came home from school today tired and a bit cranky. The Wife commented he should go upstairs and take a quick nap or have a snack, he kind of skulked off, prompting her to say:
“He’s tired; he’s cranky; he’s hungry; he’s …. the boy.”
Yep. Pretty much sums it up.
After returned home from my Cub Scout den meeting, I sat down to unwind from the ordeal to hear the Wife say “I’m going to start washing the dishes by hand.” It was delivered in a calm, sincere manner.
Any husband out there should instantly recognize this statement for what it is: a threat. Allow me to translate the above: “I’m tired of the stench from the dishwasher. Fix it, or I’m buying a new one tomorrow.”
So, having spent the better part of 2 hours disassembling the dishwasher in search of “The Source” last night, I can honestly say, should there be a next time, I’ll seriously consider giving in to that threat.
The boy came home from school today to discover that his sister had received a gift from the other girl in her dance class. He turned to the Wife and said, “Mom, I think Santa has a rule about the number of gifts that you get. The more you receive before Christmas, the less you get on Christmas day.”
Subtle.
The Wife replied “Well, I guess after all the hockey gear you received, you won’t be getting much on Christmas…”
“NO. I mean, I didn’t mean that my sister should get less presents… I was just was thinking…” He trailed off into something unintelligible at that point.
The boy came off the ice from Saturday’s hockey practice visibly upset. Watching him for the final few minutes they were on the ice, it was clear that he was upset. He wasn’t skating hard at all and seemed to be deliberately ignoring the drill he in which he was involved. I’d say he was attempting to be provocative. Thankfully, the coach wasn’t biting.
Turns out he was upset because some of the other kids were laughing at him during one of the drills where he was the goalie. He was also upset because they seemed to have targeted him during one of the other drills where they just kept taking him down anytime he got the puck. He didn’t know what to make of the circumstances- other than that he didn’t like them.
For once, I was on firm ground in counseling him. I’ve suffered through similar circumstances in my time and I’d been hoping something like this would happen. Mental toughness is a valuable trait to acquire and there’s no better opportunity than when you’re made an object of ridicule.
The first rule I told him was, when getting laughed at- ignore it. It would be better if he could come up with a witty remark of some sort, but I think that’s asking a bit much from a 7-year old. I explained that if you let your antagonizer see they are getting to you, then it will only encourage them to continue.
The second thing I explained is that, as long as it’s within the rules give back to them twice as hard. If they bump you down, then go knock them down every chance you get. If you sense them coming up to try and take you down, push them away or shove back. Opponents will use whatever they can to gain an advantage in a direct competition, don’t let them get that advantage. I told him if he kept after them, they’d change their tune in a hurry.
But mostly, I told him outside of my advising him on what he could do to combat the circumstances, I told him I absolutely couldn’t intervene on his behalf. I couldn’t go to the other Dad and ask them to take it easy on him or go and talk to the other boys directly. That course would only make matters worse for the boy. There are some fights he has to wage, and succeed or fail, on his own.
He seemed to be intrigued by the advice. Particularly when I told him he could push back. My guess is it’ll take a time or two more before he remembers and gets a chance to really apply what I told him. Hopefully he doesn’t go overboard when he does. But, we’ll deal with that when, and if, it happens.
Reading through reviews of the Cuisinart 7-qt mixer, I stumbled upon a reference to the Bosch Universal Plus Mixer. I’ve searched through several review threads and I’m now extremely intrigued by it. I’ve even watched a video of someone making whole wheat bread that had at least 8 cups of wheat flour. Impressive! Even more so, the specs claim it can handle 15 pounds of bread dough. I’d never try that on the KitchenAid. Even when it wasn’t broken, because that would break it.
My only issue is it seems to be an online purchase. I haven’t found a brick and mortar that has it so I can look at it. The main knocks against it are that it’s not a great general purpose tool. I’ve seen comments that it isn’t effective at creaming sugar and so forth because of the bowl/ mixer design. Of course, in my case the thing will be used for bread dough 90% of the time so that might not matter to me.
The search continues.
If a picture is worth 1000 words, then The Invention of Hugo Cabret is easily the longest story I’ve ever read. Yet, I read it in 3 hours last night. It’s a 500 page story told mostly using pictures, with text adding the dialogue of the characters involved. The book itself clocks in at somewhere over 500 pages, with roughly 80% of them being pictures, all rendered in black and white.
But this isn’t a comic or graphic novel like Watchmen. It’s a unique approach to storytelling via the book medium. And it’s done very effectively, with the opening of the book being the best example.
It opens with pictures of the Moon over Paris to set the scene. As we flip the pages, night changes to dawn and we zoom in on a building which is revealed to be a train station. As we continue to flip through the pages our attention is brought to a young boy, whom looks to be about 10 or so, as he navigates through the station and into the vent system. Eventually, we part ways with him and we are introduced to an old man in a shop who is keeping a close eye on a large clock across the street. The boy is hiding in that clock, watching the old man’s shop. The sequence of pictures that reveals this part is amongst the most clever in the book in my opinion.
To this point, the “reader” has not encountered a single word, save for those in an introduction at the very beginning. We’ve probably flipped through 40 pages of pictures or so and we have now been introduced to the 2 main characters in the story. The reader is now introduced to the initial pages of text related to the narrative. If you’re not hooked by this point, then don’t bother.
The story itself is a simple tale about a homeless boy who has fixated on a quest that he believes will change his life. Hugo Cabret is a talented young clockworker who is rebuilding an unusual automaton. The story takes us through an extraordinary sequence of coincidences resulting in a happy ending for Hugo and the old man. The narrative drew me along easily as interesting tidbits are slowly revealed over the course of the narrative: the circumstances behind Hugo’s homelessness; how he came to reside in the train station; where the strange automaton came from; why he is compelled to fix the automaton. All this is revealed in Part 1 of the book.
Part 2 of the book is everything that comes after Hugo repairs the automaton. A pleasant surprise because my assumption from the start was the story would culminate in the repair of the automaton. When he runs it, it renders a picture with a signature. Resolving the mysteries behind the picture and the signature propel Hugo, and the reader, through the remainder of the story. All along the way, the book seamlessly transitions between pictures and text, sometimes punctuating a scene with pictures, sometimes laying out an entire scene in pictures, sometimes providing a viewpoint of the characters themselves.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a fast, pleasant read for any adult. Because of the pictures, it’s also accessible to younger readers. I showed the boy the opening sequence of the story and he was intrigued to the point of wanting to read it. The story moves quickly and even though it becomes predicable at points, I found the characters interesting enough that I wanted to know how their story ended. While it’s tempting to consider the pictures a gimmick (or worse a storyboard for the movie), I’d say it’s more accurate to think of them as essential to the story in question and actually a clever vehicle for telling the narrative.
Hugo Cabret’s invention is well worth discovering.
It was such a gob smackingly ridiculous accusation, I just turned and walked away from him. Why dignify such a thing with a response?
Last Sunday, the boy had been playing with his DS prior to it being time to go to hockey practice. I’d given him a warning notice that it was getting close to time for him to get ready. Then, the Wife had arrived home and told him it was time to get ready.
He was so upset that he yelled at the Wife, which earned him an early bedtime. That had the predictable consequence of making him more upset. But rather than stop digging the hole he’d made for himself, he redoubled his efforts. So he declared he didn’t want to go to hockey practice.
Since our KitchenAid crapped out and I haven’t been in a huge hurry to replace it with something I’m equally suspicious will give out somewhere down the line, I abused our Cuisinart food processor yesterday to make stromboli dough. While not nearly as convenient as the mixer, it was just as effective at producing an adequately kneaded dough.
I just made it in 3 cup batches, since I didn’t want to beat the motor up too badly. I used a plastic dough blade, put all the dry stuff in, then closed her up and turned it ON, then poured the water in through the shoot. It actually combined the water and flour much quicker than the mixer normally would, with the bonus of not spreading flour all over the kitchen since it’s covered up. Probably took 30 seconds to completely combine the water and flour mixture.
After that, it only took another couple of minutes using the PULSE switch to knead the dough. It wasn’t perfect here, but it was good enough and I was only making stromboli dough so I didn’t “knead” it to be perfect.
Of course, the ultimate proof is in the eating. I made 3 yesterday. Two of which went with the Wife to a knitting party and the last one stayed here for the kids and I to eat for dinner. The Wife’s I filled with a pepper, onion and spinach filling for one and a turkey, mushroom and black olives for the other. The one that remained home I filled with spinach, hamgurg and sausage.
The Wife didn’t bring anything home (who knew knitters were so voracious!). There was only a little bit left of the one the kid’s an I had.
Score one for the Cuisinart.
A couple of days ago, I was trying to update my older netbook, which is now the kids netbook, and I got a bunch of strange errors during the update. A little later that morning, I discovered that my internal web server had stopped working. It’s a pretty vanilla apache install from the debian/wheezy repo. The only mods I’d made were to allow for support of the public_html folder in user directories as well as setting it up for WordPress.
I’d performed an update over the weekend and my guess is that is when it got zooted. When I tried to restart the server I got the following error message:
/usr/sbin/apache2: 1: /usr/sbin/apache2: Syntax error: ")" unexpected
Action 'configtest' failed.
This meant next to nothing to me. I mean, it looks like an error in the compiled image, but that makes no sense. I had an even more cryptic error in the error.log file which I can’t reproduce because I deleted it in the process of getting it running again. But it read similar to the above with a bunch of what looked like Unicode characters after it- in other words, no text but a bunch of symbols. Very weird. Oh, and Google was no help. I seem to be the only one to have encountered this problem.
Ultimately, I was able to get it back by uninstalling and purging all the packages related to apache2. It’s possible it had something to do with the apache2.2-bin package, but I can’t really be sure. All I know is that until I removed everything webserver related, followed by reinstalling, I was unable to get it running again. Before I did that, I archived the configuration directories for apache, php and wordpress so all I’d have to do, hopefully, is replace the stock configuration with my archived settings. As it turned out, that worked.
Ultimately, not a very satisfying conclusion. But it’s running again, so I’ll take it.