Month: September 2012

Categories
Family

Sunny Cat

I snuck out for awhile tonight to get in some sparring practice at the dojang. At the time, the Wife was helping the boy finish his homework set for the week (things went much better this time around) and, naturally, wanted some focus time with the boy. This meant the lass needed to be kept busy.

She’s been playing on the computer making pictures using the Paint program on Windows. So I told her if she made me a picture, I’d post it on a website somewhere.

She made me a picture, called Sunny Cat. So here’s me, keeping up my half of the deal:

Categories
Admin Notweet

Blog Theme Updated

The theme we’ve been running here, Mystique by digitalnature has undergone a number of improvements since I originally installed it. Once I started playing around with some of the other site settings and the like, it was inevitable that I’d take a look at the theme.

To make a long story short, I’d modified the original theme code when I started running it and, foolish me, didn’t do so with the services of a VCS. Therefore, I knew upgrades would be a bear. So, I avoided it. The site didn’t seem to be suffering.

But the new twitter widget had some issues and the updated version of the theme seemed like it would be worth spending the time bringing it up. I still liked the look, so I’ve gone through the process once again. The nice thing this time around is the theme provides an area for my own CSS modifications, so I didn’t have to touch the original code base.

Well, almost. But that’s fodder for another post.

Suffice it to say, the updates aren’t an exact duplicate of what the site was, but it’s pretty close along with some minor improvements I made (using VCS this time). There’s still the search and Twitter feed and tabbed widgets for looking at a tag cloud or archives or what have you. One thing I have removed the links I had earlier- they cluttered things up and weren’t really necessary.

Leave a comment if you notice anything hinky that I missed during the upgrade. Otherwise, back to normal blogging.

UPDATE:
Alright, couldn’t help myself. I’ve now modified the nav button on the right to remove the text as well as adding the Twitter button. I tried it on my test blog in the house and asked the boy which he preferred. This is it, so blame him.

Categories
Family

Adjustments for The Boy

We now know the pattern for the boy’s homework: he receives a packet on Monday which he then has to turn in on Friday. Each packet consists of math, spelling, reading and writing- all to varying degrees of intensity, or required effort.

Or whining.

The boy at least understands that the work has to be done. When he brought his first packet home, he sat down and got to work on it quickly, figuring he would knock it out in plenty of time for Friday. He ran into some headwinds related to the reading and writing portion of the assignment and got frustrated. I was able to work him through it though, and his math and spelling he didn’t have any issues with.

This week has been different, and it’s only Tuesday. Once again, he sat down and did the math portion of the homework. But the reading and writing section is giving him fits.

And, to be clear, that’s OK. He hasn’t done any writing to this point, and until he’s had some practice with it I don’t think it’s unreasonable for him to be a bit bewildered about how to approach a writing assignment.

But what’s not OK is the miserable attitude that his frustration brings out. When the Wife suggested he try writing a rough draft, he balked at the idea of doing twice the work, snapping at her and stomping off. When he finally did follow her advice and asked me to proofread it, I tried to offer some suggestions (totally meaning to disrail him and make him miserable- that’s what we parents live for after all) he got mad again, declaring he couldn’t do the work.

So it went for the evening. He would start to work on it, then we’d offer some suggestions and he’d go off the deep end, becoming nasty and irritable.

The Wife took a final shot from him and decided she’d had enough, refusing to help him anymore. That, of course, got him madder and more upset. Now, everyone hated him and no one would help him. The long sob story had begun. We ended up putting him to bed early as a result because there’s only so much verbal abuse that can be tolerated before enough-is-enough. Blowing off steam is one thing, he had pushed it into different territory.

After a quick discussion with the Wife, I decided to summon him back downstairs for a Talk. Not, The Talk, just a Talk. I’m sure it’s the last one I’ll ever have to give…

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow, but suffice it to say that I explained that the Wife and I were going to be damned if we had to deal with him like this every week with each new homework set. I told him we were there to help him, that we didn’t expect him to be able to do it on his own, yet, but he had to stop with the attitude and that he had to start owning up to his behavior. Now. If he didn’t, then his martial arts belt-advancement was going to be extended because we will give him poor marks for attitude on the parental evaluation his school give parents when the kids are ready to advance to a new level- he’s attained a level where any poor marks will hold him back a month.

To his credit, he listened without getting defensive or displaying more attitude. He went back to bed and the Wife and I sat down and breathed for a few minutes.

Afterward, she asked me “Do you think it will work?”

“No,” I told her. But this is one time where I hope I’m wrong.

Categories
Family

I Question His Judgment

This parent inhales:

I swear I am a more loving, attentive and patient father when I take my medication as prescribed. Perhaps this isn’t surprising. As anyone who inhaled during college can attest, cannabis enhances the ability to perceive beauty, complexity and novelty in otherwise mundane things (grout patterns in your bathroom floor, the Grateful Dead, Doritos), while simultaneously locking you into a prolonged state of rapt attention.

He’s got a medical marijuana card to help with his stress. The stress is a result of living in a 2-income family in an expensive city.

I won’t say I’m speechless, though I don’t really know what to say. On the one hand, why not move somewhere less expensive and give up the job? On the other hand, who the hell am I to tell this guy what to do. Let’s leave it at, I won’t be using this method any time soon.

I do wonder, what’s this guy gonna do when his oldest puts 2-and-2 together?

hattip: Patterico

Categories
Family

Hands On with the Lass

The Wife wanted the kids to vacuum this morning. The lass immediately volunteered to do the hardwood portion, leaving the area carpets for the boy.

So the lass did her ‘vacuuming’ while the Wife ran an errand with the boy. I was poking around on the intertubes at the time, so I wasn’t exactly paying attention to quality-of-performance on the lass’ part.

When the Wife arrived home, I was quickly updated on that point when the Wife asked me “Did she vacuum? It doesn’t look like it…” Sure enough, dust bunnies rolled like tumbleweeds across the hardwoods. Somewhere in the distance, that whistle from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” quietly sounded. A mouse in a serape and a hat appeared riding a cockroach. Across the floor, another mouse stood precariously on a wood chip with his head in a noose fashioned out of dog fur hanging from a corner of a baseboard heater…

Back in reality, rather than get upset and start yelling, I opted for a more direct approach. Inconvenient to me, but more likely to get a point across. I went upstairs and retrieved the lass from her room where she was listening to one of her audiobooks that she’s heard approximately 100 times. By the hand and without a word, I led her down the stairs.

She didn’t like that one bit. She wasn’t sure what was up, but she knew she wasn’t going to like it. She fought me a bit even on the steps, but I didn’t yell and attained a bit more cooperation when I calmly told her that she could get hurt acting that way on stairs. Her brow furrowed, she trudged downstairs behind me. While she’d stopped physically resisting, her verbal resistance, “I don’t need you to hold my hand!”, served to inform me she was still not liking this one bit.

I walked her over to the still setup vacuum, placed her hand on the handle, placed my hand over hers and assumed a position behind her. We then turned on the vacuum cleaner and I slowly and methodically demonstrated how to vacuum the whole floor, with her present the entire time.

She fought me the whole way. Complaining I was holding her hand to tight; telling me she already knew how to vacuum (I merely replied “All evidence to the contrary.”); saying she’d already done that part. At one point, she spied a dustbunny across the room and wanted to go right over to hit it with the vacuum. I gently redirected her and explained we would get there in a bit. Finally, she said she got it so I let her try a small area.

Clearly, she didn’t get it, so I resumed my training.

I’m not under any delusions that she can now properly vacuum the floor. But if I continue to make the job so pleasant for her, I figure the message will sink in sooner than later. At least, that’s the plan. If one of us has to vacuum anyway to get the job done properly, we might as well make the most of it.

Categories
Misc

Pistorius Had It Coming

I never made any comment about Oscar Pistorius during the Olympics because, well, I just didn’t feel it mattered that much. But I’ll do so now because of this. In short, Pistorius was beaten in competition by someone with better prosthetics, and he didn’t like it. (hattip: Althouse)

Pistorius should not have been allowed to compete in the Olympics, because it should be obvious to everyone that he doesn’t belong in competition with non-disabled athletes because there is no clarifying purpose to his competition. The whole point of competition is to clarify who is the best. When a variable like prosthetics are thrown into the equation, that distinction has been clouded because everyone will suspect the prosthetics of having given an unfair advantage.

It’s unfortunate that he doesn’t have lower legs, and it’s fantastic he’s been able to push the envelope as far as he has. But if he’d actually been able to medal, how could anyone escape the conclusion that he was there only because of his prosthetics? We already know he has a different set of prosthetics for competition versus his normal life- that right there should be all we need to know that his track performance isn’t entirely tied to his training.

That’s what the article demonstrates about competitors with prosthetics- they can be gamed by equipment selection.

What will the Olympics do when the next Pistorius comes along at 6′ 5″ with prosthetics that give him (or her) a shot at a medal? Because believe you me, the only reason for the lovefest with Pistorius at the Olympics was because he was a complete non-threat for a medal. As soon as that changes, you can bet your bottom dollar that the other athletes will complain, loudly and often. That’s the nature of the athletic competition at that level.

The Olympics, and other current world-level events, should craft a simple rule that prohibits competition with assistance of any sort. Life may not have been “fair” to Pistorius (whatever that means), but spreading that “fairness” to those without disabilities doesn’t improve competition. It complicates it to the point of making it meaningless.

Categories
Misc Notweet

This Shouldn’t be Tweeted

Somethings don’t need to be tweeted, like this post. I’ve added a “Notweet” category and configured the plugin to not tweet posts in that category. The question is, will it post it because it’s also in another category that can be tweeted?

UPDATE:
And the verdict is, it works!

Categories
Family

A Wonderful Morning

Anyone out there thinking about kids are welcome to come spend a morning here, chez SAHD. That ought to fix ya.

The boy and the lass were at each other’s throats almost from the get go this morning. First, it was the boy lobbing snide comments as they were getting their breakfasts together. Those had the lass screaming at him to stop.

Then, while helping with lunches, things started getting physical. The lass started lightly kicking at the boy, who then started pushing her around. When the Wife told them to knock it off, the boy started mouthing off to her.

“It’s not my fault!”

“She started it!”

“Why do I always get in trouble?!?”

“Why can my sister do things to me and I can’t do them to her?!?”

“Why do you hate me?!?”

Frankly, it’s way too much drama on three-quarters of a cup of coffee. Even a large cup.

So, both of them were given early bed times- and it wasn’t even 7:30 yet.

The punishment only elicited more howls of favoritism and indignation. So the Wife through in no morning TV, just for good measure. She was taking no prisoners this morning.

Then, after a brief period of detente just prior to heading out to school, the boy found out the lass had looked at his library book. Apparently, he’d forbidden her form doing that. Under what authority, I don’t know- but he felt he had the ability to do that. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that he might as well have drizzled chocolate syrup all over the book.

That launched the “Copying Game,” which the boy always goes to when he really wants to get his sister’s goat. Predictably, the lass obliged and was screaming at him to knock it off, receiving his soft mimics in reply every time.

They are both at school now. And the house is quiet, easily the best thing that’s happened so far.

Categories
Misc

The Future of Cable

There are a bunch of interesting articles over at Wired about the cable industry. The first one is about how the industry is slowly changing, the second could be my own blog entry lamenting the declining value of cable service, the third is about how carriage fees (and ESPN) make cable subscriptions so expensive, and the fourth is about different media streamers for those out there interested in cutting the cord.

I think the ideal situation is one where cable companies become bit haulers, providing access to a data pipeline that can be used by the customer to access what they like, be it phone, TV or Internet. And really, with services like Hulu and Netflix, TV and Internet are becoming one and the same anyway. Heck, even live programming is available from sources like ESPN3.

This reduces the headaches for cable companies because now, all they need to worry about is providing their pipeline to as many eyeballs as possible for the best value. They no longer have to worry about striking deals with content providers (like HBO and Disney) because all the providers need is a website to offer their content. In essence, the cable company is relieved of it’s middle-man role.

Another interesting consequence is that potentially anyone is a content provider, since it’s not just the Disney’s of the world that have websites. It only costs about $10 a year to own a domain and another $50 or so per year for a webhosting service (or the cost of maintaining server equipment if self-hosting a site). Thus, the barriers to entertainment entry are lowered a notch because the upfront costs for getting involved are reduced to maintaining a domain and it’s content be it video, photos or text.

Under this arrangement some pretty large revenue streams for content providers disappear, so don’t expect it to happen any time soon. Most likely, cable viewership would have to really start to crater (ie, the market disappears) before something like this could become a reality. Another possibility is that some upstart network becomes a hit streaming their content for a minimal fee (ie, a disruption from below), circumventing cable providers in the process by adopting a streaming-only approach. If that happens, then I could see the whole thing, as it currently stands, coming apart pretty quickly.

Categories
Admin

Twitter Enabled- I Think

So I spent the day tinkering some more with the site. What can I say? ‘Tis the season, or something like that. Actually, it was roughly 3 years ago around this same time I went live with this thing, so why not?

Anyway, there is now a Twitter widget over there on the sidebar (which seems like it’s getting crowded) which should display any Tweets by yours truly. That, of course, necessitated setting up a Twitter account. In the end, neither of those posed much of an issue.

But figuring out a way to connect the blog and my Twitter account was something more of a challenge, mostly because of the rather dizzying array of options. In the end, I went for what looked like the simplest, most complicated setup I could find.

First, I installed WP to Twitter so that posts here should automagically become Tweets over there. That process was pretty straight forward, though I’ll likely continue to tinker with some of the settings as I learn what the heck it’s doing. The documentation for the plugin is excellent and up-to-date.

The bigger challenge came about because of URL shortening. The WP-to-Twitter plugin will shorten URL’s for the tweets if configured to do so. With only 140 characters to work with, that seemed like a good idea. After a bit of research, I finally opted for the YOURLS approach, which means I’m hosting my own URL shortener (sorry, it’s just for me). Getting that set up took some time, but I was able to manage it- including setting up a database, users, passwords and all that fun stuff. The documentation provided for YOURLS is excellent as well, which was a tremendous help.

Once I had it working, the final trick was to enter the proper information into the WP-to-Twitter setup. I had some trouble getting path information correct for the shortener and then was tripped up by having the wrong shortening service selected. But once I got that straightened out, my second ever Tweet confirmed I’d finally managed it. Actually, it was more like my 10th tweet, as it took several attempts before I finally got all the configuration parameters correct. I did a little pruning on my Twitter stream to get rid of the extraneous ones.

Anyway, this here post should result in my 3rd ever Tweet, and after that blog tinkering should be stopped for awhile.

Categories
Misc

Red Obesum

Only because it’s done better than I’d expected, here are some pictures of my red desert rose. I recently re-potted it and figured it would go into shock. Much to my surprise, it’s thrived on the change and this is the best it’s looked.

Categories
Admin

We Are Mobile Enabled

None too late, I finally took the time to setup a mobile version of the site this morning. Thanks to the WPTouch WordPress plugin, it was a painless operation.

I’d been looking for awhile for a way to give the site a mobile version, WPTouch hit my main desires the best. I didn’t want a separate mobile site, it needed to be as simple as possible (but no simpler) for configuration, the site itself should be minimalistic for ease of loading and there should be a reasonable upgrade path if my desires grow going forward.

If you don’t like the mobile look or just prefer the desktop site’s look, there should be a switch at the bottom of the page to turn off the mobile site for your device.

Also, use the Menu button in the header to navigate to other pages or to check out site categories or site tags.

Feel free to comment on it with suggestions and impressions.

Categories
Admin

Rotated Pictures Should be Fixed for iPad

If you’ve been using an iPad or iPhone with Safari to view the site, then many of the images have likely been screwed. Turns out it was a metadata problem and I’ve finally fixed it.

In a nutshell, I pre-process most of the pictures to keep the filesizes reasonable. I also have to rotate certain pictures when the original is taken with the camera oriented vertically. In these cases, certain metadata is present that Safari processes and causes it to display the picture incorrectly. The fix is simple enough- strip the metadata from the jpg file.

The magical incantation is this:

mogrify -strip picture.jpg

If there are a bunch of pictures spanning multiple folders, try this:

find ./folder -name '*.jpg' | xargs mogrify -strip

The command strips all of the metadata that causes the problems.