Month: April 2010

Categories
Family

Riding a Bike

The boy wanted to go for a bike ride today.

Taking him for a ride is a big production for the time being. He’s still learning so he needs training wheels. That means that he can’t really ride on anything other than a smooth surface. Our driveway is all gravel and obvious our lawn is grass- except where it isn’t, which is more than I like.

But I digress…

So I loaded up the Wife’s bike, the boy’s bike and the lass’ bike into the car and we went up to a bike/ walking path up in the next town. The loading also consisted of putting the bike rack on and packing roller blades. Nothing like following up the bike riding with roller blading.

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Categories
Politics

Couldn’t have Said it Better Myself

Professor Bainbridge has a post where he scoffs at the notion that libertarians and liberals/progressives/whatever-they-call-themselves can get together and make nice. There’s a fantastic comment to the post that I wanted to excerpt because I think it’s summarizes my own politics pretty well:

This is ultimately the problem with Progressives. Any real, sustained objection to their clawing for power is going too far. Here’s a very simple idea: if you, Mr. Just, Wise and Thoughtful Liberal believe certain things must happen why don’t you gasp go out and do them yourself? Why don’t you get your own resources together, get your friends together, and use your time, your efforts and your resources to build something useful and convince the rest of us to join in? You fascist Democrats talk about community, but you have no idea what it is: people willingly and freely working together. What you can’t get through your self-righteous head is that freedom is FREEDOM. There’s nothing dogmatic about it. There’s nothing immoderate about it. You’re free to go live in a commune in the hills not making your own food, your own clothes or your own electricity, and the rest of us won’t stop you. Go ahead. We’re that respectful of you that we want you to be happy doing what you want to do. So long as you don’t make us do it, too. But that’s not good enough for you. Because what you want is not the moderate thing: freedom. What you want is the ugly, immoderate thing: power.

If interested, here’s the post.

Categories
Computers Programming Python

Dynamic Modules in Python

I have defined a rather simple class for an XML proxy server to facilitate interacting with a blog. Right now, I’ve implemented a WordPress version so I can work with my own blog. Theoretically, it should be possible to implement other classes specific to other blog types thus making my program more general, and useful to others.

What I hadn’t figured out was how to structure the code so as to minimize monkeying around with multiple files when adding the new class. My goal was to come up with a structure that simply called for adding a module to extend the functionality.

Today, I finally came up with something and it utilizes the dynamic module loading capabilities of python.

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Categories
Misc

Painting Sucks

Especially when it’s a stairwell.

And one wall is 16 feet high.

Up by the ceiling.

And the only option is a paint brush on a stick.

sigh

Categories
Family

Growing Pains

Once aspect of the boy’s behavior that we’re trying to change are tantrums. No, I don’t think we’ll get rid of them entirely. Heck, I still throw tantrums every now and again- but at least I don’t put holes in walls anymore. At least, no other people’s walls.

Anyway, we’d like to start getting rid of 3 and 4 year old tantrum type of stuff, such as the one he had this morning over one of his Lego kits. It’s a small kit which he managed to assemble all-by-his-lonesome out of the box. Unfortunately, the small Lego kits don’t tend to stay together when subjected to actual play conditions. I’ve had to reassemble the darn thing more times than I can count. So this morning, when it fell apart again I decided it was time for him to apply himself and figure it out himself.

He had other ideas.

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Categories
Misc

Droid does…

… go on the wishlist. I can’t really say why, exactly, though. I was never all that enthralled with the iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was neat to play with. Not exactly a toy, but something like that. But I never felt the “I want one” thing kick in.

The Droid was different. I played with it, and I doubt it does anything that the iPhone can’t do, and the more I played with it the more I liked it. I didn’t even try to use it as a phone. Probably should have. Maybe it was the sense that, I could make it mine. As opposed to the iPhone which, by comparison, I’d just be renting from Steve Jobs.

For roughly the same price I could get a netbook- but a netbook won’t fit in my shirt pocket either. Plus, I’ve got one I’m happy with. Can’t say that about my cell phone.

Definitely on the wishlist.

Categories
Computers

Installing ProFont on Debian

I wish I could say it was a rewarding experience, alas, I cannot. At least not without descending into maniacal laughter for a few moments.

One of my personal quirks is an inability to let something go. Especially if it’s computer related. Being unable to just let-it-go has it’s pluses as minuses. On the plus side, I’ve solved some pretty tricky computer related problems and learned some interesting lessons along the way. On the minus side, I can waste hours working the problem, finding a solution and feel like I’ve wasted that time.

This experience goes in the minus column.

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Categories
Politics

Unintended Consequences

Glenn Reynolds has a nice article about some of the early consequences of HCR. He refers to it as a “second order knowldege” problem. I think what he’s talking about is better known as “The Law of Unintended Consequences.” My guess is this is just the opening round of these sorts of adverse, HCR related news. Ultimately, I think this will be a major thorn in the progressive narrative regarding HCR. They won’t be able to point to improvements as a result of HCR because it doesn’t fully kick in until 2014. But between now and then, these sorts of stories are going to be commonplace. The notion that legislation like this is “unrepealable” will be seriously challenged as a result.

Categories
Armoire Woodworking

Hardware In

The handles we chose for the armoire are in earlier than expected. That will mean the end of construction of the lower half. The Wife wants to paint the bedroom before putting it in the room. It’ll be nice to put it in its final resting place.

I already have the upper half figured out in my mind, just a matter of dimensioning everything. Perhaps tonight.

Categories
Family

Trusting the Kids

A couple of days ago, I realized that I can’t trust the lass. The moment came when I picked her up at school. The previous night, she showed me a book that she wanted to bring for share day. I told her no- it wasn’t really a good thing to bring for share day. Then, as she came out of the classroom her teacher handed her the book. My first comment to her was not “Hi” but rather “I thought I told you not to bring that.” She was caught red-handed, and she knew it.

The next question is, how big a deal is this? She’s only 4 after all. Perhaps it’s less a matter of coming to trust her and more a matter of understanding the type of person she’s becoming. In this regard, she’s a little girl that will listen when it suits her. When it doesn’t, she’ll have no hesitation to do what she wants. This behavior isn’t necessarily something to reject out-of-hand. Independence is something to be nurtured.

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Categories
Computers

Debian Updates?

I’ve got apt-mirror setup here to serve updates for my debian based computers here at home. The update script hasn’t downloaded an update for AMD64 squeeze or my EEE laptop for almost a week. I’ve done sanity checks as well by swapping out my sources.list file to pull directly from the debian servers and I get the same result. Very odd for that amount of time to pass with no updates.

I’m assuming that ‘squeeze’ is in the process of being frozen and this has also temporarily frozen the ‘testing’ repo. I actually pull updates from ‘testing’ as opposed to ‘squeeze’ so I’m a little surprised that I’m affected. More than likely this is a consequence of my ignorance regarding the actual management of the repos. I haven’t seen any announcements regarding freezing the current testing code, so that’s my main cause for confusion.

Hopefully we get back to normally scheduled updating soon.

UPDATE: Apparently a main server has failed so updates are frozen for the time being. Thanks to Willian in the comments.

UPDATE 4/4/10: Cool beans- repo’s available again. Back to regularly scheduled updating.