I was playing a racquetball game when I was around 8. I had only just begun learning to play. I wasn’t particularly good, but better than average. Good enough to think I could play better players and beat them.
I was wrong but I refused to admit that to myself. The result was my calling frequent timeouts and being next to tears in the corner of the court, frustrated at my inability to beat my opponent.
I came up with an improved means of handling my own exception classes. Er, well, improved for me anyway. More capable programmers than I probably do even more interesting stuff.
Got an email this morning about cell phone numbers soon becoming available to telemarketers. So, in a fit of curiosity, I decided to do a little research and turned up this blurb. Basically, the email is a bit misleading. Yes, you an add cell phones numbers to the registry by calling the number. But no, telemarketers are not allowed to call cell phone numbers, or more specifically, they can’t use robo-callers to call cell phone numbers.
So, basically, participation is optional.
There were a couple of articles out earlier this week regarding preschool and kindergarten education and the impacts thereof on the child’s later life. Here is the one on preschool and here is the one on kindergarten.
I’d meant to comment on these, but other duties continually get in the way. The thrust of the article on kindergarten is that a good teacher at that level can make a staggering difference in the future success of the children they teach. The pre-school article links to a study which shows similar findings, but approaches it from a non-IQ standpoint. Characteristics such as self-restraint and perseverance are learned in the early childhood years.
Most of the commentary I’ve read related to the article centers on what these studies might mean regarding public policy. Perhaps we should be spending more on early-years education and the like. But this misses the 800-lb gorilla in the room- what these studies really demonstrate is the importance of good parenting. A point that the vast majority of commentary I read doesn’t bother to make.
Ever since we picked up the new TV, we’ve been considering a Blue Ray player to go along with it. Earlies this week, we finally followed through with a player from LG.
What really sealed the deal, speaking personally, was the extra features of the player itself. We can subscribe to online movies from NetFlix, use Pandora Radio, and several other online features. Obviously, the NetFlix thing is intriguing since for a flat monthly rate, we can watch as many movies as we want. Very cool.
Not that we’ll be watching movies ’til our eyes dry up and fall out, but I suppose we could.
Anyway, the kids christened it with The Sword in the Stone and now the Wife and I are getting our turn with Sherlock Holmes. I’ve also tested the Pandora application and it works swimmingly. We’ll give the NetFlix thing a go in a week or two.
So Alabama is the number one team in the country, according to the preseason coaches poll.
So, given the accuracy of past college preseason polling, I guess that settles it. No need to play the games. It’s all been figured out already.
“My tooth came out!!”
I heard the words and it didn’t register for a second, then she declared “LOOK!”
We’re in the car and the Wife has just called my Mom to check in and chit-chat. We had just finished our biweekly outing where we go to a chiropractor to get straightened out and then go out for a quick bite. The chiro is a good 45 minute drive for use. But then, so is everything else.
The Wife had returned from a trip late last night and was too tired to decide on mundane things like where to eat, so we went to a Mexican joint which happens to be across the parking lot from a Best Buy. After scarfing Mexican we went into the Best Buy to walk off our meal and ogle at cool electronics. Actually, we did a bit more than ogle as we walked out with a Blue Ray player as well as some new DVD’s for the kids.
We had barely made it to the light less than a half-mile from the parking lot when she declared her tooth was out. After overcoming my initial shock at the words, my mind immediately jumped to the only logical possibility- she was pulling a fast one. I mean, it had only been this morning at 8 when she had come down and had me check and verify that the tooth was, in fact, loose. It was definitely loose, but not that loose.
Apparently, the apple was more effective than I had imagined.
Once the reality of the situation struck us, the Wife turned to me with a deadly serious expression and said “I hope the Tooth Fairy is ready.”
“The Tooth Fairy is always ready.” I calmly lied in reply. The Tooth Fairy had been caught with her wings folded this time.
“I just remembered that I have to get something from Kohl’s” she returned.
So as I’m sitting in the parking lot with the kids, the boy starts giving advice on what to do with the tooth, going so far as to offer his tooth box so she would have something to stash the tooth in for the Fairy’s visit. They also discussed possible gifts she might get.
When the Wife returned “empty handed” she let the lass tell Grandpa about her tooth coming out. Then she got to tell Memere and Grandpa as well. So as to insure the tooth’s safe passage back home (after all, no tooth- no Tooth Fairy) she had relinquished the tooth to the Wife who wrapped it in a tissue and placed it in her purse. When we finally arrived home, she was fast asleep.
With visions of Tooth Fairies dancing in her head.
Done.
Finally, at long last, after many false alarms, the lass has a loose tooth. She’s been waiting for this moment for many months now. Watching longingly as her big brother lost one tooth after the other.
She’s been milking it for all it’s worth as well. She wanted to know how she could make it looser. We told her to keep wiggling it and maybe eat something crunchy. She asked if an apple was crunchy enough and when we told her yes, she immediately tromped off to get herself an apple. She ate the whole thing, as opposed to the usual 3 bites and leave it lying as a surprise discovery for the Wife or myself.
She’s also been giving regular status reports. Each time, it’s a little looser. So unless she can detect infinitesimally small changes, I figure it should fall out tonight.
Or not.
A week or so ago my computer failed to boot, giving me an error stating that ‘grub_xputs could not be found.’ My final solution ended up being straight forward and I was up and running again fairly quickly. However, I had a commenter drop by who was unable to resolve the issue on his side, despite trying some grub command-line incantations. As a result, I’ve continued to kinda follow the problem, curious as to a final fix.
I don’t think there’s, as yet, a formal fix. My guess is that it should be possible to fix the grub install with an install image. But I also found this fix which involves using a liveCD. Keep in mind that I have not tried it myself so I can’t vouch for it personally, but I thought I’d point it out for others who happen across this spot in search of some kind of solution.
I’ll note that the solution is not related to the grub_xputs issue. But the end result is a newly installed grub2, which is essentially the requirement to fix the problem.
I finally got around to setting up WordPress on my home server for purposes of tinkering. I decided to install the blog in the public_html directory in my home. The apache2 webserver was already installed and I knew that browsing to the public_html folder worked just fine.
But when I tried to access the WordPress install page, all the browser wanted to do was download it as a text file.
Hmmm.
So I stuck a php file with phpinfo() in the public_html folder and tried to access it. Same result.
OK. So I check for a few things using aptitude and checking the enabled modules in the apache2 setup directory and it looks like everything should work. So I decide to stick the phpinfo() code into a file under /var/www since that’s the document root.
VOILA! The PHP info page pops into view. So, for some reason, PHP is disabled for public_html folders on my machine (a debian/testing installation). Some quick googling turned up the culprit. It was 5 lines in the php5.conf file under the apache2/mods-available directory:
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
<FilesMatch "\.ph(p3?|tml)$">
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "\.phps$">
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php-source
</FilesMatch>
# To re-enable php in user directories comment the following lines
# (from <IfModule ...> to </IfModule>.) Do NOT set it to On as it
# prevents .htaccess files from disabling it.
# <IfModule mod_userdir.c>
# <Directory /home/*/public_html>
# php_admin_value engine Off
# </Directory>
# </IfModule>
</IfModule>
As can be seen, there’s even a handy little explanation! After commenting them out and running /etc/init.d/apache2 restart I was finally able to install WordPress on my home machine. Kinda blew the whole “5 minute install” thing though.
When the boy returned from his sleepover this past weekend, his friend was in tow. One of the great things about kids going to friends’ houses is they come back with all sorts of new ideas about what they absolutely-have-to-have-don’t-know-how-they’ve-lived-without. In the boy’s case, this item turned was his friend’s Nintendo DS.
What was amusing was that his friend decided to be helpful and suggested that the boy ask for it for Christmas. After all, that was how his friend had obtained his DS. They then proceeded to argue about how Santa got the DS. On the one side was the boy, insisting that Santa’s elves made the DS. After all, that’s what the elves are for, right? For his part, his friend was very confident that Santa bought the DS, because there had been some sort of sticker on his when he got it. The lass was in her brother’s corner, but I think she would have been willing to switch given a more convincing case.
I was asked to moderate, but chose not to since stuff like that is way above my pay-grade. Although later, I wished I said that Santa probably has his elves purchase the DS from Amazon, that way the elves have more time to build other stuff. That would have been a nice way to split the baby.
The Highlander just passed the 100,000 mile milestone. We hit it just at the horse farm at the beginning of our street. It’s been a remarkably trouble free 100,000 miles. Although it’s been leaking transmission fluid lately- so that needs to be addressed if we want it to make it for another 100,000.
Life as an SAHD isn’t that boring.
Honest.
The Kickoff Classic is roughly a month away. Yes, I’m rounding down. So sue me. Would you rather it were farther away?
Thought not.
We got home mid afternoon yesterday after a lazy zag(or was it a zig?) through New Hampshire. The Wife got to see the brick-and-mortar version of a couple of her favorites sites, Patternworks and Keepsake Quilting. Other than that, the drive home was uneventful. It also lacked the punch the drive up packed. There’s just no comparison between the White Mountain skyline and, well, any Boston area skyline.
The boy and the lass had each had there own big events to anticipate. The boy was going to sleep over at a friends, while the lass was going to be an ‘only for a night.’ Neither could really contain their excitement. They were both extremely helpful unpacking the car- not wanting to jeopardize their opportunities.
Dropping the boy off was uneventful. His friend was having a birthday party. The boy, for his part, couldn’t wait to be rid of me. There was no hesitation or second-thoughts about being away from home for the evening. I barely got a ‘Good-Bye’ out of him when I left.
The lass was in her glory for the evening. She had Mom and Dad all to herself and she took advantage of it. Particularly with regards to the Wife. Lot’s of reading and ‘playing dolls’ and other girl stuff.
The boy arrives home some time today around lunch. No calls from the other parents which either means that everything has gone just swimmingly, or the combination of the two kids together has resulted in full-scale destruction of that immediate area. I think that would have made a noise, so my money’s on ‘a good time was had by all.’