Nicknames are one of those things that can be a blessing and a curse. The rules are really pretty simple- you’re given a nickname. You have no say in the matter. You cannot give yourself a nickname.
I’ve had my fair share of nicknames over the years. Some have been better than others. I think I’ve borne them all with good humor.
Which brings me to, the lass.
The lass had her “Big Show” yesterday. It’s a little recital that her dance teacher has her kids do for their last class. She’s done 3 of these before so she’s a seasoned veteran of Big Shows. She was very excited for this one and decided that she needed a little something extra.
So she decided to apply her own lipstick. The Wife was interrupted upstairs by the cheery exclamation “Mom, I put lipstick on for my Big Show!” She turned around to see a 3 foot tall clown. Miraculously, the lipstick was only around her lips and not all over her face, arms, hands and clothes.
Awesome 3.4 is available now so I decided to go through the update process once again. Aside from the change from the 2.3 version to the 3.x version (you know, where the config file became a program) this was the worst experience of the bunch. Actually, thinking about it- this upgrade was really the worst hands down. At least changing to the 3.x branch came with the excuse of having to learn a programming language.
I had the good fortune to visit with a bunch of the members of the 1963 Dartmouth Ivy League Championship team last night. The football program has been having reunions for all the chamionship teams over the years, attempting to reinvigorate support for a program that has temporarily lost its way. A little mojo must have been passed on since the Big Green won in convincing fashion, snapping a long winless streak.
A few weeks ago we went to the zoo for the last time for this year. On our way out, through the gift shop, we purchased these “pop jumpers.” They’re these neat little toys that you “arm” by turning inside out and then set them on a surface. After several seconds, it returns to it’s original shape with gusto and jumps up off the surface- several feet in some cases. It’s basically half of a hollow rubber ball. Simple minds, simple pleasures.
I mention this by way of introduction because just prior to lunch the kids were playing with these jumpers while I was fixing them sandwiches. The next thing I knew, the lass was crying. I quickly surmised that the boy was not involved. She hadn’t fallen or run into anything either.
What had happened?
For all you parents out there, a question. On “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse”, have you noticed that Mickeys’ and Minnies’ ears always stay in the same position, regardless of their head position? It’s most noticable when looking at a profile of their heads.
With current computer animation capabilities, you’d think this could be dealt with properly.
I’ve added a new page to the site related to kidspeak. Basically, it’s a list of words and mispronunciations the kids use consistently. Some are more amusing than others. There’s a link at the top of this page and I’ll provide another one here.
The lass wanted to make her own lunch today. Since we’ve got some wraps floating around I offered that instead of bread and she accepted.
So what does a 3 year old put on a wrap?
Pink meat(ham), cheese, mustard, mayo…
The Wife hoodwinked the kids into doing chores with her yesterday. They did well, cleaning there rooms including the dusting and vacuuming. It’s a lot more than I ever did…
Apparently, at one point the lass asked for the “fuddernutter.” The Wife was puzzled by the request and replied “Huh?”
“You know, it’s the thing that has the things on it and, um uh it’s lonnnnng…” was all the help the lass could offer.
After a couple more seconds thought, the Wife tentatively asked “You mean the featherduster?”
“YEAH!! That’s what I mean. The feddernuster.”
When I first heard about it, I figured she was asking for fluffernutter.
The story stick ended up being a worthwhile diversion. It’s definitely a technique I’ll use again. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a big advantage of the story stick is that you can make mistakes on IT and still be in a situation to correct them. With it, I was able to layout all 4 posts, 2 sides per post, in about 10 minutes. When I did the original layouts, it took about 30 minutes for matching sides because of all the redundant measurements.
After getting everything marked, I once again laid everything out together for a sanity check. Everything looked good. Finally, time to cut some mortises.
I’ve managed to get uzbl and awesome to talk with one another. Without using awesome-client and uzblctrl or socat. It turned out, upon further examination, that awesome-client is just a bash script for communicating on dbus and uzblctrl is just a simple c program for communicating over a socket.
These findings suggested that if I could get Lua to talk over a socket and if I could come up with a python script to talk over dbus, I would have a more flexible means for getting uzbl and awesome to talk with one another. Luckily for me, python has a dbus module and lua has luasockets.
Just received the following message from my brother:
“She said yes! Officially off the market in Italy!”
Which makes me wonder- is he or his, now, fiance off the market in Italy? What happens when they return stateside?
Either way, congrats to them both. I’m thinking open bar…
The weather up here got cold but we never would’ve known it here in the house. I had been maintaining a fire in the fireplace, until today. The last two days the average indoor temp had to be around 78 degrees. That was oppressive enough that the wife was complaining about the self-induced heatwave. Heck, it didn’t get that warm in the house during the summer. I thought I had figured a way to regulate the indoor temp; obviously I was mistaken. It was actually pleasant to go outside and get a blast of cool air for a few minutes. It’s a pain, but I’ll go back to starting a fire each night until the current cool-snap ends.
Because a boy probably isn’t to interested in hand lotion.
A girl, on the other hand, will take the hand lotion and decide to condition the cat’s fur, in addition to her own hands, with it…
This morning brings news that Rush Limbaugh has been dropped from the group looking to buy the St. Louis Rams. It sounds like the pressure from various NFL owners claiming they would not allow the buy to go through had the desired effect. Rush fans are obviously upset.
I’ll state for the record- I would have been fine with Limbaugh being a part owner in a franchise or the sole owner of a franchise, for that matter. But it’s not up to me. At least, not just me. While free speech is still protected in this country, there is nothing that also says people are free from consequences related to exercising said freedom. Clearly, Limbaugh is suffering some consequences related to his style of free speech.
Perhaps if he had found ways to communicate his ideas without all the bombast his circumstances might be different. Of course, without all the bombast he might not have been in a position to be a part-owner in an NFL franchise.
Glenn Reynolds has posted a couple of items about the 1st grader in Delaware who had been suspended for bringing a Cub Scout pocket-utensil to school so he could eat his pudding. If this is news to you, the nickel version is that the utensil had a small knife(and a fork and spoon) in it and the school has a zero tolerance policy towards that sort of thing. Result- a suspension for a 1st grader who was just excited to have something unique to play with.
All there is to say about this is- what do you expect when policy is followed blindly? People don’t want to have to think or to make judgement calls because nobody wants to be responsible for the decisions and their ramifications. Careers are lost because of that. On the other hand, careers aren’t lost because you followed a policy to the letter. So people hide behind a policy crafted and signed on by everyone so it’s not anyone’s fault per se- it’s the policy, protocol, whatever.
Examples like this that have me convinced that good judgement and common sense cannot be replaced with policy and protocols. The problem is that the former seems to be steadily dwindling while the latter proliferates like weeds. So while this episode should provoke outrage, it occurrence shouldn’t surprise anyone.
The boy had an assembly the other morning. It was a science related presentation with two dancers who described various “motion” related concepts. The name of the act is “Locomotion” and apparently they’re a pretty well known act- they’ve been on some of the morning shows. The performance was interesting as they introduced simple things like wheels, levers and gyroscopes (which isn’t necessarily simple, but it makes for a neat thing to show to elementary kids), all done to the time of a catchy tune. The boy enjoyed it.
At this point, you might be curious as to why I have such intimate knowledge of the performance. Simple. Because I was there with the boy to watch it.
Why?
Had our first fire of the new fall season last night. Our first frost of the new fall season as well.
Coincidence? I think not.
Better than a month into the football season and I have yet to sit down and watch more than 5 minutes of a football game. Does this mean I do, or do not, have a life?
First racquetball match of the fall tonight. Yes, I’m looking forward to it. This might be a point in favor of having a life. Then again, the fact that I look forward to the game might be a point against…
I’ve worked up some python scripts for working with uzbl. They are available for download from here. They are both wxWidgets programs.
The first one, wxuzblAbar.py, is an address bar of sorts for a uzbl instance. It can be bound to a key press with something like the following in the uzbl config file:
bind a = spawn $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/uzbl/wxuzblAbar.py
When launched, it has a text field to enter an address as well as a drop down list for favorite links. In order for that to be useful a file name “favorites” needs to be added to $XDG_DATA_HOME/uzbl. The file format consists of two double-quoted text fields separated by spaces:
"Mutt" "www.mutt.org"
The other file, addFavorites.py, actually makes the “favorites” file that the first script uses. Bind it to a key like this:
bind f = spawn $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/uzbl/addFavorites.py
When the key is pressed, a text box will appear allowing the name to be edited. The next time the address bar is invoked the new link will be in the drop down list.
At this point the only dependency, I think, is socat which is required for wxuzblAbar.py to work. Also, the wxWidgets libraries might come in handy.
One limitation of the address bar program is that is must be launched for each instance. Based on the way uzbl created sockets, it might be possible to scan for all opened uzbl sockets and put them in a list so that a single address bar instance can control multiple uzbl instances. Of course, that might be a bit kludgy from UI perspective, but it’s something to try. Something else that might be more useful is a dropdown list for a history of links. I’m just not sure what would be involved with parsing the history file.