Last Friday Loken was three and I was fifty plus Loken’s age. We both had lovely birthdays, though I think Loken’s days are all pretty fine.
Loken got some fine presents, a new bone (from Kevin), a new toy (from Kevin’s class), and a new Public Display of Affection from the whole family. Can you spot it in this picture?
You know you are about to talk to a human when you get the warning “your call may be recorded …”. It took about 30 minutes and four different phone numbers to get to that point after our AT&T U-Verse service went out at 4:45PM. A bit over four hours later, we’re reconnected to the tubes.
We have a technician visit scheduled for tomorrow between 8 and 12, but I have no way to tell AT&T that our connection works now. Sigh.
Editorial Ass posts a conversation about becoming a full-time housewife.
RM: I hate this grocery store. It’s ALWAYS packed! I HATE it here. I want to move to a different neighborhood where you can go shopping after 5 pm or on weekends.
YT: I have an idea. How about I quit my job and become a housewife? Then I’ll have time during the day to go shopping when it’s not crowded.
RM: Let me tell you how that would work out. You wouldn’t make it to the store. You would blog, watch Netflix, and not wear any pants. That’s what would happen.
Glad to do my part, here at Netflix. The comments are fun, too, so head on over there.
Hmm, and I’ve been doing my own Fill-in-the-Gaps Project for a decade or so, maybe I should post some of the progress.
Ron Galloway has posted an odd article, What The Sundance Festival Can Learn From TED. Part of the oddness is that I can’t quite tell what he thinks Sundance should take from TED. I think he says that Sundance should be “about ideas” and make the presentations available for free, but that doesn’t really make sense.
Merlin Mann posted about getting better at photography by shooting a lot, and that reminded me of an observation in a photography book I read in high school.
The author observed that the difference between an amateur photographer and a professional photographer was a mile of film. I’m pretty sure this was from The Amateur Photographer’s Handbook by Aaron Sussman. If it isn’t, there was a lot of other good advice in there and the book deserves a link anyway. If you don’t have a calculator handy, a 35mm negative is 36mm wide, roughly 1.5 inches, so that is over 42,000 exposures or nearly 1200 36 exposure rolls of film.
Hmm, 42,000 is awfully close to Herbert Simon’s estimate of the 50-100,000 chunks of information needed to become a chess grandmaster. Simon later generalized that to a “ten year rule”, where ten years of heavy labor are needed to master a subject (for a nice survey, see the Scientific American article, “The Expert Mind”.
We have a very small number of very long queries that are timing out in the search engine, so I was digging through the logs looking at long queries. I found this.
“something that i think will never happen just did and i dont like it one single bit, no not even a drop, and i wish it never did because it just ruined my life and i just want to watch indianna jones”
199 characters. I think I’ll set the limit somewhere over 200 characters. I’d hate to make their day worse.
Tina made an Underdog costume for Loken. You can’t see the blue cape in the photo, but it is there. Loken is a little confused by having fabric on his legs, but he’s putting up with it. The “U” is carefully modeled on the cartoon Underdog. The one in the live-action movie looks different.
In this photo, we see that Underdog has just captured a criminal. There’s no need to fear, Underdog is here!
Yuk. Way too cute. And listening to that song would sap my will to live.
My CPR instructor (USCG Retired) suggested any Sousa march. March tempo is around 110-120 and you’ll be slowing down, so that tempo helps keep you moving. Given the low success rate of bystander CPR (~5%), I’d really rather send someone out to “The Stars and Stripes Forever” than to disco. After all, that duck may be be somebody’s mother.
For the emo or contrarian rescuer, an alternative is Queen‘s “Another One Bites The Dust”. Whatever keeps you going.
I spent an hour plus sitting at the orthodontist one morning last week while my son got started on his second round of braces. I was wearing my Netflix sweatshirt, so I chatted with the assistant about movies, search, Don, and streaming. I pointed out the Netflix support in the new LG Blu-ray player, and the kid in the neighboring chair said, “and the Roku box, we watch a lot of stuff on that”.
I love being in Silicon Valley. Even the middle-schoolers are on top of the tech trends.
Driving back to school yesterday, my son saw a Nissan Titan truck and pointed out that the Nissan car names are “epic”: Titan, Altima, Maxima. Smart guy.
On a search engine mailing list, the topic of simple A/B testing between search engines came up. This can be between different implementations, different tunings, or different UI presentations. The key thing is that users are offered two alternatives and asked which one they like better. One bit of information, this one or that one. If you’ve been to the Kitten War site, you’ll understand why I call it “kitten war testing”. Others may call it a “beauty contest”. They are wrong, of course.
I agree with Plain Jane Mom, this first story, She’s happily married, dreaming of divorce, is about the most depressing thing I’ve ever read about a “good” marriage.
There are so many things wrong about this. Leaving your shoes in the way isn’t even being a good roommate, let alone a good husband. Writing your complaints in O: The Oprah Magazine instead of going to counseling is a cheat. This is isn’t source material, it is your marriage.
Some of it hardly sounds real. Does she really believe that every wife thinks of divorce as a security blanket, that it is “the closely held contemplation of nearly every woman I know who has children who have been out of diapers for at least two years and a husband who won’t be in them for another 30.”?
Of course married people think seriously about divorce, as Ambrose Bierce said, “Who never doubted, never half believed.” But to treasure it? To call it a “secret reverie”? Dear Abby would tell you to get to a marriage counselor. Get some coaching in being human to each other, talking, living. It works, we’ve done it.
After that has thoroughly bummed you out, or perhaps, after you skip it, read John Scalzi on losing wedding rings and his tenth anniversary. It is full of the shared life, secret jokes, and surprises that only happen when you live together and love each other for that long.
Until recently, my only relative with any serious claim to fame was my cousin Sherry, who set the world record in the women’s marathon in 1971. She had a number of “firsts” — first woman with an athletic scholarship at a public university, first woman on the cover of Runner’s World, designer of the first running bra for women with larger breasts (designed after she had kids), and so on. There is a great interview with her (Cheryl Treworgy) that goes over a lot of the early history, including a male runner trying to force her off the road during her world record run. These days, she is a track and field photojournalist, with her photos at prettysporty.com.
I always love the “big dog party” up in the tree at the end of Go, Dog. Go! You can make a reasonable facsimile of that with a backyard pool, twenty-five dogs from Canine Companions for Independence, and enough toys for each dog to carry one at all times.
My (edited) photos from the party are at Flickr, in the CCI Dog Pool Party 2008 set.
For us, the most exciting part of the party was that when Loken needed a friend, he came to Kevin. This first year with Kevin and Loken is critical for their bond, and this was the first time he showed that Kevin was his best friend.
Loken had a good time, but he eventually got a bit overloaded by all the strange dogs sniffing him and and the energetic play. I was sitting with Kevin in a somewhat quieter spot to the side, and Loken found us there. You can see him looking squinty and stressed in this photo. After a bit, he put his head on Kevin’s lap. This is the same as the “Visit” command, but we didn’t give the command. It was Loken’s idea.
Kevin gave him a hug (I did suggest that).
Then Loken decided to hide behind Kevin, where he would be safe.
It was wonderful that Loken went to Kevin. I was right there (taking pictures, duh) and Tina was right on the other side (you can see her in the pictures). We are big safe people and he trusts us, but Loken chose his boy when he needed a hug.
Most Casual Observer 