Yeesh!

Note to self: Do not post to your weblog when you are sick! You get all santimonious and stuff. Yuck.

Proud To Be

After seeing so many guileless declarations of patriotism of late, combined with the coercive rhetoric of the flag wavers, I have to take a stand, however small. I am not 'Proud to be an American'. I'm instead proud to be a thinking American. If I do not lead, follow or get out of the way, it is my right as an American, still. I don't simply kowtow to our appointed leader, but think for myself. If the President implies drilling in ANWR is patriotic, I am free to snort in disgust.

If you have a problem with that, then you're not much of an American, are you?

Weekly Update

When I'm under a pile of work, or feeling sick, or nursing a sick family, or just plain lazy (all too often), this weblog suffers. Considering that the last substantive post was two weeks ago, one might wonder what's up. Well, all of the above, really. So here's a quick recap of recent events.

Jean came down with a 48-hour influenza, and I had to take care of her and watch over Kelly when not working. The iMac is working out fine, I'm now at the stage of migrating software over when I discover I need it, about once every three or four days. I've finished my proofreading for the French Ocaml book, and am awaiting a second chapter assignment. I am now fighting something which may only be a vicious cold, but feels more virulent than that.

That's all the trivia dramatically compressed. Slowing down, I gotta note that this weekend was spent very quietly, as Kelly was having one of her more comprehensive punishments. She threw a wobbly at daycare on Friday which apparently lasted nearly an hour and inconvenienced a lot of folks. I tried to 'talk her down' over the phone, but she was inconsolable.

It seems she won a T-shirt from 'the reptile man', a guy who goes around the schools and daycares showing off snakes, lizards, turtles and such. But the teacher asked her not to wear it right away as it would make the other children feel bad. At this, Kelly launched into her fit, giving the teacher little room to back down.

So Jean and I had a talk with Kelly and decided her punishment. One hour of television a day for the whole weekend, and bed early every night. She got really bored, but we also told her it wouldn't be our job to entertain her during that time. I did take her down to Fry's to buy a new computer game, as she went through all her existing games, educational and otherwise, in her bid to fight off the boredom.

Playing the game turned out to be very enlightening, if a tad disappointing. She reached a point where she decided she wanted to go back to a 'save point', and she accidentally saved over the last save point, preventing her from going back. She completely fell apart! She was sobbing, and quickly escalated to jumping up and down, crying and more or less demanding that we magically restore her save point. We told her to calm down or go to her room.

Times like these remind me why I didn't want to be a parent (no, Kelly wasn't a 'love child', we chose to have her, after much discussion). But eventually she calmed down, and worked out a solution (play another game). Still, it made me question just how effective the punishment had been in making her introspect on her behavior. I did tell her that behavior like that was unacceptable. She understands that it's okay to have feelings, and even okay to cry, but not to try to bully others with her tears. But she still loses control of herself. I hope it's just a maturation issue.

Lovecraft Online

Grrr, Arghh!

Mac Daddy

Even temporarily losing the iBook annoyed the heck out of me, so I went digging into my fund bag and found enough money to buy another computer with a USB port (why, so we can print on our new, USB-only-connected printer, that's why!). I ended up buying an iMac, despite being a little peeved at Apple right now, understandably so, I might add. Reason for iMac, I have no expertise on Wintel boxes, and didn't have the time to become expert.

So now we have three Macs in the house: an 'old' Powermac 8500, the temporarily (crossed-fingers) out of service iBook, and an iMac. Jean tried installing one of her study programs on the iMac today, and did a double-take when it finished installing in an eyeblink (larger software packages may take longer, state and local taxes may apply, your mileage may vary). Truth is, even though this is only a single step above the low-end iMac, it's clock speed is over four times that of the Powermac that Jean has been using. So I expect her to be sitting at it quite a lot from now on.

Digital fansubs of anime also run smoother, as I found out when setting it up for this task. I watched episode one of Mahoromatic on full-screen mode and it was sharp and seamless. On my laptop, a file of this size would overwhelm the processor and bus, leading to frame drops and stutter. An even larger file, Knockin' On Heaven's Door, the new Cowboy Bebop movie, was totally smooth. I only watched the opening, but it's a hoot.

So anyway, I've been migrating tools and applications from the other two boxes (nursing the battery on the laptop until the replacement AC adapter arrives). Last night I booted into Mac OS X, the new os with the Unix underbody. I downloaded the free OS X developer kit from Apple, and proved that I can use remote CVS to download the TeX files for the book I'm proofreading. This will hopefully allow me to catch up from behind, as I'm not able to use remote cvs through the firewall at work, and using it on Agora is problematic as I have a 30 gig limit, and the source files for the book total more like 50 gigs. So w00t! I can do my final edits from home!

On the Positive Side

Kelly and I defeated the Sewer Evil King in Okage. He was a giant rat, and the last two times we tried we got defeated, forcing us to start over from our most recent save point. So, HURRAY!

Trick-or-treating was a hoot this year. Kelly decided that shouting 'Trick or Treat!' at every door was boring, so she started asking people if they had any children. Sort of an informal survey. by the end I could tell she was getting tired (aside from the complaints of sore feet) since she actually rejected offers of extra candy (bucket too heavy) and started asking if people had particular types of candy instead of what they were offering.

Of course, nothing tops her 3-year old Halloween, when her deviation from the script was to shout to people "I want candy!"

Curse of Halloween

My laptop power supply died, sparking and smoking at the plug which attaches to the computer when I removed it last night! Now I have to get a new one. Ugh. Doing research on Apple's bulletin boards, it looks like they aren't taking responsibility for this one, even though tons of customers are reporting it. They may bow to pressure and do a recall eventually, but I need a power adapter now, not six months after the battery runs down. And of course I think I'm just outside the warranty period. I'll call 'em and try it, but I expect I'll be buying one myself...