Things have been pretty quiet on this site recently. Not so for the rest of my life!
Here are the two main news items of interest in my life right now:
We're expecting our third child (sometime in June)
I'm starting my own company, moving to full-time in January.
I'll elaborate later, if I ever get time!
I'm not saying I buy their supposed valuation of some obscene billion dollars, but I see what all the hype is about.
Facebook really has built themselves a nice platform. Although there are minor annoyances, for the most part everything is really clean and well put together.
What really interests me, though, is the applications and how they interact so cleanly with your friends and their applications. The apps have built-in viral marketing.
It reminds me of what Microsoft has done with Xbox Live with the arcade, achievements, and online play:
Applications + Other People = compelling application
Applications + Other People + Social Network = compelling application with built-in marketing
Going forward it will be interesting to see how much traction a new application can get, now that users already have so many to choose from. I imagine Facebook can do a few things to make it easier, starting with better searching.
It will be also interesting to see if they are able to really open up their system to the rest of the internet, and let the rest of the internet seep into their system. They really have potential to become the center of one's interaction with the internet.
Possibly my least favorite thing about having kids in school is being sick umpteen times per year, ugh!
My wife is trying to settle on a CMS or blog software for her site, and she is having issues. She isn't super tech savvy, so she wants something that makes it easy for her to do what she wants. It looks like Drupal isn't what she wants. Chances are Joomla won't be either.
Currently her site is a blog that is related at some level to her profession as a childbirth educator, so she's mostly focusing on that aspect. Her original plan, however, had some focus on adding content areas to the site that weren't blog posts, but informational. Perhaps lesson snippets, practice tips, or other stuff related to birth. The blog software she's looking at won't really do this for her, and I'm not convinced the barrier of entry won't be as high as with Drupal.
How long until the average non-programmer will be able to create a site that looks and acts how they want without having to resort to hiring someone to do it for them?
I simply don't get to do my hobbies anymore. Honestly, I had too many to begin with, but I've gone from too many to essentially zero. I still occasionally get to play on my Xbox or watch a movie, but it is infrequent enough to be just so much lip service. I'm going through the motions, and I think my Xbox knows it.
It feels a bit ironic that I'm putting all of these things I know I love to do to the side for a while in hopes that what I'm doing instead will buy me time to spend on them later. Somehow I know that when later comes around I'll be addicted to what I'm doing now instead and never end up going back to those things I'm pining for.
If that is what 'growing up' is, it is pretty depressing.
My last post mentioned Barbie and Disney. As a father of two little girls, I get the joy of being constantly inundated with both of these brands, especially their 'Princess' incarnations.
Both have a large library of insipid, cloying, sexist, patronizing movies, but I was surprised to learn one thing:
I find the Barbie Princess movies better for one reason: Barbie as a princess is always the protagonist, getting herself out of problems and saving the kingdom. Disney princesses are rarely the protagonist, and usually are saved by a prince to become a trophy wife in a far-off castle.
I can't believe I just wrote this post.
Growing up I thought that song was the inner dialogue of a television set, with these words:
You don't have to be beautiful
To turn me on
I just need your body baby
From dusk till dawn
You don't need experience
To turn me up
You just leave it all up to me
I'm gonna show you what it's all aboutYou don't have to be rich
To be my girl
You don't have to be cool
To rule my world
Ain't no particular sign I'm more compatible with
I just want your extra time and yourKids
I thought it was a very thought-provoking piece on the American TV culture... I was a bit disappointed to find out it was just Prince trying to woo every girl on the planet.
Having two young kids it is hard to resist the siren call of the television. When it comes to hearing them whine or fight over toys, or playing Barbie or babies, you quickly start to wonder if it can be THAT bad for them to watch another movie...
Now that they are old enough to reasonably operate a computer, I've been trying to get them to do that more than watch TV. It gives me a break (until they start fighting over who's turn it is) and they are at least doing something interactive.*
What can young kids do on the computer?
There are numerous websites out there with tons of free games your kids can play online. Most of them are Flash, which is great for people like us who run Linux. However, be sure you are running Adblock aggressively or they will be inundated with ads. While I'd like to teach my kids not to be impressionable about advertisements I've found A: I'd rather not have to at all, and B: I can't. Ads are cool to them.
Here are some of my daughter's favorites:
NickJr.com (Watch out for ActiveX games, but most of the videos won't play on linux. This is good)
Playhouse Disney (The princess area draws the girls, but is essentially without content.)
PBSKids.org (This has increased by vast steps recently, but watch out for videos.)
Noggin (A lot of crossover from Nickjr.com, but the videos tend to work better)
Sprout Online (A lot of crossover with PBSKids.org)
Lego (There is even a princess section with decent generic princess content, or at least non-Disney non-Barbie princess content)
Polly Pocket / Barbie (All of the 'everythinggirl' sites are full of unabashed advertisement, I will frequently find the girls watching TV spots over and over again, ARGH!)
Some things about these sites:
Watch out for the video sections. Vege city.
They will browse away, close the window, right click in flash, etc. and need your help. The browser isn't the best platform for kids gaming. You'll also have issues with ActiveX, Windows Media Player, etc. This gets better as time goes on, though, they will figure out what they can and can't do fairly quickly.
Ubuntu has some great kids games in its software repository, just open up the Synaptic Package Manager and search for Pygame and Childsplay. Childsplay is a bit more polished. Make sure you get some extra modules for both to get all of the good games. Childsplay has some great games for very young kids to help them learn how to use the mouse and keyboard to interact with the computer before they graduate to complicated things like using a flash game. Other good ones are Tuxpaint (a paint program for kids) and Frozen Bubble (a bit advanced for my kids still). The quality varies significantly, but there are great free games in the repositories, for all ages.
'Cause letting your play on the computer is WAY better than sitting them in front of the TV... right?...
*Note: be wary of websites, there are many with hidden video sections that just substitute the TV with a 3 inch TV on your computer that shows a 3 minute clip with 2 minute pre and post-roll ads. Some even have video clips of the TV ads that your kids will love to watch over and over again...
I spend most of my time on Linux, I use it at work, I run it on the laptop I'm using to write this, I have it on my wife's computer and my daughters' computer. It simply has huge advantages over Windows:
- It's FREE
- It is easy to administer both locally and remotely
- My kids and wife cant really break anything
- Things typically just work
- Did I mention it's free, and comes with a shit-ton of free software?
I do use windows now-and-then for gaming, though I find I'm using my Xbox 360 for games more than my PC these days...
So why the love/hate relationship? This laptop. I was foolish and bought a new, cutting-edge laptop in the hopes that it would last me a good number of years and be a good development box, since I don't have any very beefy machines at home.
It is the cutting-edge bit that kills me. Tonight, after owning the thing for 3-4 months, I finally have sound. To get it I'm having to run a pre-release version of Ubuntu where random things don't seem to work for me, but I have sound! I've spent 4-5 hours over the last few nights upgrading it and getting it to boot at all, then boot into a GUI, then boot into a GUI that looks at all correct, then reliably reboot, etc... Times like these make me think I should have gotten a Mac... But then I want to do things like run Erlang, and being able to just say apt-get Erlang is just SO EASY.
With time things will just start working on my laptop as people with more hardware skillz and time than me donate their time to help people like me out. Open Source software is a beautiful thing. Hopefully something I work on in the future can go towards paying them back for the work they've done for me.
Ok, not really, but my commitment and dedication to a new project has had an interesting, if annoying, side-effect.
Now that I have demonstrated to myself that I can commit nearly all of my free time to work on something and enjoy it, I am continually finding new things I want to do:
I've had numerous ideas for other projects, but I need to just do one thing at a time.
It has re-kindled my love for learning:
I really want to learn Erlang. I've bought the book, I read the blogs, but I just can't afford to spend the time.
I want to re-learn math. My self-education in computer science has illustrated two things.
- Not taking comp-sci courses and related math courses is hindering my advancement in programming.
- I may have learned some math before, but I didn't really understand it. Now I'm beginning to pick some things back up and I'm actually understanding it-- if because I can approach it from the programming angle.
Why can't there just be about 48 (or more) hours in a day, so I can do everything I want to?
I still plan on putting up all the rest of my OSCON summaries, hopefully I haven't forgotten EVERYTHING yet.
Things have been crazy for me, my typical day is:
5:15 Alarm goes off
5:40 Brew Tea (Only caffeine I will allow myself for the day, stupid addictions)
5:45-6:05 Sip tea, surf the internet, read daily comics
6:10-6:20 Walk to the bus stop
6:20-7:00 Work on my laptop on the bus
7:05-4:10 Work for the man, skipping lunch 4 of 5 days a week
4:20-5:00 Work on my laptop on the bus
~5:15 Dinner
5:45-7:15 Spend time with my two little girls
7:15-8:00 Get the girls to actually go to sleep (read princess books, reassure them there is no such thing as monsters)
8:00-10:30 Either work (most days) or play xbox (tuesdays)
11+ Sleep
Of course some days are slightly different, a couple days a week I get to go to the gym and run, which typically pushes the girl's bedtime back an hour. So far my weekend days are devoted to either guests (frequently) trips to Portland (monthly) or my family. I see myself starting to work on Saturdays soon.
As you can imagine, this doesn't leave much time for writing blog posts, or really doing anything that isn't on the schedule. My neglect of this site and other similar tasks has driven me to make myself an account at Joe's Goals. I've given myself the task of writing a blog post at least three days a week. Lets see how will this motivational tool works...
Here's my current status:
