On The Other Hand
Elizabeth's Blog
September 13, 2011
Plants
Sep 12, 2011
Yesterday I was watering plants and Opal was hanging out. I asked what she was doing. "Just eating oregano" she said, accurately.
Tonight, I asked her to go pick me some oregano. After a surprisingly long time, she returned, with spearmint in one hand and chocolate mint in the other. "You didn't say which kind!" she explained. "But these are mint! I sent you for oregano!" She ...
August 01, 2011
Vestibular Stimulation
July 31, 2011
Opal and I had a quiet day yesterday, at her request, but it was really a bit too quiet and she was pretty hyper last night and bad-tempered this morning. So today we took a picnic to the park, and spent nearly four hours. She is now well worn out, and I am sorely missing ibuprofen (to which I turn out to be nastily allergic). We had contemplated adventure, but instead went to a ...
July 30, 2011
Treehouse, part 2
July 30, 2011
The treehouse is rather variable. It turns out it has a swimming pool, with tropical fish in it, in the basement. You get down to it by sliding in a tube, and there is an elevator to take you up. The swimming pool is square, and 3.5 times the largest dimension of our house (the largest dimension of our house is smaller than an olympic-sized swimming pool, but the 3.5 multiplier ...
July 28, 2011
Treehouse
July 27, 2011
When Opal has trouble falling asleep, particularly when she's feeling nervous, we talk about her treehouse. It's her imaginary safe place; it changes a lot but the decorating themes are constant (rainbows and purple) and she lives in it with a lot of pets of various kinds. There is a secret door (at one point she went shopping. To the hardware store to buy supplies for her secret ...
July 10, 2011
Stars
July 9, 2011
Opal and I have been collecting check marks and stars recently. (She has noticed that there is an unfair part of our system; she gets to pick a prize when she gets 100 stars, but I have no defined prizes). We collect these in Chore Pad HD (which is the best star tracking app I found, but has some issues -- in particular, it hates me and frequently crashes when I try to look at my ...
July 07, 2011
Unexpected Insights
The other day, I was listening to Radiolab, in particular to You Are Here and had one of those moments of sudden epiphany. The world changed a bit.
You see, I always thought that those moments, the moments when you are are in some familiar environment, you stop paying attention for some ...
May 05, 2011
Fairy Magic
May 4, 2011
Opal's at camp, but I have a recipe from her. I'm not responsible for any results, particularly because she doesn't specify what it might do, but here is her recipe for "Fairy Magic":
ingredints:
- pencil shavings
- grass and sompthing to hold it with
- a few flowers and a grader
- cilender and a pot of water
April 15, 2011
Fighting Language Change
Look, I know there's no point in fighting language change, particularly if you're arguing for specialist uses of terms that have escaped into the wild.
But sometimes, you just have to do it anyway.
Not every bad thing that can happen is "phishing". If you gave away your password and account name to evil people thinking they were legitimate people, congratulations! You were phished. Be less ...
March 24, 2011
Astrelia
Mar 23, 2011
It rained the other day, and Opal's class had free time inside, so they raided the scrap paper box. Opal found a piece of lined notebook paper with the top cut off, and decided to write a report. First, she felt that the two holes left in the paper were unsatisfactorily asymmetric, so she drew two more to even things out, and colored them in. Then she wrote the following report. ...
March 20, 2011
Spring Lambing
Mar 19, 2011
It's spring, and the lambs are out on the hillside with the rest of the flock. Isn't that cute? Wait, let me show you the wider view of their rural surroundings.
...
It's spring, and the lambs are out on the hillside with the rest of the flock. Isn't that cute? Wait, let me show you the wider view of their rural surroundings.
...
Paul's Blog
November 29, 2009
Seasons
This morning's interaction:
- Me: It's Autumn.
- Opal: I thought it was fall....
- Me: Some people in the U.S. call it that.
- Opal: Well, I call it butter side up. (Turns toast to be sideways) Butter side sideways. (Turns toast to be butter side facing away from her) Butter side forwards!
November 27, 2009
Moving With Opal
As you all now know, life has been somewhat difficult of late and is going to be difficult for us all for a while. Please reach out to Elizabeth and offer her your support.
Over the last few days I've been moving into the new house with Opal. Opal has, so far, found this mostly fun as she's gotten to choose a number of things: her room (pink walls, second factor being the flowers on the light ...
July 06, 2009
Tethering iPhone 3.0
It's well known that AT&T suck. Fortunately, updating carrier settings on the iPhone is not that tricky (and various people have worked out how to generate carrier settings files).
Here's some decent instructions for tethering your iphone
Hopefully, they'll get around to supporting it officially ...
February 07, 2009
IPv6
Cisco has long supported IPv6, but it's unfortunately somewhat of a here and there affair. Tonight's goal involved getting the wireless and IPv6 for clients going on the 877W sitting in our rack; not as straight forward as one might hope. We've had IPv6 (via Hurricane Electric) for a while, but it's been limited to the ...
February 03, 2009
On Rice Cookers And Economic Stimuli
Given that the pot of a rice cooker is the most likely item to be replaced, you'd think that it'd be carried fairly widely. Unfortunately, not so. In fact, I could not only not find any vendor carrying them, I couldn't even find references to the page (maybe my search foo is bad today or something). If you're after a pot for a Panasonic rice cooker, they have a parts and service page you can order from. ...
January 21, 2009
January 05, 2009
January 04, 2009
Change.ORG Video Competition
Metrication made it into the second round on change.org and we're running a competition for the video to add to the entry for the second round.
Metric video competition page is here and the invitation video is below. ...
December 29, 2008
Objects In LDAP Via Java
I've been working on some code to add various UNIXy stuff to LDAP. JNDI has good support for this but a lot of the example code looks like:
Unfortunately, this results in a Java serialized object like the ...
DirContext ctx = new InitialDirContext(env);
// create attribute objects
ctx.bind(name, object, attributes);
on 2010-02-17 at 05:17
