On The Other Hand

Elizabeth's Blog

Save and Cancel and

I start things a lot and then cancel them. Or not, as it happens, because apparently, just like I lived in the same house for more than 15 years and still banged my shins on the dishwasher, I cancel out of email messages on my iPhone on a daily basis, and still, every time, suffer confusion about the resulting dialog, which reads "Save", "Don't Save", and "Cancel". Often I stare at it ...

Starvation

Feb 16, 2009

Today was Opal's school Valentine's party, so she had a snack in the afternoon, and they let her eat a piece of chocolate, and yet, when I picked her up, she said she was STARVING and why were we going to the LIBRARY anyway? "Because you wanted to get another Tiger Moth book and the recording of the next book in the Young Wizards series." "Oh. I guess. But I am yearning to eat my ...

Big Numbers

Feb 13, 2010

Opal and Jason were discussing their first computers. "Mine was grey," said Jason. "Mine is green," said Opal, "and it came with games already on it! I didn't even have to go get them!" "What kind of games?" "Well, there's this one with numbers? And you put the numbers in? And then you press the equal sign and it tells you the answer!" That would of course be the calculator. I ...

Alarums and Diversions

Feb 11, 2009

Arnold succeeded in becoming less peaky and Ned sprung him from the hospital today. This went faster than anything else on this hospital visit, and unimaginably faster than the last time we did it, when we waited long enough that people kept coming around to see if they could have the bed for somebody else yet, with varying degrees of sensitivity.

The going-to-the-hospital ...

Update

Feb 10, 2010

Usually, I hate January. I live in the northern hemisphere, it's cold and dark (yes, even in sunny California). Plus my mother died in January (yes, that was more than 20 years ago. Look, I've loosened up about Mother's Day, but January I'm never going to forgive. It doesn't care.) This year, January seems to be spilling over into February.

The good news; hey, that bronchitis? ...

Fair Witness

Feb 1, 2010

Our friend Christine has new poison dart frogs. They are shiny, and blue, and improbable; as an adult observed, they look rather like their fingers aren't even properly finished. Opal observed them closely, and then said "One moved!" "That's how you know they're real," I answered. She contemplated their container. "Well, that one is, anyway." We admired her skepticism. She watched ...

Something Terrible

Jan 31, 2009

Opal: "I'm really tired." Me: "Good, then get ready for bed spit-spot." Opal, winsomely: "Sometimes when I'm really tired I don't have to brush my teeth." Me: "Those are times when you didn't just eat a dried apricot." Opal: "What difference does a dried apricot make?" Me: "They're yummy, but they stick to your teeth something terrible." Opal: "What?" Me: "The dried apricots." ...

Powums

Jan 30, 2009

Opal and I read some Maira Kalman, about Max, the dog poet, and she wrote this poem

I saw Miss Cat
Walking on Miss Catshair
Walking on Mr. Cat's feet
And I'll bet you who you're betted in
Little bed of twine

(Yes, there are three people here, Miss Cat, Miss Catshair, and Mr. Cat. I was taking dictation, and I checked.)

Read to and by Opal recently: I ...

Three Handed

Jan 20, 2009

It is raining here. Sometimes hailing. There was what the locals called a tornado warning, while all the midwestern transplants scoffed and called it a watch. The weather is, all told, nasty. This complicates school, since Opal needs a rain coat, and rain boots, and shoes. Normally the only thing she takes to school is her lunch, so she just carries it, but there's a high risk in ...

Paul's Blog

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!
She's reading this, and mentions "You didn't add the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

School Preview

We've been looking at schools in the area for Opal to attend at the end of the year. Today was the local public school.

A snippet from one of the conversations: Headmistress: We do positive discipline
Elizabeth: Bingo
Other parent: What do you mean by that?
Headmistress: We have a ...

Change.ORG Second Round

Change.org second round voting has begun. ...

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. ...

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:

DirContext ctx = new InitialDirContext(env);
// create attribute objects
ctx.bind(name, object, attributes);

Unfortunately, this results in a Java serialized object like the ...

Java Without Echo

Because it took me ages to find, if you're looking to write a terminal based app in Java and expect to read in passwords, you'll need Java 6 java.io.Console