Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Miles:
If King Kong was as big as a crystal, he would use an ant for a telephone and his best friend would be a banana slug and a beetle and a ant and he would use a banana slug for a car and he would be able to carry a ant and he would read a banana slug.
Amy and Miles at the nursery, picking up some plants. Miles picked out one of his own to grow. An attendant putting a bag of soil into our car: “Should I put something down first?” Amy: “No, it’s OK, just throw it in – the rubber mat takes care of the dirt.” Miles, hearing this, takes a step back, cocks his arm, and throws his young plant into the back of the car from six feet away.
Didn’t get around to cleaning the grill at the end of last summer (I usually try to do it once every year or two), and we were treated to a conflagration last night. Actually the fire was relatively small, but thick black smoke was just billowing out — enough to result in neighbors running over to see if everything was OK. Which got me wondering: How often do most people deep-clean their grills? I don’t mean “wire brush the surface” — I mean remove all the pieces and get down and dirty, scraping the Flavorizer bars, catch basin, etc. Or do you just let it burn off from time to time? If you answer, please also leave a comment guesstimating how often your grill gets used.
Walked into Miles’ play area this morning and found a big aquamarine rectangle scribbled in marking pen on the bamboo rug. And an aquamarine ghost drawn on his play table. Uh-oh. But where is Miles? Door to his room closed, a sign. Open it and find him sitting on his bed, evidence grasped firmly in hand. A big fat aquamarine polka dot scribbled on his bedspread. Aquamarine smudges all over his hands, neck, pants and shirt. “Miles, we need to talk about something.” He comes out to the play area and tells us “This isn’t really naughty Daddy, because see, it’s an invention for measuring your feet, like at the shoe store, see?” And he plops his foot down over the rectangle to show me that it fits, so proud. No need recounting the rest of our conversation here.
Spent the morning with Oxy-Clean and Murphy’s Oil Soap, scrubbing. Fortunately kids’ markers do come off with good detergent and a lot of elbow grease.
Miles: Daddy, did you know that knights are brave and strong?
Me: Yes, I did know that.
Miles: Yes, but the most important thing is that knights are borrriiiinnnng.
Me: Where did you hear that knights are boring?
Miles: I heard a dragon say it.
A few minutes later he started bring me O’Reilly books (one on bash and another on XML) and asking me to read them to him. Strangely, he didn’t become bored immediately. Then we tried out a few bash commands. Miles can now do arrow-up, and can cat the root crontab and can type du -h all by himself. I told him he was a Unix Weenie and he went running around the house singing gleefully: “I’m a Unix Weenie! I’m a Unix Weenie!”
SF Chronicle’s Greg Tate pays tribute to John Coltrane on his 80th birthday.
[McCoy] Tyner has said he knew it was time for him to leave the band when he saw Trane bleeding from the mouth while blowing and not even seeming to care. That degree of indefatigable discipline and unbridled passion can still render so many fans of the quartet speechless, enchanted, focused, uplifted. An avowed atheist and libertine friend once told me that when he wanted to hear God, he listened to Coltrane. He was hedging his bets that the religious ardor Trane’s music invoked in him would be deliverance enough for his sins.
Miles and Coltrane share a birthday. On the eve of Miles’ “fourthest” birthday, Miles greeted me home from work with a lovely bush in a rattan basket, so that “When you die and go away you won’t get lonely” (seems to be some Egyptian philosophy going on here). We then talked about life and death for a while, on the way to the park. Suddenly he stopped at a corner, looked around, and asked, “But daddy, why is our world THIS world and not another world?” Always knew kids ask a lot of hard questions, but was unprepared for this kind of cosmological probing.
We’re engaged in pitched battle with a double invasion — raccoons and gophers. Discovered last weekend that the roof of our metal shed was blanketed in raccoon crap, though we have garden hose fights with them a couple times a week now.
As for the gophers, we heard recently that, as vegetarians, they hate the smell of meat, as well as that of feces. So stuffed cat poop and old hamburger into some of their holes. The technique has been amazingly effective (more so than the vibrating gopher stakes we’ve traditionally used), but the neighbors look at us funny. And we’re still seeing some new evidence of their presence. I had thought Amy felt squeamish about the idea of killing them, but that “delicate flower” of mine is full of surprises. From an email I got from her yesterday:
I saw the ground moving in the backyard today, something pulling on the grass from down below. Gophers. First, I clobbered the thing with shovel when the ground moved, but it came up again in a new spot, so the second time, I stabbed it with a pitchfork, and the pitchfork went right into the ground! I think I may have killed it. A very Bill Murray moment for me, minus the explosives.
Maybe nuclear deterrents aren’t off the list after all.
The Solano Avenue Stroll is a massive (and I do mean massive) annual street fair in these parts. You know the drill – a zillion booths, overpriced food, mediocre music (with a few gems in the straw), kook cars, inflatable rides for the kiddos. So dense with humans you can barely move. Miles’ preschool took part in the parade, which meant he and I became clowns for a day. Had the presence of mind to snap a shot when the makeup was fresh.
Having a lot of fun extracting EXIF data from JPEGs with PHP for a special project I’ve been working on lately. A few lines of code gets you something like this:
Continue reading “Solano Stroll, EXIF”
Attended a camp-out with our pre-school a couple weekends ago – Miles’ first night in a tent, marshmallow roasts, hikes, lovely time. Bedtime was interesting — watching and hearing other families’ bedtime rituals in nearby tents. One little guy was melting down for one of those unfathomable reasons only other three-year-olds could possibly understand, and I overheard his father talking him down:
“Hey. Life is easy.”
It struck me as the most elegant, understandable introduction to The Tao you could possibly give a child.
The humming of the home RAID under my desk has been getting on my nerves – enjoyment of music is diminished. Finally won approval to stick it in a closet. Which left the dilemma: Run ethernet across the floor, or drill the floor and run more cable under the house? The simplest jobs turn complex.
First, had to deal with the crawlspace of death — the dusty, low-vertical, lung-compressing passage into the secondary foundation beneath our office. Obtained a 16″ monster boring bit, then faced the question of whether to drill from the top down, risking the possibility of hitting a joist, or to try and calculate the position of joists mathematically, with multiple trips into the hell-hole and back. Decided on the former and got lucky – hole landed neatly a few inches from the foundation. Then the push-pull fun of trying to get enough cable lead on either end, carefully stapling cable to sub-floor under the house.
Finally, the challenge of stripping, arranging, and crimping ethernet cables. Which is tricky enough without a 3-yr-old offering to “help” and climbing your shoulders for a better view. Ended up wasting a pair of terminators, but finally success. Office is both quiet and cable-free.