BrewBlog

Who are these people?

I had an "I'm getting old" moment today.  My friend Shane and I were talking about MySpace for some reason and he was talking about profiles of people he graduated from high school with.  I've only had a MySpace account for a short time.  I've heard so much about it I simply had to check it out to see what the big deal was.  I love the whole "Web 2.0" thing and MySpace is part of that movement.  MySpace has a limited appeal to me but I can see why people dig it so much, especially the younger people that I'm not a part of any longer.  Oh, kids these days.  Anyway, I thought I'd try to do the search where you can find profiles of people you went to high school with.  Interesting. 

High school itself was not that great for me.  I had some good times in that part of my life (I guess) but it was pretty lame overall.  I was a dorky, rocker, goof-ball with zero self confidence.  That's the making of good times right there.  Oh and the acne.  Let's see, what else?  I weighed 65 pounds or something like that.  Girls only talked to me to get me to help them with their test or homework.  I acted like I wanted to keep it that way.  Half of friends in those days were the kids that got into trouble.  I remember Martin.  He was expelled for setting the locker on fire.  He also sold LSD made a bomb and brought it to school.  He showed it to me and I remember telling him that he should probably not show too many people.  He's almost certainly in prison now.  I had a few other friends that didn't make it graduation.  Fortunately my best friends through my senior year more or less stayed out of trouble enough to go to junior college with me.  I'm off on a tangent again....

So I sat down this morning and did the search for people that graduated from Oakmont in 1989.  Ready to be flooded with memories (good, bad and mostly indifferent) I started down the list.  What are these people going to look like now.  Are they married?  Are they gay?  Are they fat?  Bald?  Do they have interesting lives now?  As I open each profile for a closer look I was surprised that I didn't recognize these people.  After looking at a few I double checked my search thinking I surely did something wrong.  Nope.  I quickly glanced at the school info as I opened the profiles, not trusting the search engine.  Who's that ?  Who's that?  I went through all thirty or profiles and remembered two people.  Two people!  Many of the people I looked up had gone the same four years I did.  I either didn't know very many people or my memory is horrible.  I sat in hundreds of hours of classes with most of the people I graduated with at some point.  The good news is that is doesn't make a bit of difference but I was very surprised.  It was almost twenty years ago but still.

Kids Will Eat Their Veggies

I've found the below to be true.  Kids will in fact eat their veggies if you feed them veggies.  Seems simple enough in concept but I often hear people say that their kids won't eat  vegetables.  I don't think that's true and sometime I'll see an article or book on the subject.  People are designed to eat vegetables and unless we evolve to survival on McDonald's, that will remain true.  I'm not writing this post to tell people how to raise their kids.  I just want to provide my own anecdotal information that may help people with this struggle.  All there is to share about it is that if you continuously offer a child vegetables and whatever other naturally good food, they will eat it.  The trick seems to be offering things many times, even if they refuse.  Offering a fruits and vegetables with every meal is important too.  The other key is not giving them poor choices.  My guess is that the biggest struggle is feeding your kids well if you don't eat good food yourself.  Trying to adopt new eating habits while taking on a baby is probably near impossible without help.

Link: Disease Proof: Kids Will Eat Their Veggies.

It is not uncommon or abnormal for a child to prefer a narrow range of foods at a young age. It is also not unusual for parents to be in an ongoing battle to coax their child to eat in a manner they feel is appropriate. Fortunately, it is possible to put an end to the food wars and solve the problem of how to get your child to eat a healthful diet… …

It is not necessary to coax them to eat or to eat healthfully. In fact, battling about food with your child is counterproductive. The trick here is to adhere to this one most important rule: only permit healthy food in your home. Children will eat whatever is available. They will not starve themselves to death; they will adapt easily and learn relatively quickly to like the food that is offered.

I love my boy

We were watching Scrubs the other day (It's a great show).  It was the new episode for the week.  One thing that stood out to me was the brief conversation on the show about how a baby will change your life and how your perspective about everything changes forever.  This isn't new information as everyone knows this about children whether you have children or not.  For whatever reason the show made me think about that again as I often do.  It's something you contemplate when you think about first having a baby, while preparing and throughout the rearing process.

What's interesting and even fun is personalizing that thought process based on your own experience.  You catch yourself thinking about something and then actually putting the newer "baby spin" on whatever it is you're thinking about.  I suppose I'll be somewhat less conscious of this thought process as he gets older and as I get used to the idea of being a father, although I'm pretty sure it's always there, hence the idea of "everything changes forever".  The obvious life changes are easy to see coming even if you don't estimate the impact correctly or completely.  It's an odd combination of mourning the loss of a sense of independence you'll never have again while celebrating the massive positive influence and change it brings.  It's never ending work but it's so worth it it's difficult to describe.

The different perspective though is something I think is more individualized and less easy to comprehend from the outside.  This is what Scrubs was briefly touching on.  For me, the clearest example is my desire to improve my health however I can because I want to be around for as long as I can be.  This is part of the reason I became a vegetarian and began looking more closely at what I put into my body.  I've always maintained fairly healthy weight and tried to exercise but my attention to my overall health drastically changed once I became a father.  Allison has had a lot to do with it too though.  She's helped me in ways I'll never be able to repay or thank enough.  Another perspective is that of having your own family.  I love Allison more than ever simply because she is the mother of my son and is so good at it.  Just when I didn't think I couldn't respect her more we have this great family together.  The bond between us is truly remarkable and difficult to fully comprehend until it actually happened.

Even though we strive for down time and want time just to focus on us sometimes, being together as a family is the best time.  And it's true, everything you think about takes your new family into consideration.  You want to be a better person.  The small stuff is even smaller.  Personal sacrifices are less important.  My sense of purpose is different in that I want Jackson to experience all the great things about life.  You learn, you teach, you learn more.  We often talk about all the things we want to do with Jackson and look forward to how he'll react and grow from each experience.  Another example is my perspective about the surrounding world.  At this point in my life I'm very confident about my ability to thrive and be truly happy in my surroundings.  Now I'm thinking about what things will be like for Jackson when he's five, ten, twenty and so on.  What if we have another child?  What about Grandchildren some day?  I want the world to be a better place for them. 

It's nice seeing this topic on Scrubs, even if just for a moment.  My generation is growing up.  I hear and see references like this on television and in music I listen to and I feel like it's targeted directly at people like me.  It's goodness.

   

Blogging in MS Word

A while ago I read about blogging in Microsoft Word 2007 and was wondering if it really would integrate well. I use Type Pad for my blog (obviously) and have been curious about whether or not this would work. I must say that I'm impressed with it. This is the first time I actually tried it and published something. It's easy to set up and get going. It's clear as to where to put the title and selecting the category is easy. You can manage multiple accounts or blogs, which comes in handy for me because of my blog (this blog) and Jackson's blog. You can publish instantly or publish as a draft. What I like about it is that if you choose not to publish you can simply save a local copy of the document like you would anything else and open it later to finish or publish. The primary reason this matters is because you can draft something offline. You can always type something in many programs and then "cut and paste" from that program into the blogging tool but I really don't like to do that. Once you do that the formatting gets goofy and I want to spend as little time as possible tweaking things for aesthetics but I want my blog to look good at the same time. Just cutting and pasting from Word isn't the best idea.  However, publishing directly from Word seems to work well.

Still, why does that matter? Often times I'll be working on a draft of a blog entry and I'll be somewhere where the wireless network connection is flaky, dropping me periodically or whatever. For example, a route table change can make me nervous because if my browser hangs and I'm in the middle of a post, I can potentially lose it. It's happened and it's frustrating. My work around when it looked as though I was going to lose my connection was to copy the text to the clipboard and then I can always paste it back if I had to start over. This didn't happen often but if I draft everything in Word, I don't have to worry about it all. It's surprisingly good.

When I'm making a U-turn and another car is turning right on a red in the same intersection, at the same time, I HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY!!! Learn to drive, get off the phone, stop eating, pay attention. Idiots.

Is it that hard?  That's all.

Favorite Bands

Here is a list of my favorite bands.  This topic would come up from time to time and whenever asked I would freeze while attempting a massive brainstorm that would leave me staring into the ceiling and the other person wondering what my problem was.  It's a simple question but one that isn't easy to answer on the spot, at least not to me.  Music is important and I don't want to get it wrong.  Now, hyped up on coffee, I've given it some thought and have a result.  Now when people ask in a casual conversation I can blurt out my top ten list like a big dork.  Cool.

This is a top ten list and not an "all time" list.  This is an important distinction to consider.  This is a current list, meaning the bands are all active (as far as I know) and have actually produced something in the last five years or so.  An "all time" list would have all bands and would give me the biggest headache of all time.  That said, here goes....

1. The Mars Volta
2. Devin Townsend
3. Deftones
4. A Silver Mt. Zion
5. Girls Against Boys
6. Queens of the Stone Age
7. Yo La Tengo
8. And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
9. Melvins
10. Nada Surf

Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

I figured I'd like the new Modest Mouse maybe just enough to make it worth the purchase but never expected it to be as good as it is.  My expectations were appropriate considering my limited exposure.  I liked their last one (Good News...) and only heard anything further back a couple times.  "We Were Dead..." is really good.  It's easily my favorite release so far this year although it's been pretty dead in terms of new releases that interest me.  This has been one of those releases for me that has a different favorite as each week of listening passes.  Eventually you end up with more than half the tracks being non-skippers.  It's actually more like 2/3 or better being real winners.  What's exciting now is that I'm motivated to go backwards through their catalog and check out their older stuff and give it more of a listen now that I'm a fan.  I want more!

Computers are not just for geeks anymore

Way back when I was goofing around on my Commodore VIC-20 (early eighties) people were largely unfamiliar with computers.  Usable systems have been around way before then of course but the home use of the "computer" was fairly non-existent for a vast majority of the population.  Another decade later people were learning more and people were getting computers so that they could get rid of their typewriters, which basically meant getting something that cost five times more, came in more pieces and weighed a lot more to do roughly the same thing.  Sure, there were a few people that were doing more with their computers but there were still fewer than five uses for it.  Once Al Gore was nice enough to invent the Internet, computers were quickly appearing in more households.  I remember having a dozen "Favorites" and trying like hell to keep it all organized.  Games were getting better at that point too. 

Outside of the limited home use, computers were for geeks only.  Extreme dorks did programming.  Only nerds took their computers apart.  System configuration was crazy unless you were wearing a propeller hat.  People were still wanting to take the Internet with them on a floppy disk because they didn't get how it worked.  Old people were pissed off because computers were frustrating and clearly for young people.  Retailers and businesses  were beginning to use computers instead of cash registers and employees would stare blankly at the screen, trying to understand the nuances of the system.  Anytime someone would use a computer they would have to think really hard about what they were doing.  A wrong move would mean they were stuck because they broke it when in reality, it was just a black box of sophisticated voodoo that few understood.  Only brainiac types and super nerds could really understand a computer and manipulate it and outsmart it.  Human Factors Engineering was mostly focused to the form factor and basic user interface but didn't extend to integration between applications or components.  This meant an even steeper learning curve for folks that were looking for basic usage.  Everybody knew one or maybe two people that could solve whatever big computer mystery was stumping them.  A few people had e-mail.  There was no spam or pop-up adds or malware.  Computers were still a little scary.

These days most people in the developed world have computers.  You don't have to be a geek to work with computers.  Gaming is very popular and not reserved for the kind of kids that would have played Dungeons and Dragons back in the day.  Retailers and business have adopted them and employees get up to speed with ease.  Even old people are using computers although they still struggle often times.  Everyone knows more than one person that can work well with a computer.  For most of us our lives are tied to a computer enough so that we use them almost every day for one reason or another.  Computer's role in entertainment has made computers almost cool.  You almost have to have some basic computers skills to be employable in a lot of fields vs. being a rare skill.  Young people take their knowledge for granted like us gen xers did so many things our parents had to learn midway through life. 

The guy sitting behind me was having trouble getting connected to the wonderful free wireless and asked me if I was having trouble.  He's probably ten years younger than me.  Our brief exchange prompted me to write this post.  Because of the way he looked and his age, I figured I could troubleshoot his issue more so than had it been the old dude in front of me.  I was right.  What struck me about it was the fact that once the conversation got technical, I got a sense that he would have acted as though he knew what I was talking about even if he didn't completely.  Younger people these days want to know about computers and technology.  He would have been embarrassed if he didn't know what an I.P. address was and how to ping to see if he could connect.  Times have definitely changed.  I wonder if my knowledge will drop off and I'll be in the dark as all generations seem to at some point.  I think not but I'll bet I'm wrong. 

Ralff Karlsson is calling

I have a work office phone as well as work mobile phone.  My work mobile phone number is a number I've had for close to six months now but the caller ID is still linked to someone named Ralff Karlsson.  Oddly, there is a "Rolf" Karlsson at my work but no "Ralff".  I've never heard of the name "Ralff" spelling in that way.   I'm guessing the Rolf Karllson at my work is not the famous Swedish artist with the same name.  He's probably also not the Associate Professor in the computer Science department in Sweden's Lund University.  It's also not likely the same Rolf Karlsson that authored the Canadian dissertation for the Mathematics Genealogy Project entitled "Algorithms in a Restricted Universe".  Maybe it's Rolf Karlsson, the Experimental Fluid Dynamics guy?  I doubt it.  Perhaps it's the Rolf Karlsson from the smash 2003 hit movie "Smala Sussie"?  No, I guess not.  I could go on but why...