KattyWilly

At the New Years party this year I said something that sounded stupid or
perhaps even insulting. Someone was talking about something that that
one of their kids had done that resulted in some sort of punishment. It
made me think about the girls and our experiences over the past almost 4
years that we have been living without Cindy.

Since Cindy died I’ve been criticized for some of the decisions that the
girls and I have made. I say “the girls and I” because for the
decisions that affect their lives directly I try to let them be part of
the decision making process. Things like choosing the style of clothes,
haircuts and makeup all the way up to choosing which High School to
attend. I’m sure some of that is because I have a hard time making
choices. I always fear making the “wrong” choice so much that I can
become static and not make a choice at all.

As I was listening to the discussion about some digression by one of the
other kids I was feeling thankful that the girls have been so for lack
of a better term, well behaved. It’s not that they are perfect kids.
Their rooms get to be a mess, they can sometimes leave the house a mess,
for a variety of reasons they make me crazy at times, but all in all
they seem to always try to do the right thing. As those thoughts were
rolling around in my head I inserted a thought into the conversation.
“I’m so glad that I haven’t had any discipline problems with the girls,
it must be that Cindy did a good job raising them.” Or something to
that affect. I think I intended it as a somewhat self deprecating
comment in that I didn’t think that there was any skill involved on my
part in affecting the way the girls behave. More that they had somehow
learned early on, during the time when Cindy was home with them, values
that have guided them and formed the behavior and personalities that
they have today.

What came out I think sounded to the moms I was talking with more like,

I’m sure glad my kids were raised better than yours.

Even more evidence that my deprecating comment was deserved, I am an
idiot at times. Here I was thinking about how to praise Cindy and her
memory (or at least my fading memories of her), and instead end up
insulting the moms that I have relied upon for so much help these past
years raising the girls.

To the moms I’ve insulted, I apologize. It wasn’t my intention to
have
those thought come out the way they did. I’m not sure there was a good
way to express my feelings in that situation and I think I’ve learned
that in some situations I probably need to spend more time with my mouth
shut than with it open.

Dave
has always liked the thought of having all your data on your desktop, or
laptop. As apposed to the server based applications. In the weblog
aggregator world it is tools like Radio Userland compared to Bloglines,
and Blogger where the data is stored on the server.

Today he mentioned a post by
Paolo that talks about the potential problems of regular folks
(users) having all this data on a local machine and what happens to it
when something goes wrong and it’s all lost.

“I think that one of the main issues with Radio UserLand is that
ultimately the user has to manage an ever growing database on his
computer. While advanced users know how to deal with little problems, do
backups and know that databases (and hard disks) tend to get corrupted,
break or get lost, regular users don’t and they often end up loosing
their stuff.”

I’m a happy Radio Userland user and I feel for the users that regularly
post to the discussion group asking about how they can get their data
back after a disk crash, or a laptop is stolen. There is one thread
going on there right now. If they were savvy enough to turn on the
switches to enable backups to the server then they might be able to copy
all those files and get back up and running. If they didn’t have
backups turned on, or somehow they got turned off at some point (seems
that happened to me when at some point. I recently checked for my
backups and saw that somehow they stopped a year ago) they are generally
out of luck.

I’ve talked about this before in regards to MP3 players and other small,
large capacity storage devices. I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t want
to be a data center manager. The more data that I can keep under the
hopefully watchful eye of a real data center that will journal, and
backup, and RAID and whatever it takes to protect all my data for me the
better. Soon we will have the capability to store Tera bytes of data in
a device that will fit in our pocket. I just wonder if that’s what I’m
really striving for.

Another aspect of this has to do with Dave’s comment about having all
your data with you on your laptop.

“And sometimes you go somewhere where there’s no wide-area Internet,
like on an airplane. This is why people who travel a lot, like Scoble,
like to have all the data on their laptop, available to them whenever
they want it.”

It’s kind of funny that having data available whenever and wherever I
want is the reason I personally like having my data on a server somewhere.

I’m one of those people that doesn’t carry around a laptop, but instead
find myself at different locations on desktop machines wanting to access
my data. I’m at my PC at work and want to get to stuff that is at home
and visa versa. I’m traveling somewhere and want to post to my weblog,
or check on my RSS subscriptions. Things like Bloglines and Blogger let
me check on things anywhere I can get access to a web browser with an
Internet connection. With Radio Userland running on my machine at home
I’m constantly running into problems being able to access my data
remotely. At work the firewalls keep me from accessing my machine
remotely. And when I can get access I have to go through some hoops to
be able to figure out what IP address my cable modem gave my router the
last time it’s lease expired.

I have the same firewall problem with OPML that prevents me from being
able to use the automatic root update process. This prevents me from
using all the cool new stuff unless I go home and do the root updates
and then bring those updated roots to work. This really sucks when Dave
releases a cool new feature like River of News and I can’t try it
because I can’t do the root update to get the new stuff.

After helping my friend go through the process of reinstalling his OS
after a disk crash recently, I was actually relieved that he was an AOL
user as all his AOL “stuff” came back without me having to do anything.

I think that there is a real market for products, devices, services that
will take care of data for me so when my PC, iPod, laptop, hard drive
etc dies I can just get a new one and all my “stuff” will still be “out
there”. Either that or there is a real market for tools that make
managing the little data center in my PC/iPod etc much easier than it is
today. I don’t know if that is RAID or disk mirroring, or nightly disk
imaging, .Mac or what but personally I think that right now it is way
too complicated and requires that I be a part time Data Center manager
trying to keep track of the data on my PC and the PC’s of my daughters.

When Cindy died we had so many people wanting to help us. The families
at schools the girls attend collected donations for us. One of our
friends in the neighborhood brought over the manila envelope that had
all the donations in it. I was so overcome as I opened it and saw what
it was. As I went through the donations there were many checks and one
that really struck me was for $1.00. It wasn’t the amount that mattered
to me it was just that there were so many people thinking about us. So
many people that cared in some way about what had happened to us and
wanted to express that caring in some way.

So when I read this
story on one of the photo
sites I follow I knew what the widow was going through, and also now
understood what all of our friends were feeling during our time of loss.
As much as wanting to give her some money, I hoped that like me, just
knowing that there are people out there that care about her and her
family would give her some comfort and reason to have faith in human
kindness at a time when it is so hard to believe that is true.

If I haven’t already I wish to thank everyone who helped is in one way
or another, and also to thank those who did no more than think about us,
and care.

I think I’ve see this before but I’m trying it out today. iSerenity Makes me think of the
old Seinfeld bit Serenity Now! 🙂

It has sort of ambient sounds and too small images. I like some of
the Environments but some are too “busy” for my tastes. Makes me want
to create my own. I wrote about the sounds of the night a while back
and it would be interesting to have that environment to listen to
during the day at work. Or maybe one of those Sunday mornings on the
patio out front when all the birds in the neighborhood take turns
stopping by the bird feeder.

I wonder if the quality of one of the low end MP3 players with a line
in would be good enough to create my own sound scapes.

I’m going to throw out this idea because it seems like whenever I do
that somebody announces the product. Before the holidays I took a few
looks at the new world of TV’s. The last TV I bought was a bottom of
the line 27″ Zenith. And by bottom I mean bottom, no stereo, no
nothing, just a single coax antenna input and that’s it. It was the
cheapest set in the store at the time.

Since then I’ve received a couple of hand me downs, and the set we have
now is more accurately described as a hand me up. It’s a very nice 30
something inches with multiple audio and video inputs and outputs.
There is something hosed in it that prevents us from using the
Playstation on it but other than that it works great and the price was
right, FREE!

So as I took a look at TVs I waded into a world of HDTV, EDTV, 480p,
720p, 1040i, digital vs. HD, 19:9 vs 4:3, LCD vs. Plasma, vs. DLP vs.
LCOS vs. PRTV, DVI or HDMI, WTF!

I decided it’s a little too early to try and figure out the “best” route
to take in getting a new TV.

What I would like to see is a box, one box, that does these things:

1) Plays DVDs, CDs, VCDs, etc. The basic functions of A DVD player. (I
currently use a $20 Cyberhome DVD player).

2) Has a basic surround sound system with the appropriate outputs to
hook up a set of surround sound speakers. (I currently run the cable
box audio and DVD player audio through my stereo receiver)

3) A cable box. (my current cable box has this)

4) A DVR, PVR or Tivo like capability. (my current cable box has this)

5) A basic AM/FM receiver capability. (back to my home stereo)

6) A couple of inputs for external devices like video game systems or
other video/audio inputs. Digicams, audio from my PC etc. (for this I
use the front panel inputs in the VCR)

With one of these all I need are the output devices, a “screen” of some
sort, and speakers. I could get rid of my DVD player, my old CD player,
my receiver, and the old VCR. And just think it would have a remote to
control all those functions so I could dump the 6 remotes I currently
have and I might remember how to get the thing to switch from TV mode to
DVD mode.

I’m not holding my breath as the Cable box people don’t want you to be
watching DVD’s they want you to pay them for iControl, or pay per view
movies.

I can dream though.

This sounds like a nice
simple recipe for Guacamole. It is Taco Tuesday so I may try to
pick up a couple of Avocado’s on the way home tonight.

I
so want this tool. I was so disappointed when I got to the end of
the article and there was no link to the cool tool Seth had written 🙂

The girls don’t write as many papers as I think they should but when
they do it is always a pain creating the bibliography. And not just for
the reason Seth mentions. Part of it has to do with using online
resources. There always seems to be questions about how to create the
bibliographic notation for websites. Who was the author or editor?
When was it published? Putting URLs into the page without having them
turn hot and look stupid when printed, etc.

“It’s
hot and speaking of hot …”

This has nothing to do with my weather but it did remind me that it’s in
the 70’s this morning and I left the house and forgot to adjust the AC.
It might be warm in da house when I get home.

And here at work people are still bringing in cookies and candies for
the holidays. Now that isn’t going to help anyone who made a resolution
to lose weight this year.

I’m still resolved to get the house in shape this year. I was off from
work yesterday and the girls were in school, why can’t everyone get
their schedules synchronized, huh? SO my plan was to attack the
decorations. But instead I worked for the whole day on court related
crap and still couldn’t get it done. I resolved that I am incapable and
have recruited the lawyers to help me out.

I did get an offer from a friend to help nail down the clean up of the
decorations so I may hold off on that task. (just kidding)

It’s a warm evening here tonight.  The window is open and the dark nighttime sounds are drifting in.  The sound of crickets creates a backgound for the sound of road noises off in the distance as the last chorus of cars and trucks makes their way to their destinations.  It is comforting in some way.  I think it is the memories of the nights of my childhood.  It is almost as if I can smell the sounds of walking around the neighborhood during nighttime backyard camp out sleep overs.