The Blog of Harald

Movies for me to see this winter season, in no particular order:

* “Peter Pan”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/peter_pan/
* LotR:Return of the King
* The Maxtrix: Revolutions
* The Cat in the Hat
* Master and Commander
* “Looney Tunes: Back in Action”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/looneytunesbackinaction/trailer/
* Alien: The Director’s Cut
* “Timeline”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/timeline/ (I loved the book :-)

Too many to see with my hectic schedule, ’tis true…

[ _update_: the article is “now available online”:http://www.moneysense.ca/planning/education_planning/article.jsp?content=20031107_143425_800 ]

Back in June, my wife was approached by a journalist, writing an article on ”how to get value for money when you send your kids to private school” for “MoneySense”:http://www.moneysense.ca (a Canadian personal finance magazine). My wife agreed to be interviewed, and she and the author had several conversations. Over all the experience was quite positive. The author was genuinely interested in the subject, and was friendly and helpful.

In early August, MoneySense asked if our family would agree to appear in photos accompanying the article. My initial inclination was to say “No”; as (with good reason) I do not trust the mass media. My children attend a small school; all of the staff, and most of the parents, know my kids. I was concerned that associating our family with a potentially controversial article might cause problems within the community.

However, our experience with the author had been excellent; I like the magazine (I’ve been a subscriber since it was launched); and we thought it would a cool experience for the kids to appear in a magazine, and have a nice picture to frame and hang up. So in the end, I decided to take a chance and accept the invitation.

Sadly, my worst fears were confirmed. When the “issue”:http://www.moneysense.ca/magazine/columnist.jsp?content=20030924_140642_4024 arrived, I opened it to find a beautiful, 1.5 page photo of my children next to the sensational headline:

p(center). “10 Things Private Schools *Won’t* Tell You”:http://www.moneysense.ca/planning/education_planning/article.jsp?content=20031107_143425_800

(Won’t was highlighted in red). I was shocked. Then I was angry; what a completely ridiculous title! The article itself is even-handed and thought provoking; it certainly does _not_ contain an exposé! As far as I can tell, nobody was hiding anything! I have no idea what the editors were thinking when they chose the headline for the article.

Any positive experience this might have been for my family was completely destroyed by that one decision. I certainly can’t display it that way; I don’t even want to give out copies to the grandparents! Staff at the school feel betrayed; they went out of their way to be helpful to us and to the magazine (including allowing the photo shoot on school property). Thankfully people in the community have mostly been sympathetic; they understand that the editorial process was out of our control. And for what little it’s worth, the kids liked having their picture in a magazine; at this point they are too young to understand my frustration.

I made the mistake of ignoring one of my personal rules of life: never, _ever_, have dealings with the media. The best intentions will always be corrupted; the correct answer is always “*No Comment!*”.

I will remember that in the future.

Mmm. Maps of the Internet. I still have my collection of old NSFnet maps lying around on disks somewhere…

ThinkGeek :: Internet Map

It was a gorgeous night on Hallowe’en in Toronto. We had kids show up in groups of 10-20, with long pauses between them (up to 15 minutes), so during one of the pauses I dragged the camera and tripod outside to play. After my wife got home she had play too; I think we filled up the memory card on the camera…

The cfrq.net Photo Gallery :: Hallowe’en 2003

I’ve messed up my shoulder a bit, probably by “sweeping”:http://www.leasidecurling.ca/ improperly. So I’ve been cutting down on the computer use a bit to give the shoulder and arm a rest. Unanswered e-mails are building up on schedule…

So the integration team, including a swarm of HR people, arrived on Tuesday morning to give us three days of training on the company organisation, philosophy, practics, policies, and procedures. There were also IT people running around setting up e-mail and teaching us about IT services. Somewhere in there we managed to deal with a couple of customer issues. In short, it was busy.

My brain is completely fried; I think we just tried to pour a gallon of information into my cup-sized head :-).

Everyone was friendly and the meetings were light; there was lots of laughter. So far, I’m happy about the assimilation. It’s nice to be working for a company that’s not going out of business. We’ll see if I remain that way after we move to our new location in December…

There are 46 people with my last name in the company directory!

I’m going to bed.

Fascinating. As soon as I figured it out, I read the rest of the paragraph as fast as I could, which was pretty close to normal speed.

bq. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

The implications for my son are, well, frustrating. He’s seven, and he’s left handed, so learning to read and learning to spell are both slightly harder for him than for righties (according to unspecified research :-).

There was other research recently that shows that dislexia doesn’t manifest in other languages the way it does in English; I wonder if this spelling result holds true across languages, or if it too is a property of English?

(I got it from “Joi Ito’s Web”:http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/09/14/ordering_of_letters_dont_matter.html).

From ryochiji’s blog:

bq. I accidentally ran over my PowerBook with my dad’s SUV today.

bq. It’s not very often that someone gets to say that. But perhaps what’s even more surprising is the fact that I’m writing this on that very same PowerBook. Hold a 12″ PowerBook G4 and you can just tell it’s sturdy. It’s thin, but not flimsy, and the aircraft-grade aluminum case makes it feel like a lump of metal, rather than a sophisticated high-tech gadget.

If I ran over my Acer, there’d be a pile of pieces on the ground. While the lid is wrapped in metal, the rest of the system is plastic case and layers of circuit board…

Spider Robinson has “a rant in today’s Globe and Mail”:http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030908/COSPIDER08/ about the dismal state of science fiction. The question:

bq. Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?

I think there are several reasons:

* Science Fiction isn’t fantastic anymore.
* Good stories are about _people_, not technology.
* Most of the interesting ideas have been used.
* pessimism and disillusionment.
* The distinction between “Science Fiction” and “Fantasy” has been blurring.

Good science fiction is about creating a fantastic setting (Moon colonies, space empires, unusual environments, etc.), and then writing about how people coped with, and adpated to, scenarios in those environments. Many of those stories have been done already. The relatively small leaps in tech that used to be interesting aren’t so fantastic anymore; we’re absorbing so many radical changes in our real lives, and are often unhappy about them. Modern life is about recessions, and megacorporations controlling our lives, and war in the middle east; we’re not dreaming nearly as much as we did in the heyday of Science Fiction.

In some modern SF, the science or technology is so complicated that half of the book is spent explaining it (instead of advancing the story). Robert Sawyer’s books are a notable exception to this trend, IMO :-). Either that, or a minor technological gimmick becomes a critical plot point.

I’ve found myself reading more fantasy than SF recently. Partly because that’s what is _available_ these days (good SF writers are harder to find, and aren’t writing as much), anad partly because that’s where the good writing and character development are right now. The SF I’ve been reading are people like John Barnes, Steven Gould, Lois McMaster Bujold; people who haven’t forgotten that the science and technology are _backdrops_ for the stories, not the stories themselves…

There was a huge rainbow in the sky last night, so I took “some pictures”:http://www.cfrq.net/gallery/rainbow.

The camera didn’t capture the true effect, but it did surprisingly well for an amateur-driven, consumer-grade digital.

I’ve been idly considering switching to a Mac, now that the underlying OS is FreeBSD. It’s the best of all worlds for me: a UNIX system where I can do all of my system tweaks; a nice, easy-to-use GUI desktop; and support for most (useful) mainstream applications. And it’s not Windows :-)

I was reminded of this again when I tripped over two weblog entries: “James”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/’ “On Becoming a Mac Lover”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/2003/07/26.html#a395, and “Brad”:http://bradchoate.com/’s “Reasons for Sticking with Windows”:http://bradchoate.com/past/001672.php (the point of the second is that the list is very short :-).

On the other hand, I’m about to inherit my work desktop (a reasonably powerful PIII), and the new employer is giving me a work laptop, so I won’t be hauling my _own_ laptop around much anymore. So I don’t really have an _excuse_ to buy a Mac right now…

Update: here is another “pro mac rant”:http://www.rohdesign.com/weblog/archives/000174.html with some scary statistics; 50% of windows boxes are running software that the owner didn’t install? Wow…

So at around 16:10 Thursday afternoon, the power went off. With a couple of quick cell-phone calls we determined that the power outage was city-wide; never a good sign, because there are three relatively separate grids in Toronto. It was only once were in the car, listening to the radio, that we found out that it was most of Ontario _and_ the north-eastern USA.

People were very well behaved. Traffic was pretty bad, but most drivers were stopping at all intersections, and many civilians were in the intersections directing traffic. It took us 1.5 hours to get home, about twice as long as usual. Lots of people ran out of gas, though; no electricity to run the pumps :-). Fortunately, we filled up on Monday.

We had a very nice BBQ dinner, and sat and played Pirateer (by candlelight) and talked until about midnight. Somewhere in there we dragged the kids outside to look up. It was a beautiful clear night, and (just before moonrise) we could actually see the Milky Way, from inside a large city! That doesn’t happen often. We saw mars, of course, and about 10 satellites and several shooting stars before the mosquitos drove us back inside.

The power at our house was still off this morning when we got up. Officials have declared a state of emergency, meaning only essential personnel are supposed to be going to work. There’s no GO Transit and no subways running. Of course, the financial companies consider everyone essential all the time (and the markets _are_ open :-). There are four of us in the office today, working on critical customer issues; everyone else is home.

The kids’ camp was up and running this morning, but they’ve been informed that there is a scheduled blackout at 1300; apparently they’re rotating power across sections of the city until they can get the full grid up and running. They’re asking everyone to turn off air conditioners and other non-essential things, but I wonder how many people will actually do so.

It was interesting walking through the underground. Tim Horton’s was open, and most food places were getting ready to open late. The mom ‘n’ pop businesses (print shops, shoe repairs, newsstands, etc.) were all open, but the large chain stores were all closed. That’s the difference between being an owner and an employee, I guess.

Anyway, we survived :-). We’ll probably lose the food in our fridge, but other than that, it’s been an inconvenient adventure, not a crisis. We were lucky; some people spent the night in elevators, and it took hours to evacuate the subway system…

As part of the Canal days celebration in Port Colbourne, the Niagara Windriders host a kite festival. This is our third year attending; we usually make a weekend of it, spending Saturday in Niagara Falls (or at the water park in Hamilton), and then spending the night in St. Catharines or Welland. The Colleges there rent out student residences cheap during the summer :-)

Anyway, I joined the Toronto Kite Fliers over 5 years ago, and this the first kiting event I’ve been to that has had to deal with _rain_; a pretty good track record!

The event was supposed to run from 10:00 to 16:30. It rained until about 13:30. Several intrepid fliers ignored the rain and flew anyway; the winds were actually pretty good! Strong (but not too strong!) and steady, enough to lift even wet kites. Gareth got into the action, ignoring the rain completely to fly his dinosaur diamond and our new mini-delta for about 30 minutes. 7-year-olds can ignore wet more easily than we old-timers, I guess :-).

Unfortunately, when the rain cleared, the wind died almost completely. It was alot of effort to keep even light-wind kites in the air. We managed one Rok battle by all thinking uplifting thoughts, and a couple of teddy bear drops. The stunt-kite guys were doing better, partly because they have more light-wind kites to play with…

We finally packed everything up around 4PM. Still, it was a fun day! Everyone was quite cheerful despite the rain, and we all got to fly _some_ kites, and meet up with old friends…

Via a friend of Michelle’s, we found a cheap Daewoo Lanos.

Well, actually we found two; a 1999 SE with A/C, a slightly larger engine, mag wheels, etc.; and a 2000 entry-level model. I decided on the 2000; this is our second car, so A/C isn’t as much of an issue (we only really need it for about 3 weeks out of the year in this climate anyway). The A/C (and other stuff on the larger engine) will only lead to more maintenance issues (and higher bills!) down the road, and the smaller engine still has more than enough power for day-to-day use.

Further, the car was slightly out of my original price-range for a beater. On the other hand, it’s also 5 years newer than all of the beaters we looked at. Heck, it’s not really a beater; I even get the 2 years remaining on the power-train warranty! I decided that since I was already spending more than I wanted to, I didn’t really _need_ to drop an extral $1000 for the A/C…

We pick up the new car on Thursday. It is red… :-)

Things are jumping around here!

In the last couple of months, we have joined the 21st century and acquired:

* a DVD player (for the TV)
* a CD burner
* a DVD burner (with DVD-RAM support, to replace the dead DAT drive for backups)

This is quite a technology jump, considering that our newest desktop PC is a P200-MMX, is about 5 years old, and was acquired second-hand from Secure Computing’s office closing sale! We’ve got another one of those and a 486 (gasp!) for the kids to play on; a P-133 firewall/server, a Mac Quadra 840AV, and two aging laptops (a PIII-450 and a PII-650).

Next on the list is a new, more powerful desktop to replace our P200; that machine will then replace the 486, so the kids will both have computers good enough to play all of their games. After that, I’ll acquire a new “server” (probably one of those disgustingly cheap celeron machines like persephone.cfrq.net), and split off the server from the existing firewall. I’ll keep the P-133 as a dedicated firewall/router. I’ve thought about getting one of the Linksys firewalls, but I like to run IPv6 and bizarre UDP-based VPNs, both of which are easier with my own Linux firewall.

We’ve also rearranged all of the furniture in our office to make more space for computers, and to add a bunch of storage for books, media, parts, etc.; Gareth calls it our computer lab now :-)

We currently own a scanner, but also on the toys list are:

* a colour printer
* a digital camera
* a USB hub for connecting it all together
* a network upgrade (10Mb/s to 100Mb/s)
* a kitchen machine (an old laptop, maybe)

I smell progress :-)

[ This entry scribbled while waiting for the DVD writer to simulate then inscribe our first DVD >:]

Some notable quotes from the children.

In Pisa:

bq. M: “It’s forty cents for the bathroom.”
H: “That’s cheap!”
G: “Well of _course_ that’s cheap, it’s not like the bathroom is very exciting…”

In the park in S.Margherita:

bq. C: “You know, mummy: hot countries and hot days are _not_ for scraped knees; they are for ice cream!”

So we’re in London, on the south side of Tower Bridge, looking at garbage art, when on the sidewalk next to us appears Charlotte’s phys-ed teacher. It was our first full day in London and her last one.

It’s a small world…

I have updated “My Firenze Entry”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/000313.html with some “uploaded photos”:http://www.cfrq.net/gallery/italy .

My first post-vacation weigh-in was today. As you can see, I managed to not gain weight while on vacation in England and Italy.

I ate like I was on vacation, which is to say a lot, when I felt like it. On the other hand, we walked _everywhere_, including up and down the hill from the convent to the seaside a couple of times per day. All that exercise burned off the extra calories, apparently :-)