Trip planning using Google Maps

What has my family been up to so far this year?

Dejaquan started taking boys gymnastics lessons once a week on Jan 24 at the Wisconsin Gymnastics Academy in Brown Deer (Whitefish Bay's gymnastics program is only geared towards girls). Sarah takes him to there after school each week. Norah started taking swimming lessons once a week on Jan 16. It's the introductory thing where each parent gets in the pool with their child. Norah is slowly getting more comfortable in the water because of it. She no longer has to have a washcloth on her face in the bath now when I wash her hair.

We are getting close to having our trip to England this spring all planned out. We'll be staying in Manchester the first couple days, then traveling about Yorkshire, visiting mostly castles, the east coast, and the Minster in York for a couple days. It's the two days right before our friends ' wedding at the end of our trip that we haven't solidified on. Tentatively we'll be visiting the potteries near Stoke-on-Trent, which is apparently not a very popular tourist area. Here's our planned trip ala Google Maps

Other miscellaneous musings: I got a used PS2 with some games a few weeks ago, and Dejaquan's really enjoyed playing ssX3, a downhill snowboarding game. We got out the Lego picturing making set tonight and Norah played with it for almost 2 hours. Sarah told me we can't let her play with it much because it would be a great item to take with us on the train on our trip out to Oregon this summer. A couple weekends ago we rearranged a few rooms in the house: switched the location of the fridge and table in the kitchen, moved the entertainment center into the front room, and redid the furniture layout a little in the living room for the first time since we got the entertainment center over 5 years ago. Sarah even wallpapered a wall and painted the other walls in the front room. While we're on our trip to England, we're having our (only) bathroom redone, so even it is getting simplified, too.

Norah's going to turn 4 in less than 2 weeks. Now that she's getting out of what I consider the terrible 3's, I need to remember what Sarah has encouraged me to do: be more empathetic and not so strict. It's a struggle figuring out how to get my children to accomplish what I feel they need to in order to stay healthy (brushing teeth, going to bed on time, etc) while keeping everyone happy.

Computer related: at work & at home, I've played with using Greasemonkey to remember passwords, as well as to allow broken javascript code from an internal webapp that only works on IE to also work with Firefox. I'm also now managing our personal finances with jGnash. Very easy to use. Just this past Friday I setup an RSS feed for some of our subversion repositories (I hate managing which source code repositories to send automatic emails from--RSS provides much more control in that anyone can choose to get updates--with an RSS feed instead of automated emails, you can't call them "spam" anymore). I hate having to use Windows & Outlook at work, but at least there's a good RSS plugin I finally found for Outlook: Blogbot

One last thing (a gripe): My Chemical Romance's 2006 album, The Black Parade was my favorite album of 2007. And close runner up was Muse's, Black Holes and Revelations also released in 2006. Too bad they ware released too close to the 2007 Grammy's to be eligible for this year's Grammy's. Awesome artsy alt-rock.

Don't tell me what to do (poem I wrote in 2000)

Don't tell me how I'll feel.
The preoccupation is worse than the real
thing. I am fully aware
of what I have to do to prepare.
So don't tell me what to do.
the present is not when I need you
except for support, you know.
It's time for it to happen; let's go.

Designer house cat?

I grew up with a house cat as a pet most of my childhood, but have had a small dog instead since graduating from college. So it's been a while since I have had a cat for a pet, but the Toyger looks very intriguing. I never even knew there were people who bred domesticated cats. I think it would be ever cooler breeding big cats, but perhaps that's not even possible.

Don't see Happy Feet

Happy Feet didn't make me feel happy despite the activist statement the movie tried to make. Pros: lots of good music, cool roller-coaster ride type sequences, and the best CGI humans I've seen yet. Cons: Not much for plot, too much penguin time & not enough time for the other sea-based creatures, and a hokey ending.

We took Norah & Dejaquan to see the movie for Dejaquan's 5th birthday, the night before his actual birthday. With Norah being 2, she didn't last all the way through, and I ended up spending 1/3 of the movie with her in the lobby. I don't remember seeing a single creature actually die in the movie, which is better than most Disney movies.

We went to the music instrument store nearby afterwards and bought them each a recorder. It sounded like Happy Feet singing in our house then that night. You'd have to see the movie - oh wait, I told you to not see it. Uh, then I should say it sounded like a dieing penguin in our house that night.

Leopard seals are to penguins as cats are to mice

National Geographic's November issue has the coolest picture of nature I've seen in a while: the "death shake". Don't look at it if you don't think you can stomach looking at the blood & innards of a penguin coming out the moment it's head is ripped off. About the expedition, they have a little clip from the photographer's perspective on studying the leopard seals, including more on how they got that photo. NG also has another short video about one leopard seal preying on penguins.

I haven't even seen March of the Penguins or Happy Feet yet, but I can't wait!

Why are kids supposed to say "Trick or Treat"?

I found out why kids are supposed to say "trick or treat" when going door to door on Halloween. Here's the story.

I took Norah (2) and Dejaquan (4) out around the neighborhood this time. Norah was wearing fairy wings and Dejaquan was a storm trooper. At the beginning of the candy trek, I would came up with them to the door and tell them to say "trick or treat" and "thank you", as they obviously are too young to understand the process without some help. Dejaquan took off his storm trooper mask after just one house because he said it made his face sweaty. After about 5 houses, they were just getting the hang of saying trick or treat when the person would come to the door.

We rarely allow my 4 year old, Dejaquan, have candy or gum, and he actually likes gum more than any candy. So when he got a piece of gum from a house we had stopped at, he thought he would start asking, "Do you have any bubble gum?" after ringing the door bell. So as he started asking that question instead of trick or treat, I thought it was humorous and let him ask it because it showed his interest in the whole thing and the candy givers were getting a kick out of it.

"Do you have any bubble gum?" Dejaquan would ask.

"Sorry, no, I don't have any gum." the person would reply.

Door after door, he would say it religiously. But something happened that made me realize what he was doing was inappropriate. Norah started saying it too. Ugh, I was kicking myself for having let it go on so long that she thought that's what was supposed to be said. So I had a talk with them about how it was rude to ask for something specific and we should be grateful for whatever they might have to give (one woman was giving out handfuls of pennies). I explained it was the same as when responding to what they give you with "hey, I already have this!", which Dejaquan managed to say a couple times. That one I jumped all over.

By the end, they were saying trick or treat, and thank you. Even though it was the second time I had gone trick or treating with my kids, I still learned a lot from the experience just like them.

Joomla & Freehostia

Until recently, my only method for creating Internet-facing websites was using a client-based program to create static pages: NetObjects Fusion or just straight HTML-editing with Emacs. I've now tried out a CMS: Joomla!, an offshoot of Mambo. I would have to say Joomla! had a bit of a learning curve with modules & components, sections & categories, and menus & content. Not too bad, though. It's nothing like any of the wikis I've used other than you edit the site using the site.

Up to now, I had used doteasy for free web hosting. I had gotten tired of my sites hosted by them being down for brief periods often & on all the time. I also did not like not being able to use any scripts, wanting to get away from static pages and go towards a more self-managed setup so that anyone involved with the organization behind the site could edit the site and not depend on a client-side program.

I looked around and found a good candidate to try: Free Hostia. So far, it's been 10x better than doteasy. I registered my domain for $20 using paypal on a Sunday morning using their interface. The email address I specified for my user account and my paypal account's email address weren't the same, and they noticed that. So then sent me an email just 11 minutes of when I signed up. Within 20 minutes of my reply saying it was okay, I got another reply saying it was all ready to go. I couldn't believe it could be that fast, so I did an nslookup of the new domain I requested, and it was there! That's 50x times as fast as doteasy which I had to wait 24 hours before being able to do anything with the new domain. And this was on a Sunday no less!

Setting up Joomla was a breeze. I simply filled out a short form to create a MySQL database, and then another short form to create the Joomla instance, and within 5 minutes, I had a working CMS. Additionally with the domain, I got a subdomain of Free Hostia to play around with, too. So I decided I would put the Joomla instance in that instead of the domain to try it out before committing to using it for the new site. I wish I hadn't done that though, because I ran into a small glitch with Free Hostia in that when I then tried to install a 2nd Joomla instance, this one on the new site, Free Hostia's interface for creating it through a database insertion error. But to Free Hostia's credit, within 1 hour of my submitting a trouble ticket through their website, my problem was fixed & off I went with the 2nd Joomla! instance.