Do You Want to Build a Snowman?

It's been a long time since I guest authored here but, as the father of two daughters and a recruiter for a tech company, there's an important message I want to evangelize.  Now that most of the mass hysteria surrounding Disney's latest princess film has run it's course it's time to take a step back and address the social engineering baked into Frozen.

For the non-parents out there, let's quickly review the tidal wave from Arendelle that swept over the parents of the world in the last 12-15 months. I was planning to see Frozen when it hit the cheap theaters but didn't. Because it never got to the cheap theaters.  It stayed in the full price theaters morphing from regular showings into special sing along showings right through the DVD release ($1.2B global box office). In June, the Billboard Dance Club Songs list was topped by a Disney song (Let it Go), and for the better part of a year parents had to sell heirlooms to buy Frozen birthday party decor off eBay. A year after it released, we went to Disneyland where Kate expected to meet Elsa and Anna.  We got lucky. We had 3-day passes, so we got into the park an hour early one day.  That day, G speedwalked from the entrance to the "Meet Elsa and Anna" fastpass line (yes, Elsa and Anna have their own fast pass line), waited in line for 45 minutes to get fastpasses, and managed to get passes for 2:20 in the afternoon.  They ran out of passes before the park opened for general admission.  When we returned at 2:20 we waited in line again for over an hour to actually meet Elsa and Anna.  Apparently, before they implemented the fast pass system parents were waiting in line for over 5 hours to meet the princesses.  A YEAR after the movie released.

The fanatical devotion that surrounds this film left quite a few people scratching their heads about what caused such an uproar.  Certainly Tangled (Rapunzel), and the Frog Princess (Tianna) didn't produce anything like this. Why this one?  I thought it over for a while and ran some ideas past G.  It turned out we had independently come to basically the same conclusion. The way our kids put it was, "She's a princess, but with powers," which is a major departure from previous Disney princesses.

Not so sure?  Let's review some other Disney princesses:

• Snow White - Beautiful, kind, sickeningly optimistic and helpless before a simple disguise.  She ends up waiting, half dead, for her prince to save her.
• Aurora - Beautiful, loved by everyone, so trusting she dances with strange men who show up in the forest, but ultimately helpless before spinning needles.  She ends up stuck in an enchanted death sleep, waiting for her prince to save her.

Of course these are really old examples.  Maybe a more modern one will be better:

• Ariel - Beautiful, but rebellious, and honestly not so bright.  Helpless before a witch with a lousy sales pitch.  She loses the guy, and gets transformed back into a mermaid after getting her father turned into a worm.  She's stuck waiting for her prince to knock off the witch and then STILL needs her dad to save her from the disappointment of losing her first infatuation love. (Assuming that being transformed into an alien creature and separated from your family forever counts as being saved.)

Now let's talk about Elsa.  She makes awesome stuff with her mind and a gesture, and runs a kingdom (without a guy even!).  Halfway through the movie she "loses" her princess status and becomes Queen Elsa of Arrendelle. Most importantly, she does all this despite feeling unsure of herself.  When she can't keep her fears in check anymore, she gives up the act, exiles herself for everyone's safety, and finally gets to revel in her own power.  "Let it Go" captured the hearts of millions of girls.  They will have to grow up a little before they really understand why its working title was "Elsa's Bad*** Song".

Disney is sending girls a big message here.  You don't have to feel perfect. Hiding your abilities won't help in the long run.  You can make awesome things.  You can be powerful.  This movie is about getting girls into STEM. (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)

No, I'm not really kidding. Elsa describes her own soul as a spiral of frozen fractals. She likes to be alone, and her skin looks like she's never seen the sun.  She can make her own dress, bridge, castle, and probably whatever else she wants to.  And she's been doing it since she was little with no training.  She can't stop changing the world around her even when she tries.  Can you say "power geek" louder than this?

Someone at Disney really gets it.  They understand what's keeping girls out of STEM. That's not really a surprise since I'm pretty sure "they" is John Lasseter (current Chief Creative Officer at Disney and former Pixar exec) and his Pixar cronies.  Sound crazy?  Lets review the "Pixar princesses":  Merida (Brave), Ellie (Up), EVE (WALL-E), Sally (Cars), Mrs. Incredible.  This group and the old Disney princesses have never met and it's not hard for me to see where Elsa belongs (or Anna for that matter).  Since Elsa's real heritage is a computer animation studio it's not hard to convince me that the subliminal message coming from her is a whispered "grow up and work for us".

Admittedly what I'm about to say could be biased, because I have a small sample set to work with but here goes.  I haven't seen girls treated with discrimination in the engineering workplace since I started working full-time a decade ago.  At least not in the traditional "you wouldn't understand, why don't you go get us some coffee" way.  I can't imagine a team where people wouldn't listen to a woman's technical input just because she was female.   I'm sure it still happens in some places, but I really don't think fear of being treated like a secretary is the issue.

The issue is at the social level.  In a STEM workplace some girls will end up uncomfortable.  A girl who shows up with a Luis Vuitton handbag and a perpetual manicure because that's how she rolls will likely get professional respect for good work, but she won't be one of the gang unless she's willing to keep her Paladin Blood Elf leveled up to the max or brew her own beer or something equally off the beaten path.  But that's just work, not life.

The bigger problem is outside of work.  The social scene is pretty harsh on girls who get serious about technical stuff.  If a girl wants to go into biology that's OK. That's on the softer end of science. But as soon as a girl says words like "astrophysics" or "focused ion beam", the guys who were going to ask for her number disappear faster than doughnuts at a hack-a-thon.  Not only that, but the girls who were going to invite her along to the next Neiman Marcus shopping trip forget to call her and all her relatives stop buying her gift certificates to Ulta and start buying her pink screwdrivers.  Halfway through college G started telling people at parties she was an "EE" major because a lot of them would just assume that meant Elementary Education and then treat her like a regular girl.

In the long haul, treating girls like they changed just because they are going into a new professional area needs to change, but for now girls need Frozen.  They need Let it Go to sink in deep so they won't freak or feel guilty when someone is intimidated by them.  They need to know that even if you do technical things, and do them well, you can still be a normal person with normal relationships because their abilities don't define them. It will be a tough process but the more girls go into STEM, the more people will realize that being smart and competent in math and science doesn't magically transform a girl into an evil step-sister or a witch. Or a boy.

I really think that ~15 years from now we'll see a small uptick in girls entering the STEM workforce, just from this movie.  But to be honest, I have to find people to hire from now until then, and I don't care if they are male or female.  If you have a daughter, or sister, or friend who hides what she can really do, and isn't heading down the STEM road just because of social pressure, do me a favor: open a door, climb a mountain, build a snowman.  Only love can thaw a frozen heart.

Pumpkins 2013

It was a bit of a tight squeeze to fit pumpkin carving into the schedule this year.  Like I said in my last post, my sister-in-law's wedding made my October a little crowded. Not that I'm complaining. I wouldn't have traded being a part of her beautiful wedding for the world. But it did mean our pumpkin carving was a little less elaborate this year.

In the past we've been able to get our pumpkins carved for the church party and still have them not entirely gross when Halloween night rolled around. But this year our party at church was almost a full week before the actual day of Halloween. Not gonna have carved pumpkins for both. Normally we would have chosen to have the pumpkins carved for our church party, but given our busy month, we ended up carving them for Halloween night.

We let each of the kids pick out a pumpkin and what they wanted carved on it.

Claire chose Angry Birds and did a lot of the carving herself:

Scott designed his own silly face and we helped him execute it.  The googly eyes were an extremely important design element for him:

And Kate really, really wanted a princess pumpkin. A Sleeping Beauty to be exact.  And because she has me wrapped around her little finger:

And then the next day I let her decorate a gold crown to put on Aurora:

M and I wanted so badly to do a design of our own choosing too, but we were running out of time.  In the end, we stayed up way too late rushing to carve one and I don't think really turned out.  Can you tell what we tried to carve?

Sun Spotting

Did anyone else try to watch the solar transit of Venus last Tuesday?  Or were we the only ones geeky enough to be excited about this?  The only ones geeky enough to have even heard that it was happening?  The only ones geeky enough to care???

Well, in case you were too busy having a real life, I'll give you a quick recap.  The planet Venus passed between the earth and the sun, becoming visible against the sun.  This is super rare.  It won't happen again until the year 2117.  So, you know, this was our last chance to see it.

But you couldn't see it with your naked eye - turning your retinas into smoldering piles of ashes and what have you.  We were reading up on it ahead of time and most places were suggesting that you view it the same way you view an eclipse.  They are all basically variations on poking a pin hole and projecting the circle of light coming through the hole onto a flat surface.

Did this actually work for anyone else?  We didn't have any luck.  Because with an eclipse, you don't need a lot of resolution so of course that would work, but Venus was TINY!!!

We did end up getting a good look at it:

See?  TINY!!!  I have trouble believing I could have seen it through a pin hole.  Instead, in short bursts, we did this:

We projected the sun backwards though Marshall's spotting scope onto a piece of paper.

And we didn't even start any fires!!!

Phase Shifted Songs

You all need to help me decide how "weird" this thing that Scott does is.

I can't figure out if all normal kids do this (and Claire was just abnormal).  I love Claire, but she is definitely my child in this respect.  Neither of us can carry a tune in a bucket.

You see, I played classical guitar for many years growing up, but eventually gave up when I realized that try as I may, I still coudn't tune my own guitar.  I just COULD NOT tell when it was truly in tune.  And if I could tell it wasn't quite in tune but close, I could never tell if I needed to tune it up or down.  Pitiful.

So it kind of surprises me to see some musical talent in one of my offspring.  I do think Scott has a knack for it.  (Must have come from M.)  I'm not saying Scott's a child prodigy or anything, but he is good with music.  He remembers songs after hearing them once.  He has always sung tunes quite accurately, even when he was very little.  He picks out simple tunes when presented with toy instruments.

I think a fair number of kids do all those things though.  I'm probably just surprised by them because Claire was an easy act to follow.  Even now, when Claire sings a tune, it's barely recognizable. 

But Scott does one thing that just blows my tone-deaf self away.

He likes to shift the lyrics to a song.  He keeps the tune the same, but delays the lyrics, or vice versa.  For example, he'll start the tune by singing the 2nd line of words to a song and then wrap back around so he ends the tune with the 1st line.  Sometimes he even only shifts by a few words and breaks up the phrasing. 

I suspect this is fairly unique.  Am I right?  Is this normal?  Rain Man-esque?  What do I do with this child?!?!? 

Guess it's time to get him music lessons, huh?

Technology Bi-Polar Disorder

Yesterday, I sent a text message for the first time.  Ever.

Yes, I am that lame.  I didn't even get a cell phone until 2006.  And then it was a pre-paid by-the-minute Tracfone.  (You know, a drug dealer phone.)  We bought it so I could always get ahold of M when I was pregnant with Scott and after I had him, I just kept using it.  But as little as possible.  I just didn't want to spend the money.  I have been eeking by on that phone used mostly for emergencies for the last six years.  (Do I have to relinquish my geek license???)

I waited until 2012 to send a text message at first because I wasn't willing to type it out on the number pad.  And then it kind of became a claim to fame.  So even when people texted me, I wouldn't text them back because how could I possibly waste my first text ever on something so boring?

But I gave in.  It was time.  I finally feel like I'm missing out on things because I didn't really have a cell phone.  I won't bore you with all the little incidents, but I just knew it was time.  (Not to mention the fact that my six year old phone wouldn't hold a charge very long anymore and I needed a new phone anyway.)

So I bought a new phone!  With a keyboard!  And I signed up for a cheap monthly plan.  So still no contract, but it's still way closer to "normal person."  And I sent my first text message ever to my best friend.  (I knew if I totally screwed up she wouldn't laugh at me too much.) (Turns out: hard to screw up.)

For how "tech savvy" I am in some ways, it does seem strange how backwards I can be too.  I'd never texted until yesterday.  We still don't have a DVR or even cable TV.  We just get by with what our TV antennae receives.  But I blog, use Facebook and Pinterest...

And for my 2nd text ever, I tweeted.

I don't make any sense, do I?

"Pie" Charts

If I show you how M and I plan a party where we're serving pizza, do you promise not to laugh at us?  At least to our face?

OK, here is a screenshot then:

 

Because happiness is optimizing the correct number of square inches of pizza to have on hand for your guests.  Do we know how to party, or what???

Okay, I'm Done Now

So, my blog redesign is officially complete.  C'mon over and check it out if you want.

If you've been here in the last few days and seen the constantly changing chaos, I'm very sorry.

I had been thinking about and planning my redesign when I made a rookie mistake and accidentally lost my old header.  Because I am an idiot.

So then I had no choice but to take the plunge and do the redesign.  It was nothing a little lack of sleep couldn't fix.  But I still had some things to finish and kinks to work out and I've been doing that the last few days.  It turns out it can be kind of hard to program in a language you don't actually know.  And it's hard to get Google to give you free answers when you don't even know what language you're working in.  But now it seems like nothing is broken.  At least not anymore.  It might have taken a dozen twenty fifty a few tries, but what's a few invalid variables between friends?

Now I declare it finished.  Please let me know if anything isn't working correctly and I'll promptly lose some more sleep over that too!

New Vocabulary

M and I have started using a new word around our house and I thought you all might want to stay on top of the cutting edge slang being developed around here:

Shobos - noun \ˈshō-(ˌ)bōs\

plural shoboses

Definition of SHOBOS

1

: a situation where your brain repeatedly proposes a specific solution despite the fact that you have already concluded it is not viable approximately 1000 times
e.g. You are playing Scrabble with your spouse and someone has played the word "hobos."  It falls with a triple word square just to the left of the "h."  Your brain will now spend the rest of the game trying to find a way to get that triple word score.  It will do this by repeatedly proposing that you put down an "s" and make "shobos."  

2

: an irresistible persistent impulse to repeatedly cram that same, still wrong jigsaw puzzle piece in that one spot

At Least the Commute is Short

A good friend asked me recently if I planned to get a job once Kate goes to school.  And no, no I don't.  At least not for a good long while.  Here's how I see it:

By the time Kate goes to Kindergarten I will have been working at this stay-at-home mothering gig for almost ten and a half years.  And in that time I have taken virtually NO vacation or sick time.  So I have A LOT of time off coming to me.

Here, let's do the math together.  I started being a stay-at-home mom the day Claire was born.  When Kate starts school at the end of August 2014, I will have been at this "job" for 10.46 years.  But we'll just round it off to 10 years.  For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that I accrue vacation and sick days at the same rate as someone working a 40 hour week.  This is a ridiculous underestimation because as every mother knows, you work 7 days a week and sometimes even through the night.  Therefore I am more than comfortable saying that the times I do get away for an evening or Saturday to do my own thing don't really count as vacation time.  I will assume that since my normal mothering work day is 14 hours long, a day off would include 14 hours.  This means that when the kids are at school for 7 hours, I am only getting half a day off.  Also, since normal workers get the weekend off, when I am on a trip away from the kids, I don't need to use vacation days for the weekend.

I will deduct the time M and I went away for 3.5 days for our 5 year anniversary and the time we went to New York for 1.5 days to see Les Mis as vacation time.  I will also count the one week I spent in Japan with my sister.  So that's 10 days of vacation time that I have taken in the last 7.5 years.  I project that I will take another 5 days of vacation when M and I go on a cruise for our 10 year anniversary next year.

As for sick leave, I refuse to count any recovery time from childbirth because that is part of the job.  But other than that, I have not taken any sick time.  Ever.  Vomiting with a horrific stomach flu all day?  Still nursed a baby between trips to the toilet and still made meals to feed kids.  Deathly ill with swine flu?  Still got Claire to school and picked her up, plus all the feeding and diapering.  Mastitis?  Kept on trucking.

Once the kids are all in school, I will get a half day off each weekday.  But they are only in school 36 weeks of the year.  Assuming that I earn vacation and sick leave at the same rate M does at his current job, I have put together a little graph to show my accrued time off with each passing year since Claire's birth when I "began employment."  The red vertical line represents when Kate starts Kindergarten if we are rounding things off to 10 years.

At the peak just before Kate goes to school, I will have accrued 240 days of personal time off.  If I just started taking that at full steam, it's nearly an entire year of full days off, Mon-Fri.  But I won't get to take it all right away.  I'll still work the half day that the kids are home after school and full time during the summer.  That will really stretch out that time off.  Plus I will continue to accrue some more time off.  Assuming that by not getting another job I will take a half day off every school day, then as you can see by where the graph of my remaining personal days finally dips back down to zero, I deserve AT LEAST four and a half years off after Kate starts Kindergarten before I even have to THINK about getting another job.

FOUR AND A HALF YEARS!!!  And that's really probably an underestimation given that we estimated a 40 hour work week.  (40 hours?!?!?  HA!  I WISH!!!!)  Plus, I'm not actually going to eat bon-bons all day.  I'm sure I'll spend a fair amount of time that the kids are at school doing things for them, cleaning the house, volunteering at their schools, etc.  And to think, I only have to wait 10 years before all my kids go to school.  Plenty of people have much longer due to more kids and/or more space between their kids' ages.  Think of the time they will have accrued!

I don't know why it seems like some stay-at-home moms think they have to run out find a "real job" as soon as their kids go to school.  Most of those women will vehemently tell you that being a stay-at-home mom IS a real and important job.  Well, I agree.  It is an important and real job.  The benefits package really sucks though (at least on paper).  You may not get medical/dental/vision.  You may not get stock options.  You may not get employer matching to your 401k.  In fact, you don't even get paid.  But you at least deserve some time off.  Staying home with your kids IS a real job.  Enjoy your time off when your kids go to school.  You've earned it.

Photography Challenge Day #8 - A Bad Habit

 

There's two layers to the meaning on this one.  First of all, spending too much time on the computer is a bad habit of mine.  (And it's ironic that I'm admitting that WHILE spending time on the computer.  Huh.)

 

Second of all, as you can see from this photo I took of one of my old keyboards, I have a nasty habit of ruining keyboards.  I tend to wear off the letters.  Weird, I know.  Looking back at this old keyboard, I can barely believe it.  Look at how there are actual grooves and indentations on some of those keys.  I swear I didn't take sandpaper to them!

 

But I have good news for those who have been following my plight with bated breath.  We found a keyboard we've been using for awhile now that I LOVE and I've had no problems so far. This illuminated keyboard seems to do the trick because the letters are actually translucent to allow the light through, instead of just being printed on.  Plus it's really nice to use and very cool looking to boot.  YAY!

 

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is over.  Posts may or may not be daily.

My rules for my self are:
1 - Take everything in manual mode
2 - No post-processing, only SOOC

Turns Out, You NEED Those Numbers at the End

My kids all have their own Gmail accounts.  Actually, two accounts apiece.  One user name is respectable and the other is more playful.  I sign them up for them shortly after they are born because I'm crazy like that.  As Claire has gotten old enough, she has occasionally used hers to email grandparents and such.  I'm pretty sure my kids are going to thank me someday for getting them addresses ASAP so they aren't stuck with some user name that is followed by twelve impossible to remember numbers to make it unique.

But speaking of numbers at the end of an email address making it hard to remember, lately I'm having a problem.  The kids' accounts all forward to my email and I'm getting email for some other Claire with the same last name.  She is apparently some sucker whose mother DIDN'T sign her up for an address soon enough, so hers must have some numbers after it.  But apparently she doesn't remember this.  She thinks she owns the address with no numbers after it.  How do you not know your own email address? I can understand one or two mistakes, but how exactly do you not notice that you haven't received things you're expecting?  Important things!

She appears to now be a senior in high school considering various colleges. She lives in Georgia and attends Baylife Church.  She is not getting her church newsletter.  Nor is she getting messages from her chemistry study group.  She is not getting her J.Crew ads.  Or several other store ads.  But worst of all, she is not getting info about deadlines for online registration to Duke University, Vanderbilt, and Georgia Tech.

I am also now in possession of her login names for these online registrations and, since OBVIOUSLY I know her first and last name, I'm pretty sure I could reset the password on most of her accounts.  But I'm not going to.  She's lucky I'm a nice person.  I really do hope she's not missing all these deadlines that I keep getting emailed about.

Also, I hope none of these universities find out about all of this. Do you really think someone will believe you are Duke material if you can't figure out your own email address???

What Would You Call It?

I miss having my sister and her family here.  Really I do.  But I'm not going to lie.  We were pretty excited to get our 4th bedroom back!

We have always struggled with what to call this room.  It normally houses all my sewing and crafting supplies, but to call it the craft room seems too greedy of me.  It's where guests usually sleep when they come to visit, but it's so much more than a guest room.  Sometimes M will go in there with his work laptop for some peace and quiet when he's working from home, but we already have another room that's officially the office (though we use it as a playroom).  I suppose a logical title might be the spare room, but that felt so stuffy somehow.

When we moved into our house, this 4th bedroom was painted a dark, DARK hunter green:

I didn't like it, but there was no rush to paint this extra room that was hardly ever seen.  We ended up calling it the "green room."  But then a few months later, we painted a green accent wall in Claire's room.  So to further clarify, this room became the "dark green room."  Cumbersome, I know, but it stuck.

However, when my sister and her family moved out of the room, it needed a little work.  And I wasn't about to re-paint it hunter green.  So it was finally time to paint that room.  We chose a nice light gray.  I LOVE it!  But the big problem was that calling it the "dark green room" just wasn't going to fly anymore.

M and I wracked our brains for what to call this room.  What was it?  It was the room that... became whatever we needed it to be.

That was it!  In celebration of our regained and freshly painted extra space I splurged and ordered some custom vinyl for the door so we could officially christen it for all to see:

 

I can't wait until our kids read the Harry Potter books and finally get our joke!

 

You Could "Count" On How This Would Turn Out

Lately Claire has a problem with being scared.  I don't even know what of - it changes almost daily.  Just really spooked, especially when she's by herself, especially at night.  So needless to say, bedtime can be a little rough.

Tonight she didn't want to go into the bathroom by herself to brush her teeth.  M told her she needed to and they had the following "conversation":

C [yelling] - Rule number one:  I'm too scared.

M - Rule number zero:  You have to do it anyway.

C - Rule number negative one:  I can't.  I'm too scared.

M - Rule number negative infinity:  I don't care.

C - Rule number negative... infinity infinity infinity:  I don't care.

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And for those of you who didn't get to see this on Facebook:

Claire's ultimatum the other night when we put her in time out: "If you do that, I'm going to tell you in my MOST STERNEST VOICE..."

(I don't know where she got this.  We don't say that phrase to her.  Those darn books she's always reading...)

Claire's screamed defense the next night when we put her in time out: "I have SCIENTIFIC REASONS why this is ALL SCOTT'S FAULT. It's because HE doesn't EAT ENOUGH and so he's TOO SKINNY!"

Bonus points if you can guess what Claire did that was supposedly Scott's fault for being too skinny!

Claire, This is Riemann. Riemann, Claire.

M got an email today from his best friend with a good math joke in it:

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first mathematician orders a beer. The second mathematician orders half of a beer. The third mathematician orders a quarter of a beer... The bartender says, "You guys are all idiots!" and pours two beers.

Claire was reading it over his shoulder and thought it was funny. I asked her if she knew why it was funny. You know, besides the fact that someone called people "idiots." This led to a discussion of the "pattern" of the fractions. We talked about how if it went on forever, the fractions would get smaller and smaller and closer and closer to just two.

So then we asked her, "When will it finally get to two?"

She looked at me, smiled, and said, "Never."

Well, then. Guess we're ready for calculus.

In Parallel

Scott has been adding to his list of what he wants to be when he grows up.  The other day he added a third career. 

"First I want to be an ambulance driver, then I want to be an astronaut, then I want to be a paleontologist."

Did we point out the unlikelihood of managing all three of these careers?  No.
Did we simply encourage him that he can do it if he works hard?  Of course not.
Instead, geeky parents that we are, we tried to help him streamline his goals.  M was quick to suggest that perhaps he could be the first aid specialist on a mission to excavate fossils on another planet.

Does anyone know of a college that lets you study to become an EMT certified xenobiologist???

M is Just Going to Have to Learn Japanese

What parent hasn't found cryptic ways of communicating secrets with other adults in front of their kids?

First, M and I could just use big enough words that they went over Claire's head.  Considering Claire's vocabulary, I think it's a testament to our sesquipedalian tendencies that we lasted as long as we did just doing that, if I do say so myself.

Then we started spelling key words out.  Yah, that didn't last long.  Lately one of Claire's favorite games and/or stall tactics is to converse by spelling her sentences out.  She and I will go back and forth five or six times just spelling out what we want to say to each other.  Whatever keeps 'em occupied, right?  It's better than listening to her chew out Scott.

So now M and I have to speak Spanish to each other.

Any bets on how long until she's bilingual?

Excuse Me While I Go Annihilate Some Music

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, I'm not as good of a geek as I should be. The dumb broad side of me is known to surface now and then. One example of this is my misuse of media conversion terminology.

I know the right words. You "rip" a track off your CD. Then you "burn" it onto a CD. No matter how much I know this when I stop and think about it, the wrong term keeps popping out of my mouth when casually discussing the management of my audio files with M. He ALWAYS points this out, and then I roll my eyes and say, "Whatever."

I think it's easy to trip up. I mean, what's with all the highly destructive terminology for working with your files? Rip, burn, flash, explode, torrent, tar, strip, hack, crack... am I missing any here?

I don't know, but excuse me. I need to go masticate a CD.

Help! My Photos Have Been RAIDed

A friend of mine is sad about recently losing a lot of photos off her digital camera. I feel really bad for her. It got me thinking about our own photo storage.

There are a lot of household tasks that I'm not very good at. Especially the menial ones. But there is one I am almost religious about. I frequently download our photos off the digital camera. I get nervous if I leave photos on there for very long.

But then I go beyond that. It's a little sad. I run my own manual RAID 1 array.

Leave it to me to have a filthy house but redundant copies of our photos on separate drives.

I've got big dreams. Someday, M says he'll set us up a RAID 5 array in his half of our closet next to the DSL router and (someday) house-wide Gigabit ethernet switch. A girl can dream can't she? (All that and I don't even have to sacrifice space in my half 2/3 of the closet for my combat boots, poodle cow skirt, and my disco ball? I knew M was a good catch!)

Even that's not ideal. I need to be better about uploading photos to an external site to protect against any real catastrophes. I used to be good about doing that, but it dropped off when kid #2 came along.

Dang it!!! Now that I've reminded myself about this, we won't have clean clothes for a month while I remedy the situation. This is all your fault...

Yes, We Actually Refer to Her in Conversation as "Fetus"

Baby names were a lot easier the last two times.

Claire was picked as our first girl's name when she was still qualified only to be called "Embryo."

Our first son was dubbed Scott I think before M and I even got married. (It happens to be a family name, so it made it even easier.)

Do you see how both times in the past we had a name to replace the "Fetus" designation as soon as we knew the gender? As soon as we left the 20 week ultrasound, our baby had a name and we started to use it. So it's been really weird this time, knowing now that Fetus is a girl and still only being able to call her "Fetus." I suppose normal people would say something like "the baby" or even a cute nickname like "bump" or "bean." I guess we're just a little bit overly matter of fact about things, but any other name besides Fetus just sounds too cheesy to me. Sentimentality has never been a strong suit for M and me.

I knew this time around we were in for a much harder time since we didn't already have a name "waiting in the wings." It could have been like this last time if Scott had been a girl. In fact, during my pregnancy with Scott we started making a list of girls' names and then abandoned it when we found out we were having a boy. But not before I got a little taste of the impending horror.

M and I do NOT have a terribly similar taste in names. I think the ideal case is for a name to be something of a unique identifier. Isn't that kind of the point? I mean, otherwise why not call us all "man" and "woman"? But since issuing everyone a serial number might be a tad cumbersome, you try to find a unique name. Not unique in the whole world, maybe even not in their whole school, but hopefully at least in their classroom. I don't want it to be a made up name, or a name no one has ever heard of, but I think it ought to be fairly uncommon.

M, on the other hand, thinks a name shouldn't make you stand out. He figures, if everyone else has used a name, it must be a good name. This is particularly problematic given our last name. Imagine the most generic last name of English origins you can think of. Are you imagining it? Okay, now I'd bet good money you are thinking of our last name. I feel like M's taste in names would doom our children to a life of hopeless anonymity, no matter what. If we pick the names he likes, our child could cure cancer and be the first astronaut on Mars and no one would ever remember their name. In fact, no one would probably even notice what they had accomplished.

It's interesting how different our perspectives are given that we both have fairly uncommon first names. Growing up, I LOVED having an uncommon name and I think he hated it. So our naming goal is to find a name that everyone has heard of and is fairly normal, but that not too many people are using right now. It's a tall order and it's a matter of debate how successful we've been thus far.

We've been working on a girl name for this time around for awhile now. We started talking about girl names even before we knew this one was a girl because we were at such an impasse last time before being saved by Scott being a boy. I'm starting to get pretty antsy. I know I still have over 14 weeks left, but I think I would rather die than walk into the hospital unsure of the name I wanted to use. That smacks of "going with your gut." Pshaw! What, do you want to me to name them based on what they "look" like? Then we should name them "Svork" or something because they come out looking like aliens. And how my kids looked as newborns has absolutely NOTHING to do with how they look later anyway. In our house, names are NOT left to some whim of the anesthesia. Around here, picking a baby name is a intensive process that involves spreadsheets and ranking and scoring and graphs to check for positive or negative correlation... Seriously, it's bad, people.

So help us. Spare us poor geeks. Vote in the polls in the sidebar and give us your two cents in the comments. Here's the lowdown:

When we were pregnant with Scott, we had narrowed it down to M's favorite girl name being Helen and mine being Ellen. Not so easy to compromise on. You can't exactly use one for the first name and one for the middle name. To ease the tension, we said we'd just always say her name with a heavy British accent and call her 'Elen. The deadlock continued so we've come up with some other names.

Kate is our top scoring name. We took a rough list of conceivable candidates we compiled together. Then each of us ranked the list. The score is calculated by the sum of the square of the respective ranks. (For example, if M ranks Svork at #2 and I rank it at #20, then the score would be 404.) This system amplifies "dislike." A lower number is better (like golf!). I'm a little concerned with this one about popularity and about the fact that she would be named Kate and not Katherine or anything. We'd technically be naming her a nickname.

The other "name family" that scores well is Lauren or Laura. Lauren has some real popularity issues as well, but there's a bigger problem here. We like the names, but we don't actually say them the same way. (Crazy east coaster husband...grumble grumble)

So what should we do???

Shameless Bragging

Claire surprised us the other day. We have this game:


It's a puzzle where you fit all the different shaped pieces of balls together to create a rectangle shape. The directions have partial creations where you then figure out how to fill in the remainder of the pieces. Does that make any sense? Let's zoom in on the age recommendation:


She loves to play with this game. She's still technically 4 years old, though nearing 5. But that wasn't the surprise. That's just mildly amusing. What surprised us is when she picked it up without looking at any clues and did this from memory:



Then after I made that video, she was anxious to demonstrate this pyramid from memory too:



Huh. It's like she has a good memory or something... Sheesh! What a geek. I don't think that's normal, is it? Maybe I'm just blinded by my parental status. But coming from geeks like M and me I'm pretty sure she's doomed to a life of nerdy freak status. It's just a shame to see it start so early...