wiredfool

Tonight, after dinner as night fell, I was standing outside a few feet from the hummingbird feeder watching them fly around and occasionally have a drink. As I stood there, with the buzzing and flying, there was more and more buzzing, till I counted 7 hummers that I was tracking at once. I’ve never seen that many. And what’s more, there were 4 on the feeder drinking at the same time, with one waiting somewhat patiently.

I’ve never seen two share the feeder before, even though there are 4 places to drink. And to have 4 and a spare at once, just a couple feet away was stunning.

One of these days, I’ll get there with the camera and catch them in flight.

Round about 10 years ago, this litte blog started out as one of the first non-Userland hosted manila sites. A week or so later, the early editthispage.com people went live, including a couple that I still check up on daily (dangerousmeta, 2020hindsight) and some that I’ve lost track of and miss. (Al.)

It was spotty at first, and I didn’t really get the rotating home page thing down till a week or two into it. The early contents were lost to editing, but some the 11/30 protests stick in my mind as being early news worthy stuff to write about. A lot of the blogging world has changed since then, and it’s sometimes a little embarassing to see how far things have moved in 10 years.

I can’t believe that I’ve managed to keep this thing going a year, let alone 10.

• The 2 successful ambulance rides this year
• That the other kid didn’t need an ambulance ride
• That the little baby considers my chest a really nice place to fall asleep
• That the older kids have both hit a major development spurt in the last couple months.
• That despite having a week and a half of flu in the house, and no food prep done for thanksgiving, we’re going to have something of a special meal today with mostly healthy people.
• A full woodshed
• Big Spoons

To start with, there are three of them now. Not that I’ve manage to post about the baby here yet. He’s getting to be a charming little alert 2 month old, with occasional cranky patches. Just about what he’s supposed to be like.

Tim has decided that english is an acceptable language, and now has hundreds of words. This started Tuesday, September 22nd. It started with the names of his brothers, and now it’s almost anything that we’ve talked about to him. A switch flipped, totally and completely. His 60-80 words of Timish, with it’s own consistent grammar is mostly gone. There are only a few words of that left, but they may be the ones that take a while. It’s very strange to have a toddler that can talk.

Ben is well on his way to reading. Sometime in September, he decided that other people could actually teach hiim something. This was conveniently when kindergarten started. We’re now 1/3 through Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons, (Engelmann). It’s a Phonics based approach, with a big section at the front that explains the methodology and what to do. And looking at it, it all makes sense from a psychology and machine learning point of view. And best of all, its working. He’s excited about reading every night, and he’s to the point where he’s moving from sounding out the most common simple words to just reading them fast. He’s trying to sound out words that he sees ‘out there’ — sometimes it works, sometimes it’s not something he’s seen yet.

In the nearly 10 years that I’ve ben running this thing, I think I’ve only missed a month here and there. Well, it’s been two now, and even thought there’s a ton of stuff to write about, I’m just not inspired. Soon, really. I know that there’s stuff in my mind that I need down before I forget.

It’s 96 in the shade on the front (north) porch, and 108 on the south-east corner of the garage, where there’s partial sun for the morning. And I’m not even going to guess what the thermometer in the greenhouse looks like.

At least it’s only 83 in the house, and the one room with AC is down to 72. This is the air conditioner that I bought when Ben was 2 days old and we had a 95 degree heat wave in the city. We have moved it from house to house since, but this is the first time that we’ve needed it on Whidbey.

And, a couple of hours later, the outside temp is falling and the inside temp never got over 83. But now, I need to figure out dinner. And that’s going to be hot.

An Open Tab Link Dump:

• An easy way to do all the steps required to get a well behaved unix daemon in python.
• Atlas Shrugged, Revisited
• Useful Emacs Commands
• Python mail server. Looks like similar intentions to something I did about 10 years ago and launched my programming career.
• MIT Course Notes on database systems. Something to read in spare time.

A long while ago, I used to have a .sig line in my emails and postings.

Hope is a choice, Not a sum. You can have as much of it as you damn well please, regardless of the actual circumstances.

It’s somewhat appropriate to resurrect it fo a day, or two, or two hundred.

Amazon has The Who. On MP3. For Download. Finally.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for some who albums that I’ve got on old vinyl (not really worth setting up the turntable and ripping, given the quality) and The Who have always been absent. (Along with the Beatles. Guess someone hasn’t shoveled enough money their way yet.)

Amazon has been a game changer for me, and I’m not really sure in a good way for the industry. I’ve been listening to MP3s pretty much exclusively for the last 5+ years, through iTunes and the Slimp3 player in the living room. Any music I buy has been CDs, since the iTunes store music doesn’t work on the Slimp3.

Now, I see the Amazon special deals all the time and while I’m buying a couple albums a month, the average selling price is more like $2, rather than the $15+ that a cd would have been. My concept of what an album of music should cost is dramatically different than it was one year ago. I buy music online. I don’t download. But having that value fall from $15 to $2 can’t be a good sign, since there aren’t that many more stops between $2 and free.

Shutting down the office. Yay. Fun. Guess it’s time for bed instead of replacing the electrical sockets in the spare room where we just finished painting.

Update:

It was out from 11pm to 1:15 am or so, when all the lights in the house came on. And now we have a good 6 inches of snow on the ground, and all the trees are looking very white and droopy.