Entries in Life

Alan pointed out 20q.net, a fun little AI that you can teach to recognise things. I tried it with “mutual fund”, one of the objects that it said “needed practice”. I’m not sure if I gave good answers (I told it you could wash it since I imagine the money could be laundered), but it didn’t guess. The fun part is the end where it tells you everything it has guessed about a mutal fund:

Would you give it as a gift? I say Yes. Does a basketball player use it? I say Probably. Can you control it? I say No. Is it found in a bathroom? I say Probably. Can it float? I say Probably. Does a hockey player use it? I say Yes. Do you use it at work? I say No. Can you use it 24 hours a day? I say Doubtful. Do you put things in it? I say Doubtful. Is it a body part? I say Probably. Does it have teeth? I say Probably. Is it a specific color? I say Yes. Does it spin? I say Yes. Does it eat fish? I say Yes. Does it have a face? I say Yes. Does it have a bushy tail? I say Yes.

I didn’t know that mutual funds ate fish.

Not sure what to make of this. The greyed-out text at the bottom says “This e-mail message is an advertisement and/or solicitation.” Which is confusing. What are they advertising?

Tim Bray has a “daddy moment”. I’ve got to admit that while I love my daddy moments, I don’t make enough of them. Or maybe they’re just really hard to come by. Anyway, doing “stuff” with your own children is a lot of fun and it is the sort of fun that encourages me to pry myself away from the laptop and spend time face-to-face with the child. This past weekend we wrapped my brother’s visit with two trips to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Taking a child or two exploring in this vast building was amazing. And it gave me some ideas for fun things we could do back home. But, as I said my brother visited. Originally, we intended to bike from Philly to my house. We would’ve taken two days on the 70 mile trip and then Nate would’ve returned to St Louis. Instead, Nate and I visited Middle Creek with the Ginger, Basil, and Violet. Not knowing what to expect, we were amazed by what looked like hundreds of thousands of snow geese flocking to the man-made lake. We’re saving the bike trip for when I visit him. We also managed a climb up a hill to visit millstone mysteriously plopped atop a hill. Most amusing: the four-year-old’s complaints of “hating” the hill. But she climbed the whole thing.

Dan, Here’s a real use for all that Geography knowledge and your GPS: Maps to the closest WC.

From a report on a study on the family that I found via Julie Leung:

“People just don’t come together very frequently in our society,” Ochs said. “They might say they want community, but they don’t seek it.”

I’ve actually been thinking about just this: How can I and my family seek community? Not just our family community, but also a larger community. The church community is good, but it has its limits. I suppose I need to start thinking about more age-appropriate activities — Do they let eight-year-olds on Habitat work sites? Alexis is really good about building community with the kids (More “Kid’s Fear Factor”, anyone?) but I do want to expose them to the larger world. They need to connect to people who don’t have their privilege or youth.

Since my mother has complained that I’m not doing as well as Jeff and Jeremy when it comes to keeping the world up-to-date on my newest addition, I offer you some spring pictures. Alexis decided to hold a “Kid’s Fear Factor”. No, we didn’t dangle the kids out of windows, waiting for them to scream “uncle”. What good would that do when their uncle is over 1000 miles away? Instead, they searched for noodle “worms” in oatmeal, ate sour gummy worms, and, in a contest that took me back almost 15 years (when my brother made it to a regional version of the official contest), an Oreo cookie stacking contest. Of course, for those addicted to baby pictures, we have plenty of Lily.

When I see a church advertising their up-coming drive-by crucifixtion, I start to wonder if we’ll go to the Junior Drive-Thru Funeral Home afterwards. Or if a drive-by crucifixtion is the first-century equivilent of a drive-by shooting. And I wonder who came up with this brilliant idea. What purpose does it serve? Are they trying to bring in lost souls? Is this their way of celebrating the resurrection? Perhaps they think it will be a meaningful way to help other Christians commemorate Christ’s death? Update: Looks like I’m not the only person bothered:

I do not want to waste this Lent. I don’t want a drive-thru Pascha: A hit-and-run that leaves me only with a nice set of clothes and with no lasting changes.

First, some non-geeky stuff: Missing my instruction manual W.H.A.L.E. or We Have A Little Emergency “I’ve seen company after company grow to the point where not only is evil permitted, it’s sanctioned. It’s like a Jekyll-and-Hyde metamorphosis of the business. It’s like a sickness that permeates every large corporation, from WorldCom to Hewlett Packard, which began by two guys who supported a non-evil workplace and turned it into a company where evil vibes are commonplace.” I spent a week at work moving the old table-and-javascript menu layout to CSS. I managed to reduce the complexity of the page and cut the download size by 10k, though it’s still much too big. Everything was great, till I learned that Firefox doesn’t automatically using new stylesheets and IE 5.2 on Mac OS hangs like a dog when it hits the site. The first is fairly easy to fix: rename the stylesheet. The second issue… Well, I’m considering serving up the old tables-and-javascript layout to IE on the Mac. What is CSS 2.1? Why IE7 won’t support CSS 2. 58% of users delete cookies monthly. Why electronic music won’t work the way the RIAA wants it to work — people aren’t going to stand for this sort of treatment. Open Source from Google. Nothing I can use right now, though. YAPC Registration open “Maintaining badly written code is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle set by someone who can’t spell.” Why I’m glad I don’t use a closed language like Visual Basic. Government sanctions and copyright law pushing Iran to the GPL and Linux

Too often, we’re over-zealous in our pursuit of our ideals. As I pointed out in this entry, developing a New Orleans mindset fights against this idealism. David Brooks of the NYT seems to agree:

Sometime over the past generation we became less likely to object to something because it is immoral and more likely to object to something because it is unhealthy or unsafe. So smoking is now a worse evil than six of the Ten Commandments, and the word “sinful” is most commonly associated with chocolate.

“Wow, that’s an excellent patch.” (In reference to some mods I made to Net::DAV::Server.)