Parenting Books

I picked up Bringing Up Geeks: How to Protect Your Kid's Childhood in a Grow-Up-Too-Fast Worldby Marybeth Hicks up at the library on a whim. As the parent of a four year old, I'm interested in ideas to do a better job as a parent. I suspect that most parents don't want their kids growing up too fast, don't want them chasing the latest fad, don't want them trying oral sex when they are twelve -- at least not their daughters. If the goal of this book is to convince you of these ideas, it is successful. However, the author fails to deal with the challenges of parenting honestly. With four children, surely she has faced some challenges. By and large, she does not share them. Instead, the anecdotes in this book are of how perfect her children are. When it is necessary to tell an unpleasant anecdote, it is usually a friend or a letter from a reader. So if you want to read 304 pages about how perfect Marybeth Hicks and her kids are, have at it. Take that ride in her minivan. If you want an open, honest, solution-based discussion of how to raise your child, look elsewhere.   

A somewhat-related book that I though was much better is Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder-- It is less preachy and more based on research in addition to just anecdotes.

New Music Night

Good new stuff from Franz Ferdinand's new album Tonight.  Not terribly groundbreaking, but they have a good formula of catchy, danceable music.  I imagine that someday the formula will wear thin.  That happened with Barenaked Ladies and Cake for me.  But for now, I'm tappin' my toes to Franz one more time.  

No You Girls - Franz Ferdinand

Comcast Speak

I'm going to see if I can spend an entire day speaking to others like a Comcast Customer Service Representative.   I've been on the phone or doing an online chat with several of them this evening, and they all have the same sort of non-responsive, passive voiced, overly appeasing way about them.    It will take some practice.  I may sign up to work for them in the center just to learn how it is done.

In any case, I think what they are saying is that I can't report an outage because they have an incorrect spelling of my last name on the account.  That will take them 24-48 hours to fix.  I think.  It has literally (no exaggeration) taken 6 hours to get that much out of them.   

So I'm damn close to just canceling them.  We have good free TV reception (can even buy an HDTV antenna and a TIVO machine and life won't be half bad).  Then I'll see if the phone company's DSL is any good.

Christmas Podcast

It is back!  By popular demand, the Unwilted Christmas podcast is uploaded for your listening pleasure.  It is in M4A format this year -- deal with it.

Facebook and Friends

I've been interested lately in  the impact that Facebook may be having on friendship.  Unlike Myspace, it seems that Facebook is a way to connect with people that you actually already know in one capacity or another  For me, it provides an easy way to share photos and information.  It also allows me to "passively" keep in touch with people with whom I may not otherwise share frequent emails or telephone calls but who I still care about to one degree or another. 

The interesting problem, though, is who exactly do I know?  Assuming I know a person, do I really want to be friends on Facebook?  

Unless you are a salesman, politician, or entertainer, the value of Facebook diminishes as you get too many friends.    After all, being friends entails getting (in some cases) multiple updates on the daily details of their life.  Do I really need to now that the dude I hung out with for a few weeks back in 1998 is sick today?  Or even worse, that he is doing great on some trivia quiz?

So this all creates some difficult decisions when I get a friend request.  One of the hardest decisions concerns people that I know now or sort of know now.  This category of person is somebody that I actually see on a regular basis for whatever reason.  By adding him as a friend today, it almost seems that I'm committing to following his daily updates for the rest of my life.  Perhaps the standard procedure will be to quietly drop the friendship after not being in regular contact for a few years.  On the other hand, it may still be good to have some sort of link to that kind of person going forward, especially if we are in the same profession or have a lot of mutual friends.

Another dilemma is what to do with the person you sort of knew years ago.  Yes, we went to school together years ago.  But we were not even really friends then.  Is there a sufficient basis to be "friends" now for the first time just based on the common experience and perhaps mutual friends?  In this situation, it at least helps if the friend request has a message to go with it.  Otherwise, it is this almost creepy agreement to open myself up to your voyeurism (photos, updates, contact information) in exchange for the same -- looking at each other through a double blind window (if such a thing exists).  

I should disclaim that although some of the friend requests have been close calls both ways (both accept and reject), and I've been fairly limited with respect to the people that I'll allow into my Facebook life.  I'm happy with the friends that I have (and there are still many real life friends who I hope will join Facebook).   It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out in the years and decades to come, and what my reaction will be to finding out that the dude I met at a conference in 2002 reached a new level in the Nickelback trivia game.   

Nothing to Do

With the election over, I'm not sure what to do with myself.  Even right now, I'm watching football.  That ought to be enough, but I've become accustomed to multitasking with the TV going and the laptop on the coffee table.  So right now, the commercials are playing and I've nothing to look at on the internet.  

Rush and Sean and the Rest

I spend a lot of time listening to talk radio. Most of what is available is the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity sort of stuff. During this last election season, much of the Republican message was generated by talk radio. Whether it was Ayers, ACORN, socialism, or Barack Obama wanting to bankrupt the coal industry, I always heard about it first on talk radio. Talk radio is the most influential conservative think tank and the primary Repub election strategist.

On the one hand, I suppose, that is a compliment to talk radio. On the other hand, I wonder if the Repub's reliance on talk radio as a source of new ideas is really hurting them. Certainly, there are intelligent, thoughtful conservatives such as David Brooks or George Will. Ronald Reagan and the conservatives ruled the 1980s on the strength of their ideas. They won in 1994 based on ideas -- the old Contract with America. But talk radio deals in broad generalizations concerning their own ideas, and mostly caricature or outright distortions of their opponents. Mostly, they attack liberals or any Repub. who is not like them (i.e., Rush today said "good riddance" at the loss of Repub. Chris Shays). They work themselves into a frenzy, and they begin to remind most Americans of their crazy old uncle who used to think that the government controlled the weather and who kept gold coins in his basement. Don't you think that is exactly how John McCain looked when he tried to compare Barack Obama to a socialist?

Republicans who are now searching their souls should search for leadership who will return them to ideas. And Sarah Palin probably does not fit that bill.

Must See -- Daily Show Exposes the BS

Back

Ready to kick this blog back up. Keep checking.

Hiatus

Hiatus for at least the next year. Maybe in that time, I'll figure out what I really want to blog about anyway.

More Mac and Youtube Disabled

The Mac switch is going fine. It does not always "just work" as they say. I was just learning to use garageband to make a podcast, went to the help file and it froze up. Then the "force quit" feature wouldn't force the application to quit. I had to restart.

That was a minor annoyance compared to my primary Youtube account being disabled. One too many copyright violations, I guess. No notice, even after the fact. And now all the videos are gone. So just as with Napster (years ago), it is off to find an alternative. Leading contender is dailymotion, although I'd love to hear other suggestions.

Mac Switch

Well, the old PC went kaput one more time. So becasue I won't be able to fix it myself during the next several months, I decided we should become a Mac family. Got a low end Mac Mini really just for web surfing, email, music, etc. That's all everybody needs (other than me), and this should appease them and hopefully "just work" for the next several months.

Having some probably normal adjustment issues, but everything is working very well. One highlight was plugging in my printer and then printing 20 seconds later without having done anything to set it up. On the old system, I kept getting printer driver errors every time I restarted (even though I had the driver disks and had reinstalled everything). Another highlight was uninstalling a program that I had downloaded but decided not to use. All I had to do was delete it. No restarting, no registry changes. And I didn't feel like I had gunked up my system (on the old system, I was very reluctant to install anything because it would just mean that I'd have to reformat sooner).

I was not able to function without a right clck on the mouse, but was able to configure the mac mighty mouse to have a right click anyway. The process for installing programs was a little bit different as well, but is not a big deal once you know what you are doing. Just a different way.

Liquor and Guns

I really can't stand Conan O'Brien, but this segment with Hunter S. Thompson is cool despite him.

Lifestyle Choices

Seeing a family with about five children today, I finally understood how Christian conservatives feel when they witness the homosexual lifestyle choice. I disapproved and was offended.

Cultural Adventist

I've been meaning to write about being a "cultural adventist" and thought the concept was pretty unique. Turns out there is a damn blog with the same name. And a timeline of the term. I want to say that I was using the term before 2001, when the timeline starts. But I can't be sure, and couldn't prove it either way. Unless Eric remembers me saying something along those lines. I remember first thinking about cultural adventism (although I don't know for sure if I used that term at the time) in Boston in 1998 when we met this gay uncle who still had vegetarian food in his pantry. He had learned a new use for Big Franks, perhaps, but the food item still united us.

Unlike some of the so-called cultural adventists I've found online, I don't consider church attendance a part of cultural adventism (although it can be). There have been times in my life when I returned to the bosom of the church not because I believe it to be true, but because it felt comfortable during uncomfortable times. When living in Washington DC, I recall going to an adventist church to get a good vegetarian meal at the potluck dinner afterwards. Living in Ireland, I went to the church to meet people and managed to get a job from one of them. Even now, if I became ill, I'd want to go to an Adventist hospital. Not just because of the food, but because it would feel like home.

Cultural adventism goes beyond food and comfort, of course. It is an essential part of the nurture side of your personality. The inability to dance or play card games. A love for nature and the outdoors that comes from going to places like Jump Creek every Sabbath afternoon. These things linger -- even if you slowly become a lesbian neo-feminist poet living in a commune. Even that person, deep down inside, will pause and take notice if a news story makes it sound like a Sunday Law could be coming. And yes, even she knows where the local ABC is and goes there -- piercings and all -- every few months to stock up on Fri Chick.