Some Blog Site

Poison Ivy:

No wait, that was a small box elder tree.

This is poison ivy:

As you can see, those two plants are hard to tell apart.

My philosophy is “better safe than sorry” so I pull out anything that resembles poison ivy.

This kills two birds with one stone, as I don’t like box elder trees anyway. They don’t cause a rash, but they’re just annoying in general.

So kill the plant – whether it’s poison ivy or box elder I’m glad to be rid of it.

I have an update to an old post about the trichotomy of features. This one pertains to technology.

I was thinking of any number of social media networks, but it could also apply to a smart phone app, or an internet-connected thermostat, or the remote start feature of your car. It seemed broad enough that I just called it “technology”.

It was prompted by the political discussions of liberty versus freedom in light of national security events. But the same concept extends to devices too.

For example, the fancy new thermostats can be controlled via a smart phone app. That feature is useful, but now your furnace can be controlled by someone in another country. So your security has gone down.

Or a social network that wants to give people freedom to interact, so it opens up its API. To protect people’s security, it doesn’t gather personal information from its users. Now it is not very useful, because it’s the information such as birthdays that enhances the usefulness of social networks.

As a parent, I sometimes find that kids respond better to certain things than others.

For instance, if you want them to leave what they’re doing and come to you, you could try saying “Come here”.

But his response time may vary depending on his mood and how interesting he thinks whatever you have for him is.

If you want an instant reaction and have the kids right by your side immediately, try saying aloud but not directly to him: “Cool! Look what I found!”

Of course, you had better have something worth showing. Otherwise you’ll be the parent who cried wolf and they’ll ignore you.

Similarly, no boy can resist going to see what it is when someone says “Ewwww! Gross!” So keep that phrase handy, possibly when you want them to clean something.

The last phrase works best on younger boys, say about ages 4 to 7. It is “On your mark, get set, go!” For example, it is time for dinner and they are not showing much interest in making their way to the kitchen. Go to them, challenge them to a race to the kitchen, then say the magic phrase. I find it’s best to start saying it before they can finish their answer to the challenge. If you can get to the word “Go!” before they have completely processed the request, they can’t help but compete.

Any other good phrases that help get your kids’ attention?

Of course, if your kids are ignoring all your normal commands and requests, you have deeper problems than some fun phrases can fix.

At work, everyone has small whiteboards that they put at their desk or office wall. The most common usage is to write a note for visitors to see if you’re not at your desk, mainly vacation days and such.

I like to put “On vacation – back tomorrow” if I’m gone for one day or “On vacation – back next week” if I’m taking a week off.

The beauty of that is if I decide to take another day off, I don’t need to do anything – the sign is still correct.

But someone at work thinks that’s not a good idea. Every time I come back from vacation, the actual date of my anticipated return is written on my whiteboard.

Next time, I’m writing “Back later”.

In recognition of Father’s Day, I put together a list of titles for the roles that dads have.

• CTO – Chief Turner Offer (of the light switches)
• CQC – Cookie Quality Checker (need to make sure they’re safe for everybody)
• GTO – Garbage Taker Outer (no one else has accepted this promotion yet)
• CFF – Chief Food Finisher (do not let a perfectly good half a steak go to waste)
• CDC – Chief Door Closer (working closely with the CTO)

I’d like to add the title CEO after my name, but I haven’t found a good acronym for it yet. Any suggestions?

Due to a long flight for business travel, I’ve been reading books when it’s not summer vacation. Rather than wait until my annual summer book review and write an interminably-long post, I decided to write about them now.

Here they are, approximately in the order that I read them.

• Airman by Eoin Colfer
  I read this book because my older kids wanted to read it. They go through a lot of books, so I can’t preview them all. Consider this a random sample of their books.

  It was intense. Or maybe it just felt more intense because I don’t go through many stories like this anymore. My reading choices are either non-fiction or books for young children (like Mercer Mayer’s Little Critter kinds of plots).

  It was very engaging, with some mild language and a bit of violence. I thought about how to recommend or rate this, and I settled on a comparison to Treasure Island. The bad people are bad, and they threaten murder and harm, and they accomplish it. But the descriptions of violence are brief and not any more gory than they need to be.

  I’d say ages 10 and up.

• The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
  I chose this book because it was purported to be an inspiration to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

  It’s a quick story, and more along the lines of old fairy tales than it is to any modern story. Especially after finishing Airman.

  I’m having a hard time deciding on an age limit. Maybe ages 4 and up?

• The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke
  This was another book that my kids wanted to read but I took it to preview it first.

  There was not any gore in this, and I don’t remember any offensive language. The story was not as intense as Airman, mainly because there aren’t any villains. There are some antagonists, but they aren’t evil.

  The main problem with this book is a common malady among modern stories – kids are the heroes and adults are the problems. It wasn’t that overt, but the general theme was there.

  I’d say ages 9 and up.

• Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
  This is the original story. Another one which inspired some great authors. Beware when checking out or buying the book that it is the original story. Some books in the library were retellings.

  The plot is pretty much as you expect, if you’re familiar with any versions of Peter Pan. Of course, there are some nuggets in there that make the book worthwhile. I’m in particular thinking of the descriptions of Nana.

  If your kids are fine with the movie version of Peter Pan, then they’ll be fine with this book. If you’re reading to younger kids, then you might have to gloss over some parts, such as why Smee’s sword has the name that it does.

  Maybe ages 7 and up for reading on their own?

• Jack by Liesl Shurtliff
  I didn’t read this one, but my wife did – in order to preview it for the kids. She said it was okay, so go ahead and let your kids read it.
• Magicalamity by Kate Saunders
  I didn’t read this one, but my wife did – in order to preview it for the kids. She said it was not acceptable, so we returned it to the library. It had an overall air of rudeness and disrespect, plus some other things. So avoid this book unless you want your child learning new insults and certain medical procedures.

Does anyone use the voice command feature of customer service phone calls? I ignore those and always press the keys.

I find myself annoyed at them, because it takes the lady long enough as it is to go through the prompts normally. But when you add having her say the phrases that you need to say for the option you want, it about doubles the time you have to sit and listen.

I understand that some people might have physical limitations that cause them to have problems with keypresses. For those people, the call system could have that as an initial option. Like they do for English and Spanish. They could say “For English, press 1; para Español, marque dos; for voice commands, please say ‘voice commands’.”

That would also work for the people who are multitasking by calling customer service lines while they are driving and can’t or won’t press keys (or key-like sections of a screen).