Lance's blog

We took these recently before you left the house to go to a fairy-themed dress-up birthday party. You had a really good time at the party.

There are a couple of things to know before watching these videos. First, in the first video, when you say “give away fairies with my wand”, you meant something like “drive fairies away with my wand” (maybe you meant to say “get fairies away with my wand”). I didn’t figure this out until later.

Second, in the second video, I regret sounding so enthusiastic about your leading an army of (reformed?) evil fairies. Daddy does not approve of evil armies and I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I find the idea of my daughter at the head of an invincible magical horde to be completely fricking awesome.

Interview with a Fairy (Episode 1: “The Problem With Fairies”)

Interview with a Fairy (Episode 2: “The Army”)

Interview with a Fairy (Episode 3: “The Trick”)

During yesterday’s lazy Sunday morning, I several times teased you that it was really still night time. “See how it’s dark outside?” I said at 11:00am. “Don’t you hear the crickets chirping in the trees?” There were no crickets. “Look, there’s the moon! You better get back in bed.” You thought this was pretty funny (by lazy Sunday morning standards, anyway, I guess).

So at lunch I took a ball that has one green and one pink hemisphere (and thus a marked equator) and I turned on the LED flash on the back of my phone and turned off the dining room lights. I tried to explain how there really were places on the earth where it was daytime all summer long (whether it was bedtime or not) and where it was nighttime all winter long. I marked the ball’s north pole with a Sharpie and showed you how the earth sort of wobbles relative to the angle of the sun’s rays. I showed you how the poles pass in and out of darkness on a schedule that has little to do with our concepts of “day” and “night”. And I wasn’t sure how much of what I was saying was getting through.

Which is why I got all excited this morning in the car when you said “Dad, when you have my ball and it’s the earth…” I thought a synthesis question was coming. But then your tone turned remonstrative, and you said: “…don’t write on it with a marker, okay?”

Fair enough. It all makes me wonder how long you spent trying to erase the North Pole while cursing my presumption.

I listened to a backlog of podcasts on a log drive to Kentucky this evening, and was treated to quite a collection of weird and wonderful tales. Like the one about the guy in the 80’s who figured out that the “random” pattern of lights on the game show Press Your Luck wasn’t random at all, and won more than $100,000, which he converted into $1 bills in an effort to win a “match the dollar bill serial number” radio contest, all before he went a little nuts and ended up dying on the lam from federal agents who were chasing him because he had bilked people out of a lot of money in a ponzi scheme and become a pioneer in the world of Internet fraud.

Or the one about the guy who cut down an old tree to analyze its rings for climate change research and then counted the rings and realized: (a) that the tree was nearly 5,000 years old; and (b) that he had just killed he oldest living organism on the planet.

Or the one about Bristol and Levi getting back together. (Mama grizzly’s little cub is all grown up.)

Or the one about how one of the students who was subjected to horrifying and degrading psychological experimentation by a Harvard professor who had been cut loose by the C.I.A. grew up to become one of the most famous domestic terrorists to ever don a hoodie and aviators.

But my favorite, bar none, was about an abandoned copper mine outside of Butte, Montana that slowly filled with water after the mining company split in the early 80’s. The resulting lake was the color of rust and full of sulfuric acid. It was so toxic that all of the geese that landed there in a storm were found dead the next day. The story is really about these two scientists who were studying the slimes that somehow lived in the lake, and who found one that absorbed metals from the surrounding water at an amazing rate — something on the order of 6 times more efficiently than the microorganisms then being used in environmental cleanup. When the scientists had the key ingredient analyzed, they learned that it was a yeast that had only ever been identified in the digestive tracts of geese.

…when I realize after dropping Arica off at work and you at daycare that I have left something important at home:

View “Forgot something at home” in a larger map

My phone says I traveled more than 15 miles, averaged 22.4 mph (while I was moving, anyway; 12.7 overall) and had a net elevation loss of about 85 feet (though the overall range covered about 270 ft; it may be interesting to note that I was ultimately traveling between two points within feet of the continental divide). All of that makes it sound like I accomplished something.

More July 4 photos to come.

Since getting an iPad for father’s day, I’ve checked a couple of times on what information is out there on gaining root access to the device’s software. Skip ahead if you know what I’m talking about. 

I rooted my Android handset a while back after spending some time reading up on blogs and in forums. In the Apple community, as with Android, contains those who have reasons not to root. In the Android community, the reasons are most often nervousness about voiding warranties or fear of “bricking” the device. I’ve noticed over the past few days that in the Apple community, users’ statements about why they don’t want to root contain a moral element I don’t recall seeing with Android users. For example, in a comment in a post about rooting the iPad:

And ? Can be done/should be done do not equate. I’ve yet to see a freelance app that’s worth jailbreaking for. Stick with the pros, everyone — there’s an App Store approval process for a reason ….

this amuses me because it confirms my stereotype of Apple users as being motivated in part by a cult-like devotion to something intangible about the brand. But there are some good reasons for advising against rooting an Apple device. Unlike Android, the Apple mobile OS is not open source. So “modders” who want to modify that OS (maybe to add some usability features for lefties, or to add support for a custom kernel that permits overclocking the CPU) are working in the dark. They can’t download and work from the existing source code. 

For another matter, Apple has a reputation for taking quick and sometimes aggressive legal action against those who could possibly be perceived as a threat to the brand. Google doesn’t have that reputation, nor do Motorola, HTC, Verizon or T-Mobile. The result is that communities of Android modders can work in the open and collaborate on ever-improving iterations of custom releases of the OS, while there’s still only one flavor of Apple.

So, about that flavor: not that anyone asked or cares, here are my impressions after a couple of days wih the iPad. First, the good:

• It is hard to be sure until you have had a device for a while, but battery life seems to be great.
• The screen looks better than the pixel density would lead you to expect, and it’s a great size for email and web browsing. And games!
• The App Store has a bunch of really polished offerings. All of a sudden, I have access to all those apps by companies who have been saying “and we have an Android app in the works, too”.

But:

• The apps are expensive compared to Android offerings, and a smaller percentage seem to be free. I’m don’t think I’m getting a better value proposition with the App Store.
• What’s with all the letters on the keyboard being capitals, even when pressing them gives lower-case? Why does the OS only give me one word suggestion at a time, and then only once I’m most of the way through typing the word? And I miss Swype.
• this is my biggest complaint: the device badly needs a dedicated “back” button. You need one in almost every program, but on the iPad, you have to hunt for where each program’s developer saw fit to place it. I will get along eventually without Android’s dedicated “menu” button (though the foregoing reasoning applies here as well), and I already don’t miss Android’s dedicated “search” button. But the “back” button is sorely missed. (Blackberry also gets this one right.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a wicked jones on for a game of Angry Birds.

We are told this exchange took place at day care today after B. (a girl about your age) had offered you a hug and you had refused it.

B.: Jesus would want you to give me a hug.

Sg: I don’t care what Jesus wants me to do!

For reference, today is two days after the day you hit three-and-a-half years old.