Only a week or so ago, Harvey gained an important and significant understanding of a vocabulary word I never though I would love so dearly: “Yes”
Much of the discussion of Terrible Twos that I have seen in popular culture revolves around the insistent and repetitive use of the word “no” but the reality (in our case at least, perhaps we are unknowingly lucky… so far) isn’t so much that every request is met with a no, but that the first deep understanding of behavioural direction kids have is about what not to do.
I don’t know, I am no child psychologist and I don’t even play on one TV. Maybe we are terrible parents raising our child in a world of negativity but the simple fact of the matter is that as soon as kids start gaining some amount of motor control parents start teaching them what sorts of things are not okay to do. I can’t see the opposite method making sense – the possible number of prohibited activities is vastly inferior to the possible number of allowable and even encouraged activities.
So kids learn very quickly that it is not okay to do certain things, and that the word “no” is how that is indicated. Very early in life they have a deep understanding that rejection is performed by saying no, which means that very quickly in life they are able to start expressing their self by identifying that which they do not want – by saying no.
Parents, or at least Jen and I, take advantage of a child’s knowledge of this concept of refusal by presenting a variety of options to children, or at least Harvey, who in turn responds with either “no” or, in Harvey’s case for a long time, no response at all. Lack of rejection was a positive response.
Harvey has learned that there is an explicit positive response, the opposite of rejection, and has started using it. He nods his head, he says “yes!” when asked certain things, and as far as I am concerned life is markedly better as a result. That positive (and frequently enthusiastic) response is so absolutely charming and endearing that I want to offer him things I know he’ll like just so he can be excited and positive about them.
I am absolutely open to the fact that, rather than me learning something about Harvey’s development, he has learned something about causing me to engage in the actions he prefers.
Harvey has officially entered the stage of food consumption that I call Bread, Glorious Bread. He hasn’t yet started denying other foods in favour of buns and loaves but that is only a matter of time.
Last night during supper he ate a sandwich bun that is probably the size of my fist which is fairly impressive for a child his size if you discount the fact that he is basically a bottomless pit when he so chooses.
I’m pretty happy he’s at this stage, as it makes feeding him ridiculously simple. The task has never really been hard, the boy loves fruit of all types (especially blueberries) and when he’s interested in eating it generally isn’t terribly difficult to find something he’ll go for, but this makes it even easier and I am all for easier.
I have no doubt that we’ll continue to offer whatever it is we’re eating for supper (or other meals) and I have no doubt that much of the time he’ll partake in our meals (especially when they feature rice or peas, or as mentioned, blueberries) but it does free us up a little bit to eat things that he has never encountered before or is avoiding without having to have long conversations wherein we offer several food choices only to have him reject each one.
Overall he is generally open to almost any sort of food, though he has yet to actually consume any amount of lettuce (it is usually iceberg though, so perhaps he is just repulsed by his parent’s poor taste in leafy vegetables). He frequently tries foods that are new to him or that he knows he doesn’t like, which leads to one of the greatest joys in a father’s life: offering your child foods you know he’ll despise and getting a chuckle at the resultant looks of disgust. He’s long since stopped just spitting things out though, and is actually becoming quite tactful at running to one parent or another to tastefully spit out the mouthful of displeasure.
Now we can shortcut the cascade of options and, if he doesn’t like what’s on his plate, we can just stuff him with dinner buns for while man may not be able to live on bread and water alone, children sure as heck can, often for years.
Now that he is a great fan of breadstuffs, and long has he been a member of the choir of Hot Dogs Are Great, I anticipate the inevitable introduction of Hot Dog on a Bun. Today I think he probably won’t be able to get his mouth around the entire beast and it would just confuse him, but in a few months new vistas of handheld foodstuffs will absolutely blow his mind, and the best part is I’ll be able to feed him after investing 30 seconds at the microwave.
So, I have this cup that I use all the time. A travel mug, if one wants to be specific (which generally, I don’t). In the mornings I fill it with coffee, and refill it once or twice from its companion thermos. Then I switch to water for a while, and occasionally have some more coffee in the afternoon.
With all this drinking, the cup gets filled probably six times daily, you’d think I would be able to consume beverages from it without risking a damp shirt but as it turns out (and really, knowing me you wouldn’t think that) I can’t.
The problem is that I start drinking from it when it is not properly aligned. Maybe I am typing something at the time, or talking with someone, or maybe I am just not that smart, but quite frequently non-trivial amounts of beverage soak my sweaters. And soaked sweaters are not fun, spring break notwithstanding.
What I need, I have just decided, is some form of glow-in-the-dark material that I can use to clearly mark the opening of the mug’s lid. I keep my cubicle area fairly dim. I have detached the fluorescent bulbs immediately above my head, and while I have one of those bendy arm lamps that is often on, the part of the room immediately in front of my mouth is generally poorly lit, especially in the winter.
So, this is something I thought of this morning.
It’s an iPhone app, and it doesn’t exist and probably never will. I give it to the universe freely and will claim that it is “practice” and an “exercise in design” or some such, instead of just me being a lazy fuck who doesn’t do anything.
Except blog, but that’s the same thing.
So, there you are holding your iPhone (or iPod Touch of course but that’s just more to type, unlike this entirely unnecessary parenthetical) but you’re holding it horizontally because that’s important for this game.
On the screen are some number of entities, moving at varying speeds from the left side to the right. They are competitors in a race, and I think they are blobular but I am not bound to that. Animation and art style are important here though, they are amusing and probably cute.
There is one in particular that you are a fan of, but you do not have direct control over any of them. You want the one that you are a fan of to win, because that is the purpose of this thing: to help your blobular thing win the race.
I haven’t yet decided what constitutes a win, maybe it is just making it all the way across the screen or maybe the racecourse is longer than the screen and there is some amount of side scrolling afoot. There is a start point and an end point to this course however, and in the base concept there is very little in terms of geographical obstacles between the two, just distance.
You can interact with the environment. You have these big pudgy fingers you see, and one or more of them can touch the screen to make things happen. If one of the other blobs is ahead of your blob you can touch the screen and pin it to the wall. If you time it right you can pin multiple other blobs to the wall (since they can overlap each other in position) but if you keep holding your finger there the other blobs need to get over your finger.
Once you remove your finger, the blobs you have pinned against the wall will become unpinned, but that takes a bit of time (perhaps in proportion to how long they were pinned!) and of course those who were climbing over your finger maybe suddenly fall.
You can touch your finger to the screen and quickly drag it in one direction or another to fling the blobs, they might bounce off the ceiling and after they land they will be dazed for some amount of time.
The goal is to run interference in such a way that your blob wins.
The challenge is that the rest of the blobs have someone doing the same for them.
First, a definition since perhaps I am making this up out of whole cloth. A ‘scrubber’, to me, is the part of a media player that indicates one’s location in the media. An appropriate turn of phrase may be ‘seek bar’.
Typically speaking, it is a horizontal scroll bar jobby, where the left-most position indicates 0 seconds into the loaded media and the right-most position is fully complete.
I hate these fucking things.
Or rather, I hate the limited level of control for timestop accuracy most offer. See, most of the media I consume these days is longer-form stuff. iTunes in specific was certainly developed with 3-minute media chunks in mind, and for that the scrubber works great but I mostly listen to podcasts which run 1 or 2 minutes in length. At that point, accuracy breaks down.
The iPod wheel was a tremendous interface element for this, since the degree of accuracy could be related to the speed with which one spun their finger around it, but my iPod battery died a little while ago so now I am listening mostly in iTunes. And iTunes doesn’t offer a convenient little wheel to spin, it offers a horizontal scroll bar jobby that doesn’t allow for to-the-second accuracy.
Even more frustrating to me, I spent a bit of time last week poking around at my office’s iPod Touch (as that is the logical, if currently out-of-reach-financially option, for replacement) and the scrubber on them is even worse. The smallest little finger movement jumps around in erratic and unpredictable increments of 3 to 5 minute chunks. That is no good!
I’ve also noticed it on YouTube’s scrubber, if I want to jump back to a specific point in time, no go. There is some kind of chunking going on that seems to offer only discrete stopping points along the timeline, not a high enough degree of resolution to get to a specific second in something that is a lecture-length piece of video.
So according to the calendar reminder I set myself, on Wednesdays I’m supposed to talk about my ongoing attempts at self-education. I thought that maybe it would be fun to talk about that sort of thing, but it turns out it really isn’t.
So now I need to muster up another topic for Wednesdays, and I’m having some difficulties deciding what to do, or whether I even do want to blog daily. I like the idea of it but there’s no real topic that I care about enough to bother with.
What I need in a calendar application is a way to schedule a randomly recurring event with some finely tunable frequency. Daily blogging, it turns out, kind of isn’t my thing in part because it requires quite a bit of mental mustering to come up with something to say.
Of course, now that I’m actually typing, it’s quite easy to babble for a little while.
On the Stackoverflow podcast Jeff has been encouraging Joel to try shorter form blog posting, and to a certain degree that is something I am going to try too although arguably I am already doing short-form blog posts, especially when compared to Joel’s average content length.
Anyway, one of the primary factors of this particular reboot is to dissuade myself of the opinion that I actually need to present or support any kind of significant thesis in a blog post. As it turns out, I am not an essayist I am a babbler and so shall I babble.
I am going to try to continue doing daily posts, and I am going to leave my current topic-based reminders intact but I am not going to be rigid with the topics because being prompted to blog is good but being constrained to specific topic matter is not.
After the last time I talked about my exercises I did a little bit of digging and learned that what I understood to be called a Russian Chair is more frequently called a Captain’s Chair, and as such the exercise that I have been performing on it is called a “Captain’s Chair exercise”, a practical name indeed.
The other sort of exercise I was doing on it is called “dips”, even though I haven’t actually successfully dipped just yet, and more accurately what I am doing could be called shrugs.
While researching these things I also learned that dips emphasize the front muscles – biceps and the front parts of shoulders and a bit of chest – and I should be complementing them with pull-ups and chin-ups which work the corresponding back muscles and triceps.
I was pleased by this information, since a chin-up is something I’ve never been able to do and I have long mad minor fantasies of actually one day being able to lift my own body.
With this knowledge in hand I finally mustered up the courage to try the chin-up machine (which as it turns out, can also be used for dips) at the gym.
On one of my first visits to the gym, I saw a frail old lady walk up to the chin-up machine and do several sets on it. It was one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen, and piqued my interest in the device. I hadn’t ever gotten around to trying it though, in part because of its placement right in the middle of the very open gym where everyone on a treadmill (easily the most popular machines) or reclined cycle (the second-most popular) would have a great view of my fat sweaty ass lugging itself up and down.
Somewhat surprising to me, and only loosely related, is the fact that working out for some time has significantly improved my body image. There is of course the fact that I’ve lost some weight (which is definitely helpful for this sort of thing) but more importantly it’s helped me realize that my weight isn’t actually the first thing on peoples’ minds when they encounter me.
So I tried the machine. It is essentially a big counterweight, offsetting some percentage of the user’s mass to let them gradually develop the form and muscles necessary to eventually hoist their full mass.
It was quite possibly the best I’ve felt after any one specific exercise ever. I felt very similarly when I finally gave up on the treadmill and returned to stationary cycling for my cardio, the movement and strain on my body was exactly the sort of thing it had been craving.
So now I’m beginning to figure out a schedule. My primary form of exercise is still time on the bike since my primary goal is still weight loss. But in addition to the bike time I like to do a few other exercises and right now what I’ll probably do is Captain’s Chair Exercises on Tuesdays and Thursday, and some rotation of dips and chins on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Of course, it’s a pretty rare week in the winter (due to shoveling when required) that I’m able to make it to the gym every weekday, but overall the missed days should roughly balance out.
Mondays I think will be pretty boring. These are my “What I Ate For Breakfast” naval-gazing days.
Eggs and hashbrown patties. I put a thin slice of cheddar on top of the hashbrown and put an over-easy egg on top so it’s a big cheesy yolky potatoy mess.
Most days I don’t eat breakfast at home, since I work out in the mornings, but there was no way in hell I was going to be in a public gym on the first Monday after New Years. I’ll put up with the insanity over the next couple of weeks, but today was bound to be the worst.
We celebrated New Years at 8pm, which if I’m right was midnight GMT which is good enough, and it meant that Harvey got to cheer with us. We have a couple of friends over for a simple supper of homemade pizza. They cabbed home before midnight, I rang in the Eastern Time New Year with the Warcraft Guild and was in bed by 12:05.
We all got sick this weekend, it was just a big mess of snot and Kleenex. Good times for sure.
I think the most important educational stride I made in the past year was learning Objective-C. Not super deeply really, enough to be somewhat familiar with conventions but I only used it for a couple of months on a couple of projects (one for work, and a few personal toys).
I like learning new languages, especially ones that differ in some way or another from generic C syntax. Objective-C isn’t wildly different, but in the way that it uses the concept of “message passing” as something slightly different than “function calling” modified the way I think about Objects.
A little bit of knowledge, as will become quite apparent, allows one to be so much more absolutely wrong than complete ignorance. I’m going to get a lot of this terminology wrong, but that is a right I reserve and I don’t rightly give a fuck. For me the best way to learn is to be wrong for a very long time, and so wrong I shall be.
Anyway, in most of the languages I’m even passingly familiar with (PHP, VB, JavaScript, C#, Java, Perl; roughly in descending order) you make a class and the class has methods and you call those methods with a set of parameters. Mostly, Objective-C is the same and the difference is largely syntactical. Where I might call an object.function( parameter ) in other languages, in Objective-C I send a message to an object in the format [object message:parameter].
After working in this style for several months I poked into Lisp very briefly, something I tend to do every year or so. This time, for some reason, something stuck a little bit better.
I am still largely ignorant of Lisp, but the way all the brackets work together makes sense to me now. I understand how to read Lisp from a structural standpoint, even if most of the words are still gibberish.
My understanding is that Objective-C was made by one or more people who really liked Scheme, which is some kind of derivative or a particular implementation or otherwise something that is very Lispy and so it kind of makes sense that some of the lessons in structure that I’ve learned while programming in Objective-C help me understand a little bit about how Lisp works.
In the late fall, I spent a week reading about Erlang. I rather like it, although I haven’t actually retained enough to write Hello World let alone anything useful. I’m having trouble thinking of things I’d like to do in Erlang, in part because everything I am thinking of these days is too big, but that is a tangent.
I still can’t do shit in Emacs.
So given that this is something of a reboot of the blog I’ll attempt to do the whole personal overview sort of thing. I’m not very good at it and I’m always unhappy with the way I end up describing myself, but then that’s also sort of the purpose of the blog: To describe myself in terrifically banal detail.
So these days I’m calling myself three things: A father, a husband and a programmer.
Harvey was born on August 25, 2006, which as of this writing puts him just shy of 2.5 years old. He’s pretty cool, I like him a lot. I could talk about him in great detail (and do on occasion!) but for now I’m just going to say that fatherhood is everything I expected it to be, times 10. Funner, harder, easier, suckier, greater and worse. Immeasurably more good than bad, but to suggest there isn’t any bad would be idiotic (and I’m trying to cut back on my idiocy these days).
I got married on September 25, 2004 to a truly excellent person, my wife Jen. When we met I bragged to friends about how she had more video games than I did, and just the other week we were both wrong in exactly the same way about the year we got married (we both argued pretty strenuously to my sister, who knew better, that we were wed in 2005). I couldn’t ask for anything more in a wife than what I have.
I’m not really pleased with calling myself a programmer, but it encompasses what I do for a living reasonably well. It doesn’t encompass the greater details of what I think about and what I care deeply about and what I want to do with my professional life, but I don’t think that there’s a single word that would do so for anyone, so for now I’m a programmer.
I like to make software and hope one day to make great software. These days I’m focusing on the detail levels of my craft, trying to become better at the concepts and practices of software engineering and to a lesser degree computer science.
My goal is to start my own company, and in fact I have done so. It just isn’t actually doing anything. The archives of this blog are filled with pontifications about theories of management, ideas for companies and attempts to make something work. The archives of this nature will grow.
I have been thinking lately that I am going to start calling myself a serial failer, which is a different thing than a serial failure. It is sort of like a serial entrepreneur but they tend to earn their title through success and I don’t think I’ve failed enough to learn how to be successful. In terms of personal development what I am working towards most is being comfortable in getting things wrong and in being patient with slow progress.
The thing is, for most of my life I’ve sort of embodied a mindset that if something can’t be done right then it shouldn’t be done at all. That is the thing I am most interested in changing about myself. It is an easy way to make an excuse and I am tired of excuses. I am attempting to internalize the reality that nothing pops into existence wholly formed and that means actually taking steps. Taking chances. Failing.
Which is why, even though I don’t think this is a complete (or even good) description of me, I am going ahead and writing this blather. To attempt is to make progress.
