http://store.xkcd.com/

Hey! A note to anyone interested in buying Christmas gifts from the xkcd store: the deadline for Christmas delivery of domestic orders is December 14th. We'll continue to ship after that, but won't guarantee by-Christmas delivery. (If you haven't been to the xkcd store lately, you might want to check it out. I've got some some new stuff there!)

http://xkcd.com/668/

Thanks to Sanguinity for posting this:

http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/

Her original post:

http://sanguinity.livejournal.com/517341.html

Having known the school date rapist in high school (or at least one of them). I can say how frustrating it is to know and not know how to help. Especially when the rest of the social scene seems to conspire against the victims, including the school and other involved institutions. I can also say, that like the article states, he did it over and over, and in ways he would never be punished for.

Note: Wrote the talk in five minutes, fifty minutes before I gave it.
Second Note: I maintain No-SQL solutions, they have a place in this world (beyond just being a punchline).

Tags: sql mysql drizzle database nosql

http://nat.org/blog/2009/11/the-man-in-the-arena/

http://nat.org/blog/?p=1452

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Theodore Roosevelt’s Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

http://xkcd.com/667/

( Progress )

Tags: diet

So miniBot and I were talking about Therapods today, and he wanted to mention something he'd learned on Dinosaur Train.

miniBot: "Well, on Dinosaur Train, they said... Well, on Dinosaur Train, they said... Well, on Dinosaur Train, they said... Well, on Dinosaur Train, they said... they said Therapods only have two fingers on their hands, and how scary can you be with just two fingers?"

Yep, pretty much an exact quote, with about three seconds for each ellipsis. I kind of wonder what is going on there- I think he's trying to form his words and match them to his idea, but he doesn't have a meaningful pause sound, and let's face it- most kinds of verbal communication are still things that require efforts on his part. The most heartbreaking thing I've heard out of the guy in weeks was when I was trying to ask him what was wrong with his bed, and he finally gave up and said "I don't know how to say it," and started to cry.

Leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of his remark about Therapods (they'd been talking about Tyrannosaurs in particular, not Therapods in general), I've learned to just wait it out with most of this. He's really pretty bright, and usually has something weird and interesting to add to a conversation, it is just a matter of giving him time to find a way to add something, rather than interrupting him and trying to either lead him on or coax some words out, which has to be sort of frustrating.

Checking up on him a moment ago, while he was sitting on the potty chair doing his business, he showed me a book of animal pictures that has an elephant on the front.

miniBot: "Do you know what THIS animal is?"
me: "I do believe that's an elephant."
miniBot: "You're totally right!"

I love my kids. :)

Friday: I don't remember much of the first part of the day, but I do remember going to Cloud City for some coffee and studying, which was way overdue. That evening, I came back and vacuumed the ground floor, and helped the boys through dinner (including implementing the new "you don't leave the table until your area is cleaned up" rule).

Saturday: wKnitter got up and did breakfast with the boys, and then drove herself and her partner to the Etsy show, while I pretty much entertained the kids and got them ready for the day. When she got back here (9:30 or so), we loaded up the boys and drove her back. This allowed me to have the car for the day and her to be there for (almost) the opening bell.

After the boys and I did the show (I was happy to discover that they were selling beer at the concession stand), we went to the Children's Museum, where the boys ran around in more-or-less self-directed play and I tried to keep from pushing the etsy show to every parent with a toddler. miniBot was a big boy about using the restroom there, and after a little lunch, we decided that it was time to go home. Gnat fell asleep on the way, and when we got back, miniBot took some quiet time while I ate my lunch (I hadn't had much at the center).

When the boys woke up, we loaded up and went over to Kids Cuts on Roosevelt to trim the shaggy head of miniBot. miniBot wasn't very excited about the idea, but he more-or-less let the haircut happen, and I took the after-haircut lull to do the following: 1) Get batteries for wKnitter's Fuze necklace, 2) Taste the flavor of the day at Peak's (raspberry Theo chocolate OM NOM NOM), 3) Pick up stuff for dinner- some sodas, a bag of salad, and a mini-tub of cheap chocolate ice cream.

I ended up having to pick up wKnitter from the show (which I'd forgotten was my job), so me and the boys loaded up in the car and did so. miniBot helped me make a pizza (I rolled out the dough, spread the sauce, and spread the cheese, he did the pepperoni), I prepared the salad (rinse, dump), and put some pumpkin cookies in the oven halfway through dinner, so we really had a pretty great meal. Why don't people do home-baked pizza more often?

Sunday: Again, wKnitter did breakfast with the boys. I drove the whole party (both boys, both women) to the show, and at my suggestion we decided to do drive through coffee on the way. Bummer was that Tin Cup coffee (home of the "Ride the S.L.U.Trolley" shirts) isn't open on Sundays, so coffee was at McCafe. miniBot wanted to stay and see the science museum, but I was a little worn out and they didn't open for an hour, so we came home and called oldmangrumpus.

Brunch was at Whole Foods, where miniBot got his first lesson in "If the thing you buy doesn't work, you can take it back." In this case, the thing we bought was a set of three pancakes, one of which couldn't be cut, sliced, or even penetrated by the cornware (might have been potatoware) utensils that were available. I was very polite about the whole thing, and the staff was quite responsive to my suggestions, calling up the chef after giving us a full refund.

The four of us then made a trip to Silver Platters, where my quest for Toshinori Kondo CDs was a failure, but we picked up They Might Be Giant's Here Comes Science album and the new Mike Doughty CD for dinner listening. There was also a brief trip to the library at Northgate, where we returned some stuff, and I picked up some comic books (hey look, "Ultimate Crisis!") before heading home.

Gnat napped while miniBot and I played Lego Star Wars, picking up the last minikits for the Battle of Endor (guess what? I seem to like these Ewoks and I'm not sure why), and getting about half of them from Episode IV's "Rescue the Princess," which may require using a minikit guide to figure those out.

That afternoon, I left the boys across the street while I drove back to pick up the ladies, and dinner was a refreshing bowl of Mac n' Cheese accompanied with beer. After the boys went to sleep, I read the entire Infinite Crisis thing, and I'll probably read it again- they were overreaching a little bit, but the story isn't bad, and it probably has my all-time favorite Joker moment (note to fictional self: If building a coalition of supervillans, don't piss off the Joker by inviting everyone else).

Today: So far, I've written up my BUS119 and BUS236 papers for the week (the cross-cultural analysis of Thailand and Australia was fun), and pointed someone to the totally awesome story of two crazy brothers building a supercomputer to analyze a tapestry of a unicorn in response to a picture of a painting of two unicorns playing poker. Yeah, I'm cool.

This afternoon: Taking the boys to U Village to return some crappy LED flashlights (using the on/off buttons seems to break the battery housing) and find a couple of better ones somewhere.

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Both kregexpeditor (removed since the KDE 4 upgrade) and grip (unmaintained since 2005, relies on old libraries) are missing from Ubuntu karmic. I expect to find alternatives to grip, but for now I’d like to keep using it. And I’ll give up kregexpeditor when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

The hardy version of kregexpeditor still works on karmic, and I’ve used pbuilder to port the jaunty package of grip to karmic. Both are now in the repo.