This week has already gone atypical. Yesterday, Abby was off school for President’s Day. Her being home while I’m “at work” left me with one of those feelings of a void day. It felt like Tuesday when it was happening, and I stressed out over how much I had to get done to complete the week. And then today, it’s like yesterday never happened since it’s Tuesday again, with the exception that a lot of the stuff I had needed to accomplish today is mysteriously already done.
This week is Abby’s Top Dog week at kindergarten. Every week, her class has a “Top Dog” who they profile. They get to bring in a show-and-tell item and talk about photos on their Top Dog poster.
Berta and Abby have een assembling her Top Dog poster for a couple of weeks. It’s supposed to be special, covered with things that illustrate Abby’s personality and hobbies. Berta got a bunch of scrapbooking stickers to apply to the poster, and glued some other things to it too. She’s got little cutout dominoes and ballet attire, the program from her camp play last summer, and photos of Abby and Riley, and rollercoasters.
Abby also took her camera with her to school today for teh show-and-tell part of the program. For Christmas I got Abby one of those disposable digital cameras from CVS. She eagerly took pictures with it, and they came out pretty good. So a few weeks ago, I saw a digital camera on sale at Walmart for $50 and dropped it in our cart. It’s got an LCD screen, flash, and uses SD cards. It’s actually a pretty capable little camera at 4 megapixels. But she’s been taking pictures with that thing like crazy and dumping them to her computer when she runs out of space. She’s been going through batteries like crazy.
Riley is causing plenty of lost sleep - at least for Berta. The boy completely refuses to go to bed. Berta has to lay with him to keep him from getting up and running around. With Abby in a pretty solid routine for falling asleep at bed time, having Riley up and bothering her disturbs this good thing.
Worse yet, he’s been a bit sick lately, and is generally irritable. His cold has caused him to take naps at weird times of day when he’s just too worn out to go on, and then he really doesn’t want to sleep when it’s time.
As a result, Berta has been in a weird sleep pattern. I would like to get to a place we can put the kids to bed at a reasonable time, without taking overlong, and have a couple hours in the evening to ourselves. As it’s been, Berta and I hardly spend any time alone.
Tonight, Nana is going out for Fat Tuesday. The Grille where I have lunch most Tuesdays and Thursdays is now offering fish on the menu as a standard item, so you know Lent is imminent. So let’s all go out and indulge on food tonight!
I never did write about the weekend. I’m getting bad at reviewing our monthly Philadelphia meetups for WordPress and Blogging. There are a lot of conflicting feelings there. On one hand, I enjoy meeting up with other people and talking about blogging. On the other hand, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t have the patience of an effective organizer, especially as my interest in the specific subject matter (WordPress) wanes. I try very hard to at least be pro-WordPress during the hour that the meetup is scheduled. After that, all deals are off.
Several things are becoming more clear as I talk to people who’s business is “blogging”. First, people are starting to catch on to the WordPress-for-profit idea that I’ve been complaining a lot about. I don’t begrudge Automattic for making a little coin off of their work. But I’ve always felt (check the IRC meetup logs) that it’s kind of underhanded to include a plugin with an open-source applicaton that is tied to a specific commercial service.
Seriously, this sounds so much like Microsot bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. If Microsoft bundles a free browser with their OS, then what chance do other browser vendors have to thrive monetarily by offering a competing product? In parallel, if WordPress includes a plugin to a commercial spam prevention system, what chance do others have to create a competing product?
I’m sure there’s someone who would explain it better, and I’m sure there’s a pat response to spin all of the above. These days, I don’t have the energy to fight the machine. It’s not that I don’t care, but that I see it as very unlikely that Kvetching is going to change that process, if you see what I’m saying.
In any case, while it’s nice to meet with people who are involved in WordPress custom development that see the same thing going on, it’s still kind of disturbing that I’m managing the meetup at all when I have these thoughts. Others have pointed out that doing Habari is a conflict of interest with participating with WordPress, but I don’t think that’s true. I think the conflict of interest is with WordPress’ business practices in general.
I installed Delphi again on my desktop. I’ve got some projects that I’d really like to get out of my head. I’d like to rewrite the Flickr Uploadr so that it’s a good program and not the piece of crap they’ve handed us. It might also be neat to write an APP client that doesn’t suck. And a few other ideas. I miss Delphi a bit.
