Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Programming Ban
March 02, 2011

I’m curious about what will come out of the iPad 2 event from Apple that is supposed to happen today. With the market for tablets opening up, it’s just a matter of time until someone releases a more functional tablet than the iPad that Apple provides. I say this having read about the reason that the iPad is so successful - Apple’s ability to offer the device for a low price. But I think that the iPad is still just a bit deficient in a particular area.

Don’t get me wrong, I use the iPad very often. It’s not deficient to the point of being unusable. I’m using to write this post right now, in fact. With a bluetooth keyboard, the iPad is almost a computer. And that’s the problem - “almost”.

Scheduling Insanity
March 01, 2011

I have some pity for families who have kids that are sports players, and I suspect that as our kids get older we’ll start sharing some more of their issues. We’ve started Riley at a karate (technically Kenpo) school that is nearby to his after school daycare. Yesterday was an interesting day, running back and forth between places, trying to get the information needed to sign him up properly. I spoke briefly with the woman at the desk there about how insane our schedules have become, running the kids to their various activities.

Abby has Orchestra and Chorus on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so Berta runs her to school early on those days. Riley’s half-day kindergarten is a royal pain – I’m not sure how other parents deal with it and why the school district doesn’t just switch to full-day. But on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we send Riley to his after-school daycare, and on Tuesday and Thursday I pick him up and bring him home where Nana watches him. On those days he has after-school daycare, the karate school busses him from daycare to their location for the hour lesson and then returns him to the school, where Berta eventually picks him up on her way home. Sometime during all of that, Abby comes home from school on the bus, where I have to be home to wait for her. All of this is subject to the Girl Scout schedule, which often changes how things work on Fridays, and to Nana’s schedule, which includes occasional doctor visits and art lessons that make it impossible for me to be out at meetings past 5pm (which might not be when the meeting is scheduled, but would include travel time home from the city or elsewhere).

Keeping Kindergarten
February 18, 2011

Riley’s been concerned lately with our too-easy dismissal of his creative works from school. Every day, he comes home with one or two, sometimes more, creations that he has constructed in kindergarten. Granted, they’re not all masterpieces - some are just assignments that are colored in with blanks filled out using the right letters of numbers. Others, though, are nice works of art for a 6-year-old. A recent project that included a double rainbow, a unicorn, a castle, and a dragon is certainly the stuff of keepsake.

But how much of this should we keep? I think this is a similar question to the one skippy presents about keepsake books. I’m not sure that Riley’s formative scribblings are going to be something he’s going to want to show to his kids, but is still begs the question, how do we decide which of the things are going to turn out to be important to him when he grows up?

The Straight Razor
February 15, 2011

For Christmas this year, Pat got me a pair of straight razor handles for disposable razor blades. When I opened the gift, everyone’s reaction was a parody of those in A Christmas Story, “You’ll cut your face off!” But it’s something I’ve been wanting and had asked to receive for quite some time, and I’ve been using it for the past few months.

Since I started working at home, I don’t shave as regularly as I did when I was working in an office. Why would I? It’s kind of a pain to do it. Even when I was working in an office, I didn’t shave every day, even though my face hair would grow in fast enough to warrant it. It simply hurt my skin too much to do it, even with the safety razor.

Valentines Packaging
February 14, 2011

There is only one redeeming feature of those little chalk-like heart candies (of which we bought way, way too many for the purposes of photographing for our latest beer label): They have sort-of custom text on them.

What’s amusing about the hearts is that the packaging presents them as pristine. The text is clear and centered, and there are variations of text there that I’ve not seen in all of the photographing I’ve done of them. In reality, the chalky treats have text that is blurry, broken, printed outside the bounds of the candy, or printed too lightly or too heavily, and is in most cases unreadable. I wonder at what point quality control became a non-issue with these candies; when they stopped caring that you could actually read them. Or perhaps the printing was always crap.