Category: Uncategorized

Congratulations are in order for my eldest daughter tonight as she was nominated by her teacher for something called The National Young Scholors Program Apparently, it’s a nationwide program where the brightest 3rd, 4th and 5th graders in the nation go to a week-long camp during which they do fun, brainy things. That Ellen was nominated for something like this doesn’t in the least surprise me. Quite honestly, nothing that Ellen does academically surprises me at this point. She’s as bright a child as I’ve ever met, and everyone knows it, including, clearly, her teachers.

However, as Kim and I have discussed, if it’s a program for someone with a disability or learning or even behavioral problem, the goverment falls over itself to pay for it. If, however, you have a talented and gifted child and the program is to enhance what they do in school because what is available to them in school bores them to tears, it’s time for the parents to fork up the dough. How many parents of bright children can afford to send them to this National program? Well, at $1900 for a week, I’m guessing not that many. The priorities of this country are seriously askew.

Tonight, after Katie finished dinner, she disappears upstairs to go shower, and Ellen, Kim and I are all still finishing up. All of a sudden, Katie reappears crying loudly, for no apparent reason. Through her sobs, I discern that she’s upset because our neighbors, 3 very sweet kids that Katie and Ellen play with (and were playing with today), decided to explain to Katie what a serial killer was. As Katie sobbed, she explained that she was scared of the serial killers.

Poor bug. Our kids are very sheltered. They’ve never watched scary movies or TV (except the last Harry Potter movie, which was pretty scary, and only Ellen went to see it, not Katie). Katie hasn’t even read the more recent Harry Potter books because they’re too scary. In fact, she covers her ears during the scary parts of the audiobook of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets–and covers her eyes during the movie.

I know many parents whose kids have seen all sorts of frightening movies and TV, and are mostly inured to those images, but, for good or bad, ours mostly aren’t, and I’m guessing that Katie’s dreams won’t be pleasant for a few days.

Today, and about time, we pried Katie’s training wheels off of her little Schwinn bike and set her zooming along. Enough of the telltale rattle of her training wheels–she is ready for the open road. With me running along beside her (well, waddling along at speed), she leapfrogged well ahead of the pace that Ellen set in mastering the 2-wheeler. For about 30 minutes, we trundled up and down the street until daddy needed to rest and Katie retired, proudly, into the backyard to cover herself in dirt. I would imagine that just a few more goes with either Kim or I dashing along next to her and she’ll be freewheeling it alone.

And then like that *poof!*, she’s gone!

Yesterday Verizon came to install FIOS in our house. We were paying a ton of money to Speakeasy for DSL (who I still like, and who has good support, but who is kind of expensive), Comcast for both a backup cable modem and digital cable, and Verizon for phone service. We bought the “triple play” or whatever it’s called from Verizon which included the same phone service, digital cable service, and an amazing 20Mbit/5Mbit fiber internet service. It also included a monsterous (and complicated) wireless router.

The FIOS guy (Bill) spent from 10 AM to about 7:30 PM here setting everything up. Most of that time was spent figuring out how to get the wiring right. They had to connect up to my phone block and my network and my cable, all of which terminate in my work room, but are nowhere near the old phone block. Once i suggested moving the FIOS ONT (Optical Network Terminal) box away from the old spot, Bill suggested a place where they could punch through the wall and run everything easily. They had a few minor glitches, and poor Bill was saddled with a total newbie for this complicated install which didn’t speed things up, to be sure, but ultimately they got things installed and running. Everything works incredibly well so far. The internet is exactly as advertized, 20/5. It’s blazing. Kim said it felt like the web pages were locally cached they loaded so quickly, and I have to agree. Their DNS must be rocking too because it’s really amazingly fast.

It took me about 15 seconds to get the entire feed for a 6 minute YouTube video last night. I’m only having 2 issues. First, I can not get DHCP working on the router. As far as I can tell, it’s set up correctly, but it just won’t allocate DHCP for some reason. No idea why. Static IPs work fine, so we’re using that for now. The second issue is that there’s one dead spot in my house, but it’s a place I use my laptop all the time so I’ll have to add a second wireless access point to the network to beef up that area.

Otherwise, FIOS is very very sweet. Of course, I haven’t had to call Verizon yet…we’ll see if I’m cursing them at that point.

For whatever reason (and believe me, I asked), Ellen decided that she needed to write her Last Will & Testiment for the world to know. Below is the uncorrected version:

My Will

I leave my computer to Katie. I leave my Nintendo DS to Katie. I leave my computer parts to Dad. I leave all my books to the Hazel avenue school library. I leave half of my money to my family and the other half to science. I leave my writing supplies to mom. I leave all my art and art supplies to Mrs. Nellen. I leave all my school papers to the teachers that taught me.

At this point, I don’t question why she does things like this too carefully. She’s…unique.

Katie was in Columbus visiting Rachel when, apparently, she and they went to a book festival. Amongst the activities was one were the kids made their own bookmarks. Katie made four of them, decorating them, and writing her own slogans. The spelling, below, is unedited:

1, I love to read!
2, Life is what maters
3, Me and a book. BFF
4, Treat bookes like my mom.

My little bookeworm.

For the last 2 weeks, my body has been beaten up by this damned bug, but yesterday I started feeling better and today I was about 75%. However, just as I’m coming out of this fog, it’s amazing how much work I’ve been thrust into. First, I have this monster calendar/contact solution in Filemaker to install at one client, and I’ve spent the entire day working on bug fixes. We should go “live” tomorrow with it.

On top of that, I’m at another client at the moment (it’s 6 PM now) just starting a reinstall of the file server. I’ll be here for several hours, and I can barely keep my eyes open now. Fortunately, I have Michele to keep me company, and giggle.

It’s gonna be a long few days.

It’s been so long since i’ve updated this blog that I’ve almost forgotten how. Today’s story centers around the tinyest of living creatures–the lowly bacterium. This one has a name, though–Chlamydia pneumoniae, a very small, very mean, very hardy little bug. Now, normally, this would be OK. The bug goes his way, I go mine, and everyone’s happy. However, this particular bug has decided to make its home in my chest and seems to be very well snuggled in. He and his friends are producing copious amounts of goo dribbling down the back of my throat, filling my lungs, and making me hack away bits of alveoli. I LIKE my alveoli!

Pneumonia sucks, but I do get sympathy and free food and stuff. And lots of sleep.

Rumors abound about Apple coming out with a new iPhone type device. Here’s my suggestion for our friends in Cupertino: Come out with a combination phone/iPod shuffle–A phone that clips onto your shirt and randomly dials anyone in the address book. They could spin it saying it’s more fun and will lead to chance encounters, when in fact it would mostly lead to you getting your mother-in-law on the phone 90% of the time and having to excuse yourself and hang up gracefully. We can call it the Phuffle.

This actually happened about a week ago, but I’ve had the blog-malaise and haven’t done much reporting here (as I’m sure is obvious). Travelled up to Hartford to visit/help out Greg’s parents, Eleanor and Dale Blake. Two nicer people, I’ve never met. Of course, when Greg was around, most of the things I heard about them was bitching, but that’s usually the case with kids and their parents, no matter how old the kids (and the parents!) become. Greg hated asking them for things, and I’m sure they offered with great frequency knowing them better now. He SO valued living on his own, and I’m know that when he had to resort to moving back there because of a combination of getting downsized and his illness (and his utter lack of motivation to go find another job, but that was Greg…), he just loathed the idea. Still, I think it was probably a good thing is a lot of ways–his parents got to spend a lot more time with him in what they didn’t realize would be his last year or two.

Anyway, I (and everyone I know that met them) find them sweet, charming, extremely bright people who give ’till it hurts, so the least I could do was schlep up there and help them untangle the mass of wires that any techie worth his/her salt would leave behind without a manual. Lord knows that if I go tomorrow, Kim will have a nightmare trying to figure out what’s connected to what. That’s like the new version of a Last Will and Testement–a manual of how everything is hooked up:

———
I, Paul Meyerson, being of sound mind and body (sort of…), do hereby state that the component cables go firts into the receiver and then into the Xbox, but have to be swaped out in order to use the cable…
———

Greg’s setup was pretty confusing, but it helped that I was able to figure out his master password. People had changed things on his network since he’s passed by wiping and reinstalling them because they couldn’t get in and didn’t know where to look for a password, so it had a bit of a crowbarred-into feel, but we got most of the stuff cleaned up. They were pretty pleased, and I got a rubbermaid container full of really good chocolate-chip cookies out of it, so it worked out just fine.