My childrens’ daycare center (Woodside Children’s Center) finally gets a website

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…thanks in part to me:

Amherst, Massachusetts – Woodside Children’s Center website

Amherst College more or less owns the Woodside Children’s Center but keeps it as a distinct entity for liability and other reasons. Historically this has meant they couldn’t take advantage of many of the services the college provides to employees and the various offices and departments, including my department’s services. That recently changed, and we spun up a simple little WordPress site for them so they can have a home on the web. Time for them to party like it’s 1995 😉

Tragically, despite one of my employees doing the bulk of the content work on the site, no pictures of my children ended up on it, at least not yet, which I teased him about when it went live. On the other hand one of the children of a board member, who’s also a tenured faculty member, did end up on the homepage, so truth be told he made the smarter choice.

Soolin’s 9th birthday

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My beautiful Golden Retriever Soolin turned 9 years old yesterday. Last night we engaged in what has become a tradition for her birthday, starting with a gift (this year – a big squeaky crocodile, chosen by Brady), followed by the happy birthday song,  and then a feast of some of her favorite things: kibble, cheese, yoghurt, and ground meat.

Truth be told, Soolin’s not aging very gracefully. She’s had a year free of surgery for the first time in several years, but the growth under her arm continues to swell and has now spawned several other smaller growths on her abdomen. This along with her arthritic hips has greatly limited her mobility, which in turn is causing some weight gain. Personality wise, she sleeps and lounges around a lot more than she used to. That’s the bad news. The good news is, her essential character is still there – she wants to play, she just finds it a physical challenge to do so and she doesn’t have anything like the stamina she had when I nicknamed her ‘The Mighty Soolin’. Also good is that despite these challenges, she’s still quick with a smile, she still greets visitors with an enthusiasm that can be overwhelming, and when a member of the family comes home, she still rouses herself for an excited greeting despite her aches and pains.

Pictures of this year’s fete:

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Don’t click on that gift horse

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An episode at work which I recently wrote up brought an old story to mind.

I have an acquaintance who was one of the founders of Flooz, a dot.com 1.0 startup which offered a virtual currency that was accepted at participating websites. Many folks remember it because of its silly name and because Whoopie Goldberg was their celebrity spokesperson and appeared in a lot of advertising.

Flooz came to an unhappy end – organized crime allegedly figured out a way to use Flooz in a money laundering scheme, and it was shut down abruptly, with most people who held Flooz losing all their currency.

I was aware of this, and as things came to a head I happened to be reading Fuckedcompany.com, which was a site insiders used to come visit to trade war stories about the dot.coms as they imploded during the original dot.com collapse in the late 90’s. One of the posters claimed that he had discovered the method the criminals were using to exploit the system, a backdoor url anyone could use.

As I was reading this my girlfriend at the time had come home. I clicked the link, thinking that while it was unlikely, I might discover something of use to my friend. My girlfriend came into the room shortly after I clicked.

What happened after I clicked is my browser went berserk and began spawning pop-up windows with photos of explicit gay sex.

I should mention that our relationship at this time was on the rocks. It was already clear to me that things were coming to the end between us, but we hadn’t had ‘that talk’ yet. I had taken to sleeping on the couch a lot though, a prelude to the impending separation.

My girlfriend freaked out. What the FUCK is that!!! was her basic reaction. Is this why you’re sleeping on the couch? What the fuck! And so on.

Explaining things was harder back then because pop up advertising was brand new and most folks weren’t really web savvy – this included my girlfriend. She was no dummy, but she also basically didn’t understand what I did for a living and had only a nominal sense of what the web was – she had been exposed to it, and used it occasionally, but it’s not like today where it’s a common experience with a shared vocabulary. Also bear in mind that this was over 10 years ago – computers were slower and browsers were more fragile. My machine’s reaction to this accretion of popup windows was…to……get…………..ever……………………slower, ultimately ignoring mouse input and other attempts to stem the tide of new images. Why it didn’t occur to me to just flip of the monitor instead sitting their frantically clicking close boxes as I tried to stammer out an explanation for what was happening on the screen I’ll never know, but that just made the explanation seem flimsier at first.

I did talk my way through it and calm her down, but man was it embarrassing. Ultimately we recovered, as did the machine after a reboot. For years after this I kept this to myself, but nowadays it’s fodder for cocktail hour story time when I’m looking for a laugh and the audience seems right.

Brady’s journal #2

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Brady has been showing a lot of interest in counting this week. He can count to twenty while still consistently skipping over fifteen. His counting of objects has improved steadily.  We rearrange items in row or hold his hand and count together when things are jumbled together. He’s also started naming letters when he sees them. This week he noticed a bag on the table with Whey Protein written on it and read out the letters to us. He likes to figure out what the first letters of words are, sounding them out if he doesn’t know.
Following on the nocturnal animals lessons this week, Brady talked to his Gargy (grandfather) about an owl in his backyard. He also saw a moth on the window at night. He’s been telling us about some of the other nocturnal animals he’s learned about, bats, raccoons, and owls.
We found a free easel at a neighbor’s house so now Brady has started to draw with chalk in his play area. He can also use the other side to draw, paint and color on paper. He’s pretty excited about the “new” toy.
This weekend we took a trip to the mall where Brady rode on his first escalator and glass elevator. We returned to a Bob the Builder Scoop ride that Brady rode on once over a year ago. He was thrilled and remembered it because we have a video from the last time. We had a snack in the food court (another first) and visited an arcade where Brady and Mom played skee ball. The Springfield Museums sponsor a coin funnel in the mall that simulates the motion of the solar system. Brady loved dropping in coins and watching them go faster and faster as they entered the center of the funnel.
This weekend in music, Brady took a shine to The Beatles ‘Yellow Submarine,’ which he calls ‘the submarine song’. He also likes The Beatles’ ‘Drive my Car,’ which he calls ‘the road song.’ He learned both of these playing Rock Band with his Dad, something he’s been wanting to do since he learned to talk. He had great fun playing the drums while Dad played the guitar. We’ve now played Yellow Submarine to death according to Dad, but definitely not according to Brady  😉
Brady had some outdoor time with his Dad, which included romping around in the yard and going on a long tractor ride back into our ‘wayback’ (our property abuts a large parcel of Kestrel Trust protected land), which is one of his favorite things to do. On the way back we saw the hawk that lives in our area stalking our chickens, so we chased it off.
We have a firepit on our patio, and we had a fire this week which we then roasted marshmallows on to make smores. This is only the second time Brady’s seen the firepit lit, and he was quite taken with it, though he was even more taken with the smore 😉
Brady’s been learning to play with his little sister. She’s just starting to become her own little mobile person, and Brady’s been great about helping us with her, plus finding things to do which amuse both of them. This week the most popular thing was pushing a large toy bulldozer about the house at full speed, ending each session with a big crash into something. Mom and Dad were less fond of this than the kids, as you might imagine 😉

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Brady’s journal #1

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Brady graduated to preschool a few weeks ago, and now we write a weekly journal for him to help his teachers craft activities for him during the week. I’ll post these here when I write them. This week’s follows. Bear in mind this is written for the preschool teachers.

Susan went out of town for several days, the longest Brady has ever been separated from her. He spent time with Dad and his sister Laura. We talked about airplanes, looked at pictures of them in Richard Scary books, packed our own suitcases at home, pretended to fly a plane to daycare when we drove in in the mornings, and comforted ourselves with a line from Daniel Tiger, ‘Grownups come back!’

We also pretended our couch was an airplane and flew it off to Atlanta where mom was. This has transmogrified into a game where we pretend to drive a bus, and take his stuffed animals to their homes, visit our relatives, and go to various places he likes. Dad drives and Brady is the ‘copilot,’ whose duties include paying tolls, shooing cows, cats, and other animals out of the ‘road,’ paying for gas, and applying the turn signals. Now he wants to play this constantly.

We try lots of different kinds of music for Brady, and this week he’s been most fond of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ which has a passage he recites a lot (‘the piper will lead us to reason’), and Mumford and Sons’s album ‘Babel,’ which we sort of suspect he likes just because of the album’s name 😉

Brady helped me fix a door on the chicken coop which blew off in high winds, which was an opportunity for him to practice hammering. He hammered in his first nails.

We went for a family walk across the dam at the Quabbin, where we saw the big lake and the dam and talked about what dams are and how they keep the water from going where we don’t want it to.

We discovered that it can be great fun to setup long runs of dominoes, with towers and different shapes laid down on the floor, then have Brady set them to tumbling over. We then combined this with wooden building blocks and various balls, and have been building ever more elaborate rube goldberg contraptions. This requires lots of patience from Brady and he’s been doing great with it. Of course he loves the ‘everything falls down’ aspect of this best.

Brady’s just beginning to show the ability to actually count things. He can recite numbers up through 20 or so somewhat reliably, but only in the last week or so can you point out a collection of things and have him count them off one by one, using his finger to pick out each object. Success is still iffy, but he’s made the mental connection now.
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Embarrassing Google story to the max

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This was so embarrassing that I’ve written drafts of this little vignette then deleted them later twice now, but at the same time it’s really funny and I can’t resist sharing it.

We added a new feature to our site a few months ago, taking advantage of Google’s increased support of microformats/data, which they call rich snippets. It’s a way to teach the google search engine small facts about your web content so people get more context about the search results they get. We were applying this to a number of things on our site, but the thing we knew most of the users would appreciate was the fact that if someone searched for them by name, in the search results Google would always show their title and contact info.

Right after we enabled it on our site, I was in a meeting with 10-12 folks, and mentioned we had done this and offered to demonstrate when my description wasn’t clear enough for them.

I should mention that a) I should have known better, and tested the demo before showing it to folks, and b) my name is common and I share it with several notable people, including a photographer.

So I google ‘David Hamilton,’ and what comes up as the first result is the photographer, who specializes in nudes. Adjacent to this as the first result are a bunch of thumbnail photos of prepubescent female nudes.

!!!!

I have never closed a browser tab faster, but man did I initially stammer my way through the explanation of what everyone had just seen. What’s worst about this is I have known for more than 10 years about this guy. He’s famous, he’s always the first result on my name, and I knew Google had started showing relevant content adjacent to search results. Somehow, despite knowing all this, I did my own name instead of, say, one of our faculty.

Fortunately I knew everyone in the room, some very well, and I had enough credibility with the crowd that my truthful explanation was accepted with good humor, but I cannot recall a moment at work where I’ve been so thoroughly embarrassed. Best remark from the room, and probably the biggest contributing factor to my becoming flustered, was a muttered ‘how is that even legal?!?’ from one of my colleagues.

The moral of this story: don’t google for me – you won’t find me, and the chances of you having an appreciation for what you do find are really low 😉

(this story brings to mind an episode with a girlfriend from some years ago which was just as embarrassing, also featured prurient content, but did not feature public humiliation. Still a good laugh so I’ll write that one up soon).

 

Weekly Digest for November 2nd

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Shared NPR quiz reveals few understand basic healthcare policy stuff.
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NPR quiz reveals few understand basic healthcare policy stuff

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“While the share of people who answered east question correctly varied, the vast majority of people who took the quizzes got at least something wrong.”

Not me, I got them all correct – how well do you do? It’s short. I was surprised how poorly people apparently did on this. I hate paperwork and red tape and try not to pay attention to this stuff, and I still knew all of this. No wonder there are struggles with Obamacare.

The NPR quiz is here.