wheatblog

New Year’s resolutions work out for me about as well as they work out for everyone else, which is to say “not at all.”  So, let’s not use the r-word.  Instead, here are some things I’d like to do in the new year.  And, if I manage to make any progress on them, I’ll be pretty happy:

• Lose the excess weight. I’m really good, actually, at losing weight.  But I am, unfortunately, also very good at packing it back on. But indulgence gets old after a while. So I need to start watching what I eat and spending some regular time on the elliptical.
• Sleep more. I’ve always had issues with insomnia. And grad school taught me the valuable skill of living with sleep deprivation. It’s nice to be able to pull all-nighters when I need to, but I make a habit of it and that’s not good for my health. And, besides, it makes me grumpy.
• Record more often. I tend to tinker with my recording gear, but it’s rare that I finish a track. Time is an issue, of course, but music is better or me than TV, so why not try?
• Be a better person. That’s the uber-goal, isn’t it?  That’s the meta-goal that all others tend toward, the project of which all other projects are merely sub-projects. Buddhist and new age folks might use the term “mindfulness” for what I’d like to achieve here, but the pragmatic definition is much more to the point and can be summarized thusly: think about what you say before you say it (and, if what you intend to say isn’t an improvement over the silence, leave it unsaid), and attempt to give others the benefit of the doubt.

The recent outage at Dreamhost somehow killed my installation of Tracks, the web-based Ruby on Rails application that I had used for the past few years to manage my tasks and projects, following the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology.  I messed with it for a long time, even installing a new version locally and attempting to import my data (which still lives on the MySQL servers at DH). But it began to be a real waste of time, and I was getting tired of trying to resurrect it.  

So I took the scorched earth approach and started over with OmniFocus, and I’m very happy with the software and the decision.  I tend to favor web applications for portability and tweakability, but OmniFocus is so very nicely designed that I genuinely enjoy using it (and, with my education discount, don’t much mind paying for the privilege).  Task management software isn’t sexy. But if you spend as much time as I do planing, organizing, and agonizing over tasks, the subtle niceties of the user interface save you time and take a lot of the pain out of it.  Try a demo.  It’s good for a fourteen days and there are some nice help vids on the site that will get you started.  

Though I manage my lists and projects with software, I actually print out my lists and cary them around with me, folded up and clipped with a pen. This makes it easy to add new things and cross off ones I’ve accomplished.  They make a version of OmniFocus for the iPod touch, but that would mean having to type with my thumbs and worrying about having a charged battery and such.  Since the paper and pen approach works for me, having the software on my desktop rather than on a web server is fine.  In fact, it just gives me another excuse to spend time with my iMac.  

Using a desktop application to publish to a weblog has always seemed like overkill to me, but I downloaded a trial version of MarsEdit. This is my first post using it. So far, I’m not quite sure what to think of it.

My wife and I are now almost a year into this baby adventure.  I’ve been planing for a while to document some of the gear we’ve found useful.  I’ll cover the less fun–but incredibly useful–stuff in Part II.  Right now, I want to focus on the fun stuff:  toys.  I’m sure that individual preference is a factor even for infants, so I can’t guarantee that your bambino will enjoy these things.  I just know that mine has.  Keep in mind, too, that some toys become more or less interesting at different points in your child’s development.  Some toys are instant hits.  Some become interesting later.   

Tiny Love Gymini Super Deluxe Lights & Music

This is a great playmat with lots of stuffed animals suspended from the two arches that criss-cross overhead. It plays classical music, which triggers three lights on the mat to fade in and out. There’s also a mirror (kids love looking at themselves). He has finally outgrown this one. But, for a long time, it was the main attraction. The manufacturer’s page proides more details about it than I can hope to summarize here. 

Fisher Price Rainforest Jumperoo 

I’ve often called this thing “the best $80 I ever spent.”  Haden loves it, and I think it has really helped to develop his leg muscles.  It’s not the sort of thing he likes to hang out in for long periods of time, as he tends to jump very vigorously when he’s in it.  It’s more a short, intense sort of activity for him.  But it really puts a smile on his face, especially if you stay close and occasionally jump along with him.  Besides the jumping action itself, the seat swivels 360 degrees to allow access to the various toys on the platform.  It’s height adjustable (3 positions) and the rubber feet keep it from scooting. It plays jungle animal sounds and music (two volume settings) in response to movement.      

Remo Kid’s Precussion 10″ Floor Tom

Technically, Haden isn’t old enough for this toy.  But he loves to drum on things so much that I wanted to get him a decent drum to play.  To keep it safe, I didn’t give him the mallets.  He just plays it with his hands (or his pacifier, or a stuffed animal, or whatever else he happens to be holding at the moment).  The head is tough.  The construction is solid.  It has nice little rubber feet that help keep it in place on hard floors.  It produces a pleasant, fairly high pitched tone.  Remo isn’t, primarily, a toy company.  They make real drums for real musicians.  

Leapfrog Spin and Sing Alphabet Zoo

This toy is similar, in concept, to the See ‘n Say.  But it requires less manual dexterity to operate.  You just give it a spin, when it lands on a letter, you are treated to the name of the letter (in one mode) or the name of an animal that starts with that letter and an animal sound (in another).  The voice sythesis is very high quality.  And the Leapfrog folks have done their homework be adding nice attractor sounds at the proper intervals to encourage your kid to keep playing with it.  The base is a sturdy rubber of some sort.  There are blinking lights to indicate which letter is the current one.  It sings short little refrains as it is spinning.  It’s built to take abuse and Haden still plays with it, event though we bought it when he was quite small.  

I really wish the made a bilingual (or trilingual:  English/Spanish/French) version of this, as they do with many of their other toys. 

Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics Baby’s First Blocks

Sometimes, the simple things are best. Shape-sorting toys are standard fare. This particular implementation uses colored shapes and a little bucket to place them in.  The lid has holes for each shape, and it comes off easily.  Haden hasn’t yet bothered with the sorting part, but he loves playing with the blocks (e.g. placing them in and out of the bucket, chewing on them, kicking them across the floor, etc.).  And here’s a perk: no batteries required.  

Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics Stack & Roll Cups

This is deceptively simple. You have a set of ten cups in different colors, each sporting a different number, and a little yellow ball with a bell inside and a smiley face painted on it. I swear, if there had been nothing in the box other than the yellow smiley ball, it still would have been worth the money, at least for my kid, who was thoroughly fascinated with that alone. But the cups are great, too, and a source of endless options.  You can stack them one on top of the other, from largest to smallest. You can stack them inside one another. You can combine any cup with another one size larger or smaller to make a ball (and, by repeating this procedure, you can actually stack all of them together into one ball that contains all the others, like one of those Russian nesting dolls.  But, mostly, you can hold one in each hand, bang them together, and try to get one to fit inside the other. Endless fun, no batteries, easy to sanitize. 

Fisher-Price Little Superstar Sing-Along Stage

As a musician, I’m often hyper-critical of musical toys. And I was skeptical of this one at first, but what it does is really cool. There are several controls on the front, a big button that represents a drum, another that represents a keyboard, a slider switch that represents the saxophone, and a roller ball that controls the guitar. There’s also a rattle shaped like a microphone. It sits in a mic clip on the side, but it can be removed easily. There are two basic modes. In one, the device plays a song (some are traditional kid’s songs. Others are traditional melodies with new lyrics. There are male, female, and children’s voices). Hitting any of the various instrument controls changes the mix and lets that instrument step out for a brief solo.

In the other mode, clicking the keyboard starts an instrumental number. Activating any of the other instrument controls brings that instrument into the mix or, if it’s already in, takes it out.  The instrumentals are fairly groovy.  And you can build up a pretty interesting mix by this simple addition and subtraction of instruments. So, essentially, what the toy provides is a really simple mixing console, and your kiddo plays the part of the producer and/or engineer. 

There are lights and blink and two audience members who pop up when the drum or the keyboard buttons are pressed. There’s a large mirror that is a big part of the fun, during pauses in the action, the device responds to sounds–the idea is to use the mic for this, but any slightly loud sound will do–with some sounds of its own, to keep the child interested. 

Well, that’s seven to get you started. I may to a future installment with a few more, as there are some I feel guilty about not having included here. 

Hab.la is a Jabber chat service designed for being embedded in blogs and other sites. On your site, it looks like a little floating palette on the screen. It works, more or less, like Facebook Chat. On my side, it integrates with Adium or iChat. I’m experimenting with it.  I currently have it here on wheatblog and also on this test page. You can style it with CSS and such.  I haven’t tinkered with that yet. 

Of course, for it to work, I have to be at my iMac with a chat client running, though that is fairly common in the evenings (especially evenings when Gina is working). But, feel free to test it out. And, if I get sick of it on wheatblog, I’ll probably leave up the test page for further experimentation. 

Most discussion boards these days publish feeds for each thread.  But I never really took advantage of this feature until recently.  I’m sort of a stickler for keeping my feeds organized, and feeds of this sort seemed to cut across the grain.  But I simply created a separate folder in Google Reader called “Threads I’m Following,” and now that’s where ephemeral things go, saving me to trouble of surfing to the sites themselves to see if there are any updates.  It’s stupidly simple, but it saves a lot of time.  

Arkansas, the state where my parents relocated from Texas when I was just entering junior high, passed a ridiculous ballot provision this November, sponsored by a Little Rock-based, right-wing NPO called the Family Council Action Committee (FCAC), an offshoot of the Family Council of Arkansas (which is, in turn, an offshoot of Focus on the Family).  

The proposal, Initiated Act 1 (PDF link), called The Arkansas Adoption and Foster Care Act, bans adoption and foster care by families where parents are unmarried.  And, while its primary target is obviously cohabiting gay and lesbian couples, it also affects straight couples who are unmarried.  

Mike Huckabee, while governor of Arkansas, had issued a directive to similar effect, banning unmarried couples from adopting/fostering as a roundabout way of banning gay and lesbian couples from doing the same (as they cannot legally marry in Arkansas, a state that, since 2004, has defined marriage as between one man and one woman–another of FCAC’s political success stories).  

That both these measures are driven by a potent mix of fundamentalist religion, ignorance, meanness, and outright stupidity is only too obvious. Though groups like FCAC do their best to monger fears about gay and lesbian couples as parents, the scientific consensus is that children of gay and lesbian parents are no worse off than those of heterosexual parents. FCAC and their ilk feed on unfounded fears that gay and lesbian people are more likely to molest children than heterosexual people are. 

If FCAC’s banning agenda were based on evidence rather than irrational fears, perhaps they should have considered banning adoption by families where one or more of the parents smoke cigarettes.  Their children are three times more likely to develop lung cancer.  They’re also twice as likely to take up the habit themselves. Banning smokers from adopting and fostering at least has some documented health benefits for the children.

But, thanks to these “defenders” of the (married, heterosexual) family, many the 3,700 some odd children currently vying for placement in homes can continue to sit on their hands in the system, as FCAC, with the support of Arkansas voters, has made it harder for them to find a placement.  

I caught a lucky break yesterday, the evil domain squatters who had hijacked wheatsbassbook.com forgot to renew it, and I was able to swipe it back.  Here are the details:

Though I started Wheat’s BassBook back in 1997, for years it just lived at wheatdesign.com/bassbook. Relatively recently, I decided to register a domain name for it.  When it came up for renewal, my domain registrar sent me an email, letting me know.  I starred it in Gmail but quickly forgot about it.  A domain squatting company named maisontropicale.com registered it and put up page full of advertising.  I contacted them via email and offered them $75 for the domain.  

They emailed back saying the price was 5700 euros ($7,260 US, at today’s rate).  I replied, informing them that I had been using the name “Wheat’s BassBook” since 1997 and that, as they had no commercial interest in it (other than trying to swap my ad revenue), that I would file a domain name dispute.  They replied that such proceedings would cost me at least $1,700 US and countered with an offer to sell me the name for 750 euros ($955 US).  

I didn’t reply.  Instead, I did some research on dealing with squatters.  The basic idea is to eliminate traffic from the site the squatters are holding, so it generates no revenue and they won’t be inclined to renew it.  So I registered wheatsbassbook.org (and .net, though I later intentionally let that one lapse) and changed every link on my sites to the new domain.  I emailed anyone linking to the .com site and asked that they change their links as well.  I put the domain’s new expiration date on my calendar, set every sort of notification, and waited it out.  

Luckily for me, most people don’t go to wheatsbassbook.com directly; they hit it via Google.  They put in “bass book” or “bassbook” (with or without “wheat,” “wheats” or “wheat’s”) and it pops us.  Google’s algorithm is so good that, before long, the .com domain wasn’t coming up in any relevant searches, netting the squatters zero ad revenue.  

In the week before the domain came up for renewal, I received two interesting emails from services that offer to buy of domains for you, using some automated process that attempts to grab the name before some other squatter is able to do so.  One, tripodukonline.com, was quite cordial, and offered a range of pricing options (with varrying success rates) ranging from $250-$995, with payment due only if the effort were successfull. This might have been a good option if the domain were in high demand, but it was still too steep for me, so I let it pass.  I’m not sure if tripodukonline.com is a legitimate company or just another domain squatter.  

Then I got a misleading email from Digital Caucus (dcinchq.com), who did their best to make it sound like they had bought wheatsbassbook.com and were willing to sell it to me for $99.  A little web research revealed that they are simply a (ridiculously expensive) domain name registrar.  And they didn’t own the name; it was available.  So I registered it (for a five-year term) with namesecure.com, whose services I’ve been using for as long as I’ve owned domain names.  

So, what did I learn from all of this? Well, I learned not to count on starring an email as an adequate reminder. Renewing the domain should have gone on my calendar an in Tracks.  I also learned that it’s worth the extra cash to register for multiple years, at least for domains that I intend to keep (when my other important ones come up for renewal, I’ll be buying five-year terms for them as well).  

I got lucky this time.  I got my domain back with minimal out-of-pocket expense.  I just had to wait for a while.  I hope never to have to mess with this sort of thing again.  

Possible titles for this post that were considered but rejected:

• “In your face, McCain”:  Lacks class.  Sore winners are almost as insufferable as sore losers.  McCain’s consession speach was, after all, surprisingly magnanimous.  And it would be unintentionally ironic to embrase the sort of partisan divisiveness that Obama himself has been preaching against, these past two years.  
• “The Day After”:  Nice cultural reference to the 1980s post-apocalyptic cold war movie.  But, as I’m of the opinion that Obama’s presidency will be a good thing for the country, the resonance is all wrong.  If you’re a conservative blogger, feel free to use it.  
• “Yes. We. Can.”:  Entirely too obvious.  And the full-stop-as-stylistic-device thing is. getting. old.  
• “So, how will Fox News spin this?”:  A relevant question, as the talking heads there were surprisingly congratulatory last night (in the little bits I caught as I clicked past them).  But, I sometimes think the best course of action with the Fox News is to ignore it as completely irrelevant–as one does with flat earthers and alien abductees–and hope that it withers away.  
• “The times, they are a-changin’”:  Even more obvious than the others.