Barkerburgh

The other day I had the pleasure of babysitting little Simon Long-Concatenated-Family-Name-Smythe while Leslie went to the dentist.

He’s a cute little guy, very engaging and good-natured, even when he bumped his head under the dining room table when we were playing Peek-a-boo - which I think is a childish name, so I call it ‘Hello!’.

He’s not really a born heller, but he is active and curious. I figured the whole gig was gonna be a doddle; put him in the playpen with a rattley-bell thing and watch Judge Judy. No play pen.

So I had to pretty much pay attention the whole time. =;]

He was actually fun to look after. He’s friendly, in that he didn’t make strange once with me after Leslie left and being a little primate, he’s into everything. His current credo appears to be ‘If it ain’t food, it’s a toy, or vice reversa’. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

He climbed the stairs once and a half, giving up about halfway on the second try. I was right behind him with my hands at the ready just by his ribcage, and he kept looking to make sure I was there.

We played in the backyard, on the front porch, on the kitchen floor, in his room (cool animal puppets which he loves - so do I), on the porch again, in the living room, in the backyard again, up and down the hallway, and on the return air grate in the front hall by the door (it’s got tin-foil on the bottom, hell, even I think it’s cool).

When we heard heavy equipment on the street we went out to the sidewalk and saw a backhoe and a dumptruck just down the street so went as close as I dared, which was when he started looking distressed at the level of the noise. He adjusted quickly though and we watched until the backhoe left.

We went for a walk with him in his stroller to find other heavy equipment, but I think it was their lunch time because, even though I knew there was more road repairs (etc) going on in the neighbourhood, we couldn’t find any activity. We were gone for about 40 minutes, Simon fell asleep twice, after making a pleasant little cooing noise a couple of times.

Leslie was home when we got back. I hung around, hung out and chatted, then stayed for dinner (kedgeree, mmm) and got some interesting information on my spider from Peter and his books.

I slept like a really tired rock that night, and now my shoulder and back are sore from lifting and carrying Simon around, but hell, it was fun and he’s a great kid.

Oh, and the parents are pretty cool too, but not as much fun to hang out with.

=;]

I’m this close > … < to figuring out just what the fuck it’s supposed to do.

But don’t even ask my how to install anything. Jeezes, it’s worse than even the most maleficent of the evil Mac race.

I found the instructions to the universal remote control I bought for my very old second hand VCR (that’s so old that 2004 is the highest year you can set it to…).

The batteries died rather abruptly in the remote a few months ago and it lost its programming. I couldn’t find the printed instructions that came with it even though I was sure I’d stashed them somewhere safe. Well, I didn’t.

I couldn’t remember how to program it, and I couldn’t find the instructions on the web, oddly enough.

I was sweeping under the bed and they came out, having been lodged (apparently) between the leg of the headboard and the wall.

I got new batteries, reprogrammed it and now, oh rapturous day, I don’t have to crawl across the bed to change the channel (small place) or switch from VCR to TV, or play a VHS tape.

Life, as I always have always believed for no good reason, is good.

On Saturday night CBC ran the recent reimagined remake of ‘The Time Machine’ based on/inspired by the HG Wells novel of the same name.

No real story was told in the making of this film.

cf my recent post on War of the Worlds

blah blah lousy movie blah blah planet of the apes blah blah nice cg blah blah 1970’s Doug McClure Edgar Rice Burroughs rubber monster suit monsters blah blah what the fuck blah blah morlocks or orcs blah blah oh come on blah blah planet of the apes again blah blah nice try but jeezes blah blah I can’t believe I watched the whole thing

I promise my next post will be something less of a downer. No, really. I seem to be moaning a lot lately.

Political Correctness: a system of thinking where it’s OK to offend someone right in front of you by enforcing a made-up rule to stop a theoretical offense to an unknown person later when you aren’t even going to be there.

I can’t seem to find the original attribution for this, but I would be glad to post it if it were brought to my attention.

I’ve had two livejournal accounts for a while. I had a recent one, forgot about it, created another one, then rediscovered the first one. I vaguely remember having an account way back when it first got popular, but it wasn’t easy or straightforward then so I let it lapse, and it’s worse now, years later.

Is navigation and design ever fucked up.

Often, the labels are vague, misleading, or dumb. There are too many steps from Point A to Point 2 and there are things on the page that are unexplained, misleading or pointless, and I don’t just mean the ads.

(If you’ve been at it for a while and everything is second nature, well and good, but it ain’t chess, it’s a blog. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get the brunt of the gist of it. Really. Code geeks shouldn’t design interfaces. Neither should co-ops. Or bosses. Or recent graduates of Devry. Christ.)

Some things just don’t make sense at all, like the fact that when I’m logged into my account, there is no easy or obvious way to view the results of a poll, and you don’t seem to be able to edit the poll itself once it’s posted. Sure, it may be right in front of me, but it sure as hell ain’t right in front of me, if you catch my meaning. (You can edit the actual entry the poll appears in, but you can’t edit the poll itself. And the editing page for the poll entry is just dumb…)

Yeah, if I spend a couple of hours clicking around, I’ll figure it out. But a> I don’t have a couple of hours to do that (I’m not that busy but my online time is very limited), and ii] why the fuck should I have to?

Website designers who think they know best about page design should take Thoreau’s advice: run off into the woods and live by a pond. I mean ’simplify’.

Yeah, LJ’s got more features than Wordpress, but that don’t mean I can forgive the design flaws.

For a nicely designed website for a specific purpose, with lots of information and options, see W3Schools. Yeah, of course I know it’s apples and oranges, but it ain’t apples and octopi.

(But to misquote Matt Damon’s character from ‘Dogma’ in the brief elevator scene at the airport near the beginning of the film; “Oh, I don’t mean you!”)

Last week, she disappeared for a few days and the web went to hell, then she stayed disappeared for a few more days. I thought ‘She’s dead.’

Then one day, I look up and there’s two masses oscillating wildly just below her favoured perch at the top of the web and a few centimeters behind. (She hardly ever sat in the middle of the web.) It went on for a couple of hours. The upper mass seemed to be just spider legs, with no spider body skin. Then the lower mass just hung there, drying out, I assume, with legs becoming more separate from the body, and finally turning back into Shelob. Charlotte. Charlobbe? Shelarlotte? I don’t know. Loblotte maybe?

Let me know what you think at my Livejournal poll!

It turns out she was moulting and trying to disengage herself from her old skin.

She’s back, less voracious it seems, but purty as ever.

Telepathy as caller ID, and I don’t mean ‘Intelligent Design’ because, how could I?

The Google string for ‘pseudoscience’; cherry pick your references and let me know the good ones.

Just shit-disturbin’…

Google string for”’science vs religion”…

Found this right at the top. What a deep, earnest guy.

What a lively debate!*

* Wikipedia article on the old European Catholic practice of ‘auto da fe’.

This is an interesting article from the Guardian

Take a read, it’s short, then come right back. I’ll be here.

Basically, I agree with his idea about humans being hard-wired for Religion, but that Science, for a true believer, fills pretty much the same function of any religion*; causing a sense of awe and wonder, a sense of belonging to something greater, made by something we don’t really understand, encouraged to explore the world in terms of the tenets of Science, seeking answers to the great questions of cosmogony, teleology, eschatology, 42, and just what the hell is this crazy little thing called Life anyway. All the stuff you find in Augustine and Aquinas and Hildegard of Bingen, but also santeria, scientology, the Mahabharata, and Jack van Impe.

Difference is, I’m right. And I know it.

* Not the least of which is a smug sense of superiority to beings whose beliefs aren’t true, right or good.