Unexpected Adventure

The other day we had all kinds unexpected adventures. We went to a new park, then the library (planned), followed up by unplanned visit to the coffee shop followed by a brief stop at the grounds of the museum. On that day, not only did they have the train running (which is super awesome to be able to do), but they had tours to the top of the light house. Super awesome. I think that the key to having all these amazing adventures is wearing our adventure hats. Also being ready to change our plans at any point helps too, but it's clearly the hats. Most people discount the hats. Never discount the adventure hats.

Two of my favourite people ever

At the top of the lighthouse, looking at the tiny light bulb they have. Note the hats.

Cost of magic

I don't often read fantasy, but some of the books that I got through the Hugo voter packet are. So I decided to read them. Some of them are good, others I have ditched part way though. Some I finished but felt like I shouldn't have. Such is life.

One thing that I guess is fairly common to fantasy stories is that there is a cost of doing magic. Energy, soul, something. With that in mind, that's something that seems to be missing from the Harry Potter universe. With seemly zero cost of doing magic (other than being able to follow recipe books or be able to enunciate properly), shouldn't pretty much everyone be uber wizard?

Then I looked around what we do every day and how it would look like magic / witchcraft to someone a couple of hundred years ago. How much effort / cost would have have expended to have light in their home? Warmth or coolness? Communication? Food? Clean water / sanitation? To an outside observer we get this for "free". Of course it isn't actually free, but the act of me working and being able to pay for being able to have electricity to the home to be able to turn on the kettle is so removed and abstract, it would be difficult to explain. Which, like all tech, always seems to follow Clarke's 3rd law.

Tech is magic is something that I think of almost every night when Laura comes into the darkened bedroom using her phone's flash as light. Every single time I think of the Phial of Galadriel and Frodo using it in Shelob's cave. How does a black piece of glass light up like the brightest star with a mere touch of the hand? Magic.

Never going to grow up

First a story.

At the park the other day Laura was talking in French (which I don't speak) with another mother. The lady asked how old Laura's kids are. She said 2.5, 2 months and her husband is 12. Just at that moment I went down the slide saying "weeee!" They both laughed. I had no idea why...

Second off, I'm the luckiest guy ever. I have a wife that loves me and she permits allows encourages me to be me - to be a kid trapped in a tall fuzzy body. It's not my fault that the fun things from my childhood are still fun.

A swinging good time

Nightmare Scenarios

One of the things that I find different now that I'm a parent is that I have nightmare scenarios running through my head a lot of the time. I can only assume that this is "normal". Things like: if Alice gets out of the house and I back the car up without seeing her; passing out while holding Isaac and dropping him down the stairs; etc. It's exhausting sometimes, but I figure that's just the way that things are going to be. Laura tells me that it's healthy so that I can anticipate these possible nightmares and be able to prevent them from happening. Maybe.

In some ways it also feels like I've lost my babies a dozen times a day too. Maybe I just need to use this as an excuse to hug them more. I can live with that.

Just watching the light dance

It's pretty amazing to just hang out with Isaac in the mottled light under the maple tree. He's lying in the peapod watching the light dance on the roof, sucking his hand. It's amazing that I was part of creating this little person. I also have to meantally archive these moments because I know it won't always be like this. His sister is proof of that. 

These are moments that I cherish. It might not always look like that as I hold my phone, but I've got to type it out while it's fresh. 

Distracting text makes a poor drm / fingerprinting

I'm reading some of the works as part of the Hugo voter packet and some of them have what at first appears to be poor editing. Something that looks like an artifact of badly done OCR. Mostly missing spaces between words or a missing hyphen. But these are digital works, presumably straight from the publisher. Not something that should have any errors like this.

It got me thinking that this must be some form of text based watermarking to uniquely identify me, or perhaps any works that are pirated from the voter packet. I know that they've done similar things to digital music / videos, but usually in places where people wouldn't notice. I think in theaters they are disguised as those old dust spots that you might see on a frame of film, but since there are no frames of film from the digital projector, it couldn't be those. It's something that people are used to, so their brains probably just skip right over it.

It's distracting. It's like someone lightly slapping you every once and a while. It wrecks the flow of the work and makes the work feel like a poorer quality than I think that it really is. Along those lines, it's disappointing.

I hate drm. I hate this type of fingerprinting. And I hate being made to feel like a criminal when I enter into a agreement in good faith. It's that kind of shit that turns customers into pirates.

I'm proud of... me!

Sometimes dealing with Alice can be quite challenging. Other times she surprises me in the most delightful way. The other day she "read" her Disney story book (which she remembers a significant amount of) and then when she was finished informed me that she had read "all four 'torirs by 'er telf". She was quite proud of the fact. I was too. Here was this 2.5 year old going through 4 stories, reading them aloud, quietly, calmly. She really does amaze me most if the time. We are pretty lucky.