Tech Generation

My husband has a much nicer phone than I do. This has caused some tension in our household. One of the things his phone does is retrieve his email for him. Then it beeps. And he reads his email. And I bitch and moan because
a) My phone can't do it &
b) He's always reading his damn phone.

My daughter has a little green toy phone that beeps and plays noises. Yesterday she brought it to me looking grumpy. Looking at me soulfully, she wails

"Zeb's phone doesn't have email, and you want email!"

I'm pretty sure she doesn't really have a handle on what email is, but it was pretty funny nonetheless :).

Pay it forward

This is kindof a sneaky post, as I know hardly anyone reads this blog! Anyway, there's a crafty, handmade Pay It Forward meme out there. It works like this - the first three commenters on this post get a handmade gift emailed to them some time in the next year. Really. I've got to tell you, though - that they will be small.... my track record with big projects is not good :).

I got this from Muses of a Dragon Mad Knitter, a blog I really enjoy :). (Dragons, knitting - what's not to like!)

I'll make sure I have an email address on my profile for a bit so that you hordes (hah!) of handmade-gift-wanting-commenters can send me your postal addresses.

Later.....

You thought it was a hippo

Last night my daughter came running up to me in the garden, urging me to come with her. (If she sees anything scary now, she fetches me and I have to come and look.)

"See that, Mommy - that brown thing, with eyes", she says, pointing to a small (~10cm high) clump of mud and leaves in the flowerbed. There was a bit of white gunk on it that could conceivably have been mistaken for eyes. I explained that it was a heap of leaves out of the pool pump, and kicked it apart a bit so she could see what it was.

"You thought it was a hippo!" she exclaimed.*



*She's improving with the first / second person pronoun mix-up, but it's not quite perfect yet.

Buttons!

My daughter has developed a major phobia about buttons. You know, those things that pretty much all mens' shirts have, and most of my smart, for-work clothes. Well, she started off last Tuesday having a complete hysterical fit whenever she saw a button, and refusing to be in the same room as her Daddy until he changed into a T-shirt, and she has gradually been improving all week. On Wednesday, when I fetched my car after a service, my Mom had to take Zeb out into the car park - because she refused to stop screaming when she noticed that one of the guys at the service reception desk was wearing a button-up shirt.

This follows hard on the heels of the massive ant phobia (about 2 weeks ago) and, before that, the snake phobia (causing her to be unable to enter the children's diningroom at the hotel, or even walk past the door - because there was a small picture of a cartoon snake on an ABC poster). This seems to be the pattern at the moment..
1) Develop huge, world ending / hysteria inducing phobia.
2) Gradually work through phobia, until it settles, in 1 to 2 weeks.
3) Develop new huge, apocolyptic, hysteria-inducing phobia.

I'm now running out of reasonably smart clothes to wear that have no buttons. This morning, my daughter suggested I should wear my (buttonless) dressing gown all day. Hmmmmm...

Two, going on fourteen

The other day my daughter dashed outside early in the morning, while I wittered on in the background about it being really cold and her needing to put on her slippers. But she completely ignored me and carried on walking carefully around the pool bricks (it's netted). So I walked out a bit further (it was cold), and said "Did you hear what I said? What did I say?" *
Little Zeb, without looking up, then says loudly "Zeb's not caring!" and keeps on walking.

I, of course, initiated immediate disciplinary action, without trying to decipher whether she didn't care about the cold, or whether she didn't care what I had said, but would do what she liked anyway! I figured, either way, forcible removal from desirable outdoors and insertion into slippers was justified.

I'm torn between pride at her obviously correct understanding and good contextual use of the concept of not caring about something, and utter disbelief and incredulous shock that the thing she doesn't care about is my opinion.




*Shudder - I really did say that.

Birdsong

It's a bird of paradise.
It's not a dove.
It's not a peacock.
It has a fancy tail -
It's definitely a bird of paradise.


- Made up by my 2-year old, bird-mad daughter today. I can't remember the
tune, but there was one. She made that up,too.

Don't hand me!

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a restaurant with my daughter sitting on my lap. She accidently pushed her elbow into me, and I said, as one would "Don't elbow me!", at which point she fell over, convulsed with laughter.

I said "what? what?" - wondering if it was some strange sort of fit - and she gasped through her chuckles "Elbow me! elbow me!" and collapsed again. So I said "What's so funny about your elbow?", and then, just in case we've never introduced her elbow to her, clarified this with "It's that pointy bit in the middle of your arm - why is it funny?".

Little Zeb then calmed down enough to sit up, waved her arm about madly, backhanded me in the face, shrieked "Don't hand me!" and collapsed in convulsive laughter again.

It's illuminating to me how much of our language use really is quite wierd. I guess the use of a body part to describe an action is a bit odd - but as an adult I'm used to it. I remember as a kid sometimes just repeating the same word over and over and over until it lost all meaning - then being really stumped in conversation for days afterwards.

As you wish

I have just reread The Princess Bride. It just gets better and better each time. I'm reading a lot at the moment as I have a UNISA assignment due and my wabbing structured procrastination is taking a bit of a hit.

Anyway, today I found, in a marvelous example of universal synchronicity, one of my favourite web comics doing this.

Made me feel all warm and fuzzy :). Hooray!

Bookses!

We (at work) got notification today that the book that our paper will be in will be out soon.

It's one of those catchy, easy to remember titles...

The Geospatial Web: How Geo-Browsers, Social Software and the Web 2,0 are Shaping the Network Society

The book has an accompanying home page here . My contribution is the paper / chapter titled "Fire alerts for the Geospatial Web".

Structured Procrastination in action

So this weekend I .... hemmed the curtains. At some point I'll blog the list of things I have for my structured procrastination experiment. It was a scary list. (Yes, wedding samplers appear on it).

.. no really, I'm not procrastinating

but just check out this post on structured procrastination - it made me laugh a lot, and really, it's ultimately going to improve my work productivity, so could reasonably be classified as work. Really.

Telecommuting Tip and news comment

I don't know how many of you have seen the ridiculous furore caused by FNB dropping their proposed anti-crime ad campaign. Of course government delegations should have pressured them into dropping it. I mean, God Forbid anyone should venture to suggest that there is anything even vaguely not brilliant in our country that the government could possibly be doing anything about and isn't! Anyway, the text of the proposed ad is available on Real South Africa , and seems to me to be pretty innocuous. It doesn't in any way lay blame for our current high levels of very violent, scary crime at the government's door, but simply requests that our president take into account the concerns of many South Africans, and actively, publicly and vocally prioritise crime-fighting in this country. I think I might fill in the letter and send it off anyway.

One letter I have sent to government recently, is one to Trevor Manuel. I think the tips for trevor email address is a really good idea. (Hell, even if he never reads 90% of what gets sent, at least you feel you've had a say). Well, my tip is to try to economically advantage companies that prioritise telecommuting for their staff at least one day a week. I figure we have some major problems with road congestion and greenhouse gas emission, and simply improving our transport infrastructure ain't going to cut it. I think it will take years and years to convince car-driving South Africans that to take public transport is a safe, reliable alternative to driving their own cars (certainly I'm not going near the Gautrain until it's been running for a least a decade - with a brilliant safety record...) and I'm not sure that the planet really can handle everyone willy-nilly driving for that long.

Flicking sore

I broke my toe this morning while carrying the potty to the bathroom. It hurt quite a lot.

I have spent quite a lot of the day trying to convince my daughter that I said "flick".

Link link linkety link link

As Marginalia said, this is important.

Then, courtesy of Confluence , a fiendish word puzzle, Funny Farm . BTW, if anyone can get the unobvious three letter word linking to "chicken" (you'll know what I mean when you get there), please tell me - it's driving me nuts.