baltimore_dad

This is going to be an incredibly inane post.

My inlaws got back into town, so we had a dinner at their place. Got back, and our dishwasher was stuck in “make everything really f’ing hot mode.” Realizing the thing was probably 20 years old we decided to get a new one. I was stuck at work late dealing with some last minute bug, so my wife drug our daughter out to Sears to get the dishwasher. The next day the dishwasher installer showed up 10 minutes after my parents showed up at the house. The influx of insanity must have been challenging. It was great to have the dishwasher the next day, it was great to have my parents over. It was a bit of a circus though (a fun one, but a circus none the less).

My daughter has been so off schedule this week she barely knows which end is up. Fortunately she’s a great kid and deals with this insanity surprising well considering she’s only 18 months old.

I did get the latest Hillegass book so I’ll have something to work through for learning cocoa and objective c. Should be fun. Anyway, I’m incredibly happy that this is a long weekend coming up.

First of all, saturday was a beautiful day. I was expecting cool and overcast, instead I got warmish and sunny. I took our daughter to the aquarium to get my wife a break. We had a great time, Liz spent 30 minutes or so just staring at the dolphins. I really recommend a membership. Treat going as something you can just do on the spur of the moment rather than “An Educational Trip To the Museum” that must be carefully planned. Go, walk around for an hour (or however long your kid wants to), grab some lunch, take the long way back to the car, or whatever.

On other fronts, I ran across a few links on doing some firefox plugin work. I haven’t really spent a ton of with ‘em but I think they’ll be neat to read through. I’ll be adding stuff to delicious, so get the links from there. I’ll post up any experiences I have while diving into that stuff. Same with anything I end up doing with Ruby/Objective C. I’m mulling over what I want to write, not really sure yet. Have some ideas floating around, but I think I’m going to lean more towards something not so much work related. Finding the time to do this stuff is going to be a challenge. Mostly because any downtime I get I usually spend doing other stuff (games, reading, etc). Anyway, that’s enough for now. . . .

I’ll get this out of the way up front. I voted for Ron Paul in the republican primary. I tend to be pretty liberal socially, and fairly conservative economically. Make your judgements, etc. I don’t really care that much. (though if you want to rationally discuss any of this, I’m game. I love civil discourse about politics)

Anyway. . . .

At this point, I really hope Obama wins the nomination. He is the only one of the major party candidates that I wouldn’t absolutely despise voting for. He’s the only candidate who voted against the war, though I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t a hedge so he could say “I voted against the war” during the primaries. Other positions he has just makes me scratch my head.

I want him to win because I think he is FAR better than the other two major party choices, but he is not someone I actually “want” to be president. I follow Dave Winer on twitter and it seems like every other post from him is some form of “Obama is teh awsome.” I’d say “Obama is better than the rest of the pile of suck” but far from awsome. (I do appreciate the articles that Dave posts, I f ind many of them interesting lunchtime reading)

It really strikes me how different a world my daughter will grow up in than I did. I know for a fact that I’m not the first person to have these thoughts. I would imagine every parent since the beginning of time has had these thoughts at one point or another. She will never really know what film is. She will never really know what a typewriter is. She won’t know a time when finding a pay phone was an issue. She’ll never know a time without completely ubiquitous computing.

I was talking with my wife tonight about something and the conversation moved towards our daughter being in school, which is still several years off. I realized that I have no idea how the internet has impacted life in school. I think I have a pretty decent grasp on the “social networking” stuff. I know what myspace, facebook, twitter, etc are. I don’t use all of them so there’s a limit to what I can know about them, but I have a feel for where they fit. What I have 0 clue about, is how the internet is impacting the educational part of grade school. Are there assignments to look something up online? Are assignments emailed to the students? The possibilities seem endless to me. In 4 years when our daughter actually starts attending school what will the internet look like? I’m really excited to see what the answers are.

I remember my mom switching from handwritten drafts and a typewriter to using a word processor while she was working on her master’s degree and her CASE (masters +30). I remember my dad using a Burroughs hand pull mechanical/electric “adding machine” to tally general ledgers. There was a time in my life when there weren’t computers (yes, I know that computers have been around since the 30s, this is just from my standpoint). My daughter will never know a time without the internet. I think because of that she’ll have a different way of looking at the internet because she never knew a time without it. Like my grandparents saw life a bit differently than my parents did because of the telephone, and other improvements my parents took for granted. I realize this isn’t groundbreaking stuff but I had never taken the time to think about it. Off to send some mail. . . .