onfocus

I'm still alive! And if I had time to blog, I might post stuff like this:

• Eddie is doing great. Two months old, super chubby. Loves eating and sleeping. Hates gas.
• Last month Machinist had a nice summary of How Comcast blocks your Internet traffic—another reason network neutrality should be set in legal stone.
• How about those Google coalitions of the willing? What happened to open standards? And when will we get open cell networks, already? Walt Mossburg nailed the reasons why we need this in Free My Phone. Google's entry into the cell world isn't disruptive at all.
• But hey, I dig Gmail's IMAP. I'm using it everywhere now—especially on my iPhone. And the Google can block spam like nobody's business.
• I was quoted in a Baseline article about Yahoo!: YaWho? (In the section Accentuate the Positive.) Basically I said that I liked Yahoo's REST-based Web APIs, and I was disappointed Google shut down their Web APIs. I do, and I am.
• I love this picture of an Alaskan lake with aurora.
• sk and I have been reading lots of parenting advice on Ask Metafilter. The following questions have been particularly helpful:
  • Ways to keep being the rock for my family?
  • Good advice for a new dad.
  • How to play with a newborn?
  • How do I stay sane while home all day with a newborn?
• And yeah, my work at MeFi is going well. Did a fun Twitter thing a while back to go along with the Flickr thing. Lots of behind-the-scenes stuff going on now.
• I want to be Neil Postman when I grow up. I'm loving his book Disappearance of Childhood. It's a crash course in media history, how media affects our concept of childhood, and how literary and visual cultures differ. And to go along with that, I'm reading The Victorian Internet about the history of electronic communication. The book opens talking about France's network of optical telegraphs in the early 1800's—fun!
• Next up on my to-read list is Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, Books on Fire, and The Plague.

Until next month (probably), have fun without me.

ok, this time I have a really good excuse for not posting for a while:



Say hi to my son Edward Lucas Bausch. (You can call him Eddie.) He was born September 9th, over a month early. He weighed in at 5 lbs., 11 oz. We spent the past few weeks getting to know the excellent medical teams at Corvallis' Good Samaritan Hospital and Eugene's Sacred Heart Medical Center. They took great care of him, and now he's happy and healthy at home.

I'm hoping to dust off this blog a bit more now that I'm home, but who knows?

pffft. pffft. Is this thing on? 1, 2, 3, test.

• NYT Slideshow: What's Your Sign?, a look at the new highway sign font ClearviewHwy.
• 5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know.
• Birthdays Without Pressure is a site by parents who want to downsize birthday parties. It's nice to see like-minded parents using the web to organize against their children. I mean someone has to stand up to big children, they're a powerful lobby.
• pastebin is a site for sharing/debugging code with a group.
• Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped fame is working on a Google Office Hacks book for O'Reilly.
• Desktoptopia is a cool little Mac application that sets a desktop background from their pool of images. You can rate or block any background you don't like. It's been buggy for me (crashing on start), and I wish the collaborative filtering was a bit more transparent (a la public ratings), but this is a great start on a fun idea.
• Wikipedia image: Broadway tower. Love this photo.

Here are a few parenting blogs that have made it into my regular rotation:

• Daddy Types - the weblog for new dads.
• Geekdad - Lego projects and occasionally other stuff. part of Wired blogs.
• Nested - hip kid products + commentary.
• Nesting - more hip kid products + design commentary.
• yokiddo - even more hip kid products (with little commentary), by David Galbraith.
• Parent Hacks - shared parenting tips.

On review, I think I should subscribe to some frugal-parenting blogs. Most of these are heavily stuff-oriented. Being a new parent does put you in a new class of consumer, but there's a lot more to learn than what stuff is available to buy. The parenting blog search will continue. I also subscribe to posts tagged with parenting at Ask Metafilter. I've found a ton of seemingly useful parenting advice on Ask Metafilter, and I'll try to include some examples in my next post.

This has been a not-too-organized link dump. Until next time, as you were.

Here's another batch of links that have crossed my desk recently.

Last time I was talking about the news providing an excellent civics lesson, and yesterday was the day for an economics lesson. The New York Times had a couple of good articles about the current state of the economy:

• NYT: A New Kind of Bank Run Tests Old Safeguards. "...a new financial architecture emerged in the last decade — one that relied more on securities and less on banks as intermediaries. With the worth of those securities now being questioned — and no equivalent of deposit insurance — some who financed the securities want their money out, a fact that has created the 21st-century equivalent of a run on a bank."
• NYT: Keep Your Eyes on Adjustable-Rate Mortgages. "The peak month for the resetting of mortgages will come this October, according to Credit Suisse, when more than $50 billion in mortgages will switch to a new rate for the first time."
• Metafilter: great comment by bookie in a thread about stock analyst Jim Cramer melting down on MSNBC: "this morning we saw the london interbank market effectively cease to function. This is the marketplace where banks source their daily funding requirements for ongoing operations...What these banks were saying was, in effect, 'I don't trust any of these other banks enough to give them any cash at 4%pa overnight, because I'm not sure I'll get it back.'"
• For even more background on the subprime/credit squeeze, check out this post on Metafilter from last month: A world of Casey Serins. This post has a bunch of links to articles explaining how we got where we are, with some interesting discussion.

Color:

• Speak Up: Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies. Nice visualization of the dominant colors used in movie posters—broken down by film rating. As you'd expect: dark for adult movies, bright and colorful for kids.
• I've been having fun reading and playing with the techniques in Photoshop LAB Color by Dan Margulis. I hadn't played with the LAB color space in Photoshop too much before, but I like the results so far. Here's a photo of mine that I've processed three different ways:
  
  
  No Process
  
  
  My Standard RGB Process
  
  
  LAB Process
  
  I feel like I've been getting better colors out of my photos with the techniques in the book. (And sharpening in the Luminosity channel does seem better than sharpening in RGB.) I've been meaning to do a longer post about this with better examples.

Grab Bag:

• There once was a girl named Lenore, a fantastic spontaneous literary limerick-off at MeFi.
• Another good baby names resource: SSA Popular Baby Names. (Still no definitive name here yet.)
• Microsoft RDC for Mac 2.0 (Beta). Nice for those of us who manage Windows servers from a Mac. [via anil]
• I don't think I've mentioned here before that Wondermark is my favorite web comic right now. You might also want to check out xkcd, the perry bible fellowship, and bunt cake if you haven't already.

And finally, what link roundup would be complete without some iPhone news? A: none.

• cre.ations.net: Tether your iPhone: EDGE internet on your laptop. These hackers show how to get the iPhone working as an Edge network proxy for a laptop. I can't believe this isn't built into the iPhone already (my two previous phones acted as bluetooth modems). Well done.
• Interesting example of Amazon reviews + comments not working in favor of the product for sale: Don't buy this [Belkin iPhone adapter]. Though trimming didn't work for me, ruining an aux cable in the process. My kingdom for a stupid simple iPhone auxiliary adapter. Why did you go non-standard, Apple? Why?
• Leonard posted a cool screenshot of his hacked iPhone. I want to try out MobileTerminal and NES emulator, but instead I've been putting together this post. SSH out would be a killer app for me, wonder if MobileTerminal handles that yet.

Until I link-dump again, huzzah!

Instead of auto-posts from del.icio.us, I'm going to post links in batches—maybe once a week. (?) This time around I'm focusing on the three P's: Politics, Parenting, and the iPhone.

If I detach from the mess our federal government is in, watching the gears grind is fascinating. In school they'd throw out wild scenarios just to show that the framers built a robust system with multiple redundancies that couldn't possibly be toppled by one of the branches loosing their collective minds. We have a system for Presidential succession, checks and balances, and an orderly justice system that can ferret out corruption even in the halls of power. With the administration pushing the limits of our system, reading the news everyday is like a civics lesson. Follow along:

• Washington Post: Broader Privilege Claimed In Firings: "...administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege." This article mentions congress' power of inherent contempt not used since the 30's.
• Harper's: A Republic, If You Can Keep It: "...they will argue that the president, because he controls the apparatus of the administration of the law—the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorneys—can do exactly as he likes, and the Congress can do nothing about it." This article puts the current swing toward authoritarianism in historical perspective.
• Why bother with impeachment? That's the question Bill Moyers put to Bruce Fein in a fascinating interview. Bill Moyers: Tough Talk on Impeachment.

Like I mentioned, if I emotionally detach from the situation at hand, it'll be interesting to see if the American system can handle the strain. I'm not giving up hope yet.

Here are a few parenting-related bookmarks:

• Alternatives to mainstream baby paraphernalia? Every single thing we've received from the hospital has been branded—diaper brands, mostly. And the diapers themselves are branded with children's TV show characters. So this question about finding non-branded baby stuff is something I've been wondering for a while.
• We're still considering names, and for a while I had the Baby Names Voyager up more than Google. The other day sk found Nymbler, a nice Ajax-y interface for name recommendations. I wish it had a bit more information about each name, but it's a great start.
• Megnut: How I ate while pregnant: "Believe me when I tell you the pressure to ensure everything you eat isn't going to kill or permanently damage your unborn child is intense."

I'm loving my iPhone. Related:

• TUAW: ssh on iPhone. Hackers have found a way to get SSH working. This is early, but ssh would let me do administrative crap on my servers via the iPhone. I hope this gets solid soon.
• iPhone VNC. A remote desktop tool that runs in the iPhone browser. Very nice hack, but I'm not sure I trust running a modified VNC on my servers.
• I've been trying to figure out if I like the standard Google interface on the iPhone, or the mobile interface better. And now there's this: Google iPhone Search. Too many choices.

And we're up to date.

I've been thinking about parenting lately since I'm on deck, and it's reminding me of college in a way. College is where I made the transition from being a child dependent on my parents to being an adult, and that's the time when I began figuring stuff out for myself. It's also when I was fully immersed in the problems of the adult world via my classes, and thanks to that I read some philosophy (among other things) to help make sense of the world. I didn't always understand what I was reading (I wasn't a philosophy major—just read for fun), but some of those books did give me new ways of looking at things that I've found useful.

So as I'm getting ready for another life-shift, I've been wondering what philosophers have said about parenting. I know there are a lot of books out there about "parenting philosophies" and that's not quite what I'm after. I'm wondering what classic Philosophers have said.

The philosophy I read in college dealt with abstract concepts like whether or not a table exists in reality, or whether the table is simply expressing its tableness through existence or something. I didn't read anything about practical matters like raising children. (Or maybe I wasn't reading the right books.) It's not like I expect to find Baby or Superbaby? by Nietzsche, but thinking back there wasn't much in what I read specifically about family life, which isn't all bad. Ideas about personal responsibility and freedom that are a part of existential writings can apply to every aspect of life. Philosophy is sort of a meta-layer above everything else anyway. I also think philosophy has the problem of being dominated by men who might not be completely tuned into their nurturing side.

I remembered reading some thoughts on marriage by Bertrand Russell and if you read his bio you'll know why he had some ideas rattling around about that. Even though his life isn't the model of family bliss, I've found his logical writing hard to argue with. So I thought I'd see if he'd written anything about parenting. I eventually found his Conquest of Happiness on Google Books and read a bit there before picking up a copy. It's not a philosophy book or a parenting book. It's more of an early self-help book he published in 1930 where he lays out "life lessons" for being happy.

The book is surprisingly modern for being almost 80 years old, and the issues of modern living he addresses have only become more pronounced. Parts of it are dated, and he was obviously writing for a white, Western, upper-class audience. And sometimes I couldn't decide if I was reading grandfatherly advice or cranky old man rants, but either way this book has given me a lot to think about. The book has also generated a lot of conversation around the house, and I thought I'd summarize some of his parenting thoughts.

The most fascinating chapter in the book for me was ironically about Boredom where Russell encourages parents to teach children how to endure boredom. "The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts himself from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness." He talks about how the ability to concentrate on boring tasks will pay dividends in adult life. And in a poetic passage he mentions that the human body is adapted to the slow rhythm of the Earth, and children especially need contact with this slow ebb and flow. (I was reminded of this just today reading Asha Dornfest's thoughts on planning summer activities and the fear of "wasted time" for kids. It's obviously still something parents are grappling with.)

In a chapter on Family, Russell describes a conflict that arises in all parents, "...between love of parental power and desire for the child's good..." He advises parents should have an almost mystical respect for the child's personality so they don't become possessive or oppressive parents. This can lead to the classic case of Democrats having a Republican child (or vice versa), where hilarity ensues. The idea that, "...the child should as soon as possible learn to be independent in as many ways as possible..." seems difficult to me, and I'm not even a parent yet.

Russell also mentions that our modern knowledge of psychology is both a blessing and a curse. While we have a better understanding of phobias and neuroses that can help children be healthier, Russell feels this knowledge can create timid parents who are afraid of screwing up. His prescription is self-confidence, respect for the child, and self-permission for occasional mistakes. Easy!

The bits on parenting only make up a small portion of the book, and overall reading it was like a smack in the face. But in a good way. I went looking for philosophical parenting advice, and I've found just this small bit. I'm sure there are other parent-philosophers who have a completely opposite take. Anyway, just as I found in college there's only so much you can glean from books before real life takes over and teaches you the hard way.