…but Geek decided to skip 12th grade and go to Reed College next year! That sudden acceleration of him ending high school and starting college has caused a lot of scurrying around as we figure out logistics. We currently plan on selling our 21 acre homestead and farm and moving into Portland near Reed so Geek can live at home the first year (he’s only 16). As a result, we’ve been too busy to do much here on the blog.
We’ll be back!
So I have an old iPod Photo (color) 60GB iPod that’s been working great for a long time now (since July 2005!) that I use for my office music while I work. I’ve just now finally run out of space on it and so I thought I’d use iTunes’ “Convert higher bit rate songs to…” feature to cram my growing collection onto the existing iPod. I’m on an iMac running 10.7.5 and I was connecting via a USB cable.
Nice idea but it always fails after few hundred songs when I try to sync with this setting turned on. Grrrr.
Tried turning off “Enable disk use” because there was always an error about the disk being unmounted improperly when it fails. No dice.
Finally thought that maybe it was a USB issue and so tried connecting it via Firewire (which this older iPod Photo can do) and Bingo! It seems to be working (4860 songs of 7839 copied so far without a problem).
Thought I’d write this down here so others could find it. I should file a radar but I’m having trouble imaging Apple caring about this old device… Could be an underlying USB issue though…? Anyway.
On a cold snowy day in Corbett…
Me: walking by cat on way to the house for lunch…
Cat: “Meow. Meow, Meow. Meow! MEOW!”
Me: “What?”
Cat: “Brrrr. Inside cat?”
Me: “no”
Cat: “29 degrees!”
Me: “Fur!”
Cat: “SNOW + 29 degrees!”
Me: “5x pissing on bed == OUTSIDE CAT!”
Cat: “Surgery! Ow!”
Me: “Let you back in 2 years later & you beeline for a bed. No!”
Cat: “meanie…”
Me: walks away to write guilty blog post
From the FASA Games forums:
FASA’s 1879 Kickstarter is Live!
by FASA Games Admin » Mon Nov 26, 2012 11:14 pm
FASA’s 1879 Kickstarter is Live!It’s 1879. Queen Victoria’s armies march through the Rabbit Hole to lay claim to a new world, expanding the Empire so that multiple suns now shine upon it at all times.These new lands are not given up easily. Descendants of the lost kingdom of Babylon fight for what they have mastered for millennia. Reptilian beings, as well, refuse to submit to the Crown without a fight.
It’s 1879, but this history is not the one you know. It’s the one you will help define.
FASA returns to the world of gaming with a bold new project, and we are launching it with an amazing Kickstarter effort that lets you become part of the story right from the beginning. With miniatures and an elegant set of rules, you can play out the key battles that will decide the fates of two worlds, and with the 1879 wargame app, you can carry the war of worlds with you everywhere! With the RPG, you can tell the stories of unique individuals who will tip the balance for all time!
Join FASA in heralding a new era of gaming, where multiple ways to play all tie into one fantastic story. Get in on the Kickstarter and help make the dream of FASA’s bold return to gaming come true!
Unfortunately, no one donates unless we ask them to, and the people most likely to donate are those who have donated before. If we don’t email our donors, we go out of business and can’t do the work people donate to us for. If we do email our donors, some percentage will never donate to us again. It’s a catch-22 that every non-profit
suffers.
An interesting dilemma. To me there’s some interesting psychology at work here and figuring out the optimal strategy is a fascination problem.
Just ran across this Great blog post by DrTechniko about teaching 5-7 year olds how to program. Reminds me of teaching Geek sort algorithms very early (maybe at 3 or 4?) using colored legos, colored blocks, etc. Then we’d do different sorts: by color, by shape, etc. We’d make a game of how few you could touch to sort them and so on. I just called it a “plan” or “strategy” rather than the too big and odd “algorithm”. There are lots of opportunities to teach strategies aka algorithms using play.
Then we moved to Stagecast and then Scratch when it came out. I haven’t looked at Stagecast in a long time (10 years?), but I’d highly recommend Scratch. The only downside with Scratch is that it’s so good you might have trouble getting them to take the next step of typing in code. 
Just a quick apology for the multiple broken post links in the RSS feed. WordPress’ new “home page quick entry post form” was buggy and was posting drafts (!). So I deleted those drafts but apparently they’re still listed in the RSS feed but give a 404 error when selected.
The real posts should show up by monday or so; waiting on a couple of friends to review them for idiocy, er, errors 
peace,
-Dad
Xin Nian Kuai Le!
It’s the year of the dragon, so I decided to post another dragon drawing (click for full size):
This dragon is fully modernized with brainwave readers and mirrorshades and ready for the cyberpunk future!
@noel_llopis (who’s recently a new dad – congrats!) tweeted a link to this excellent and funny post on working from home: ”How to work from home without going insane” and then queried for tips from others.
Having worked at home as a software developer for most of the last 22 years through two new babies and 11 years with a stay-at-home mom and growing children, I have a few tips I thought I’d offer.
In outline:
) and give them some positive time at each break.Number one is probably the most important place to start. I explained to my wife that it can take as much as 30 minutes for me to load the program I’m working on into my head where I can then work on it. And that an interruption feels like a painstakingly constructed house of cards coming crashing down; not only have I lost the 30 minutes of load time, it’s also very defeating to fall back so far and have to start all over and this can make it cost way more than the 30 minute load time.
Number two was key when Geek was born. He was born with undiagnosed reflux which means that he almost never slept more than 20 minutes before he woke up screaming. (a pair of foam ear plugs in my pocket for much of the first year, just to turn the volume down really helped). It took a real team effort to stay sane through that first year. But even in less stressful situations, there are just things that are so much easier to do when not holding a baby. So my wife started coming to the office and asking if I could “hold him for just a minute” while she _______. Each one of those things seemed very quick to her – just three minutes! – but they required the 30+ minute reload for me and so were terribly destructive of productivity. We figured out that having a schedule of breaks worked well for both of us. If she knew that she’d get a break of X minutes at 10:30am and 2:30pm, then she would put off those things that were easier without the baby until then. It was also easier to hang on through the screaming knowing you had a break coming at a specific time. I actually worked half time for the first 6 months because of the reflux, but that’s a different story.
Number three is about creating an environment where you can actually do the highly cerebral work that is programming – noise being the biggest issue for me. An office space with a door was an absolute requirement. In my case replacing the cheap hollow-core interior door with a solid core door and a threshold to close the gap under the door was very helpful in reducing the sound transfer. I also learned to program with music playing, which helped provide covering noise. For me the music has to be music that is very familiar so my mind doesn’t need to attend to it. Some people need exclusively instrumental music. Some people can do headphones (this wasn’t something I learned how to do until I had to work in a cube for a couple of years (shudder)).
Number four is about sanity. It is really easy to slide into working all the time when you work at home. This will feel really productive for a time, but in the long run it’s bad for your marriage and your productivity. A mental break from time to time can really increase productivity when you are working. If you are billing hourly there is another dangerous trap to avoid: it’s easy to start converting everything into ‘lost wages’ and so a 2 hour movie date “costs” you 3x your hourly rate for travel time and the movie and so you can start skipping family stuff because “I need to be working.” Suggest you avoid this path to insanity and a broken marriage. Lower your monthly expenses (cheaper house or car, cancel cable tv, whatever works!) instead. And, as I’ve suggested in a previous post, put a cash-flow savings account in place as soon as possible to provide a buffer that frees you from this financial stress.
Number five is for when your kids get old enough to come to your door and open it because they know you’re in there… :) This one will take a few repeated lessons for them to get it, but the important thing is to be cheerful when you have the discussion (i.e., opening the door and venting your frustration at being interrupted makes both of you feel badly in the end – try to avoid doing that). So patience while this learning process happens is critical as is teamwork with your spouse who will have to reinforce and help enforce the “door is closed, don’t bother them unless it’s an emergency” rule. It’s also important to help define what an emergency actually is, how to look at the clock and know what time it is and when the break is coming, and so on. This is also an opportunity to start teaching lessons around “where does our food come from?” ”How does one get to live in a house?” “Working earns money which can then be used for food, and other things?” and even some discussion about what it is you do for a job and why it’s interesting and what the challenges are. All part of a well-rounded education for your children.
Number six is about reinforcing the clear dividing line between you being “at work” and “on break” so that kids (and spouses!) are clear about when they can talk and interact with you and when then can expect you’ll be up for some fun (or available to help). Some people need this more than others, but I find that with a family it helps to have a clear “signal” for them. To this end, I got a pitcher for water and a large quality thermos for hot drinks so that I wouldn’t need to go refill until my next scheduled break. The bathroom is obviously trickier and that’s about getting a house with the right configuration, when possible. Some kind of tupperware for snacks and you’re set for uninterrupted work sessions with no false “mini-breaks” which are too difficult for small kids to distinguish from real breaks.
On the house layout issue: clearly choosing the right house for stay-at-home work with stay-at-home spouse and growing children can really help. Not always possible, but some things to look for/consider:
One mistake I made in one house was to put my office in the basement because it was quieter and on a different floor. Bad idea for a guy from Hawaii; Cold and dark. Very gloomy. Remodeled part of the attic with a dormer and windows and moved myself up there for dramatic mood/productivity improvement.
My current setup involves having some acreage and some space in a wooden barn which I remodeled into office space – this is really good in many ways. The 150 foot “commute” is just long enough to get myself into a work head-space and the sound issues are 100% gone.
I hope some of this was helpful. If you have other tips, feel free to add them in the comments!
peace,
- Dad
So true. So important.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass
got there from this blog post which is pretty good also.
