Suburban (in)Sanity

Your parenting tip for the day: Bookmarks for the kids

Parenting Tip: Create a folder of Bookmarks for each child

My kids love playing on the computer. I'm on the computer a lot during the day while they're in school and I often come across a site or activity that I think they would enjoy.

After a few too many "browsers of doom" where I had 12, 15 open tabs just waiting to show the kids, I started a bookmark folder for each kid. This way I can put bookmarks in for pages I think they might be interested in and then *close the webpage.* This has done wonders for my digital sanity, though I still have a digital hygeine problem as explained below.

My own bookmarks are ridiculous, I don't keep anything in there, at least not anymore in the tangle of sites I originally bookmarked in 2003. It's the curse of a visual-spatial person, I can't ever find the things I want no matter how carefully I try to create folder structures and organizational schemes. I swear my digital organization is worse than my physical organization, and that's saying something!

However, for my kids I can manage a reasonable number of bookmarks. Right? (Right??!)

Some of the tidbits in there right now:

Liam's folder:

• Crowdsourcing space exploration tool called Zooniverse that I want to be a part of, too!
• Legends of Druidawn interactive creative writing game (click the link at the very bottom of the page to see the genesis of this site - creative writing solutions it says.)
• A site to convert text to multimedia, like the bunny/mouse characters speaking in tinny computerized voices reading scripts that people wrote....whatever that one is called. Note to self, this would be great to use in Media and Design classes...
• The requisite Lego recreation of something totally AWESOME, this one is Middle Earth.

Anastasia's folder:

• Tree of Life web project - collection of information about biodiversity compiled by amatuers and experts alike.
• How to make friendship bracelets (I'm totally in the clear on the website name since she thinks WTF stands for Why the Face?)
• A music video of an 8 year old girl singing a hardcore (punk rock) song. She's always making videos herself and I think needs a little inspiration, since the script is often the limiting factor.
• A make your own snowflake picture (online) site. Love this.

So I challenge you to go forth and make a folder for each of your children and drop in fun tidbits and cool sites that they might like. Also a good place to put book recommendations, particularly if you're parenting a tween who might not want to actually ASK you for ideas. (P.S., if you don't know this about me already, know that I can talk your ear off with recommendations for books for kids ages 8-18. Please ask! Give me an excuse to talk your ear off!)

Come back and report on the great sites you found! Perhaps one day we'll do this all in pinterest... ;)

Ode on a Wireless Access Point that Does Not Suck

Ode on a Wireless Access Point that Does Not Suck

 

Thou access point of doom,

How you taunt me with,

Your wavy bars of signal and glowing green lights,

Indicating neither signal, nor strength

 

Your suckage pulls at me,

Dragging my productivity down, down,

Until I cling to the edge of the pit of despair,

Fearing to never see another silly kitten video,

 

But what, fair Wireless Access Point?

Thou just wanteth me to reconfigure my wifi?

But do yet you not understand?

I am on a tosh de macin, this device excels beyond my limited intellect,

 

Spirits again dashed like paint on concrete,

I contemplate a roof-test for your beloved countenance,

And as I gently lift thine metal body from thine shelf,

What? The internet is back up? ...Meow

 

The most memorable gift of the year?

Reverb10 challenges me today to write about the most memorable gift I've given or received in 2010.

By far, it would have to be this, which is not an iPad:

(The chaise, not the dog, who was not a specific gift to anyone, though she is pretty nifty and we're glad to have her.)

If you don't know what I'm talking about, clearly you don't read my blog regularly! Here's where I explain this.

Best part? For Christmas I got...an ottoman to match the chaise! (Oddly enough, it came in an iPad box. Strange.)

The death of newspapers? Maybe the paper-versions...

People moan and groan about the death of newspapers all the time these days. Oh the kvetching! There's even an entire website devoted to the Newspaper Death Watch. All the media houses I like and appreciate, as well as some I don't, talk about it.

It's to the point where honestly some day soon I expect to go out the door to get the newspaper [1] and find that they just stopped printing it last night.

But then...how is it that about 30% of the windows open in my browser right now (which is 30% of a considerable number...I have an addiction to opening windows to "read later" - soon. ish.) are links to not just any news site, but one particular one? Interestingly enough, the local paper (which we receive each day and read) is NOT the site that I have open, but rather the New York Times.

From articles about Facebook hackers to random sh!t from the Freakonomics guys' blog about parents being addicted to parenting (snort, snicker) to cerebral stuff like this about your brain on metaphors, I'm addicted to reading news articles! From actual news sources! And even aside from the New York Times, I read articles on NPR.org, The Huffington Post, and all sorts of other places. The least-read sites for me are my local sites, but of course when I want information on a local event I need those sites to work, to have the information I want exactly when I want it.

But honestly, what is all the malarkey about the death of newspapers? If they want to narrowly define their business as print, perhaps (and that might explain why I don't have a bunch of links to my local Chicago Tribune open right now, they aren't as prevalent on the web it seems to me) but if they can conceive of themselves the way we consumers have *always* conceived of them - as purveyors of information and opinions - there's more of a role for them now in this big confusing morass we call the Internet than ever before. We need these information curators, the collectors, the sifters, the people who help us find the good stuff among the ten thousand offers to "lose belly fat with this one simple but wacky tip!" - now more than ever!

 

[1] Okay, this is a lie. My husband brings in the paper almost every day. When he's travelling, it causes me no end of consternation to have to get the paper myself - brr!

On email accounts and backing up and general digital hygeine

Found myself writing a long post on a yahoo group about why and what I do to secure my email inbox against catastrophic loss, and thought it was worth boring to tears sharing with my blog readers. So what do you do? What's your solution or insurance policy for your email?

Note: This is going into my Tales from my Science Fiction Life file because honestly, email is something that came into being during my adulthood. When I was in college, no email. Grad school, we used IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and sometimes we found information on newsgroups. Post-grad my first work email was a ccmail [1] account. One of my email addresses has the number 99 in it because that's the year I created the account. So, it's been only a bit more than 10 years, really, since this stuff has mattered, and today it matters a great deal. But enough about history, back to our regularly scheduled lecture information session about email and backups.

For email, I've switched over to gmail for my primary email storage, although that is putting my eggs in *their* basket, it's a pretty reliable one (they have multiple redundancies and things like bomb-proof bunkers, I trust them, your mileage may vary.)

I use email accounts that run the IMAP protocol, which who the heck knows what it stands for, but means that the server and the email clients sync with one another. Contrasted with POP and/or POP3 (which tries to do something similar but does not.) Main point - there are copies of all messages on the server, until you manually delete them from one of your readers (sometimes there's another copy, if it was synced down from the server before you deleted it and you haven't synced back up to the server again yet, but this is temporary and somewhat rare unless you're a freak like me...)

I use Thunderbird as my email client (mozilla free download - same people that bring you Firefox browser.) I have it running on my iMac and my macbook. I also then have my iPhone hooked up to my email accounts (yes, there are multiple email accounts, and yes, there are a lot of computers/tech in my house. Geek, remember? I prioritize tech over almost every other household purchase! Some days the cats don't eat because mamma needs some new tech. Just kidding. Meow.)

When I check mail on my phone while out and about, it fetches me the latest from the server, which may mean 5 new messages, as well as 8 or 10 deletions from when I was at my desktop earlier in the day. Very convenient for checking mail from many places. I can check on a computer at the library using gmail.com via a web browser, and again those changes will be fetched down to my other computers next time I log in on them.

Can't beat the convenience, and because it's all server-side it means I can't really lose that email inbox. A local copy is stored on each of the other machines (the phone carries only the last 50, though you can dig back into your inbox deeper by fetching more messages manually) so there's a quasi-backup there, plus the server copy.

Again, all my eggs are in gmail's basket, but it's giving me the convenience of what I need. I even run one of my other email accounts through a shell gmail account because I prefer gmail's way of handling messages and I was having a spoof problem with that account. The only hitch is that the first time you download the mailbox to a new machine, at least in my case because I'm a digital packrat, it takes a while (I have 5k messages in my inbox. I delete a lot, but get a LOT!)

I predict this kind of mobile connectivity will be standard in the future, in fact I'm waiting for my invitation to download a copy of RockMelt, a new browser that's more tuned into the social web because I think they're starting to head that way - basically more awareness of the constantly moving user, one who uses multiple types of devices all day and needs access to their core "stuff" be it email, files, images, movies, music library, digital books, friends, contacts, etc. Stay tuned for ... more tales from my science fiction life!

 

[1] If you actually follow all the links from this note to the wikipedia articles, you can get a nifty little primer in Ancient Internet Tech, aka "You kids get off my lawn!" stuff. Lovely. When, exactly, did I get so old??

 

Ah, Ira Glass and Violent Video Games, thank you Jon Stewart

Tying in with my post of last week about violent video games, The Daily Show has applied some of their own (unique) perspective. Clearly they read my blog.

For those of you with short attention spans, or those of you who are actually squirrels, you should watch the one-minute round-up from the Daily Show.

If you have four minutes, the whole segment on violent video games is really hilarious. I should have thought of these. ;)

More tales from my science-fiction life

I'm sitting on our patio right now, fire going in the fire pit. I'm on my computer, which is only about the size of a textbook I would have used in fourth grade. Little smaller, now that I think of it. Apparently my computer is sending bits and bytes of data through the *air* to this thing called the internet.

Meanwhile, I've got some work to finish, which I will do using this neato program that lets me capture my thoughts in typing instead of having to write it all in longhand and lets me make corrections right here on the page even while I'm writing. And then I'll send the document through the *air* to my printer, which will reproduce my words *exactly* on paper. Like magic.

Then I will use this link in my electronic mail program to check in for my flight (through the *air* in a newfangled aeroplane.) I'll also send my boarding pass through the air to that aforementioned printer. I will carry it with me to the airport tomorrow where someone will use a scanner to scan the bar code on this piece of paper I printed from my house and that will tell them who I am (and all sorts of other personal information like my shoe size and the last time I had my hair colored, I'm sure.)

Oh, and just because it's cool, in the morning I'm going to present a 90 minute talk on oversupply in breastfeeding. On a video call. From my couch.

 

I know you rely upon me to bring you news of technology

Because of that heady responsibility, I scan and scan the technology headlines to understand what's coming out, what's new, what you should know about.

So without further ado, I bring you the latest technological innovation. It's coming to you through the global world wide web, but have no fear, the information is subtitled.

  

 

Edited: hmm...I have no idea how to actually integrate a you tube video, perhaps it's not allowed. In that case, check out the link to the you tube video I tried to embed above about this fabulous technology that it's possible you've heard about before.

Link Salad - a few of the things that interested me this week

That should say "a few of the things that interested me and sucked my time away from the things I should be doing this week." But that seemed like an awfully long title.

• La Leche League of Illinois' area conference is next weekend - I'll be speaking via virtual conference (video!) on Saturday morning at 8:30. Lots of good stuff for moms, lactation professionals, health care providers, dads, families, everyone. You should go!
• Diaspora* - a new social network being created by a bunch of geeky kids. Looks interesting. I'm all for owning and controlling my personal data MYSELF. I've been watching this story for a while. Props to my friend Carf who has been watching it and posting the links, too. Makes it easier to watch a story when someone else promotes the links.
• I posted two different links to Single Dad Laughing this week. Though I find the writer a bit over-long sometimes, he does make some great points, and they apply to all parents, not just fathers. 
• Hoagie's Gifted keeps producing links that are fascinating to me. This week one of them was this article about genetic aspects to ADHD. The more we know...
• Lots of my geek friends posted a link to this article about a planet found in the habitable zone orbiting star Gleise 581. The best part? My National Novel Writing Month project last year was set on a colony ship heading toward Gleise 581! I also find the idea of a tidally-locked planet cool - one side of the planet permanently faces the sun, the other permanently faces away. Holy climate changes, batman.
• Another Hoagie's Gifted link with some analogies to arbitrarily grouping children by things such as shoe size or height (comparing to birthdate.) It goes well with my redshirting of kindergarteners' rant of recent days. We should group children by where they ARE, not when they were born. Some are ready for school early, some not so much. 
• A satirical post about what science reporting is like. The comments were hilarious, too.
• A reminder to local peeps that the Northwestern University Midwest Academic Talent Search testing registration is open. If your child seems ahead of the curve on academics, this testing can help him or her qualify for gifted programming in your area. Grades 3-8.

Top 10 things I would do with an iPad if I had one

First of all, I have to say I am totally turning in my geek card. What geek on earth would be caught dead here 5 months after a new product release with NO NEW PRODUCT? Not this geek. Er, the double negatives and meanings of those phrases are kind of killing me, so let’s move on to the list of the top ten things I would do with an iPad if I actually had one.

10. Read my Nook books upstairs, while leaving my Nook in my gym bag in the car. Better for reading at night because of the backlight. Seeing as how I just started the HUNGER GAMES trilogy, I predict this to become an escalatingly important problem.

9. Do this (stupid) research I’m working on for work, OUTSIDE, on my CHAISE!

8. Read up on the different ways hotmail likes to torture me with it’s idiocy and try to puzzle out how to make a hotmail POP account act like an IMAP one. Outside! On the chaise!

7. Let my husband check his fantasy football scores from the couch, which I believe becomes surgically attached to him on Sundays (the couch, that is.) Maybe it would help keep his GRUBBY PAWS OFF MY LAPTOP on Sundays. Nobody touches my laptop, not nobody, not no how.

6. Send my father, sisters, mother-in-law, and others I love gushy reflections of my adoration for them from...the upstairs bathroom while I’m drying my hair, the car while picking up the kids, the back yard (while on, you guessed it, my chaise!)

5. Read awesome recipes like this one in the kitchen, you know, where I actually cook and stuff.

4. Test out the ePub format of my short stories, one of which I plan to list on the Kindle store soon.

3. Read blogs from my newly configured and awesome Google Reader feed manager. And then feel oh-so-much-smarter-than-you. (Lucky for you I’ll post the good ones on facebook and you can maintain your IQ that way.)

2. Let my kids play games on it [1]

1. Draft blog posts! Or at least collect the links I want to use in a blog post in one spot.

[1] Because I rock like that. Truly.