Tikkabik

About three years ago or so I actively started using the iTunes Store to buy most of the music I listen to. I rarely buy CDs anymore, although I still will -- but I've set very different criteria compared to the days before the iTunes Store became as useful to me as it has. Mainly I reserve my CD purchasing for stuff I want to make sure I have pristine archives of -- music that's important to me, artists that I consider my favorites, or content that I think will sound much better on CD than MP3/AAC.

But realistically, for about 80 percent of my purchases, the iTunes Store is perfectly sufficent. Whether it's a pop song I can't get out of my head or an album by an artist I'm not sure if I like, I'm willing to put up with the DRM limitations and relatively low bit-rate.

Now, before we had kids, I bought a lot of music on CD. I think when we got married I had about 550 CDs, plus probably another 100 of Bonnie's, and by the time I started switching my purchases to the iTunes Store, I think I can safely say that I bought another 300 or 400. That's in a span of about a decade and a half, and for a music lover, I really don't think that's a lot. I never got rid of many of my discs, though. If I tired of something, I'd put it away, into storage -- I never sold back my old CDs to used record shops. Just never much saw the point in it. I'm not a collector, by any stretch, and I'm certainly not a completist. Just a musical pack-rat, really. Figured just because I didn't want to listen to it today doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to listen to it, say, five years from now.

What's irritating is that I've lost track of some of the music I really adored, and it's stuff I want to hear again, and it's stuff I can't find. It's undoubtedly around. I'm just not sure where.

Having kids changed things. I used to keep every CD I owned in a beautiful fruitwood rack that stood as tall as me. I had everything organized alphabetically by artist name (last name, first in the case of solo artists) and then subcategorized alphabetically by album name. It was a terrific system. Maybe not the greatest for just finding random stuff to listen to, but I always knew where stuff was.

My friend Joe and I argued on this point -- he felt that artist collections should be subdivided chronologically ("Rubber Soul belongs between Help and Yesterday and Today, not after Revolver!"). Yeah, I know, it's a flash from the movie High Fidelity, to be sure. Some of my friends tell me they're surprised I'm not a musician given the depth and breadth of my musical nerdiness sometimes.

Then Robert came along. As a toddler, he took great joy in knocking all the CD jewel cases to the floor. I had to buy replacements because they'd break. But still I kept up the system.

Then Emme came along. And she decided when she was a toddler to mess with daddy's CDs.

By the time James came along in 2000, I'd given up hope of keeping my CDs categorized. I swear, moving to MP3s was partly a relief because it meant the kids couldn't screw up my collection any more. To this day, alphabetized by artist and subcategorized by album name is how I prefer to keep my "virtual" collection of music.

Anyway, I recently went looking for my collection of Love and Rockets stuff -- the band that three guys from Bauhaus ultimately formed after Peter Murphy started his solo jaunt -- and I'm damned but I can't find it anywhere. Apparently I haven't ripped any of my Love & Rockets stuff to MP3 on any Mac that I have in the house, and have no idea where the discs are. Same goes for Wire's A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, and that REALLY pisses me off.

Posted by flargh at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I keep getting e-mail spam for "cialis soft tabs." I have no idea if they're real or not, but doesn't anyone else see the irony in a soft version of a pill designed to ... well ... make you hard?

Posted by flargh at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With Bob Woodruff's triumphant return to ABC broadcasting this week, the network has been running stories about the trials and tribulations of American veterans who return from Iraq and Afghanistan with crippling injuries, and what these young men and women go through after they return with everything from missing limbs to traumatic brain injuries.

To hear the spouses and families of some of these vets talking, it seems that the issues they're dealing with aren't entirely different from the problems that families often face when their children are diagnosed with special needs. In short, families have trouble accessing services, knowing what services are available, and making sure that all the government agencies and public health care they're entitled to are all pulling in the same direction.

So don't think the problems that vets have getting health care, occupational and physical therapy and assistance from the Veteran's Administration is unique only to them. These problems seem endemic to just about anyone who depends on a government bureaucracy in order to get services.

Posted by flargh at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week I took the kids up to the Derby Street store in Hingham because they had a music workshop (specifically for kids). All three kids tooled around with GarageBand and came up with some pretty cool stuff.

James hit it out of the park with his Umbrella song, though. It was a big hit with the staff.

I've sent it around to a couple of friends, including Aaron Fothergill. Aaron and his brother Adam are Strange Flavour, the game developers behind Airburst and Toysight and an Xbox 360 game called TotemBall. Adam is a talented musician who works under the name Jaffa Mountain, and he came up with this remix.

Posted by flargh at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday we got about three inches of snow in the morning. It was enought that I finally had an opportunity to fire up our new snowblower -- first time I've had to since we bought it in November, if you can believe it. That's been due to a stretch of unseasonably warm winter weather followed by a stretch of unseasonably dry winter weather.

I haven't really stressed about it, because I figure even if I don't use it this season, I'll end up using it next season. I've lived on Cape Cod long enough that I've seen drier winter seasons followed by really nasty winter seasons as well. (In fact, with Emmeline's 10th birthday bearing down on us tomorrow, that marks our tenth anniversary living here -- we moved, quite literally, when she and Bonnie came home from the hospital.)

We got a stretch of sunshine in the afternoon that thawed things enough that whatever the snowblower didn't pick up ended up melting anyway. Chances are I could have blown it off and it would have disappeared, but I felt better about getting rid of it -- man against nature and all that. And in all honesty, I probably *wouldn't* have bothered if I'd had to do it without a snowblower.

I think I need to adjust the skid plates on the bottom of it because I got a bit of gravel mixed in with the snow (our driveway is unpaved). But not nearly as much as I have when I've had to shovel the driveway by hand.

Posted by flargh at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I love my kids, I really do. But after being home with them for a week (they've been on school vacation), I'm more than ready to send them back on their respective buses and get them back to school come tomorrow. Having them home is really disruptive to my work, as I work from home.

I know Bonnie's looking forward to it as well. She does a lot of her work from the house, making phone calls to clients, and she was grousing on Friday that she hasn't been able to do so because of the constant din of chatter and yelling from the kids.

Without sounding like too much of a Scrooge, I find the whole concept of school vacation to be anachronistic and unnecessary. Given that so many households have two parents who work, and given that they are likely only to get a few weeks per year of vacation themselves, I really think that schoolkids ought to be on a similar schedule, and that schools ought to operate with enough flexibility that kids can take vacations with their families whenever it's convenient for the family, rather than convenient for the school.

But in the end, I guess it's another example of how anachronistic and inconsistent schools are with the lifestyles and needs of the very people they're tasked to help.

Posted by flargh at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When you watch Dateline NBC or any of these shows where they corner pedophiles who get stung trying to have sex with kids after chatting with decoys on the Internet, inevitably they'll show some footage of the cops ransacking the molester's house.

And inevitably, they'll be carting away a PC for closer forensic examination. I have yet to see a Mac, but then again, I haven't been looking too hard.

Why is it that these sickos only seem to use Windows?

I'm not casting aspersions on Windows users or anything. I'm just sayin', is all...

Posted by flargh at 01:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sorry to get heavy for a moment, but Sgt. Paul E. Cortez has been sentenced to 100 years in prison for his part in the gang rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the execution of her family.

Frankly, I think he got off lightly. If Cortez, who hails from Barstow, California, had committed this crime in his home state, he'd be looking at a needle instead. That's not to say I want to see him killed. Wearing my heart on my sleeve for a moment, I'm opposed to the death penalty on basic principle.

I understand the explanation given for why this occurred: That battlefield stress was the root cause of this heinous crime. I can't pretend to understand the horrors of war or the dehumanizing experiences that soldiers and civilians alike must go through in such a place as post-invasion Iraq.

Maybe I'm just being naive, here, but I say that any way you slice it, the gang rape of a child and a family's murder takes a special kind of inhuman brutality that has absolutely nothing to do with military training. That one person might have been responsible for this is mind-boggling enough. That four men -- trained by the U.S. Army, no less -- conspired to do this is damn near inconceivable.

Posted by flargh at 01:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Steve Jobs recently spoke at an education reform conference and came out pretty clearly against teachers' unions.

At an education reform conference where he appeared with none other than arch-rival Michael Dell, Jobs said that one major problem with schools in the united States is that administrators don't have the power to get rid of bad teachers.

"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" he asked the crowd.

The problem here is that schools aren't small businesses. They are, by and large, usually one of the largest employers in a given town or municipality, and they need to be run like large businesses. And as Dell pointed out in his comments, the reason why unions exist in the first place is because big businesses were mistreating their employees, and the employees need protection.

I agree with the gist of what Jobs is saying: That bad teachers shouldn't be protected by their unions. And some, to be sure, do hide behind their unions or their tenure to avoid being discharged when they're long past the point of being an effective educator.

But equally to blame are bad administrators that don't support their good teachers or look in the wrong places to figure out what's wrong with the system. As are town and city legislators and committees who either lack effective management skills or prudent oversight to understand what's wrong in the schools. As are state and federal legislators, who often come up with really screwed-up, cart-before-the-horse suggestions for reform or funding that basically apply band-aids to very system and ugly problems with how public schooling is funded.

No, Steve, it's not just the unions. The whole system stinks, from top to bottom.

Posted by flargh at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's probably telling that one of my all time favorite Mac games is Ambrosia's incomparable Escape Velocity. It's set in outer space, and it has you man the controls of a small spaceship as you travel from system to system, hauling freight and passengers for money. Eventually you can earn enough coin to trade in your meager vessel for a larger one, outfit it with weapons and more storage capacity. A branching storyline lets you become hero of the universe or a pirate, or just play endlessly as a merchant. I spent weeks playing this game when it first came out.

I've finally found a game that rivals it in terms of sheer gameplay. Over the long weekend I picked up Sid Meier's Pirates for PSP, and I can't stop playing it. It's awesome.

The basic premise is the same: You start out as the captain of a small vessel in the Caribbean in the 17th century. You start out by aligning yourself with one of the dominant naval powers at the time -- England, France, Spain or Holland -- and you set out to make a fortune and a name for yourself.

At each port you can buy and sell goods, repair your ship and recruit crew members. You can also meet with mysterious strangers who will offer to sell you special items or offer you tips on where you can get the best prices for your goods; talk with barmaids and bartenders about where your enemies are hiding, and meet with the governors of each city or town and establish relationships that may ultmately lead you to taking one of their daughters dancing.

Once you're out on the high seas, you'll face off against pirates and merchants; if you win in a broadsie battle you can either scuttle their ships and steal the contents of their holds, or add their ships to your armada (a fleet of up to five ships). Occasionally you'll have to board (or be boarded) and fight the enemy captain with swords.

Now, Sid Meier's Pirates isn't anything new -- Pirates is a franchise that's been around for years -- but thanks to a confluence of events and my preference for Mac games, this is my first exposure to it, and I just love it.

Awesome game. Strongly recommended. Definitely worth the $20 I paid at GameStop.

Posted by flargh at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've told this story many times, but in case you've missed it:

I have this shirt I bought on sale at K-Mart a number of years ago. It's got these two fat, intertwined fish that look somewhat like a yin and yang symbol and Chinese writing on it. It's comfortable and good in hot weather so I wear it.

One year at Macworld Expo I wore it when I was standing in line waiting for the Steve Jobs keynote to start. I was milling about with a bunch of other journalists in the press line and this guy says, "Hey, nice shirt. What's it say?"

"I have no idea," said I.

"Those two fish look like dicks," said my friend David. "Probably says, 'white man wears the penis-fish shirt.'"

We had a good laugh about it, and not an occasion went by where I didn't reach into my closet for that shirt and say, "I guess I'll wear the penis fish shirt."

A year or two ago I was in the local chinese restaurant to pick up a take out order. The guy behind the counter looks at me and says, "Hey, nice shirt. You know what that say?"

A light went off above my head. In all the times I'd worn the shirt, I'd never actually thought to ask someone who might know Chinese what it says. I'd always just assumed it was nonsense, like the Japlish/Engrish clothes you sometimes see Japanese kids wearing.

"It say 'sick sick roo,'" he explained, in heavily accented English.

"Sick sick roo?" I parroted back.

"Yeah, sick sick roo," he repeated. "You know, Chinese is a very abstract language, like French. Sometime things in Chinese shouldn't be taken literally."

I wasn't following what he meant by "like French," but the rest of what he said made sense. But "sick sick roo?"

"Yeah, 'roo.' Like, 'road,'" he explain. "Sick sick roo."

Then it dawned on me. "Sick sick" was "Six six."

"Six Six Route."

Route 66. A K-Mart house brand. Go figure.

Posted by flargh at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert and Mrs. Goulart


Originally uploaded by flargh.

Robert had Friday off, so he came with Bonnie and me to see Emme get an award (all A's and B's) at her school, which is his old school. This year Emmeline's teacher is Bob's old fourth grade teacher, and it was nice to see him give her a big smile and a big hug when he saw her.

Posted by flargh at 08:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The kids are all on their February vacation this week. For our part, we're not doing much of anything this week; just kicking back and taking it easy. I got a long weekend because of President's Day, but it's back to the grind tomorrow. The day starts with a meeting with the school superintendent to go over some issues related to the SEPAC, then I'm back to work.

Posted by flargh at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

PBS' Frontline is currently broadcasting the first part of a four part series entitled News War. Absolutely fascinating stuff, and I highly recommend it.

The people they lined up for Part I are truly a stellar cast -- executive editors for the New York Times and Washington Post, a writer for The New Yorker, Bob Woodward, a professor of journalism at George Washington University, Judith Miller and others, talking about how the Bush Administation has manipulated the press.

Posted by flargh at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Robert and I were talking about the other kids in his class. One of them, he mentioned, was born in Brazil and recently left to go there on vacation to visit his family.

"Are there any other kids in your class from other countries?" I asked.

"Yeah," said Bob. "There's a kid from Canada."

"Like Jim," piped up James.

"Yeah, but not as scary-looking," Bob said.

Posted by flargh at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I saw a woman last night who owns a retail business in Sandwich, our neighboring town.

"You always have the nicest kids working for you," I said. "Your place and the Stop & Shop down on Quaker Meeting House Road -- they're all really nice kids."

"They're probably high on oxycontin," she said, without a trace of sarcasm. "Stuff is great. Takes your aches and pains away and makes you just not care. All the kids at the high school are doing it these days."

Posted by flargh at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More specifically, it's Robert and Emmeline's fault.

Robert went to bed last night oppositional as hell and woke up this morning in no better a mood than before. Apparently he got into a fight with a kid toward the end of the day yesterday -- no punches were thrown, but he slapped the kid with his glove. That yielded him a "time out" session.

Trying to get details from him last night about what happened was like getting blood from a stone. He was defiant and just downright nasty, throwing snot-laden tissues at me. I ended up walking away from it -- I just didn't want to have an unpleasant encounter with him over this. This morning he refused to get ready for school -- I had to physically grab him by the arm and drag him down the stairs to get him out the door.

I let the bus driver know what was going on and I also called the school principal for a situation report, which I'm expecting later today.

Emmeline woke up late, dragged her ass getting ready and then forgot her violin, assignment book and glasses. So I just got back from the school after having dropped that stuff off.

James, of course, was cooperative and compliant, got ready in plenty of time and was nice and polite. Go figure.

Posted by flargh at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by flargh at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And I'm not really that happy about it.

I started working from home more than seven years ago, after I got laid off from my IT job. It gave me an excuse to pull our second car off the road, and I eventually got rid of it (thought it actually took a long time). I don't miss the insurance liability and the cost of maintenance, and for a long time, it worked out quite well. Our kids were little and Bonnie and I could coordinate schedules easily so one of us could use the car when we needed to.

Times have changed, and so have our needs. Bonnie is working now, and spending more time out of the house. The kids are older, and they have interests that keep them out of the house as well -- Emmeline's after school program, doctor's appointments, Robert's video workshop, book club. It all adds up. Rather quickly.

Today I grimly realized that we're going to have to get a second car. The van is a terrific way to transport the family, but at the end of the day, it's just one vehicle. We need something else for those times (that are hitting us with increasing frequency) that we need to be in two places at once.

Posted by flargh at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Spongebob Clownpants


Originally uploaded by flargh.

James' new thing is paper hats -- actually, paper creations like robots and (as seen here) Spongebob Squarepants, that he's figured out how to strap to his head. He wears them around the house, looking like some really weird Indian chief.

Posted by flargh at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By now you may have seen the YouTube Kitty Washing Machine video, in which some poor cat is bathed by a "pet spa" and spends his entire time clawing wildly at a plexiglas panel and jumping around trying to escape the geysers of water that spurt up from the floor. It's entertaining, if a bit sadistic. Aw hell. If you like cats, it's pure entertainment, because you know that they're just fine after a bath, even if they freak out when the water touches them.

Well, yesterday Max has a loose stomach. And he's really, really furry. And he's tubby. So he's not that adept at cleaning himself. So he stank. I'd decided I'd had enough this morning, so I took him in the shower with me to hose down his hindquarters.

That Pet Spa in the video? That was me.

The wounds just stopped bleeding a little while ago.

Posted by flargh at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, I'll admit that I love John Moltz, not just because he'll stick me in one of his crazy Apple rumors now and again. This is funny as hell, though.

Posted by flargh at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went to my second-ever school committee meeting last night -- it's a monthly affair, and most of it is open to the public. I went ostensibly to show support for one of our SEPAC members who offered a situation report about our first meeting, although I arrived too late to see her present.

These things are quite interesting, though, because they're chock full of information about what the schools are doing, from budget to personnel to things like professional development and the recently-instituted Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports (PBIS) system.

Anyhow, I plan to continue going to these -- I figure it can't hurt to have more information to understand how the school committee works.

Posted by flargh at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)