The important thing about this picture is that I was in front of the swings, playing with the camera, instead of behind the swings pushing. M has finally figured out how to swing by herself! My wrists are celebrating!
(I chose this photo because my patching job on her jeans — which I consider a successful domestic project — is nicely visible.)
The Star has started an interesting series looking into substandard daycares:
Get daycare data online promptly
Parents who are contemplating sending their child to any licensed daycare in Ontario should be able to find out easily whether it meets the minimum standards of safety and cleanliness. But a lengthy Star investigation, based on thousands of daycare incidents and inspection reports that had been kept secret for years, uncovered a wide range of serious problems about which parents had no way of learning.
It’s a good idea to put the relevant data online — if the assessed value of my house is online, if restaurant inspection reports (now there’s some good descriptions of filth) are online, so should daycare inspection reports be.
But there is an easy way to get at them now anyway if one has concerns: ask for them. Our old daycare, the fabulous University Settlement, passed the inspection reports around the parent advisory group meetings then posted them, IIRC, on a bulletin board in the hallway where any parent could read them. That level of transparency is probably beyond the call of duty. But I would worry about a daycare that refused to show them to me at all.
In a few weeks we’ll be fighting the squirrels and raccoons for these…
The water heater is busted. Happily, though, it’s busted in a way that has not (has not yet, let’s not tempt fate) leaked water anywhere. Also happily, it’s a rental so it’s Somebody Else’s Problem.
Unhappily, there are five people in the house at the moment — three large and two small — and we’d all like to avoid the ninja-shower thing, character-building as it is.
I called Direct Energy yesterday and they had someone out to have a look at it within hours. Great. Buddy agreed that yes, it was dead and yes, we could replace it with a larger one, and yes, it could probably happen today. Great.
I called this morning to make the appointment; dispatch called me back. Next Wednesday, they thought they might be able to come out.
Ummmm, no. No, no, no. We are not doing without hot water for a week.
Four phone calls and the intervention of a supervisor later, we have an appointment for 9am tomorrow morning. It was in their system as a straight replacement, not as something broken.
I’m writing this because, despite the glitch, it’s been an unusually pleasant customer service experience(*). They answered the phone, they were polite, they were nice, they took initiative to get things done. They called me back when they said they would, and they were clear that a week without hot water was not considered acceptable.
Of course, we’ll see if they actually show up tomorrow.
(*) Buddy the repair guy took exception to the placement of some of our machinery relative to the placement of the furnace, which is vastly inconvenient for us, but eh, he was doing his job.
I’m at DrupalCamp, surrounded by a sea of (other) MacBook-toting geeks.
There’s a conference of Marxists using the same space. A while ago they came in and carried off a couple of our tables, which was a tricky moment for the DrupalCamp organizers: “Oh yeah. I’m going to go tell the guy who doesn’t believe in private property that those are MY TABLES.” Eventually a common understanding emerged — Drupal being Open Source, code free as in speech and free as in beer and all that — and I think the tables came back.
Nonetheless, I put on my dorky conference t-shirt. There are hardly any women at DrupalCamp and I didn’t want to be mistaken for one of the Marxists.
A tech summary:
I’ve developed a long list of Drupal modules to look at and a much better understanding of how presentation elements function, so I may have to bug our poor db guy less often with silly questions and he won’t have to bug me to upgrade versions. Good.
Drupal supports OpenID. I’m still unconvinced that OpenID is a good idea. Technically, yeah. Makes things a lot easier. But practically speaking I do not think most users have a deep enough understanding of what information is where and how it’s used and how to control it for OpenID to be an acceptable risk. An example: how many people actually give Facebook their Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo! password, which would be a hugely insecure thing to do, so they can auto-import their contacts? 99%, I bet. And suddenly these folks are going to be able to make appropriate decisions about their OpenID information?
Issues surrounding the value of anonymity and the value of maintaining multiple personas aren’t a part of the OpenID discussion at all. Admittedly the technical forum is not the place for those discussions, but they aren’t happening anywhere else either from what I can tell. Those things will be key factors in how OpenID should be presented to non-geeks, especially female non-geeks. I suspect that goes back to the lack of women in Open Source generally. Talk to women for a very short time and you’ll hear just how highly anonymity is valued.
Anyway, the technical stuff is great, and the Marxists have entertainingly wild outfits that balance out our dorky t-shirts, so there’s visual as well as technical entertainment.
I love seeing academic stuff tossed at online phenomena — like this sort of sociological/linguistic analysis of lolcats via I Can Has Cheezburger?
Check out this chart:
Ha! Harbls in a chart!
The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades.
It also demonstrates how the Internet changes the way we connect and communicate. These words and macros depend on the users manipulating not only the information being passed back and forth, but the format of the codes we agree on to represent the information. Strunk and White would probably be appalled, but then again, maybe not.
Heh. Nice to see a bit of work that manages to analyze something goofy without mocking it.
(The post title refers to this image)
The hammock chair is a great success; it’s a shame we have only one decent branch from which to hang one, because it is quickly becoming an item of contention. I had a rather long turn in it reading library books, then I was booted out by M.
You know that thing where you twist up a swing at the playground and then hang on for dear life while it untwists? Since the hammock is hung by ropes and not chains, it can get about seven times as twisty. If you happen to be wearing a crown/tiara and a cape, all the better.
Also if you have been sick all day and your parents aren’t convinced that your stomach contents will stay put through the tornado-like twistiness, it adds a certain pleasing frisson.
On Bloor Street. Happily we were headed in the same direction so I could follow him and take a picture without being very obvious.
He didn’t particularly look like he was attempting to be ironic.
