random dream and other news

So, in this dream I had last night, I was handed a round basketball sized object. There were arcane numbers and diagrams on the pieces of cloth making its surface. They seemed to indicate that one should push here or pull there. Following these guides I was able to make changes allowing the thing to progress through a series of forms. I remember the first form was a cross between a samurai and the honda robot as all of the pieces of cloth flared out to become sections of armor and the legs and arms rolled into place. And there was a way to keep your hand in or on it such that it could be controlled like a puppet. Next it was changed to what I can only describe as "Vampirella meets Kubuki". Finally it ended up as a Man-Bat type of monster that was particularly amazing as a puppet, before flying off. I know there were other people around but when I woke up I could not tell you anything about them. Even in my dreams I spend all my time with tech toys, go figure.

Other news is that we are in our second week of all day daycare for our son. If his mom can survive the process she plans to go back to work, at least for a little while. In large part this will let us get the money to send her and our son over to Poland to spend the summer with her family. Hopefully this will lock in the second language. He is almost two and a half now. While his verbal skills are about what you expect for a bilingual house, his ability to use baby signs to communicate is amazing. He is creating signs every day it seems and using them to communicate in ways we never would have imagined. He signs for turning on the lights, books, filling something up, birds, monkeys, cats, bananas, ... the list just goes on. There are signs he is using that we are not understanding. We suspect he is trying to tell us about his day or something along those lines. While frustrating when we don't get it, it is worlds better than when he wanted to communicate and could not.

The "Intro to CompSci" class is going well. We finished up the projects using the robot just before the midterm. It was fun programming the scribbler bot to do the various tasks. A wooden pyramid was built as a tool for many of our tasks. The first was to send the robot in, have it take pictures of the inside and then get it out of the pyramid. The outside of the pyramid was painted a vivid orange. A later task involved have the robot find the orange object in its camera, then travel to up to it, hopefully stopping before you ran into it. Simple compared to the things involved in the Darpa Urban Challenge but fun nevertheless. The last project has us shifting to building our own games. I am hoping to do a simplified version of Rogue, aka Nethack. We shall see how it goes.

halloween cuteness

IMG_0530, originally uploaded by ca5m1th.

Here is a shot of our little one is his Railroad Engineer costume. This was his first year going out for trick or treat. He does not really get it yet but he enjoyed walking around at night, playing with the flashlight, eating candy, running around with the other children and visiting lots of different houses. And his mother and I enjoyed eating his candy.

IMG_0536, originally uploaded by ca5m1th.

A group shot of the other cute kids from our street that we went trick or treating with. A Princess, a pumpkin (slightly overhead), our engineer, SpiderMan/Venom and the Littler Mermaid. There was some last minute changes on the part of the Little Mermaid, who had been planning on being Wonder Woman up until the day of the event. All of them did very well with the staying together. Only the pumpkin got tired and went home early. Although I think it was more a case of the transport system for the pumpkin (mom by that point of the evening) got tired and went home early. *grin*

IMG_0535, originally uploaded by ca5m1th.

His mother handled all of the sugar transactions on his behalf. Here she is pictured with our engineer, bag in hand. We missed the shot later in the evening when the Tootsie roll residue was smeared over his face. At least I hope that is what it was...

potty training and why there will be no pictures

Our little one has started showing an interest in going to the bathroom. Which is a great relief to us as diapers are not cheap and we were starting to worry about what our strategy was going to be if he decided it was not his thing. We had conversations wondering if we should home school him as a means to keep folk from realizing we had not managed to teach our child how to use the bathroom. (I never claimed we were always rational in our concerns about our child.) We have had various potty training implements scattered around the house almost since he could walk. The only interest he has shown in them is an occasional tendency to want to wear them on his head. Which makes sense to me but is a little disconcerting to my wife. A few weeks ago he made a break for it during a standing diaper change in the living room. He promptly scampered over to the nearest potty and sat down. It took a few more times before he got the idea that he could urinate into the potty. Now this is his preferred method. The ritual has become that every twenty minutes or so, as the spirit moves him, he will stop what he is doing to go and sit on the potty. Afterwards he will triumphantly get up and proceed to bring us the potty for our inspection and applause. The masterpiece in swirling yellow is disposed of, the potty rinced and returned to its place by the fire, ready to be used again. He has even been known to carry the full potty up a flight of stairs in order to present us with his latest offering. To support this budding habit he is left sans diaper for much of the time he is in the house. In fact he is sans anything but shoes from the waist down. The shirts he wears tend to be long and often his shirt is actually a onesy left unbuttoned. Think of it as a stealthy kind of nudity. Very "Risky Business: the early years". It is still startling to come home and pick your child up only to find he is without clothes on his bottom half. So far I have been lucky and he has been dry whenever I have picked him up. Eventually my luck will run out. As I am only home and able to spend time with this child during those times in the morning and evening when he is most likely to be without pants, I am sorry to say there may be a slowing down of posting his latest pictures. We don't mind it so much but tend to think the Internet is not a good place for pictures of children without pants.

Hills are hard

This is an update on how running is going these days. I finished the 12 week schedule of slow increments in distance while maintaining a faster speed. It worked wonders. I started with a mile average around 11 minutes and am now below 9 minutes for the mile average. Or I was when running on the track at our local high school. The very odd track that is .20 miles on the inside lane and .23 miles on the outer lane. More importantly, the really flat track with nary an incline or slope of any sort. I did not realize how good this was until I went out on the nature trail at work for the first time in at least three months. This trail is not in the mountains or anything dramatic like that. It does however have a lot more ups and downs than the track. Long gentle inclines that just suck the speed right out of your legs. Enough that my mile average is back up to about 9:40 minutes. I have until the Turkey Trot to work on getting this closer to the pie times, which I am putting at being below nine minutes per mile for the full five miles. Plenty of time. My distance endurance has also improved. I can now run three miles without stopping at the paces mentioned above. Its not prettty but I can actually do it. So, in addition to working on my speed (better said as "try actually getting some speed") on hills, I also have to extend my distance to a full five miles. Enough to keep my morning runs interesting. Today I ran the path for the local 5k and was almost four minutes faster than when I did it back in May. I still had the problem with the hills just taking it right out of me but I am enjoying seeing that improved time.
*smiles*

on upgrades, robots and new software

Three quick things for this post.

I finally upgraded the RAM on the home computer. Not that big a deal for most but last time I touched RAM on this thing was to remove some as it was corrupting something and requiring me to reinstall the OS every week or two. Could be lots of reasons for what happened, but I never really looked into exactly why. That was three and a half years ago. Since then the computer has been, as they tend to do, getting slower. It has been really bad recently. It dawned on me that since we had been paying off the credit cards completely these last few months, now was a great time to do something about the slowness. So I went to Crucial and used their tools to identify what type of RAM I needed and how much would max out my motherboard. It was all very straightforward, even for my level of paranoia. I use Crucial at work a lot so I was in a good position to trust them, and the price was also nice. I ended up going from 256M to 2G. It was amazing. I think I actually got whiplash from the speed the first time I turned on the computer. It has been a long time since a simple upgrade reminded me just how much fun these things can be when working as intended.

I am taking a class this semester. Not for graduate school, which I already finished. But instead an "Intro to Computing" class being offered at the sister school to where I work. Some may wonder why I am taking an Intro class, after having just finished a Master degree in the same subject. A very good question. The answer is "'cause it has Robots!" The class is part of a grant from M$ exploring the use of robots in intro cs classes. Each student gets their own robot for the duration of the class, and all of the programming assignments etc are focused on getting this little wonder to do what you want it to. It is very introductory but lots of fun. More on that another day.

Finally, I moved off of Yahoo photos and onto Flickr, and I love it. Especially the ease with which I can upload pictures to flickr using their upload tool. I generally do not like the various tools from web sites but this one has had a huge (positive) impact on how I use the service. It is much simpler for me to go thru the pictures and right click on them and select "send to flickr" than try to remember the directory they were in when using explorer and then go to that same directory using the web based tools. This is as much my fault as anythings, as I never changed the camera settings so there is a folder for each day pictures where taken. Frequently there is a single picture or video in each, which makes finding things a bit tedious. Yet, with the uploader installer, in one evening I was able to get almost entirely caught up on posting pictures of our little one. You can follow the link at the top of the left column to my flickr page and poke around for the latest pictures. Yes, he really is that cute. Except when he is trying to play us. Actually even then he is cute, since he knows that helps. The "not cute" starts when we do not respond according to his plans and he protests such injustice.

Ok, that is enough for now. I hope you and yours are well!
*smiles*

Full on video cuteness

It has been a while and I am betting everyone is just jonesing for the embodiment of cuteness that is our son! These are in no particular order and there are no special occasions, just the same level of cuteness we see every day. Ok, not quite true as we are generally not filming every second of his waking life. For example, remembering to work the camera goes right out when he is cranky, upset, injured, screaming, throwing himself on the ground, spinning his head around, shooting lightning bolts from his eyes or dismembering household pets. Not that he does these things regularly or anything. Nothing like that at all, it is just we have not managed to catch it film, trying as we are deal with the particular situation at hand. (I am in fact kidding about the dismembering pets thing. The cat may walk funny for a while but it is just fine, thank you very much.)

This first one is a typical day in the back yard. First we help water..everything, including ourselves. This is followed by a rousing course of "what are you doing and can I stick my nose into the camera?" Ending finally in a demonstration ofboth jumping and making noise.

This second one reflects the process of eating as demonstrated by a toddler. Notice the fine display of dexterity, creative use of fingers and exploration of body art as personal expression.

Table forts, or blanket caves, are simply the coolest thing when you are a toddler. Right up there with empty boxes and dirt for demonstrating that the best toys and memories are more about approaching a moment with a sense of glee and less about the amount of money spent. Now if only he were doing something more interesting than crawling in and out of the "cave".

And finally, nature provides the greatest thing of all, puddles! Puddles exist for splishing, splashing and running through, in case you were curious.

early morning adventures on Friday

My darling bride and son have been slightly unwell this past week with what seems to be summer colds. Lots of blowing of noses and similar trumpeting. My bride was having trouble sleeping this past Thursday night (ok, it was Friday morning by this time) due to all of the coughing and nose blowing on her part, so she went down stairs. She claims this was to let me get my sleep butI think she has gotten hooked on late night tv. Once she got down stairs she found she was not the only one up. Ok, not so much that someone else was up but better said that we had a visitor. A visitor that was startled almost as much as my bride. There was much flapping about as my bride tried to convince the visitor that 5 o'clock in the morning was not a good time for a social call. After that did not work she begrudgingly decided to wake me in the hopes I would have better success in convincing the visitor to view the wild egress. Bleary eyed, groggy and not sure I had heard my wife correctly I came down stairs to confront this persistent visitor. Not believing my eyes I thought I should record the moment. It helped that I was standing next to the camera when I had this thought. Here is our visitor:

It had decided to take a break on the curtains in the sun room. The unfortunate thing is that this room has no windows that open and is the farthest any room can be from either door to the outside. So I, armed with a broom and a drowsy determination to get back to sleep, went forth that convince it to remove itself. I figured the ceiling fans were not going to do its echo location thing much good, so they got turned off. Then I nudged it with the broom to get it started flying again. After that it was a matter of getting the front and back doors open and trying to convince it that certain doors were in fact walls. What I learned was that even though this bat could fit in the palm of my hand when curled up, it had a wingspan of at least a foot. I also learned that up close it does not fly like a bird does and can be very disconcerting when it is flying very fast at you. The swooping and circling does not help much either. Despite these challenges, I stood my ground and slowly, with several restarts, managed to get it outside. The we realized that one of the cats had decided to take advantage of the open doors and went exploring. Our cats are indoor cats so this was a bit of a tense moment as it was coaxed back inside. I left this to the expert and took my chance to go back to bed.

I can only hope your Friday morning was less interesting.

*smiles*