zen.org Communal Weblog

Google, but everything is backwards—meaning, do your search backwards too.

What an awesome hack.

I called TiVo today to ask about having our account suspended or put on hold, since we’ll be away for a while and would prefer to not pay their fees. You can’t suspend an account, unfortunately, you have to cancel and then start up again. If you cancel and sign up, you’re doing it as a new user again and commit to a 12-month contract again, among other things.

Or, TiVo will just give you a credit for the cost of the automated charges for the duration of your absence, effectively making it not cost you anything to keep the service going. If we’re back earlier than I estimated, it’s effectively free TiVo.

Positive side: this is awesome, it makes it much easier.

Negative side: I wonder what it’ll take for this to go away cuz too many people are lying to get free service?

Or maybe TiVo will just absorb this in exchange for their customers being really happy?

Thanks to a mention in one of Adam Curry’s podcasts, I learned that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is carried on the More4 channel in the UK. Our digital cable company in Ireland added the channel in December.

So now our MythTV box can happily grab it at 9:30pm each night for our enjoyment later. Only recently I discovered a pieced-together weekend The Daily Show: Global Edition airing once a week on CNN. While that was a great first step, this is now so much cooler. 🙂

It was just past 8pm, and I went into the kitchen with P following close behind. Next to the sink was our wine decanter, almost empty of its well-aired bottle of 1997 Château Musar, a truly gorgeous red wine made in Lebanon. As I set my glass down on the counter, P’s voice spoke up behind me.

“You have to finish that,” he instructed. As I turned around, the expression on his face made it clear I shouldn’t question this.

Trying my luck, I asked, “Why?”

“So you can grow big and strong,” he said, then paused for a moment, choosing his next words carefully. “So you can run.”

“Run? Where?” I asked, puzzled.

He gave me his family’s patented eye-roll of contempt and replied, “To the park, Dad.” Oh.

Putting the remainder of the wine into my glass, I asked,”Would you like to taste it?”

My sommelier gave it a gentle sip. “Yuck!” he proclaimed, his face scrunched up like he’d found red wine vinegar. “The rest is for you.”

I just looked at him for a moment, trying to hide my smile.

“Really,” he insisted. Nodding with a brief “yes,” he dismissed me and returned to the livingroom.

This weekend I watched a beautiful dance making its own music and moving in perfect harmony. All of it happened in a clean and healthy green park in Ireland with the rich blue of Dublin Bay as its backdrop. Our four year-old son P was one of the performers proudly sitting astride his bicycle.

We gave it to him for his birthday last month. He’d been using a tricycle for a long time, but really enjoyed a “grown-up” bike (with training wheels) when we were in the US. It seemed to make sense for him to have something similar in Ireland, since he’d pretty much lost interest in using his ever-shrinking tricycle. He’d ridden on it a few times, but not for very long.

About a week ago he took a turn on the corner too sharply and fell off. Despite my efforts, he refused to get back on and instead chose to push the bike for the rest of the time. I didn’t know what to expect.

On Saturday we spent a good two hours over in the park. It gave me lots of free exercise trying to keep up and let P increase his confidence as a bike-rider. Plenty of other kids around the park with bicycles made him feel driven to take part. While he insisted he only wanted to push his bike around, soon enough he was again willing to sit on the seat and pedal himself along.

P caught sight of one boy near his own age on a bike quite like his: flame red, same tires, same training wheels. Turning around, P made a point of riding by him a couple of times. Rider #2 did the same sort of exercise, driving in a wide loop along the different walking areas to reach a common point. On a third pass, P (now Rider #1) used a thumb to make his bicycle bell ring out: brrrring, brrrring. His compatriot quickly responded with his own: brrrring. Both boys got silly grins on their faces as they spread further apart.

They raced around the park for a good hour like this, but none of the movements were truly random. Instead, they took the form of an intricately coordinated exercise using a pattern of signals and movements they both understood (but, as I will only continue to learn as he grows older, I could only begin to grasp it).

At one point they rode next to each other down one of the wider paths. I immediately had a flashback to when I was about 10 years old. John Starkey and I were Ponch and Jon from the television show, CHiPs, racing our bikes up and down the “old road”, a stretch of aging tarmac through our really small Maine town. I still hold those memories with great fondness, and can’t wait to see P have the same sort of fun with friends he’s still yet to meet.

The two professional bicyclists did a wide circle together around one of the larger water fountains, followed by a perfectly executed merge of paths on the other side. Separating down other paths, each looking back with curiosity as though asking, Where are you going? As they swung around to head up a path, some sort of signal was exchanged. The agreement was to park by a small step that goes up onto a raised bit of grass. Each dismounted and began to check his gears, make sure chains were tight, and check the tires for air.

Satisfied their pit-stop was a success, they mounted their hogs and continued the journey across the park. I expected them to call out to each other over the noise of their engines in a new version of Easy Rider. Away they went, their bikes not too far away for me to hear periodic laughter and calls of vroom, vroom.

Finally, the performance had to finish. P’s new friend went back to the dad who’d also been in the background, waiting patiently on a bench and watching the exchange. With a comfortable nod and smile across the distance, the other father and I acknowledged our small role in what our children had just completed.

As he saw his playmate leaving, P looked a little disappointed that the fun was over. But it didn’t stop him—we were there for another half-hour before finally going home ourselves.

When we’d parked his bike back at our house and were inside taking off our jackets, I asked P if he enjoyed all of his biking today.

“Yup!” he shot right back, his beautiful eyes glowing brightly. “And Dad, thanks for giving me the bike for my birthday. I really like it!”

I get a pretty steady supply of suggested links for The Kids on the Web, a collection of Web pages I started back in 1995 (10 years ago, my goodness I can’t handle some of these realizations). Not all of the email is constructive. Some is just plain silly. For example, today I was asked to link to a site where my “kids” could “Explore a worldwide directory of MBA programs and business schools that includes admission tips, scholarship links, and glossary of terms.” MBA? The Master of Business Administration degree doesn’t seem to really be in line with more than 99% of what my site is offering.

I wrote back with the simple question, “What age group of children do you believe would find these of interest? ” The response was one of the most entertaining yet.

Dear my friend.
well they can find about 12 age.
I would like to exchange link with you.
please let me know if you are agree.

Since I’ve yet to meet a 12 year-old with a focus on getting their MBA, I wrote back with the brief response, “No thank you.”

P’s decided daddy-long legs spiders are okay. He asked me to keep him company in the bathroom because of a spider in the corner. When we got there, I explained they’re like Grampy Spiders who are just fishing for bugs.

He looked me right in the eye. “Does it have a fishing rod?”

I told him the web was like a bunch of fishing poles all out waiting for bugs to show up. He nodded in agreement as he put further thought to the brilliance of this approach, and continued back into the dining room to play. At the time, I wondered if he’d use the bathroom by himself next time now that he knows old Grampy’s not the swiftest.

About half an hour later, he got up and went back to the bathroom, peed, flushed, and came back into the room. Not a word spoken.

I hope this sort of thing sticks…

A fun bit of craftsmanship: handy instructions on how to make a RFID blocking wallet using duct tape, helping the passionate privacy advocate fend against the RFID‘s own pervasive version of a pandemic. EPIC has a similar fix on a postcard, theirs involving aluminum foil to protect your passport.

Why worry about your passport? Check out Bruce Schneier’s recent article in Wired, where he points out a fatal flaw in how the U.S. State Department will be issuing passports containing RFIDs starting in October 2006. The chip in the passport could be readable by someone up to 69 feet away from you.

More times than I can count, I’ve seen (mostly) ladies sitting in their airplane seat, relaxing not with a book or music or a movie, but instead a nice bit of knitting. To run through the rules: no Swiss Cards, no scissors, no pocket knives, but knitting needles are okay? For the paranoid, they’d be able to get through your eye and into your brain even easier than the now-plastic knives they give you for your safety while dining. But at least our in-bred fear of every object that exists in an airplane cabin hasn’t reached too much hysteria just yet. Umm…it hasn’t, right?

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee has a great description of this sort of thing from the perspective of the needle-weilding terrorist and their 14″ aluminum weapons of minimal destruction. My favorite part of her story is towards the end, where you see that if she’d wanted to, she could seemingly have socially engineered herself right into the damn cockpit. 🙂

Our friend Michael Everson was on a panel in Vancouver about international top level domain names. The session was being streamed live, so we got to watch some of it before going to sleep. (It started at 1pm there, which is 9pm in Ireland.)

The chair of the meeting wasn’t there, so fellow panel member Vint Cerf said he was going to cover for him for a moment. And then it happened:

Vint “father of the Internet” Cerf referred to Michael for his comment, and in doing so did it solely by Michael’s first name.

Holy cow! Major major geek points for being able to say you were on a panel with Vint Cerf, who called attention to you using your first name in a familiar fashion.

And he did it more than once! “I just want to queue up a question for Michael…” Later, he asked, “I have a question for Michael…” and mentioned three languages (my guess is Udu, Farzee, and Arabic) having similar scripts. If you take the union of those scripts, and set up a domain using that subset of scripts, would it help to divide by script? (We’re trying to find a good transcript of this exchange.)

But then the best was saved for later. At the last session, Michael queued up to offer a comment at the microphone. As can happen, he turned out to be the last person, in the last session, on the last day of meetings. He made his criticism of something proposed by a panel member, and when he finished he turned to go. Vint called out to Michael to please come back—he’d like to discuss the issue some more while still in session.

<beam>

Mondo-points!