Friday Four

Friday, February 28, 2014

Editor's Note: I have a backlog of "proud father" stuff today...

1. Three cheers for the web, this time for saving me from my own carelessness. One evening, Pumpkin wanted to "work" (i.e., play with my desktop "becuter" in my office area), and I let her. Of course, in the span of a half-second of my being distracted, she managed (I think) to invoke a settings selector a couple of levels down in a right-click menu, thereby accidentally removing the borders and controls from all windows. This "stacked" all my open applications and x-terminals uselessly on top of each other. Persistently, too: Neither logging out nor rebooting changed anything.

Luckily, I was able to search the problem on my laptop and find a solution almost immediately.

Time to create my little girl's first user account...

2. Little Man, my eight-month-old son, impressed me a couple of days ago, just before his bedtime. Rather than start crying, he looked at me and reached for me with both arms -- and got slightly fussy only when I incorrectly guessed he wanted to practice standing. (He pulls himself up now, by the way.)

No: He was trying to ask for bedtime. He quickly went to sleep after I figured that one out.

3. Our recent vacation was part of a surprise party for my wife's sister's birthday. It was fun seeing Pumpkin and her cousin -- about the same age, but a head taller -- interact over the course of the trip. My wife has an amusing series of pictures of them fighting over who could dance with Mickey Mouse. Unintimidated by being pushed away, my daughter pushed right back -- not that we encourage fighting as the go-to means of dispute resolution!

4. My favorite moments from the vacation, in no particular order, were as follows: (1) my son buying me a rest on the beach by wanting a nap; (2) visiting an aquarium with my daughter, like we frequently did in Boston; (3) the massage my wife and I got for ourselves as a belated anniversary present; (4) a morning walk alone; and (5) the whole set of three families actually making it to a show on time (hard to do with two toddlers and an infant involved!). It was especially fun to see how Pumpkin lit up whenever it was time to clap.

-- CAV

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Gus,

Your story about your daughter and the computer reminds me of an employee that works for me. Back when we had a retail store and an electronic cash register, she could do things to that machine with the 'register' key in place that I couldn't fix with the programming key in place.

For instance, she would try to void a transaction and by the time she was done, neither I, nor my bookkeeper nor my accountant could figure out WHAT she had actually done. So we finally had a policy to just have her document what she wanted to void and we'd do it manually on the books.

Other than that she was a stellar employee and I have seen her identify customers by voice alone that she hadn't seen in years. Great for customer service. Not so much on the technical side.

c. andrew