The boys were having a conversation this morning over breakfast about loonies and toonies. I came into the conversation in the middle, so I asked Ryan what he was talking about, and he came up with this gem:
I was telling Nicky that there used to be two-dollar bills, back in the pioneer days.
It’s Saturday morning around 7:45. My kids (8 and 5) are watching Popular Mechanics for Kids, their favourite show. I’m not watching with them, but I’m sitting in the kitchen reading the newspaper, and I can hear the TV, and I have been in a couple of times to see what they wanted for breakfast, and stuff like that. During this show, there have been commercials that featured scantily-clad models (for an HD TV), feminine hygiene products, and even one for Viagra. I’m no prude, but there is no way that a Viagra commercial should be aired during a show that contains “For Kids” in the title.
I sent an email to the National Geographic Channel telling them that someone needs to revisit the types of commercials that are aired during kids programming. Not only are these completely inappropriate for kids, but totally pointless from a marketing perspective. Their sponsors pay them for a certain amount of air time or a certain number of commercials played — would they be happy that their commercials are being played to an audience that has no chance of buying their product? It’s not even that kids have little money are so aren’t likely to go out and buy these products — that’s true for many toys that are advertised as well. But the kids aren’t going to ask for these things for Christmas or birthdays, which is pretty much the sole purpose of toy commercials. Do the manufacturers think that the kids are going to think “Hey, maybe for Christmas I’ll buy mommy some of these Always with Wings, since the women in the commercial seem pretty happy about them”?
I’m not one of those parents who wants to shield their kids from the “evils” of the world so much that the kids grow up in a bubble. (If I were, I’d be pointing them at Conservapedia.) But at the same time, some things are simply inappropriate for kids. The Viagra commercials may not be explicit (they’re entirely innuendo, which my kids don’t get, though I think most of them are quite funny), but I still think they fall into this category.
I’m sitting in the family room watching game 4 of the World Series; lovin’ that wireless internet. We had a bit of a busy weekend; Gail and Nicholas were at a Beaver camp on Saturday, so Ryan and I had a day to ourselves. We checked out the brand new Canadian Tire store that just opened in Waterdown; that’ll take some getting used to. It’s not set up like other Canadian Tire stores, all the car stuff is to the right while everything else is off to the left, and there’s a big Mark’s Work Wearhouse right in the middle of the store. I was kind of expecting one of those huge “superstores”, like the one in Waterloo, but it’s not nearly that big. Anyway, we bought Ryan and me each a new pair of skates and I got some new windshield wipers for the car. We then started painting a bookshelf that I’ve been building for Nicholas for about three years. Just before we started that, I got a big ego boost when a friend of Ryan’s from down the street came to ask if Ryan wanted to come out and play. I told him it was entirely up to him and after thinking for a minute, he told the kid that he was going to stay in and paint with me.
After painting we had lunch, then went grocery shopping, played on the Wii for a while, played some game that Ryan learned at school called “fumble”, which involved throwing a tennis ball against a wall, and then went out for dinner. After dinner, we came back and I continued reading Harry Potter to him (we’re into Goblet of Fire now) until bedtime. We had an amazing day.
Today, the boys had swimming lessons in the morning, then we all went out to Dyment’s Farm, where we froze had lots of fun. The boys played in an inflatable train, a big ball pit, a straw fort, and on a trike track (though Ryan was a little too big for the trikes), we went on a wagon ride around the farm and right along the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, and enjoyed a nice lunch of very expensive hamburgers, a hot dog for Nicky, and some really good fries. All in all, we had a good time, though it was pretty expensive. It cost about $25 for all of us to get in, and lunch was pretty pricey as well (three burgers and a large fries was $17.50, and a small cup of apple cider was $1.50). The pumpkins were only $2 each, and were pretty small, though we’ve been told that because of the dry summer we had, the pumpkins are small everywhere this year. We usually go to Parkside Farms in Waterdown each year for our pumpkins, but decided to give Dyment’s a try this year. Parkside is smaller, but just as much fun, no entrance fee, and cheaper food, so I think we’ll be heading back there next year.
I have a presentation to give on security in SQL Anywhere tomorrow morning, so I should probably not stay up too late. However, the Red Sox are an inning away from winning their second World Series in four years (and as one of the commentators said, also its second World Series in eighty-nine years), so I think I’ll stay up just a little longer and watch the end of baseball for another year. Despite the fact that they’re in the same division as the Jays, the Red Sox have become my second favourite baseball team. I think that happened when they came back from three games down to beat the hated Yankees in the ALCS three years ago. I also spent a lot of time in Boston during my three-year stint at my previous company, so that’s probably part of it as well. Plus, you can’t help but like David Ortiz. Manny Ramirez, not so much, but hey.
I’d like to write some stuff about the NLL season being cancelled (bad) and then reinstated (good), but I’m too tired tonight.
Ryan was given a special award yesterday at school. From last fall until late January, he was part of a four-student team working on a project called Exploravision. It’s an international science competition, where students have to research current technology and then use their imaginations to design some kind of future technology, outlining things like what it will do, why it’s better than the current technology, what other sorts of technology need to be invented / expanded in order for this to work, that kind of thing. A parent of one of Ryan’s classmates wanted to enter both of his daughters in the contest, and decided to be the team’s coach. He recruited a family friend to be on the team, and then asked his daughter’s teacher (who’s also Ryan’s teacher) for a suggestion on a fourth person, and she recommended Ryan. The team met after school and on weekends, and the idea they came up with was a system to more efficiently apply sunscreen using nanotechnology. They researched the history of sunscreen, skin cancer, the light spectrum, nanotechnology, and other related topics on the web, and even visited McMaster University to visit with some nanotechnology researchers. They got to visit a clean room and laboratory, and use one of the most powerful electron microscopes in the world. It was an amazing experience for all the kids — the whole project, not just the visit to Mac.
Ryan and the team had a lot of fun with this project, and out of thousands of entries from across the US and Canada, their team placed in the top 10% and was given an honourable mention. They each got a framed certificate and a prize (a pair of compact binoculars) from Toshiba, who sponsors the event. Ryan was very excited about the award (we wanted it to be a surprise, so didn’t tell him about it, though I’m sure he was wondering why we were at an assembly at his school), and Gail and I are beyond proud (I’m even misting up a little writing this entry, but don’t tell anyone). Many thanks to the team’s coach Greg Hodgins and Ryan’s teacher Barb MacLeod for all their hard work.
Part of a conversation Gail and I had with Ryan and Nicholas the other day:
Gail: We’re the parents. It’s our job to keep you guys safe, to protect
you. It’s also our job to teach you to be nice, polite, helpful, to help you
learn, give you food and clothes, a place to sleep….
Ryan: Drive us to school?
Gail: Yes, that’s another one. All of those things are part of our job as
parents. Nicholas, what do you think your job is?
(Nicholas then rolled his eyes and gave a big sigh, as though he’s given
this same answer a hundred times before)
Nicholas: Remember my shoes.
We had a “parent observation day” in Nicholas’ kindergarten class today. This is when a few parents sit in on the class for a while (90 minutes), and just observe (a) how the class runs, and (b) how their child behaves while in class. We were not supposed to assist him at all, we were just supposed to sit and watch. Of course, Nicky was an angel while we were there. We sat and watched him sit and read with two other kids with minimal incident — one of the kids wouldn’t let Nicky hold the book, and rather than yelling and hitting (which he would do with Ryan), he calmly told the teacher what was happening. Nicky loves to throw stuff — I doubt he could go an hour and a half at home without throwing something, unless he’s asleep or watching Scooby-Doo on TV, but he didn’t throw anything the entire time we were there. Just before we left, his teacher came over and told us that Nicky was having “a stellar day”.
This would seem to me to be a prime example of the Observer Effect, where the act of observing something changes it. (I have referred to this in the past as the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle”, but according to Wikipedia, this is incorrect.) Nicky knew we were in the corner watching, so he behaved better than he might have otherwise. The only way around this would be to install a video camera somewhere where the kids wouldn’t see it, don’t tell them about it, and watch the whole thing from another room. But then some parents would go all “civil rights” and “Big Brother” on us and sue the school for mental anguish or some bullshit like that.
Of course, it’s possible that I’m not giving Nicky enough credit — we all have our good and bad days, and perhaps he’s just having a good day. He did get a lot of sleep last night, and ate a fair-sized breakfast, and we did get to watch in the morning before he gets tired, so maybe our presence didn’t have that much of an effect.
The popular play “The Vagina Monologues” ran into some trouble recently (I
think this was in Florida somewhere, but I can’t find the link), when
a woman driving her niece by the theater was “offended” when the young girl
(don’t know how old she was) read the marquee and asked what a vagina was. She
complained to the theatre, and they changed the marquee to read The “Hoohaa”
Monologues (including the quotation marks). How stupid is this? It’s not
like “vagina”
is some vulgar or dirty or even slang word. I know that if my son read a marquee
that said The Vagina Monologues, he would probably just ignore it. If, however, he
read The “Hoohaa” Monologues, he’d laugh at it and make a big fuss, and ask what
a “Hoohaa” is. He already knows what a vagina is (well, I’m not sure he knows
what one is, but he knows that girls have one and boys don’t, and he
doesn’t consider the word dirty or taboo or anything), but I know that
he’d never let go of the word “hoohaa”, and we’d be hearing it all the time.
In any case, any child old enough to read the word vagina is old enough
to be told what it is and that it’s not a dirty word.
This reminds me of one of my favourite “my kid is so cute” stories, from when
Ryan was just two years old. Gail and I were going out, and we got a babysitter
for Ryan (Nicky wasn’t even born yet, so Ryan was definitely two). He was
sitting at the table finishing his dinner, and Lindsay the babysitter came in
and sat down next to him. She said hi, and he put down his fork, looked at her
silently for a couple of seconds, and then said matter-of-factly, “You don’t
have a penis.” Lindsay, to her credit, didn’t even flinch, but confirmed his
suspicion. He nodded and went back to his dinner, apparently satisfied with her
response.
I was working on an HTTPS issue today, and Ryan came to talk to me. While he
was watching, I figured out what was causing the problem, which was related to the
SSL handshake. Ryan asked about the handshake, and I tried to give him a
laymans-terms overview of what it was. Before I started, I started to picture in
my head what the conversation might be like:
Me: When an SSL connection is made…
Ryan: What’s SSL?
Me: When you want a connection to be encrypted…
Ryan: What’s “encrypted” mean?
Me: When two processes are talking…
Ryan: What’s a “process”?
Me: .
Here’s how I described it:
Me: If I want to send a message to another computer, I write the message
on a kind of postcard, with the address of the other computer on it, and then I
send it. The postcard goes out, sometimes on a wire, in this case through the
air –
Ryan: Like radio waves?
Me: Exactly. Then the other computer receives the postcard, checks the
address, and figures that the postcard is for him. Then he reads the message.
But, if there’s another computer nearby, it can look at the postcard too,
even though it’s got someone else’s address on it. So if I want to send a
secret message to a computer that’s my friend, I don’t want that other computer to be able to read it.
So, I take the data on the postcard, and mush* it all up, and change it, and make it look funny. My friend knows that it’s mushed up, and
it un-mushes it and gets the original secret message out. But the other computer
doesn’t know this, so it looks at the message and says “Huh? What’s that
mean?”
Ryan:
Me: When we first start talking, I tell my friend “Hey, I’m going to mush
up this data, and here’s how I’m going to do it.” and I give him some stuff that
allows him to un-mush the message — that’s called the “handshake”.
Ryan: Like this?
Me: Yes, just like that. It’s a way that two computers say “hello, I’m
going to send you some mushed data, here’s how to un-mush it”.
Ryan: That’s cool.
* – Important note: Note that “mush” as used here rhymes with “bush” or “push”, not “hush”.
Then I gave him some examples of why you’d want to do this — when I order
a book from amazon.com (I thought of this because I pre-ordered the 7th Harry
Potter book today), I give them my credit card number. I don’t want someone else
to figure out my credit card number, or they might go to amazon.com and say “Hi
amazon.com, it’s me, Graeme. I’d like to buy 500 books and charge it to this
credit card”, and he gets the books, and I have to pay for it.
Ryan has a fairly limited sense of the value of money, but he gasped at this,
obviously realizing that this would be a Bad Thing. Either that, or I just gave
him a brilliant idea for how to get free stuff, and started him on his way to
being a career criminal. Heh heh heh… oops.
Ryan was working on some homework the other day, and asked for some help. (He’s in Grade 2.) He was doing some logic puzzles, which I used to love as a kid. The first one was: There are four birds sitting on a fence. Colour each of them according to these rules:
“OK, this is easy”, I thought. Yellow is between green and blue, so we have GYB somewhere. Since blue is not last, it must be GYBR. But the last clue says that red is first, so it must be RGYB. But that makes blue last, so that’s wrong too. I must have looked at this for a couple of minutes before telling Ryan that there must have been a typo somewhere, since the puzzle is not solvable. He skipped it and went on to the next one.
Later, I was going to show it to Gail, and make some kind of joke about the fact that they gave Ryan an impossible question to answer, when I noticed that the birds had all been coloured in. I looked at the colours, and smacked myself in the head for being so stupid. Of course the question was not impossible. When it said yellow is between green and blue, I assumed that meant GYB in that order — it actually meant BYG. Putting red first (as clue 3 dictates) gives you RBYG, which fits all the clues. Boy, did I feel like a moron.
I knew there would come a time when I would not be able to help Ryan with his homework. I just figured I had a couple more years….
Another video of Ryan singing. He’s almost three in this one as well.
Cut The Chatter, Red Two 