Things Teenagers Should Know

On apophenia [zephoria.org], I saw a post about things they thought that teenagers should know before going out on their own. They include:

• Learn to manage your own money including situations where you don't have enough money for something really important


• Learn how to come up with money for monthly bills


• Learn how to cook, clean, and do laundry


• Learn to travel respectfully to foreign cultures


• Learn how to handle being drunk


• Experience being bullied, embarrassed, ridiculed, taunted, beaten up


• Be exposed to people really different than you and learn tolerance and respect

And there are others in the list that I didn't quote. Anyway, I whole-heartedly agree. I think that these days, too many parents leave it up to the college experience to teach teenagers how to survive on their own. That technique works in some areas, and doesn't in others. And too frequently, it seems like teenagers learn by doing the wrong things over and over and over again. For instance, looking at statistics of college students dying in alcohol related incidents is really sad. I can't help but think that many of those could have been prevented had parents done the right thing and taught them how to handle being drunk.

But it extends to the simple things, though. I mean, I can't tell you how many people I taught how to do their laundry and iron their clothes in college. My mother stopped doing my laundry in my teenage years for exactly that reason.

As far as learning how to travel respectfully and learning tolerance and respect, I can't help but think that this could be accomplished by requiring college students to do a semester or year abroad. Again, when I got to college, I was surprised at the number of people who had not experienced any travel at all (out of a 1 state radius of their home). I don't think that the reasons are entirely due to limited means, either.

Getting back to the original topic of requiring a semester of year abroad... I guess that one thing that could go horribly wrong is if American communities started forming in foreign cities, in which students would stay insulated from the culture they are supposed to be experiencing. And I suppose that the cost of college is already prohibitive enough without requiring travel.

Those Darn British Singers

One of my friends recently told me that they have a hard time understanding people who have British accents -- especially when they are singing. My reply was that it really depends on the accent, because some British accents are way worse than others as far as singing.

And I gave an example. I happen to love the song "She Sells Sanctuary" by The Cult [wikipedia.org]. If you want to hear a clip of it, you can go to the listing of the With Honors Soundtrack on Amazon [amazon.com]. Track 3 is the song that I am talking about, and there are samples of all of the songs on Amazon.

Anyway, my point was that with some British singers, you literally cannot understand a single thing they are singing. Luckily, I happened to have the CD with me at the time, so, we listened to it, and my friends agreed with me. If I were to write out what I thought the lyrics were, they would be something like, "And a heh he spawn, make my ba ber, and a heh he spaw, make my ba, make my ba ber..." I don't even want to know what the actual lyrics are, because it is so much more fun to sing along with it this way.

I really need to go to a karaoke bar and sing it into the microphone the way that I sing it in the car.

I have a horrible voice to begin with, so I hardly doubt that not knowing any of the lyrics would really make a difference. But it would be hilarious to tape it and post it to YouTube.

I defy you to decifer the lyrics without looking them up. I mean, it's possible that he's singing "make my back burn", but that doesn't even make any sense.

Paint.NET

I constantly talk about how I use Photoshop. I use it for everything (in regards to image editing).

But the majority of the things I use it for only use about 2% of Photoshop's capabilities. I would say that I use it most often for simple resize and/or crop operations. Sometimes I use it to put simple borders on images (which I think makes them look better when inserted into technical papers, etc). At other times, I adjust levels or color balance. Occasionally, when I need to prepare a presentation, I'll put together a complex image with all kinds of layers, etc.

One of my friends recently pointed out Paint.NET [getpaint.net] to me. It's a free image editor, and it has all of the tools that I normally use in Photoshop (even the ability to use layers). So, I'm thinking about checking it out.

It does require the .NET framework to run, but I already have that installed (so that I can use Sirius Recorder [backpocket.com]). It looks pretty sweet.

First Anniversary

Surprisingly, after an entire year, my wife hasn't decided that getting married to me was a huge mistake. ;)

We spent this weekend at a winery, and had a rare day to relax. We spent most of the time drinking wine and watching movies, which was really nice, because we haven't had a whole lot of time to watch movies lately. This past year has been so hectic, with buying a house, along with a number of other major purchases (most of which were related to the house). I think that before being married, the only major purchases I have ever made involved computer hardware...

But anyway, it seems like only yesterday that I was making a complete ass out of myself out on the dance floor, and my friends were doing "drunken Frankenstein dancing" impresonations of me.



Anyway, it's been the best year, and my beautiful wife is the sweetest and most understanding. And I love her.

My Car Needs Paint

Ugh, last weekend, I looked out the front window of a friend's house and saw someone making a bad attempt to parallel park into the spot right in front of my car. And it was clear that they didn't really know how to parallel park.

First I saw the driver back up over the curb and onto the grass. And then they continued to move backward... until they hit my car. So, I went out there and told them that I saw them just hit my car. I was hoping that it wasn't going to be a big deal. But because they had rolled up over the curb (and because it was a car from the 70's), their bumper kind of missed my bumper. The result was that the bottom of their (metal) bumper hit the top of my bumper, and scratched a bunch of paint off of it.



In the picture above, you can clearly see that the paint has been removed, and it's not something that can be buffed out. The longest dimension of the scratch is about 4 inches.

I got their information, and resolved to get an estimate. But anyway, now I have a dilemma. The scratch isn't that bad. And it's just cosmetic. If they had scratched the paint off of a metal part of the car, there is no question that I'd go after them and make them pay for the repairs (because if it weren't repainted, it would rust). But this is on a plastic part of the car, so I don't have to worry about rust. And it's not dented or anything.

But I worry that the paint could start peeling off the bumper. And if it does that, then in a few years, I'll be kicking myself for not making them pay to have the bumper repainted. But I feel so vain going after them for such a small scratch.

How is it that it's their fault for hitting my car in the first place, but I feel bad for making them pay to have it fixed? I know that I have to go after them, though. It's the least bad of the two bad options I have.

Battlestar Galactica

For the past few months, I have been overly self-involved with all kinds of things going on in my life. Certainly, buying a new house and all of the projects that entailed has been taking up a ton of my time.

Anyway, I had cut out all of the unneccessary activities in my life like watching TV and reading Slashdot [slashdot.org]. Other than the occasional Formula 1 race (which by the way, is a series to watch through the end of the season this year!) I haven't watched any TV this summer. But I think that I might want to crowbar in some time into my schedule to watch a little TV.

One of the things I am eagerly awaiting is Battlestar Galactica [scifi.com].



There are a number of internet-only episodes [scifi.com] to watch before the beginning of next season, which I have to get on soon if I'm going to have any hope of seeing them all in time.

I also discovered that a number of my coworkers watch Lost [abc.go.com], so I might watch that this season (I was debating about not watching it this year because the last season wasn't as good as the previous one was).

Elliptical Machines

Over the weekend, I seriously considered buying one of a number of elliptical exercise machines. I think that the front-runner is currently the Diamondback 850Er [geartrends.com].

I used to go to a gym all of the time, but there isn't one convenient geographically for me right now. At work, I could go running on an indoor track, but I don't want to do that for a number of reasons: I would rather not take a shower there, my MP3 player is hard drive-based (so I wouldn't be able to use it while running), and I tend to get shin splints, among other reasons (or should that be excuses?).

I debated about getting back into cycling, but I can't really do that during the winter. I was using my road bike on a set of rollers, but one of the bearings on the rollers is failing, so it starts making this irritating noise at high speeds. Plus, my set of rollers isn't that great (I bought it 10 years ago), so I'm pretty sure that the bearing can't be replaced (well, at least not without tools that I don't have).

I really wanted a workout routine that I could do year-round. Plus, my wife is trying to do the same thing. That's why we're thinking about buying an elliptical.

An elliptical would be low shock (which was our primary reason for ruling out a treadmill). It's also not as boring as sitting on a stationary bike. And there are plenty that interface with a (chest strap-type) heart-rate monitor, to keep the workout tuned correctly. One of the things that I didn't like about riding my bike on a set of rollers was always switching gears to keep my heart rate in the right zone.

The only thing that makes us hesitate right now is that I can't see to find any reviews on the one listed at the beginning of this post. I seldom ever buy anything without reading internet reviews these days. We also looked at the machines available in big box stores such as Dick's, etc, but everything they were selling seemed like cheap pieces of crap that wouldn't last very long (or had too much vertical displacement in each stride).

Beer League Review

On Friday, I mentioned that I was going out to see Beer League [imdb.com] in the theaters this weekend. And I have to say that it was better than I expected. There were tons of really funny jokes throughout the movie, although Artie Lange (the lead) is a horrible actor, and should clearly stick to writing or standup.

The premise is that there is this overweight, obnoxious, Italian alcoholic in New Jersey (in other words, Lange is playing himself) that keeps ruining the lives of everyone on his softball team (albeit in a hilarious way). He's constantly breaking everyone else's balls, and drinking and snorting coke, and the entire movie is filled with obscure baseball references. The charm of the movies is all in the dialogue (kind of like Clerks [imdb.com]).

Meanwhile, standup comedians (such as Jim Breuer, Tina Fey, Nick DiPaolo, Jim Florentine, etc) keep up the density of witty one-liners. The cast is rounded out by Ralph Macchio (who still looks exactly like the Karate Kid), along with a bunch of faces that are familiar if you watch The Sopranos.

I thoroughly enjoyed the dialogue, but Artie Lange's (over)acting was painful to watch. But overall, it was a fun movie.

Beer League

This weekend, I will hopefully be going to see Beer League in the theaters.



Things in my life are starting to slow down and get back to normal, so I am actually starting to have the odd minute of free time here and there. It's a weird feeling.

Hopefully, the movie will be enjoyable and funny. Otherwise, it might be another 6 months until anyone sees me at the theaters again.

More Microsoft Annoyances

I have this crackpot theory that the quality of Microsoft software peaked around 2000, and has been on its way down every since. It really isn't based on any facts. But 2000 was before Office XP and Office 2003, as well as Visual Studio .NET.

I feel that most of their current software is no better than the software they had put out back then -- it's now just heavily burdened with massive amounts of features that most users don't want or use. It is for that reason that I stuck with Office 2000 for so long. It had all of the features that I wanted, while allowing all of the craptastic bloat (such as auto-correct, smart copy/paste, etc) to be turned off.

Recently, I started using Outlook 2003. Overall, it is very similar to Outlook 2000. Except that it has all of these really stupid features. For instance, it "helpfully" removes extra line breaks in emails (which, of course, is on by default). I really have no idea what this feature is really intended for, but it has the end effect of making my multi-line email signature completely unintelligible. And the thing is that I can turn it off in my email client, but everyone else that reads my email in Outlook 2003 is going to see a mess of crap.

I still haven't figured out how to fix the problem, other than switching to composing email in HTML mode, which I won't do. For now, I have reformatted my signature so that it will still be intelligible with the line breaks removed, but it doesn't look as good that way.

The Necessity of Multiple Incomes

On things magazine [thingsmagazine.net], I saw a link to a Metafilter thread [metafilter.com] about why families nowadays need multiple incomes when they only needed one in the past.

This is actually a topic that I have wondered about for a while now. Especially as I have been trying to figure out what is wrong with my budget. But anyway, there were some interesting opinions in the thread:

• "-Homes were smaller, way smaller, three bedrooms, one bath was sorta typical. The only kids I knew with their own bedroom were either rich or only children.
  
  "- Clothing, shoes especially, was more expensive but it was also better made. We got our shoes repaired, and they were worth repairing; ditto for other articles of clothes"


• "And has anyone mentioned college costs? Harvard cost something like $1,000 a year when my father went. Now college degrees are considered almost mandatory, and are a hell of a lot more expensive than that, even for public schools."


• One person linked to The Two-Income Trap, which is a whole article about the subject.


• "The cost of consumer electronics has dropped. (Case in point: I recently saw an All in the Family episode where their new early 70s colour TV costs $500. That's more than a plasma TV when you adjust for inflation.) Cars cost about the same and are more fuel efficient. They show that families now spend 22% less on food, 21% less on clothing and 44% less on appliances. Families earn 75% more than they did 30 years ago but they have half the disposable income of 1970s families."

Wireless Bridge

A few months ago, I talked about how I was looking for a wireless bridge. The deal is that I have wireless in my house, and it wasn't convenient to run network cables up to my office, where I would eventually like to have several computers. And instead of buying tons of wireless adapters so that each computer has its own, I wanted to connect all of the computers in that room to our broadband connection through a wireless bridge (which would, in turn, connect to our wireless router, etc). In addition, I wanted the capability to put other devices needing network connectivity in my office. Many devices, such as PVRs don't even have wireless options. Having a wireless bridge fixes all of those issues.

The problem I ran into was that almost all of the wireless bridges I could find only had one port. Meaning that I could only connect one computer through it (unless I wanted to put it inline with another router -- ugh). I did find one made by Buffalo, which is a company I have no experience with. I would have much rather bought one made by Netgear or Linksys.

Anyway, the one I bought was the Buffalo AirStation Turbo G Wireless Ethernet Converter [amazon.com]. The manual explains that it can be configured in two ways. One method is through a Windows utility. The other way is through a web browser, making it compatible with Mac or *nix systems.

I tried both methods, and was only successful using the Windows utility. The instructions for configuring the device through a web browser are wrong (or perhaps they are just badly translated). In any case, if you decide to buy this device, you will need a Windows computer to configure it (unless you have plenty of free time, and aren't aggravated easily, in which case, you might be able to figure out how to use the other method).

The Windows utility is not as user friendly as you would think. It is adequate, and it works, but there is little to no documentation. And the various So for instance, if you are a novice user and don't know what an ESSID is, you're going to be using Google a lot throughout the configuration process. But, I suppose that the likelihood of a novice ordering a device like this is minimal.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the device works as advertised, but you really need a Windows computer to configure it.

I Need My Tools

The other day, I needed to email a screenshot of something from a computer I am not used to using. And it didn't have Photoshop or any other image editor. And it wasn't until then that I realized just how often I use Photoshop.

I use photoshop for everything, from preparing figures for papers or presentations, to cropping pictures from my digital camera so that they can be printed (4x6 or 5x7 prints are a different aspect ratio than the camera's native resolution). Plus, there are tons of times when I just need to resize a digital picture so that it isn't too large to email.

And I guess that I'm just totally useless without the tools that I am usied to using.



And speaking of totally useless... I still haven't been able to complete the Wordpress thingy. Ugh.

Crap

Ok, consider this weblog to be on hiatus this week, while I take time to figure out these Wordpress issues. This whole thing may have been an enormous mistake. I feel like I'm trying to beta-test this thing.

And to add insult to injury, I couldn't post this for an entire day, because Blogger was having problems (which is the whole reason I wanted to migrate).

Wordpress

I just tried unsuccessfully to migrate this weblog to Wordpress. I'll have to try that again over the weekend. At this point, it's no longer a question of "if", but a question of "when".

One of the options that will definitely be enabled is the comments system. So, look forward to leaving me comments that I probably will never read.