Adam's Mother's Day gift

My first scan on my new All-in-one HP 2610 printer (fax/scanner/copier). CNET says the scan quality was only fair with this machine, I think it is FANTASTIC!!!

Enzo in real life

Not many boys get to pose in front of a real Ferrari Enzo (MSRP Price $643,330). This was at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum Italian Car Show (Tutto Italiano for those in the know). Adam knows the car well from his 1:18 Hot Wheels model. Check out the rest of the show on my Flickr set (click on the cool moving Flickr badge on the left).

NPR : Beating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

When I heard this story, NPR : Beating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder about a 13 year old boy with OCD, I listened carefully to see if Adam was showing any signs of it. The poor boy in the commentary had to "balance" everything, talking forwards then backwards and touching things with both his right and left sides. He had lots of behavioral therapy, but it still seemed so painful to live with. Adam is no where near this degree, but a few nights later, he was overtired and had a complete meltdown over his burpie (the little cloth diaper that he puts on his pillow) not being flat and square enough. I kept folding and refolding, flattening and tucking the edges in. It was never right and I couldn't reason with him. I kept pleading with him that it was OK even though it wasn't perfect, but that just made him scream and wail. Finally, Doug went up and managed to fold it correctly. I was obsessed with not having Adam be so obsessive! He's been fine since, but I'll keep an eye on it and try to let him be when he is overtired.

Ms. Beautiful Eyes

I'm finally getting into all the hip services and got a Flickr account. Here is my first post. I should just upload all my pictures (100 or so a month, if it can fit in 20MB)!! It's so easy with the Windows Explorer plug-in through Web Publishing.

Edited 11/5/2018 - Flickr has finally shot themselves in the foot. After paying for a Pro account for many years, and then allowing free accounts to have massive storage (where I stopped paying), they've gone back to an even more expensive Pro account for something that is no longer worth it for me. So all these photos will be replaced by their Google equivalent. I spent less than a minute searching for "Dova 2005" and found this exact photo.

Chocoholic at 16 months

Chocolate is one of life's simple pleasures. Why should we keep it from young children? I know of two families that have banned chocolate from their children's diet (one was foiled by a grandmother at Easter when the girl was 2). Is it because of their own chocoholic guilt? So do they stop eating chocolate as well, or do they sneak behind their kid's backs, reinforcing the guilt!

Adam first got chocalate sometime between 1 and 2, and loves it like his parents, but doesn't get a lot of it and doesn't ask for it all the time. Dova got her first taste of chocolate in her 1st birthday cake (double chocolate). Shortly afterwards, Doug gave her a Ghirardelli non-pareils that we keep in a tupperware tub in the cabinet. Couldn't figure out how she ate it with no back teeth, but she had no problem eating it and asking for more. Now, if Dova finds the cabinet unlocked, she will pull out the tub and put it on the kid's table, expecting to be able to feast on it. Any time I ask whether she wants a snack, she will say "Choco?" Doug's thinks we have failed as parents, creating a total chocoholic. I think she just takes after her mom. Where's the crime in that? Just as long as we keep the cabinet locked!

So where does chocolate fall in the new Food Pyramid? Is it a bean? How about some dairy if it is milk chocolate? LOL!! Too bad this pyramid totally ignores a lot of the food that people actually eat. I guess that is the point!

Do You Want to Live Forever?

Do You Want to Live Forever? is a very disturbing article I read in Technology Review online. I had been putting off reading it for months because it was too long (of course now I have a bit of free time at my job). Aubrey de Grey is some wacko that thinks that aging can be solved by "fixing" 7 areas of biology. He believes that everyone wants to live forever and that once that happens, there would be no need to have children. My friend Jim, a fellow alum, who had read the article on his own, put it perfectly, "You can think whatever you want, but don't tell me not to have kids."

Just recently, I finally happened upon the tiny forums link in the corner of the page, which is a posting area for this (or any) particular article. Apparently there are a lot of flames for the author of the article (and some condescending defense from Aubrey himself on p. 7), but I happened to agree with the author completely. It is natural to die. It just goes to show how scary some of these MIT brainiacs are.

Here is the official Aubrey de Grey Responds that he gave in response to the original article. The guy is still lost. Another related editorial by Jason Pontin is on the money as well, but unjustly flamed in the forums. They even asked for his resignation!! I'm not about to put my 2 cents into these fires, but at least I can here!!

Update 10/5/07 - I revisited this post and updated the links after listening to the WNYC Radio Lab's podcast about Mortality. The links in this post were out of date as Technology Review revamped its archives. The forums I mentioned have been integrated as blog comments, although the "unjust flaming" of Jason Pontin have been completely removed (I suppose he is editor after all).

Podcasting - get with the program

I started listening to the WGBH Morning Stories podcast earlier this year when I had a mere Palm before my iPod. I thought this is great, after searching for and exhausting all the free audios from the Audible.com website, here is what I've been looking for all along. Audible had some good stuff like the 9/11 commission hearings (more on another post someday!), presidential debates, interviews with authors, and most notably the Everest expedition. But podcasting is really where it is at, just as long as enough people spread the word. I'm just starting to weed through different podcasts, so I haven't sorted the good stuff from the crap. Morning Stories is excellent, professional and well produced, but relatively short. Adam Curry's Daily Source Code is good too, although kind of just a big promotion for podcasting which I don't need since I'm already sold.

If you want to get started go to www.ipodder.org and download iPodder. I do like the seamless integration with iTunes, but it is just as easy to load up the MP3's onto any portable device.

Flak for Perfect Pitch

For some reason, I am getting a lot of flak for my perfect pitch post. It is not something that I was trying to brag about, and it certainly doesn't make me a crazy (well, OK, my obsessive behavior could be considered crazy). The way I explain it to people is to compare it to sight. People have perfect sight, in that they can identify the visible wavelength they see by naming the color. When you see red, you know it's red. Or green or blue. When I hear C, I know it's C, not some nameless tone.

Doug asked me today when I figured out that I had perfect pitch. I told him back when I was at summer music camp (Usdan) when I was about 10. The teacher would do relative pitch games, where she would play middle C and then another note and ask the student to name the note from the interval they heard. I thought this must be some kind of joke, why would you need to hear C first before you name the note? At that point, I assumed that everyone heard the same way I did, but then realized that I was the different one.

That was just one of the many things that I learned that I was able to do better than other people. It's hard to be a GENIUS (OK, you can flame me for that comment!!!). Just kidding ;P

Bathing Beauties

The first (and maybe last) time the kids bathed together. Check out the cool water drops!! Shortly after the photo, Dova completely flipped out, not used to the big tub with Adam and not her cute mini-tub.