Random Eyes

According to Apple’s web site, the Utah Apple Store in the Gateway will open this Saturday, the 19th. I’m going. How about you? Maybe we should all try to plan to appear at about the same time? (Yeah, I know, before the doors open so you’re first in line, right? Standing out in the cold with a baby isn’t going to work for me, though…)

I know everyone weighed in on this long ago, but what the heck. I can still make a few observations, right?

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s interesting watching babies begin to employ problem solving techniques to get what they want. I’ve mentioned before that Joseph likes to grab my glasses off my face at almost every opportunity. That started pretty young, but even as soon as 12 months (which was early summer) he started getting trickier about swiping stuff.

Read the rest of this entry »

At almost 17 months, Joseph still has a very limited vocabulary (of course). I find it funny that one of the things he says the most is kind of complex — “look at that”. He treats it like a single word, not a phrase, though. And of course, this is the type of “baby speak” that is pretty much only intelligible to a child’s parents. it’s highly unlikely that anybody would understand it if they heard it, since it comes out sounding kind of like “dookehdat”. From context, though, I’m quite confident that he really is trying to say “look at that”. In fact, body language can say as much as the words.

Read the rest of this entry »

There was a funny blooper on the news Tuesday night. On Fox 13 (Utah), we were treated to this little blooper tonight when one of the newscasters started a story:

President Bush prepares for a possible bird flu outbreak. Today the president outlined a stragety to keep a pandemic from coming to the United States.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Somehow it just seemed really ironic (and funny) that an article about the president would have a blooper like that in it. It almost seems as if Dubya Speak is contagious. Any Mac user who hasn’t yet been infected and would enjoy a funny screen saver with a lot of Bush-isms need look no farther than here.

I’m a bit behind on my news reading, so I have someone to thank (you know who you are, and thanks) for bringing this to my attention. Here’s the original article:

Mark’s Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

You know I’m behind on my news reading because this was picked up by Digg, Boing Boing, and even The Register and yet somebody else pointed it out to me!

But about this DRM scheme. This is bad. Very, very bad, so even though a ton of people have already said something, I feel compelled to make my own little bit of noise about it. A lot of times people go overboard criticizing DRM, but in my opinion this is one of the few times where it’s not possible to criticize it enough.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, Halloween is over. We decided to do a simple (and inexpensive) costume for Joseph this year. He went as a skeleton; the costume itself was pretty much just a very warm, black sweatsuit with white bones on it. Even though it was pretty cheap (like $10), it is still really cute; when I get a moment I’ll put up a picture of it. (I haven’t put a gallery of family pictures up on .mac for a while, it’s about time to do another.)

You know, I also begin to wonder if the whole American tradition of extorting candy from the neighbors on Halloween is on its way out completely. Ten, fifteen years ago we needed to be sure to have a pretty good stock of candy on hand, and there would be many trick-or-treaters. This year the doorbell rang a grand total of four times, and one of those was the pizza delivery guy with our dinner. The past several years, the trend has been towards fewer and fewer visits.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it finally happened. Last week, Joseph took his first steps. And within a couple of hours of his first attempt, he was able to walk 15-20 feet without plopping down onto his butt. He’s also able to stand up in the middle of the floor, without needing or using any objects for support. When we let him “free range” about the house, he still crawls a lot of the time, but he’s walking more and more often now that he knows he can.

He sure took his own sweet time on this; it seems to me that most babies are walking well before 16 months. (Though some do take longer, each one is different, that’s for sure.) But at the same time, I wasn’t totally looking forward to this since the more mobility he has, the more trouble he can cause.

I also figured that he was more than capable of walking if he wanted to do so and just wasn’t yet interested in it. The speed with which he learned to walk suggests that this was true. I’m not quite sure what made him suddenly become interested in walking, however. For the past month, though, I’ve tried to let him walk to places with him holding one or both of my hands; maybe he just decided he wanted to do it on his own now.

Anyway, that’s yet one more exciting milestone crossed for the little guy.

Referring to a previous post here, it would seem that the current rumor is that the Utah Apple Store (in the Gateway in Salt Lake City) will be opening on November 5th.

What is odd is that this doesn’t appear to have been very widely publicized — I haven’t yet even been able to verify the date for sure. And Apple’s site doesn’t say a word about it. They used to make a big deal about a store opening. Then, when that stopped, at the very least they’d tell you about upcoming openings. Now, nothing. It’s almost like they don’t care or something. I wonder if they’ll even bother to mention it once the store has opened.

Well, I care and I hope to be able to stop by on Saturday. It’s about time Utah got an Apple Store. And if I do go on Saturday and if they are indeed open, then it will be the first time ever that I have set foot inside an Apple Store. Hard to believe, I know, but true. So if any people from Utah that are reading this spot me there, be sure to stop me and say hi! (If you don’t know what I look like, you can find a few pictures of me scattered throughout these image galleries.

I ran across this quote the other day, attributed to Albert Einstein:

We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.

It got me to thinking: does this mean the the trend towards outsourcing our entire tech infrastructure to India is really nothing more than having them collecting on that debt? Or am I just being a glib smarta**?