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Claire just turned two and I must say the "terrible twos" are not that bad. Sure she can be stubborn and want to do things her way, but as long as she knows you're the boss we can usually work out a compromise.
There is one recent change in her behavior that is really driving me nuts: she won't eat anymore. When she was really young it was problems with different textures in baby food, then she wasn't really all that adventurous in trying new things and now she just doesn't seem to eat anything at all. We had a very short list of food she was guaranteed to eat. We would always try to get her to taste new things but in case that didn't go well could always give her something she liked. Over the past month she has slowly started crossing things off that list.
She used to eat a bowl of cereal with me every morning. We'd mix it up with some mini pancakes or scrambled eggs but now she won't eat any of it. Even if she doesn't say "NO" to it when I ask if she wants it, she'll take one bite and say "done." Same goes for lunch and same for dinner. She used to love pasta with sauce, grilled cheese, yogurt, apple sauce, corn, chicken nuggets and a few other things. It seems like she doesn't like anything anymore. I was praying this was just a phase, but it's now been a month of this and still going. Dinner used to be very enjoyable but has become a nightly torture trying to get her to eat anything.
She does seem to eat better at daycare, but I have a feeling that's peer-pressure or the caregivers being optimistic with their descriptions. Does one bite qualify as "some" or "none"?
The only things she does actually request to eat are craisins. Obviously those things have like no nutritional value at all since they exit looking the same as when they entered and while they are fat-free they're loaded with sugar which she can't survive on.
We recently went to her 2 year wellness appointment and they said she's doing fine, so the small amount of food she is actually swallowing is keeping her alive. I guess that's good to know, but I really hope she snaps out of this soon.
I've owned an MP3 player for many years. My first one was a Dell Digital Jukebox back around 2002. I had a few of those because they kept breaking and Dell kept replacing them. Then Dell got out of the portable music player business and stopped making them. When I finally wore out my last Dell DJ, Rachelle got me a Creative Zen Vision:M. I loved this player and used it for many years. Sadly, it started acting stupid recently so I figured it was time for a new one. I did some research and found that an Apple iPod was probably my best option. I was conflicted about this; I am the opposite of an Apple fanboy and I really don't like iTunes, but I figured I could give it a try. Rachelle got me a 7th generation 160GB iPod Classic for Christmas and so far I've been very happy with it.
I spend a lot of my time listening to audiobooks. IPods have special functionality for audiobooks so I was rather excited when I found this out. Audiobooks can be separated from the music library and not included in randomized music play. They also have a resume feature where you can come back to the exact point you were at if you go listen to something else. They also support chapters so you can easily skip around. This is the best considering how much it sucks to fast forward though a book that can be 30+ hours long.
These features are perfect for me, except I'm having a big problem getting my current audiobooks into the format required to take advantage of these features. All my audiobooks are in multiple .mp3 files. I can put these on the iPod as-is, but it'll treat each part as it's own book. What I really need is to convert all the .mp3 files into one big chaptered .m4b file. There are tons of tools to join mp3s into an m4b out there, but inserting chapter breaks is the tough part. There doesn't seem to be any free windows software out there that actually works to do it. I'd even be willing to pay (a little) for software that works, but all the ones I found seem to be Apple software and won't run on Windows.
I found a free Java-based tool called ID3v2ChapterTool that supposedly can add ID3 chapters to media files but the resulting files were never recognized or imported by iTunes. Maybe I wasn't using it correctly, who knows. I was assuming Apple used chapter support in ID3 tags embedded in the media files for chapters...but maybe they use some other proprietary means of doing it. My next try is going to be installing Mac OSX in a virtual machine on my Windows desktop to try running one of the Mac tools for creating chapters.
I'm the king of keeping things low-key. Yesterday was New Year's Eve, and I wanted nothing more than sitting at home with Rachelle and Claire. We did end up going to a friend's house for about two hours before Claire's bedtime. It was a good time and I am glad we got out for a bit to see friends, but I was happy after putting Claire to bed to sit on the couch and watch a movie.
We're a bit lame and went to bed around 11. I don't really have a problem missing out on things like midnight on New Year's Eve because in fact I didn't miss it. At midnight I was rudely woken up by my neighbors shouting, playing music and setting off fireworks. I wasn't aware that NYE is a big fireworks holiday, but I guess it is according to my neighbors. I don't know who it actually was, but they most have been very close since I found a couple spent fireworks in my flower bed the next morning.
I was amazed it didn't wake up Claire. Maybe it did, but she didn't make any noise. If she had started crying I would've gone over there in just my boxer-briefs with a baseball bat and made all of them cry.
Banks can't really afford to screw around with their website security. With viruses and spyware recording keystrokes on users' computers, money can disappear from accounts in the blink of an eye. So banks need to go a few steps further than just requiring a username and password on their websites to protect accounts.
One of the banks I'm currently with used to require a username and basically two different passwords. The second one, called a security key, having to be "typed" on a virtual keyboard using the mouse. I think this was a very good technique to combat things like key-loggers and spyware.
So in an effort to keep things fresh, in November they changed how the security key works. Now instead of requiring you to click in the whole key, they ask for the characters at 3 seemingly random places in the key:
Sure this mixes it up and I'm sure their intent was to have you type different characters each time, but I'm not sure this is an upgrade. First, instead of requiring a really long string of characters now they're down to 3. Second, my security key is rather long and intricate and trying to figure out what the 6th or 18th or 19th character is in my head is practically impossible. This forces me to write it down, which breaks the first rule of passwords: you don't write them down!
The last problem I have with this setup has to do with the data the bank stores. In order to authenticate people the bank needs to have your password stored in their system. More accurately, they should have a one-way hash of your password. So when you login they hash the password you supply and see if the resulting string matches what they have in their database. This way they don't know your password and more importantly if they were to be compromised, your password is still safe. With this new security key mechanism they either need to have your password stored in plain-text or have a hash of every possible 3 digit combination of the key. Either way it seems your password could be easily figured out if you had access to the data on their end.
Depending on how well you know me or when we met, you might know that I used to play a game called Quake 2. This game was released back in the late nineties when I was still in high school but I didn't start playing online against other people until freshman year at college.
Back then I played mostly what is commonly called free-for-all (FFA). This is where you and a bunch of other people just try to kill each other as often and as fast as possible, there isn't any organization to it. There really isn't much skill involved in this; it's fun but mostly aim and luck. I was always pretty good at FFA, but I always wanted to be a good duel player. Playing against just one other person requires so much more skill and strategy to be successful. I didn't duel much back then because I was bad at it and didn't have the patience to slowly improve my skills.
Life happened and I stopped playing sometime around 2002, much to Rachelle's pleasure. A few months ago I looked around on Youtube for a q2 video I remember seeing a long time ago and was shocked to find that there was still a small Q2 scene going! Most of the videos on Youtube were from different seasons of EDL, the European Duel League, which currently in its 10th season. I also discovered a bunch of servers in the US hosted by tastyspleen.net that are actually somewhat active.
I really don't have a lot of time to play now with Claire and everything going on, but I do play when I can and I'm actively trying to improve my game. The biggest problem I ran into is that everyone left who is still playing has been so for years and is very good. For the most part the game is fun but when you're playing someone who destroys you 30-0, it can be hard to keep a good attitude, especially when they're not very nice about it.
This is the video that inspired me. It's basically just a highlight reel from the season 4 (2007) of the European Duel League:
I actually signed up for season 10 of EDL that is going on right now. Even though it's a European thing anyone can play, you just need to be able to play against people on the other side of the world. This presents its own challenges. I'm not kicking-ass and chewing bubblegum, but I'm neither in the lowest division nor worst in my division. I'm just looking to have fun.
Most Friday nights there is an event called King of the Hill (KOTH) where anyone can sign-up to play a little mini-tournament. Obviously you play to win, and if you win your match you play again against the next guy. The last player standing wins. It's seeded so that okay players go first and the really good guys play toward the end. This video was taken during my third match (having won the first two) against a rather good player from Europe. Even though I lost I was thrilled that I played that well. A few days later I played Jakzah again and he destroyed me 10-0. Maybe I just got lucky. I've been using the name "Claire" when playing for lack of a better one.
What's in your basement? Mine was full of most of the crap that wouldn't fit in the rest of my house. Now in addition to that it's also the new home to all of Claire's outdoor toys.
Last year around this time she was barely walking so she was more than happy hanging out in the family room. Now she's running all over the place and tearing the house apart. Recently it's gotten too cold to play outside regularly like we did in the summer and early fall so in order to keep everyone's sanity we turned our basement into her playroom.
Our basement isn't totally finished, but it's not a wet stone dungeon either. It has terrible carpeting and stucco walls with faux bricks peeking through here and there. The only thing I really needed to do was clean up the crap, throw out the junk and disassemble my weight bench. I don't think I've used it once since moving into this house. My drumkit is still down there and she loves banging around on it; she even has a favorite pair of drumsticks she uses.
We also bought a nice chair for our living room to replace the huge loveseat which ended up in the basement. Claire likes jumping on it. I also moved my desktop down there since I'm rarely ever upstairs in the office.
For the past few years we've gone to Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with my family. This year my sister just had a baby so my parents were down at her house and we did Thanksgiving in Buffalo with Rachelle's family.
I usually get a little worried when we have to take Claire out of her cast-in-stone routine but she did great. The plan was to eat around 3:00 but life happened and we ended up eating around 4:30 instead. This worked out better for Claire anyway since she usually eats dinner at 5. I was hoping she would eat some of the holiday dinner food that we don't normally have, but not even close. The only thing she showed interest in was the cranberry sauce, and I think that was only because she thought it was jello. She pulled a face and spat it out as soon as she tried it. Well, at least she tried it.
We ended up leaving around 5:30 so we could get back for her bedtime. I was a little nervous that she would fall asleep in the car on the way home totally ruining bedtime but she was awake almost the whole time and in good spirits. I was impressed considering it was dark and she couldn't see anything.
The next day Rachelle's mom and sister came to town and babysat for us so we could see a movie. Her mom brought Thanksgiving leftovers which enabled me to make the most excellent t-day leftover sandwich for dinner.
