Donie blogs

Cool Creative Commons Papercrafts

A couple of years ago I discovered Rob Ives' "Flying Pig" paper crafts website. He has a bunch of paper animation kits that are all really creative and fun. You can buy them from his website, and I even found a pre-printed, die-cut kit in my local independent toy store. Two or three years ago I got the "Mexican Peck" kit and built it with Jordan and Jada. Rob also has a bunch of information out there about paper engineering, kits for teachers, and cool things like paper lock kits to show how things work.

Now, Rob is splitting things up a bit - Flying Pig will sell his pre-printed kits, and RobIves.com will be his personal website and blog. All the downloadable kits will be sold from there. One recent blog entry caught my attention, and since I want to support him in this endeavor, I'm writing this up. He starting to release some of his kits as Free Downloads with a Creative Commons license. I just downloaded his free Reindeer Ride kit, and plan to make that with the kids sometime before Christmas.

Clever Disguise

With apologies and credit to xkcd

Cool Dance Performance coming up

Blue Lapis Light is a local dance company that does things very differently. They frequently do site-specific works, and they seem to almost always do stuff that is up in the air - lots of work with ropes and fabric that they climb, swing on, slide down, etc. We first saw them doing a piece they called "Requiem" at the shell of what was going to be the Intel building in downtown Austin. Jada was so entranced that we got her a private lesson with them for Christmas.

Now they are doing a new piece called "Impermamnence" at the JJ Pickle Federal building downtown. I think we're going to go. Tickets are a bit pricey ($20 and $25), but they are also having a 'pay what you want' performance on the 21st.

Details at the link above, but here's the basics:

June 18-21 & 24-28 9:15pm
J.J. Pickle Federal Building, Downtown Austin (300 E. 8th St.)
TICKETS: $20 General Admission; $25 Prime Seating

Map the latest crimes in Austin with Statesman.com

This is pretty cool! A Mashup of google maps with local crime data. Map the latest crimes in Austin with Statesman.com

Parenting Hack - providing quick and visible feedback

I came up with a pretty effective technique with the kids recently. We're still all working out the details, but I am so pleased with it I wanted to share it. To start off, I think my kids are wonderful. They are smart, creative, and have all kinds of good qualities. But they also frustrate the heck out of me at times.

The precipitating incident the other day was that daughter #1 wanted to read a book that daughter #2 had bought with her birthday money. Daughter #2 hadn't finished reading the book yet, and in daughter #1's opinion, she was taking too long. Much bickering and arguing ensued. There had been several other recent incidents of this nature, along with what I perceived to be a general lack of responsibility, initiative, and whining over trivial issues. They are getting pretty big (10 and 11 currently) and I think they really ought to be able to do things like pick up after themselves, make their own lunches, negotiate disagreements with each other without drama, and so on.

The incident that I referred to above touched off something in me, and I got really upset. There was far too much yelling on my part, and as is sometimes my practice, the dispensing of empty threats. One of my threats was that since they obviously didn't appreciate all the stuff they had, I was just going to take away all their books, toys, and extra-curricular activities, and from now on all they would do was school work and helping out around the house.

One of the hardest things about parenting, we have discovered, is that disciplining your kids requires doing things that you don't want to do. Lets take the example of being at the store, and the child throwing a tantrum about not getting some desired item. The options in that situation for many parents seem to be to yell at the kid, ignore the kid, or give in to the kids demands. What I would consider the best approach - leaving the store - isn't usually considered, because that inconveniences that parents enormously. And so it is with me. They don't seem to appreciate all the running around we do to get them to ballet and Tae Kwon Do and so on. If I really wanted them to start appreciating those things, it might be good to take those things away for a while. But that isn't what I really want, so I had to come up with something else.

OK, enough rambling and background nonsense. The thing that I came up with was that I told the girls I was going to just start keeping track of their behavior. When they did something I didn't like, I would write it down. When they did something above and beyond expectations, I would write that down too. I have been doing this for about a week now, and it seems to be helping. Rather than getting mad at the girls, or raising my voice, or getting into an argument, I just write it down. I just have a sheet of typing paper on the refrigerator door, and I've taken to using red and green pens. The girls have also learned that they can write stuff down if they do something really noteworthy and I wasn't there to write it down.

The quick feedback, the lack of emotion in it, and the persistent view are all things that have helped bring more family harmony. I like it.

Austin's Most Walkable Neighborhoods

This is pretty cool - there is a website that uses a variety of different metrics to determine how 'walkable' a given address or neighborhood is. I know my current neighborhood is not very walkable at all. Would be cool to mash this up with housing prices and find those areas that are both walkable AND affordable. Austin's Most Walkable Neighborhoods - Walk Score Neighborhood Rankings

Inauguration Day Crowds in Washington, D.C. : Image of the Day

Fertile Ground goes digital

My wife Julie has been running a very successful garden maintenance business for the past 8 years or so. During that time, she has always been growing at a crazy pace. Now, with the economy slowing a bit, she is getting a bit of breathing room. One of the things she has been meaning to do is set up a website for the business. I've always been a Windows guy, but she was frustrated with the complexity. She also owned a very old machine that was getting quite slow. So we have recently purchased her a new iMac. Now, she's gone off and used iWeb to create her own website, and I think it is really awesome. Go check it out! Fertile Ground Gardens

a belated apology

I was listening to a story on NPR this morning, and I am now compelled to apologize for the behavior of my older self. From the time I was 4 until I was a freshman in high school, I lived in Somerset, NJ - a small suburb near New Brunswick, home of Rutgers University. My Dad commuted on the train into New York City every day. It was a small town, really. Central New Jersey was like that - lots of small towns, all up next to each other. I went to school with a somewhat diverse set of people. Mostly white, but also black and a few Hispanic. We had Protestants, Catholics, Jews. A few people that stood out more than others - Hyeop Cha, who was Korean, and Namita Gupta, who was Indian. I'll clarify that she was Indian, not Native American, as that becomes important later on in this story.

We all went to the same elementary school for many years. Fourth grade was a big year - it was supposed to be our final year in elementary school before we moved up to middle school. One of the big transition events was that all the 4th graders from the whole district went to Stokes State Park in Northern New Jersey for a week.

So there we all are, many of away from home overnight for the first time. We're camping in cabins, staying up late, doing summer-camp like stuff. The student-teacher ratio is very high, and we're spending a lot of time unsupervised. I don't remember what the impetus was, but I still remember sitting around with several friends of mine when Namita walked by. Someone made the "Native American" gesture of the fingers flat over the mouth, with the "Whooping" kind of sound. It seemed to upset Namita, so other joined in. 'Cuz that's funny to 4th grade boys. Eventually, she cried and ran off. I felt bad about it then, but didn't say anything.

Life went on. I was pretty smart, Namita was pretty smart, we had a lot of classes together through middle school and Junior high. We weren't close friends or anything, but we were friendly. Then, I went to a private high school while most of my friends went to the public high school, and then during the middle of my freshman year we moved to Houston, TX.

I ran into Namita again later in life - sometime in High School. I don't remember all the circumstances, but somehow we discovered that we lived in different parts of Houston. I think she was coming to my school for some sort of competition. We talked for a while about old times, about the culture shock of moving to Houston.

Anyways, that's a lot of lead up to this. I listened to the story this morning. It was about an Indian girl growing up in the US, and some of the difficulties she faced. It made me think of the difficulties that Namita must have faced, and how I was one of those difficulties once. And I'm sorry for that.

Multiple Personalities

I've been lucky over the past several years to meet more people in the Austin tech community, and to become a bit more involved in it. Recently, I was invited to start blogging with the Los Techies crew, so from now on I'll be doing my technical postings over there and keep my random ramblings over here.

I hope you start following me there. With the added pressure of the group, I hope to post a bit more regularly.

p.s. - sorry about the recent website outage. I updated my web infrastructure and it took me a while to get everything sorted out. Somewhere in the update from pebble 2.0.1 to the most recent version the template jsp files got moved around and that hosed things up in a not-so-easy to find manner.