buter's BABY blog

So I'm still hanging around on Facebook and yes it's eating my life. Sad really. But if you know me and know me on FB then you've read my apology and so now you can all stop gloating and instead laugh over D™'s lack of resistance to it.

So anyway one of the time-wasting joys on FB is the "Are you like me" application where you rank 10 items from most true to least true, and see how well your choices match to your friends' choices. Sometimes it's eerie - the number of matches I have with Hiren is just uncanny. But I've just been sent a link to the "Your wildest dreams" quiz and I'm stuck.

If the choices are these:


.. and others in the same vein, then I have no idea. I honestly don't want any of these because each one has a significant downside, in my opinion. So maybe I should rank them in order of least- rather than most- wantedness ... but what really concerns me is that I don't think I have any "wildest dreams" - not that I have identified recently anyway. Have I really become so content with my lot? Or rather, does it just mean that I've lost my imagination and got stuck in the practical realities of day to day life with the peanut? What a sad thought.

I do have some dreams, but I wouldn't call them wild. I don't think FB has a quiz that has these answers, so I might as well blog about them :)

• See Peanut grow into a lovely adult;
• Go back to work and move ahead in my project management career;
• Find some new books to read;
• Have a long and happy life with D™, Peanut, and maybe a sibling for her;
• Travel to France and spend maybe a month there;
• Go skiing in Colorado, no, wait - just go skiing again, anywhere!!

These things aren't all that wild and most of them I have some control over and so I will be able to pretty much achieve them. Does that make me into a more boring person because I don't want to be a sports star or win a million dollars?

Sigh.

Yeah, so you all know by now that I'm hanging around on FaceBook for no good reason that I can think of. I've had fun trawling the lists of groups though, like If You Can't Differentiate Between "Your" and "You're" You Deserve To Die and if 9039230293 people join this group it will still be lame.

But now I can relax, because according to an article in today's SMH,

"Facebook is becoming increasingly trendy ... It's where more of the thought leaders and influentials go."

So that's sorted then. It's good to be reminded that I'm an influential thought leader ... :)

Now, all those other thought leaders out there on Facebook, it's time to unite and take over the world, or something. One lame interest group at a time ...

You may have heard that the Australian Government in all its wisdom, provides a non-means-tested baby bonus payment of about $4000 for a newborn. They even go so far as to ensure 16-year-old mothers get the payment in a form of pension rather than a lump sum to make sure it's spent on the baby and not on booze or drugs or stolen by non-well-meaning relatives. Personally, I think it's a way for the Government to assuage its guilt over not creating better industrial relations provisions for parental leave.

It's a very sad thing that Australia's population growth from birth is so low. A sociologist I heard on the radio once said you can directly correlate the declining population growth with the rise in female education. It makes sense too, as potential mums are spending more time getting educated and starting careers, than starting families. But what's not being acknowledged by the Government is that those potential mothers are sticking to their careers for longer before having children because they need to save up money to be able to raise said kids, because once they leave to have the baby they are suddenly bereft of income. Then the Government wails about cost of childcare, and how they can't provide enough subsidised places for all the kids we're having, but mums have little choice but to go back to work so they can pay for the mortgage and all the bills as well as paying for childcare. It's rotten.

Some more enlightened nations have legislated parental benefits. Like, up to 2 years' paid leave from work - you can have your children, and still cover your mortgage repayments, and what's more you can choose when to go back to work, with the benefit that your child has had the chance to grow up a bit with at least one parent at home all the time, you're not entirely broke, and you can still go back to the same job you had before. Don't get me wrong, some employers here do offer a period of paid parental leave, in fact there are some very good places in that regard, but most only offer the minimum required by law. Which is, 12 months' leave. Unpaid. 12 months in total, that is, so if you happen to have some annual leave available and you choose to take that instead of unpaid leave, you still can't have more than 12 months away from your job. So in our case, I've had 1 month annual leave - before Peanut arrived - and I get 11 months with her before I lose my entitlement to go back to the same job. 11 months with no income, that is. Just to be clear, I wouldn't give up Peanut for anything, and I definitely wouldn't want to be back at work right now with her only 11 weeks old.

Oh, and the baby bonus? That went towards our private medical bills - we avoided the public hospital system for a reason.

So, I finally gave in to peer pressure, or something, and signed myself up to facebook. I mean, what else do you do when the baby's gone to sleep? I'm counting this as my "me" time!

D™ threatened to disown me, but I said I'd take the baby if he did so he desisted for now. I think it's still potential though ... But I must say it's kind of fun trawling through finding people and seeing how they present themselves to the world... I've found most of my high school chums on there (they weren't exactly pressuring me, more like "don't join facebook, it's such a time sucker") and also friends from primary school as well as ex-colleagues and family. So it's kind of fun.

One set of pals started a scrabulous game with me, because I was dissing facebook and online scrabble so much. The starting word was "CURN".


I'm familiar with the word "KERN" as a term used in publishing, something about the spacing between letters, but what on earth is a CURN?

I asked the scrabulous dictionary and here's what I got:


Uh-huh. So it's like, a real word? And on a triple word score and everything!

I guess I shouldn't trust a dictionary written by someone who made up the word "scrabulous", right?

I think it's time to face facts and realise that buter's blog has to refocus. Since the arrival of the peanut (above) I realise I've spent very little time surfing the net for "fun geekery stuff" and loads of time surfing for "fun geeky baby stuff" ... so let this serve as the announcement of buter's baby blog.

The first post should of course set the tone for future stuff, and so you know I'm still the same person, albeit with a slightly different set of priorities now, we'll begin with some social commentary.

Since becoming parents, D™ and I have talked about all the new things we have to worry about. Schooling. Immunisations. Stranger Danger. Childhood Obesity. And not to forget, OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!!1!! ... that is, Netiquette.

We have found ourselves agreeing that DVDs aren't good babysitters, that the ABC is the only TV station that the peanut will need, and that computers don't belong in bedrooms. And we really really don't want to go down the path of censoring the internet. Instead, we agree it's better to educate our offspring in how to think for oneself: make decisions about what to see and what not to look for, based on reasoned decision making rather than because it's been removed from sight for you.

Actually this ties in with our perspective on alcohol as well. We don't think it works to ban all alcohol. Rather, educate the child, if they want to drink, then at home under parental supervision is much better than a Southern Comfort experience at 16.

So hopefully the peanut will grow up to be a healthy well-adjusted technosavvy moderate drinker who finds the internet as amusing as we do !

Ok, more, and probably cooler, baby posts to follow ...

I seem to have run out of words so I'm going to make a habit of just posting funny things I find floating around the internet.

.... sigh.

Some things just gotta be shared. (click on the image)


... found via a comments thread at cute overload.

Ok, I know it's a hoppopitamus rather than a heffalump, but there isn't a baby hippo theme song :) ... and now I'm hoping that you have that tune running through your head ...


For those in the know, the reason for my lack of posts will be self evident, but let the above image serve as a reminder ....

We watched Heroes recently - 23 episodes of fun and drama, highly recommended viewing btw. And since the ending of Season 3 of Veronica Mars and its subsequent cancellation, we are now hanging out for Season 2 of Heroes as well as hunting round for new TV to be interested in, which means I'm watching DVDs of Gilmore Girls and Buffy.

One of the lovely things about being home all day (apart from 24 hour Buffy marathons) is that I can wander around the internet to see what new wonders of interconnectedness are being created every day. And now it appears that Veronica Mars was going to appear on Lost but they lost her to Heroes and so there's even more reason to hang out for the new season. Yay for interconnectedness!!

But now I must pause and consider the possibility that I'm addicted to the internet. Luckily, though, one of my regular reads is Mind Hacks, and they've recently written that there's no such thing as internet addiction.

... so it's warming to find people that think like you don't you reckon? I've just come from the angriest's post about 1980's cartoons - and while I'm sure there are lots of people out there who watched the same ABC cartoons as I did, what with them being the national broadcaster and all, it's just, well - a bit friendly to meet up with one of them :)

Of course after that I contracted an earworm. "It's me Nono, small robot you know, friend of Ulysses" which was annoying enough in itself - except the only reason I know what an earworm is, is because of a comment on the above mentioned blog post, which led me to Wikipedia, which led me to the Maim That Tune site which guarantees to remove earworms by replacing them with hideous midis of even more appallingly earwormy tunes.

... which in turn led me to decide it was worth blogging about (after all, what's the point of a blog?!) and that led me to the Red Dwarf theme tune because even though they were talking about space (which is really big) I think the first verse kind of does for the internet too.

It's cold outside, no kind of atmosphere,
I'm all alone, more or less ...
Let me fly far away from here
Fun, fun, fun, in the sun, sun, sun ....

It's an interesting thing, to think about how you learn something. I'd go so far as to say, the way that you learn influences how you deal with unfamiliar situations. If you're a person who learns best by reading or by listening to someone else talking to you, it's possible that you handle new situations differently from someone who learns by doing. Even more than that, I bet it influences career choices too. If you learn by reading/listening you may be more likely to feel comfortable learning in an academic environment, i.e. university, than a vocational environment, so you're more likely to end up with a desk job than a trade. Maybe?

Anyway Lifehacker posed the question: find out how you learn. So I did the survey and discovered I'm a visual learner, but balanced verbal and non-verbal - I learn best from visual materials whether it's text or images, compared to learning by doing or by listening. Well, I knew that already! Anyone who's tried to give me directions will know that. I basically can't find my way there again if someone else has driven me there, or if they tell me the directions over the phone. If, however, they write them down (or I do) then I'm fine with it - ditto for map reading. That's what they're for after all!!

Since I'm not currently pursuing any academic learning, what does it matter what my learning style is, I hear you ask. Well, it's a funny thing but I think surveys that tell me about myself are more useful for telling me how to deal with other people than anything else. So, if I'm a visual learner and I write someone some instructions, I get frustrated when they don't seem to get it. After all, if it's written down that should be enough shouldn't it? But for many people, I guess it isn't really. So instead, maybe I need to figure out what *their* style is, and present the information accordingly. Or, to be brutally honest, the person receiving the information should know what their style is, and request the information accordingly. As in, I know I learn best by reading, so I ask for written information. Simple, eh?

... on rereading I realise there's some pent up bitterness in that last few sentences, you can tell that I may have had trouble training people in the past. Maybe I'm not such a good teacher as I am a learner :)

I love Ikea instructions. There are no words, so they translate to any language with the same amount of ease. They always start with the things you need, and sometimes the ikea man has a helper - does that mean "You need a friend"? - I wonder if it's a comment on the sort of people who furnish their houses with ikea .... oh wait, that would be us.

So anyway you know how I was ranting about little boxes, well it seems Ikea has taken this to the next logical conclusion: flat-pack housing. It's not new (treehugger talked about it in 2005) but I've only just become aware of it. I wonder how many allen keys you need to assemble them? Arre they bigger than normal size? Do you need a friend too? Do you then have to assemble all the furniture (and is it fixed in place with tippskyd) and what happens if you put in a floor part upside down - does the furniture attach to the roof????

Side note: while researching links for this silly, silly post I've found out why Ikea instructions aren't in words: their word for an allen key is insexnyckel. Tell me that you'd take it seriously.

So you know how Rip Van Winkle slept for 20 years only to return to his village all confuddled and messed about - well after watching the best movie in the world on average 2x per year since it was released, I empathise with ol' Rip after seeing this page (also linked from Cynical-C).

errr, thanks Jarv. This was a bad bad way to wake up ... :/

...

I'm not working at the moment.

I don't realise how little I've done each day until about noon - at which point I have some lunch, and then ponder going out, during another couple of games of solitaire, so sometimes it's about 3pm before I manage to even go outside.

I used to be such an organised, busy person. This time wasting thing is really weird and yet strangely comforting. There's just nothing that needs doing more than sitting here on the lounge with my feet up. Time enough to have things to worry about later.

... and it's back to the game.

As we get better at the refinement we will be able to remove virgin rape from the process.

....errrr ?

Either McDonalds has finally admitted there is something sinister behind the slightly evil-looking clown motif, or the comment above was taken out of context. You can figure it out for yourself, but meanwhile it seems the big D is going to use their own waste cooking oil to drive their trucks. Yep that's right, it's a new take on an old joke.

Q: What has 4 wheels and fries?
A: A Macca's truck driving on biodiesel.

Thankyou, thankyou. I'm here all week - try the veal.

The other day, listening to parent radio, they played a snippet of a song that had the lyric "pour myself a cup of ambition" and I thought, what a great blog post title (and I don't think I'm the only one). But then realising that I was on my way home from my last day of paid employment for a while I figured that I probably wasn't in the best place to be writing about ambitions.

But hey, after a few days bumming around I figure maybe I should use the time constructively and instead actually put some words down about my ambitions. I mean, just coz I'm not being paid right now doesn't mean that I don't have any ambitions, right?

So thinking about it, what kind of thing makes up an "ambition" instead of just a "I wanna do that thing" concept? Is it just that you want to have no regrets? No, because that falls under "I wanna do that" and in my book includes things like bungy jumping and skiing in the Northern Hemisphere. So maybe it's stuff like "I will feel more fulfilled as a person if I do that" .... but then that implies that I'm not satisfied with who I am, and that's not really true either.

Back to the start then, and google for ambition. You get career consultants. articles from TIME, other stuff all pointing to ambition being involved with your paid for employment. Does that mean that those of us who are bumming around at home have no ambition? Is that a bad thing? It seems like it should be a bad thing, seems vaguely negative in connotation.

Merriam-Webster says

1 a : an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power
b : desire to achieve a particular end

Hmm. So maybe it's usually all tied up with corporate or commercial achievements, but doesn't have to be. And it is all tied up with "I wanna do that" after all.

Well, I guess I will keep pondering it for a while.

I was going to call this post "Third time lucky" but found the other title more amusing.

So last night, D™ and I went to see Ocean's Thirteen at the moofies. It was much much much better than Ocean's Twelve (which sucked big time) and done with much the same style and slickness as Ocean's Eleven (which we loved, and watched on DVD, several times).

There's this excellent Mexican interlude where Casey Affleck as "young dumb white guy" is doing something mildly dangerous. His coworker says "Es peligroso". He replies with "Peligroso es mi nombre medio" (which had D™ in stitches in the first place), and translates as Dangerous is my medium name.

Apparently it should have been:
Peligro es mi segundo nombre

But seriously, Ocean's 13 is another sequel to a sequel where the sequel to the sequel is waaaay better than the sequel. It was the same with Pirates of the Caribbean - #2 was kind of boring and awful, seemed to be spending more time setting up for #3 than actually making any kind of story, but #3 was pretty fine.

And how about SpideyThree? Spidey was pretty good, SpideyTwo was average, and SpideyThree? Err... it was ok. Not in the same league as the other 3rd-part films we've seen lately.

Oh well. Next on the movie list - another sequel. I wonder if it follows the same rule.

It's been raining a lot lately. So I've been watching Weeds. No, not the garden kind (though that happens too after rain) but the TV kind - a cute little show from the US about a housewife in one of those suburban communities where all the houses are rammed up next to one another and are all built according to the same set of plans. You know the ones. The theme song has been running through my head for *days* now and it's driving not just me but D™ insane. As he puts it, it's bad enough getting a song stuck in your head. It's so much worse when the song stuck is not the actual song but someone else's (i.e. mine) poor reproduction of it.

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the same.

There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

Of course the song was written about American suburban development but as in all things cheap and nasty we Australians have to follow suit. Think fast food - until the American franchises started here we had our own excellent burgers at all the local takeaway shops. Burgers should have salad on them. With beetroot. And fresh minced steak. Not plastic cheese in a sweet bun with a frozen semi-meat patty slapped on.

So I'm (still) really glad that we were able to move somewhere that isn't made of ticky tacky but is all bricky bricky. Even though we haven't got a lot of heating yet and as I write this I can see my breath. Indoors. At 9am. I have lots of warm clothes!

Apparently this is the coldest Sydney winter for 8 years. Combine that with our recent moving house experience (from an air conditioned, carpeted townhouse to a double brick, polished floorboards, no heating, awesomely cute freestanding house) - it's *rooly* hard to get out of bed in the mornings.

AFAIK D™ is still *in* bed. He worked late last night on some photo editing for work and decided that entitles him to a sleep-in.

Sigh.

So, I was just investigating some product purchasing for my company and came across this. I suppose it's a built-in geekometer or something. After all, how many products are out there that remind you on each weekly invoice how geeky you are?



... or is it just me ?

*sigh*