Wireless neighborhood

My wireless network is on the fritz, which is pretty sad given how new it is (less than six months).  It had a rocky start, which was followed by a month or two of blissful constant connection, and has now degenerated into only good reception punctuated by frequent drop outs.

What's changed, you ask?  Got me.

Anyway, as a result, I spend a lot of time looking at my wireless network configuration dialog.  Davis is there (it always is).  Tudor Systems is there, slower, but visible.  Maybe I see 1354 House, maybe not.  My own network is never there when I'm looking at the dialog.  Typically, the signal reappears minutes before my son wakes up.

Two things strike me as strange about this.  The first is why I am getting a better signal from the network across the street than I am from the one in the next room.  The second, is how our neighborhoods have changed;  I learned the next door neighbor's last name from their network.   Now, they're actually quite nice people, and I must admit that I knew them before I saw their network listed on my computer.  I've even joked that I should just pay to use their Internet connection since I can never connect to mine.  But isn't it peculiar how in this day of isolation from the people most physically near us we should have this kind of wireless introduction?

Finishing fiction

I finished reading Life of Pi last night.  I stayed up way past my bedtime to do so, and after I put the book down I concluded that one should never finish a good book just before it's time to go to sleep.

This is especially true with fiction, which often doubles its pace in the final chapters, turning everything you've absorbed in great detail upside down at the last second.  I can remember reading The Princess Bride
for the first time as a 14 year old, crying with anger at the turn of  events in the epilogue (this part was left out of the movie, by the way).  Of course, that's the sign of a good book, one that leaves you mulling over everything you read in great detail to figure out some piece that is revealed to you in the end that requires revisiting everything you read before before you can know what it means.

Tunnel wonder

I made a tunnel out of a box for my son to play with.  He loves it.  I need do nothing more than look at him from the other side for him to drop whatever he is doing to crawl through the box.  In fact, anything that is remotely tunnel-like will get his attention: the previously forgotten play gym, someone's legs, the dining table (or more likely, the dining chairs).

I must admit a certain affinity for tunnels myself.  As a child I always enjoyed driving through the tunnel from Detroit to Windsor; it never bothered me that we were going under a large body of water to do so.  On the bus to summer camp we always held our hands up to the roof going under a particularly long and dark tunnel-like bridge.  And I still enjoy crawling under the dining table with my son.

This affinity is clearly present from a young age, so what is it about tunnels that makes them so inviting?

Is the devil in the details?

My son had his first birthday party last weekend and he received the usual assortment of toys, books, and clothes that you would expect for a 1 year old.  Along with these came the packaging, which every parent knows, is at least as interesting as the contents for the first few days, which is how I came to be examining an old shoe box this morning.

The shoe box in question is red, with a white silhouette of a puma on top and bottom.  It clearly contained a pair of athletic shoes at one stage, but now was being used to teach the concepts of "in the box" and "out of the box".  What caught my attention this morning was the small writing on the end of the box: "Average contents: 2"

What could they possibly have meant by that?  Surely, their intention was that the box would contain exactly two shoes until it got into the end user's hands and after that they would relinquish concern for the contents.   As a purchaser of shoes, I would be extraordinarily annoyed if my new box of shoes contained one shoe or, even worse, three pickles.  Nevertheless, it did pique my curiosity, and having nothing else to do as my son insisted I sit with him while he played with his new Duplo, I read on.

On the end of the box covered by the aforementioned label, are five more icons: a no battery image (do shoes require batteries these days?), a no swimming image, an image showing a running person moving towards a door with the label "escape", a warning that products may differ from the images shown (under a drawing of a wingtip), and and icon saying that shoes can only be sold in Paris!  (Oops, that must have been my sleep deprived eyes.  Upon further inspection, I see that it actually said they can only be sold in pairs, hence the "Average Contents: 2").

It goes on.  Most of the stuff isn't worth mentioning (even the stuff I've already mentioned).  I did like the list of suggestions for recycling, however:

1. Doll house
2. Place to store stuff you should have thrown out by now
3. Place to store photos you can't store on your hard disk

What gets me is this: Puma spent a lot of money employing someone to spend a lot of time to come up with this rubbish, most of which is seen only by the consumer after he has purchased the product and then probably not even then unless he is that tired of watching his child play with his new Duplo. 

Which makes me wonder how much the shoes cost?

Children's Books

My son is about a year old.  Every night, as part of the bed time ritual prescribed by all of the child rearing "experts", we read him two or three books.  At this rate, one can go through a lot of books.

Now the first thing that I have to say about children's books is that they are absurdly expensive: "A dollar a word" as one friend and parent said to us.  Now, it's not really that bad.  They're probably closer to $0.20/word, and some of them may even go less than $0.04/word.  Still, can you imagine paying that rate for your typical novel?  I've mostly gotten over this.  If I find a really good children's book, I will simply ignore the price tag as I take it to the register and pay for it with my credit card so I don't ever have to acknowledge the actual cost.

My real issue with children's books is that on the whole, they are so bad.  They insult the intelligence of the readers (both the children and their parents) by sloppily throwing together pictures and a few uninspiring notes with little semblance of a story.  At the risk of committing a bit of copyright infringement I'll give you an example, the complete text of one of the board books we own:

Baby bunnies enjoy an early morning wash.
Heads down, tails up! Bunnies drink their breakfast milk.
One, two, three... Hide and seek is fun to play.
One young rabbit learns how to hop.
Cuddle up, it's time for bed.  Goodnight!

Now, with the exception of an old college mate of mine who would have liked the cute pictures of bunnies, I can't see how anyone could enjoy reading this book once, let alone the hundreds of times a parent can expect to read each book they own.  That's why when my son decided he liked to use this book as a teething ring I didn't discourage him until the pages started to fuse together and I started to worry about what kinds of glue he might be ingesting.

Fortunately, there are a few stars that shine through the dark, books with nice stories, clever rhymes, intelligent words, and good illustrations.  They include words like "cavort" and "rapscallion".  A few I've discovered so far include "Slinky Malinky", "Harry Maclary and Zachary Quack", "Edward the Emu", "Edwina the Emu", "Olga the Brolga", "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", "Barnyard Dance", and "But Not the Hippopotamus" (who can resist a story about a hippopotamus?  It's just a fun word to say - try it).

Have you read these books?  Do you have other suggestions or remember favorites from your own early childhood?

By the way, if you're ever giving a children's book as a present to a young child, make sure it is a board book, otherwise it will either be torn and crinkled or stored away to save it from that fate.  I'm not sure at what age this no longer applies, but certainly beyond 1 year.

Couldn't put it down

I've just finished reading Or I'll Dress You In Mourning, the biography of Manuel Benítez, El Cordobés, the bullfighter I mentioned in a previous post.  It didn't take me long to read it (it has actually taken me longer to get around to writing the review).  Plainly said: this was one of the most compelling books I have ever read.  I could hardly put it down (only a year of sleepless nights with an infant was enough to get me to turn the light out each night).

This book tells the story of Manuel Benítez, a peasant born on the eve of the Spanish revolution.  He grew up in a region with only three landholders who paid next to nothing to the local field hands, and the promise of a socialist republic was a popular concept.  His father was quick to join the socialist militia when the fighting started and was imprisoned until his death when the war finally ended.  His mother died quickly after a brief illness and he and his siblings were left to be raised by his oldest sister.  Determined to become a bullfighter like most other peasant boys, he demonstrated a dedication to his cause that few people have, until he finally broke into the big time at an age when many bullfighters are considered washed up.

Despite knowing the fate of El Cordobés, which you can quickly gather from the captions on the collection of pictures, I found it difficult to put the book down for want of knowing what would happen next.  The only disappointment is that the book ends in 1964, at the start of his illustrious career that still continues, 40 years later!

Drowning in the suburban mall

I've sunk to new lows.  Yesterday I made a trip to our nearby suburban mall.  In four years of living at this address, I've only visited there twice, both times in the past few months.


It's supposed to be the best of the malls in Melbourne (there are five or six around the suburbs).  A friend of mine, shocked when I told her I'd never been there, said she'd drive across town to go to "Chaddy", as it is known in the local vernacular.  But on my first visit to Chaddy I was struck by just how similar it was to the shops in the city, a place where I have been blessed with a few too many pointless lunch hours.


On this recent visit the parking lot was filled to the outer reaches and the halls were packed with meandering hoards of people not quite sure why they were there.  They were wandering the mall to spend their time more than their money, in pursuit of a purchase to take home as a souvenir.


One of the nice things about living in a moderately large city (no comments from the NYC folks, please) is that the local shopping areas are generally easier to get to than the mall, and many of them contain a great selection of stores, making malls mostly irrelevant for those of us shopping out of need (or at least perceived need).  But in the mall, the marketer rules.  Things are not sold because they will be useful, but because the masses are an easy target in our time of plenty.  We live in a disposable society (I've said it before); things are produced to last only a few uses, at best, and we purchase as if we plan to use things only a few times.  Nothing can be repaired for less than it costs to purchase a replacement.  This behavior is not limited to our purchases, either, but that is a topic for another day.


I'm happy to say that the only thing I purchased during my visit is something I've been meaning to get for months but couldn't find at the local shops.  I suppose that explains my compulsion yesterday to go there.  It is a sad statement for me however, because it was a replacement for something that still works reasonably well.

Cloth vs. disposable?

It's a very common question, but it almost seems rhetorical these days: will you put your baby in cloth or disposable nappies (aka diapers)?  We live in a disposable culture, so it's hardly surprising that the vast majority of people (well, Americans and Australians anyway) choose to use disposable nappies without a second thought.  The question also implies that one must use one or the other, ignoring the possibility that it might make sense to use cloth during the day and disposables at night.

The strange thing is that when you choose to use cloth nappies for your baby, even when you don't do it full time, you seem to be joining a bit of a fraternity (well, more likely a sorority).  Since there are about 45,000 different cloth nappy products to choose from, none of which are carried in your local supermarket for examination, if you aren't careful you can end up spending hours reading about them on-line, where you will also end up reading a list of reasons why cloth nappies are better than disposable.  And the list will inevitably argue that the time spent cleaning cloth nappies is marginal and actually not as much as having to go to the store to purchase disposables all the time.

Sure, if you're disorganized, you may find yourself making an occasional trip to the store to get an emergency supply, but most people would buy the nappies at the supermarket when they do their weekly shop.  How can the 60 seconds it takes me to walk down the nappy aisle while I'm at the supermarket once a month possibly compare to the time spent on three extra loads of washing, drying, and folding I do each week to keep my 1 year old in cloth nappies during his waking hours.

What's happened to El Cordobés?

When I was in high school I had the fortune to meet Manuel Benítez (El Cordobés), one of the most famous bullfighters of the 20th century.  My family had an extravagant and festive dinner with him and his wife where we were entertained by his overwhelming energy and disregard for convention as he played the bull through the waiters napkins to the Paso Doble ringing out from the piano.  At the end of the meal, we parted ways, with contact details scribbled on a scrap of paper that has long since been lost.

I am now reading the biography of El Cordobés (Or I'll Dress You in Mourning, which I'll review after I've finished).  The book was written over thirty years ago and so does not cover most of his life.  After reading the details of his youth growing up in Francoist Spain, I can't help but wonder what has happened to him.

I did a little searching on the web (as you do) and found surprisingly little current news.  For someone so famous (in Spain) I thought there would be the occasional newspaper article in the past few years mentioning him, but not that I could find.  Nor could I find any mention of his death.  In fact, the stub article in wikipedia claims he's still alive.  A little further digging and it turns out he gave up retirement and was in the ring (in Spanish) as recently as 2004 (at the age of 68!).

His predecessor, Manolete, died in the bullring not long after coming back from retirement to redeem his name after the public turned against him for retiring.  It seems that anyone who makes it as a bullfighter (and a lot of people who tried but didn't succeed) are destined to die in the ring.

I'd be interested to know more about his recent life, if anyone finds anything (or who reads Spanish better than I and finds Spanish news about him).

Books that changed the way I see the world, part 2: Under the Banner of Heaven

There are books that provide more detail to something you already knew or broaden your knowledge with something you knew nothing about.  Other books cause you to fundamentally shift your view of the world.  Under the Banner of Heaven is one of the latter.

I bought this book purely because I like the author, even though the topic was outside his usual area.

The book illustrates that religious fanaticism is the exclusive domain of neither Muslims nor foreigners and exists among homebred Americans.  It also demonstrates that the publicized behavior of "religious extremists" does not necessarily represent the values of the greater population following that religion.  "Under the Banner of Heaven" chronicals the events surrounding the gruesome murder of a young mother and her infant by two of her Morman brothers-in-law.  It provides a detailed history of the Morman church and explores how extremist factions have formed and continue to exist.

Krakauer writes with a very unbiased tone and lets the reader come to his own conclusions.  That said, reading this book completely changed my views on organized religion.

Bike lanes and ridership

I went for a walk during the morning commuting hour yesterday, which I don't usually do.  I was surprised by the number of people I saw riding bicycles through the neighborhood streets.  This shouldn't be too surprising as I used to see a large number when I commuted by bike, but what I really noted was the high proportion of females and the number of riders who weren't clad in Lycra.  In fact, I didn't see any Lycra.  I take this to mean that there are more people using bikes to get around than you generally notice, which is a good thing for several reasons.  First, bikes are superior to cars when it comes to pollution, fitness, and possibly mental health as well.  They are quiet, consume less space, are less likely to severely injure or kill a pedestrian or bicyclist if they collide, and they don't use any fuel or produce greenhouse gasses.  If we're not noticing them, that also means that they are less obtrusive than cars.  Sadly, many people have given up riding and discourage others because they do not feel there are safe locations to ride.

Okay, so it should be obvious that I like cycling by now.  You have probably also figured out that I think there should be a network of bike routes that rivals the network available for cars.

It's time for me to give credit where it is due: compared to many cities, Melbourne has a reasonably large network of bike paths and there are a number of bike lanes around.

Now that I've said that I can pick it apart: most of the bike paths around Melbourne are designed for weekend rides with the family, which is great if you only ride on the weekends with the family, but not very good if you want to use your bike for transportation, whether that means riding to work or to run errands.  Furthermore, the bike paths tend to be poorly maintained with very rough paving and vegetation encroaching on the paths.  Routes follow creeks, which make them scenic, but also circuitous.  And there just aren't enough of them.

I hear that there are very good cycling facilities in various parts
of Europe, but I've never been to those places, so I won't talk about
them.  I used to live in Boulder, Colorado, which is fantastic for biking.  The city has really committed to providing good, safe routes for cyclists and the network of paths is so extensive that it was often faster and more direct for me to ride my bike than to drive my car.  Furthermore, because many of the paths are along irrigation ditches and creeks, they are  quite scenic and generally isolated from automobile exhaust.  They are of excellent standard, with underpasses even for quiet neighborhood streets, and have good flat surfaces.  The city plowed the more popular ones when it snowed (granted - after the roads) and swept them occasionally.  The city also had bike lanes on some of the roads, which I used as well.

So I was pleased when my local council announced it would be spending more money to improve bike facilities.  The first evidence I saw of this was the painting of bike lanes along one of my nearby roads.  As is often the case with bike lanes, this one starts at the intersection with a busy road with no bike lane, ends at the intersection with another busy road with no bike lane, and does not intersect any roads with bike lanes (though it intersects many neighborhood streets on which bicycling would be appropriate).  The city must have painted other bike lanes because I've recently read several letters to the editor in our local paper (sorry, it's not on line or I'd provide a link) complaining about the city wasting money on bike paths.

My first reaction was intense irritation at the car drivers who think bicyclists are not entitled to use the roads.  As someone who has commuted by bike for almost 10 years, I've encountered plenty of drivers who act as though I wasn't supposed to be using the road.  And I thought - hey, great blog topic.  So I decided to do a little research on bike lanes, but was surprised by my findings.

It turns out that there is a vocal contingent of bicyclists who think bike lanes are a bad idea.  As I read their arguments I couldn't help but agree with some of them.  Essentially, they are saying that rather than improving safety for cyclists, bike lanes force cyclists out of the smooth flow of traffic and into places where it is dangerous for them to be (for instance, curbside of a car turning towards the curb - right in the US and left in Australia).  They argue that the mere presence of a bike lane reinforces car driver attitudes that roads are for the exclusive use of automobiles and that bikes do not belong there.  They believe the solution is to remove bike lanes and focus on rider education of how to manage traffic situations (what about driver education about who's entitled to use the roads?).

I must admit that when the bike lanes were painted on my local road, I was a bit concerned.  When I was commuting (I'm at home with my child these days) I regularly rode one block on that road and then turned right (across the lane of oncoming traffic - for all you non-Australians).  Because I would be turning right shortly after entering this road, I always turned onto this road into the right side of the lane so I was in position to turn right, and there was plenty of space for cars to pass me on the left.  Now there is a bike lane to the left, which reduces the amount of space the cars have to pass and could cause drivers to feel that I actually belong on the other side of the road from where I am.

In other parts of the city, the bike lanes include the bluestone guttering, which is a dangerous place to ride.  Many of Melbourne's bike lanes are shared use with car parking, and in my opinion, a good number of them are situated so close to the car parking that cyclists are jeopardized by car doors.  The essential problem with bike lanes is that they seem to be constructed as an afterthought and with very little regard to how bicycles work and where cyclists may need to go.

Whereas I agree that many accidents are caused by the cyclists themselves, either through inexperience, lack of attention, or arrogance, I feel the bicycle education solution ignores what I consider to be the superior option: bike paths or shared use paths, like the ones I used in Boulder.

Unfortunately, what is really needed is for drivers of automobiles to acknowledge that the roads are constructed for many modes of transport and to respect the rights of all road users.  It is possible to force respect of other road users by enacting and enforcing strict legislation, but in our car dominated culture, I can't see that happening anytime soon.

Incidentally, good bike routes are not the only facilities the council could provide to reduce the disincentives to ride, but that topic will have to wait for another post.

Wandering the streets for peace and quiet

I took my son to his first session of child care this morning so I could get some work done outside of his naptime.  However, since the session was when he normally napped, I had to wander the streets for an hour pushing him in his stroller to get him to sleep before the childcare session started so he wouldn't be too grumpy to survive the whole 2.5 hours.  The irony was not lost on me.

Fortunately, I have just gotten a report that he has settled in very well and is doing better than many children his age do on their first day.  After 11 months of not being able to leave the room without him complaining, I have just managed to leave him in the next suburb without him getting upset and I'm wondering why I didn't do this ages ago.

Send fresh produce for Christmas

I have vague memories of my grandfather sending us a box of pears for Christmas.  I suppose there was a time when this would have been a really big treat, but I think by the time I was a child there was pretty good fruit in the grocery store at Christmas, so I always thought it was a bit of a let down.

I would have thought this tradition had died a long time ago, but it turns out that you can still send a box of fresh produce as a gift.  And in my humble opinion, this one would be even more disappointing then that box of pears.

Is your dictionary missing something?

Half the time when I look up a word it's not so much because I want to know the meaning as where it came from.  As much as I like to know the etymology of a word, I'm too cheap to buy a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and our many lesser dictionaries are missing this information for most words.  Of course, when I'm at my computer, I often use dictionary.com to look up words and it does not provide etymologies.

Fortunately, I've just discovered etymonline.com, which is for etymologies what dictionary.com is for definitions.

Books that changed how I see the world, part 1: Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice

I'm sure most people go through this when they start their blog, but when I was brainstorming what to write about, I couldn't help but think of my favorite books, not necessarily books that I would read over and over, but ones that really impacted me.  I'm always eager to share a good book with someone who's interested, so here's the first installment in my list of books that changed the way I view the world.  Needless to say, I highly recommend every one of the books that make it onto this list.

Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, by Mark Plotkin

I dragged this book around for five years before I finally had time to read it.  When I did, I couldn't put it down.

I always knew the world's rain forests hold plants that can be used as medicines, and this book provides living details of this, but the book also helped me see the many ways in which the developed world is impacting the native cultures, and the conflict that exists between protecting those cultures versus transitioning them to interacting with the developed world.

There are many sides to this interaction: the missionaries who try to convert "primitives" to Christianity, the aid workers who try to improve living standards and health, the anthropologists who study their culture as an oddity, the tourists who appear to have so much wealth.  Western medicine plays a particularly complex role in this tango between cultures.  All of these things are illustrated as the author recounts his experiences living with several tribes in the Amazon over a number of years.  Reading this book gave me a much greater understanding of the issues surrounding previously isolated cultures and the struggle that exists between retaining their identity versus integrating into the wider world.

The story is a race against time and, even though the author is an ethno-botanist, the story is compelling.

A music library on 4 disks

Our CD player died a few months ago.  It wasn't anything special, but it was a five disk changer, which was nice because it meant I could park a few disks in it for a while without getting completely sick of them.  Anyway, now it's dead and so not much use.

For a little while we just didn't listen to music.  It wasn't hard.  We had just had a baby and there wasn't much time for leisure anyway.  When we started to miss it, we looked into getting it fixed and found that, as is so common these days, it would cost almost as much to repair it as we originally paid for it.  We looked into replacing it, but everyone is selling (one disk) DVD players these days.

The DVD player!  I had forgotten that it could play CDs.  So we decided just to use the DVD player to listen to CDs.

This had its drawbacks, the biggest being that it could only hold one CD.  Most people would have bought an iPod to solve this problem long before it got to this, but we're too cheap.  We persisted for a while.

Somewhere along the line we got a new computer with a DVD burner.  I don't know what we expected to use our DVD burner for, but we got it anyway, then kind of forgot about it.   Eventually we remembered that our DVD player plays MP3s.

It took a week of concentrated disk swapping to rip our modest CD collection into the computer and another few days puzzling over why iTunes had rearranged all the songs in my "musicals" playlist when I burned them to CD as a test.  I never did figure it out, but decided to persist and burned one DVD containing a third of our music library.  Initial tests were promising.  For some reason, the renaming problem that occurred on the CD did not occur on the DVD, and the directory structure was surprisingly useful.  I especially liked that the highest level of directories was for genre.  The only problem is that the first two albums worth of music on each of the disks skips in our DVD player, a minor detail that I will resolve by burning another few disks.

So for the past week I've been listening to music almost non-stop and haven't heard the same song twice.  I'm still not through the first disk, and I'm hearing music that I'd forgotten about and really enjoying it.

The solution's not perfect, but it's working pretty well for now, and when I do get an iPod adding music to it will be as easy as plugging it into my computer.

Update: The DVD player didn't like dealing with so many songs.  Eventually we relented and got an MP3 player (but not an iPod).

Identifying your audience

Okay, post #2.  It's not much to you, but it's taken me some time to get here (way more than the half hour or so since the last post).  You see, for a while I was concerned that someone might actually read what I post.  Why post, you ask.  Good question.  Call it a learning experience (though I hope many of my posts will be worth reading nevertheless).  Now, I've realized that the real concern is that no one might read what I post.  It makes it hard to identify my audience, which is one of the first things you are taught to do in your high school English class.

What is a wombat?

You may know this already: a wombat is a furry, fat, nocturnal marsupial that comes from Australia, which is where I live.

So what does a wombat have to do with cents?  Not much, except that when I moved to Australia from the US the exchange rate was almost 2 Australian dollars to 1 US dollar.  It made for very confusing conversations about the price of housing with friends and family back home, so we decided to call the Australian ones wombats, though technically they probably should have been called roos or kangaroos, since that's what's featured on the $1 coin.

So what does this have to do with this blog?  Again, not much really, except that it will undoubtedly be flavoured by the fact that I am an American living in Australia.