Acceptance and punishments
Posted on September 14, 2005
Filed Under Life | Leave a Comment
[Just read this on CNN.com](http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/14/school.fight.ap/index.html):
>HOUSTON, Texas (AP) — A fight between a group of displaced New Orleans students and their new classmates at a Houston high school ended with three teenagers hospitalized and five under arrest Tuesday.
>The morning fight at Jones High School started after a student from Houston threw a soft drink can into a group of New Orleans students, a school district spokesman said.>One student from New Orleans was treated for facial injuries, and two Houston teens were treated for face and rib injuries. In all, 20 to 25 students got involved.
>Terry Abbott, a spokesman for the Houston Independent School District, said that sort of behavior would not be tolerated.>”The quickest way to earn a ticket out of Jones High School and into detention is to hurt one of those students from New Orleans,” Abbott told the Houston Chronicle.
I know that there are two sides to every story. For all we know, a student from New Orleans “started it.” These are high school students…detention?!? Come on! What’s next? A time-out? Going to bed without their supper? What if the Houston students involved in the fight are sent to a shelter to do some community service instead? Good stuff, like cleaning the toilets or doing laundry.
We’re talking about people who were marginalized before the storm hit, this can’t help.Reminds me of a conversation I had with Emily last year. There was a boy in her first grade class that was giving her a bit of a hard time. Nothing major…sticking his tongue out at her, making dirty faces, etc. He had been having a lot of discipline problems in school. One day, he said to Emily, “You don’t like black people, do you?” This is a 7 year old! Emily didn’t know how to answer that question. What she told me she said was, “I like black people.” And she then listed all of her friends that had brown skin, as she calls it. She told him, “I don’t like you because you…” and she told him about all the times that he was mean to her, or made faces at her.
When Emily told me this I complimented her on how she handled it, but then I also reminded her that this boy’s parents recently got divorced and he hasn’t seen his Dad in a while. He lives in a not-so-nice part of town and things are really hard for him compared to how her life is going. I wasn’t making excuses, it was a reason. So I told her to remember that when he says mean things and does mean things, it may be because he’s really scared and upset inside. I told her that she doesn’t have to like him or be his friend if she doesn’t want to be, but she should understand that if he didn’t have all those other things going on he probably wouldn’t be so mean and she shouldn’t go out of her way to be mean back.
I only have to hope that when she’s in high school and goodness forbid there are students in her school under similar circumstances as what is going on in Houston, she remembers what I tried to teach her. Too bad those parents in Houston obviously didn’t have an opportunity for a similar lesson.
Must suck to be that guy…
Posted on September 12, 2005
Filed Under Internet & Technology | 3 Comments
who [accidentally cut the wrong power line](http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/12/la.power.outage/index.html) and brought down Los Angeles today. Next time I have a technical bad day, I’ll think “it could be worse.”
Unfortunately, I found out today the hard way that [Dreamhost](http://www.dreamhost.com) is in California. Around 4:30 pm or so, all of the sites that I host went down. Dreamhost did a pretty good job of keeping their customers updated first through their [offsite status page](http://status.dreamhost.com/) (server in San Jose, CA…come on guys…should be in New York or Boston, not in the same state as the main server) and then on their [company blog.](http://blog.dreamhost.com/) Their support pages are still down. The web panel just came back online. I give Dreamhost some credit for concentrating on customer sites before worrying about bringing up their own site. I’m typing this in ecto now, but who knows how long it will be before I can hit the “Publish” button since Dreamhost’s MySQL servers are still offline. No MySQL, no MovableType. No MovableType, no blog entries. I want to blog about the fact that I can’t blog, but I can’t blog because I can’t blog. (Since you’re reading this, you know it did come back…10:45 pm…about 6 hours after going down…hey, better than the east coast blackout from 2 years ago, right? 
)
While I was offline anyway, I finally upgraded the RAM in my notebook. It’s now maxxed out at 2 GB. [ZipZoomfly](http://www.zipzoomfly.com) was selling [Crucial](http://www.crucial.com) chips for $120 a piece with free 2nd day shipping. That’s $30 off for top-of-the-line memory so it was time. It was either get in the habit of closing down applications or get more RAM. I was spending way too much time hanging out in virtual memory. Say what you want about [Dell](http://www.dell.com) laptops, they’re decently designed for the DIY’er. No digging under the keyboard to get to the RAM. It’s all accessed from underneath. 10 minutes start to finish.
So now I have two perfectly good 512MB chips here. 512MB PC2-4200. DDR2. Be the first to make a donation to [C3](http://www.c-three.org) and agree to cover the shipping costs (shouldn’t be much) and they’re yours.
Firefly phone
Posted on September 11, 2005
Filed Under Kids | 4 Comments
I mentioned [yesterday](http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/2005/09/catching_up_1.php) that Laini had a bit of a scary incident on Friday. She got off the wrong stop in our development and couldn’t find her way home. Her bus was early so I had no idea that she was lost and upset and wandering around the neighborhood until a neighbor brought her home. I don’t want to think about how that story could have ended. It gets me too upset.
We went outside and took note of what makes our block different. Not much. We moved when I was in Kindergarten and I remember how scary it was that first bus ride home. I was able to tell my street apart from the others because of the style & color of the houses on the corner. All the houses in our development look *exactly* alike. You have to look at which houses have certain decorations in the window, or which cars parked out front to tell the difference if you’re not studying street signs carefully. The bus loops around and doesn’t get to our corner in the same way we would drive. Eventually, she’ll learn the turns but we’re not there yet.
Over dinner tonight, Laini says “You know, if I had a Firefly phone and I got lost I could call you.” Eric and I looked at each other. She’s right. I said, “Laini, you may have sold us on it.”
The [Firefly](http://fireflymobile.com/) is a cell phone designed for children. It has two big buttons on the front. One to call Mom, the other to call Dad. No keypad. Parents enter phone numbers (I assume by using the big buttons as up/down keys) in a PIN protected address book and the phone will only make incoming and outgoing calls to those numbers. It comes with 30 minutes, additional minutes are refillable.
I think it’s a fabulous idea, (if a bit pricely at $99 per phone…of course we’ll get one for Emily too) and when we told Laini that we agreed with her suggestion you could just see the worry melt off her face. The incident on Friday spooked her big time (as it did me!). She only takes the bus home on Wednesday and Friday. Target sells the phone, so if I can help it, she’ll have it by Wednesday. We told both girls that the rule is that the phone must stay in their backpacks and they couldn’t use it except for emergencies. No casual “Hi Mom” calls from school.
Yes, I could buy the girls “regular” cell phones for a lot less money. But I don’t want to worry about who they’re calling or who is calling them. They’re only 7 & 9 years old! I’m paying extra for the simplicity. Hmmmm…[where have I heard that before?](http://www.apple.com)
Quark Oopsie
Posted on September 11, 2005
Filed Under Design | 10 Comments
Yeah, I know I promised myself that I’d never mention the “Q-word” on this blog but this is just too good.
[Quark](http://www.quark.com) is trying to change their image. They’re feeling the heat from Adobe and they know they can’t sit on their rump and rest on their market share anymore. Imagine that…making software that people actually *want* to use, not use because they have to. And Quark is supposedly trying to treat customers like customers, and not a bunch of potential thieves.
There’s nothing they can say or do to get my business back, but I’m still on their mailing list. I got an email last week announcing their new logo and teasing for Quark 7. Didn’t give it too much thought until I saw [this post from Antipixel](http://www.antipixel.com/blog/archives/2005/09/11/the_new_quark_logo.html).
Quark’s new logo:
Scottish Arts Council current (and presumably much older than Quark’s) logo:
Coincidence? Maybe. I know how the design process works. You’re influenced by everything you see. Ideas rarely start from a blank page. You think about what you’ve seen and experienced and try to bring that in to the design at hand.
Here’s a true story… I didn’t design the [C3](http://www.c-three.org) logo. With my blessing, the Board contracted with a well-known medical PR firm to do the initial launch work. It had to happen in too short a time period for me to do solo out of my home studio. However, I looked at everything the PR firm did and I was one of the folks who had the final decision about what logo to use. I looked at their 4 designs, we made our comments, tweaks and suggestions and we ended up with this one:
A few days later, the PR firm came to us and said “we have a problem.” It seems that the alzheimer’s organization’s logo was remarkably similar:
I am sure that the similarities were pure coincidence. Our logo evolved to the point it ended and the fact that it ended in a similar place just *happened*. In a “oh dang we have to fix this quickly” moment I was the one who turned the puzzle on its side making it look very different from the alzheimer’s logo (and let’s face it…more like polyps than heads) and we went from there.
So was it reasonable that Quark’s independent design ended up at the *exact* same place as the Scottish Arts logo? I’m not sure. The logo does “feel” more like a Q than anything having to do with Scottish Arts. Also, had our PR firm found a similar logo in a completely different industry we might have moved forward with the original logo anyway. We changed it because the similar logo was from another health-related organization. It was a stressful few hours, days before our printed materials were due to go out the door. I think we ended up with a better logo, so it all worked out in the long run. Design is a process.
So, I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Quark. Did they know? Do they care?
ecto 2.3.9
Posted on September 10, 2005
Filed Under Uncategorized | 4 Comments
Wow, is it just me or does the new version of [ecto](http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/) fly!?! I’m used to clicking the “Publish” button and waiting while it goes through the motions of setting the categories and posting to my blog. I didn’t change anything on my server (I don’t think) and it’s pinging the same sites as it always has. Yet, now posting with ecto is taking a fraction of the time it used to.
I’ve all but given up blogging from anything but a browser on a PC. All of the clients are terrible. Ecto for Windows means well, and the developer is a nice guy. I paid for a license that I don’t use all that often. The versions I’ve tried are just too buggy for regular use and they’re missing some of the finer touches that the Mac version has.
