Pre-Flight

Each flight of the drone is preceded by a lecture from Nathan as to how this flight will go. That said, he's very good at flying it considering that he hasn't had it very long.

Dropping Alex Off

...starting three whole days with no kids. Well OK, two, since we are picking Nathan up on Sunday. And well since I'm working Friday, that really means one. So yeah, one whole day with no kids.

Review: The Legend Of Tarzan®

Actually a pretty good story. It is interesting that studios feel safe telling at least some stories about the slave trade, even if this is a safe, "free all the slaves" type of story. The movie manages to weave the Tarzan® origin story with the new story. Some of the animal stuff is a bit on the unbelievable side, but then again it always is going to be.

Racing The Weather

On the ride back from Bayshore, we saw the weather coming in from the west. It looks a lot closer than it actually turned out to be, the rain didn't actually arrive for an hour after we got home.

Presto!

He loves his Presto card. Too bad it was out of funds. Fortunately I had mine with me, so the possibility of a crisis was averted.

Rainbow Beads

This is one of Alex's more intricate sortings of his beads.

Review: (T)error

Documentary about a FBI informant who lets a documentary crew film what he's doing -- without his FBI handlers knowing. Nobody comes off looking good here; the supposed target ends up looking like the victim.

Thinking Games

Sometimes we hide Ceili's cat treats so that she has to figure out how to get them. This is a small Jello box, with a hole the size of half one of the small ends, with a half dozen or so treats inside. She didn't actually defeat this one, so we'll try it again in the future.

Working Hard

I'd like to tell you I spent my week off working hard around the house and on other things, but that'd just be lying.

That's Unusual

Never seen an english-russian multimarket toy packaging before.

Review: Terminus

Very indie-movie which is science fiction without the science fiction. Saggy middle. The point it is trying to get at is rather difficult to see, even if it is interesting at the end. Overall though I wouldn't rate it as worth anyone's time.

Remotes

Ceili is having a bit of trouble figuring out which button on the remote brings up her stories.

Bedtime Call

Mommy called from San Diego at bedtime. Even though she was on speakerphone, Alex insisted on holding the handset up to his head like this. It is going to be a long week without mommy.

Crrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrispy

Back in the late '90s, or whenever these were first offered, I loved them. When I heard that M&M was bringing the Crispy back for 2016, I was really excited -- usually these special candies are one-shots and then they disappear forever (Cadbury Caramilk Fudge -- I'm looking at you.) So I've been hunting these everywhere I go. Tonight I found them in the last place I'd think of -- the Metro has these 178g bags of them.

Having tried them again, they are not as good as I remember, but they are still pretty good.

Would still like Caramilk Fudge again, though.

Milestone

Not only did he earn a letter and a trip to McDonalds, not only did he do this on a weekend -- a relatively rare event in and of itself -- but he initiated all by himself with absolutely no prompting or supervision. This is like only the third time ever he's done that. Daddy is so proud!

Git Along

Nathan at his riding class.

Fedora 24 Exploration

Well that was mildly interesting. I was caught in a gap between some phone calls, so I decided that I could spend some time assembling a network monitor node on an ancient, spare laptop. Since the tools I was going to install on this thing were fairly well known, I decided to use Fedora 24 as the basis for this laptop instead of CentOS 6 which is what most of my experience was with.

So today I managed to:

• install the OS with disk encryption (trivial)
• install nfsen's dependencies (pretty easy)
• install nfsen (less easy, I had to change what type of rrdtool was installed -- nfsen doesn't like v1.5 which is what Fedora 24 comes with, but hacking the installer to change the version check threshold has -- so far -- worked)
• build and install fprobe (because there was no documentation on getting fprobe-ulog to work with firewalld)
• get both nfsen and fprobe to start under systemd on boot

I'm still suspicious of systemd, but so far it hasn't eaten any of my babies. Mostly it just seems to be "new" for the sake of being "new".

Now I'll let it cook and see if it actually captures anything.

Take A Note

....note to self: turn off OneNote's stupid notifications on the iPad.

Incomplete Thought: Bathrooms

What might be interesting, but I've not yet seen someone attempt to examine, is the fact that the "bathroom" controversy is so volatile because it pits two victim groups against themselves.

On the "conservative" side, you have "traditional" females, many of whom have grown up with the notion that they deserve a safe space from "men". On the "progressive" side, you have trans- and other gender cross-identification people -- who also, ironically, want a safe space from "men".

The problem is that the conservative side has grown up with ideas like "harassment is in the eyes of the harassed" -- that is, if you feel uncomfortable, that's not your fault and others should behave differently in order to avoid your feeling uncomfortable. And now their safe space is being used by people who have the biomechanical accessories which would visually identify them as "men".

I'm not trying to judge either party here, nor do I have any solutions. I think both groups have a perfectly understandable and reasonable desire to have safe spaces (note -- I do not think this automatically translates into a societal obligation to make all spaces safe, but that's a different issue).  I just think it is interesting that there is this conflict between the two victim groups.

Happy Dominion Day

It wouldn't be July 1st without a blurry photo of a child enjoying himself on a fun fair ride.