MAKE: Blog: LED art all over Boston today 
one year ago today, after Boston went to DEFCON 4 over a couple of lightbrite’s on bridges, I figured the rest of the country would think that we were a bunch of rubes who couldn’t tell a bomb from a lightbrite.
Then I hoped it would all blow over and nobody would say another word about it.
I guess that didn’t pan out.
2008 State of the Union Address - TIME
You’ve seen tag-clouds before? Like on flickr.com or something. Time took George Bush’s State of the Union address and if a word was used more frequently it is larger and in bold. How cool!
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Chloe sold 135 boxes of girl scout cookies. I’m proud of her - she did well and tried hard. Her troop is selling cookies at the grocery store this weekend and it shouldn’t be too hard to sell a TON of cookies for the troop. She will get credit for selling more cookies which will make her eligible for the next prize level (at 150 boxes). So I think she’ll be happy with it.
Sphere: Related ContentTivo was the undoing of Verizon FiOS at my house. The little woman was very unhappy with all the cable boxes scattered around the house and it was these little cable boxes that made Tivo incapable of recording one thing while we watched another.
So I called Verizon to come get their boxes out of my house and they’re coming by on Friday to do just that. Because I was lazy I hadn’t even cancelled my contract with Comcast so it should still be active. I was thinking that now I could go to Comcast and hold Verizon over their head to make them give me Comcast digital service at the price of standard. But I think that would mean that I would have to get more of those flipping boxes. So phoey on it. I don’t know why I am going through all these hoops for MORE television channels. I need to watch less TV – not get MORE TV!
So this is fine. I’m backing off… letting sleeping dogs lie… it ain’t broke so I ain’t fixin’ it.
But its very hard to do that. I don’t know why I can’t leave well enough alone.
Gabriel was supposed to go to see the Boston Symphony Orchestra today. So I dropped Ben off at school at 7:30am and then me and Gabe sat in the car for a while waiting for 8am to roll around. In the meantime he started to feel ill so I brought him home instead of putting him on a bus. I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do or not until I got an email later in the day from Liz remaking on how lousy Gabe looked. So I guess it was for the best.
Chloe has dance today.
But that comes after play practice.
She had brownies yesterday and Grace had dance (where Chloe is one of the class helpers)
I skipped my cub scout committee meeting last night, but need to take Gabe to this evening’s cub scout den meeting.
Our whole week has been like this. Its been crazy.
But that’s it for now.
Sphere: Related ContentWhile I was home yesterday, I was on a conference call when a different call beeped through. I could see that it was the local elementary school. Thinking some child of mine needed help I interrupted the conference call to accept the elementary school call. It was Chloe’s violin teacher who was calling to let me know that Chloe’s playing suggested she hadn’t been practicing much. She wanted to know if there was something going on at home that she should know about.
SOMETHING GOING ON AT HOME?!
I was very distracted by the conference call so I assured her that everything was fine and Chloe would practice; goodbye. But the more I thought about it the more offended I got. Chloe’s VIOLIN teacher, who has only JUST taught them how to rosin their bows despite ostensibly teaching them violin since SEPTEMBER thought she should check on what was happening at home.
DUHWHAT?!?
This is crazy. Also, I should mention that as it turned out Chloe hasn’t been to class in over two weeks because some foul weather cancelled school. Its not like she spent the whole hour having to focus on Chloe because she’s fallen behind or something. She hasn’t even seen chloe for weeks! So what prompted the called?
And on what basis did she think “something” was going on at home? Abuse perhaps? A death in the family? What was she hoping to find?
Coincidentally, she’s right - chloe hasn’t been practicing but that’s not really the point.
What kills me about this is that she NEVER even asked Chloe what was up. She never took chloe aside and wanted to know why she hadn’t practiced her violin. Not once. She never even casually asked Chloe, in front of people what was up. Why is she calling me up, interrupting MY work to ask me what kind of nefarious activities are going on at home that are keeping chloe from practicing PLUCKING her violin?!
I think I need to call her back and find out if there’s something going on at school that is preventing Chloe from learning how to play the violin.
Food: Cheeseburger in a Can is Both the Best and Worst Thing I’ve Ever Seen
Genius or afront-to-humanity - you be the judge
Yesterday was a tremendous pain in the neck. I stayed home so we could get rid of the Voice-over-IP system we were using and replace it with standard telephone service from Verizon. While they were out I asked them to switch my TV service to FiOS as well.
The telephone portion ran quite smoothly and even the TV portion went ok. But it turns out that Tivo won’t function they way it used to. It only gets the first 50 channels because it does not have Verizon’s proprietary descramber box.
My TV has several input options – one is set to Tivo and one is set to Cable. When I want to watch something on Tivo I use the television’s remote to switch it over to the Tivo input. But now, because I need a descrambler / cable-box the Tivo box has to be inserted in between the television and the cable-box. The cable-box can only put out one channel at a time, so Tivo also needs a way to change the cable-box’s channel. But if it does that I can’t watch something else at the same time Tivo is recording something.
At my house, Tivo rules. The whole family uses Tivo to record shows we like. If this system doesn’t work with Tivo, then it’s a deal breaker.
As far as I can tell, I have only two solutions.
I think Liz would prefer option #2 anyway because, although it doesn’t offer 20-bajillion channels (50 may be sufficient for us) she is familiar with where they all are.
More on that as things shake out.
Sphere: Related Contentok, I think the site is fixed, but it took reinstalling the software and now its just a generic blog. I have to reinstall my favorite widgets, plugins and make the style changes I like. Which is fine, really, because I never cared for that orange-look, anyway. I hope this shows up ok on RSS.
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