Role Models for Our Kids

I have been thinking about what my kids are seeing in the world around them these days and trying to anticipate who they may become based upon the role models they are exposed to. There are those people we would like our kids to emulate. like Peyton Manning for example. This is a man who has worked hard and been blessed with talent. He is clearly the best player on his football team and how does he respond? He goes out and plays his tail off every game, he works hard between games to be sharp for the upcoming week and his public persona is the nice guy a father would not mind his daughter dating (just so long as she is over 30).

There are those that we clearly do not want as role models for out kids. Take the antithesis of Mr. Manning, Terrell Owens. T.O. as he is referred to on the sports shows has gone from a really good player to an OK player and how has he responded? T.O. has long been known as a terrible teammate, self obsessed and arrogant, and over-spoken in public to a point of being obnoxious. Definitely not what I want my kids to aspire to.

So who are the jewels of my genetics looking up to right now? Spongebob Squarepants! Ok, Now you may say that Spongebob is a funny guy who is constantly being stomped on by those around him, but doesn't he always triumph in the end?

So maybe the more important factor in not who the kids are watching, but how you (or me) as a parent communicates with them about who they are seeing. People have good sides and bad sides even if both are not always shown. And in my opinion, the best role models for kids should be the parents. Unfortunately, some parents suck at it in a monumental way, but for those of us that truly care about these things, we should strive to be the best we can be so our kids look to us and not a yellow squishy marine sponge.

Age of Aquarius, Hero vs Badguy, and I Write Therefore I Am

It has been awhile but since I had a few minutes on this Sunday afternoon, I thought I would sent an update on the last few weeks. It has been quite busy with the Joneses as I am sure it has been with you.

Just this weekend, Ashley decided to participate in Locks of Love and had nearly a foot of hair cut off and donated to an organization which creates hairpieces and wigs for children who have lost their hair due to medical reasons and cannot afford hair replacement. She is maybe even more cute with her shorter hair, but it is taking her some time to get used to it.

For Halloween this year, Ashley dressed as the crime-fighting hero Batgirl and Ryan was the super villain Megatron from Transformers. After fighting a super battle, the teamed up to find and confiscate candy from all at one of the malls in Huntsville. And what a team they made. They brought enough candy home to make any dentist proud.



As for me, as I am sure you have heard, I am participating in this years National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and trying to bring that writer in me out into the open. The link above takes you to my page on the NaNowriMo webpage and as of this posting my word count is just under 10,000 words after 6 days of writing. 10K is 20% of the final goal so I have to get shaking if I want to complete the task. The characters are starting to come together and the plot is shaping up as well. I haven't been able to claim a genre yet, but I do plan on putting an excerpt out there soon to give you a little taste. I do have a working title: "The Other Side of The Coin". Also anyone wanting to participate in the editing process in January (after I tweak it a little myself) drop me a line and I will send you a copy to peruse. I am not expecting an award winning production, but I do want to be able to say that I wrote a novel.

That's it for today, the kids are demanding some attention, so until next time, don't take any wooden nickels.

It may not be new, but its news to you!

It has been almost a month since posting mainly due to an extremely busy work schedule. We are faring pretty well financially here in the south as compared to the high expenses of Chicago. Lets just say we have caught up with the boat and are climbing on board compared to the near drowning state of a year ago.

I did decide though to pad the finances by teaching an overload. Sounds like fun huh? So I am not doing laboratory research or advising students leaving plenty of time for another class. A normal load for me consist of a stacked intro to bio class (all students in one lecture) with 2 labs (1 per week each) and a stacked microbiology with 2 labs (2 times per week each) for a total of 17 contact hours per week. BTW: This was considered an overload in Chicago, but included many other responsibilities. So an overload is an additional course, I chose a night microbiology for an additional 7 contact hours per week bring the total to 24 contact hours per week. The money is good, but it is a bit of stress in trying to keep organized. But all in all, still less stressful than Chicago.

As if I did not have enough to do with this workload and family commitments (it is the holiday season), I have also decided to participate in NaNoWriMo during the month of November. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo.org) is a full force attempt to motivate lazy (excuse me: undermotivated) or aspiring novelist to crank out a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. They emphasize putting words on paper instead of editing as you go to jump start the production of a first draft for editing. For people like me who have evolved to become editors instead of writers, it may be the boost I need to get back to writing.

This is also an opportunity to try out a piece of software I have been wanting to try for awhile now called Scrivener by Literature & Latte, LTD. Scrivener is a writing tool which utilizes the method of research based writing I learned in Jr and Sr High school and used throughout most of my college days. This "notecard" approach reminds me of trips to the library (before the internet of course) with a pack of fresh 3x5 index cards and an assignment in hand. Each little tidbit of interesting or relevant info read from a book or abstract index was written on its own index card and then coded to denote source and topic (now called keywords). When a bunch of cards were completed (no set number just the arbitrary "bunch"), they were laid out on a table (or bed) and organized into an outline. Then the real writing began.

Scrivener is setup to record text (or snippets) on individual "note cards" and then to organize by moving around on a virtual corkboard. This promotes a focus on putting words on paper and capturing the flow of ideas during writing and not on formatting and editing. After you are happy with the text and organization, the output is exported into a word processor for final formatting. Since much of my writing for class is research intensive, this will likely be valuable software for organizing my thoughts and research clippings and writing as I did in the good old days when I considered writing to be fun. I will keep you posted and probably post snippets of the novel over the course of the NaNoWriMo timeline.

Transformation (from 3 to 4 that is ...)

In the Jones household, you can't just celebrate a birthday for one day, so this last week was the culmination of Ryan's 4th birthday celebration. It all started on Saturday night (8/29) with a trip to the local grocery store in search of the perfect birthday cake. Ryan decided on a cupcake with a large yellow happy face on it which was fine by us. Sunday morning began with a rendition of Happy Birthday to the newly woken birthday boy and soon became smiles and request of "Cupcake, Mommy!"

So after a breakfast of cupcake (you knew we would give in didn't you?), it was onto the opening of gifts. Amidst the "Little Einsteins" and other education toys and books, came his favorite gift of the day - Megatron from the "Transformers" Movie. Thanks Aunt Kathy!

The next day, Cathy decided to surprise Ryan at school with a little party with his classmates. A cookie cake and an afternoon of frivolity was well received.

Things were pretty low key until Friday and Grandma came to visit. More presents came with his new favorites, also from "Transformers" including a bumpercar version of BumbleBee and Bulkhead (when he says this it sounds like Butthead).

Saturday Morning had us all getting ready and heading to Chuck E. Cheese for the family and friends party. A good time was had by all with pizza, games and a visit from the Cheese Meister himself.

But the party didn't end there. Of course we had to have the visit to play minigolf.
So in the end, Ryan had a long and enjoyable birthday celebration. But hey, how many times do you turn 4 anyway??

Use Smart Playlist in iTunes to Improve Audiobook Experience

I have a terrible memory and like to listen to audiobooks on my iPod. So as you may guess, I sometimes lose track of where I left off when I stopped listening last. While the iTunes software is good at bookmarking the stop-off point within a file, I tend to forget which file I was listening to. So to solve the problem, I use the smart playlist feature within iTunes.

The book I am currently listening to, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaimen, has 19 MP3 files. I setup a smart playlist filtering by "Album is Anansi Boys" and "Playcount is 0". I sort by chapter number and am ready to go.

Instead of listening to the book from the Audiobook section, I listen from the Smart Playlist. When I finish a file and move to the next one, the read file is removed from the list (not from the iPod though) and I know each time to listen to the topmost file.

I hope this is helpful to you since it has made my audiobook experience much better.

Paradigm Shift Regarding Digital Organization

Many geeks have seen the writing on the wall as the philosophy of organizing digital assets is evolving. I believe this is mainly due to advances in search algorithms as seen by Google, Apple and others. Can tagging and dumping be the new means of efficiently organizing digital assets?

My "old" means of organizing everything from word processing documents and spreadsheets to digital photos and music relied heavily on folders and subfolders (and more subfolders) in an attempt to categorize each item for easy retrieval. I just never knew when I would need that syllabus from a microbiology class from the fall semester of 2003. Unfortunately, when using this method can take awhile to find items, but it is usually possible to find them.

If you scan my computers' hard drives now, you will find a folder for academic work with subfolders for each class and subfolders archiving for each semester, etc. If you look in my personal photo directory, you will find folders for each year (since we went digital as I have not made time for scanning of older prints) and subfolders for each month within. Same with email archives and music and videos. I think it is safe to say that most of us who do not have a desktop with 500+ icons on it have some sort of folder hierarchy working for us.

For the last few months, actually since I switched to Gmail as my primary mail aggregator, I have made a concerted effort to change my own philosophy about organizing my digital materials. When I look back, I was already doing it (unknowingly) by using iTunes and iPhoto. Lets start with iTunes.

If you use iTunes and navigate into the iTunes music directory, you will probably notice a folder hierarchy which uses artist and album folders. While this is not really any different from the above mentioned method, it is within iTunes where the magic happens. Each song is (or can be) loaded with metadata including title, artist and album, but also a series of other keywords used for organization. Genre, year, bpm, groupings, etc. all can be filled in and used to search for specific songs and more importantly to create Smart Playlists. If you want to have a workout playlist, maybe you choose songs with a high bpm, if you are wanting a "live" experience, you can create a playlist with only live tracks. This is what I am talking about as the new way of organizing - tag items with relevant keywords and use better search tools to organize them on the fly.

iPhoto works in a similar way by organizing photos by event and/or keywords in addition to the metadata supplied by your camera (exposure info, time, date, camera type, etc.) Creating smart albums for uploading to Facebook or Flickr become so much easier than looking through each photo in a folder structure.

Now I find myself using the same type of organization with email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and pretty much all digital assets (which aren't already in an archive folder that is). I use Gmail as my primary aggregator of many accounts and the google philosophy is to tag and dump into an "all mail" local and them create search strings or smart folders to retrieve targeted mails. One example is my use of the tag "Action" in which any email that come in which needs to be resolved later (see inbox zero from GTD) gets an "Action" tag. when I have time to address these messages, I simple click on the "action" tag link and all of the messages show up onscreen. When the item is resolves, I simple remove the tag and it is archived. This works because Google has such a good search engine.

Now add this idea to documents and productivity can go way up. Apple's OS X has a really good indexing search engine (Spotlight) which searches text throughout each document as well as any keywords you assign. This is even easier than assigning tags, since I usually just rely upon text strings to find documents. If I am looking for the syllabus for microbiology in fall of 2003, I can just search "syllabus 2003 micro" and I will get a list of files which have all of those words in the title of body of the document. Unfortunately, this does not work as well on Windows systems (I am forced to use Windows XP at work), but I have installed google desktop and it is better than Windows search.

In conclusion, I still hold on to the folder hierarchy system for my old files and many new files on my hard drive, but am turning to using search to find the files instead of folder diving. I do tend to use less subfolders now, and it is still important to be sure and tag items well. If you find yourself intrigued by this paradigm shift and are moving towards this tag and dump method. Just ask yourself if you prefer to do the work on the front end (tagging) and save time in retrieving files or would you rather quickly save files and spend more time looking for them later.

Bills, Schools, Dance, Christian Wicca and Ashley wants me to start dating again.

Charter Cable has now proven to be a "normal" cable company. They had actually been pretty good for us. The price was good, the installation painless and repairs after the storm handled well. Of course this was too good to be true. Cathy noticed an extra charge on our bill last month for "DVR installation and Service" ($15). Well, since we never authorized this service and do not use it (in fact didn't know it was there), Cathy called and they agreed to credit the charge. Well, imagine our surprise (not) when the same charge was found on this month's bill. Their explanation this time, "You have a DVR cable box installed so we thought you were using the service." HUH!!!!

It turns out that the installer had put in a DVR capable cable box (needed for HD content) because he thought they were out of the normal boxes. This was mentioned to the home office and was OK for 5 months. So now we are told that we have to exchange the cable box and then they will credit it back. It seems that many utility companies have these complex (and mostly automated) billing systems which cause their customers grief.

Open house for the new school year was yesterday, so we went to Ryan's school first and "met" his teacher (same as last year) and picked up paperwork. Later in the evening we went to parent orientation at Ashley's school and found out new policies and met Ashley's 2nd grade teacher. It turns out the first fundraiser starts on the first day of school. It seems that the entire year is just one big fundraiser sometimes.

Ashley's teacher is quite ambitious, but seems confident that the students will progress quit quickly this year with reading, writing, math and science. Cathy and I are excited about the curriculum with a major focus on science and critical thinking development. They are having school-wide science themes including field trips and are teaching many subjects with a "how does it work" approach rather than the traditional "do it like I do it" approach. We will keep you updated throughout the year.

We also stopped by Dancers, Inc. in Decatur yesterday to sign Ashley up for ballet and tap classes. It has been a year since she has danced, but we are sure she will catchup quickly. While sitting in the car waiting for the girls to come out, I noticed an interesting building located right next to the dance studio called "Shadows and Light". The artwork was eye-catching on an extremely vanilla building, but it peaked my interest. An internet search yielded the following description:

Shadows and Light Occult Shoppe - shadows and light carries supplies for the entire magickal community specializing in New Orleans Voodoo, Ceremonial Magick, Christian Witchery, and Neo-Paganism. There are many paths to enlightenment.

A further search found the owner "Gypsy Nancy" was also a guitar player in the band "thejudasgoat" and a Christian Wiccan. Not only was I completely surprised to see an occult shop in the heart of the bible belt, but now had been introduced to this religion. Wikipedia list the definition of Christian Wicca as the "syncretism of Christianity and Wicca which uses the organizational and festival framework of Wicca while professing belief in the teachings of Jesus." and is credited to John Michael Greer's 2003 book The New Encyclopedia of the Occult. I have to admit, I am quite intrigued.

And lastly, as we were getting ready to go to the open house, Ashley uttered the quote of the week as far as I'm concerned. She had a small bottle of hand sanitizer from Bath & Body Works and asked me if I wanted some. I said "no thanks" and guess what she said?

"Oh come on Daddy, it smells good. It will attract more girls for you!"

I thought Cathy was going to fall down.