Kiwifruit Trivia

 Food and Wine  17 Responses »
Oct 272006
 

When Eve was vis­it­ing a few weeks ago, she said that someone was tour­ing gro­cery stores in her area teach­ing people how to eat kiwifruit effi­ciently. I expressed some scep­ti­cism that this was neces­sary; she assured me it was. For fun I decided to do a photo shoot of how to cut and eat kiwifruit the way I learned as a child in New Zea­l­and (it also gave me an excuse to play around with host­ing pic­tures on Flickr). So here you have the series, enjoy! I do find that kiwifruit from New Zea­l­and taste bet­ter, the ones from oth­er coun­tries seem to be less intense and juicy. If they’re not ripe when you get them, put them in a paper bag with an apple to ripen. They keep for some time in the fridge but taste bet­ter at room tem­per­at­ure. Once the skin has star­ted to wrinkle, eat without delay as they are on their way to being too soft and squidgy. I have made kiwifruit lem­on­ade for a party which is fun (the green col­our is start­ling to many people) and a good way to use up squidgy kiwifruit.

uncut kiwifruit kiwifruit cut in half start scooping
first portion scooped out first half eaten almost done

Consequences

 Family  Comments Off on Consequences
Oct 242006
 

It’s awfully cute when you watch a kit­ten play­ing with the phone cord
Marlowe with phone cord
but not so cute when you see the con­sequences of the same kit­ten, now a cat, play­ing with the hand­set cord. I’m sure there’s some sort of par­ent­ing les­son in there.

Chewed Handset Cord

CfS: NV2007

 Conference, Technology  No Responses »
Oct 232006
 

Enough acronyms for now — the Call for Speak­ers for North­ern­Voice 2007 is open! North­ern Voice is Van­couver­’s blog­ging con­fer­ence, focus­sing on per­son­al blog­ging. This means talks on how to solve some com­pany’s PR prob­lems are not really in scope, though tips on how to run a per­son­al blog when you’re also an exec­ut­ive at a well-known com­pany would be. We’re doing the two-day ver­sion again, where Moose­Camp is an “uncon­fer­ence” on Fri­day Feb­ru­ary 23rd, 2007, and the con­fer­ence prop­er is on Sat­urday Feb­ru­ary 24th, 2007.

In pre­vi­ous years we’ve held the con­fer­ence down­town in Van­couver, but we could­n’t get the space we wanted this year. So we’re going out to the UBC main cam­pus, way out west in Van­couver, about as far west as you can go without fall­ing off into the Geor­gia Strait (note, it’s still in Van­couver prop­er, south of the Lions Gate bridge). Cyp­ri­en man­aged to get us space in the Forestry Sci­ences Centre (pho­tos) so we can have all the space we need for talks and the self-organ­ized child­care. I think this will be a fun con­fer­ence, par­tic­u­larly as I’m not plan­ning on being any­where else the week before. Last year I was jet­lagged, hav­ing got back from a trip to Rome the night before, and I still had a good time at the conference.

Oth­er mem­bers of the organ­ising com­mit­tee have blogged it already: Bor­is, Bri­an, Dar­ren, and Kris all have their takes on what’s import­ant about this conference.

At the selec­tion meet­ing I’ll be look­ing for pro­posed talks that cov­er one or more of the groups of people we’ll have in the audi­ence. As a side-note, please don’t just say you can talk about any­thing. That really does­n’t help us fig­ure out who should talk on what — if you have an idea and we think a vari­ant of it would work bet­ter, don’t worry, we won’t be shy in ask­ing you to change focus a bit! I expect we’ll have few­er new­comers to blog­ging, although we will have some of those; to make up for it I expect we’ll have a cer­tain num­ber of people who feel they’ve already said everything that they can say and want to some tips on keep­ing up the excite­ment and interest in what they’re blog­ging. We’ll have some people who want tips on how to incor­por­ate pho­tos, video, or audio bet­ter, and some who still aren’t sure what style sheets are all about. In your speak­er sub­mis­sion, tell us who you’re aim­ing at and what know­ledge they need (or don’t); this will help us fig­ure out how to put everything togeth­er. This is a fun and edu­ca­tion­al con­fer­ence and good speak­ers are part of that, so please put a bit of time into those sub­mis­sions to make it easi­er for us to pick out the good speak­ers! The dead­line is Novem­ber 28th, and this is a real dead­line. Please do use the form and don’t just send us email as we want to make sure we don’t over­look any sug­ges­ted talks, or lose them in some­body’s over-eager spam fil­ter. Oh, and by the way, let us know of talks you’d like to see, even if you don’t want to give them.

Social Networking Musings

 General  1 Response »
Oct 182006
 

It seems social net­work sites are con­sidered the heart of the inter­net these days, at least if you’re under 25 (which I’m not); real-life net­works still exist of course, espe­cially if you have chil­dren (see Tim’s post on Real Social Net­works). I’m old-fash­ioned in that I still use email to keep in touch with people and not exclus­ively instant mes­saging (for one thing, lots of the people I email are in timezones 7 or more hours away) and I have enough to do without writ­ing in strangers’ scrap­books (one big reas­on I deleted my Orkut account was because I nev­er went there except to delete what people had writ­ten in my scrap­book and even­tu­ally I could­n’t be bothered any more). For me the big value of a social net­work­ing site is being able to keep in touch with people I used to work with (in a com­pany, on some stand­ards com­mit­tee, or through the XML con­fer­ence). Giv­en that people in the tech industry move jobs and email addresses with alac­rity, I’ve decided to use Linked­In as a large self-updat­ing address book. This is maybe not the major reas­on that the site exists, but it’s use­ful for that. So as I have time I’m search­ing for names of people I know and send­ing out invites to “con­nect” while I still have their email addresses (I’ve already lost touch with lots of people from DOM WG days, for example); for­tu­nately this pro­cess can be inter­rup­ted when the baby wakes up and demands attention.

International Car Seats

 Family, General, Standards  3 Responses »
Oct 162006
 

We’re plan­ning on trav­el­ling to Aus­tralia for a vaca­tion, and since the baby will shortly need a new car seat any­way, I was hop­ing to get one that matches Cana­dian and Aus­trali­an stand­ards. Britax makes car seats in each coun­try but when I called them they said the Cana­dian car seats did not meet Aus­trali­an require­ments (hard to believe they can be all that dif­fer­ent, I assume she meant that the car seat isn’t cer­ti­fied in both countries).

Does any­one know of a car seat that can be used for a big infant under the age of 1 (in Canada, that means rear-facing) in both coun­tries? Or have sug­ges­tions? When we’re in Aus­tralia we’ll mostly be with friends rather than driv­ing rent­als, hence the desire to take our own car seat.

This is one place where true inter­na­tion­al stand­ards would be help­ful… I won­der why every coun­try needs its own?

Books on Raising Children

 Books, Family  6 Responses »
Oct 142006
 

There seem to be as many philo­sophies about how to bring up chil­dren suc­cess­fully as there are par­ents, which fact you tend not to dis­cov­er until you are a par­ent your­self. And then you have to hope that your philo­sophy is reas­on­ably con­gru­ent with that of the oth­er par­ent and/or care­givers in your child’s life. We’ve been lucky in this regard; there are always issues that need to be dis­cussed but Tim and I gen­er­ally have sim­il­ar views on child-rear­ing issues. Most of this we had to fig­ure out as we went along (for­tu­nately there are few things you do that are really crit­ic­al and can­’t be fixed later). I found a couple of books to be really use­ful in fig­ur­ing things out, so here’s a quick run-down on which and why.

There are a large num­ber of books on the sub­ject of rais­ing chil­dren, each with their own philo­sophy and assump­tions, so it’s inter­est­ing try­ing to fig­ure out the dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives they were writ­ten from. And the books all have to be writ­ten to allow for the old adage of “they’re all dif­fer­ent” (when you have two, you find out just how true that is). I’ve found with this second baby I’ve ten­ded not to read the books as avidly as I did with the first, prov­ing I guess the oth­er adage about first-time par­ents being tense and want­ing to do everything per­fectly, while more exper­i­enced par­ents relax more and settle for hav­ing things be done well enough. When you have two chil­dren, well enough really is good enough and that leaves you a little time to try to keep your own san­ity as well.

I found three books worth read­ing and hav­ing. First, Penelope Leach’s Your Baby and Child, which is divided into sec­tions accord­ing to the age of the child up until the age of five. The book’s philo­sophy is to be “be kind to and gentle with your baby”; there is lots of mater­i­al on the child’s point of view and how to inter­pret reac­tions and actions. As an added bonus, the pho­tos are great and our son loved look­ing at them when he was a toddler. 

Dr. Spock­’s Baby and Child Care is the clas­sic I turn to when I’m not sure about wheth­er the baby needs to go to the doc­tor for some­thing that looks minor but might not be, or for an issue affect­ing our sev­en-year-old who’s “out­grown” the oth­er book. The tone seems to me to be more mat­ter-of-fact although there’s also a lot of psy­cho­logy in the book; the dif­fer­ence is tone is prob­ably because of the issues deal­ing with older chil­dren and the emphas­is on bal­ance with­in the family.

And for boys from tod­dler age up, I recom­mend Steve Bid­dulph’s Rais­ing Boys. This is a quick read that has ideas on how to cope with the bio­lo­gic­al dif­fer­ences between boys and girls that affect how many boys behave once they’re past the tod­dler stage. I’ve recom­men­ded this to sev­er­al people and lots have told me they’ve found it use­ful with their sons. I’m going to get anoth­er one of his books out of the lib­rary to read to see wheth­er it has use­ful stuff to say about rais­ing a daughter.

There are lots of oth­er books I’ve read but would­n’t neces­sar­ily recom­mend for any­thing oth­er than get­ting out of the lib­rary, since I read them once and not again. Libby Purves’ How Not to Be a Per­fect Moth­er fits into this cat­egory; fun to read once but not a must-have for the par­ent­ing lib­rary. Edward Chris­toph­ersen’s Little People: Guidelines for Com­mon Sense Child Rear­ing was mostly good, though I dis­agreed with some parts of the book. I read it once, figured out the import­ant bits of the “catch them being good” mes­sage (which is use­ful) and haven’t read it again since. YMMV on any or all of these books of course (what was that about they’re all dif­fer­ent? So are the parents…)

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