Social Networking Musings

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

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

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…)

Ephemeral Blogs

I’ve noticed a few blogs dis­ap­pear­ing over the past few months, blogs I used to enjoy read­ing and had poin­ted out to people. I find it dis­ap­point­ing when people decide to get rid of the entire blog, though of course I defend their right to do so (and to not pay host­ing and sup­port costs), since I think the web as a whole loses some­thing when parts of it dis­ap­pear. And mostly these were blogs I read for interest, for the lyr­ic­al writ­ing, or for the sub­ject mat­ter. I’ve become used to the idea that the Web is one big archive, and that inform­a­tion will still be there when I come look­ing for it again; all I have to do is remem­ber which search terms to use, or book­mark the site. When that assump­tion is not val­id, it seems odd some­how, although a few years ago it would have been normal.

And it’s even odder when the blog just ends, and then dis­ap­pears, without even a “can­’t be bothered any more” final mes­sage. The enplaned blog is an example of this. It was an excel­lent blog about the air­line industry, full of inter­est­ing inform­a­tion, and one day it just stopped. And not long after­wards the con­tents of the blog were deleted. And if any­body knows why, they’re not telling… some thoughts are at the Flight Inter­na­tion­al blog (which has now iron­ic­ally also dis­ap­peared; it used to be at http://bizbuzzmedia.com/blogs/flight_international/archive/2006/05/11/2224.aspx.

So if any­one read­ing this is think­ing of stop­ping blog­ging, please do your read­ers a favour and write a “so long and thanks for all the fish” mes­sage to close up, and at least con­sider leav­ing the con­tents of your blog up for pos­ter­ity. Someone some­where will thank you for it, even if you nev­er know about it.

Liquid Matters

I see from the TSA web­site that we’re now allowed small quant­it­ies of liquids on board flights in the U.S.A., and I assume oth­er coun­tries will also start allow­ing these items. And knit­ting needles and books are still allowed, so we’ll have some­thing to do on the flights. The thought of a long flight to Aus­tralia or Europe with noth­ing to do was not pleasant…

And you can now buy cans of drink again in the secure board­ing areas. I nev­er under­stood that par­tic­u­lar ban, I must admit. If you think about it, who­ever decided on that ban ascribed an abil­ity to plan and execute that far exceeds any­thing any­one is likely to pull off without being found out some­where along the way. To get some sort of liquid explos­ive into a can of soft drink (pop) in a vend­ing machine in the secure area would be hard enough, but then mak­ing sure the right per­son gets to that par­tic­u­lar can without any­body else acci­dent­ally get­ting in first seems impossible to me, if you pos­tu­late that the per­son who is meant to get the can has to act nor­mal so as not to attract atten­tion. And then mak­ing sure the can does­n’t leak at any stage, par­tic­u­larly when it goes thump into the tray… Over­all I think the risk of someone mak­ing a bomb out of ingredi­ents passed along in that way is infin­ites­im­al. Any­one that organ­ized would choose oth­er, easi­er meth­ods. Bruce Schnei­er calls this secur­ity theat­er; his blog should be required read­ing for whomever sets the rules as well as those hav­ing to carry them out. For the rest of us, par­tic­u­larly those sub­ject to the rules, his art­icles show clear think­ing. For example, this piece dis­cuss­ing the air­plane secur­ity meas­ures and how the Lon­don ter­ror­ists who star­ted the liquids scare were appre­hen­ded. Highly recom­men­ded reading.

Baby Passports

I had to take the kids in to get pass­port pho­tos done today, since we’ll be trav­el­ling with them out­side of Canada. I found a loc­al place with exper­i­ence in tak­ing pho­tos for dif­fer­ent coun­tries (Canada and New Zea­l­and); the require­ments are dif­fer­ent. For example, Canada wants a white back­ground for the pho­tos, while New Zea­l­and wants a light but not white back­ground. Both coun­tries expect pho­tos with eyes open and mouth closed and no vis­ible hands, so the pho­to­graph­er put a cloth over the hand hold­ing the front of the baby. She kept turn­ing to look at me, or smil­ing at the pho­to­graph­er, but even­tu­ally we were done. For­tu­nately there is an inter­sec­tion set of who’s allowed to sign the back of the pho­tos to say this is really the child in the photo (our fam­ily doc­tor); New Zea­l­and will allow any New Zeal­ander or one of a num­ber of pro­fes­sions to be a wit­ness (guar­ant­or of iden­tity), while Canada insists on the pro­fes­sions (doc­tor, account­ant, etc). One could won­der why people who engage in oth­er pro­fes­sions aren’t con­sidered good enough to veri­fy your iden­tity in Canada. Why not your employ­er, for example? And why is geoscient­ist on the list, but not phys­i­cist or com­puter scientist?