to persevere: parenting stories and other geekery

Encryption of data on PCs, including encrypted disks, is vulnerable to a RAM-based attack, according to a new paper by a group of Princeton researchers.

read more | digg story

I grew up in a house without cable TV. (In fact, they still don’t have cable! I’m not sure what they’ll do when all broadcasts go digital, but we still have a few years to go before that happens in Canada.) When I first got married and moved out, one of the first things we did was get cable. My wife grew up in a house with cable. (See how these things happen?)

When we had our own kids we made the decision to cut the cable, figuratively and literally! It was pretty hard at first, and we found that we really missed things like the news, and the food network. But that was five years ago, and we’ve never looked back. We still get some channels via antenna (but only on the second floor), and if the kids want to watch something, we only watch selected DVD’s and videos with the them. They get to watch TV when they’re at the in-laws in the afternoon, but only 30-60 minutes of kids programming. And because the kids go to bed at 8:30PM, we don’t catch any grown-up shows during primetime. We don’t turn on the TV till after they’re asleep.

While I have no regrets about our decision, I have been tempted by the DVD rental by mail services lately. For Valentines Day I rented a movie from Blockbuster, the first rental in a number of years. I was a bit shocked that it cost me $6 and change to rent a new-ish movie for a week. I’ve done the torrent thing in the past, and I don’t want to anymore. Firstly, it’s in a grey area of the law, and secondly, the video quality is mediocre. I’m a really visual person, and I enjoy good films and shows, how they’re shot, the lighting, and so forth. I don’t really enjoy compression artifacts that much. I can’t wait to get a Blu-Ray player and a 1080p TV, but that’s another story.

Since there’s so many TV series on DVD now, joining one of these mail rental services makes total sense. It’s cheaper than cable, you can keep the shows/movies for as long as you want, and you can essentially rent them as fast as you can watch them, depending on the type of plan you get. You can watch shows without commercials, and in high quality. What’s not to like?

Next time: which DVD mail rental company is the best?

If you’ve ever gazed down to the bottom of my sidebar, you’ll notice that I have some buttons down there. Among them are a couple of popularity meters, like technorati and feedburner subscribers. I don’t put them there to show off, because to be frank the numbers are low. I’m not an A- or B-lister, not even a C- or D-lister. The reason I put them there is to remind myself why I write. I’m not writing for those numbers. I’m not writing for pageviews or CPM (although should I ever get dugg I’m ready to take advantage, ha!)

I’m writing to remember. Who we are is defined by our relationships with others. More important than achievements or career success, more important than fame or wealth, the people we affect and who affect us make us who we are. As I get older (I’m 35 this year) I notice that memories are becoming more important to me.

10 Random Things I Want To Remember:
- the way the Comic sneaks into our bed every night without us noticing and stays there till morning
- how the Linguist responds to structure but still has moments of wild exuberance
- how our walls used to be pink but now they’re MUCH nicer
- the way the Linguist used to call a blanket a “blank-o-let”, and how the Comic calls blueberries “blue-blerries”
- how great it was to have snow tires for the first time this winter
- the first time I held the Linguist and looked into her jet black eyes and everything just clicked
- the way the Linguist as a baby would SCREAM every time we changed her
- how the Linguist pre-reading could hear a book and know it verbatim after the second read
- how the Comic ‘reads’ a book mostly verbatim and is willing to fill in the parts she doesn’t know
- how awesome it was that my DW agreed to get a Wii for Christmas, and that she’s as fierce a competitor as I am

Why do you blog? What things do you want to remember?

Hot on the heels of the US announcements, it has now been announced that there will be Smash Bros. Brawl Tournaments in Canada as well. w00t!

read more | digg story

Our youngest has food allergies. A lot of them. Part of the struggle with food allergic children is finding ‘normal’ foods that allow them to feel like regular kids. One of the hardest things to find is a good non-dairy cheese, but we finally found one that comes in slices. Now normally cheese slices aren’t high on my list of food, especially since it’s usually not great cheese. But if you’re trying to make a grilled sandwich, or melting it on veggies, nothing has the same kind of consistency as a cheese single. So we were really thrilled to find Tofutti Soy-Cheese Slices at a health food grocery down the street from the girls’ dance school. As soon as we saw them our eyes widened and we bought a pack right away.

Slices are useful because of the way they melt, but also since they’re individually wrapped, they keep longer. We had been having trouble with another brand of soy cheese that only came in a block form. Invariably, we’d only get through half of it before the whole thing went moldy. What a waste.

So how do they taste? Well, if it’s any indication, the Comic had 5 slices in the last two days. She loves them. We couldn’t be happier!