Eric posted about his daughter’s Child Development class this semester, and how the old egg “baby” the student cared for back in our days, has been replaced by a highly realistic electronic doll. The doll keeps track of feeding, diaper changing, rocking, head support, etc., and the statistics are downloaded from the doll by the teacher for grading.
As I was reading, I found myself wondering if a little “wired” onesie with data recording/download capabilities would be possible for paranoid parent baby-sitting sessions. Heck, you could easily tie it into a home wireless network with monitoring software running on a workstation, which would send an SMS message to said paranoid parent’s Crackberry, if the baby was not burped to their satisfaction. Percentages of the hourly rate could be deducted based on the baby-sitter’s grade… Or the county Child Protective Services department could require such an outfit full time in questionable parental situations…
We have a few more years than Eric, until we get to the “worrying about being a grandparent” stage - I feel for you, my friend, but I sometimes fear where technology will be taken to Big Brother extremes… Someone may stumble upon my meandering thoughts, patent the idea, and we end up seeing technology used in invasive monitoring of human imperfections.
I say run with scissors - regardless if you have a GPS tracking device is your jammies. 
Tim found a movie he took when Roxane spent the night at their house, years ago. This was right when Roxane was learning to walk, so she was right about 1 year old - must have been January 2003, because Roxy took her first steps Christmas 2002.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Thanks to: darrell, heather, anton, and mark for an interesting quiz to cruise. Seems I have a bit of creative mad scientist in me
1. Explosives Specialist
2. Camera Operator
3. Industrial-Organizational Psychologist
4. Multimedia Developer
5. Electrical Engineering Tech
6. Electronics Engineering Tech
7. Geologist
8. Avionics Tech
9. Nuclear Medicine Technologist
10. Optical / Ophthalmic Lab Technician
Give it a whirl:
1.) Go to Career Cruising
2.) login nycareers; password landmark
3.) Take the career match maker quiz and list the top 10 responses
Thursday, August 16, 2007
I have grown tired of maintaining my gallery software locally (and lazy with uploading images..), so got myself a Pro Account and migrated all the existing images to the wonderful flickr. I will update the gallery link and tinker with blog integration - there are a few flickr widgets that might be just perfect 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pbandjelly/
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
A post to the debian-user mailing list included a nice little aptitude command to show installed packages not from the main debian apt repositories.
mshuler@ares:~$ aptitude search '~i!~Odebian'
i dynagen - Cisco 7200 Router Emulator Command Line Interface
i dynamips - Cisco 7200/3600/3725/3745/2691 Router Emulator
i w32codecs - win32 binary codecs
My mail server is going mad.. It looks like some spammer decided to use my domain and I am currently rejecting thousands of emails to the user ‘fidpbandjellyqid’ at my domain.. Sorry, but it wasn’t me..
update: (Thu Jun 21 18:18:27) - the mail traffic is slowly but surely tapering off, but total rejected messages in the last few days is currently at 118,796 and counting..
Another little tidbit.. I use this frequently to translate epoch timestamps from a Postgres database log table:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# translate epoch time to human readable local time
use strict;
use warnings;
my $epoch = $ARGV[0];
if ( $epoch ) {
print “Epoch time: “.$epoch.”\n”;
print “Local time: “.localtime($epoch).”\n”;
} else {
print “This script takes an argument of an epoch timestamp and translates it to local time:\n\n”;
print ” perl epoch2local.pl 1131662204\n\n”;
}