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trading down

O how the coming of our new son Cohen has brought about much:  The name of my father and his father will now survive another generation (presumably); our house has completed its metamorphosis from post-college pad to full family domicile; we get another break on taxes; things of this nature.  One Cohen-induced change that makes a good writing topic: the great vehicle exchange.  Mmm-hmmm, I’ve been handed-down Sharaun’s Saturn while she’s upgraded to the new Acadia.

I knew this was coming; I mean it’s the reason we bought a vehicle as big as the Acadia to begin with (all good American consumers know the rule of doubling, which dictates that a family of four needs a car which can comfortably seat eight and that if you want three pancakes you should order six, among other things).  I’ve written bits here and bits there about my sadness at being bumped from the Acadia, with all its modern conveniences, and the tiny things about the Saturn that turned me off.  But I’m here to say that I’ve embraced my new primary vehicle, and am, in fact, quite happy with our new arrangements (remember that post where I picked on just what it means to have something “grow on you?,” it was in the context of music & beer… but still).  OK so I did a little work to the car to get it more firmly into my good graces…

  • I had the cracked windshield replaced.
  • I ordered and installed a new stereo.  One with built-in Bluetooth for both wireless stereo music and phone, and USB and AUX-in on the front, and all sorts of other bells and whistles.
  • I fixed the busted running light and left blinker.
  • I replaced the missing interior panel down by the gas pedal; it’d been in the trunk for years.
  • I cleaned the thing of all Sharaun’s detritus and took the car in for a white-glove interior detailing.
  • I dropped her off for an overall 90k service and tuneup, just to be sure.

Oh boy guys… not only did all this get the vehicle in tip-top shape and make it a lot more appealing to me (OK so all I really cared about was getting my music on the speakers over Bluetooth), it also saw Sharaun (not entirely surprisingly) asking “why?”  Why did I soup up the car and get all the broken stuff fixed only when it became my car?  Yeah… good question.  Sure she’s been asking me to replace that burned-out blinker for about three years now (I’m not exaggerating) and sure that interior panel took all of ten seconds to re-attach… I won’t deny those things…

Uh-oh blog, I don’t really see a way out of this one…

At least I’m still the bigger man for diving into my newly downsized wheels with relish?  No?  Still the heel who only fixed his wife’s car when it became his car?  OK then.

Goodnight.

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daddy-daughter hiking

Tuesday and the week plods along.

If you’re caught up to yesterday’s entry you know that I don’t feel like I spent near enough time away from work to “bond” with my newly larger family.  I did, however, use what time I had wisely.  I tried to spend purposeful time with both Keaton and Cohen.  However, since time with Cohen chiefly amounts to napping together on a couch, I’ll share here about some daddy-daughter time that Keaton and I had last week.

We joined a friend and his son (also a good friend of Keaton’s) on a hike to a local waterfall.  We left early and grabbed breakfast along the way and had a gorgeous day for some fun in the water, sight-seeing, hiking and even some basic four-year-old-compatible rock scrambling.  Keaton was a champ, and followed my instructions well, practicing safe climbing during the hairiest parts of the short ~200ft ascent.  She did slip on some decomposed granite a couple times, once falling enough to scrape her calve before I could pull her up (we had a strict “always hold daddy’s hand while climbing” policy for just this reason).  Here are some pictures of the expedition (please excuse the sasquatch escorting her):

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We spent more than a few hours wandering around, wading, and enjoying creation.  And in the end Keaton was immensely proud of herself for making the haul to the top (we were proud of both the kids, as they both did really well on the little outing).  In fact we talked about getting them each a “climbing” or “hiking” badge ala Scouts or something to tout their new experience (maybe I’m not  properly conveying the amount of pride they each felt in their efforts… but it was a big deal for them both).

I’ve been making regular trips back to that waterfall in my head at my desk this week…

Later.

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all this for eight hours of that

Mmmmgrrph… stupid back to everything normal.  Here goes.

It’s Sunday afternoon and there’s a tight spot in my chest and an thinness to my attentions; it’s a mild sense of dread.  Not an excited dread either, like being poised at the apex of a roller coaster or dropping in on a big wave.  No it’s a dread-dread, in the Websters sense, and it’s because I return to work tomorrow.  This time with family has been perfect and I don’t want it to end.  The feeling is compounded with the fact that there are at least two, if not more, difficult issues waiting for me to be dealt with once I’m back.  Being away from work with those things looming made the time even more sweet, but now coming back looms doubly with the weight of them.  O but Lord I don’t want to go back!

But let’s stay away from the drudgery and keep things positive.  All things in the world of our new four-person archetypal American family unit are going well.  Cohen seems to have picked up the “great baby” torch passed along be his big sister Keaton, and is super low-maintenance – only waking us twice at night for feeding (one late feeding before bedtime for mom and dad, one in the dead of the still of the night, and one right around sunrise).  He doesn’t fuss (yet), doesn’t spit-up (yet), eats well and sleeps well.  His beef-jerky belly button fell of without fanfare last week and he’s already recovered much of the birthweight he lost in those first few days.

Just as Keaton before him, he was an instant source of joy for me; the kid shines with some magical sheen I can get lost in – some aura that I can stare into for hours.  They are so precious, new babies.  I wondered, before he was born, how he’d “impact” the strong feelings and ties I have to Keaton – our firstborn.  Wondered if my attentions or passions would be split or multiplexed or somehow diminished.  Seems so silly now, it just adds together in heaps… you fill this huge space you didn’t even know you had.  My heart swelled the moment the slimy ruddy little man broke free and screamed from his toothless little mouth, and it’s roomier for each yawn and gurgle and startle.  The love I have for Keaton is the love I have for my big, four-and-a-half year old girl.  For Cohen my newborn boy.  Apples and oranges yet both innate and instinctive.

So anyway I’m depressed about having to go back and trade all this for eight hours of that.

Goodnight.

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cohen’s song

Back in February of 2006 I told blog readers of my choice for Keaton’s “first song.”  I wrote an entry about it, and shared the track itself near the end.

I’ve always loved the idea of our kids having a “first song;” a song they can tell their friends was the first piece of music they ever heard, a song which hopefully conveys a message to them.  I got the idea from my oldest buddy Kyle, whose dad remembered the song he first heard as a newborn.  Kyle had a cassette tape, the j-card in his dad’s own hand, where that track had a big start next to it to denote the significance – I always thought this was a neat concept.

And with both kids, Keaton first and now Cohen, the songs I chose jumped right out at me without much thought – leading me to believe they’ve always been their songs and I’ve always known they were… they were just waiting for babies to be associated with.

The song that maybe always wanted to be Cohen’s song and now can be is a standout from John Lennon’s 1980 Double Fantasy album, “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy).”  At first, when it popped into my head, I worried it might be too… “fay”… but after listening to it a few times and getting the  sentiment vs. testosterone “OK” when I queued it up for my brother-in-law those fears were put to bed.  It starts as a simple reassurance, a father to his son, after what might have been a nightmare – and develops into an awesome statement of how rad little boys can be.

Anyway, here then I present to you Cohen’s song:

[audio:bbdb.mp3]

Cohen’s first song: John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” from the Double Fantasy album, 1980.

Monday Keaton and I laid on the bed with Cohen and put this song on repeat.  I taught her the words and we both sang it to him over and over again, five times total.  Cohen was awake the whole time and listened to each go-’round of our crooning, a solid twenty minutes.

Guess he liked it.

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what sucks about android

Had this post binned for a while so thought I’d publish.  Back to new baby stuff ASAP.

While I love my new HTC Evo (which is running Android v2.1 as of writing), some features are really lacking.  Coming from the iPhone perhaps I’m spoiled, but the list below is what bugs me most about the OS on the new phone.  Now, there may be some apps that I haven’t found yet which might address and/or fix some of the below, but this entry was meant to be more of a rant anyway.  Here’s my list:

  • Browser bookmarking sucks

Why it sucks #1: Browser bookmarking could be vastly improved; the stock browser  just has one long flat list of bookmarks, offering no way to organize via folders or item-ordering.  People have suggested making folders on one of the desktop screens but this also sucks, and is not a real solution.  iPhone had this down.

Why it sucks #2: No bookmark-sync back to other machines.  This is Google’s OS, right?, I love Chrome’s bookmark-sync feature and have my favorite sites sync’d across my several PCs – why can’t I sync my Android device’s browser too?

  • Contact management sucks

Why it sucks #1: Contact sorting sucks.  May seem like a small thing but I hate that I can’t order my contacts by last name.  Furthermore, I hate that I can’t sort contacts within a sub-group.  I like the idea of having a “Favorites” folder with my starred contacts for easy-dialing, but not being able to arrange contacts in an order of my preference is annoying.  iPhone did this.

Why it sucks #2: Syncing contacts with Google ends up compressing the crap out of your contact images, ruining them and making them look like dookey.  This is a known, Google-acknowledged issue and it makes my phone look stupid when someone see this blocky pixelated image pop up when a contact calls.

  • Using media sucks

Why it sucks #1: Videos don’t resume playback where you last left-off (in the stock player, and most 3rd party media player applications too).  What?!  This is a ridiculous problem to have in my opinion.  How this was not implemented baffles me.  Makes continuity while watching a movie or TV program near impossible.  Just stupid.

Why it sucks #2: No “marketplace” where a user can purchase and download content to the device.  When I had iTunes on my iPhone, I could easily purchase and download a few episodes of Scooby Doo from the airport just before boarding a cross-country flight with my four year old.  Not having this easy-access to for-purchase content is crappy.

Why it sucks #3: Getting media on the device is less than intuitive.  There’s no dead-simple synchronization mechanism (DoubleTwist is OK… but 3rd party and not native) and while dragging-and-dropping content is nice for tech-heads it’s not entirely obvious where anything should go on the SD card or internal storage.

  • The app store sucks

Why it sucks #1: It’s full of spam apps, crap apps, it’s disorganized and it’s confusing.  I mean, there are multiple versions of the same application compiled or optimized for specific phones, CPU instruction sets, etc.  There are font packs for apps listed as apps.  There are tons of apps that do illegal things (download MP3s from shady sources, etc.).  There are apps that slow-down or crash devices, don’t run on certain devices, etc.  I know part of this is owed to the multitude of Android hardware and software versions that are in the wild… but a lot of it is just poor housekeeping and policing.

Why it sucks #2: There’s no way to browse and install apps from a web-based storefront (again, iTunes gets this right).  Luckily, AppBrain has this down – but there still needs to be a native solution.

  • Gaming sucks

Why it sucks #1: Compared to the iPhone, gaming on Android blows. The graphics suck.  Comparing the exact same games from the same developer, the graphics on Android are noticably worse.  You can verify this yourself with games like Doodle Jump or Zenonia.  Why this is the case, I don’t know – but it’s a noticeable deficiency coming from the better-looking platform.

Why it sucks #2: The selection of games sucks.  Now, I do have to give Android points here for allowing emulators in the app store, because if it weren’t for my NES/SNES emulators and ROMs this device would suck completely at gaming (instead of mostly sucking, as it does now).  Again, however, even the presence of emulators speaks to the above bullet about the proliferation of shady and grey-area software on the application marketplace…

  • Random small things suck

You can’t arrange/re-order application icons within a folder.  Yep, folder support is great for organizing and being frugal on screen real estate – but having app icons ordered as they were dropped into a folder is dumb.

There’s no concept of regular or centralized backup and restore.  With an iPhone, if your device died or you bought a new one you could plug it into iTunes and 30min later you’d have a carbon-copy of your previous phone.  With my Evo, if it breaks or I lose it I have to start from zero.  You lose all applications (unless you’re synchronizing with AppBrain), all customizations, and unless you’re syncing contacts with Google or Facebook or Exchange or something else – you’d lose them too.

Landscape mode only works on one “edge.”  At least on the Evo, I only get landscape mode in a “turn it left” horizontal position.  This may seem dumb, but if you’re using the phone while plugged into power and you’re right-handed, it’d be nice to have the option to turn the phone to the right and have the cable on the short-edge you’re not holding.  iPhone does landscape regardless of which “edge” you point down.

The funny thing is, reading this back it almost seems like I’m bagging on Android for not having a native client-side “management” and “content” application ala iTunes.  Odd indeed because I hate iTunes.  But I do have to admit that having iTunes for things like purchasing/renting content and backing-up/restoring/upgrading a device is a real plus for Apple hardware.  So c’mon Google, do iTunes but do it right.

Bye.