Files and Records

Category: Random Wednesday

  • #RandomWednesday – Who am I again?

    Weird thing about having kids.  You stop being you.

    I mean, we all exist as relationships to other peoples. “You work with so-and-so, don’t you?” is quite common up here where everyone knows someone who works, or used to work, at my place. “Oh, you’re so-and-so’s husband, aren’t you?” is one I’m used to and happy with.  It’s part and parcel of married life and one I’m proud of.  But when you have kids this gets raised to a whole new level.

    I know dozens of people from doing the school run, nursery pickups, out-of-school events.  But, to my shame, I can only name a few of them!  However, ask me who Harry’s dad is and I’ve not got a problem.  With 5 kids myself, I’m known by a variety of these names depending on which one of mine their kid went to school with.  This isn’t as much of a problem as perhaps it should be.  I have a dreadful memory for names.  Truly awful.  First place I worked, I was very lucky indeed.  Almost half the guys there were called Steve, the majority of the rest were Daves.  I had a 50-50 chance of getting someone’s name right first time.  The way my brain works, it’s actually easier to combine peoples identities with those of their kids.  My kids know their kids names and some quirk of my brain tags “mum” or “dad” onto that without being prompted too much.  It all falls apart, though, if I have to introduce them to someone else.

    In a way, this is a loss of personal identity.  I’m no longer just me.  But then, was I ever?  Was there ever a time in my life when I couldn’t be defined by my relationship with someone, be it a parent, sibling, friend, colleague?  We’re all shaped by our relationships and interactions with others.  If you’re a friend to someone, and that’s how someone else knows you, their initial impressions of you will be coloured by their relationship with the friend who knows you.  If you see what I mean.  Hmm.  This is turning out to be surprisingly deep for me.

    Anyway, bottom line is, I am not now just me.  I am a husband and a father.  And if that’s how people know me, that’s perfect.

  • #Listography – 5 Inventions I Wish Were Real – #RandomWednesday

    Kate, over at Kate Takes 5, has set what sounded like a fairly simple challenge this week.  List the 5 inventions you wish were real – things that would make your life easier.  Easy, right?  Wrong.  I’ve been reading and watching SF for almost as long as I can remember and there’s some amazingly cool stuff the writers have come up with that would be so useful to have.  Things like Star Trek’s transporters – do away with all that pesky commuting and just beam yourself directly to work.  The Doctor’s TARDIS – book not released yet? No problem, nip forward to a year after the release date and grab it from the bargain bin (you’d have to watch your credit card’s expiry date if you’re going to do that).  Phasers would be fun – car-mounted, to get rid of those pesky morons on the road. I’m going to grab one thing from each of my favourite SF shows or books, go from there.

    Doctor Who – The Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver

    Working in IT, a gizmo that I could scan someone’s computer with and instantly (a) diagnose and (b) fix any and all problems with would be wonderful!  Instead I have to rely on the Great God Google and home I roll enough successes on my Google-Fu check.

    Star Trek – Holograms

    Tricky to pick just one thing from good ole ‘Trek to make life easier.  Going to have to go with the portable holo-emitter.  Create a hologram of myself, send it in to work instead of me.  Create multiple copies of myself! One can do the school run, a couple can go to work (one for each building, perhaps), I can stay at home and write.  I’d need some way to merge the experiences of each one.

    Babylon 5 – The Starfury

    B5 was harder than Trek to choose from, mostly because it was fairly hard science fiction.  There were no transporters to speak of, no fancy scanning gadgets like Trek’s Tricorder, nothing that really broke the laws of physics (and wasn’t wholly appropriate to the story).  But I do want a Starfury.

    Star Wars – Repulsorlift Drives

    I know, geek-alarm.  The repulsorlift drive is, according to the Star Wars Technical Manuals, the magic gizmo that makes things like Luke’s landspeeder, the Empire’s speeder bikes (and almost anything with the word “speeder” in the name, come to think of it) fly/hover/just generally work.  I’d far rather my car did that.  No more expensive bills for tyres every year. No more worrying about if you’d just run over something expensive.  Like a hovercraft but made of pure awesome.

    The Matrix – Instant Learning Widget

    If you ignore the fact that you’d have to live in a world where most people are inside a human power plant, plugged into machines that feed you (and the rest) whilst some alien machine intelligence lives off the power you’re generating, the ability to learn skills and the touch of a button would be really, really useful.  Especially for those “Daaaaaaad? How does this work?” moments.

    Of course, there’s more.  Many, many more things I wish were real from all the SF I’ve read and watched.  But if you have this, then you have to accept that that is also real.  If you have a sonic screwdriver, then maybe there’s a TARDIS out there.  If there’s a TARDIS then the chances are good that there are Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, Silurians and the whole plethora of goodness and evil that comes in the Whoniverse.  Say yes to anything from Trek and here come the Borg, the Klingons, the Romulans…  Yes to a Starfury, hello to the Shadows, the Vorlons and the other Elder Races.  It’s all checks and balances.

    The one gadget I use on a day-to-day basis is a little piece of code called the Demoronizer.  I just wish it did what it said on the tin.

  • #RandomWednesday – Kids and the Internet

    First, I’ll scare you with some statistics:  7.5 million Facebook users are under 13!  That’s despite Facebook having a policy prohibiting anyone under 13 from joining.  So for every hundred friends of yours on Facebook, chances are 1.5 of them lied about their age!  Are your kids on Facebook?  Do you know who their friends are?  Are you certain their friends are who they say they are?  What about that strange man with the Baron Greenback profile picture?  Ah, no, sorry.  That’s me.
    There are a lot of ways to keep your kids safe on the internet.  Here at work we use a combination of the following:
    1. Unplug it.  Cost: Free.  If you don’t need a computer to be connected to the internet, don’t have it connected!  Then you don’t have to worry about viruses, malware, your kids seeing sites they shouldn’t.  If a machine sits there for the purposes of playing games, leave it offline.  It’s the only way to be certain.
    2. Filter what they can see.  Cost : Free (You only need the basic edition).  There’s a cracking service called Open DNS (http://www.opendns.com/).  This allows you to specify what areas of content you want blocked and what you want open.  You don’t have to maintain anything, you just have to alter the settings in your router.  Word of warning here – what’s blocked for one is blocked for all.  If your kids can’t find something online, you won’t be able to either!
    3. Personal Firewall.  Cost: Free.  For the truly technical among you,  Smoothwall is good for this.  Not only can you specify what you want blocked you can log everything going in and out so you can see what the little mites are Googling.
    4. Browser Extensions.  Cost: Free.  If you’re using Firefox, give the kids a list of approved sites they can visit unsupervised with the ProCon extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/procon-latte/).  If you’re not using Firefox, your options are limited to 2, above, or 5, below.
    5. Use dedicated software – NetNanny, K9, that sort of thing .  Cost: Varies.  K9 is free, Net Nanny is £15.99.
    If you give your kids their own computer and let them go free I guarantee that one of those methods will work for at least a few days.  Then someone will point out a way around it.  They’ll ask their friends, they’ll search for something innocuous, they’ll discover the wonder of php proxy sites…  They’ll tunnel under the firewall, disable the extension, guess the password to the router and change the DNS settings…  If you search for “Parental Controls Chrome” one of the top 3 hits is someone asking how to disable them.  They didn’t get an answer, clearly their Google-Fu is weak.
    So which one am I doing?
    None of them.  I’m leaving the internet in all its unfiltered glory accessible from the computers in my house.  There are two of them and they live in the kitchen in plain view for all to see.  Nothing stops people looking up something dodgy better than the thought someone could walk in at any time.
    When kids are young, the internet is a shared experience.  You guide them to the sites that will be best for them – CBeebies, Octonauts, Lego.com.  You use the computer with them, make sure they’re safe.  As they get older, give them some independence on the internet and talk to them about what they’re doing, ask them what sites they’re visiting.  If they’re anything like my daughter the full extent of research on the internet consists of consulting Wikipedia.  By all means, check the browser history to make sure they’re not doing anything untoward (and, by the way, history logs don’t delete themselves.  If you find no history, it’s time to start asking questions – of your partner first).
    All of these technological solutions move the responsibility for our children away from the parent and onto the tech.  It’s like entrusting your child to the sole care of the TV.  It’s not the tech’s place to keep our kids safe, it’s ours.  Pure and simple, end of.  The tech can help.
    When they hit the teens, though, then it’s time to start throwing obstacles in their way.  And that list up there is only the start of what I’m going to do!
    Why?
    Because they’ll learn.  Nothing teaches better than doing.  They’ll learn their way around the guts of the computer’s network settings, know how to access the security pages of a router and what to do with them, know which extensions do what to a browser.  They’ll find out how to configure a patch panel, trace network cables to find out which of the 4 they’ve found actually works.  They’ll be teaching themselves useful skills without you having to lift a finger.  Or they’ll go round to a friend’s house and go online there.
    This blog post originally appeared as a guest post at The Blog Up North (though how he can call himself a Northerner with a strait face, I don’t know).  I repeat it here because life is damn hectic this week and I’ve got nothing else to pull out of the bag!
    Related articles
    Enhanced by Zemanta