Olivia discovered The Cure this weekend.

Realizing we were lacking in Cure music, we picked up a “best of” album. When we got home I popped it in CD player and she danced and danced and danced. Loved every song.

If you’ve got a two year old and don’t know what to do, there is always dancing.

Carnival

She also got to experience her first carnival. Yes, one of those slightly scary things set up in a parking lot. We went down the super slide, rode the merry-go-round and the balloon ride.

The balloon ride was one of those tilt-a-whirl kind of rides. The gondolas rise up about 15 feet and then tilt so that as you rotate you also rise up and down. She was a bit startled when it tilted, but then relaxed and had a great time. So much so that we stayed right in the bucket and went for a second ride. That was all dad could take though — it just wasn’t build for my 6 foot frame.

• Maxtor DiamondMax 3400 11.5GB hard drive; works fine, no known errors
• American McGee’s Alice video game (PC)
• 2 sticks of Elixir DDR-400 256 MB ram
• Thrustmaster Super Sport Racing Wheel, hardly ever used

I’m tired of storing them. Take them off my hands and save me the trouble of selling them on Ebay.

Behold “The Doctor is IN”.

Hendrick’s is unusual in that, in addition to the typical botanicals in gin, they have also added cucumber and rose petal. The result is, well, more cucumbery than junipery. What I like best about Plymouth is its flavor. You can really taste the botanicals, especially the juniper, but they do not overpower the base spirit. In fact, the base alcohol and the botanicals work together to keep each other in check.

Hendrick’s is very much the same. It starts off watery, then a subtle blend of cucumber and other botanicals perks up your taste buds. Unlike Plymouth, there is also a little spike of alcohol and it has an oily finish. The finish is my least favorite aspect of the gin. It’s not as bad as Edgefield, which has a very oily finish, but it is noticeable.

Overall, I prefer the flavors Plymouth Gin and the oily finish of Hendrick’s keeps it from taking top honors in my bar. I’d certainly recommend trying it if you are a gin aficionado.

So, a couple of quotes from chapter one “Comprehensive Propensities”:

All universities have been preogressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever-expanding inventory of experiences.

He continues,

Of course, we are beginning to learn a little in the behavioral sciences regarding how little we know about children and the educational processes. We had assumes the child to be an empty brain receptacle into which we could inject our methodically-gained wisdom until that child, too, became educated. In the light of modern behavioral science experiments that was not a good working assumption.

Inasmuch as the new life always manifests comprehensive propensities I would like to know why it is that we have disregarded all children’s significantly spontaneous and comprehensive curiosity and in our formal education have deliberately instituted processes leading only to narrow specialization. …

I’m not sure what it is about those passage that struck me. Probably because I’m watching my child grow, discover and learn, and because I’m married to a high school teacher. It seems Mr. Fuller understood the problem with “traditional” education — read, memorize, regurgitate — yet our education system, some 30 years later, is still stuck in that paradigm. The school my wife teaches at was originally based on the idea of breaking this model, and yet I’ve watched as that has been slowly crushed and beat back into the traditional model.

At any rate, there it is for you to consider.

R. Buckminster Fuller. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Pocket Books, 1970, pp. 13, 14.

But it’s a damn fine novel.

My networked Tivo has the ability to stream music from the computer, but it doesn’t have any playlist controls. It simply sees all of the music in the folders you point out to it. It does allow you to shuffle the music in those folders, but it’s pretty rudimentary. So, I was in the process of creating a playlist in iTunes and then copying all of that music (10 hours worth) into a separate folder for the party. Then I found AudioFaucet.

AudioFaucet does exactly what I wanted: it looks at you iTunes XML file for the playlists you’ve created, streams the music to your home theater and displays the current track information on the screen, along with the album art and upcoming song. I should note, I don’t have any album art here, AudioFaucet ran off to Amazon.com for each song as it started.

The result was perfect. (And I scored major geek points with my geek friends.) The only minor quibble I have is that for some reason AudioFaucet skipped a few songs. For example, it didn’t play any of the Motown or Sinatra that was in the mix. The skipped songs didn’t interrupt anything, the software just kept going to the next song, I just don’t know why it skipped them. I put it off to being a beta release.

Hosting the party and running the bar, it was nice to not worry about changing CDs or making sure everything was up and running. It just played all night. While it might not have been spot-on-perfect, it was close enough that I didn’t have to care. Kudos DigitalDroplet. I see why you won the TiVo Developer Challange Grand Prize.

I’ve been told a number of times, because of the types of music I listen to, that I’d like old Genesis (the 70s stuff). I just tried listening to Trick of the Tail. Couldn’t finish. Too boring.

There, I said it.