attention for the girls

Yesterday Jessica was leaving in the van and I gave her a kiss and a hug.  Then she pulled out a bit and stopped, rolling down the window to say: "Madeline wants a hug, too".  I went over to give Madeline a hug and a kiss and I realized that she wanted attention  because she just saw me being sweet to Jess.

It reminded me how girls model relationships with men on how daddy treats mommy, and why being sweet to my wife is more than just about how I may feel on a particular day.  I'm also setting the bar for future boyfriends and a spouse.  So instead of complaining 20 years from now about how I don't think Madeline's boyfriend is up to snuff, my best defense is to show them the minimal standard in myself now.

Mac mini media center

We recently got a new LED/LCD TV (our prior TV was over 10 years old) -- this is the first flat-screen TV in our house.  Now that we are emerging from behind the home entertainment curve I have embarked on a project to solve our problem of not having a home desktop computer.  Jessica and I both have laptops, but sometimes we look at things online together (budgeting, or online shopping for rugs - one recent example).  Doing this on a laptop is really difficult wherever you sit, because it is hard for both people to get comfortable and see the screen well.

Our house does not have a study, so I have decided instead to get a mac mini and hook it up to the new flatscreen.  This will turn it into a multifunctional media center for: music, web browsing, games for Madeline (and eventually Emily).  After some research it seems that if you use a DVI connection for the mac mini then the picture is of good quality.  I may have to increase the minimal font size for the system so that you can read text from the couch.  

The biggest problem is managing all of the remotes.  I have resisted getting a Logitech eHarmony universal remote, mainly because they look confusing to me and are very expensive.  And I'm sure Jessica would never use one so half the purpose of getting one is shot anyway.  

New Resolutions

I have a bad habit - Jessica calls it "stacking".  I do it both at work and at home.  Basically, I find myself flooded continuously with paper.  Most of it is errant information and junk intermixed with occasional important things.  But I never have time to make a decision about what to do with it (unless it seems really important), so instead I stack it in a big pile (at work on my desk, at home in my closet).  It probably does not help that I have packrattish tendencies and am always afraid that I may throw away something critical that I will desperately need later.

Eventually the stack reaches colossal proportions.  At this point I go nuts and suddenly have a mission to do something with all of the paper.  I just did this and found that about 95% of the paper is junk that can be thrown away.

So here is my new years resolution: become better at deciding what is junk in the short term, and trash it immediately.  In order to curb my information storing obsession, I scan anything that might be important and then trash the paper version (unless it is something like a birth certificate or vehicle title).

About a month ago I got the Fugitsu Scansnap s300m, and that is a great little scanner.  I have it set up at work so that it scans directly to ReadIris for OCRing.  I save all of my .pdfs in a regular directory-based filing system and give them long, descriptive titles; since they are searchable I'm sure to always find what I need later.