I’ve long thought of myself as an independent thinker and a skeptic of conformity and consumerism. In the last few years, however, it’s occurred to me that much of what I thought of as my rebellion against conformity was, in fact, just a different type of conformity.
Go back to high school. For reasons that I do not fully understand, in the U.S. we tend to think of teenagers socially as falling into two groups: the ‘socials’ and everyone else. As a non-social, I thought of myself back then as a rebel against the conformity of that group. In actuality, I now realize, I conformed quite well and willingly to the norms of other groups: band member, speech nerd, etc.

Pet strollers: “On your next adventure allow your pet to safely join in-whether over grass, beach, bumpy city sidewalks, or forest trails”

Everyone who has a Tivo or other digital video recorder has told me how it has revolutionized their television viewing: they watch their favorite shows on their own schedule, never watch something ‘just because it’s the only thing on,’ skip commercials, pause live television, etc.
After waiting impatiently for several years (since TiVo came out), our Cable company finally started offering a digital video recorder. I got one this past week. Sure enough, in just a few short days, we’re enjoying the revolution of broadcast/cable TV on our own terms.

Detail from the arena where Hannah Beth takes riding lessons.

I took this photo at sunset while Hannah was taking her riding lesson the other day. I wanted, but was not able, to get in a position where I could photograph the horses without the fences in the foreground, but now I’m thinking that the foreground fences and flora add some nice depth:

For most of the year (the humid part), our dog Xena’s nose is very dark brown, almost black. But when cool, dry weather rolls in, Xena’s nose turns lighter brown with a dark brown/black border.

Tonight, Samuel’s preschool had their Christmas pageant performance. Since I planned on videotaping the performance for Katie who couldn’t attend, I volunteered to make the ‘official’ videotape. I set up my tripod and video camera at the back of the church sanctuary, right next to the center aisle. I wasn’t worried about being close, as my video camera has a very long zoom lens.
The church sanctuary was standing room only. It seems every family had both a still and a video camera, and some of them disregarded common courtesy in order to photograph their little angel My video was pretty poor, due to the large number of camera-happy parents who got in the way: standing to photograph their kids, holding their camera at arm’s length above their head, walking right down the aisle in front of me and others to photograph, etc.
I’ve always been a reluctant photographer at such events; I prefer to enjoy the moment, rather than spend my time focussing on the technology to capture the moment for posterity. Apparently, I’m in the minority!
To be fair, for many of these parents, it was their child’s first such performance–and for many, their first or only child. I’ve been through all this before. Maybe I was equally aggressive when Hannah Beth was small.

(via Kottke.org)

I use FutureQuest to host my domains. I found them a few years ago after conducting exhaustive research into web hosts that supported PHP and MySQL. They are not the cheapest, but I decided on them because they were highly recommended by people who actually use these technologies.
In the several years that I’ve hosted my sites with FutureQuest, I’ve been impressed by the technical expertise of the FQ staff. Well, they came through for me once again this weekend.
Yesterday, Katie and I were not able to send email via FQ’s SMTP server. After doing some diagnosing, I concluded that our home ISP, Cox Internet, had started blocking outbound port 25 (to keep people on their network from sending spam). I sent a support request to FQ, asking whether it would be possible to run my SMTP server on a different port. Their answer: they already run customers’ SMTP servers both on port 25 and another port, just to deal with this problem. So, I set my email client settings to use this other port, and I’m back in business!

This afternoon I ran to Home Depot for a few items. When the man in front of me got to the register, he handed his debit card to the cashier. She looked at it and then asked him for an ID. He said it was his fiancee’s card. The cashier called the manager, the manager said he couldn’t use it, he pulled out his own card and paid. I was pleased to see that Home Depot was taking such security measures.
When I saw the cashier call the manager, I jumped to the next register. My cashier didn’t ask to see my debit card. I happened to walk out at the same time as the guy who was ‘carded’–who happened to be black. I told him, “They didn’t ask to see my credit card. You think it was racial profiling?”
He shrugged and answered, “Probably.” We parted ways. I got the distinct impression that it was a scenario he’s used to. Pretty sad state of affairs.