electronics

Parenting: Keeping up

Reed’s taken up watching the NASA channel. No, seriously. His homework the other week was to write the word ‘blue’ and draw something blue. He drew the planet Neptune.

Today he wanted to talk about how the house was wired in parallel circuits, and looked at the effect of ionization of a balloon on the flow of water in our kitchen sink. That was all before heading out to the bus this morning.

Over dinner, using a new placemat that shows the United States, but only their borders, not names, Reed was able to name every state west of the Mississippi from memory, and about 38 of them overall (honestly, the Northeast is a friggin’ trainwreck of states, right?). I had to flip the thing over to make sure he had Wisconsin and Minnesota correct.

I’m having to work to keep up with a five-year-old.

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‘you bring light in’

5 days since i posted last. oops.

today is sunday. where has the time gone? thursday and friday were somewhat insane — roxy left for portland thursday morning, leaving me with free run of the apartment.

having her away now is identical to what used to happen when i didnt talk to her enough — i stay up late, am unproductive, forget to eat…general funkiness. this time was too bad — i was over the funk by last night and today have been really awesome working on the apt.

light hung, turntables hooked up, wires bought and connected, 2 boxes unpacked, 1 load of laundry and hung a few things on the walls.

its 5 now and im sitting on the balcony in shorts, listening to underworld and enjoying the breeze and sunlight.

sometimes you might ask yourself ‘how nerdy is tripp?’

id like to take a moment to tell you how nerdy i am today.

most of my music resides on my old crappy desktop machine. my laptop just cant hold all my music. so no brainer — computer wired into my stereo.

but thats awkward and im lazy — ill work on the sofa with my laptop. and i dont want to hop up and down to switch songs. so i found a great plugin for winamp (similar to the one i used through the site for letting people control my winamp years ago) that sets up winamp as a webserver. so now i simply open a browser and pick what i want to hear. sweet.

but what if im out on the balcony? i cant hear the stereo out here? so i drag out a little boombox and have hooked up a radio broadcaster to my desktop and can tune into the fm station out on the balcony.

finally…sometimes im not in the apartment. well, why not set up a shoucast server on my machine and stream the music? then wherever i am, i can listen to those files.

yeah, i really am that big of a nerd. but im pretty pleased with all my wiring.

and yes, this is what i do with my life. wooha.

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