How's this shot? I went to see the Harlem Globetrotters with my two oldest sons, and with the benefit of a day's worth of reflection, I want to share some thoughts, but first, what I learned about my camera:

It's really hard to get good photographs of professional basketball players unless you are on the court, under the basket, and take a LOT of shots. Most of my shots didn't come out, even when I was using the fastest speed of my EOS-20D, which is wicked fast. I also used RAW files for the first time and was very impressed with the results. I also got to use (after negotiating with the security guards), my favorite lens in the world, the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM, which was recommended to me by Clive VanRensburg, one of the best photographers I've ever met. The f/2.8 along with image stabilization lets you get shots like the one at left, (1/125th of a second, f/2.8, 200mm zoom, hand-held indoors), which I'm pretty happy with.

OK, now the fatherhood reflections....I think I messed up on a few fronts; the first was the fact that I bought tickets on the floor. This was bad for too reasons, the first was that they couldn't really see over the people's heads in front of us (we sat directly behind the Globetrotters), and it was selfish.. I wanted close tickets to take pictures, and I should have simply gone for something a few rows up where they would have had an unobstructed view.

The ticket issues was somewhat minor though; the real "downer" was near the end of the night when my older son (actually, he asked me a few times through the night), wanted "stuff". Not food stuff, but "junk", like stuff that they could sign or a flying thing or some more junk that would clutter the house and get thrown away in six months or a year. I wasn't in the mood to waste money on more "stuff", since the house is so cluttered anyway, but it became a big problem. The conversation went back and forth for a while from "No", to "No, you didn't behave well today", to "No, quit asking" to "No, why can't you say 'Thank you for taking me Daddy'". By the end of the night both of us were pissed at each other. Was I right? No doubt we have too much crap/clutter, and the prices for more crap were outrageous ($25 mini-basketballs), and that it would get thrown away, but did I let the cost of one of those things ruin the night/experience/memory? Should I have simply budgeted $20 for each kid for "crap" for the event? Last night I would have said "No", but tonight I'm thinking that is what I should have done. If I could do it again, I'd get slightly worse seats (I don't think my kids really care about the seats), but let them each have some money to do with as they please.

So this took longer to write than I had planned; probably because I was watching YouTube on the other monitor. Still am...

The only question left is "Do I take them to Monster Trucks next week?" I don't know. I'm still torn. I personally want to go myself actually; but do I want to reward the bratty/ungrateful behavior, or do I give everybody another chance, but this time with a budget that they can use for shirts/trinkets/food/whatever. We did buy slurpees and popcorn and water ($20) last night??? I'll have to think about it this week...

I helped my Mom with her computer tonight. What the heck is wrong with my industry where we can't create something that the *rest* of society can use? My Mom was upset that she couldn't connect to her wireless network at home, and really confused why it kept saying Netgear when she had a D-Link. She was going to return her new MacBook because it couldn't connect to her network. Well, as you might suspect, she wasn't connecting to her network, she was connecting to a neighbor's network. So how do you remote diagnose these problems. Well, you don't. Trying to walk somebody through these kind of issues over the phone is nearly impossible and insanely time-consuming. So, I installed a version of UltraVNC SC (SingleClick) that lets you build a client that your friends/family can download and run as an EXE. As long as you have a static IP (or get the same DHCP assignment from your provider), you can have a viewer running and they can connect to your machine and you get to view their desktop.

Pretty sweet, especially when helping your parents. I then did the quick and obvious things, like connect to her router, change her password on the router, change the name of her wireless network (the idiots at Best Buy thought it would be OK to use her last name as the name of her Wireless network so that any neighbor would have that much more information when hacking in), disable SSID broadcast, and use WEP. A little redundant, but a good practice nonetheless. We then set up her Macintosh using a very helpful USC page here. She's elated, and won't be returning her Mac, nor buying a new wireless router (which was her other suggestion).

I have to wrap this up now as my four-year-old just came in (its midnight), so I need to walk him back to his room...

A slightly belated post (I have a few in mind to add), but this has been on my mind for some time. I decided this year that Halloween is actually a *disgusting* holiday; not for the religious connotations that so many seem to be fixated on, but for the lessons that it teaches our children. Some would emphasize the "fun" of dressing up and getting candy, but have you seen the behavior of the children who do this? I was *aghast* at some of them who came to our house. Very few, if any, said "Thank You" without being prompted and most took HANDFULS of stuff. Very rarely did they take ONE thing and be grateful.

The most disgusting example of this is a parent and two kids who came inside our house (we were doing some rennovation the Mom wanted to see). While we were in the kitchen, the daughter went back to the front door and starting filling her bag with candy? I told her to "save some for the other children" when I saw this but it was *DISGUSTING*. The Mom laughed it off which was more atrocious.

My children, on the other hand, only GAVE to the people who came to our door. They dress up in costumes all the time because they are children and love putting costumes on (we have many at home)...But I'll never let them go around just TAKING and TAKING from neighbors. It is gross.

"We got wood floors"

Aaron went to school on Monday morning and one of his teachers said "Aaron, I heard something really exciting happened in your house this weekend!" His answer.. "we got wood floors."

Of course what the teacher was really talking about was the birth of Eliana Raquel Pinkus, our daughter! Who I will blog about momentarily. But I couldn't let Aaron's comments go unrecorded.

And we *did* get wood floors, but that's far less interesting than our new baby...

Speaking of whom, she's sleeping now, ergo so should I..

 

First game of bowling with my two older boys! And we LOVED IT. The second game was better (I'll post in a minute), and as every parent can tell you, the best thing is when one child wins one game and the other child wins the next game. I suppose a tie would be best, but, that's pretty unlikely (now I feel compelled to calculate the odds statistically; I think I'll do it later). OK, gotta run for now, but be back in a flash...

Buffalo TeraStation - Part 2.

After I was unable to reach anybody last night, I called their support number today. It said there was a hold time of one minute, and sure enough it was 18 minutes later before somebody answered the phone. This time "Jason" is helping me. He did not know the answer to my question, so I'm on hold again while he asks somebody else...

Next time he puts me on hold, I'm going to ask him to conference me.

You'd think at a company where they sell these devices, everybody on the support line would have walked through rebuilding a RAID array and paid attention to the dialog boxes.

OK, so I was instructed that the dialog box I saw was a translation error, and that it should rebuild fine, which is now seemingly what is happening. It is "Rearing" (as evidenced from the System Status - Drive Properties screen), and it should take several hours.

Apparently I've voided my warranty, which is fine, and I'll repost if the RAID rebuild worked successfully.

Is it only me, or do others think software should be easier and companies should emphasize correct translation?

Misery with my Terastation.

I have a Buffalo TeraStation NAS device. Theoretically the device works great (after you change the frame size so you can properly support Gigabit ethernet) and provides me all the redundancy I need...until something fails and you try to get help.

So let me state for the Blogosphere that Buffalo has the WORLD'S WORST TECH SUPPORT. I was on the phone with a technician for 1 hour and 20 minutes trying to diagnose what was wrong and it was so painfully clear that he was CLUELESS. Every time I asked him a question, he put me on hold for 10 minutes while he either a) looked up the answer or b) asked a co-worker. It was RIDICULOUS. At the end of it, he sent me an RMA e-mail because he couldn't figure out what was wrong...

...Which was simply that a drive had failed (which is why you buy the box in the first place). So instead of dealing with an RMA, buying a new drive, copying all my data, then shipping back the old drive, I just went to Fry's to buy a replacement drive for $80 and I'll call Seagate to warranty the defective drive. BTW, the Buffalo web site says they use Western Digital, but all the drives in my unit are Seagate.

So I replaced the drive; a rather long and unnecessary convoluted process involving 22 screws. Why the heck can't the build a drive chassis that removes EASILY? Poor design.

But the real problem is this. Now that I'm back running my drive, I need to FIX the array, but the only option in their tool is to "restructure" the array, and when I hit "OK", it says that it "Data stored on the target disks will be deleted", and the checkboxes for ALL of the disks are selected. Now if they knew how to build a UI worth anything, they'd have not put check boxes (which are selected) next to the other drives, or they'd use a phrase like "REPAIR" RAID array and indicate that only the NEW drive that has been added is going to have its data wiped.. But.. .NOOOOOOOOOOO... some engineer with no regard whatsoever for "normal" users wrote all these dialog boxes. I am an engineer, btw, and still think their UI is disgusting.

I've now been on hold for 19 minutes, after their voice-prompt told me 8 minutes. I tried this once before and after 60 minutes I hung up. Worthless Tech support.

So since I don't at all trust their dialog boxes, I'm not formatting the array until I move things off of it, which is absurd because if I had all that storage, I wouldn't need this array.

27 minutes on hold. Last time when I called during the day I still waited about 45 minutes.

I'm going to hang up now and go to sleep, in the meanwhile, I'm copying the most critical stuff off the array before I "restructure it" to make sure that in case "restructure" does not mean "repair" and instead means "recreate", I haven't lost everything... Can't the dialog box say "I see that you've replaced a drive within an existing RAID array. Should I assume this was a replacement drive for a bad disk and integrate it to make a healthy array?" or something like that. Why scare users with "Data stored on the target disks will be deleted" and flag ALL the drives? What the heck is the point of that.

Buffalo, your tech support and manuals are HORRIBLE. The repair process isn't even documented in their manuals! How pathectic is that?

36 minutes; no answer; after it said 8 minutes. Morons.

Good night.....
-d

My four-year old, Aaron, showed me this morning just how smart he is...Now of course I think all my kids are brilliant, but Aaron may seriously be future Mensa. Anyway, so I was trimming a tree in the backyard, and he asked what I was doing and lamented about not having shade...He asked something about what the tree needed, and I told him trees only need water and sunlight and he corrected me and informed me that they also need AIR. Brilliant, of course. Not just that he learned that, but that he could put it in context and correct me when I was mistaken. Now where this would exactly fall on Bloom's taxonomy is a question; I think its clearly at least "Apply" and maybe "Analyze", which to me is a higher level. Granted other critics would simply say its "Remember" (The lowest level of Bloom's taxonomy), but the confidence that he demonstrated when he explained it to me suggest a higher level, in my humble fatherly opinion...

I had the most amazing lunch a few weeks ago. My five-year-old and I started playing tic-tac-toe... You could almost see the synapses firing as we worked through different scenarios of where to go first, who should go first, etc. I always now let him go first, and he knows to go for a corner, and if I take a side space, he'll win 90% of time time. I still will trick him now and again by taking a middle space or a corner, but each time we work through more scenarios. It was, and continues to be, a wonderful Daddy moment watching your child "figure this stuff out". The great thing is, my four-year-old also caught on, although he's not quite figuring out which squares to go in first, and doesn't block me.. But he'll figure it out soon enough...

The only graphic I should post is a crayon-laden tic-tac-toe sheet, but I don't have one :)

My oldest son Ilan, looking rather intense as he takes a spin on the sport-court on his new bike (thanks grandma). Our biking adventures came to a screeching halt when the temperature hit 100, but our project immediately after it cools a little bit is to get back on the bikes and get him comfortable without his training wheels...