Keith Bierman's Weblog

Saturday July 10, 2004

When did you learn to swim? I think I was 5 or so. Our son, Jerry (picts at thebiermans.net/jerry) started at six months (he's now seven months old). Proponents of early swiming make a variety of ambitious claims. For us, the key thing was for Jerry and Mom to have fun.

While it's not always obvious at the time; he seems to really enjoy it. The way I judge that is when we walk into the pool area he broke into smiles (and "skreeches" of joy) and started making kicking motions (at least for his last two lessons, I had work conflicts for the earlier sessions). Naysayers seem mostly to focus on the fact that teaching an infant to swim doesn't mean they are poolsafe (that is, safe to wander around pools unattended), and that they don't learn "very much" (viz. they'll still need formal lessons later). That's certainly true, but they may be safer than if they had no training ;> ... and as long as there aren't particular performance targets to need to hit, why not just enjoy the process?

Various infant swiming sites:

1. Infant Swimming Resource
2. Jerry's School
3. Israeli Program

Thursday July 08, 2004

Bad UI's cost! My neighborhood has a small community elist. Earlier today, someone posted a plea for help. Her daughter who is moving cross country, had "copied" her "My Documents" directory to a zip disk so she could continue working while her computer (as well as all her other stuff, I suppose, was in transit).

Unfortunately, every attempt to open the "My Documents" directory on the zip disk resulted in getting the Mother's files.

Of course, what had happened was that instead of copying the files, the daughter had accidentally created a symbolic link ("shortcut" in Microsoft parlance) instead.

Now, a sophisticated user would have noticed (either because the copy was so very, very fast, or because of annotation in the glyph or something). Or the sophisticated user might have used a command line alternative.

But nice looking UI's make even sophisticated users tend to ignore underlying implementation details ... often this is good. Working at a more abstract level can be handy. But when it misfires, it can misfire badly! Is the default on Windows really to create a shortcut when dragging a directory across drives? (Or did the poor soul actually have to work at creating a shortcut?)

Unfortunately, other than diagnosing their problem I couldn't do anything useful for them. When the bits aren't there, the bits aren't there.

Hopefully her computer will survive the move, and arrive shortly.
(2004-07-08 00:18:21.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday July 01, 2004

It's not really a Microsoft world after all! I was in LA visiting family earlier this week. The hotel featured free "high speed wireless internet". It was free. It was pretty fast (other than the last few feet ;>).

What proved to be somewhat complicated was actually getting a computer up. We had two laptops, a windows and JDS2.

Even though the access was no cost, there was supposed to be some sort of odd login arrangement (not uncommon in hotspots). I'd thought that I'd have to use the windows box to figure out what the right settings were. Well, after 20minutes I gave up with windows and tried JDS. DHCP yes. IP address acquired. But no DNS. No default route.

Wandered into the Hotel Office, asked what their usual instructions were. Reboot. I asked how many people complain (the answer was lots). I asked if they had a system up that I could see. They let me alone with their main office computer (you'd think they'd watch, or they'd type what I asked). Recorded the IP address, DNS entries and default route and went back to my room. Back to windows.

After a few tries gave up. Used the "switch profile" facility in JDS to create a new "Hotel" profile, populated it with default route; told it to acquire IP and DNS settings from DHCP and away we went.

Worked like a charm.

Never got the windows machine up.

I must confess that I've never had that much trouble getting a windows machine up in a hotel (not since the days of dialup, and having to hack a cord to get into the analog line soldered into the wall....)

But aside from the route (which, no doubt, some specialized javascript applet that runs in IE only, was supposed to acquire) JDS just worked out of the box. Nice when technology actually works ;>
(2004-07-01 17:24:39.0) Permalink