kayray.org

Our friend Squigley from Australia is travelling all over the country and stopped in LA, so he took the train down to visit us today for a few hours! He’s just as nice in person as he is on IRC. He and Dan went down to the Guitar Center in SD so he could buy a Geddy Lee bass (much cheaper here than in .au) so I got a LOT of recording done while the house was quiet: four or five sections of the poetry book and one of the Letters of Two Brides. (As I had hoped, the poetry book included “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix“!!!) When they got home, the guys played music while I made a huge ginormous lasagna for dinner. Henry came home and played TimezAttack (he’s almost beaten the 3x troll) and Fizzball, and then we ate. Squigley brought us a little jar of Vegemite :)

The time change threw me off, of course (did I mention how extremely much I hate the time change? I HATE the time change!), so dinner was very early. Henry and I had time to play WoW for an hour while Dan and Squigley went to the shooting range. At about 8pm Henry and I started the Bedtime Routine and I read him the last chapter of The Dark is Rising. Ahhhhhh what a book. It runs circles around Harry Potter in every possible way. At 9 Chloe called and said they were up in Carlsbad and could they stop by! YAY! So we all sat around and talked til 11. So nice to see them!

The air is so dry, and I think there are particles in it from the big wildfire that’s been burning up north. The inside of my nose has felt yucky all day, like it needs to be washed out. Oh I wish it would rain. I put the little humidifier in the bedroom and hung up some damp towels to try to make it more comfortable tonight. Dan and I ran some errands today, and I edited four more recordings, and did a bunch of LibriVox work. And I registered Fizzball!

It took three hours to drive to Tierrasanta and back!  Lordy.

I found a good game to help Henry memorize the times tables: TimezAttack.  Warning: the page loads an annoyingly loud demo, so turn your sound down before you click: http://www.bigbrainz.com/index.php

The game only works in Windows, though they claim to be porting it to MacOS.  It’s free!

I’ve just found a wonderful new game! Fizzball works in MacOS X, Linux, and Windows. It’s jolly and fun, great for kids and adults, not too hard and not too easy. It’s sort of a pinball/breakout combo, but to make things interesting you need to rescue animals by hitting them with your ball. The ball (sort of a bubble, really) starts out very small and you can only rescue the tiny animals, but the ball grows as you progress and you can eventually rescue the big cows, sheep, and horses. The graphics are adorable, and there are lots of whimsical touches — the dogs start out sleeping, but the first time you bump into them with your ball, they wake up and open their eyes, and then the next time they stand up and bark. Monkeys hop up and down and scream, as all good videogame monkeys should.

As you play each level you get powerups, coins (used to progress to different islands and to feed the animals in the sanctuary), trophies, and other bonuses. I can imagine going back through the levels I’ve completed and attempting to collect the bonuses I missed on the first time through.

The good people at GrubbyGames have, as usual, provided a very generous demo version. You’ll be able to play for quite some time, and decide if you want to register. It’s only $20 to buy the game, a more-than-fair price for such a well-thought-out and entertaining game. Since we are a multi-computer, multi-OS family, I emailed the developer to see if they had a family discount or something, since we’re all three going to want to be able to play on our own computers. He emailed right back and said that we’ll only need to buy one copy, and we’ll be able to download as many versions as our family needs. How generous! How pleasant not to be treated like a criminal! If all companies treated their customers as fairly, there would be a lot less piracy.

Thanks, Grubby Games!

So so so tired, but nice day, Henry and I ripped out the dead tomato plants and dug up the soil and worked in water (takes so long) and worked in compost.

We did lots of math at aleks.com and also verbally, worked on his Dragon costume (made tail, made spikes, cut out wings).  Gotta put the clean sheets on the bed and then i will go to sleep i guess.

Busy busy day. And I had a rather bad headache all day, but still I got a lot done! Karate in the morning, and then on the way home we shopped for costume supplies. Henry’s going to be a dragon. He and his dad went to Costume Castle and bought a big purple and green latex dragon head, and we’re going to make wings and a tail and spines and stuff, built on a navy-blue sweat suit. He’s got the pants already, and we found a sweatshirt at Target for $3.66. Bought purple and green felt and some extra stuffing for the tail — total was like $11 or so. We want to get some stick-on claws at the costume store but we were too hungry so we came home.

We had to be at Bayshore early for photo day, so Henry made himself a PB&Banana sandwich and I gathered up his Mythology notebook and my laptop and then we dashed away to Bayshore. Got his photo taken, and then waited around for classes to start. Nice teenage computer helper at the school gave me the wireless password so I could get some work done while I was waiting, yay! Mark finished his recording of Uncle Remus, but I’d stupidly missed the fact that his id3 tagging scheme was not quite The Thing, so I had to re-tag all 40-some files, which took a loooooooong time. So it was lucky I had those two hours + laptop + wireless. Entered all the required info into the system and started the Big Upload to archive.org, then cross-checked Betsie’s 250-file poetry project for her, and by then it was time to head home again.

Little Toddler Colin (young sibling of Sal’s piano student) was waiting for Henry when we drove up. His mom said she offered to read him a story in the car while they were waiting but he demanded that they wait on the steps until Henry got there. I fixed H a plate of lunch and he sat with Toddler Colin and his mom and chatted. My 3pm student cancelled, thank goodness, so I just lay on the bed and rested. Henry came to keep me company after Colin had left, and we talked and did some math together. Fun :) And then Matthew came to pick him up for the evening, and I just lay around and did more tidying up at LibriVox. Made the catalog page for Uncle Remus, added stuff that belonged on the “To Come” page and took stuff off that was finished. I’m bad about remembering those steps :)

Then Dan got home and built his new chair while I rested some more, and then I made dinner. Then bedtime and Survivor. Ahh, so soothing.

We were boingboinged!

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/24/audio_of_un_declarat.html

We did a multi-language recording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for United Nations Day (today). Great project. I read the American English version.

So we’ve got this spiffy new cataloging system, and it includes this spiffy new “reader list” feature that lets Book Coordinators keep track of reader and chapter information.  But it’s a bit complex to use at first, and it has a lot of features that are not readily appparent to a new user.  So I wrote a document explaining how to use the system.  I’ve worked on it all day. I think it’s pretty good now.

Instructions for Reader/Chapter List

If you’re a BC/MC with LibriVox and you think I need to add or change anything, please let me know!

This afternoon we sat together in Dan’s Fortress of Solitude. He played games and I did a TON of LibriVox work. I edited and proofed 10 sections of the poetry book and another chapter of Wives and Daughters, and did some administrative stuff too.

Dan went out for a few hours this evening to help Caesar with RC aircraft stuff, so I made myself a cup of Special Coffee (hazelnut decaf from Trader Joe’s, extra-strong, lots of heavy cream and sugar) and sat in my comfy chair in the quiet and read and read and read. I read the last three quarters of “Lipstick Jungle” by Candace Bushnell. I had a hard time getting into this book, which is why I’d only read about a quarter of it in the last week or so, but once I got partway into it I started to enjoy the story a lot and blew through it tonight.

I started a little hat with some white and blue cotton yarn I had hanging around. I did the crown already and wanted to do a lace pattern for the main part but I had a hard time finding a good one. Ripped back three different tries tonight while we were watching Venture Brothers and South Park, and finally found one I like, “Horseshoe Lace”. I don’t know what striped lace will look like but I guess I’ll find out.

Check out these amazing and creative CD covers that our volunteer Sayeth has been designing for us:

http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/CompactDiscCovers

So far he’s made cases/covers for 13 of our books, which can all be found here: http://www.librivox.org/searchable-catalog (do a browser find if you’re looking for one of the books that Sayeth made a cover for). A nice audiobook on CD with a lovely full-color case would make a great (and nearly free) Christmas present, so help yourself :)
I cataloged Mark’s reading of The Reluctant Dragon and Kristin’s reading of The Amateur Cracksman today. Yay, two more beautifully-read LibriVox books! Henry and I listened to The Reluctant Dragon today. Charming story.

Henry and I read a chapter of his history book, about St. Augustine bringing Christianity to England, and monasteries, and monks. And we found some lovely illustrated manuscripts online to look at. And we worked on subtraction with regrouping (which was called borrowing when I was a kid). He gets the concept, just needs a bit more practice actually DOING it.

Have you seen the ok go treadmill video, or the backyard dance video? I’m a bit obsessed with these. Here are links to youtube:

Treadmill Video

(treadmill live at MTV VMA)

Backyard Dance

And some of my favorite fan-versions of the backyard dance:

suitnop

bennyviz

jbrooker101

solosilo (these guys rock especially hard)

Yeah, ok I’ll stop :) But you can go to youtube and search for “ok go backyard” or “ok go contest” and come up with a million more.

I love Visine.  I just love it.  I’ve used up half of Dan’s bottle already.  My eyes only feel a little bit dry now, and not painful anymore.  But I keep dousing them with Visine anyway ’cause it feels soooooooo good.

I felt fine today!  The sore throat which threatened me yesterday never came to fruition.  So today I recorded five more sections of the poetry book, and ran errands, and took myself to the library.  And worked on the librivox catalog system of course. Here’s a peek at our new searchable catalog – it’s not finished yet and we haven’t entered even half the data yet, but you can get an idea:

http://librivox.org/sandpit/librivox_catalog/visitor.php

Did I ever mention the LibriVox Community Podcast?  One of the best things about LibriVox is the people. We have the nicest, most helpful, most civilized online community in existance.  Really.  It’s amazing how well we all get along! Recently someone (Jim?) decided it would be fun to get together and do a podcast for and about our community.  Some of the folks have been taking turns creating a weekly (more or less) podcast which is so much fun to listen to!  Sometimes there are interviews with random volunteers, usually there are bloopers, there’s a listing of newly-released works, etc.  And they just chat about the goings-on behind the scenes and stuff.   I look forward to it very much.  I recommend you copy and paste this feed into your podcatching software:

http://www.umor.co.uk/podcast.xml

Or just go to archive.org and download the individual episodes:

http://www.archive.org/details/librivox_community

There are some running jokes, you might say, so I suggest you start with the first episode and listen in order.  In the most recent episode, the host, ducttapeguy, featured bits of actual singing from some of our books.  You’ll hear me singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat” from Alice in Wonderland, “The Doxology” from The Secret Garden, and “The Boar’s Head Carol” from our upcoming Christmas carol collection. And lots of other people who can actually SING ;-)

Woke up feeling kinda sick, like I was on the verge, or just over the verge, of a sore throat.  My throat felt stingy with I drank water.  So after I made breakfast I went back to bed for a while to rest, and then I got up and went grocery shopping.  And forgot to buy frozen strawberries, BAH.  Henry felt tired todeay (up too late ast night) but he still the carried groceries in for me. And then we lay on the couch all day.  We put on The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra for entertainment.

When we started to feel moldy we went out in the backyard and I soaked up some nice autumn sun while he watered the plants and played with an old dog toy.  I worked on LibriVox’s massive data entry project all day, too. We’ve got this wonderful new catalog system.  Dan built the foundation while we were in Montreal at Hugh’s house, and Chris and Kri have been adding features, fixing bugs, and making it pretty and user-friendly for the last two months.

We’re just about ready to go live so we need to plug all the existing completed projects (there are 300-ish, I believe) into the system.  And since we have this awesome system for keeping track of readers and chapters we needed to get all the known readers’ forumnames, catalog names, and personal urls into the system as well.  Which is what I did today. Basically I took this info: http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/ListOfReadersCatalogNames and copied and pasted everything into the new system, fixing errors at the same time.
So it was nice to have something so dull and repetetive and non-challenging to work on today.

My eye is a bit better today, not so itchy. Dr. Dan told me to put Visine in every hour, which I didn’t quite manage but I did use it frequently all day. Dr. Chloe recommends Theara Tears, which I’ll get tomorrow if I still have any discomfort.
Tiny Tigers in the morning. I think Henry really enjoys working with the little kids. He’s so sweet and patient with them. He was playing with the toddler sibling of a piano student this afternoon and I told him with just a little more experience he could get work among homeschool families as a Mother’s Helper, and then in a few years as a real babysitter. He got all excited about that prospect!

Mythology and Musical theater this afternoon, and I stayed at the school and edited recordings – 5 sections of the poetry book (I’ve got 20/81 done now, preview here: Poems Every Child Should Know) and another of the Letters from de Balzac’s Letters of Two Brides. (I’m reading Louise’s letters). When we got home we baked fantastic oatmeal raisin cookies and did math at http://aleks.com while they baked. Lots of fun. Except that the java thing is semi-broken on my mac. You need to reload pages several times, sometimes, before keystrokes are recognized, but oh wel, it always works eventually. Henry is a whiz at math, the concepts anyway. Memorizing Facts is less fun, but I think being a whiz at understanding concepts is more important anyway.

Felt horrid all day, like my head was stuffed with cotton, and had a headache that extended down into my neck and shoulders.  Tired too. And the corner of one eye has hurt since Saturday. It’s red and swollen and itchy. Dan has lent me his Visine to try to keep it from itching so badly.

A few weeks ago, Dan’s friend Rod (from the RC aircraft field) invited us to his 50th birthday party. Of course we wanted to attend, but our introverted natures felt quite nervous about it. What if we wore the wrong thing? What if we said the wrong thing? What if we felt so uncomfortable that we had to hide in a corner all night?

Well, the party was last night at a great little restaurant in Fallbrook — the Cafe des Artistes. We got there about 5 minutes early so we wandered around the attached art gallery for little while until things were set up. Rod had hired a magician to entertain everyone during the “cheese and wine” hour before the dinner was served. The magician, John Carney (what a great surname), came up to us and did several close-up card tricks, very amazing and entertaining. There was also a two-man band playing sort of uninteresting generic party-music, but the lead guitar player was astounding. He was this old guy, maybe in his 60s, and his guitar (and violin) skill was unbelievable. Dan and I found a spot to sit down and just watched him in awe while everyone else was mingling, heheh :)

Then after about an hour we all went in the dining room and found our place cards at the small tables. Dan and I sat with a fellow named Caesar and his wife, a VERY nice couple. Caesar is an RC airplane flyer who wants to get into RC helicopters but doesn’t have the time or inclination to build them. Dan loves to build RC helicopters but doesn’t have anywhere close enough to fly. So the two of them had a lot to talk about! Oh, and the magician was at our table too :)

The food was good — started with a creamed cauliflower soup, which was absolutely delicious, and then a green salad with really tender organic lettuce and a yummy dressing. I could have eaten that soup and salad all night. Then I had veggie lasagna, which could have used a lot more seasoning, and Dan had Chicken Marsala which he says was great. Then there was dessert — flourless chocolate cake, and little squares of lemon cheesecake, and chocolate truffles. YUM.

Then the magician did a show for us in the dining room, which was wonderful, and then everyone went back out into the main room for dancing. Dan and I sat and ogled the guitar player and his 1964 Strat for a while and then we said goodnight and headed home. We both had a really lovely time and are very proud of ourselves for overcoming our introversion. Go Team Venture!

Oh, and the restaurant uses Fiestaware, which I found very very interesting because I’ve daydreamed about replacing our nasty old dishes with Fiestware for years, but I’d never seen any in person. It’s lovely! They used an assortment of colors, which was charming.

Craig Silverman, who wrote us up for the NY Times, has published another LibriVox article in the Montreal Gazette. The text is available on his blog:
LibriVox and the power of distributed communities

Craig quotes Jon Udell re: projects such as LibriVox and Wikipedia:

“From my perspective, the key value of this is in changing people’s expectations about the relationship between being a consumer and being a producer,” he says. “For several generations we’ve been trained to be consumers … the option to be a producer in a variety of ways doesn’t even occur to people.”

Interesting, eh? I do find it to be extraordinarily satisfying to produce these recordings.  Thanks for another great article, Craig!

Went on a fantastic field trip to The Monarch Program.  First we visited the Butterfly Vivarium, which was like a big airy greenhouse with butterfly-friendly plants and a little pond in the middle.  There were tons of adult butterflies flyling around and some caterpillars and chrysalises. The kids got to feed cantaloupe to the butterflies, and let caterpillars crawl on them.  They loved it.  Henry says butterflies are his new favorite creature.  After the vivarium, we went indoors for a great presentation with a little film about the life cycle of the monarch (every time I type that word I think “Somebody loves the monarch!!”) and a slideshow.  The Butterfly Man and the Butterfly Lady were kind and enthusiastic and great with the kids.  We got to purchase two monarch caterpillars and three milkweed plants to feed them on until they hatch.  When we got home we made them a house in an up-ended cardboard box with saran wrap over the front.  They ate nearly a whole plant this afternoon, so we gave them a fresh plant before Henry took them to his dad’s house for the weekend.  He’s fascinated by them!

Oh my god.  This is the funniest thing ever, especially if you know an Ambien user.

The Ambien Cookbook

I had the house to myself, all to myself, until 1pm today.  So I did lots and lots of recording!  I did 5 more sections of the poetry book, the Conclusion to Wives and Daughters, one of the Balzac letters, the Weekly Poem, and The Boar’s Head Carol.
Whew!  None of them are actually ready to upload yet.  Still need to run the 10-band EQ, the compressor, chop out the errors, and proof-listen for swallowing sounds, lip smacks, and pauses that are too long or short.  Encode to mp3, and then put in the proper ID3 tags.  It’s quite a process. But I can do all that stuff when the house is noisy.
Also did three loads of laundry, which is not easy because our elderly washer gets unbalanced if there’s a gram more wet laundry on one side than the other, and requires constant babysitting and re-arranging.  And sometimes it gives up entirely unless you sit on it to keep it steady. And our elderly dryer doesn’t get very hot so it take about 2 hours to dry one medium-sized load. Usually I hang things to dry outside but it was cloudy today. I discovered, though, that because of the powerful personal server that lives in our walk-in closet I can put the wooden drying rack in there and things dry really fast!  So the delicates go in the closet to dry.

And in the afternoon, when Henry got home, we did some math together on aleks.com!  Fun.  He finished up the level-3 Place Value slice of the pie, and did a bit of work with fractions.  And we went over the 7-times table (because neither of us was comfy above 7×4, heheh).  And then we played some WoW — took Zinny and Animala back to Ferelas and killed water elementals and yetis, and Henry helped me do the Robot Chicken escort quest.

Star-Spangled Blooper

I did, eventually, manage to read the whole thing without giggling :)