Postcards from the Mothership

Are you completely exhausted by my adventures with electronics lately? You may want to pass this post over, then. Apparently my electronics are sick of me, too. Or maybe there were sunspots yesterday that disturbed the electromagnetic spectrum. Or maybe I’ve just exceeded my place on the techno-savvy spectrum, and this is the way that the universe busts my britches.

My iPod died last night. It’s been a stellar two and a half weeks, and each day I found new ways to love the little dickens, but it’s all over now but the crying. I don’t know what happened. I downloaded two songs off iTunes and transferred those plus three songs that Beloved had ripped from our CD collection back when he gave me my original MP3 player last year onto the iPod. I got a funny message from the system tray of Windows XP, and started fiddling with things. (cue ominous music) At one point, I decided I should just take everything off the iPod and start all over again, but even though I deleted everything it was still showing the memory as in use.

Eventually, I made my way to apple.com’s iPod support pages, and I tried their 5R approach to troubleshooting. I installed the iPod updater twice, reinstalled the iTunes software at least once, maybe three times (things got a little fuzzy after I was up past my bedtime) and restarted the computer at least four times. I got at least five different types of error messages in different platforms, but the bottom line was that something in the iPod itself was corrupt. By the time I was done, I wasn’t getting the funny message from the system tray anymore – but iTunes wasn’t recognizing the iPod anymore either.

My iPod has been disowned by its peeps. And it’s so deeply in mourning that it won’t speak to them or me. Poor little “Escape Pod” gave me nothing but joy, and it had to end like this – it’s nothing short of tragic.

I finally gave up and went to bed and turned tech support over to Beloved. He fiddled with it for another couple of hours, and this morning I figured all would be right with the world again. Au contraire – it seems over the course of the night, my iPod gave up the will to live entirely. Despite being almost fully charged, and being plugged into the laptop for the better part of five hours last night, it ran out of power and died a lonely death sometime around midnight. Thank electra for the extended warranty program.

And that fancy-ass Nokia phone I’ve been going on about? It went on strike last night, too. I was trying to key a few names and numbers into the contacts folder, and the keypad started behaving randomly. You know how the number pad keyboard works, where you click the number a few times in rapid succession to get the letter you want? It started giving me random letters from each number, sometimes starting with the second or third letter on each number and sometimes giving me random strings of letters. If I pressed 333 quickly, sometimes I’d get a D, sometimes I’d get FFE, sometimes I’d get DEF, sometimes just an E. No idea why. Sometimes it would stop at four letters and give me a ? and not let me type any more characters. Random confusion.

So today I’m going out to Grand and Toy and buying myself a nice gel roller pen to go with the pretty little notebook with handmade paper that my mom gave me last week. Maybe I should make that a quill and ink, just so the universe sees that I’m truly penitent for my unapproved forays into the land of technology. And hosting my own blog? You never heard that from me. If the universe isn’t satisfied with my contrition, it may come down to writing my posts with an eyebrow pencil after all.

P.S. I guess Blogger was listening. Even though I damn well know better by now, I clicked “publish post” without copying or saving this post – and got a 404 message. Luckily, it was still here when I pressed the ‘back’ button.

I prostrate myself in repentance, gods of technology. I apologize for having offended thee. I’m not worthy.

Edited to add: at least I’m not the only one with techno-woes. Maybe it’s contagious?

Okay, so it took me two weeks to figure it out (which translates into about 35 minutes of time, spread in 17 instalments over six separate days), but with Beloved’s tech support I finally managed to figure out how to get my fancy new Nokia 6682 to release the pictures I took on my birthday.

For those of you who live in Ontario, that was the blistering hot day when the humidex topped out in the high forties, and there’s no better place for a day like that than at the beach. Britannia Beach, in this case – the nicest, most kid-friendly beach in the Ottawa area.

A self-portrait, for Marla:

This one is grainy, I think because I maxed out the zoom. Still, I liked it enough to set it as the wallpaper on my phone. Simon loves wearing the “goobles”.

For my birthday dinner, we went to Lone Star for fajitas. This is the boys with my wonderful mother, who is conveniently also my best friend.

Unfortunately, my dad looks a bit like a growth out of the side of my head in what would otherwise be a really cute shot.

These pix were taken with the phone straight out of the box. One day I might sit down and actually figure out how to compensate for light levels and such, as I think there are a whole whack of controls that I should be able to master in about a year and a half.

This concludes the paid advertising portion of our program. Thanks to Nokia, Matchstick and Rogers for the sweet deal!

I was having coffee with Andrea last weekend, and the topic of blog hosting came up. (Andrea was great company that night – too bad I couldn’t say the same thing about myself. It was the same week we found out that frostie didn’t work out, and Simon was in the thick of his barf and poop marathon. I could barely get my nose out of my navel, and yet she left me feeling better than I had all week. Perhaps I should have said thanks for that before now…)

Ahem, anyway, we were talking about my disappointment that Blogger won’t allow true mobile blogging for cellular customers outside the US, and she said that I’m a big-girl blogger now and perhaps it’s time to move out on my own.

Six months ago, I would have said I was perfectly content with Blogger, but the tides are slowly turning. I’ve long coveted the capability to make catagories, and I made a stab at it with del.icio.us a while back, but I never kept up with it, and the idea of sorting and tagging several hundred posts makes me tired just thinking about it. And Blogger’s capriciousness with its ability to post photos is annoying at the best of times. And maybe a nice three-column format would be nice for a change, wot?

But, there are obstacles. First, Blogger is free and domain hosting is not. Then I’d have to choose another blogging interface, and while for no particular reason I’m leaning toward Typepad, don’t I have to pay for that, too? (Too lazy to click around and find out.) And the biggest obstacle is that moving from blogger means change – and you know how I feel about change. There’d be a change to how blog looks, and a change to the blog-posting interface, and a change to how you’d find me, and I’m just not sure if I’m up for all that.

So, whaddya think? Any thoughts or recommendations? Tell me what you love and hate about the blog interface you use. Is it time for me to pony up an actual cash investment for this silly, addictive hobby of mine? If you don’t mind, if you’re paying an ISP in Canada, would you comment or e-mail me with information about your domain hosting so I can get an idea to expect what to pay, and whether you would recommend your ISP? (I have absolutely no idea.)

Would you still drop by if I moved to a fancy uptown place? And hey, if it works out, stay tuned for the ‘name that domain’ autumn contest!

Edited to add: if you’re thinking about domain names and web hosting in Canada, check out the most excellent analysis over at Miche’s place. Thanks, Miche!

As I mentioned last month, I was offered a free Nokia 6682 smart phone for the simple price of blogging with and about it. I’m fulfilling the last half of that obligation today, and will do the former just as soon as I figure out how. The whole time I wrote this post, I waited for the USB cable drivers to install themselves, but something’s not working. Ugh, technology.

It’s a sweet little phone, I must admit. It has still and video photo capabilities, a video editor, internet connectivity, e-mail and instant messaging, it can play MP3s and act as a voice recorder, it has games – oh yah, and it’s a telephone, too.

Here’s the whole package I received from Matchstick.ca, the buzz marketing specialists who are working with Nokia on this campaign:

There’s a Bluetooth wireless headset in there, extra memory, and a whole bunch of other widgets I am only now beginning to understand. So you can understand how truly state-of-the-art all this is for me, here is my former cell phone. I think we bought it around 2001.

It has text messaging – which I’ve never used because I was too cheap to pay for voice mail and call display, let alone a data package – and that’s about it. When I brought the new Nokia 6682 into the Rogers outlet to have them help me transfer the account, the enthusiastic young woman who served me said that Rogers will no longer even be supporting this type of phone after this year, so the arrival of a free replacement was more timely than I realized.

She was very impressed with the Nokia 6682, and even moreso with the concept that I got it for free, just for blogging about and with it. She said it was one of nicer phones she had seen, and enthusiastically showed it to several other employees and even a familiar customer while she helped me transfer my cell account.

I was a little worried that my grandfathered cell account, originally activated through a no-longer-available corporate plan back in 1998, wouldn’t support this new phone, but I had no problems. I’m going to buy a small data transfer package (an extra $3 a month) so I can do a little bit of mobile blogging, but I was disappointed to see that Blogger doesn’t support true mobile blogging for customers outside the US. It may just be time to cut the apron strings and move to hosting my own blog, but that’s a post for another day.

I find the phone very easy to use, even for a Luddite like me. The phone itself and the camera features are fairly intuitive. I haven’t used much of the Web connectivity features yet because I haven’t upgraded my phone account for the data package, but it’s fun to play with. I set the ring tone to the sound of an old ringing phone (think of the heavy black rotary dial ones) as a tribute to my utter lack of familiarity with any of the phone’s features.

It would have been nice if it were a flip phone, or at least came with a protective case, because the display screen is already a little scratched just from being carried around in my purse, but that’s my only complaint. There are features I know I’ll never use on a regular basis, but it’s still fun to have them. And with time, I’m sure I’ll start using some of the other features simply because I have them.

For now, I’m still trying to install the software that will liberate the photos I’ve taken from the camera. It’s been twenty minutes and the USB drivers seem to be hung, so I’ll have to go back and reinstall the software, I think. More later when I figure it out!

Sorry, kiddies, I’ve got nothing for you today. It’s almost painful because I’m in one of those stretches when I have about six or seven ideas for posts clogging up my brain, and the words are just coursing out of my fingertips every time I sit down at the keyboard – but I’m smack out of time.

I could have written something up last night, but I spent two and a half hours discovering iTunes. Are you completely nauseauted by my obsession with my iPod yet? Just wait, I still owe you a post or three about (warning: gratuitous product placement ahead) my new, free Nokia 6682 but I haven’t yet had the time (see the motif here?) to figure out how to make it give me back the pictures I took with it.

All that to say, while I’ve got nothing up my sleeve, I thought we could try one of those comment games again. We tried it a while ago, and it was a little ugly, but still fun. Let’s try again, since you’ve already gone to the bother of showing up when I wasnt’ ready for company.

Here’s how it goes. I’ll propose a movie, and you post an actor/actress who is in that movie. The next person posts a different movie that said actor is in, and the person after that posts a different actor in that movie… and so on, until the end of time. Got it? So, if I say “Star Wars” you say “Harrison Ford” and the next guy says “Six Days and Seven Nights” (or whatever that movie is called) and the next person says “Anne Heche” and the person after that goes to imdb to see if Anne Heche ever made another movie. And if two people post at the same time, the next person has the choice between the two answers to follow.

Fun, eh? Well, at least you won’t be me, stumbling through yet another interminable French class, having forgotten during your brief but lovely vacation every verb you ever conjugated.

So I’ll start you off with: The Godfather. Go!

There’s nothing like a summer road trip, with the windows open, wind whipping your hair, and the Wiggles blaring on the stereo.

Ugh. Man, do I miss the days when I controlled the CD player in the car. And it’s not just the preschoolers – Beloved, who used to have at least a semblance of taste in music, now rips Wiggles and Dora and Thomas the Tank Engine compilations for the boys, and has even threatened to burn the David Hasselhoff Pingu rap onto a CD for the car. And I thought it was bad when he was simply a fan of Duran Duran.

There was a time I would never dream of leaving the house without a decent collection of mixed tapes or CDs with me. (Now that I’m a big girl and have an iPod, you know the car kit is on my Christmas wish list!) And I was very particular about my road music, too. Nothing too new or unfamiliar, nothing too soft, nothing too sappy.

Road music is energy music, as confirmed by national polling results announced yesterday that found Canada’s favourite driving song is Bryan Adams’ anthemic Summer of ’69. I adored this song when it came out in the mid-1980s, partly because of my earth-shaking crush on Bryan Adams and partly because my idol was actually singing a song about the time when I was born (and ironically, a time when he would have been about five years old, if I do the math right.) I figured it meant we were destined to be together, in the manner only a lovesick 15 year old can reason.

According to the poll results, Canada’s top seven favourite road songs are:

Summer of ’69 — Bryan Adams;
Bohemian Rhapsody — Queen;
Born to be Wild — Steppenwolf;
It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It) — The Rolling Stones;
Drive My Car — The Beatles;
Free Fallin’ — Tom Petty;
Radar Love — Golden Earring.

Eh, not a bad list. I could do better, and I know you could do better. Oh, the agony of choosing! Hmmm, let’s see. In no particular order, my top driving songs would be:

New Orleans is Sinking – The Tragically Hip
(That one’s for you, UberGeek and Fryman!)

It’s the End of the World as We Know It – REM

Home for a Rest – Spirit of the West
(also appears on my soon-to-be-announced best drinking songs list!)

Baba O’Reilly – The Who

Radar Love – Golden Earring

Spirit of Radio – Rush

Bat Out of Hell – Meatloaf

… and just about anything by Queen, especially from the Highlander sountrack.

Your turn!

A while back, Andrea Gordon had a fun post talking about near misses and parenting calamaties, in the wake of all the Britney baby disasters. I didn’t contribute anything to her post that day – although I could have. I might have written about the more than once that Tristan barrel-rolled down the stairs, or the time at nine months old he fell off a bench in a mall and landed on his head on the granite floor – remember that panicked phone call, Jojo?

I was grateful that I’m not a celebrity and didn’t have an audience to broadcast my parenting foibles the other day – and yet, here I am, about to broadcast them to you. Because yesterday’s utter panic is today’s good blog fodder, right?

It was one of those blazingly hot days, and Simon had been completely resistant to the idea of a nap. I finally gave up and tossed both boys into the car and we went off to do a few errands which involved driving over a large part of the city. They managed to stay awake for the first leg of the trip, but by the time I arrived at my second destination, both were soundly asleep in the back seat.

I only had to run in and out. It was a tiny little shop and they were actually holding what I needed behind the counter – I would be five minutes at most. For the first time ever, I contemplated leaving the boys in the car, weighing the danger factor (practically none) and the panic factor should one of them wake up and find me not there (marginal, as both were snoring) versus the annoyance factor of waking both up, carting two sweaty, cranky preschoolers in with me for my one- minute errand, and facing the rest of the day with their slumber-interrupted crankiness.

I found a spot in the shade, debated for a long minute, and made the wrong choice. I figured I’d leave them in the car, and leave the car running so the air conditioning would stay on, but lock the doors and take my electronic remote key fob with me.

I ran in, concluded my transaction, and ran out again. The whole thing took maybe 180 seconds. I felt a little guilty, because I know better than to do something dumb like that, but it was a calculated risk and I told myself I would never do it again as I pushed the button to unlock the doors.

And nothing happened.

I pressed the button again, and a few more times for good measure. I tried the door, in case it miraculously unlocked itself in my absence, and tried to lift the back hatch. With desperation, I tried to use the remote on the back hatch, closing my eyes and wishing with all my heart to hear the familiar thunk of the trunk release when I pushed the button. Silence.

Did you see it coming? Did you know that if the engine is running, your electronic remote key fob doesn’t work? Great safety feature, isn’t it? Unless, of course, you have locked your sleeping preschoolers in the running car, that is.

All the air evaporated out of my lungs as I realized what I had done. I stood blinking stupidly at the boys in the back seat, imagining the phone conversation – oh god, look, there’s the phone right there on the front seat where I left it – that I would have with Beloved, trying to explain this. I pictured police with slim jims called to unlock the doors and liberate my now-awake and terrified children. I envisioned child protective services becoming involved, and the media, too, because you always see the story about the person who leaves their dog in the mall parking lot in 30C heat, so surely to god they’re going to run with the story of the dumb-ass mother who locks her babies in her car in 32C heat.

After a full minute of standing rooted in full-out panic, I realized I had another option. Tristan knows how to open the door. I tapped gently on the window near his lolling head, stage-whispering his name. Nothing. I thunked the glass, whapped the glass, pounded on the glass with all my might and bellowed his name, and he slept blissfully on. I finally – FINALLY! – managed to get his eyelids to flutter open, and he regarded me with unfocused confusion through the glass (I can only laugh to picture what my face must have looked like!) before trying to drift back to sleep. I thumped the window a few more times, and finally roused him enough to convince him to unlock his door.

My legs were rubbery by the time I dropped into the driver’s seat and pulled out of the parking lot. A few deep breaths later, I could almost see the potential humour in the situation, but mostly I was grateful that outing my stupidity would be my choice, and not foisted upon me.

So, I’ve showed you mine. ‘Fess up – what parenting misadventure made you grateful that the paparazzi weren’t lurking in the bushes ready to broadcast the whole thing on Entertainment Tonight?

(fanfare, dramatic pause)

… Escape Pod! (balloons and confetti fall from the rafters)

Our big winner is tricky ‘Trixie’ who suggested the winning name under a pseudonym, which I only realized when I went to send her a congratulatory e-mail and realized she is one of my favourite colleagues in disguise. Hey, at least this way I don’t have to pay the postage on her candy prize package!

Thanks ‘Trixie’ for the suggesting the winning name, and thanks to Kris for making the extra effort to vote via the comments and finally breaking the deadlocked tie late this afternoon. The excitement, the suspense, the drama of it all – this is better than prime time!

And, as promised, the ‘thanks for playing’ extra prize package goes to (more fanfare) Renee of Froggie Mom! Woo hoo! I hope I can find something interesting to send her that they don’t have down there in Louisiana.

Thanks to all who played – this was a fun little distraction. We should have contests around here more often!

Edited to add: If you are curious, here’s the final standings:

iBob 5 votes
Tunes-eh? 1 vote
Escape Pod 9 votes
Cherie 1 vote
Sally 2 votes
Dopi 2 votes
DaNiPod 8 votes
DaniCasting 1 vote
Mother’s Little Helper 3 votes
iPollo 2 votes

It’s a civic holiday here, and I had assumed my gym would be open as usual, but it opened an hour later than usual, about 45 minutes after I arrived. Not wanting to miss my opportunity, I decided to go for a run instead (I’m really not so fond of running) and thought that since I was already in the car, I’d choose some new scenery to pound and sweat through.

There’s a little conservation area just a few clicks from my house, and with its winding paths and boardwalks through the marshes, it seemed like a lovely choice. What I had forgotten was the little canoe dock that appends one end of the path. It’s small, just five by ten or so, and just out of the way enough that you might overlook it if you weren’t paying attention.

I went for my hobbling, ungraceful run – why is it that other runners always look so lithe and athletic when they run and I look like a herd of lumbering three-legged cattle? – and stopped to stretch and catch my breath on the peaceful little dock.

It was probably the 30 most peaceful moments of my whole summer vacation. The Rideau is a busy river, but only two boats rippled the tranquil surface while I was there. I watched an elderly gentleman quietly fishing off his own dock a half mile or so down and across the river, but other than that, even the animals and insects were at rest. The breeze was gently soothing, and in the early haze of a day that promises to swelter, the air was pregnant with possibility. Nothing has yet been committed this early, and the day had not yet coalesced into the vivid colours and harsh shadows that will define the midmorning and afternoon.

I have a serious case of dock envy. I realized that when I was riding about in the little aluminum fishing boat of my father- and mother-in-law last weekend. Sure, it would be nice to have a cottage on a lake somewhere, but I don’t need that much. All I really want is a dock, somewhere I can plant my chair and sip my coffee in the morning, or my frosty, sweating beer in the lazy heat of a summer afternoon, and hear the waves gently patting the moorings.

It hasn’t been the best summer vacation ever this year. Too much drama, too much anxiety, too much barf and poop, thanks to the stomach virus that Simon has been battling for the past seven days (it was so bad on Friday that I was afraid we’d have to bring him in to the ER for dehydration, but he’s better now.) That’s not to say there haven’t been high points, and fun days, and lots of things that I enjoyed – but emotionally, the past two weeks have been too erratic for me to look back at them with any collective fondness.

But on this little dock, with the breeze tickling errant strands of hair across my cheeks, it seemed I could get my feet solidly under me again. I tried to inhale the calm, to charge up my heart, my brain, my cells with the sweetness of promise, of possibility, of hazy blue calm and scudding clouds and lapping waves. I tried to remember that each day starts with this quiet promise, this possiblity, this gentle calm – sometimes you just have to move yourself off your beaten path to find it.