I bellied up to the counter at my favorite breakfast stop yesterday and ordered orange juice.  The wait staff all know me so there are usually several rounds of greetings as they each swing by to pick up the coffee pot or grab menus.

Yesterday, one of the newer waitresses asked “where’s your brother”. This slowed me down a bit since my brother lives in Europe and I haven’t seen him for quite awhile.  Then it hit me…

“My brother?  You mean the kid who comes in here with me all the time?  That’s my son.”

She was mortified.  You can usually tell when someone is caught completely off guard by new information.

I spent the rest of the day with a littel extra spring in my step and a smile on my face.

Just a random thought as I walked around today looking at the hotel gardens and thinking about recent adventures in parenting.

Plants, like people, tend to conform to their environment. When a tree or a shrub gets overgrown, lazy gardeners like me simply cut off the offending bits without much further thought. Of course, two months later we have to repeat the process because the actual issue hasn’t been resolved. The environment allows the tree to grow in that direction and trees, being what they are, grow in every available direction.

If I were a judicious gardener I would look at the environment and try to alter it so that the tree grew the way I wanted. Perhaps I can straighten it by adding guy wires. Or maybe I can put in a trellis for those climbing roses I like that are running amok right now. Given a new environment the plants are perfectly content to keep on growing the way I want. Sure its more work for me now but in the long term I am going to get the effect I want with much less effort and I will have happier healthier plants to boot.

I think a lot of parents take the lazy gardener approach to raising their kids. When they see behavior they don´t like they swoop in and stomp on it. Cut it off as it were. So their little one no longer misbehaves. Unfortunately, a week goes by and the child starts doing the same thing again as the parent wails ¨But I TOLD you not to do that!¨

The reality is that if you don´t change the environment your child is in they will continue to grow in the same direction. I had a run a few months ago where I was swearing way too much. Now, the kids know not to swear (at least not where we can hear them) but the environment was telling them other things. So when my son started cursing in front of me I knew the problem wasn’t his, it was mine. Instead of chastising or punishing him I stopped and said ¨Ok, I know I have been cursing a lot around you and that is not who I want to be and not who I want you to be. So here is a jar and whenever someone curses they put in a quarter. This includes me and if you hear me curse, point it out. Hold ME accountable for my own rules.¨

Then environment changed. I curse much less and the kids not at all. It took a day for them to get in line with the plan and me about a week (Something about old dogs and tricks). Today it is not a problem.

I have done variations on this many times over the years with different behaviors. It has met with great success each and every time.

When a child does something inappropriate the first response should not be ¨stop that!¨¨ The first response should be to ask ¨what is there in my child´s environment that might have caused it?¨ Until you figure that out all the lectures and punishment will be superficial pruning of the tree. Once you change the environment, the kid will be perfectly happy to continue growing up in the way that you think is best.

I tried. I really tried. A salad here. A small turkey sandwich there. But they wore me down. The conference is providing three meals a day and alcohol at night. Last night was some perfectly wonderful Salmon. I cracked. Back for seconds? You bet! Care for dessert? Why not? Couple of beers to wash it all down? No problem.

I have given up for the rest of the week. I will pay my penance when I get back home and all my work for the last month has been erased. But for the rest of the week? I shall attempt to avoid excess but the plate will be full of whatever yummies they put in front of me.

More from the land of milk and honey later.

Editors note: I fixed the typo in the title, lest my good friend and commenter think I am trying to cover my tracks.
So I undertook to survive a week long conference without a laptop. A year ago this would have been a pipe dream. No laptop? How will you check email? Keep up on the news? Check bank balances? Check on flight statuses?

Well, the N800 has , so far, exceeded all my expectations on the trip. Here are the myriad uses so far:

• Personal and work email
• Music, games, and movies on the flight
• Used ftp to download an ebook I forgot at home
• Calendar synced to Google Calendar for the conference schedule
• Took pictures of the hotel
• Quick edit of the pictures, uploaded them to Facebook
• Used wordpress client to publish blog posts including pictures
• Recorded conference session. This is especially neat since I can make a time mark in my notes and then go back and listen to the complicated bits later.
• Random web surfing

Not a bad list methinks. There are a few spots that could use some help but its a much shorter list.

• Couldnt get on the wi-fi at the airport. It connected but both the web and email failed to come up.
• Lack of VPN. Apparently there is something missing from the Nokia kernel. I have the other packages loaded but can´t get it working. This is unfortunate because the remote desktop package is awesome. I can see Windows Machines through RDP with no trouble. The lack of VPN is all that´s keeping me from using the tablet in a pinch if something goes wrong at work while I´m away.
• Camera quality is not good. I know its not supposed to be and putting a better one in would ruin the price point which is one of the most attractive things about the N800. But I can dream can´t I?
• This is a problem for me to solve with the desktop but I have to find a way to boost the audio on DVDs when I convert them for the tablet. Too quiet to hear on a plane.

Overall, I haven´t missed the laptop much and none at all when I´m walking around the conference center with only a pound of gadets on me instead of the 5-10 that go with a laptop bag. Lastly, even though its not a Nokia product, I should put in a plug for the iGo foldable bluetooth keyboard. It has been a dream. I am almost as fast with it as I am with a normal keyboard. Much faster than I would be with the N810 and its slide out thumb qwerty.

Here I am somewhere between the checkin desk and my room. Looking for a native guide to help me.

Ok, so I´m not Alice. But I am lost in Opryland. Specifically, the Gaylord Opryland hotel, resort, and convention center.

I´ve been in some big hotels before. Casinos in Reno, Resorts in Texas and a few other places but this one takes the prize for me. Casinos are bigger but they tend to be vertical arrangements. 5000 rooms stacked on top of a gaming floor. Here, nothing is higher than 6 stories but it is spread over half of Tennessee. Later I will be posting a transcription of the directions they gave me to get from the front desk to my room. Suffice to say I´ve driven halfway across the country before with fewer turns.

I´ve been here a whole day now with nothing to do but walk around and see things and its not enough. I haven´t seen the front desk since checking in and I may need a native guide when its time to leave because I´m not sure I can find it again. It was a 10 minute walk from my room to anything else and short of a GPS tracker there is no way to find the shortest route. The whole thing is built on curves and obfuscation.

All that aside, it is a fairly neat place to explore. Lots of greenery and sites to see. I tried out the pool and fitness center last night and both are excellent. The food is good and only overpriced by a factor of 2 and the staff is always helpful no matter how many times they get asked ¨How do I get to the Cascades from here?¨. The room is pleasant and the TV is a big flat screen. All in all, its much better than a kick in the shorts.

Since I´m writing all this from the Nokia tablet I will have a post on that later on in the trip. Lots of things to report on and noone to talk to here about how bizzare this all is. The conference begins later this afternoon but won´t really get underway until Teusday so until then, the blog is about the only place I have to give voice to what´s hapening.

Not as much to report this week other than the fact that the pushup plan has finally overwhelmed either my ability or my determination (I´m not sure which yet). I am still doing push ups three times a week but there is simply no way that I can keep up with the schedule they posted. So a bit of a failing there.

The good news is that I have been upping the cardio work. Either running or mixing in the elliptical trainer three or four times a week. I´ve also reconnected with the best weight loss site in the world. Spark People is a free site that provides a complete tracking system for food, exercise and any other goals you care to enter. In addition they provide social networking tools for connecting with others who are working through the same experiences. I used it to lose 20 pounds a few years ago and now I need to drop a bit more.

I´m off to Nashville tomorrow and will, for the first time, use a hotel fitness center for its intended purpose.

Hopefully by the time I post on the topic again I´ll have some weight loss news to report along with the fitness gains.

Awhile back I bemoaned the lack of full discussion about copyright and its uses.  Specifically the fact that noone seems to mention or care about the Fair Use clauses in American copyright law.  Well it seems that it was simmering below the surface all along and at last has seen some light of day.

Slashdot | Fair Use Must Be Considered In DMCA Notices.

“US District Judge Jeremy Fogel has ruled that an ‘allegation that a copyright owner acted in bad faith by issuing a takedown notice without proper consideration of the fair use doctrine thus is sufficient to state a misrepresentation claim,’ which paves the way for a lawsuit against Universal Music over a ridiculous DMCA Takedown notice they filed.

Its good to finally see those words somewhere in all of the legal wrangling.  The specific case pertains to a woman who posted a very low quality video of her toddler dancing along to a Prince song.  The studio sent a takedown notice and YouTube complied.  Now the court has ruled that the studio was under an obligation to at least attempt to determine if the offending clip qualified as Fair Use.

I thnk this moves the needle in a good direction by stating that it is up to the copyright holder to be judicious in their use of the DMCA notices and not the responsibility of the person using the material to cover all legal bases before using copyrighted material in a legal manner.

‘Hamlet 2′ – Los Angeles Times.

I suppose my post title could apply to the movie as well.  I haven’t seen it and I’m not sure I will.  Just not my normally preferred brand of comedy.  But what caught my eye was this snippet from the LA Times review:

The one bright spot in Marschz’s life is his discovery that his favorite actress of all time, Elisabeth Shue (deftly played by Shue herself), having tired of the dark side of the business, now works as a nurse at the nearby Prickly Pear Fertility Clinic. (emphasis added)

Now, this line made me laugh out loud.  I absolutely can’t tell whether the author is being sarcastic or if he is indicating that in an effort to portray herself, Elisabeth Shue actually pulls it off convincingly.  Either way, I think its the best line I’ve heard in quite awhile.

Microsoft’s data centers growing by the truckload | Latest Microsoft News – CNET News – CNET News.com.

“The trucks back ‘em in, rack ‘em, and stack ‘em,” Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie told CNET News. And the containers remain sealed, Ozzie said. Once a certain number of servers in the container have failed, it will be pulled out and sent back to the manufacturer and a new container loaded in.

It’s just one way that Microsoft is trying to cope in a world where it adds roughly 10,000 servers a month.

Its hard to comprehend the scale that they are talking about here.  I’ve read several articles about shipping containers as data centers but imagining the shipping container as the basic unit of the data center, the part that you will relpace, is staggering.

YellowPagesGoesGreen.Org .

…helping municipalities and local governments around the country establish ordinances to mandate Yellow Pages and White Pages only be delivered to home and offices that ask for them.  Municipalities and local government that provide trash services are extremely concerned about the landfill cost and why they have to absorb the cost of handling the telephone directories.

Great idea.  I signed up already.  We currently get phone books from (as near as I can tell) three different companies multiple times per year.

I can honestly say I haven’t opened a phone book in over a decade and having them laying around the house is more than a little silly.