Tag: kids

  • Sibling Rivalry 2009

    A Nokia colleague of mine here in Finland had a charming update to an age old scenario. In this scene, the older sister, who is 13, is saying she has a crush on a boy in her school. It’s a boy in her school and the younger sister is dying to know who it is.

    Younger sister creates a website which is all sparkly with animation and mood music and has an embedded form in it. Fill in the name of the person you love and this site will tell you if it’s a true match. It’s a trap of course. There’s a mailto: embedded into the Submit button. Anything typed into the box will be emailed to the younger sister’s email account.

    The younger sister is ten.

    Older sister runs across the form, can’t resist temptation and types in boy’s name and clicks on button. As soon as she does, old sis realizes what’s happening! She’s furious!

    Old sis tries to logging into Young sis’ email account to delete the email. It takes her a few tries but she gets it. It’s easy to guess. She deletes the email with her beau’s name, disaster averted!

    Old sis saunters into the living room, tells Young sis that she wasn’t fooled by her amateur prank – says that her password was easy to guess and she deleted the email anyway.

    Young sis winks back at Old sis. Says she figured that would happen. That’s why she added a .forward file to her account that forwards any email sent to her email address to another secret account she created just for that purpose.

    Hair pulling ensues!

  • Up and to the Right

    Up and to the Right

    It was windy today so we flew a kite. More photos here.

  • Leapfrog making a toy Blackberry

    Text & Learn

    I am not sure what to make of this. I’m all for making toys realistic and all but working at Nokia, we’re all about trying to make mobile mobile devices more playful and fun. So it’s weird to see a Leapfrog making a toy phone more, um, business-like.

  • YouTube as a Search Engine

    My son was featured in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times in an article (At First, Funny videos. Now, a Reference Tool) about the unforeseen use of YouTube as a research tool. We all associate videos with entertainment but Tyler has taught me that with the addition of meta-data and micro-chunked content, it’s possible to use YouTube as a rich source of reference material.

    I was contacted by the reporter, who had seen a post on ReadWriteWeb about Tyler’s use of YouTube and wanted to bring the story to the New York Times’ readers.

    My father commented, “It is the inclination of succeeding generations to simplify.” Tyler is on to something. For certain things (contact juggling, macarena, or bugatti vs. fighter jet), YouTube is going to explain things to you better and quicker than plain old text search results. You can sort by not only Relevance and Date Added but also using meta-data from community actions such as Ratings and View Count. Finally, using the example from the article, if you search on platypus, embedded in the results is a pre-defined playlist of over 40 video clips all about the animal.

    Tyler was pleased to see that the article was in the “Bright Ideas” section. His comment about his pose in the photo was that after over 200 photos his head was feeling a little heavy. Strangely, the local newsstand didn’t carry the Sunday Times so we had to go to a Starbucks to get a copy for the photo above and as a keepsake.

  • Tyler gives his first speech

    Tyler has been writing stories for class assignments and his story was picked as something to read in front of the school at their last weekly assembly.

    The class went to the Taiko Drum Show. I almost cried because it reminded me of Japan. I was born in Japan. There were two Japanese people in the show. The taiko drums are made from wood, iron metal, and cow skin. They played a shell too. They said Japanese words. They did martial arts. They did a lot of throwing. I had fun and my class liked it too.

    I would say more about what he felt but Tyler didn’t really talk about it too much – he’s kind of embarassed to be singled out this way.

  • Julia on the big screen

    Julia on the big screen

    On a lark I uploaded a recent photo of Julia I had posted to Flickr to Nationwide’s Life Comes at you Fast site. In return, I got an email with a link to their site telling me when the photo would run on the big screen outside the Reuters building.

    If you’re curious, check out the site between 4:40 – 5:00 pm (NYC time) each day this week.

  • “I like this one”

    “I like this one”

    While shopping for plants, Julia found this one tucked in the back. It was kind of lonely & sad and didn’t have a price so they gave it to us for free. We don’t have a dog, we have an avocado plant.

    Other activities include Aikido lessons for Tyler and his weekly soccer game. We placed him in a league with kids a year older than he is to challenge him a bit and I think the extra competition is good for him. He’s a bit more focused at practice and he’s got a great coach who’s working really well with the kids. They won their game handily and Tyler really mixed it up despite being the smallest on the field.

    My little experiment with internet classifieds worked like a charm and we sold off our old refridgerator Saturday morning. I listed on craigslist, edgeio, and an internal Yahoo list. A toss up between craigslist and the Yahoo list for the number of leads but in the end it was an Alameda buyer that found us on craigslist that settled with us just 48 hours after listing the fridge for sale.

    Sunday was spiff up the house day. After picking up plants (above), I painted the bathroom, patched up some holes in the toy room ceiling left over from an old light fixture that I had replaced a few weeks back, and painted some exposed wood. Oh, I also got up early and went for a nice long run which may be why my legs are so sore right now!

  • Julia’s Special Day

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    Today was Julia’s “special day” at her pre-school. I spent the morning with her and met her classmates (there are 15) and put faces to the names she sprinkles in her conversations. There was some singing and we identified the weather for the day. After 11 straight days of rain, Julia optimistically said it was “sunny” but we could see that she was just being relative – it was misting instead of pouring sheets.

    The activity of the day consisted of sorting jellybeans by their color into different piles, counting them, then pasting flowers that represented the jellybeans onto a sheet of paper. It was neat to see how each child approached the problem and how some were more effecient at sorting through the tasks than others. “Payday’s on Friday!” I said to one of them when she handed in her work but the joke was lost on her.

    Julia also, because it was her special day, got to pick out which toys would be set out for playtime. There are four boys in the class and they were clumped up in the corner and when Julia indicated with her “wand” that the box of cars would be set out, the boys all frothed, “oooh, caaaars.”

  • The King Sleeps

    The King Sleeps

    Izumi popped in to check on Tyler before going to bed and saw this. He didn’t have any head gear on when we tucked him in. When we asked him about it the next morning, Tyler said that he put it on after we left him because it was flattened out and he wanted to restore it to it’s original shape.

    The crown was given to him on his birthday at school where he was. “king for a day.”