everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Home

  • Hairball

    Hairball

    Some memes you just can’t seem to escape. They follow you around and track you down, mocking you from the corner of your desktop, infiltrating your search results and clogging up your feed reader.

    First Anil’s seminal post on Cat Grammar which popped up not only in my feedreader but then again on Techmeme and in various online conversations through the day. Next we have a quick history of blogging from Valleywag in which we find cats as the basic motivation driving each new publishing platform. Finally today, while looking for something totally unrelated to. . . cats, I see that the most popular slideshow on SlideShare is about. . . cats.

  • 5 things you didn’t know about me

    Dave McClure tapped me (and Steve Goldstein) in this season’s Blog Tag meme. The whole round started off with a post from Jeff Pulver who wanted to see if he could get everyone to reveal a little bit about themselves and bring some color to their online personalities. I’m game so I’ll oblige:

    Five things you may not know about Ian Kennedy:

    1. I lived in Japan for 10 years (I am half-Japanese). In a classic case of poor timing, I showed up in Tokyo just as the Nikkei was crashing and then moved back to the US right before the .com bubble popped. I think I’ll stay put for awhile.
    2. While in Japan, one of my jobs was wiring up the Fixed Income trading floor for Lehman Brothers. It was during the late-night rollouts on the end of a T-1 to NYC that I discovered Usenet, Mosaic, and the rest was history.
    3. I love to snowboard and once spent 10 days carving turns up in Niseko, a resort in Hokkaido, where it snowed 1-2 feet of powder each night.
    4. I have over 1,000 hours of bootleg cassettes of the Grateful Dead in my garage. One of these days I’ll get around to digitizing them. A reeeeally loooong rainy day.
    5. I was captain of my Cross-Country running squad in high school. My wife’s cooking has slowed down my times considerably.

    Ok, that’s me. I now it my turn to tag. Let’s see how long it takes for them to discover they’ve been tagged:

    Susan Mernit

    Dav Yaginuma

    David Beach

    Daniela Barbosa

    Cody Simms

  • 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.

  • Why I cancelled my Bank of America Visa card

    Despite the fact that I’ve got more pieces of plastic than I really need it really irks me that in order to activate the new card B of A sent me I have to listen to a two-minute spiel about why I really should consider signing up for a credit protection service.

    No option to <press #> to opt out or even skip the message. I had to listen to two messages (the second slightly more shill than the first) in their entirety. Only after the lecture on dangers of identity theft could I proceed and activate my new card.

    I put my trust in a bank to protect my identity in the first place. Something just doesn’t sit right with this very same bank saying “it would be a good idea” if I signed up for their service just in case. It smacks of protection money.

    Credit is due to the B of A customer service rep though. He was nice enough to cancel my account without too much hassle (unlike other organizations) and when I suggested they go easy on the marketing messages in the future, he sighed with a knowing verbal wink.

  • 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.”

  • Homemade Hardware – Laptop

    Homemade Hardware - Laptop
    Homemade Hardware – Laptop,
    originally uploaded by inky.

    Tyler made a laptop with an innovative fliptop keyboard that reveals a couple of new buttons not normally found on any QWERTY keyboard – one for "Rock Music" and another for "Soft Music." Notice on the screen he has drawn in the all the icons for a browser as well as the one box display for a search engine.

    He also made a set of iPods and a Gameboy. Julia decided to make a kite.