Quilt Fair

The entertainment director for the quilt fair is also one of our musicians. The quilt fair patrons have become accustomed to seeing morris dancers around the periphery of all the stitching. This year the theme was The Universe of Quilts, so a lot of the quilts had astrophysical themes. They asked folks from the observatory to act as judges of the theme, and the winner was a quilt about life on new world -- discovering those being one of our specialties. But that's not the most surprising aspect of the people at the fair this year.

Much as computers have become the norm for the operation of mills and lasers in manufacturing, they have also invaded the world of sewing. There have been copyright battles waged over the sharing of sewing software in online forums. Each year several of the booths at the local fair have been selling software and advice on the machines. Sometimes the speakers on the fair stages sing the praises of computer-assisted quilting. That's all normal. This year there was something else, something different about the quilters, something new.

Most of these silver-haired sewers were wearing bluetooth headsets.
Maybe my discomfort stems from Doctor Who.
In any case, for those who haven't seen it, this is an excuse to mention Cybermen call centre confounding Dalek customers.

whack a mole

The beauty of the internet is that there is no limit to the number of new games which are available for occupying the little ones. The beauty of Safari on Mac OS X is that it can limit URLs to a parentally-authorized white list. The beauty of a relatively recent wireless router is that it can be configured to allow access during prescribed hours, and cut things off when it's time to get ready for bed.

Together these are also a curse. Recent Flash-based games are largely served through content aggregation sites which manage micropayments for the game authors. The games themselves are often accessed from the servers of their authors. Safari does not limit access to URLs embedded in the authorized URL. But the newest twist really makes it a game of whack a mole.

In the past week I noted that the router has been continually busy while the girls play one Flash game. Then I noted that it was a competitive, multiplayer game. This new game was constantly accessing the server to update the state of all the other players. So once again I dig into the router log while they are playing, I identify the central server, and I add it to the list which gets cutoff for bedtime.

The girls expressed dismay that all of a sudden the game which had been in cache stopped letting them compete. I just said it was time to get ready for bed. They haven't yet noted the difference between things that work after hours because they're already in browser cache, and things that stop working because I'm tapping away on the laptop while reminding them it's bedtime.

With them maybe I can keep getting away with this for a while. But what happens if the feds pass this law that says router logs are supposed to be kept for two years? Clearly I won't be able to profess ignorance.

The eons have passed

Way back in school Athena got to reading all the Ayn Rand books. She told me about them, but I never took her advice to read them. She didn't get success with that sort of thing until she gave me Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

This week slashdot reported on the US legislature proposing that all DHCP servers should keep logs for 2 years. The commentary there is well summarized by the tags "wontwork" and "goodluckwiththat", but there was one that caught my eye. It used and linked to a quote from Atlas Shrugged.

When I read that I recalled what Apollo said on Pollux IV: Athena, you were right.

Maybe Athena should have tried giving the Rand books to me, for clearly I would have been better off for reading them.