I was listening to a Bach orchestral recording (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”), and my son Johnny said, “I hear bagpipes!”
As a Presbyterian, I guess I’m supposed to know about bagpipes, eh? But I’m not Scottish or anything.
Anyway, I don’t know how Johnny even knows what bagpipes are, much less what they sound like. (There weren’t any in the Bach, by the way.) So I decided to show him some bagpipers on the web. Next he wanted to hear some bagpipe music. I googled “bagpipes audio” and found this:
Radio Gaita, “Bagpipes from around the world”
Check it out! I’ve never heard bagpipes from India before, for example. Just don’t ask me what the lyrics mean.
Maybe that title should be “Patents by dummies” or “Patents hoping that the examining patent officers are dummies.”
According to an article by The Register, Cingular is trying to patent smileys (you know, like this “:-)”). Though I saw my first smiley in 1987 or so, they’ve been around much longer than that.
I wish greedy corporations would stop trying to pull this kind of stuff. Whoever filed it probably got a patent application bonus too.
Anyway, use ‘em while you still can (without paying a licensing fee).
Happy Birthday, Joshua!
I can’t believe that my second son Joshua is one year old already! We just had the family over for dinner and a celebration of Joshua’s first twelve months.
As is traditional in my family, Joshua got his own (small) birthday cake to eat. But there were lots of kids running around, and he wasn’t as interested in the cake as in his cousins.
Still, we got the customary picture of him with cake all over his face. (His first move was to pick the thing up to his face to try to eat it.)
We are very thankful for Joshua and the blessings that he has brought to our family in his first year. He’s a great kid.
The Whitney family started the New Year off, not with a bang, but with quiet.
Our power went out on January 1st at about 2 in the afternoon. We expected it to come back on in a few minutes as it usually does. It didn’t.
OK. It was going to out a while. Eleanor called PG&E to see what was up and they told us to expect the power to be restored by 7 p.m. No point in hanging out in a cold house. We went and ran some errands, ending with dinner. At the end we called PG&E and the new time for restoration of power was midnight.
It was cold and dark so we considered camping out at my parents’ house, but we decided to brave it at home with extra blankets and candles. As angry as I was with PG&E (they originally told us that a crew was working on it, even though there was clearly no crew working on it), we had a nice night. I played the guitar. We told stories. The candles were peaceful. It was a nice, slow night. We hadn’t had one like that in a long time. No computer, no CDs, no TV, nothing.
It turned out that a cold, dark night was just what we needed.
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