Anya made me a coconut custard for my birthday, and it was her first time successfully cracking eggs. I showed her how to do the first one, and she got the others cracked all by herself!
Category: Parenting
Squid Custom Error
We’ve been having a challenge with Anya getting her school work completed. Part of the problem is the school’s own fault — they provide a site where kids are encouraged to read, but don’t provide any way to ensure this reading is done after classwork has been completed. But, even if that site didn’t exist … the Internet has all sorts of fun ways you can find to waste some time.
So her computer now routes through my proxy server. I’d set up a squid server so *I* could use the Internet unfettered whilst VPN’d in to work. It’s really annoying to get told you’re a naughty hacker every time you want to see some code example on StackOverflow!
While I didn’t really care about the default messages for my use (nor did I actually block anything for it to matter), I want Anya to be able to differentiate between “technical problem” the site didn’t load and “you are not allowed to be using this site now” the site didn’t load. So I customized the Squid error message for access denied. This can quickly be done by editing /usr/share/squid/errors/en-us/ERR_ACCESS_DENIED (you’ll need to make a backup of your version & may need to replace the file when upgrading squid in the future).
On Questioning Science
Zombie Monster Invasion
Anya went almost eight years without developing any imaginary monster fears — right after she entered preschool, she thought there were generic monsters that might be lurking. But I invited them over for tea and cake, we’d chat with them, and she was OK with our new monster friends. She read The Last Kids on Earth series six or more months ago. Tonight, about twenty minutes after he went upstairs to bed, asked to come down and say goodnight again. She was worried that monsters were going to fly zombies into the house. She sat with me, and I explained that the best thing about imaginary fears is that you can come up with imaginary solutions. And eagles are great protection from zombies. And there are a lot of eagles in our area — big golden guys, even bigger bald eagles. Lots of eagles. And they all eat zombies (and probably monsters). She’d forgotten to take the compost out, so she took out the bowl. And realized she forgot to bring the chickens into their coop (which was really odd since she went outside with food and water specifically to bring the chickens in … and she did fill up their food and water. But left the chickens in the tractor). She apologized to the chickens, snuggled them all to warm them up, and came back into the house. I sang her a goodnight song and we chatted about the eagles perched on the top of her bed — a golden girl she named Goldie, a bald eagle she named Balder, a golden guy that didn’t get named yet, and Balder’s mate was over at the lake getting a fish for them (we told them to eat over the fish tank so they didn’t get fish guts all over Anya or her bed). Goldie had an egg that she gave to Anya to keep warm. There were a few zombies, and Goldie ate them. All of the eagles have kevlar jackets that prevent zombie bites, so there won’t be any zombie eagles. Then the egg hatched. Anya put fifty kevlar jackets on the baby eagle (and herself) to protect them from zombies. And Goldie got some small fish from the lake to feed the hatchling. So Anya’s feeding her baby eagle while three grown eagles watch over them. Hopefully that’s sorted the zombies.
On Patriotic History
Chalk Tightrope Race
Anya’s online school includes physical education — they provide ideas for games we can play, and we we tweak the idea. Last week, they wanted us to stand on one foot and play catch with a ball. That turned into a cross between volleyball and tennis. The activity this week was to draw a few chalk figures (circle, triangle, line, zig-zag) and pretend those are a tightrope. Anya turned it into a race — you start by running along the long line, leaping to the triangle, following it and then leaping to the circle, running along the circle, jumping to the next circle and running along it, then leaping over to a short line that gets you to the zig-zag. There was a lot of running into each other (especially when she added the “go either direction around the shape” rule), and it was really hard to win if you didn’t want to run over the tiny person. Which makes it one of Anya’s favorite games.
On art … 2
On art
Letter Monsters
When Anya was first learning her letters, I made a bunch of letter monsters. They had lots of sharp teeth and look very chompy.They also all had names, stories, and adventures … I was reminded of them when someone in a parenting group asked how they could encourage their kid to learn the sounds letters made. The stories for the monsters were all letter themed — Collette works as a cabdriver — her car has “CAB” written in a big chartreuse circle. When she is done working, she cleans her car and collects anything passengers may have forgotten. She enjoys a cup of coffee in the cafeteria before heading home. When she is at home, she cares for her cat. And, yeah, drawing a toothy letter monster snugging a cat is a challenge 🙂
Connections Academy – Planner UI/UX Issues and Learning Module Voices
I was surprised at the voices used for the cartoon characters in Connections Academy’s learning modules. Anya paused her maths lesson to tell me the lion is shrill. And proceeded to mimic the voice. I had her play a little of it for me and, yeah, it’s awful. The ladybug in the language arts module is better, but that’s a terribly low bar. I’d expected there to be a few voices from which we could select — not just because someone may well find a voice objectionable, but also because some people have frequency specific hearing loss — someone with trouble hearing high frequencies isn’t going to be able to use these modules. I set up an in-browser audio equalizer and dropped out high frequencies. Makes it usable, but I’ve still submitted feedback with my observation.
Then there’s the planner. I’ve noticed a few UI problems in the Planner —
- I am frequently unable to save an event – in cases where something is not populated, the missing item is highlighted in red. That’s not what I’m talking about – I’ve got all of the required fields populated, nothing is highlighted when I click ‘save’. It just stays on the item creation form. I am able to cancel item creation, try again, and get an event created.
- When the purpose is set to “Enrichment”, items cannot be opened/edited/deleted.
- When creating a new item, expanding the “Recurrence” section produces an overlap between the “Description” field and the top line of the recurrence selection. The description field is on top, which renders the top half of the check-boxes unusable.
And more of a UX issue … while the event items can include half-hours, the credit hours field appears to be an integer value. It is auto-populated with a float. Which leads me to expect