Epic

"perfect in power
matchless in glory
nothing is greater, Brilliant Creator
friend of mine"
-Kristian Stanfill, "Beautiful Jesus"

Asher started singing a different song when I put this one on the stereo a while ago. He sang a couple of lines then announced that the title of this other song was "The Cries of the Squid in the Sea". He then sang another couple of lines and stopped to announce "this song is pretty long." I said, "it's only 3 minutes" thinking he was talking about the Kristian Stanfill song and he said, "No... it's 3 HOURS!" And proceeded to keep singing.

Now, if I was a better parent I would've run and gotten the recorder sooner, but at least after 45 minutes of constant improvisation I realized he was serious about this being a THREE HOUR EPIC operetta involving sharks and the poor squid in the sea. I'm uncertain as to the plot - for a while it sounded like the squid was in a video game trying to beat the sharks, but now it sounds like the squid is being prevented from attending school by the sharks (or maybe something else... we haven't heard from the sharks in a while.)

Of course, my son isn't bound by such pedestrian concepts as plot or theme. This is a THREE HOUR EPIC after all, covering great swaths of love and loss - the trials and tribulations of our entire race as projected onto a poor, lonely, crying squid. Weep, weep, my brothers and sisters. Face your mortality in a sobbing calamari!

Recording coming later. Sorry Asher - maybe I'll take it down off our blog when you reach adolescence (said the liar).

Technology

"I beta tested every operating system.
Gave props to some, and others? I dissed 'em.
While your computer's crashin', mine's multitaskin'.
It does all my work without me even askin'."
-Weird Al Yankovich, "All About the Pentiums"

Being on leave has taught me that while I love our kids a lot, really I want to mess with technology for at least a few hours a week. 40+ is an awful lot, so work sometimes still feels like burning out, but being completely without is reasonably rough.

Sharon and I got new iPhones a few weeks ago when our contract with Verizon expired. It's the kind of gadget-y extravagance I feel bad about, but not enough to not do it. We also have an HDHomeRun, so it seemed reasonable to try to figure out how to use VLC to transcode the video from the HDHomeRun in real time, enabling us to watch TV on our iPhones. That part was easy. Then I wrote a script to automatically tune the HDHomeRun based on HTTP GET requests as well as restart the VLC transcoding. Then I made a simple webpage listing all the ClearQAM channels we can tune with the HDHomeRun, with links to this script to start the streaming.

Now Sharon and I can watch Live TV from anywhere in our house on our iPhones, and it took about two hours. It was actually so simple to do I am surprised that there's not already "an app for that." We're one step closer to one of my technological fantasies: being able to display the Super Bowl on every TV, handled device, and computer at the same time on Super Bowl Sunday during our annual Super Bowl party. Everybody needs a dream, right?

It's the little things that make me smile. Only two more weeks of leave left, though.