We love to rent DVDs for our daughter at the local library. They’re free, they’re a good source of entertainment for a week or two, and did I mention they’re free?
Last week, a DVD called Bottle Fairy was brought home. It’s a Japanese cartoon dubbed in English. Now, I could write about the show itself, the characters or the maybe the DVD presentation. No. I’m going to focus on the lyrics of the theme songs, as translated into English and printed at the bottom of the screen.
All you need to know is that “Sensei-san” is the roughly college-age human male that looks after the four little female fairies that live in bottles in his house. Seriously.
Ready? And-a-one, and-a-two…
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I know it’s easy to blame everything on “the economy” these days, but honestly, who wants to pay $55 a month for basic cable service, even in a good economy?
In an effort to reduce our monthly bills a bit while we ride out the poor economy, we decided to axe the cable television service. Our rationale is that we never watch TV on a schedule, and we’ve got broadband internet access, so why pay? We can watch all the shows we’re interested in online. Granted, we won’t be able to watch the season premiere of Lost next week as it airs (ABC.com will have it available for online viewing the following day, if they do it the same way as they did with season four), but is it really that important? Is it $55 a month important, just to see it as it airs? I say no. Two days ago, I spoke with Comcast and cancelled our service. Yesterday, the technician showed up to collect the box and do whatever it is that technicians do to the lines. This is an account of our first day, yesterday, without cable television service.
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Our weekly Geek Dads @ Home podcast is up for your listening pleasure. The team of me, Sam, Joe and Scott covered some great geeky topics!
- The cost of finding good babysitters
- Geeky stuff in Las Vegas
- Companies that offer daycare (or not)
- Scott’s tour of the Zappos headquarters as a guest of Kim Rowley
- Cable television – Sam ditched his a few weeks ago, and I just did too.
- Cloud computing – how much information will we – and our kids – trust to the cloud?
I’ll be publishing a series of diaries detailing our cable-free existence shortly. We finished up with:
- Google’s taking over the world?
- The Big G managing our medical records
- How long will it be before we see Google RFID chips planted in our children?
Fun stuff! Thanks to my fellow Geek Dads for another week of geeky goodness!
Scott Jangro joined the Geek Dads for this episode. Scott is a father of three and meets our geeky requirements, so he was a welcome voice on the show!
We covered a fair range of topics today, including:
- What should be taught in schools – based on a finances vs. math Twitter conversation from earlier in the day.
- They say kids are more mature at earlier ages these days. Are they really?
- College alumni gatherings are changing.
- Twitter phishing and people giving their credentials to random sites.
- Scott’s daycare situation.
- The kids sleeping in swings and swaddling.
- Moby Wraps
- BPA and baby bottles.
- Causing harm to your kids, smoking and asthma.
All in all, it was a fun show, clocking in at a hair under an hour. Good times for geek dads!
Make sure you check out our RSS feed to be up-to-date on Geek Dad happenings, and subscribe to the show in iTunes!
It occurred to me earlier that although I mentioned it frequently on Twitter, at AffSpot and on Facebook last week, I failed to mention that I’m doing a weekly podcast here at my own site!
Geek Dads @ Home is a new podcast hosted by me, Sam Harrelson and Joe Magennis, with Brad Waller joining us in the recording posted earlier today. We are stay-at-home/work-at-home fathers with a background in tech/IT/internet-related interests—we’re geek dads!
Last week we recorded and published our first episode, in which we talked about the birth of my new son, our thoughts on posting photos of our children online, twitter, social media, the holidays and much more.
Today, Sam did the recording and posting (it’ll be my turn next week I suppose!) of #2, Growing Up PowerPoint, and we covered the use of Powerpoint and laptops in schools, video game consoles, baby circumcision, and more on Twitter. We wrap up with a bit about Joel Comm’s iFart app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Winter makes an appearance around 53 minutes in.
Each episode is available at geekdadsathome.com and on iTunes!
Today, I recieved notification that I was being followed by “agus3anto“. I always check the Twitter page of the person who follows me to see if I might want to follow him or her back. If you’re new to Twitter, please follow these instructions to ensure that nobody of value ever follows you.
1. Choose a login that makes little or no sense. Don’t bother customizing the display name.
2. Follow as many random people as possible as quickly as possible. Hit that 2,000 follow limit or die trying.
3. Feel free to fill out your Bio in English, but make sure you misspell the name of the country you’re in (Idonesia) and your primary reason for using Twitter (bussines). For extra points, ignore grammar – ‘i want make bussines’ is perfectly acceptable.
4. Protect your updates so nobody can read what you write before deciding if you’re worth following back.
5. Use the default Twitter background and color scheme. Nothing says “I’m worth following” like a lack of personality.
Follow these five simple rules, and you’ll likely get bored with Twitter and give it up in no time. Thankfully.
[UPDATE - January 2, 2009]
Two things happened which make this entry look like the ramblings of a madman. First, whilst switching this site to a new web host, I somehow lost two images. One was a picture of my son, Ian, which accompanied another recent entry, and I was able to get that image back. The other image was the one that went with this entry, and without it, #3 above just doesn’t have as much punch.
The second thing that happened was the suspension of the “agus3anto” account. Twitter nailed him. Bummer, huh?
