mikefisher.org

In the five years I have been married I am not sure that I have ever hung out laundry. However with the birth of our fourth child I am definitely seeing an increase in the frequency and variety of domestic chores to which I am assigned by my dear wife, and therefore the risk of having to engage in said activity increases by the day. With the onset of winter only a matter of a few months away I finally got around to installing a different sort of clothesline, one that can be loaded while standing in one spot on the back porch. Don’t tell my wife but I would at least like to hang up laundry once to see what it’s like.

Fascinating paragraph from The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom:

“Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally. Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order. But as they have succeeded, men have also been liberated from their old constraints. And women, now liberated and with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume responsibility for them. So nature weighs more heavily on women. In the old order they were subordinated and dependent on men; in the new order they are isolated, needing men, but not able to count on them, and hampered in the free development of their individuality. The promise of modernity is not really fulfilled for women.”

I’ve seen it happen. I think some men are quicker to acknowledge responsibility for a child than for a wife, and in those situations I have seen women birth a child apparently for the sole purpose of chaining a man to a relationship in which he would otherwise feel no responsibility. Our society worships the autonomy of the individual to the point of ignoring divine familial order, and we are seeing the consequences.

One of my biggest questions about the use of the Internet is how to manage its use by children. While I still have not entirely decided how I will relate to the issue (after all I have a few years before I really have to worry about it) I have been researching web protection options. In my opinion accountibility is absolutely necessary even for adults, for which CovenantEyes has worked well in my experience. However CE does not restrict any Internet content and I have been looking for a good filter, free if possible.

I think that K9 Web Protection is a good option. The program is lean and mean. Does what it is supposed to do without making a fuss (unless you set it to bark when a page is blocked). Fully customizable. This is a free, family-friendly version of a program developed for Fortune 500 companies. The only thing I would want is a feature which blocks pages based on a bad-word list.
Lots of positive reviews here.

It’s not often that I wish I had VNC or some other remote access program but I think it might come in handy sometime. LogMeIn seems like a good way to go for this kind of thing.

From the LogMeIn website, this description of LogMeIn Free:

It should be obvious that, like any good Mennonite, I am a junkie for good stuff cheap, and here’s the latest utility that has me all in a kerfluffle. BeInSync. What I have been looking for is a way to synchronize files easily between two computers on a network and this seems to do the trick. Synchronizing as I write.

The catch is that the download is a free 30-day trial of the full version, which can do all the following according to http://www.beinsync.com:

• Access your remote files from any Web browser
• Keep your files in sync between your laptop and desktop automatically
• Maintain a backup copy of your photos and documents at all times

After the trial period you can purchase the full version for $59.95/year. Seems sort of steep for personal use. However the program continues to work on a limited basis (10 items transferred per day). And no autosync or remote access. The way I see it this should still be a good deal. It’s at least worth the one-time sync if nothing else.

I like Google Analytics. A few screenshots telling me who visited this blog the last couple of days:

So much for the MindViz tracker.

Here’s a blog that may actually pay for the time spent reading it. From lifehacker.com:

“Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the software downloads and web sites that actually save time. Don’t live to geek; geek to live.”

A few ways I have benefited so far.

I have just uninstalled Adobe Acrobat Reader, which took around 100MB of hard drive space and took ages to open on my low-end computer. Thanks to lifehacker.com I found a much smaller (13MB of HD space) and faster program called Foxit Reader.

* Edit: This Firefox extenstion is great for managing PDF downloads.

I remember reading about Google Analytics awhile ago but I never looked into it until I read the rave reviews here. I inserted the code and time only will tell what I can learn about you, the unsuspecting readers of this dry, boring blog.

And here is something that I may need someday!

Both of my computers are megahertz-challenged, so I was very interested in what slows computers down. I learned from experience that Yahoo IM completely drags a slow computer into the dirt, but it seems all those unused fonts may have the same effect. Also you can see from the above graphic that slow computers may do better running AVG (my favorite) than Norton.

…that we live in a liberal society.

C.S. Lewis wrote:

“Only liberal societies tolerate Pacifists. In the liberal society, the number of Pacifists will either be large enough to cripple the state as a belligerent, or not. If not, you have done nothing. If it is large enough, then you have handed over the state which does tolerate Pacifists to its totalitarian neighbor who does not. Pacifism of this kind is taking the straight road to a world in which there will be no Pacifists.” – as quoted by Paul Copan.

How interesting that the Amish and most ‘conservative’ Mennonites are more likely than not to vote for the party that is least likely to tolerate their pacifist views.

It took until midnight last night to create a photo birth announcement, but I learned a few interesting things in the process. First of all I didn’t have a good photo editing/enhancing software program so I dug around on the web a bit until I found PhotoPlus 6. I was expecting something a bit cheesey since it was a freebie, but actually it was such a complex program that the accompanying tutorials were absolutely essential. Being a non-graphics-designer the whole concept of layers was foreign to me but I begin to understand how much can be done with it.

Then I decided to try out Wal-Mart’s online tool to upload photos and order prints to be delivered to a local store or to your home. Since my wife was passing by the Huntingdon Wal-Mart today I ordered 40 prints at that store. I had to select the 1-hour option ($.19/print) rather than the regular in-store delivery option since that took 2-3 days for delivery. After I uploaded the picture I discovered that the width-to-height ratio would not work for Wal-Mart’s standard sizes so I had to go back to the drawing board and start over. Finally I got it to look right on a 4×6 print and ordered the prints. There was a nice first-time discount for using the service which brought the price of the prints down to $.15 each. I paid for the prints using my credit card and all we have to do now is pick them up at the counter. What fun.

Here by the way is the finished result. Tell me it isn’t too bad for an amateur!