Category: Home Life

Posted on

Star Trek Tech Coming to Your Home

For those of us who grew up reading the Star Fleet Technical Manual and the Next Generation Technical Manual, the development of real world technology that works just like on Star Trek is always fascinating. One example of this is cell phones, which, in function and actual physical design, work just like Captain Kirk’s [pardon my language] ST:TOS communicator.

Other than space-warp propulsion, artificial gravity, and transporters, the designers of Star Trek typically try to predict everyday technology that is about 20 years away from real-world current technology. (Although researchers have successfully space-shifted a laser beam using quantum mechanics, and suspect being able to do so with a simple atom may not be far off, which gives us a basis for transporter technology.)

The voice-aware communications system employed on the Enterprise may be in your home’s future.

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is working on the problem with Social, Mobile, Audio Spaces, a project designed to create shared audio space so you can be in constant communication with people in other homes. Instead of making phone calls, you’ll have an always-on, hands-free connection that picks up your voice wherever you are. It’s jokingly referred to as “the God phone.”

Read the full article here at PC Magazine Online.

Now, if I were able to go into the 23rd century world of Star Trek, I already know how to make myself rich enough to be the envy of every Ferengi. I’d simply patent a nonexploding control console for use on starships …

Posted on

It’s Officially Christmas Season

It is Tuesday, September 13, 2005, and the Christmas season has officially begun. How do I know this? (Click the photo to enlarge, or just go out to your own mailbox.)

Today I retrieved the mail to find Christmas catalogs from both L. L. Bean and eToys. :: sigh ::

I remember countless years of devouring the Sears Wish Book, whose arrival announced the official commencement of the blessed season of unrestrained Commercialism. Today my own dreams of childhood (I once requested a Lego set costing $50) pale next to $179 pogo sticks promising 6 feet of “air” (no kidding!) and $300+ game systems. (Of course we all know the top item on most lists will be the $399 Xbox 360 model that includes backward conpatibility with the existing Xbox.)

Posted on

Man with a Backhoe

For anyone who tried to post/read the Wilcox Family BLOG yesterday, we were affected by the power outage in Los Angeles. When I noticed our mail server was down, I started to file a help request, and got to this page:

Urgent Notice: 9/12/2005

Currently there is a Major Power Outage that has affected Los Angeles Area where one of our data center currently reside.

About half of the servers are currently running using the backup generators.

Unfortunately, the backup generators are not able to supply enough power for the other half of the servers.

We are currently working with the Los Angeles power department to getting power back up for your server.

To read more about the power outage… http://kcal9.com/topstories/topstoriesla_story_255162353.html.

If you have any questions regarding this matter, please proceed and open a support ticket or give us a call. Thank you.

Sales/Support

Posted on

Nashua Commuter Rail

Editor’s note: I moved this post to a this page on Monday, October 24, 2005.

Nashua, N.H., seems too far away from Boston to be a “bedroom community,” but in the quest for affordable housing, crime-free neighborhoods, and other prized essentia of suburbia, Nashua is an excellent choice, especially considering its sales-tax-free shopping and vibrant downtown.

After seeing the huge benefits the commuter rail brought to our former hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts, I am eagerly awaiting the day Nashua becomes a stop on the Purple Line.

I thought I’d start tracking some of the articles that come through Google Alerts about the rail project.

Posted on

NaNi’s Words – Getting Beyond the R2-D2 Stage

Naomi is now 22 months old. She seems to have gotten remarkably taller in the past month, and also seems ever less the baby.

Photos in this post: top—Naomi the explorer (Rattlesnake Hill, elevation 1,231 feet, next to Squam Lake, Holderness, New Hampshire); middle—Naomi enjoys reading Calvin and Hobbes while on a trip to the Lower Falls, Kancamagus Highway; bottom—Naomi shows off her block-tower-building prowess.

Right now, she is in a fascinating speech development stage, after a fairly long plateau (if anything can be considered long in toddler development) of sounding like R2-D2, where we could figure out what she was saying by the emotion put into the words and sometimes matching syllables, to using new words every day. We repeat what we think she’s said back to her in an interrogative tone, so she can confirm it.

One funny example: We were watching the 2004 movie Thunderbirds, and she was watching it quite intently. I asked her, “Do you like this movie?” She replied, “[Unknown syllables], [unknown syllables], [unknown syllables] cute.” “What!?” I responded, “He’s cute?” (Probably referring to Brady Corbet, who played Alan Tracy in the film.) “Uh-huh,” was her answer.

Also like R2-D2, NaNi can understand just about everything we say to her, and has been able to for the past 9 or 10 months—even complex sentences with multiple commands, like, “Pick up your shoes and put them in your room.” Of course, she’s also at the age where she’s developing a strong will (or perhaps a strong won’t), so she is equally good at ignoring our instructions completely when it suits her purposes.

She’s also doing other cool things. She can identify just about everything in a picture or storybook we can name. She recognizes people in photos. She builds block towers, puts together Duplo, and will sometimes partially assemble Lego people. She can climb the long ladder to our slide, and slide down it without help, now that she’s learned to slow herself down. She will come over to me, lie down, and stick her feet up in the air, which means she wants a “pendulum” ride, where I pick her up by the feet and ankles and swing her back and forth while upside-down.

She recognizes the tunes of many songs, and can even hum along to the “Imperial March” from The Empire Strikes Back. She brushes her teeth by herself. She picks out which pair of shoes she wants to wear, and can put them on. (When we got back from vacation, she insisted on wearing her ruby-red dress shoes to bed, as she apparently missed them while we were away.)

In the past two week, she has started using new words, such as up, and even surprised us with lifejacket.

She has managed to wrap every one of us around her little finger.

So, I’m going to try to enumerate her vocabulary. (I’ll be updating this often in the next couple of days, as I think of new words she is currenlty using):

  • ah-ha
  • all done
  • apple
  • baby
  • backpack (to refer to her baby-carrier backpack that we wear, or to her riding onto my back without the backpack, with her arms around my neck)
  • Bible
  • Blue
  • Blue’s Clues (Her absolute favorite television show, although we limit her to about one hour of TV per day. For the record, Steve was a much better host than Joe is.)
  • bye
  • bye-bye
  • cheese
  • cyclopentanoperhydrophenanthrene
  • Chapstick (Yes, I know it’s a brand name.)
  • Chaz
  • Daddy
  • hi (She also—just yesterday—started using hi in conjunction with a person’s name, as in “Hi, Daddy.”)
  • ice
  • Isaac
  • keys
  • lifejacket
  • marble
  • me
  • mine (I taught her that one. I tried teaching her gimme, but Nichelle took issue with that.)
  • Mommy
  • no
  • nooooooooooooooooooooooo (used especially when her brothers are bothering her, or trying to take something away from her)
  • okay
  • oooooooooooooooooooooooh (drawn out with a long o sound, as if in realization or final comprehension of something)
  • ow
  • ooooooooooooooooooooooow (used especially if her brothers are touching her in the slightest way)
  • pee
  • Phoebe
  • please
  • plum
  • pool
  • Pop Tart (Another brand name)
  • stuck
  • thank you (more of a syllabic match than a phonetic one)
  • T.V.
  • up
  • uh-huh (for yes)
  • uh-oh (for no)
  • uh-uh (for no)
  • up
  • Yes, sir! (Only when singing “I May Never March in the Infantry …”; she also salutes with her hand, and does all of the other actions correctly.)

NaNi loves to sing. Some of her songs are more phonetic or syllabic than verbal, but here are her favorites:

  • Blind Man (an old chorus I learned at Camp Fireside)
  • The Emperor’s March, from The Empire Strikes Back
  • The Farmer in the Dell (which her See ‘n Say® plays)
  • Happy Birthday (She surprised us by knowing that one today.)
  • I May Never March in the Infantry
  • Jesus Loves Me
  • Old McDonald had a Farm (another See ‘n Say® one)

And she can identify the following body parts:

  • belly button
  • ears
  • eyebrows
  • eyes
  • fingers
  • hair
  • mouth
  • nose
  • spleen (I’m not kidding)
  • toes
  • tongue
Posted on

Nichelle and NaNi Play Dress Up (At Clark’s Trading Post)

We spent part of the last day of our vacation at Clark’s Trading Post. Nichelle decided that she and NaNi would have one of those old fashioned photos done. (This is exactly the kind of thing my parents would never have done because (1) it might have been fun, and (2) it cost money. According to Nichelle, Naomi had a great time.

Below are the results, with some fun effects. I got tired of just the original and sepia, so I tried Lego (0fficially “Kids Blocks”) and stained glass, which I modified to look more like a mosaic. Click to view the enlarged versions.

Posted on

A Crocodile Monitor on the Loose …

Today I took Isaac, David, and Naomi to RJ’s Exotics to buy some food for the critters. I too was on the lookout for a new snake. (See Jaeden Has Escaped.) As we checked out all of the cool creatures they carry, I spotted some corn snakes.

I was holding Naomi, when Isaac and David quickly came to the front of the store and I heard that a crocodile monitor had escaped. One of the employees came charging up front looking for his gloves. We were told that the front of the store was safe, but not to enter the back of the store. In the meantime, I had Isaac and David go outside and wait by the door.

Things settled down a little and at that time I had narrowed my choice of snake down to two. The monitor was still on the loose, but I finally decided which snake I wanted to buy. Unfortunately, the containers to transport the new Wilcox addition was in the back of the store with the monitor. I told the employee, not to worry, I’d come back in about half an hour or so to buy the snake then. When I returned, I was informed that the monitor had been captured, and that no one was hurt. They can be quite vicious.

So I now have a new female corn snake, which looks pretty much like this one.

See “Name That Snake” for some pictures.

Posted on

Nichelle Has Been Scheming

My wife has been scheming for the past few weeks. I knew something was up, because she would do things like call me on my cell phone, and have the kids chorus, “Neener, neener, neener.” I also ought to have been extremely suspicious, because she volunteered to drop the kids off at day camp, which involved the extra task of getting Naomi ready to leave the house early. All of the usual items were off the list. It wasn’t my birthday, and it wasn’t our anniversary, and Father’s Day has already passed. I have a history of puzzling things out from the smallest of clues, so she wasn’t going to provide even a hint as to what she was up to.

Today was no exception. I knew she wasn’t home because she’d said she would be out of the house all day, and she hadn’t logged on to the computer. This time, however, she assured me that I would find out this evening what was going on.

To my complete surprise (I don’t think I would have figured this out even with a small hint), Nichelle presented me with an extremely well-made dress that she made for Naomi. With the help of our friend Trish Dunn, Nichelle has been learning to sew, something that she has wanted to do for years.

Typical of my wife, her first project was amazingly well done, as the photo above shows. It seems that anything she wants to tackle comes easily to her, from sewing to cutting hair.

Of course, she’s really looking forward to sewing all John’s school clothes for next year. 😉

I’ve already quoted part of Proverbs 31 when talking about Nichelle, but here are a few more appropriate verses from the same chapter:

19She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. 20She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. 21She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet. 22She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.