Today is Rose Red’s 9th birthday. Before today I might have described her as the most thoughtful member of the household, but she seems to have inspired her brothers to greatness.
Cool Breeze, with his own savings, bought her a toy she wanted and a Hello Kitty DS game he thought she would like. “I just want to do something great for her because she always helps me out,” he said, as I suggested he only had to buy her one gift.
Dirt Diver colored her a detailed picture and presented her with breakfast in bed this morning — all his own idea. He served Eggos with whipped cream on our tradtional Happy Birthday plate and ice, cold milk in our flashing-lights celebratory drinking glass.
She was thrilled with the honor her brothers showed her. On the digital side, she loved the video game. On the unplugged side, she basked in the breakfast treat. So I guess it takes both, the digital and the unplugged, to make this birthday complete.
We have seven television channels. We don’t have dish or cable. Just don’t want to go there. And now we don’t need to.
After at least a year of the digital kids gathered around the laptop watching episodes of Hannah Montana, we have finally done the smartest thing ever. Bought a Roku. This digital video player connects to my home internet connection and accesses my Netflix account. Anything I can play instantly on Netflix I can watch through the Roku on my television screen. You can access Amazon too, but I haven’t done that. Now we can have iCarly marathons any time we want — with no commercials.
The small black box comes out of the package and sets up in a matter of minutes. Cost is $99.99 plus $14.99 shipping. You need a minimum speed of 1.2 Mbps, typically met by DSL or cable internet connections, and it works with wireless or wired connections. The quality is slightly grainy, but for someone who got her analog signal from an old-fashioned antenna on her roof until the world went digital, it’s really not too bad. A more high-powered internet connection might improve it.
Not everything is available to play instantly, but there’s enough to keep yourself busy. My new guilty pleasure — MI-5, a thrilling look from the BBC at the world of the clandestine British security service. The guys aren’t as tough as my favorites on The Unit, but they do have British accents.
Five months ago RuneScape was the only thing Cool Breeze could talk or think about. The mmorpg (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) consumed the then 10-year-old. I listened in during a car ride as he and a friend talked for 40 minutes straight about the game, its adventures and strategy.
I wrote before about my worry at delving into this new world. I decided then to inform myself through What They Play, discussions with my gamer brother, and by playing a little myself. Life lessons were learned — someone hacked into Cool Breeze’s account and took all his gold. There were helpful people in the Rune Scape world and there were thugs.
As soon as I was really getting up to speed, it all just stopped. Two weeks into June, RuneScape was abandoned. “Just got tired of it,” Cool Breeze says.
I’m glad it doesn’t consume him anymore — scoring real-life touchdowns and getting to the YAFL Super Bowl are today’s topics of note — but I’m also glad we went through the process. Although I’m still wary of online games, I understand them more and will be ready to assess the next one that come along. And I’m sure another one will come along.
Ever wonder how to behave properly on Facebook? Etiquette expert Thelma Domenici gave the advice that follows in a column early this year. It’s worth reviewing periodically.
“Friend” only people you actually know. That means in making a friend request and in accepting a request.
If you get an unwanted friend request, ignore it. That is the most honest thing you can do and you won’t have the need to undo anything later.
It is acceptable in Facebook to de-friend people, especially if you really have no connection to them even virtually or if you find their views and the items they post on your wall to be offensive. If they discover it and ask you about it, you can say honestly that you wanted to create a more manageable list.
It is fine to make a friend request to someone you’ve just met; however, don’t be upset if they ignore it. Along those same lines, don’t be offended if you find yourself removed from someone’s list of friends. They’re not trying to offend, just creating a more manageable list.
Keep your Facebook site personal, and only accept friends with whom you want to share your personal life. For your work life, create a LinkedIn account. Direct professional contacts there if they request to befriend you on Facebook.
For safety’s sake, take a close look at your privacy settings, especially if you have a lot of marginal “friends.” There’s really no need to share your telephone number and email address, among other things, with everybody.
Do you have any Facebook etiquette advice from the trenches? Any lessons learned? I’m seriously considering a Facebook purge. More on that to come.
Although the skies did not produce the “brilliant fireballs” promised for Digital Mom’s star party (we had a cloudy horizon), we did have a great time reclining on the driveway, using our NASA star finder, and messing around with the flashlight. Dirt Diver picked out Scorpius, the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross before I could.
I plan to keep up with what’s happening in the sky at stardate.org/nightsky/almanac. We’ll be looking for Jupiter to the lower left of the moon on Aug. 5 – 6 and for the Perseid meteor shower Aug. 12-13.
Did anyone else catch the Capricornid meteor show?
There’s something about the starry night that makes keeping the kids up late worth while. Tonight we hope to get a live action show as the Capricornids meteor shower peaks with its “brilliant fireballs.” Skyscrapers Inc. has a good description and how to improve your chances of seeing the shower. We’ll start observing right after sunset in the east-southeast about 20 degrees above the horizon.
For star maps from your location, enter your latitude and longitude, or chose from a list of cities, at fourmilab.ch/yoursky. For a fun game to play as you watch and wait, make a Star Finder, an astronomical variation of the old “cootie catcher” or “fortune teller” featured at NASA’s Space Place. Fun fact: NASA was established this day, July 29, in 1958. Let’s celebrate with a star party tonight.
My mom scared me last week with the news that Kodak would no longer make film.
“What? No film?” I panicked.
Turns out her facts were off. Kodak will stop making Kodachrome, which is a slide film that represents a fraction of 1 percent of Kodak’s total sales of still-picture films, according to the company. Even when I did shoot slides to go with a few magazine stories I wrote in 2003, I used Ektachrome.
It was the panic at the thought of the no more film that really made me think. I love the creative things I can do with digital photos — compiling them onto DVDs, scrapbook pages, easily sharing them with my family — and the instant gratification. Photography is something I spend time on every day, a hobby passed down to me from my mother and my grandmother.
However, I do miss the richness and clarity of my 35mm shots. My Canon EOS Rebel was the first major purchase my husband and I made after we were married. I bought it for my first reporter/photographer job at a community newspaper, as I needed to return the Nikon I’d commandeered from my mom. I used it at various jobs and assignments and at home for 14 years. I literally loved and still love that camera. It takes beautiful pictures.
I avoided digital photography for a long time because I just didn’t like the quality of the images I saw. I didn’t get a digital camera until two years ago. It’s not a good camera, maybe because it was inexpensive. It washes out everything, can’t shoot a moving subject to save its life, and it’s temperamental. But now I’m hooked.
Although I know I can’t abandon digital, Kodak’s announcement inspires me to go buy some film, shoot a roll, and wait with anticipation for the images to be handed to me from behind a photo counter. I know it will be worth it.
You don’t get any more unplugged than sponge rollers placed with precision by your dad.
I have to admit, my husband is the best dad ever. Red Cap, who changed her name from Rose Red as soon as I published the code names post last week, for two days in a row asked me to roll her hair at about 9 p.m. — when she should have already been in bed. On Tuesday on his way out the door, Dad told her to remind him to curl her hair when he got home.
I figured that meant to remind him to remind me, but that night he spent an hour rolling her hair as promised. The results were great and it’s a memory I will never forget.
Lest you think him an absolute saint, she finished dinner the next day and announced, “I’m going to take a shower right now so we can curl my hair again, Dad.”
He laughed. “Oh, no, I don’t think so.”
Not one to be deterred, she rolled it herself. Nothing can stop that girl when she puts her mind to something.
Speaking of determination, don’t sponge rollers still make the best-bouncing, long-lasting curls ever? What “old-fashioned” greats still have a hold on you?
Photo credit: Melissa W. Sais
“Unplugged” is a once-a-week focus on the non-digital that delves into the fun things we do away from the gadgets and the Web and their importance in our lives.
If you haven’t heard about the Federal Trade Commission’s plans to monitor blogs, read the Associated Press story here. The gist is that this summer the FTC plans to approve new guidelines that would clarify the agency’s ability to go after bloggers who are paid or given freebies to review products and don’t disclose that their reviews may have been influenced. The logistics of doing so in the Wild West of blogging is lost on me.
What does this mean for Digital Mom? Nothing today. I don’t get paid nor do I get freebies, and I don’t run affiliate ads on my blog – where you click though my blog to get to Amazon and I get some pennies. If I did get paid, the ethics I hold as a professional journalist and preserving my reputation as a professional would compel me to disclose.
Regardless of how it all pans out for bloggers, it’s a good wake up call to blog readers. It’s always important to read everything with a critical eye and to consider the source of your information — online or off.
Digital Mom ~ Raising Kids in a Digital World explores what parents need to know as our children grow up in the age of mmorpgs, apps and endless gadgets. From what's fun to what to avoid, blogger Melissa Sais is in constant research mode and shares her findings with you. Sais is a freelance writer. See her resume and clips pages for more information.
Today is Rose Red’s 9th birthday. Before today I might have described her as the most thoughtful member of the household, but she seems to have inspired her brothers to greatness.
Five months ago RuneScape was the only thing 
You don’t get any more unplugged than sponge rollers placed with precision by your dad.
