Quoted, telephonically

My pontification parade continues...

A colleague and I were interviewed by a senior editor from Jupiter Media last week. We chatted about Voice over IP deployment issues, and generally had a lovely conversation with someone who clearly understood what this technology means to regular business folks.

The article, VoIP High on List of Tech Investment Priorities, was published yesterday by VoIP Planet. I know it's geeky and not really related to my more usual forms of writing. But it's still a kick to be on the other side of the writer's pen.

Time of few words

I don't much feel like writing anything creative right about now, so I'll leave the words for another time.

On the admin side, after living through weeks (months) of Blogger's performance-challenged commenting system, I enabled Haloscan comments on the site (don't worry, I backed up the Blogger comments, but need to figure out how I'll implement them in the archives.) We'll give this a try and see if it performs any better. Please let me know if this is an improvement over the old. I may still tweak things in the days to come, so thank you - both pre and post - for your patience.

Many thanks for your words of comfort about our cat (head here for previous entry.) One thing that struck me after bringing the kids home was how our youngest, Noah, wanted to be the first one into the house. He walked in, looked around, and said, matter-of-factly, "The house is so quiet because Shadow isn't here."

He hung up his coat, then walked through to the living room, as if he was looking for the cat. He found Shadow's toy mouse and picked it up with a big smile on his face. He asked me, "Can we put it up in a special place?" Of course, I told him.

More wandering and looking until he found a spot beside the TV. "So I can always see it," he said.

The little man misses his "best cat", but something tells me the lessons in compassion he learned from his furry friend will persist long after the pictures begin to fade.

Endings

We’ve known for a couple of months that our cat’s days have been numbered. Shadow was diagnosed with diabetes in January, and it’s been all downhill since then.

Long story short, he hasn’t responded to anything we’ve thrown at it. Between diet and meds, he falls into the majority of felines who simply won’t get better. His reaction to being at the vet – namely, enough hissing and howling to permanently disqualify him from cat-of-the-month honors – dictates the absolute uselessness of even considering insulin injections.

During his most recent checkup last week, I brought up the dreaded topic of euthanasia when it became painfully clear he was getting much worse. Our vet, Dr. Tom, explained it all to me as we scheduled him to be put down the following Monday (tomorrow). I didn’t have the heart to do it any sooner, and I wanted the kids to have a chance to say goodbye. I swear when he looked at me when I let him out of his carrier back at the house, he knew.

I know, he’s a cat. In the overall scheme of things – a phrase I use a lot these days – a cat’s fate doesn’t amount to a huge impact on the celestial plane. But he’s been a part of our own little world since just after we got married, and he’s the only pet our kids have ever known.

We broke the news to them Saturday morning, trying to balance the wish to keep them in the blissful ignorance of childhood with the eventual and necessary intrusion of the real world of loss. We thought giving them the weekend would be enough.

Zach, our eldest, is having the roughest time. Just over ten years ago, Shadow sniffed the car seat after we brought our first munchkin home from the hospital. The cat seemed unimpressed at the time, but he became a furry friend to the first kid he had ever really known. Zach grew, and grew to love his aloof animal with the extra thumbs on his front paws.

Earlier tonight, Zach said goodnight to his now-much-smaller-than-him pet for the last time. He’s been negotiating for a dog, and the edge in his voice as he asks is enough to break a parent’s heart. He has spontaneously broken into tears through the weekend. Nothing hurts more than to see your child hurting. I wish I knew what to do to make his pain go away (beyond bringing home another furry friend, of course.)

Tomorrow morning, the kids will say a final goodbye before we take them to school. In the afternoon, my wife and I will bring him to the vet one last time. When we come home, the house will be silent.

Time will heal this, as it always does. Soon, they’ll be able to look back at their life with Shadow and smile at all the kooky things he did. They will, unfortunately, learn of losses far more profound than a mere pet. And as they do, I’d like to think that just having had Shadow in their lives will have given them an additional perspective, a few more tools to handle whatever challenges life throws their way.

All from a black cat who, despite never having uttered a word, had more of an impact on three young lives than he ever could have imagined.

Read these folks...

My high school writing teacher (yes, that's you, Marie...may I call you Marie?) once told me that writers are only as good as the writers they read. It was one of the few literary lessons from my high school years that I held onto as I went out into the big bad world of higher education and, later, on-the-street journalism.

To this day, I read a wide range of writers. Some inspire me to write like them. Others simply get me thinking. But you never come away indifferent, which come to think of it is what I try to do with my own scribblings. Here's a quick rundown of a few. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do:

• Steve Tilley: Edmonton Sun columnist and Sun Media games reviewer. He does funny better than anyone in the country. Do not read him over breakfast, especially if you value the integrity of your laptop's keyboard. Don't ask how I know this. His latest piece, Plane truth, flying sucks, is classic Tilley.
• Rob Pegoraro: Washington Post Fast Forward technology columnist. Says it like it is; a rarity in today's tech press. He also hosts regular online discussions (next one is here) about his recent work. Definitely an example of an old media institution understanding how to adapt to the new media reality.
• Gene Weingarten: Washington Post columnist (Below the Beltway), and the oft-referenced heir apparent to Dave Barry's crown. I think that's an injustice to Gene: he's a great writer in his own right.
• Jeff Jacoby: Boston Globe Op-Ed columnist. His take on some of the most contentious issues of the day never fails to get me thinking. For anyone wondering what opinion writing is all about, his column is a self-encapsulated lesson in the genre.

Your turn: If you have any pet writers of your own, feel free to share 'em here.

Along came a spider...

Here's the scene:

I'm finishing up breakfast in the kitchen. Good Friday in Canada is a stat holiday, so we're home with the munchkins. The children are playing quietly in the living room. Suddenly, there's a commotion. No, they're not fighting, and no one has "accidentally" stepped on anyone else. Nothing like that. Rather, our daughter has spotted a spider walking across the ceiling, and has enlisted her younger brother's help to visually track it while she runs to the kitchen to fetch Dad the Spider Eradicator.

Dad grabs a tissue from a nearby box and follows spider-phobic little girl to the scene of the arachnid intruder. The eight-legged dude has arrived at the crown molding and is sitting (standing?) on a spot directly above the kids' computer. Dad grabs a chair and assesses the tactical situation. He usually tries to get them out of the house bloodlessly, but this one refuses to play along. It doesn't move when the tissue is placed next to it.

This is bad: a spider that won't cooperate can easily make a run for it, rapelling down a quickly-spun line of silk into some never-to-be-seen-again hiding place inside a dusty piece of computer equipment. No, says Dad, not today. After what seems like hours but is more likely 30 seconds, Dad squishes the intransigent insect (murderer!) and wipes the spot a couple of times to ensure there are no spider-guts left behind.

Daughter cries, "Ew, there's blood there." Dad confirms, no, it's just a shadow on the edge of the molding. The spider is very much an ex-spider, and all of him (her? it?) is now firmly stuck in the folds of the tissue.

Formerly-squeamish children suddenly lose their fear and become very curious children. They must visually confirm the deceased state of the spider, and insist that father opens up the tissue and shows them.

"Ewwwww....cool!" They both ooh and aah over the state of their father's recently-dispatched victim as they all meander over to the bathroom for the ritual flushing.

The tissue is tossed in. The lever is flushed. The children wave and say goodbye as it circles the bowl before beginning its inevitable trip down sewage pipe lane.

Once it's obvious that spidey is good and gone, the children turn around and go back to their toys on the living room floor. Crisis averted.

End scene.

Quoted, Jerrily

"It's amazing the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper."
Jerry Seinfeld

Publish Day - death penalty

Today's column in the London Free Press, Get tough with violent offenders, reflects my growing frustration with the threat that career criminals represent to the rest of us. Sometimes a little anger is enough to get people thinking.

Admin update

Sorry in advance for the overt geekiness of this entry. I wanted to share a couple of quick infrastructure updates with you before we get back to the fun stuff:

1. New comments are temporarily disabled. I suffered a bit of comment spam at the hands of someone who, shall we say, had a lot of free time on his hands. Bad news: all you good folks won't be able to post for a bit. Good news: I'm building a pretty good case study for process steps to deal with a cyberstalker (ever notice how these morons don't have the guts to use their real names?) More good news: I should get some articles and at least one opinion piece out of it. Thanks for your kind comments, Thumper!
   
2. I'm wireless, sort of. I seem to have sniffed out an unsecured wireless LAN connection in the neighborhood. Tsk tsk to whoever's running that network for being such a security slacker, but woo-hoo for me. So here I sit on the living room floor in the middle of the night, typing my first wireless blog entry (all together now: who cares?) Still, I think it's rather neat. Maybe tomorrow I'll install my own damn wireless router. Hey, there's an idea!
   

Until I figure out a way to balance comments and security, please e-mail me your thoughts and I'll post them later. Thank you for your understanding. More later...

Little man hangs out

I wouldn't wish illness on anyone. But I've got to admit it was nice spending a couple of days at home last week with our ailing four-year-old son.

The fact that my wife is a teacher and I'm a writer often influences our planning when one of the kids gets sick. Since all I do is toss words at a screen until some of them stick, I can easily work from home - or a suitably-equipped Starbucks (yes, I'm dreaming. For now.) It is decidedly more difficult for her to phone it in to her class. Oh, I suppose her kids could make do with a webcam.

Oops, maybe I've just given a bean-counting school district administrator somewhere a really bad idea. But the truth is elementary school teachers need to be in class. That's a bummer when your little people wake up too sick to leave the house.

As of Tuesday, little man had been up for most of the two previous nights. We weren't sure what was worse: the high fever, his coughing, or his general state of restlessness as he tried to drift off in between the two of us. By that morning, my wife was starting to look greener than our son, and I got on the phone to get him a Doctor's appointment. I did this only AFTER sending the now-routine "my-kid-is-sick-so-I'll-be-online" today message to the office.

By mid-day, he had been diagnosed with a throat infection. I gave him his first dose of antibiotics and he was happy. He ate apples, crackers, and anything else he could get his busy little hands on. Mom brought home the DVD for The Incredibles, which made him and his elder siblings very happy.

I got a ton of work done. And despite the fact that I still had a ton of work left to do, it felt good to power through a mountain of stuff while a munchkin played at my feet. Every once in a while, he'd quietly call my name and ask for something. A movie, an apple, some crackers, and even water for the cat (oops, glad he caught that).

He smiled the whole day, and was ever the trooper when it came time to take his meds: like a champ, he insisted on taking the syringe (we fill needle-less syringes with the medicine...less fuss and mess than spoons) in his hands and self-administering the dose. For four, he's remarkably easy to have around.

I found myself periodically staring at him. Occasionally, he'd catch me in the act and give me his Silly Daddy look. But I couldn't help but wonder what I ever did to deserve a kid like him, or kids like his brother and sister. They're not perfect - indeed, whose children are? - but they're little slices of us. Pretty magical, even when they're not feeling well.

Vacation images - fins

A small picture of a small scene often ignored by the beachgoers who walk past the lifeguard tower. Simple and overlooked: definitely my speed.

What small aspect of your world will you be staring at today? Take the time to peer deeper. You might be pleasantly surprised with what you see.

Bumper-to-bumper parenting

As much as I hate being off my bicycle during the winter, my malaise is pretty much offset by the fact that I get to drive into town with my wife and kids every weekday morning. London's not a huge city, so we're only talking a total of 15 minutes in the car. But that's often enough for something notable to happen. With that in mind, I give you yesterday morning:

We were sitting at a red light in one of London's infamous traffic jams - you know, seven cars in a row - when my wife noticed an arm come out of the driver's side window of the van in front of us. The driver tapped on a cigarette in the universal better-to-mess-up-the-road-than-my-vehicle maneuver before retracting said hand inside for another cool drag of some luscious nicotine.

My ever-observant wife shook her head in disbelief upon spotting Part 2 of this sad scene: the handle of an infant carrier in the middle of the rear seat. Lovely, we both thought at the same moment: a parent who cares so much about the welfare of his child that he'll smoke inside the vehicle.

Two or three decades ago, when smoking wasn't the social equivalent of leprosy that it is today, perhaps this was considered acceptable behavior. As a child, I can recall many an evening when my parents, afraid to offend visitors to our home, would allow them to literally turn the air blue while I tried to barricade myself in my room to escape the fumes.

Times have changed, yet this kind of thing still persists. Of course, the times also dictate that we keep these things to ourselves, since you never know when someone will beat you with a tire iron for so much as tsk-tsking in their general direction. So we said and did nothing.

The light turned green. The van drove away. A baby sat in the rear, breathing the smoke of a parent too stupid to understand, or to care.

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BTW, I'm not exactly unbiased on this issue: I wrote a column entitled Fuming over smoking litterbugs last July. I guess that makes me a bit of a militant when it comes to smoking-related issues. I'm OK with that.

Going nowhere...

Thoughts?

On crime and punishment

I have to admit I pretty much cheered when I first heard that Scott Peterson was sentenced to death for killing his eight-month-pregnant wife.

Call me a cruel and inhuman human, but a part of me likes knowing that some jurisdictions in the world still aren't afraid to give back to murderers what they gave to their victims. It's my ultimate revenge fantasy, lived out by proxy.

It bothers me immensely that we live in a world where victims can be repeatedly victimized by criminals, but those same criminals can go to prison and get a degree. I know I'm oversimplifying, but the unfairness of crime and punishment in today's society is enough to make most of us law-abiding folks nauseous.

So where do you stand? What do you think we should do with the likes of Mr. Peterson? How can victims be treated more fairly in the eyes of the law?

Quoted, relatively

I'm working my way through a fair bit of writing this eve, so I've got precious little time to write anything coherent here. Then again, when do I ever write anything coherent? (Don't answer that!)

Still, I came across a quote from Albert Einstein that I'd like to share. Why him? Because he never fit the mold. He failed math and generally had difficulty fitting into life's established order. He blazed his own road and in doing so redefined how we look at the world - and beyond. Imagine if he had listened to the naysayers and followed the conventional route.

I know, frightening. Now think of all the people around you - or even you, yourself - who are at risk of tumbling into the same trap. Have you ever doubted yourself because someone dismissed you or your gift? This ought to change your focus a bit:

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
Albert Einstein

Your turn: what quotations do you use to keep yourself pointed in the right direction?

A writer's milestone

Not a day goes by that our children don't do something that causes us to stop dead in our tracks and realize that right under our noses, things have changed forever.

Today's news: seven-year-old Dahlia started learning cursive, or script. As usual, it got me thinking about how moving beyond block-letter printing represents another step on her long road to adulthood. It also got me thinking how I wanted to mark the date in some small way, so here it is.

The earth didn't move and the skies above our house didn't open up when she carefully wrote her name in pink so that I'd see, for the first time, what her real handwriting looks like. But it was nonetheless important to us. This time thing continues to march in only one direction. I hope I'm doing a good enough job making notes along the way.

And if I'm not, another member of the family can now take over in case my writing hand gets tired.

A bad few days

When you're four, you don't have a job, pay bills, or fight rush hour traffic. You don't fret over your hair or your clothes, either. You simply live in a happy bubble of childhood (I really should copyright that term) where you're generally happy and carefree, and your sadnesses tend to come not from the politics of others, but from the hands of a sibling.

Noah's bad weekend got started a little early last Friday morning when he bumped his face on the bathroom vanity while playing with his big sister ("It was an accident!" said she. Isn't it always?)

As always, Mom was there with an ice pack, a hug and some soothing words. I did my usual run for the camera and took this picture of the sad clown. Thankfully, beyond the bruise on his face - it's always fun watching everyone's reaction at the grocery store...no, I don't abuse my kid...please go back to choosing between the Alpha-Bits and Frosted Flakes and stop judging my parenting - he's fine.

Then he spiked a fever last night, so Debbie and I will alternate working from home today. Yet, despite his run of bad luck the last few days, he sits pyjama-clad beside me on the couch, watching Shrek 2, with a rather contented smile on his face. He's also found time to make nice to his cat, to wave to the neighbors on their way to work, and to try to fill his own bowl of Cheerios from the pantry (don't ask.)

I'll keep this morning in mind the next time I approach meltdown because some overstressed doofus with challenged hair and clothing tried to run my bike off the road. Maybe that bubble doesn't have to be limited to kids after all.

Zach's mosaic

It's tough being surrounded by a wife and kids who have artistic abilities in their blood when I'm still struggling with stick figures. But I make do: they generate amazing creations that end up on shelves, walls, and wherever else they will be seen by visitors to our home.

Here's Zach's latest. Suffice to say we've been very careful about where it goes. He's done an amazing job rebuilding it from its first fall...we don't want to go through a second one!

The question is: where should we hang this for maximum effect?

Publish Day - a tech opinion on blogs

I logged in this morning to find a lovely surprise waiting for me: My latest opinion piece for Processor.com, Time For Some Blogging Common Sense, was published online on Friday.

I love writing for Processor.com because I get to combine the two things that I love to do during the day: write, and write about technology. This piece touches on something that I know is near and dear to the heart of everyone who reads this blog, so I hope you take a few minutes to read through and then rant right back at me in a comment.

This whole publishing thing is so cool, isn't it?

Quote - a writer's philosophy

My friend, Tim, sent a quotation to me earlier today, and I thought it would be appropriate to share here.

As many of you know, I write an Op-Ed column for the London Free Press. In the process, I have fairly regularly stuck my neck out on issues that tend to polarize readers. Every time I've dug my stake in the ground, I've done so with the firm knowledge that I'd be sitrring up a tempest in the process.

But I've never done so in fear or with any sort of hesitation. I'm privileged to have the opportunity to regularly publish, and I decided early on to use the space to change the world - even if it's in some small, barely-visible manner. If it prompts some people to disagree with me, I'm absolutely fine with that. At least I've reached them. And even if they want to hurl partially-open ketchup packets at me, that's fine, too. Perhaps I've helped them view their world through a slightly wider perspective - which is really all that matters.

The writer is Thomas Merton. The work is True Solitude:

"If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people, you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn.”

Your turn: I guess you know how I feel about Mr. Merton's words. How do they make you feel? Do you have any other similar quotations to share in a comment? (I'll be posting more of my own, but I'm hoping you'll feel free to share some from your world, too.)

Carmi sent me...

I've been seriously remiss in recognizing the zillions (OK, maybe not that many...yet, but plenty nonetheless) of visitors who have graced my site and taken the time to share their thoughts since I went live last year. Without you all, I'd be barking in the wind - and believe me, that's a pathetic thought. So I'm going to take a cue from the queen of blogdom and start my own "Carmi sent me..." tradition. Periodically, I'll pick a blog of note and let y'all know about it. Sound OK? Cool...let's roll...

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I'm not sure if you've had a chance to visit Michele Agnew's site. If you haven't yet done so, drop in and look around - and please let her know Carmi sent you. She paid me a huge compliment earlier this week, and I believe she deserves to be recognized for her own contributions to this nascent medium.

What stands out about Michele is the fact that she turns her focus completely outward. Most folks write about themselves. Not in this case. This site is all about the people who visit. And a lot of people visit. After a couple of minutes reading through her extensive comment logs, you'll know why.

It's hard to explain, but suffice to say it reaffirms that there are a lot of good people floating around the blogosphere. The world needs more of that now.