Hockey!

I posted this photo directly from my Nokia 6600 using a photo blogging applicaton (this post text excluded). I always seem to have better ideas once I use a prototype, so naturally, I have a great many cool features to add to the app.

Hockey!

She so wants to come

First Snowball lay on the bag when it was closed. Then she hopped in after I opened it. And when I closed it and stood it up, she jumped up. One thing I think she didn’t know – I’m off to Hong Kong. Are cats fair game in Hong Kong? I don’t know, and I don’t think Snowball wants to find out.
– Moblogging from my Nokia 6600 (in the cab on the way to the airport) 🙂
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More thinking of mobile blogging

So I have been giving more thought to mobile blogging and have realized some big gaps.

Blogging via email stinks. You can’t really control what you are posting. But, let’s not get some über-client that is too cumbersome. So far, the basics for a moblog client would be:

  • simple text entry with minor formatting (main, extended, and excerpt text entry available thorough menu, not on main screen)
  • in-line posting of images (going to image gallery to upload an image, but also inserting image link to better position)
  • offline mode, to prepare multiple article and then upload all at once
  • firing up Opera after post
  • list of posting (like Ecto) for better managing
  • categories!

Zempt is a good example of a simple yet thorough PC client. I see many of these features being the basic ones to be folded into a mobile blogging client.

With a client on the phone, some of the headaches I have now – no category selection, no automatic browser feedback loop, and emailing issues – would fall by the wayside.

Of course, being a Series 60 junkie, I want a Series 60 client – especially for my Nokia 6600. Any takers? I’d be willing to consult. 😉

Requisite child art photo

Here’s a picture of a neat collage in a box top that my daughter made at day care.

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While day care may look like parents can’t take care of their kids, I keep reminding myself that my daughter is surrounded by really creative people who love to teach children new things.

My role is to teach things as well, but at day care at least, I know her time is well spent – not just an ‘in loco parentis’ situation.

Hey, taking care of kids is work. Unfortunately, somewhere in the Industrial Revolution, we became isolated families, instead of this large social network of sharing the responsibilities of raising the children. While not living in some sort of commune, I am fortunate to have friends and family with whom at various times have split care of the children, freely giving time to one family to give them a break or help them out. Sure, we don’t take the other children in for days at a time, but a night here or a day there, sure make the difference.

It’s this support network that has made parenting less challenging and more rewarding.

Sunny view

View from our old offices, overlooking the working harbour Länsisatama in Helsinki. This photo doesn’t do justice to the sunny, expansive view with ships and islands and cranes.image103.jpg

Boston Globe Magazine – The Science of Her Art

I am a scientist-turned-writer. While writing gives me joy, the learning, discovering, and research into neat new subjects is what gives me joy in science. I came across this article on Andrea Barrett who not ony intensely researches her books, but folds into her works the details and feelings of scientific discovery.

I need to go out now and read some of her stuff, both for the thrill (they sound exciting) and for the technique.

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Magazine / The Science of Her Art

In person, Andrea Barrett does not seem like the kind of woman who has slept in a tent on an Arctic ice sheet in 30-degree weather — though she did just that in 1997 to research her novel The Voyage of the Narwhal, plunking down the entire sum of a Guggenheim grant to travel for six weeks with her husband, biophysicist and photographer Barry Goldstein, to the northern edge of Canada’s Baffin Island in Nunavut.