May 21, 2010

On Emailing Posterous

Posterous likes email

I've never used Email to post an article. I mainly use the Share on Posterous Javascript Toolbar button.

I wonder how well customising this will work?

Testing

Posted via email from franksting's posterous

May 19, 2010

On telling bedtime stories to Ms4

As a father one of my favourite things is bedtime stories with my daughters. Reading is not just something I love to do, but something I've done since I was very very little. Legend has it I was reading my first proper books at 5 and upon entering proper school at a little over 6 was bringing my own Famous Five and Secret Seven Books to the class library because "the ones already there were only for babies".

At least that's how I remember it. My mother may dispute this.

Normally at bedtime we have stories ranging from 10 Little Rubber Ducks by Eric Carle to Reading is Great to Miffy. Tonight at bedtime was more than subtly different. Ms4 asked me if I could read one of my books to her.

Now I've tried this before, The Hobbit has been produced and paragraph one of page one was attempted with indifference. Since we've had kids the opportunity to retake the steps of my boyhood hero has been one of the things I've looked forward to immensely. So imagine my horror some months back when it was rejected out of hand at the first attempt.

Since that failure I've sustained myself with an almost convincing argument; they were just too young.

My first reaction tonight was it was going to be the perfect opportunity to reacquaint my offspring with Hobbits & Dragons, Wizards & Dwarfs as described so vividly in the prose of the erstwhile Mr. Tolkien.

Imagine my surprise when the first book which came out of the shelf was The Perfect Gift for a Man. Unhesitatingly I joined it with a couple of other books (including the fantabulous Room on the Broom), grabbed a cup of Milk for Ms4 and sat down with her to read.


Cuddles ensued, accompanied by the prose of a certain Ms. Annik Skelton.

I'm pretty sure Ms4 had no idea about most of what I was reading, so the descriptions of Blood, Guts, sewing people on the kitchen floor, sexually transmitted diseases and certifying corpses with Daddy at 5 would hopefully have gone right over her head.

While The Perfect Gift for a Man was a Perfect Gift from Gavin Heaton to me, because I wrote a post for the Manweek initiative from ReachOut Australia. However I nervously chose not to submit for the book and hadn't read all of the stories in it previously. Telling Neekatron's story to my little girl while I read it for the first time seemed amazingly inspired to me.

Because if my girls ever feel they can hold me up as the standard for all men who ever enter their life, as Annik does with her dad, I'd be the proudest Dad alive.

May 02, 2010

Honesty in Football - and my own thoughts on 44,000 tweets

I say: 'Come on, you have two personalities?'" Assou-Ekotto says. "I can't listen to people when they speak like that. I know that they lie, and I hate lies. Me, I am not like that. I am honest all of the time, although the truth is not always good to say.

As I drive past 44,000 tweets this morning, let me associate with Mr Assou-Ekotto's sentiment. As Jason Fried writes in ReWork, it's all Wabi-Sabi. If you like it, you follow me, even if you don't like it, maybe you do too. Perhaps just to figure out what rot I'll write next. That's okay, I might be sometimes wrong or just plain stupid, but I'm sharing my honest position.
Does that work against me sometimes? Perhaps. But at least you know what you are getting.
There are no Plastic Flowers here.

Posted via web from franksting's posterous

Desmond Tutu: Arizona: The Wrong Answer

The police talk today about how they do not wish to, and will not, engage in racial profiling. Yet faced with the option of using common sense and compassion, or harassing a person who has done nothing wrong, a particularly sinister aspect of Arizona's new immigration law will be hanging over his head. He can be personally sued, by anyone, for failing to enforce this inhumane new act.

...

How far can this go? We lived it -- police waking a man up in the middle of the night and hauling him off to jail for not having his documents on his person while he slept. The fact that they were in his nightstand near the bed was not good enough.

...

Abominations such as apartheid do not start with an entire population suddenly becoming inhumane. They start here. They start with generalizing unwanted characteristics across an entire segment of a population. They start with trying to solve a problem by asserting superior force over a population. They start with stripping people of rights and dignity - such as the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty - that you yourself enjoy. Not because it is right, but because you can. And because somehow, you think this is going to solve a problem.

...

The problem of migrating populations is not going to go away any time soon. If anyone should know this, it should be Americans, many of whom landed here themselves to escape persecution, famine or conflict. With the eyes of the world now on them, Arizona has the opportunity to create a new model for dealing with the pitfalls, and help the nation as a whole find its way through the problems of illegal immigration. But to work, it must be a model that is based on a deep respect for the essential human rights Americans themselves have grown up enjoying.

If it looks like Racism, if it sounds like Racism, if it feels like Racism, pretty sure it is Racism

Posted via web from franksting's posterous

May 01, 2010

Michael Pollens Food Rules (via Darina Allen)

be guided by Michael Pollen, who wrote the Omnivores Dilemma published by Puffin, in his book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.

- Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food.
- Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.
- Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup
- Avoid food that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients.
- Avoid food products containing ingredients that an eight year old child cannot pronounce.
- Avoid food products that make health claims.
- Avoid food products with wordoid "lite" or the "low-fat" or "non-fat" in their names.
- Avoid foods you see advertised on TV.
- Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
- Eat only foods that will eventually rot.
- Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.
- Buy your snacks at the farmer’s market.
- Don’t ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.
- If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.
- It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.
- It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language

Sounds good to me

Posted via web from franksting's posterous