Rachel had a sewing class tonight, so Jacob and I had another conversation as we were cleaning his room:
Jacob - Can we play the wii after we clean our room?
Me - no, after we're done it's dinner time and then bed time.
Jacob - Mom said we could play the wii after we clean our room
Me - Mom isn't here, I make the rules
Jacob - Mom said so you have to do it
Me - You never do what she says, why do I?
Jacob - Because you're the dad, dads have to do what moms say - it's the rule!

I finally broke down and purchased a kindle. I worked out how much I've spent on real books and what the difference would be if I had purchased a kindle and ebooks instead. I was about 1/2 way to the cheapest kindle they sell, so I decided to go for it (and not carry any more 1200 page books around in my backpack to and from work).

I got the $79 deal. I've had it for a couple of weeks and have read a couple of hundred (real) pages on it (maybe it's just the book I got, but there aren't any page numbers... it just tells me I'm 20% through it). With a little work I was able to get the Standard Works on it. The Church has done a great job for phones and tablets, but I think there is work to be done in the ereader world. On that note, I wouldn't recommend it for Church use, as it seems very hard to quickly jump around to different books and chapters.

Overall I'd give it 4/5 stars. The only negative I have is that it's hard to jump around. I've started using book marks so that might make it a little better. For example, I'm reading a book about a programming language, and I often find myself reading some code thinking, "what does that symbol do again?" I know that area of the book that talked about it, so I head to the table of contents to follow the link to the right chapter and section. Then I flip through a bunch of pages (each real page takes a couple of epages) until I find it. There is a 'search' option, but I haven't had much luck with it. It seemed a little easier to do with a real book, especially once you train the binding on which pages are really important.

I don't mind the advertising (you get ads with the $79 version), you don't see any ads while you've got a book open so it's not like their in your face all the time.

Jacob: why do you always make us clean before we can play the wii?
Me: why do you always make the house so messy?
Jacob: why do you always ruin my life?
Me: why do you always make the house so messy?
Jacob: I'll clean it tomorrow if I can play now
Me: you made it a mess today
Jacob: it's no fair, why do we always have to clean?
Me: is it fair that you get to make a mess and then play games without cleaning up your mess?
silence...
Jacob: how come you always ruin my life, but when I try to ruin your life it never works!
Me: laughing... and laughing some more...

Maybe he'll get his chance when he's a teenager.

Rachel and I were asked to start teaching the 4 year-olds in primary (Sunday school for kids between ages 3 and 11). That is, teach as a team. This lasted almost a week, but before we could teach our first lesson the primary president asked us to split up! now I'm team teaching the 8 year-olds and Rachel is going to teach the 4 year-olds on her own (it's kind of a big class, so they're going to try and find her a partner). Just when we thought we had our dream callings...

Today I needed to delete hundreds of Picasa web albums. I tried using the web interface, but it makes you click into each album, then click delete, which takes about 30 seconds in total. Next I tried the Picasa desktop app, but it also makes you click on each album and then click on delete.

After a couple of Google attempts, I found a command line tool for Google data api's (including Picasa's api)! it's great! I was able to delete all my albums with a few commands of the form "picasa delete --title 2" (this deleted all my albums that started with a "2" namely all the albums that started with the date, like 20xx-xx-xx). A few other commands and I was down to only the couple I needed to keep (like the one that holds the pictures for this blog - yes, there are some pictures on this thing... somewhere).

Anyway, thanks Google!

(after looking at the pictures for this blog, I decided I need to blog more often)

Sam commented about having the last post on my last post so I'm posting again.

Nothing too exciting going on right now. I've been working a lot on a project this last month, and have decided that I really like the work I do. Good thing I've got Rachel to remind me that I need to have a life too.

Yesterday we wen't over to Miriam, Brenda, and Judy's house for a BBQ and croquet - it was great!

I've been fortunate enough to do some pair programming (basically two people working on one computer) at work; it's pretty awesome. The guy I've been working with has about 15 years of professional experience and is a genius (and super nice and humble). The first few hours I worked with him he doubled (maybe tripled) my Linux script writing knowledge. Basically it's sweet.