GE puts the whole smart grid world in your hands

Some awesome internet magic that will totally impress your kids.



plugintothesmartgrid.com

The OC

Wazzup kids! My supremely judicial home-girl, Sandra Day O'Connor, or as I call her Sandy D, is on da scene droppin' some old school civics knowledge on your new school IMing behinds.

OurCourts.org fools, check it!

Information Regurgitation

A few more things found on the internets that I think are worth passing on.

• A fun little paper whale art project via Swissmiss via Squared Eye
• Geekdad's "It's a Good Time to be a Twin Cities Maker" post mentions several reasons but the one I think is really worth pointing out here is Make: Day at The Science Museum of Minnesota on March 14th.
• Chalkboard paint on the walls is way cooler when it's in Mo Willems' house.
  

Today, A New America Begins

Today, YOUR America Begins!

Q & Ozzi,

Your mom and I have done our best to keep things around you as politically neutral as possible. It's important to us that you both grow up able to form your own informed opinions while able to respect the opinions of others.

Today, however, transcends politics. Today marks a beginning for your generation. A generation that will have a black man as your first memory of The President and no recollection of a day in which you couldn't just watch historic moments you missed because of preschool or nap-time by simply turning on a computer.

Baby it's cold outside!

So here's a little something to pass the time: Build A Squid

Museum of Childhood

This ad really makes me wish we were back in London.... that and the near absolute zero temperature outside my frosty windows.

Googley Eyes

I made two discoveries on the internets tonight:

1. I am a bum


2. My review of Big Plansis quoted on Bob Shea's website.

Modern Times

One might argue that my not having a super-high-tech phone like the awesome new G1 (seriously Google, you and Tmobile have my address. How shameless do I have to get here?) would disqualify me from the title of "modern dad". Well, one might be right, but I'm trying. For example;

Q is getting quite familiar with computers and has his own XO Laptop,

the boys have their own ipod that even Ozzi is learning to operate,

and this weekend we went to a party hosted by someone we only knew via the internet. Our internet real life friend Pumpkin Girl put on a great party for the kids and the adults as well. She generously sent everyone home with her highly sought after handmade baby clothes available on etsy.

Q scored a rockin' guitar shirt.

Ozzi got his dirty little hands on one of the famous tiesies. All we need now is a pair of red baby Cons and Ozzi could be Chuck for Halloween.

Internet Schooling

The Alphabet





Geography





Math, Economics, and Contracts



Geometry

DIY Parenting or Raising MacGyver

I've done the occasional dabbling in DIY projects like the playgarden and Q's robot costume but lately I've really started to re-catch the "hardware hacking" bug that I had as a kid. Spurred on by the short distance our dollars seem to be going these days and Q getting to an age where building stuff and basic science is almost as cool as Word Girl, I've found some fantastic resources and communities online.

• The best DIY site I've found out there is Instructables.com. An open forum for everyone to post and use instructions on building most anything you can imagine.
• Curbly and the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories are two great DIY blogs that are either posting their own projects or pointing us all to the innovative ideas of others. Curbly is centered on design while EMSL registers a bit higher on the geek berometer.
  
• ReadyMade and MAKE are DIY magazines that also have great websites. A subscription to either one of them will definitely be on my xmas list this year.

And then there is Bre Pettis. Bre is the Jesus of the modern DIY movement. Formerly with MAKE, Bre is now creating videos for Etsy, blogging, and doing 700 billion other things to bring all us hipsters into the hardware hacker fold.
Coolest of all, his pilot tv show, History Hackers, just aired on The History Channel. (If you're like us and don't have cable you can find a torrent file online if you look hard enough.) The show is AWESOME! It even held Q's attention and he's 3... and its not a cartoon. History Hackers manages to perfectly blend Mr. Wizard, Nova, and Mythbusters together with a DO try this at home theme. The show is very well produced but still maintains a genuiness. I think the reason HH captures the attention of both adults and children is Bre's honest excitement for what he is presenting. Bre's ability to translate something like Nikola Tesla's ideas to something palpable like turning your bike into an AC generator with a few basic household items makes HH one program that I will make a point to sit down and watch with Q (and ozzi provided the show gets picked up for multiple seasons).

Back to school shopping season

As we so often do, the boys and I stopped into Siji Kids while out for a casual stroll through our hood. They seem to be ready for fall with a second mortgage worth of sweet looking duds for the kids. They have a boat load of new stuff from monster republic, one of my favorite kids labels. We talked to Kyle, co-owner with his wife Macy, who showed us a rockin' robot shirt with some old school Space Invaders on the back. This reminded me of Blik. Or at least the kick ass wall decals they have. I forgot the actual Blik name.

Kyle seemed pretty interested in the decals so I jogged my memory and found them online again. Then I went to sijikids.com to get a contact email to forward him a link to blik. While in search of an email address I discovered that Kyle's photo studio, Siji Studios, has one of the coolest and fun to just play with websites I've been to in a while. As if they're not busy enough, the Siji Empire also appears to includes graphic and web design. And to tie all this together, The Siji Blog.

Steve's Face and a Windy Vagina

During my senior year in high school I was briefly in a band we called Steve's Face. And by "in a band" I mean I just wrote the songs. And by "wrote the songs" I mean I wrote a bunch of lyrics and suggested wacked-out concepts to Dave, the prodigy. Dave took care of the whole music part of the writing process. We were like Elton John and whoever the hell that other guy is that wrote Elton John's lyrics. The third guy in our revolutionary crew, Jason, was the guitar playing frontman. If nothing else, Jason had the excess part of the frontman persona down pat.

Our songs were quite varied. There was a heavy thrashing tune called Steve about a kid and his vulgar relationship with his mother. There was Land of the Lazy Eye, a psychedelic ballad, again, about Steve. I wrote a little ditty titled The Anarchy Polka, pretty self explanatory. We even had a Mariachi style piano number that was going to include gun shots and us yelling "eye eye eeeyyyee!".

Then Beck released Odely. It blew my mind. It was everything that I was dreaming for Steve's Face but a million-gazillion times better than anything we could ever dream up. Steve's Face was soon disbanded. What was the point? We'd been bested... times infinity.

Anywho, my point in this story is that the same sort of thing has happened again. This time with the blog The Wind In Your Vagina by Black Hockey Jesus, a fellow daddy blogger. This guy is always hilarious and often touching. He takes smartassery to an whole new level in blogging and writes like I can only dream to.

This time however I'm not giving up. I'm instead comforted that there is at least one other guy out there that might have a hard time telling respectable adults the title of his blog.

So there, the title of this post has been explained.

We're so excited and we just can't hide it.....

NBC Olympics

Old School Olympics tshirts

Picture Books A Go Go

Though a bit limited so far, LookyBook.com is a super way to find new picture books for the wee little ones. You can set up a bookself to share what books you and your spawn are reading over and over and over and over and... Or you can use it the way it should be, a wish-list of books that friends and relatives can go to for gift ideas. At least that's what I did because they don't have much for books that we already have at home. The feature that puts lookybook above all else though is that you can actually look at entire books on-line and even embed them like this:

Just click on the book.




And yes, I know the illustrations in the Jabberwocky book is pretty dark for the little ones. That one would be more for me. I'm weird like that.

Green Babies

For those of you that are looking for ways to become more environmentally friendly, you know, for the kids, and have stockpiles of cash that you saved by selling your Hummer and biking to work everyday. Check out Tiny Decor and they will tell you where to go for those $200 organic cotton print shades you just have to have for the nursery. Or you can wait for them to open their online "boutique" sometime this summer. (Sorry, the last shred of manliness I have forces me to put words like "boutique" in quotes.)

The second best way to experience nature

Obviously getting off your butt and going outside is the preferred method to experience the splendor of our natural world but when those adventures are met with road blocks such as todays dreary weather (I know. I'm a wuss.) it's good to know that websites like earth-touch.com exist.

With new high definition video of wildlife from around the world available daily, Earth-Touch is the best nature website that I have found. Possibly greater than the beautiful high quality footage is the narration, or more accurately, the limited narration. Just a brief description of what you are seeing. No over dramatizing or dumbing down.

They also have a weekly highlights podcast on itunes. Which could be very valuable on our upcoming plane ride, should we decide to include the computer in our carry-on arsenal.

Hulu Rules!

Hulu is the future of television. I know there are more sites like this but Hulu is one of the better ones thus far. Now I can watch some great shows that I couldn't watch before because we don't have cable, like the Sundance Channels Big Ideas for a Small Planet. I can watch shows whenever or wherever you can find an internet connection. All free. You just have to put up with the occasional McDonald's ad.

Get your geek on.

I know computers are supposed to count as the "screen time" that pediatricians say are destroying our children's brains. At least the computer is interactive. Plus, in order for him to be able to use the computer I would have to stop. So his computer screen time is still pretty limited. Anywho, here are a few things I've found on the internet that Q and/or I have been enjoying lately.

starfall.com, Q is loving this reading education website.

The Geekdad blog at Wired.com. All sorts of great things that combine children and technology/science. Like a website that lets you spell out your child's name in Elements from the periodic table.

Freerice.com, If you ever find yourself board with the internet, why not test your vocab and feed hungry people around the world at the same time... for FREE! This site is genius and I would expect several similar sites to start popping up all over like the Crocus in our front yard.

Livin' La Vida Local: Art, Crafts, and The Internet

Thanks to Pumpkin Girl, our new internet friend in Minneapolis, I've discovered a whole new world of great local artists.

Saint Paul Craft Mafia, of which Pumpkin Girl is a member, is a local gang of crafty revolutionaries. Many of them are selling their wide variety of wares on their own websites and sites like etsy, which is definitely worth regular perusing.

Turns out Adam Turman has done all sorts of illustrations and paintings that I have seen on everything from beer labels to the cover of Vita.mn without realizing that they were all from the same local artist. I really like the cityscapes of local landmarks that he does and will be getting a hold of him for all custom painting that I dream of getting on the boys future skateboards, snowboards, etc. Now that I think of it maybe I should look into getting Q's skateboard/bike helmet done. Or maybe I should just stop spending money for a while.

Then thanks to Turman's post about his new custom pillows made by his friend Nate, I can fall asleep dreaming of a custom Vinyl-Lux laptop bag or some flashy orange robot pillows.

I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees....

Q's favorite Dr. Seuss story animated. I love the internet!