La Familia Brophy

I am painting Nathan’s dresser all funky so his clothes are displaced. Some of them are in a plastic box in the living room. Today I left the lid off for a second…

We took Nathan apple picking today at Honeypot Hill Orchard. He had a pretty good time riding around on Ben’s back and eating bites of apple that I fed him. It was soooooo crowded and crazy. As usual the best part was eating the carmel apples and cider donuts when we were done. We were able to trick Nathan into eating a whole wheat graham cracker while we pigged out on sugar and fat.

Here he is in the pumpkin patch:

When I want an extra special lunch break, I walk down Vassar street past the Stata Center Construction sight (which I enjoy admiring) hang a left on Main Street and stop at the Poppa and Goose truck outside the A.I. Lab. When it’s my turn I say “Peanut tofu brown rice no salad.” I eat my ambrosia in Technology Square. I have been doing this for about 5 years, since my brief stint as part-time admin assist at the AI Lab. I had an awesome office there, but I was completely unsupervised and utterly bored. I mostly watched this truck from my office and taught myself to use Adobe Illustrator on my brand new beige Powermac G3. Today the tofu was fried just right, there was enough sauce for all of the rice and the weather was amazing. I think I had my peak peanut tofu experience.

Nathan’s started saying “Mama” and when he says it he clearly means Lisa. So it’s word number two. What’s with that? Don’t I rank? I am referred to as “Papi” in our house. I feel like if I’d been little more traditional and gone for “Dad” I might have “Dada” by now. But no, I’ve got a name that requires precise lip and breath control. He is working on it though. He has more than once attempted to refer to me, but comes out more like “pabwa” or “wabha” or something. Still, I know what he means, and he means me and that just rocks.

Here’s the boy with “Mama” playing at the Franklin Park Zoo yesterday:

Last night Lisa and I watched Revolution OS, a documentary about the GNU Project and Linux. I’m too hooked on Mac OS X to use Linux, but I am curious about it. The internet is really built around the concept of the free exchange of information and ideas, and free software has that same ethos.

Easy exchange of information is the source of the hulabaloo over file sharing, especially of music files. I believe that sharing is not the same as stealing. It’s also not the same as selling, which is why it’s such a threat to record companies. One thing that gets lost in the debate over file sharing is that there is nothing inherently illegal about MP3s, or about sharing them. There is tons of good music available for free, that is is perfectly legal to download and share. The website Fingertips is one amateur music lover’s catalog of legally available MP3 downloads. It’s great stuff, there is no guilt in grabbing a copy of some really good music. Download, listen and share.

I would love to see a good system that proves a song is available to share (the folks at Creative Commons are working on that). Once people have a way of knowing that a given piece of music is free and legal to share, the RIAA won’t be such a threat. Currently it is hard to get an MP3 and know if it’s a legal or illegal copy. There needs to be some sort of metadata that clearly indicates,”you can share this.”

Some professors are trying to produce free textbooks (I think it’s at Rice University). The effort is slow, since they don’t have publishers investing their resources, but I hear the books are high quality and open source (meaning they can be continually improved by others). Once there are high quality free textbooks, don’t you think price gouging text book publishers will have to mend their ways? The same could be true for music if good free music becomes available. I believe it will, too, because most musicians never make any money off recordings anyway.

Nathan was born on this day in 2002 at 9:25 p.m. in Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia. We weren’t there and didn’t know when it happened but it turned out to be one of the greatest moments of our lives. So much of life is ruled by pure luck - and we are so so lucky.

Happy Birthday, Nathan!

We had lovely weather for Nathan’s first birthday party. He had a great time getting lots of attention and having everyone stuff food in his mouth all afternoon. And of course he loved his first taste of cake. I made him a sugar free carrot cake but he got to have real cream cheese frosting on it.

It is so hard to believe that he is a year old already! Last year at this time we still didn’t know when he would be born or if he was already born. We had expected to travel to Colombia by September and were having a hard time waiting. We still had 6 weeks before we would know anything about the best baby boy on earth. And here we are a year later. It is hard to believe that we ever lived without him.

It might be just my part of Roslindale, but when of the first things I noticed when we moved here is the way people park on the sidewalk. As a result every morning you see people walking up in the street on the way to the commuter rail. It’s like backwards land. These shots are from Pinehurst Street.

It’s not that the streets are that narrow. I think people just do it because that’s the way it’s done here. We have a driveway, but I’ve parked on our sidewalk once or twice myself, to show my community spirit. I am always sure to leave enough room for a stroller, though, nothing irks me like when some people use the entire sidewalk for their vehicle (and it’s always an SUV or a pickup).

I went to Simmons’ orientation for new students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) last week. There were hundreds of new students, apparently they admitted their biggest class ever (and not entirely on purpose). Vernica reports there is a shortage of AACR2s because of all the students in cataloging. I borrowed mine from a cataloger at MIT, so I don’t have one to loan.

I am in the program more for the information science than the library part, so I was amused to over hear some new students talking about how they wanted to take as few technology courses as possible. One of them picked Simmons because it is flexible enough that you can avoid computers. The other said “I want to be a dweeb, not nerd. Just books for me.” I think they are in for a sad realization - from cataloging to reference to school libraries and even in archives it’s all about the technology.

Of course that’s why I am there. I was just reviewing my ideal set of courses, and they are all tech intensive, except I want to take the Freedom of Information course (which is actually pretty tech intensive these days, too…).