January 2007 Archives

A recent post on BoingBoing about a children's show called Pocoyo reminded me how much I appreciate old-school cartoons. They tended to be much more laid back than a lot of the frenetic fare available these days -- a lot of it coming from Japan (seizure inducing or not) and most of it blaring annoying synthesized music.

I'm glad that Magda enjoys the slower paced DVDs I got her in the Czech Republic. I grew up on animations and book illustrations by Zdeněk Miler and enjoy passing it on to my daughter. His art is pretty timeless and beside his trademark Krtek (Mole) (here's bunch of them), he's done a lot of other cool stuff.

Magda's favorite right now, is a collection of shorts about a violin playing cricket. Simple story lines with nice, mellow soundtrack of mostly solo string instruments. These were actually published after my time (late '70s) and the main menu on the DVD comes in a curious collection of languages, including Finish!

The series of Krtek movies started in 1956 - with an educational film explaining how flax becomes linen. The first movie (How the mole got his pants) is the only one with real spoken dialog. After that he used his daughter's to provide the voices -- without intelligible words -- for the characters.

I looked on YouTube and found several movies, including the classic The Mole and the Green Star from the year I was born. There are also some more recent ones of varying quality, including one from 1997, Krtek a Maminka, where he gets to help some bunnies as an obstetrician!?! You gotta love that crazy Eastern European kulture.

I didn't blog about this earlier, but in early December we trekked up to Dallas to participate in a Czech St. Nicholas celebration. We'd done this last year as well, but this time it's left a lasting impression on the girl.

The party was at my cousin's friend's house and Magda was playing in an upstairs room when Mikuláš, along with the devil and angel, arrived. I raced upstairs to get her before she got freaked out by them and managed just in time. My cousin's son, Martin, wasn't as lucky and was startled when he saw the devil arrive. He then spent most of the evening clutching his mom hysterically.

Magda was pretty terrified of the devil and didn't trust Mikuláš much, either. She spent most of the time with her face buried in Jennifer and barely looked at the trio when it was her turn to face St. Nicholas.

Afterwards she kept proclaiming that "the devils was very scarry" but the angel "was nice". She kept talking about them a lot in the following weeks, but it sort of petered off. I kept waiting for her to start discussing that "the devil is scary" with some stranger and getting a visit from CPS (or some missionaries) but luckily no such thing.

She still occasionally brings them up and -- now in retrospect -- gleefully talks about how scary the devil is. And then she want one of us (mostly me) to "be the devil" and scare her. She thinks it's the most hilarious thing, ever!

We're having a pretty good time during the big freeze. I did a full day at work on Monday, but I didn't want to get on the roads this morning. And when I tried after lunch, the damn car wouldn't start (luckily it did manage to start when I went to pick up a pizza around 5pm)

We made it out to the park around noon and there were quite a few people there -- most with their cameras. The park wasn't too spectacular, but our roof is lined with cool icicles along all edges. And they keep growing...

Magda hasn't complained about being out in the elements. Although getting hit in the face with sleet isn't as much fun as sledding on real snow in the Alps...

My fellow geeks have been atwitter since Apple announced the iPhone at the Macworld Expo earlier this week. Beeing the fanboy that I am, I watched the announcement keynote and was duly impressed. The UI looks extremely slick and the phone is definitely drool worthy. It's a good thing we recently renewed our cell contracts so I won't be too tempted until a few versions down the road when the bugs have been worked out (and maybe the price becomes more appealing).

One intriguing sidenote is the whole trademark fight over the "iPhone" name. Cisco has owned the trademark for close to a decade and recently rolled out the Linksys iPhones -- basically cordless phone that you can use with VoIP services (such as Skype). Now it seems obvious that Apple's device is too similar to Cisco's not to be infringing, so I keep wondering what the lawsuit is about.

Here's my Machiavellian speculation:

When I saw the iPhone announced -- with its built-in WiFi -- I immediately wondered whether it could be used with Skype or other WoIP services. To me, as a potential user, this makes perfect sense and there is nothing from the technology's point of view that would make this difficult.

However, having other communication modes on the device would obviously not be in Cingular's interest (they'd be missing out on celular minutes if a user could use the iPhone to Skype). Interestingly, Cisco claims that they "wanted to let Apple use the word 'iPhone' on the condition that both companies' phones could communicate with each other" and presumably with other Cisco equipement (where they really make their $$).

Maybe this trademark infringement lawsuit is intended to allow Apple to claim that they need to add VoIP functionality in order to "settle" with Cisco. Basically, Apple could use the lawsuit as leverage against Cingular to let them have non-celular telephony on the iPhone.

By settling the law suit, Apple would end up with the iPhone name and with additional functionality in the form of VoIP. Cisco would end up with kick ass client devices for their VoIP networking equipment. And Cingular? Well, they'd end up holding the bag, I guess...