Wanda’s winding down on nursing, trying to break up with me gently. I’m a bit sad, a bit excited about getting my body back and a bit scared about what will happen to that body when it’s back under my total control.
M-Day
Happy Mother’s Day from our bed of revellers to yours!
Baffled by Facebook
I cannot figure out how to make a button to get readers of this blog to “Like” it on Facebook. If you “like” it with or without the quotes in real life, will you please go and “Like” it with quotes over on Facebook?
Thanks.
And if you know how to help me make a fancy button for people to click on and you feel fairly sure that doing so won’t steal the identities or souls of those who click on it, please let me know how.
Click here if you “Like” or like this website and then click on the “Like” button at the top of the page.
With Incredible Power Comes Incredible Responsibility
(Feel free to skip to the bottom for my quick take on the new HTC Droid Incredible.)
I buy capers at Costco. Sure I can only go through a few tablespoons of capers a year but I still buy the Costco-sized bottle of capers. It’s all about value. The little teeny bottle at the regular grocery store costs the same as the ginormous bottle at Costco and I cannot bring myself to buy the itty bitty for the same prices as the Jamie-Oliver-sized jar. (This is conjecture. I have no actual idea how many capers Jamie Oliver goes through in a given 3-month period. I imagine it is more than the 25 that fit into the jar at Safeway.)
Which brings me to a point. The Droid. Or should I say Droids?
In my latest adventure in selfish smartphone testing, I tried out the Motorola Droid. I was hooked almost immediately. It was fast. It was versatile. With an inexpensive app (Touchdown) I was able to sync up all my Outlook calendar and contact information using Exchange. The built-in Exchange support was lacking. It came with access to a plethora of apps that were cool, useful and fun. One of the most amazing things was the speech-to-text capability. You’d speak into the phone and it would transcribe your words into searches, text messages, emails, etc. I kept texting Dan with things like, “I just said that,” and “I’m not typing this either.” It was hot, the phone, not the texts. I loved it.
It was not as cute as the Palm Pre. It didn’t feel as good in my hand. It was not a mobile tethering wireless hotspot but it did everything I needed and more.
But wait. Then I found out that its Costco caper jar equivalent was coming out soon and I just couldn’t be happy with the Motodroid. The HTC Incredible Droid Droid Incredible from HTC Incredi-HTC-ible-McDroidy-Pants was released on April 29th and it has everything that the MotoDroid has plus and plus and plus.
The Incredible has access to the same apps and features as the MotoDroid but it also has a faster processor, more internal storage, an 8 megapixel camera, HTC Sense UI (meaning cool modifications to the Google Android operating system making it more sleek, attractive and functional), a better feel and a partridge in a pear tree.
So I could have been very happy with the MotoDroid but why spend $200 on it when I could spend $200 on the new hotness? The only reason I see to go with the Motorola Droid vs. the HTC Incredible is the slide-out keyboard. If you can’t live without it, then you’d better stick with Moto. I thought I couldn’t live without it but it took me all of a week of abstaining from using the MotoDroid keyboard by choice to convince me that I could live without it. The touch-screen keyboard is actually quite nice.
So I jumped in and bought the new hotness with my own hard-earned cash and we frolicked in the grass and synced up calendars and contacts. I downloaded known apps that were recommended to me by friends and family. I loved the phone and the phone appeared to find joy in me as well, remembering all of my likes and dislikes and allowing me to rearrange its multiple home screens to my liking.
HTC Sense has much better built-in Exchange support than the standard Android 2.1 operating system so after we figured out some weird bugs on our Exchange server, I was really happy with the way everything worked together. My Facebook contacts are now linked with my Google and Outlook contacts so anyone with a profile picture in my Facebook friends now has a photo attached to their contact on my phone and when I look at their contact info, I can see their latest status updates right there.
The first day I had the phone up and running, I took a picture of Wanda eating in a cute bib my friend had given me as a gift. I clicked “share” on the phone and chose “email” from the long list of sharing options. I then selected my friend from my contacts list, typed a one sentence thank-you note and sent it off. The entire process took less than 2 minutes and she was impressed that I’d taken the time to send her a photo thank-you.
The built-in Twitter app is lame but there are others for free in the Market. The Facebook app is alright. The internet speed with the Incredible on Verizon frequently beats my laptop. It’s very very pretty. I can point it at pictures and landmarks and it “scans” them and tells me what they are. It does more things than a phone really should do.
And there’s the hitch.
The joy of my new toy was disrupted last weekend when I was browsing the Android Market for new apps and came across several distasteful and offensive apps in the games section. I do not want to see clothesless women as I’m browsing for solitaire games on my phone. I do not want to see apps for freaky weird creepy guys with specific “interests”. I’m trying to avoid certain key search terms here but you get the picture.
So I figured if they had an app for finding my car in a mall parking lot and an app for people who like to do things to pictures of women, then they certainly had an app that would help me and my family avoid running across that junk while we’re searching for games. They might even have a filter built in so I could just say, “Don’t subject my eyes to these types of apps. I’m not old enough,” or a way to lock access to the Market altogether so my kids don’t accidentally navigate there as they’re playing a Disney Princess game on my phone while I doze next to them on the couch.
Not so much.
I searched and searched and found nothing but references to the fact that people wanted filters, locks and controls for their Android phones but could not find them or were having trouble getting Google to let them create them and add them to the Market. So basically, even though my home internet is filtered, I found myself carrying around unfiltered open season to all the junk the internet has to offer in my diaper bag without much hope of a solution.
Luckily since I’ve been working with PR at Verizon I was able to get into contact with someone at Google who spent some time on the phone with me this afternoon, listening to my concerns and answering some questions.
The short story? They don’t have an app for that… yet. The man I talked to handles among other things “child safety policy and communications” for Google. He pointed out several instances where Google has made strides to make internet usage safer for children and adults like myself who don’t want to deal with filth.
I was unaware that you can now filter your browsing experience using SafeSearch filtering. It’s a setting you can get to from the Google main page. I didn’t know about the new Safety mode on YouTube, a button at the bottom of the page that you can activate and lock to reduce the risk of seeing nastiness on that site. Neither of these are perfect by any means but they’re a good faith effort by Google to offer options for filtering and they’re working to improve them.
My new Google friend was very encouraging. The phones are still fairly new terrain for Google. They’re working on it. They know there’s a demand for this and they’ll follow their model on the web, bringing filtering and locking to their mobile phones.
He said he’d let me know as soon as developments occur. And I’ll let you know as soon as he lets me know. For now, I’ve locked the front screen of my phone so my kids can’t slip it out of my purse and play with it without me. I’ve also set the SafeSearch mode in Google Mobile’s settings to “Strict” although there’s currently no way to lock in this setting but unless the kids figure out how to change it, it should keep me from running into too much junk. However, there will still be garbage on the Android Market and for the time being I will still run into it occasionally.
To avoid it, I’d suggest sticking to the “Top” apps rather than looking at the “Just In” apps because after signing up as a developer with Google, which requires a credit check and access to the developer’s real identity information, a developer can post things to the Market with no sort of vetting process. This allows for the kind of creativity and freedom that has made Google so successful, but again there’s that whole bad-comes-with-the-good thing.
If an app violates Google’s policies by posting anything pornographic or malware or spyware, users can flag it to be taken down. Personally I’d rather not be the one to “discover” malware, spyware or pornography so I’ll stick to the high end of the Market and wait for quality apps to be tested by others and trickle up.
Daring Young Mom Quick Take – The HTC Droid Incredible is an amazing tool with huge possibilities for productivity, fun, creativity and connection. I love all of the great things it can do for me. But, like the internet itself, it’s also got some real hazards built in. I’m so glad Google’s working on them. I can’t wait to pass on the good news that they’ve implemented mobile safety solutions but for now I’d say to proceed with caution.
Click to Read My Product Review Policy
Can You Still Feel it?
Over at Parenting today I was talking about how love changes and how you need to focus harder on just enjoying your kids the older they get. It was a pre-Mother’s-Day musing that I hope I keep with me as I continue raising my kids. [read more at Parenting.com]
Also, one of the readers at parenting posted a link to a post she’d written in a similar vein that I really connected with. [read that post here.]
Mother’s Day Gift Book Idea
If you’re still looking for a last minute Cinco de Mayo/ Mother’s Day gift, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to the girls who put together The Mother in Me, a really lovely compilation of poems, essays and reflections by young LDS mothers.
A friend who was part of the project sent it to me for review a year ago while I was pregnant with Wanda. And since I was… well… pregnant with Wanda and barfing constantly I let a lot of things slip and never posted a review.
I’m sure she’s not expecting to hear from me now but I wanted to let you know about it. The writing is beautiful and very real and I think you’ll enjoy it. Heck. It would make a great Mother’s Day present for yourself because chances are you’ll see yourself in the pages you read.
I recognize that most of my readers are not LDS, but some are and the book is quite tender and affirming of the role of mothers in a way that I think crosses religious boundaries.
The Honesty of Children
My kids laugh at me when I jump rope. They say they can’t help it. It’s just so funny to watch my belly jiggle when I jump. They cover their mouths with their hands and promise they won’t laugh if I’ll please please do it again. And then they laugh.
I gave them a good talking to about how we should treat other people, how it’s not nice to laugh at someone because of their physical body and that even though I was pretty secure and not prone to being devastated by their giggles, other people might not be so secure.
I stopped jumping and they stopped laughing. Magoo even came up to me later, looked at my stomach and said, “See? I’m not laughing at it now. I just laughed when you were jumping because it was SO funny. You know?”
Yeah. I know. But I’m old enough to have learned to control what I say and what I laugh at most of the time. Kids are more honest than that.
One of his friends was over this week, watching Wanda playing on the floor. “That’s a weird toy!” she exclaimed, “It’s a slug! With a HUMAN FACE!”
Essentially yes. It is. But a grownup would never say that.
Then there’s Magoo’s other friend who was coming over to play last week. I told his mom that it was good he would be there to keep Magoo occupied because my house was trashed because we’d been moving the furniture around and had let the house go to shambles. She said what most polite women say when a friend apologizes for the unsightly state of her house, “Oh, you should see my house. It’s a mess all the time and I don’t have your excuse.” I’m paraphrasing here but I think we’ve all said that line or had it said to us at one time or another. It’s comforting. It’s a gesture of friendship.
So we got back to our house and as I opened the door, Magoo’s friend got a wide-eyed look on his face. “Wow!” he said, “This really IS a mess.” He then leaned towards me with a conciliatory air and said, “You know, my house isn’t actually messy.”
Called his mom a liar right there in my front entry. It was all I could do to not bust out laughing. Yep. It was a mess. But he played with Magoo while I power-cleaned and everyone was too preoccupied with their fun to notice what parts of me may or may not have been jiggling around hilariously.
Magic
Today was May Day. It was also Saturday. Saturday is a day to rejoice.
Magoo is only allowed to play video games on Saturdays. He loves them so much that he refers to Saturday only as “My Lot of Game Day.” I’m not honestly sure if he even remembers what it’s actually called.
The other night he was getting into bed on a not-Saturday night and he said, “Mom? Do you wanna know something magical?”
“What?” I asked.
Sheepishly he pulled my Nintendo DS out from behind his pillow. “Look what I found,” he grinned. “It just appeared… under my pillow… like magic.”
Now he knows he’s not supposed to be playing and he knows he’s not supposed to take the DS without asking. He knows a lot of things but I looked at that magical muffin-head and wondered what I was supposed to do.
“Did you take it from my room?”
“No. It was magic… Yes.”
There’s sort of a parental gray area where misbehavior and honesty are concerned. On the one hand, you want to give your kids credit for telling you the truth and admitting when they do something wrong. You want them to keep confiding in you so you don’t want to come down too hard on them when they tell the truth.
At the same time, you don’t want them to think it’s okay to become a heroine dealer, sleep around, and kidnap other people’s pet gerbils as long as they fess up quickly after the fact. It’s a tightrope we walk, balancing the olive branch of honesty in one hand and the hammer of “YOU DID WHAT?” in the other.
In general, my balancing act looks something like this:
Notice that as the child increases in foreknowledge that what they are doing is wrong, the seriousness of the consequences increases. Also, if the child confesses quickly, the consequences will be less severe than if, for example, they reach a 10 on the graph which involves lying repeatedly, blaming a sibling for the wrongdoing and possibly swearing a blood oath of innocence before finally confessing to the misdeed after hours of intense interrogation, including but not limited to, denying the child food while eating Mike and Ikes 3 inches from his face.
All that being said, I think any child should receive one get-out-of-jail-free card the first time he uses Magic as an excuse, but only if he does it with a huge grin on his face.
HTC Incredible – DROID
So I’ve been playing around with the Motorola Droid for a few weeks and I’m gonna share some thoughts on the experience soon. However, I’m first going to jump to the end and say that I LOVE the Droid.
I had all but decided to buy one when I found out that its hotter younger brother was coming to town April 29th so after much thought, consideration, reading rave reviews, plunking down $199, squealing, and stalking the UPS package online, I am pleased to announce that our new command center is safely home A DAY BEFORE RELEASE and charging happily on the windowsill. I’m not sure if you can see but he already has a Wanda fingerprint on his face. I’m sure he likes it. I hope he doesn’t catch her ear infection.
I’ll be sure to let you know if it lives up to all the hype when I surface from the technological honeymoon.
What’s In a Name?
Magoo came home from a birthday party last week and told me they’d eaten cheese-flavored cake. After a brief retch as I imagined a block of cheddar covered in frosting, I figured out what he was talking about. Why does his name sound so revolting and the other so delicious?
