My keys have been silent, and I apologize for that.

The summer has been another one of those summers that fly by.  Fortunately I can say that it hasn’t been a summer of idleness, but I am somewhat dismayed at the realization that the local “official end of summer” festivities (otherwise known as the CNE) closes shop in less than a month.

My summer to-do list has been shrinking, which is a good thing.  It wasn’t a big list to begin with, but the items are worthwhile and it’s nice to see them getting ticked off one-by-one.  One of the remaining items is one I’m most looking forward to – taking Andrew’s training wheels off.

It’s utterly amazing to me how children grow.  Justin is a regular talker now, when he’s not being overly stubborn that is.  Andrew courageously carries the torch of first-born-son and big-brother, with all of the unrealistic expectations that go along with those responsibilities.  Sometimes I feel so sorry for him – outwardly he’s a little man, but inwardly he’s still an innocent child.  I find myself constantly reminding myself of this, usually after I realize that perhaps I expected too much of him following some admonishment for a trivial transgression.

But the little man is quite creative.  He’s very adept at recreating on paper the things he observes in person.  His fascination with planes and buses continues – moreso the former these days – and as with his general development I’m quite impressed at how refined his visual arts talents are becoming.  He has an interesting attention to detail, and it’s very amusing to experience his attempts to dissect music and, later, construct instrumentals with his mouth.  He’s very much an innocent, creative spirit – and I love him for it.

Justin is a whirlwind.  As mentioned earlier, his stubbornness continues.  I’m reminded of the Dark Knight’s undercurrent of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.  And I sometimes wonder if his stubbornness is his way of attracting attention in a household where his older sibling seems so capable by comparison.  He’s very calculating, and I find that a response needs to be measured – because although he may not just want to watch the world burn, I’m very aware that he will escalate, and the repercussions will become evident as he ages.  Even so, he will repay your efforts if you spend quality time with him and keep him from making fun of the subject at hand; he learns very quickly, as perhaps most children do, and I think he deserves more of my time.

The great news is that the two of them do work together, and are even supportive of each other.  Yes, Andrew is supportive of Justin’s potty training (!)  And Justin makes no bones about giving credit to Andrew for his latest visual arts creation.  And then they fight – albeit briefly – and serenity is shattered.

Meanwhile I continue to plod on with my various obsessions, although much less often as in the past.  It would seem that there’s not enough time in the day to get through everything I want to do or should be doing; but if I’m being honest, I secretly suspect that I’m simply not maximizing the time that I have.  I’m working on it.

On the Home Automation front there hasn’t been much improvement.  Some refactoring of code, some cleaning, some additional logic, but nothing groundbreaking.  If I had to pick something to report on, it would be that I coded 2FA for remote access to the Home intranet.  Which is nice, I guess.  I also activated Last.fm “scrobbling” for the DB.Music system, in the hopes that Last.fm would be kind enough to make worthwhile recommendations and alert me to new albums from artists in my collection.  Neither appear to be happening very well, mind you.

And probably the last worthwhile mention regarding code development is that I implemented full HTML5 client-side playback for DB.Music streaming zones.  I also implemented a system that would allow you to control said clients from another client acting as a “remote”; this is a precursor to deploying low-cost web-based audio players to re-implement the “zones” we used to have at the old house.  I still haven’t settled on the hardware/OS that would be used client-side, but I was digging around in the server code so I did what came naturally. 

So that’s a little update.  I would love to bring back the old Thoughts posts I used to do on occasion, as I do have sparks of inspiration every now and then to share some apparent insight I have into some worldly issue.  But my memory is so horrible these days, that the minute I think “Hey, I should write about that” the insight flees and I’m left with nothing.  Perhaps a combination of voice memos and scheduling will resolve that problem.