Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Lukie’s long-awaited first day at peuterspeelzaal (pre-school) was yesterday. We’ve all been very excited for this day to come, so it was with great anticipation that we biked over there for his first day.

Two redheads in a bike

He has, of course, been there many times before. Daily as a baby to drop off and pick up his big sister, and here and there during the last school year when Eloïse went back op visite. On recent visits it’s been hard to get him out of there at 2:00 when all the parents leave.

Ian and I both stayed for the whole first day to watch the proceedings. Eloïse got to play at two of her friends’ houses while we were there. He was a bit shy to start, but not terribly so. But after his second day he still hasn’t spent more than a few minutes in the large sandbox, which was his sister’s favorite place to hang out. I was sure that he was going to go straight for the water table that comes out once the parents leave, but while he has looked at it with great interest he has yet to spend more than a couple of minutes at it. One problem is that he’s been wearing sandals and he really doesn’t like to get sand in his shoes. There’s a rule that shoes have to stay on at school so we’ve got to remember to put him in closed shoes tomorrow to see if that remedies the problem.

Right when he was starting to talk, it was very very cold here and there was ice everywhere. We were frequently warning him about not slipping on it. Then we went to Egypt were I guess we were warning him about slipping on the sand (on dunes, for example). He took to calling sand “ice” from that point on. So now he says that he has ice in his shoes. Sometimes he gets it right, but more often than not sand is ice.

Instead of the sand and water table that Eloïse gravitated towards, Lucas has taken an interest in the cars, trucks and airplanes. Here’s a movie: Lukie plays with a truck. Lest you think he’s a real man’s man, note his dress-up clothing selection in subsequent photos. He’s taken a sudden strong interest in “blue-tiful” dresses and skirts. As I type now he lies asleep in bed with one of his sister’s outgrown pink skirts on. Boys will be boys.

I think the reading of the book was perhaps a highlight of the first day for Lucas and today he was quick to invite himself back up to the couch area where Wanda sits to read the book. On a normal day being chosen to sit next to Wanda for the book is a big honor that the children must be chosen for; I guess she’s just made an exception for him these last days since he’s just beginning. This particular book involves a lot of yelling of “STOP!” and “TOOT-TOOT!” and he parroted that every time Wanda read those lines.

Lukie, Isha and Sophia sit with Wanda as she reads the book of the day

At the end of the school day yesterday the bikes and scooters were out and Lukie tried a tricycle. To my great surprise, he was able to pedal it! It only took him a few minutes to get good enough to actually go around the room unassisted. Here’s a movie: Lukie’s first day on a tricycle. I remember that it was well into Eloïse’s time at peuterspeelzaal that she acquired this skill.

Today I left for an hour, ostensibly to buy popsicles as a treat for him being so brave to stay on his own. He wasn’t at all keen on the idea of me going and tried to come with me, but when he realized that he could wave bye-bye to me, something that he has been talking about frequently, he came around to the idea. I’m told that he never cried and had a great time while I was gone. When I got back, I came upon the group just getting ready to paint. He saw me after a couple of minutes and immediately burst into tears. Clearly the stress of being left on his own for the first time with people that he doesn’t know well took all that he had. He’s hardly been left at all with people that he does know well, after all.

After a good cry and few minutes of snuggles he was ready to join back in with the painting and the rest of the activities of the day.

Ethan, Amelie, Lukie and Boyd get artistic

Tomorrow Ian will take him to school, as I have an appointment. I suspect that Ian’s departure will be easier for him. We’ll see if I’m right. Hopefully he won’t melt into a big ball of wailing baby as soon as I pick him up. Even if he does, I feel very confident that within a few days he will be an old pro; he does, after all, have the best peuterjuf in the Netherlands!

We arrived back in Inverness after our day around Loch Ness in time to go down into town to browse around briefly before dinner. Eloïse dragged Ian into an everything’s-a-pound shop to investigate all the treasures inside while I took Lukie with me to look for a shop selling wellies. When I met back up with them Eloïse was quite angry because Papa wouldn’t buy her a “princess diarrhea.” I asked what princess diarrhea was and found out that it was, as I had suspected, a little book with princesses on the cover and a lock. We explained that it’s called a diary, not diarrhea. She has all the syllables right now, but still persists in using the wrong emphasis, calling it a princess di-a-REE.

Ian didn’t buy it for her because it’s a horrible bit of junky tat and didn’t let her buy it for herself because he didn’t know what her current pocket money situation was. Luckily for her, she hadn’t yet spent last week’s pound so the next day it became her third pocket money purchase.

We’re back in Amsterdam after a good night’s sleep on the ferry. What a blissful way to travel. It really is so much better than flying.

The day has, of course, been marked by errands and chores: a haircut for Luke and me, a run to the post-office to pick up packages that couldn’t be delivered in our absence, fetching new coffee beans, sorting through the mountain of post that all but stopped us gaining entry to the house, and an evening ride to the supermarket to stock up on food provisions. It’s good to be back on the bike.

Speaking of Lukie’s haircut, he looks so different now. It’s aged him a bit, but in a nice way. He looks gorgeous.

Tomorrow morning, we have to clean and prepare for a friend of mine who will be staying for a couple of days.

For those who are interested, here’s the map of our full route from Amsterdam to Scotland and back.

The map only shows the places where we spent the night, plus a couple of the ferry ports (necessary to make the map plot the correct route). All in all, we notched up a healthy 3455 km. With two children and the Scottish weather, our car is a lot filthier on the inside than the outside and could do with a good clean.

It’s always good to be back. It didn’t used to be, but since we’ve had this house and made it feel like a home, rather than just a place to crash, it’s always felt good to come back to it (and made it hard to even go away sometimes, too).

As ever, I’m looking forward to my own bed tonight.

Another day, another Facebook job offer.

These headhunters obviously don’t do much research on the candidates they are attempting to recruit. If they did, they’d quickly discover that I am and have always been a vociferous critic of a service — I use the term loosely — that I believe is a blight on the on-line world.

Perhaps they believe I might be mercenary enough to work for them anyway, despite a total lack of affinity for the company or its product. If so, they are wrong. I wish Facebook absolutely nothing good.

Facebook is busy creating an alternate on-line ecosystem that will, if the trend continues, disenfranchise all who do not use it. The day is not too far removed when Facebook usurps e-mail as the primary means of communication. In some circles, this has already happened.

Already, so much material is lost to one unless one surrenders to the Facebook hegemony and signs up for an account. What should be — and, until just a few years ago, did still take the form of — unencumbered, accessible material is now sequestrated behind closed doors, assimilated and absorbed by a corporate entity that is gnawing away at the notion of publicly accessible information with the naïve cooperation of millions of collaborators, more commonly known as its users, from whom it draws its power.

It’s an unwelcome return to the bad old days, when the concept of multiple parallel, mutually inaccessible content provider networks was still the norm. The Internet ultimately won from closed systems like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL by being based on open standards. These standards meant that no company could misappropriate the Internet’s protocols, control its growth or lay claim to its content. This made the Internet free — free as in gratis and free as in liberty — and this freedom was to become the ice-age for closed system dinosaurs like Compuserve.

Facebook is different, however. Whereas networks like Compuserve were distinct and separate alternatives to the Internet, neighbours to it, if you will, Facebook is burrowed deep inside it, feeding on it like a parasite.

What once might have surfaced as a blog or a user’s personal home page is now more likely to find a vent on Facebook, where it automatically becomes the intellectual property of the host company, generally inaccessible to anyone unwilling to join as a member. And there are many reasons why one might desire not to become a member of Facebook. There’s much wrong with both the company and its product, from multiple societal, sociological, technical and ethical standpoints.

For me, the biggest of many issues is the undermining of the social fabric of the Internet itself. Facebook partially solves the very real problem of managing on-line relationships, but does so by hermetically drawing the user inside its biosphere. Rather than expand the on-line universe, Facebook causes it to contract. The goal is not so much to aid human-beings in their pursuit of managing relationships, as it is to control the entire infrastructure for doing so.

Facebook therefore operates parasitically within the Web, like a huge tick in its flesh, steadily weakening its host. I want no part of that. It’s enough of a thorn in my side that Sarah sees fit to use it. She regards Facebook much more superficially and benignly than I do and, as a result, I can’t read what my own wife posts there or look at the photos she uploads. Other people in a similar predicament sign up for an account at this point, but I am of the opinion that I’d then be complicit in an endeavour that I believe to be fundamentally rotten and detrimental to the Internet

No amount of pre-IPO stock options is going to make me feel good about that, so thanks for this latest job offer, but no thanks.

We ate dinner at our hotel tonight. We were seated at one wall of the restaurant and the door was on the opposite wall. Outside the door was a small lounge area with a toy box full of ancient electronic toys and the like. Our kids enjoyed the toy box greatly and we enjoyed having them be somewhere else. They came back to the table with regularity to tell us something or have a sip of their drinks but they mostly stayed out of our hair.

Getting back and forth to our table did involve quite a bit of running across the restaurant and I was slightly concerned that they were going to annoy the other diners or knock a waiter over (there was at least one close call), but the restaurant was loud enough to mask the sound that they made and the floor was carpeted so they didn’t make that much noise. It seemed better to keep the noise that they do make (and there is a lot of it since Eloïse is the loudest talker on the planet) outside of the restaurant and simply subject the others to their occasional passes through the room.

It was with the awareness that our kids are probably often an annoyance to other diners that Ian greeted the approach of a fellow diner with trepidation as he returned from the toilet. He thought that he was probably going to ask him to keep his kids from running past their table. However, he actually asked him what our secret was and went on to explain that their table of four couples in their 60s or 70s wanted to know what we knew that that didn’t when it came to raising children. They thought that our kids were playing noticeably nicely together and were very well behaved. Ian replied that it’s all in the eye of the beholder and that we often think the same of other people’s kids. The man went on to say that they are a credit to us.

Ian returned to our table and told me this tale. It brightened my day. After a month of constant vigilance regarding the many ways that they might be mucking up someone else’s meal or tour or experience of some historic site or other it sure was nice to hear something so positive.