Zoey digs the Imperial March

by Brint

If you have a kid, you know that you sing and hum some random stuff to keep both yourself and your child entertained. I started doing the Imperial March for the heck of it. And we've found that it may be her new favorite song.

I just hope she chooses the right side.

We've been able to get her dancing when music is on pretty easily now. It's pretty funny and cute at the same time. She's added spinning to her routine now. So we have the head bob, knee bend, and spin in a circle moves.

Reminder: Don't drink the water

The water in this town is treated, but it is not filtered, so you may notice a light brown tint and slight odor to the water. Here is a picture for proof:

Many houses have a filtration system that's connected to the city water. Jenifer's family has one as well. The water in this picture was pulled from the city directly.

I'm not sure how common it is, but the water is turned off here during the day due to the drought they are experiencing. Houses generally have a reservoir that they keep filed so they can use water during the day. Jenifer's family has a reservoir under ground, and two water tanks in the roof. So water comes in from the city, it's filtered, put into the underground reservoir, and then pumped into the tanks in the attic. This allows them to use water throughout the day.

In this town, it's currently illegal to use water in your front yard for anything. There are very steep fines if you are caught, and neighbors will even report you.

Drinking water can either be purchased at a store, or through a water service. This house doesn't have gas lines, so they also get their tanks through the same company.

The water is obviously on top, the gas sits in the bed of the truck.

Random

As of January 1, 2015, several new laws came into effect around Texas, among the most notable being the "hands free" laws for both drivers and cyclists. With this in mind, I saw a guy riding down the street on his bicycle with one hand on the handle bars, the other hand feeding his mouth a beer.

I've been told it's legal to drink on the streets here. So we've done a lot of that while walking around the neighborhood.

Learning a Second Language

Since getting into Santa Cruz das Palmeiras, I've spent 1-2 hours every afternoon using Rosetta Stone. One very weird thing about their website, especially since they offer language training, is that you can't change the language you see on their website. They use geo-location to point you to the country specific instance of their website, and there's no button to go to another version of the site. What?!

The process of picking up a second language is very tough. What I've learned so far is that you have to have complete discipline when it comes to learning. Similar to body building, you have to hit the gym every day, even if you don't feel like it. Every day, you are either getting better, or getting worse, there is no middle ground, so you must make a conscious descision to learn.

The way the Brazilian Portuguese lessons are setup are pretty strait forward. Everything is in Portugese, you will not see a single word in English during your lessons. They show images and boxes over the images, and there are exercises that give you repetition with the words and phrases you learn. Here's an example where you're going through a conversation:

There are parts where you select the right phrase, some exercises require you to actually type out the right word or phrase, and other exercises require you to actually say the right thing. Now that I've been using it a while, I have Google Translate up in the next tab at all times. Occasionally with phrases or words, I'm not completely sure what the difference is.

I do have a good escalation point for language questions. Jenifer is who I ask when I can't completely figure it out. The gap of just using the course, is some of the pronunciations are very subtle, and it's really hard to pick it up. Here's an example that I'm still having some trouble with:

  • avô - grandfather
  • avó - grandmother

If you slightly mispronounce that last letter, you may call a man a woman, and vice versa. There are a number of words where the accent changes the word significantly. Some are so drastic that one version of the word is a common item, and the other version is incredibly insulting.

Rosetta Stone does offer 1:1 sessions with native speakers to help with these types of things, but I don't know that it's enough. There are some things where you just need a human to fully get it. I'll share more as I get further into this. It's clear that this will be a very long process to learn a language, and I just have to make it a priority for it to happen.

Note on How I'm blogging

So I'm using a self-hosted installation Ghost for blogging. My quick pitch on node: It's a Node.js application that allows you to blog entirely in Markdown. It is just for blogging.

Since the internet here is very flaky, I have to deal with losing connectivity on a very frequent basis. How bad is it? It's bad to the point where I now have a continuous ping hitting 8.8.8.8 to see if things are just slow, degraded (packet loss), or down. Today, I'm looking at roughly 30% packet loss, which include stints where the DSL goes down for ~40 seconds or so every couple minutes

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
1661 packets transmitted, 1159 packets received, 30.2% packet loss  
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 189.007/337.812/20317.912/1421.915 ms

So with that fact, I actually don't use the Ghost editor. I'm actually using Atom editor, which comes with a built-in markdown preview utility.

My use of Atom over the Ghost editor is not to say the Ghost editor isn't good, I think it's great! When you're scrolling through your Markdown, it will automatically scroll the preview along side, which makes for quick checks very easy. Within Atom, I scroll the Markdown preview and the actual markdown code separately.

The benefits to Atom in my situation are two fold:

1. Automatic spell check (GitHub issues exist, were closed as "Won't Fix")

2. Offline saving of drafts. There's no real way around this one.

Here's a snapshot of what the side-by-side Markdown editing in Atom looks like:

I think the Ghost team needs to allow the browser spell checkers to work. If you are using Ghost, at a minimum, you should copy/paste your entry into some editor that will allow you to perform a spellcheck so you don't look like a dummy.