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expected human behavior
Tuesday, June 27 2017
This morning I couldn't do much with the internet. My ssh connections kept timing out and pages loaded very slowly if at all. I figured this had something to do with the kids and all the streaming video they watch on their various devices when they're bored. Such behavior might be fine in an urban setting with 100 MB/s internet connections, but not here at the end of a marginal 3 MB/s DSL phone connection. I figured that telling the kids not to watch their videos wouldn't work, since they could sneak off somewhere and watch them anyway. So instead I turned off all but one of the WiFi hotspots and then throttled the one open one down to 200 KB/s. Initially this seemed to work, but then my connection started crapping out again, probably because I hadn't effectively shut off some WiFi hotspot. Later it turned out that the kids were blameless in this situation and that what had actually happened was that Gilaud's laptop had decided to do a sync with its DropBox account on the cloud. You'd think such things would be given a low priority by DopBox itself, but you'd be fooling yourself. In my experience, every company behaves as if they are the only one with software running on your computer and that you're perfectly willing to fill out a registration form, restart a computer, or any of a number of disruptive acts that I myself always abort.
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This evening, Gretchen assembled some items prepared earlier in the week to produce a big pot of fancy rigatoni pasta with a vegan cream tomato sauce for the seven of us to eat. Andrea contributed with cooked kale served with white beans. It was M's (Dina's daughter's) tenth birthday, so as the meal wound down, Gretchen started talking in dour tones about the miserable cookies she might be able to scrounge up for dessert. But M was on to the whole thing and said, "I know, you have to say that, but you've made a cake!" And sure enough Gretchen had. It was a multi-layer strawberry shortbread cake, presented with all the usual birthday fanfare. As the meal wound down, M and her little brother L started referencing the musical Hamilton, which is a current mutual obsession. At some point Gretchen started playing songs from the Hamilton soundtrack and the kids built themselves a little makeshift stage out of chairs. They danced and sang in time to the music, occasionally breaking the third wall to grab someone's smartphone or pet Neville the Dog on the head. For his part, Neville was fascinated and a little concerned, watching with rapt attention, unaware that such behavior lay within the realm of expected human behavior. He'd been a little perplexed from the start by the diminutive size of these humans, but these crazy movements and sounds seemed to blow his young canine mind.
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