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Dear Ladybug,

Yesterday you turned sixteen months old, or as we mathematicians like to call it, “four-thirds of a year.” To celebrate, your mom and I went out and watched Ratatouille at the theater while you were in daycare. Cheers!

Actually, we also went out and bought you a plastic pool for your splashing enjoyment. If this month has taught us anything, it’s that you enjoy being in the water.

You spent the first three weeks of your sixteenth month in Hawaii, or, more specifically, in water in Hawaii. I mentioned last time your great affinity for your nana’s pool and the regimented program of water exposure your mother initiated designed to acclimate you the ocean through the process of repeated dunkings under the water and swimming laps like an Olympian. That was only after three days; by the end of three weeks you’d swapped out your bony endoskeleton for cartilege and were trying out for the part of Aqualad.

Truth be told, you haven’t learned to swim yet; rather, you’ve learned to balance on our hands as your mom or I zip you through the water. To allow you to stay comfortably afloat without actually holding you aloft, your nana bought you a “snorkel board,” which is a cross between a boogie board and a glass-bottomed boat. The little fiberglass hull has a small porthole affixed near the bow, allowing the rider to look through it all the way to the bottom of the pool without having to dunk their head in the water or wear a cumbersome mask. Granted, a glass-bottom boat tour of the pool is about as exciting as, say, a glass-bottom bus tour of Utah, but out in the ocean it allowed you to see all the fish and coral under the ocean’s surface. The basic operation of the board is as follows.

Step 1: Swim out to the reef, sitting safely on your snorkel board:

Step 2: Plunk your head in the plastic cowling and look at fish for hours. Ignore the fact that this vaguely looks like you’re puking into the ocean:

Step 3: Have fun!

I should note, however, playing in the water was merely your second favorite thing to do at the beach. Your absolute, all-time favorite activity, the thing that would send you squealing into apopleptic fits of excitement, was, of course, playing in the sand. It was as if the beach was covered with billions upon billions of teenty tiny rocks — ROCKS! — which, in fact, it was. You would dig holes in it, eat it, run it through your fingers, eat it, build sand castles (or at least, sand mounds) with it, and eat it. You were fascinated that contact with water would change the sand into a moldable mud, and would spend hours burying your hands and feet in the wet sand. You would scoop it up and drizzle patterns and curves with it along the shore. And then you would eat it. If there was anything better than sand in Hawaii, you didn’t want to know about it.

Actually, this was a pretty common theme during our entire Hawaiian experience: we would take you to places of unimaginable beauty, emerald green landscapes lush with palm trees and exotic flowers, vistas shaped by the unimaginable fury of nature and the relentless toll of time; you would squat down and play with the rocks. South Point? The southernmost point in the United States, a windswept beach of jagged cliffs and thundering waves? You played with the rocks. Pu’uhonua o Honaunau? A beach lined with plam trees and ancient tikis, a holy site once known as “the place of refuge”? You played with the rocks. Kilaueua volcano? A massive, smoldering caldera of geothermal spouts and otherwordly arid landscapes? You played with the rocks. Punalu’u Beach? A beautiful black-sand beach where you were mere inches away from a sea turtle napping on the shore? You played with the rocks.

To hell with Hawaii. Next summer, we’re vacationing at the Geology Department.

In addition to swimming, the other big highlight of your sixteenth month has been your blossoming vocabulary. You now know the words for “eat” and “grapes” and “milk” and “backpack” and the list goes on and on… Perhaps the most delightful word in your current vocabulary is “Papa,” which is what you call your grandfather. It’s a litling happy word when you say it — Pah paaaaahhh! — and it reflects the great fondness you developed for him. Heck, the fact that you mastered “Papa” and “Nana” while actually visiting your grandparents has virtually ensured you a healthy inheritence down the road. (I’m expecting the same level of charm from you next month when we visit Nana and Papa Shoo… our future retirement depends on it.)

One of your favorite words is up. You say it to get held. You say it to get picked up. You say it to direct attention skyward. It’s so versatile! It’s like the Swiss Army knife of English! Especially cute is that you say “up” every time you climb a stair. While we in Hawaii, the sound of “up-up-up-up” meant that you were busy climbing the stairs again, an activity you delighted in precisely because it terrified your mother and grandmother. “Up-up-up” you’d go, and within mere nanoseconds your matriarchs would materialize at the foot of stairs demanding that you descend. In response, you would either (a) giggle maniacally and race further up the stairs (much to the perpetual irritation of your mother) or (b) giggle manically and suddenly attempt to descend the stairs in the most suicidal of face-first fashions (much to the perpetual horrification of your grandmother). Ah yes, the stairs were a wealth of good family fun. On a related note, you spent a lot of vacation in time-out.

More recently, you’ve picked up down (or rather, “dow”), and one of my special joys as a dad is to walk with you, hand-in-hand, and listen your little voice going “Dow… Dow… Dow… Up… Dow… Up…” with every step we take, a charming topographical diary of our journey. You are gonna love “level sets” in Calc III, kiddo.

Another versatile word is hot, which you always say with a percussive flair while simultaneously signing it. Nana serves you steaming hot food? Hot! You see a fire? Hot! It’s warm outside? Hot! So far, so good. You eat ice cream? Hot! Your shirt gets wet? Hot! You step on scratchy grass? Hot! In fact, you say probably say Hot! about thirty times a minute, in response to pretty much any external stimulus. Your mom and I have tried to teach you that “hot” and “cold” are opposites, but that hasn’t yet worked: while you happily accept that ice cream is cold, you will in the same breath simultaneously maintain that it is also Hot!, a discrepancy I chalk up to you being blessed with an unfathomably deep understanding of the quantum nature of matter, and you mother chalks up to you being a bonehead.

Perhaps my favorite word in your vocabulary, though, is Eye-you, which is how you say “I love you.” More frequently you just blow a kiss in my general direction (with a new-and-improved “popping” noise when you smack your lips) or just smile your toothy smile and wave, but every now and then you swint your eyes and say Eye-you. As you are becoming more conversant, it is more and more evident to me that you are a no longer my baby, but my little girl. You’re growing up quickly, little Ladybug, and I’m going to miss all your little infant quirks so much… but if I get to hear you say “I love you” and see you run to get a hug from me, it’ll all be worth it.

Eye-you too, pumpkin.

– Ba ba

Photo album

See more pictures from your sixteenth month of existence over at Flickr.

World’s most difficult word problem

Since the difference between a bathroom and a bedroom is a toilet, I can simplify the first part as

2 Br. - 2 Ba. = -2 (Ba. - Br.) = -2 toilets

Unfortunately, I’m not even sure about the units when you divide an office by a den.

WWJD?

On the one hand, I think it’s awesome that Jesus himself visited Hawaii. On the other hand, I would have expected a sign of higher quality from a carpenter.

It’s all relative

On the way home from work, I pass a billboard that looks something like this:

As a student, he was no Einstein.

Actually, I’m pretty sure he was an Einstein every single day after he was born, failing some initial mix-up at the hospital.

Who says movies are too expensive?

Sweet! That’s 100 movies for under a buck! Date night’s on me!

Hidden cost of weddings

If you’ve just blown eight grand on cleaning your gown, may I suggest where to rent your movies?

Inadvertant filth I

And to think I found those old Wake up with the King commercials were uncomfortably homoerotic.

Inadvertant filth II

Based on these examples, I can only assume the fifties were unspeakably raunchy.

Among the mountain of bills and junk mail that accumulated during out tropical absense, we received a letter from Verizon Wireless announcing that the Queen B and I, as employees of the state of South Dakota, might, just might, be eligible for for a state employee discount on our wireless bill.  Sweet.

I logged onto the indicated website and typed in my state ID, only to find that I’m not eligible for the discount, since I apparently make too much money.  Not enough money to pay my wireless bill without donating a pint of AB negative each month, but too much for a rebate.

The Queen B logged on next.  After entering her ID, the computer announced that she — yes, she! — was eligible for the program.  Her discount was being calculated even as we read, and a statement of her total monthly savings would be sent to her indicated email address within seconds.

She quickly signed out of Verizon and logged into her email.  There, at the top of the inbox, was a mail from Verizon Wireless about her new South Dakota Employee Discount!  She clicked open the mail and read:

Can you hear me (laughing) now?

Prologue

It started — for me, it started — on Father’s Day. In response to an early present from the Queen B, I hurried home from the university where I’d been teaching. At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.

It was… the iPod People!

Yeah, I got an iPod shuffle for Father’s Day.

For me, that was a big deal, as I am not an Apple guy. Sure, I like those “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials — Jon Hodgeman is awesome in his PC-befuddledness — and I recognize that Microsoft products are crap, what with their tendancy to crash-and-burn more frequently than Lindsay Lohan on a Saturday night.  Nevertheless, Apple turned me off to their computers way back in the day, largely for two reasons. First, I felt distinctly uncomfortable with any operationg system in which the action for removing a valuable floppy disk from the computer — namely, dragging the disk to the trash bin — was the exact same action for deleting all the valuable content off of said floppy. Second, and more fundamental, I didn’t like the way the those old Macintosh computers “smiled” at me everytime it was turned it on or off. I don’t want or need my computer to be my friend, man… that’s just one step closer to the machines seizing control of the world and sticking floppy disks up my holes. No thank you.

Still, I’d heard lots of good things from students about their iPods, and the new Shuffle is a masterpiece of portable music design. It’s essentially a 1.1″ x 1.6″ x 0.4″ chip-clip with a gigabyte of music storage. The device has only three buttons (power switch, shuffle toggle, and volume/tracking button) and a single port that doubles as the headphone jack and the USB interface. It’s designed for quick and easy music listening: it an be completely and automatically filled (and refilled) with a random selection of music from your computer’s library in a single click. As I primarily uses my current (and ancient) MP3 player to listen to random music while walking or exercising, it sounded ideal for me, and at 80 bucks, it didn’t break the bank.

At least, that was the sales pitch.  Together with those awesome commercials, it’s easy to see how a person could be carried away into the magic fanstasy land of iPodism.

I’m hear to tell you that the cold, hard reality is something altogether different.

iHell

I opened my iPod shuffle just before we left for Hawaii, mostly because I wanted to take it with me. I pulled it out of its box, along with all the stuff that came with it: the ubiquitous white iPod earbuds, the USB connector, two “Apple” window stickers (really), and a single 2″ x 8″ sheet of directions written with the same brevity of words and creepiness of illustration as the average airline flight-safety booklet you’d find squirreled away in the seatback in front of you.

The first step towards my iPod music experience was to download iTunes. iTunes is Apple’s media application for playing and organizing digitial music and video. My experience with iTunes is that it can be likened to the supercomputer Deep Though from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: user-friendly, very powerful, and takes about seven-and-a-half million years to execute a single command. My God, is iTunes slow. Worse, it’s like a plague, infecting its slowness to every aspect of Windows… everything slows down when iTunes is thinking, and iTunes tends to think longer, harder, and more frequently than Stephen Hawking in a physics lab.

Once iTunes was installed, I plugged in my iPod. iTunes happily acknowledged its presence and began “syncing” with it. Apparently, syncing is the process by which iTunes renders your operating system and your iPod inoperable for days on end. It turns out that iPods come with a fully discharged battery which must be charged through the USB connector, a process the Apple website says takes about 4 hours, although I suspect they dropped a “zero” after the “four.” However, after a night of charging and continuous activity from iTunes, in the morning I had an operable iPod shuffle.

It was great — I had a an offbeat playlist of newer and older stuff, and the sound quality through the earbuds was just fine for me. The shuffle’s battery almost (but not quite) survived the lengthy flight to Hawaii. A few days later, I decided to “autofill” the shuffle with a brand new playlist, so I plugged it in, let it charge for a bit, and then pushed the “Autofill” button on iTunes. A new gigabyte’s worth of playlist appeared in the iTunes window, and it began “syncing” with the iPod.

And then error message after error message appeared…

• the iPod doesn’t have enough room for this track here
• iTunes cannot read that track there
• iTunes cannot sync with the iPod
• iTunes is uncomfortable with the consequences of Godel’s incompletemess theorem

…and so on. The entire troubleshooting section of the directions sheet consists simply of the url for Apple’s support website, so I went there and navigated my way to the iPod shuffle’s support page. One of the first links there is for the iPod Shuffle New User’s Guide that, when clicked, sends you to a user’s guide for the iPod Nano instead. After that, the support page gets less helpful.

After spending a few days reading everything on the support site, from Apple-certified “articles” to endless user-group discussions on the meanings of the various error messages that appeared, I discovered that, no matter what the actual problem consisted of, the ultimate advice from Apple was to try the Five R’s. iPod won’t talk to iTunes? Try the Five R’s. You can’t access your playlist on the iPod? Try the Five R’s. Your arm was unexpected amputated and your iPod is still clutched in the cold dead palm of your disposed arm? Try the Five R’s.

So I tried the Five R’s. Reset, retry, restart, reinstall, and restore.

Reset the iPod. I disconnected the iPod from the computer, turned it off, waited, and then turned it back on again. I got a blinky orange light instead of a shiny green one. No dice. On to the next R.

Retry. Apple’s advice is to retry connecting the iPod to a different high-powered USB port. I did this, and discovered that, in addition to now being unable to sync with the iPod, iTunes was now also unable to even recognize the iPod in the first place. On to the next R.

Restart the computer. Okay. Five minutes later, I still have an orange blinky iPod, a glacially slow iTunes, and no interaction betwixt ‘em. Next R?

Reinstall the iPod, since apparently the software on an iPod can go obselete withiin mere nanoseconds of its installation. I went and downloaded the newest version of iTunes, as the current version on my computer, now three days old, was woefully obselete. I then connected my iPod and asked iTunes to update its software, if applicable. It said “I sure can!,” and then proceeded to freeze up the computer for hours before finally spitting out an error message admitting “Oops, I guess I can’t.” On to the final R.

Restore the iPod. Essentially, the scorched earth policy — reformat the iPod and start fresh. To begin, I installed the newest version of iTunes, as my current version, now hours old, was woefully obselete. I then connected my iPod and asked iTunes to restore it. It said “I sure can!,” and then proceeded to freeze up for days before finally saying that the iPod had been successfully restored to its factory settings.

At which point iTunes and Windows refused to recognize the iPod, and all the music on it was lost.

Finally, I called up Apple Help, gave them the story, expalined the failure of the Five R’s to resolve the problem (which I believe caused one Apple tech to faint on the spot). The eventual sad response was that my iPod was probably defective, and I should take it back and replace it with another. I explained that I was several thousand miles away from the original store of purchase, and the nearest Best Buy was on a different island several hundred miles away. The operator suggested I swim for it, and that was that.

So I held onto my defective little clip of an iPod for the next two weeks. When we returned to the mainland, I took it back to Best Buy, swapped it out with another iPod shuffle, and took it home.

This time, however, I did everything right. I installed the very, very, very latest iTunes first, and let it spend a day organizing my music files. Next, I took out the iPod and let it fully charge its battery (a process that took 6 hours) before trying to sync it up with oodles of music. Once fully charged, I had iTunes make sure the iPod’s software was up to date. Finally, finally, I pushed the “Autofill” button to put music on the iPod…

[ Beep. ] “iTunes cannot sync with the iPod.”

Another round of the Five R’s later, and iTunes and the iPod were still not syncing. I made another call to Apple help who, after relaying them the entire sordid ordeal, suggested that perhaps it was time I should get a new computer, and, you know what? a Mac would be a good choice for interacting with an iPod.

At that point, I hung up, returned the iPod, got the money back, and bought a beer instead. Given my experience, I can’t fathom how the iPod has taken over the music world, but I suspect the same people who rally behind the iPod would also probably pay big money for ths next big, revolutionary Apple idea.

Epilogue

I ever meet Justin Long in person, I am so gonna kick his ass.

Well, we’re home from Hawaii.

We spent a relaxing three weeks on the big island of Hawaii, which is itself called Hawaii.  (This sort of confusing naming convention is common in Hawaii.  We spent most of our time in the town of Kona, situated on the western half of the island, which is itself called Kona.  To add to the confusion, the town itself is also called Kailua, or Kailua-Kona, or even Kailua-Keauhou.  They oughta save some time and just call everything Konfusin-as-hell; at least you’d know what to expect.)

We did some nice sight-seeing, some hiking, some snorkeling, and a lot of swimming and lollygagging near the shore.  Rather than bore you with the details here, I can instead bore you with the details and hundreds of pictures over at Flickr if you’re interested; just click on the photo-collage below to see our Hawaiian Photo Album.  Mahalo!