I came out of the cafe across the street from our office after getting my afternoon coffee. A little boy and his mum, probably in her mid thirties, were walking towards me along the footpath. The boy was energetic; he bounced down the street rather than walking. I heard him ask his mum if the car he saw up ahead was theirs. She replied it was. He then challenged her to a race, which she accepted.

And there you have it. A five year old going flat-tack down the sidewalk, being matched by a mum who's juggling a shopping bag but making use of her larger stride.

Last Sunday I visited Lennon* (and Kristy and Chad, but mostly Lennon :)

Lennon was doing some cooking (that is, playing with a bowl, some measuring cups and other whatnot). He had a Tupperware container with his Cruskits in that he coudln't open. Chad wouldn't open it until Lennon said "ta", which he wouldn't do. It's a male-ego thing. He had no problem asking mum nicely so the box was opened. He then proceeded to take all the biscuits out, and inadvertadly dropped a few on the carpet. Which he then inadvertadly stomped on.

Without thinking Kristy said "we need to eat these tomorrow Lennon" and he picked up his now-halved crisp bread and put it back into the box. It wasn't a big deal - the crumbs can be cleaned up (which incidently Lennon loves to do - you should see him burn around with the vacuum cleaner and broom). He clearly didn't meant to tip them all out, and he clearly didn't mean to squash them into the carpet. It's not that I had a low expectation of how Kristy would handle the situation, quite the opposite in fact, but it was still refreshing to see a child treated with respect when so many parents would have taken the opportunity to scold them.

I remember Richie making a point that often children aren't trying to be naughty. They're curious, and when you give them answers like "because I said so" then there's no surprise that it doesn't satisfy their curiosity.

These two instances have reminded me that parenting is the most important job a person will ever undertake, and whilst it doesn't balance out all the shit parents I see at shopping centres, it's good to know that some people understand the responsibility they've got. A responsibility that they knowingly undertook.

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* I can't easily determine what my user ID is for including in searches on Flickr. The URL has a w variable (which I'm guessing is for "who") and when I select "my photos" it sets w=me which I expect will be useless for everyone not logged in as me. Ohh well.

I've been doing a bit of Ruby on Rails development lately at work. I use Subversion on our development server to manage the code which I check in at certain milestones throughout the day.

One of the great things with Rails is that it'll generate (scaffold) a fair bit of your CRUD code, if you want. This makes the transition from having a database table defined through to having an interface that lets you interact with that table very smooth. It also generates a bunch of files throughout the tree.

When you run svn status these new files are shown with a question mark at the beginning of the line. This snippet of code, which lives in /home/mlambie/bin/svnborg.sh, adds any such file to the repository. Simple but useful.

#!/bin/bash
echo "Borging commenced."
svn status | grep "^?" | cut -f7 -d" " | xargs svn add
echo "Borging completed."

Brad won't marry Angelina until anyone can marry anyone. It's in the US, obvioiusly, but with Australia desperately wanting to be the US' little brother there's a good chance we'd be affected by a change in their laws.

But that's not going to happen. Sadly.

You know what's really not wicked? Dickheads that take off their car's Holden badges and put on Chevrolet ones instead.

You're still driving around in a piece of shit, no matter what the badge is.