Scott Means » kids

My daughter.

smeans — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:37:55 +0000

My daughter never speaks. Most weeks I spend two or three hours total driving her around in my car, and she never speaks, she just looks out the window. I often wonder what she’s thinking about, and today when I got the school newsletter I saw this poem she wrote:

Memories
Selene Means
Team 73

I am a piece of paper;
clean and blank,
now written all over
by others.

Words written in sharpie;
written in ink.
Staying there.
Forever.

Everything is written.
Everything.
Praises.
Compliments.
.Kindness.
Lies.
Hatefulness.
Misery.
Anger.

Sometimes it seems,
just seems,
kindness is outnumbered
by hurt.

But still,
I am a piece of a paper.
A home to these words.
Written in sharpie.
Staying with me.
Forever.
In memories.

It makes my heart ache, because I can’t give her any of my experiences, just watch her form her own. And hope.

Windows Vista: making the formerly trivial nearly impossible every day since 2007.

smeans — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:17:23 +0000

So yesterday my daughter got herself into trouble. Normally, she’s a really well-behaved girl, but last night she made up for a few months of good behaviour with one well-timed failure to obey her mother and some poor choices regarding a school orchestra recital. So to punish her, I’ve taken away her access to the computer for a week. Should be a snap, I think. In every version of Windows since NT I can just go in and disable her account. Child’s play. Wrong, sooo wrong.

I tried several approaches, some obvious, some not, but for some reason Microsoft decided that the account lock out feature is too dangerous for primitive Windows Vista home users. They don’t provide any access to it in the User Accounts applet through the Control Panel, and they’ve disabled access through the Computer Management MMC plug-in. After flailing around for about fifteen minutes (which for such a trivial thing felt like a lifetime), I suddenly remembered the old tried-and-true user account command line tool: NET USER.

Not to be confused with NET USE (which is for accessing shared network drives), NET USER lets you manage Windows user accounts from the command line. Feeling like I was only seconds away from my goal, I started a command prompt and got the command line help for the tool (NET USER /?). I get this output:

NET USER [username [password | *] [options]] [/DOMAIN] username {password | *} /ADD [options] [/DOMAIN] username [/DELETE] [/DOMAIN] username [/TIMES:{times | ALL}]

Arrgh! Nothing remotely resembling the disable command I remember from 10 years ago. But, not willing to give up yet, I try NET HELP USER, and I see this:

(boring stuff elided)


Options      Are as follows:
   Options                    Description

      --------------------------------------------------------------------

   /ACTIVE:{YES | NO}         Activates or deactivates the account. If

                              the account is not active, the user cannot

                              access the server. The default is YES.

(more boring stuff elided)

Victory! So I disabled her account, and it disappeared off of the login screen. She’ll think I deleted it, and I’ll go to sleep tonight satisfied that I have yet again managed to do something in 1/2 hour that could have been done with three mouse clicks a mere three years ago. Sigh.

I guess I’m the tooth fairy now?

smeans — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 02:19:29 +0000

I’m posting this from my phone, waiting for my son Skyler to go to sleep. He has been grilling me about Santa Claus since he was five, just plain doesn’t believe it. But the tooth fairy, he believes. So now I wait for him to sleep so I can trick him into thinking some supernatural being “bought” his tooth. Parenting is always full of surprises.