Santa

Recent iTunes Purchase

The Shanghai Restoration Project, a musical group that blends traditional Chinese instrumentation and culture with hip-hop and electronica, has collaborated with Yip's Children's Choir Canada, a non-profit subsidiary of the internationally acclaimed Yip's Children's Choir (Hong Kong). The result is "Little Dragon Tales" a collection of 12 classic Chinese Children’s songs with a modern twist.

I found this album through an adoption blog I follow. While playing the video, Kai began to sing along with a number of the songs. I really like the musical arrangements of these pieces and they are great reinforcement to help the boys learn the songs they sing at Chinese school.

Please & Thank You

How to say “Thank You”

谢谢
xie xie
“Thanks Thanks”

谢谢你
xie xie ni
“Thanks Thanks you”

How to say “Your Welcome”

不客气
bú kèqi
“You’re welcome ”

不用谢
bú yòng xiè
“you don’t need to thank me”

没事
mei shi
“it’s nothing”

Remembering Steve

My first exposure to personal computers was on a brand new Apple III. That’s not a typo, it was the Apple “Three”. One of Apple's few well recorded flops. A friend and mentor of mine had one, and I can still vividly remember him explaining to me the basic concepts of the systems operating system: Apple SOS (Sophisticated Operating System). As criticized as it was, using that machine was a watershed moment for me. Learning the commands to navigate and display the content of the 5.25” floppy disks of that machine laid the foundation for my understanding of personal computers. I went on to learn to use and understand a myriad of competing computers back in the early 80’s, including the Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Atari ST, and the Amiga. But it was the Macintosh computer that changed my life. I waited a year after they first came out, and bought a Macintosh 512K, the “Fat” Mac in 1985. I quickly realized I needed the secondary external 400K floppy disk drive if I didn’t want to spend hours flipping disks in and out of the internal drive every time I saved a file. Still I fell in love with that computer, and my love for Apple products grew with each succesive revision and upgrade.

I have continued using Apple products both personally and professionally for the last 25 years. They have shaped the way I understand and experience the world, and the way in which I communicate and express myself creatively.

Even if you’ve never touched an Apple product, if you use a computer, listen to digital music, use a smartphone, enjoy computer animated movies, your experience has been shaped by the vision of Steve Jobs. I remain in awe of his clarity of foresight, his demanding minimalist esthetic, and the unbridled enthusiasm with which he brought forth so many amazing products.

The world is a better place because of his efforts. He will be sorely missed. Thank you Mr. Jobs for all you shared with us. When I think of a world without you my heart bleeds in six colors.

Testing BlogPress

Seeing if this works


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Learning Chinese

Ni hao ma?
We've been involved with the local Chinese language school to varying degrees for about 6 years, but we've been pretty serious for the last two years now. The nice thing this spring is that they are doing an adult class. The teacher is a native Chinese speaker who is a professor at the local university. He is an excellent teacher and makes the class a lot of fun. It helps that we have been fooling around with the language for a number of years now. Having a focused class, even if it's only once a week, is starting to tie all the little fragments floating around my head into a bit of cohesiveness.

We had a set of cd's with phrases for adoptive parents that we listened to before adopting Kai. There were a handful of phrases we mastered, like "I am your father/mother", "this is your big brother", "this is for you", etc. Now those phrases are starting to make more sense to me, as we learn what the individual words and the grammar behind the statements.

It's much easier to provide encouragement and support of Kai and Shen's efforts at learning the language when we are actively learning it as well.

The New Banner

Yeah, it's a good excuse to write about my iPhone. After all, my iPhone is far and away the Stinkiest, Mousiest thing in my life. I think I like to rub it's little glass screen as much or than 凯 likes to rub Mouse's left ear. I drew the image above on my iPhone in a little app called Zen Brush. It's quite an addictive little program and very relaxing to doodle around with. It's supposed to be like using a Chinese calligraphy brush and ink. The only way it's really like that though is that I'm really bad at getting either one of them to do what I want. You can't use it the same way as you use a brush, you can't get your finger to go down onto the page or come up off it the same way, so I can't really figure out a way to use it to actually practice Chinese calligraphy. It's still a fun and relaxing little drawing app. It's better on the iPad, but I don't have regular access to one so it's the iPhone version for me.

(image links to app publisher site)

Stinky Mouse 2.0

Hey!

Sorry if I startled anyone who still had this site in their RSS reader, but Wow! This blog was getting really, really stale! it was looking nearly as old and smelly as it's namesake!

I guess I just sort of lost my direction here. I started blogging over six years ago when we began our third son's adoption. Recording the story of that process was the blog's original purpose. Twice! :-) But then we finished adopting. So it became a "family blog". I loved blogging about my family, but Facebook actually does a much better job of sharing our family's stories with our friends and relatives. Also, there were lots of things I wanted to blog about that didn't actually fit into a "family blog".

After letting this poor little blog lie fallow for over a year, I think it's time to take it up again. I love where this blog has been, and I'm keeping all of it online and accessible through the archive links above. But Stinky Mouse is moving on. There's lots I still want to blog about. It will still probably end up being a lot about family, but I'm hoping I can do something here that I can't do on Facebook. So I'm reclaiming Stinky Mouse for my own directionless purpose. You're welcome to come along.