Archive for February, 2010

Pre-school “goals”

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Having started our child in pre-school, we frequently monitor his feelings about the place, and occasionally reflect upon the effect the whole experience is having.

Our main goal with pre-school was the socialization aspect — it is great to see our child increasingly confident and social with other children and we feel this will serve him well as he grows older.  We are not the most social family, so it is good that the school allows him opportunities every day to interact with others outside of his immediate family.

Occasionally, it occurs to us that maybe we should be expecting more from the school in terms of academics.  They certainly do other activities there besides social ones — there is work on crafts and encouragement of individual exploration of puzzles, etc. there, but I’m talking more about basic academic skills like reading and writing.  Clearly, as most parents do, we feel those are critical tools in surviving in the world, so while we don’t overly push those things (we prefer until we feel the child is ready), we nevertheless value such skills quite highly.  We planned to do most of this on our own.  But again, we wondered — to what extent should we expect the pre-school to help out here?

In thinking about this, we’re also aware that we can fall into the trap of the “overaggressive parent”, pushing things on their kids before they are necessarily ready.   A good antidote for that was a recent article from Scholastic.

We will be, no doubt, thinking about all this more, but it’s useful to sometimes take a step back and think about the bigger picture.

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cam2pc - nice freeware that simplifies transferring images

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

We have lots of family pictures on our digital cameras.  However, getting them to our archives (and bypassing photo edit software) is an interesting challenge.  Camera vendors give you software, usually, for this.  However, it sometimes doesn’t work the way you want or comes with added ware that you don’t need.  Plus, it can be a space hog.

Enter cam2pc, a nice freeware utility that will detect your camera type (it’s storage protocol, we think) and then allow you a simple way to specify where and how (including wildcard-style naming for files/folders).

In addition to an intuitive GUI (the options tab is straightforward and has all you need),  a nice feature of this tool is that it will show you thumbnails as it transfers the photos.  The software doesn’t push anything on you — it defaults to a lightweight config mode and allows you to opt out of anything (like auto transformation of pictures for orientation).

cam2pc is a great little utility that simplifies a general problem.  We recommend it.

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