Watson Family News

It’s been a long time since I’ve been anywhere close to in touch with popular music. I’ve bought one album in the last year — The Nutcracker by the London Symphony Orchestra. Not exactly hip, huh? That musical lethargy combined with the obnoxious RIAA lawsuits and DRM has led to a mostly intentional boycott of the music industry. My one source of new music is when I listen to the All Songs Considered podcast. I just finished listening to their “Year’s Best CD’s” episode and highly recommend it to anyone else out-of-touch but curious about good new music.

I’m 81% Geek. In other news, fire is hot.

81% Geek

Amazingly it turns out someone other than my friend Jon from work reads my website.  My post about learning Irish Spanish actually got a response from Mark, the host of the podcast.  It turns out that among the things I was wrong about is that he’s Scottish and not Irish.  I have to admit that after I wrote that post I had a nagging feeling I had gotten that wrong.  I didn’t figure it would somehow get back to the people that do the show.  Ah well, a fairly gentle way to learn the lesson of how public speech on the Internet really is.

As penitence, Mark, I promise to listen to a few more episodes.  You can listen for yourself and decide if he speaks his Spanish with a Scottish accent or not at Coffee Break Spanish.

Here’s the full text of his comment:

Hi there to the Watson family. I’m Mark from Coffee Break Spanish and there are a couple of things I think I should point out. First of all, we’re Scottish, not Irish! Not that I’ve got anything against our Irish neighbours, but I’m equally proud of my Scottish heritage! We do indeed speak in Scottish accents when we speak English (as is normal for Scots, I guess), but, as the teacher, I certainly don’t have a Scottish (or Irish!) accent when I speak Spanish. I’ve spent a lot of time in Spain, and if you have a look at the comments on our blog and website, and reviews on iTunes you’ll see that quite a number of people have commented on my excellent Spanish accent.

I’m not trying to make a big deal of this, but you’ll understand that if people are claiming that learning Spanish from a Scot is pointless because the Scot doesn’t speak Spanish with a proper Spanish accent then this is quite likely to affect our podcast and therefore our business. My Spanish accent is peninsular Spanish, having spent time in Salamanca, Madrid and the Balearics. It is not, perhaps, the Latin American Spanish accent you may be more used to.

I’d encourage you to listen to more of the podcast, and in particular to listen to the early shows where we give lots more information about the podcast and why I’m the teacher and Kara is the learner. As a learner, obviously Kara will be trying her best to develop her accent and she has, in fact, made excellent progress in the past few months. Compare her Spanish accent in lesson 1 to her accent in lesson 17 for example!

I wish you well with your continued study of Spanish.

Sheryl sent me a link to this site so I had to try out the celebrity face recognition tool they have. You can see some of the matches below. The funniest is that one of my top matches was Jimmy Stewart. Sheryl has always had a thing for Jimmy Stewart; she even had his poster on her wall when she was a kid. I never thought I looked like him, but it’s almost too much of coincidence not to believe there’s a connection.

[Update: Oops!  Boy did I get this wrong.  See the comment for this post.]

I tried out a podcast today that I’d never listened to before called Coffee Break Spanish. It seems like a good idea — quick Spanish lessons to help your learn (or brush up on) basic Spanish. I was surprised to when the hosts of the show started speaking with thick Irish accents. Even when speaking in Spanish, their voices were distinctly tinged with Irish. Like the rest of the world I find Irish accents incredibly charming, but I just couldn’t get past the Irish-Spanish mix. I guess I’ll have to go back to learning Spanish by watching Telenovelas on Univision.

I heard a great song called “The President’s Dead” by Okkervil River on the All Songs Considered podcast last week. Take a listen here.

The songs less than three minutes but it manages to pack in about twice as many interesting lyrics as most songs and the end packs a nice emotional punch.

I thought about titling this post “The President’s Dead”, but I’m plenty busy enough without the Department of Homeland Security knocking on my door.

In the latest email I saw that my alma mater started a Planet Carleton site for aggregating posts from the websites of alumni, students and faculty. Seems like a cool idea, so I signed up to include this site. I guess I’ll have to throw in a few more “intelligent” posts and less fantasy football.

I’ve “read” a few good books lately that I recommend. By read, of course, I mean listened to — via the magic of audio-books — as I drive to and from work.

• Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order - dead, white, male militarists.
• A Short History of Nearly Everything - dead, white, male scientists.
• The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century - about one of our worst presidents.
• 1776 - about one of our best presidents.
  

Next up are:

• The Areas of My Expertise - by the Windows guy from the Apple ads.
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - Food and natural history…awesome!

Last weekend I was doing dishes Saturday morning and I noticed a raccoon amble across our backyard and climb under our back deck. On one side their is about a foot of space open under the deck, but the ground slopes up until ground and deck meet on the other side. I went and peeked under the deck but could only see the outline of the raccoon shuffling around. I wasn’t sure it was living their or just thought it might be a nice place to sleep the day away.

Well apparently it (she) was looking for a nice safe place to raise a family. Today a pest removal guy came and informed us that we have a mamma and a litter of raccoon cubs. They put out a live trap and baited it with, of all things, Hostess Snowballs. Once the catch the mamma, they’ll remove some boards from our deck to get the babies, then relocate the whole family someplace a little more remote. Or at least farther away from us. Hopefully we can get some good pictures of the event.

Last weekend the place I have worked for the last 9 years moved to a new office building with more space. The rest of the IT department and I had to work all weekend to move servers and setup all the servers and desktops at the new location. Then we worked a full week again. Today is my first day off after 12 straight days of work and I needed it. The new offices are very nice and a major move up from our last building. Here’s a picture of the building I copied from Google Maps. We have the whole 3rd floor and the red arrow points roughly to where my cube is.