At first I limited what they could buy so that no one child would use up all the virtual money at the expense of the others but once I built up a sizable reserve of coins I dropped that restriction and it has been interesting to see each tank take on it’s own character according to the person who owned it.

Please note that I would not presume to read much into looking at the tanks if I did not get to see the other aspects of each child’s life as well.

Without being familiar with the game you would not know by looking at it that Savannah chooses a large portion of her fish based on their profitability. She learned from me which fish make the most money and she always keeps many of them in stock. She doesn’t do this to be selfish, she does it because the likes to emulate adult behavior and I have one tank of my own which is used exclusively to grow the most profitable fish available (that’s how I built up enough coin reserves to allow the kids absolute freedom with their tanks). Savannah has also learned the dangers of not feeding her fish. The game only works when I have an Internet connection so when we go camping we can’t care for our fish. Once we left home for what I thought would be a short enough trip that the fish would live but when we got home almost all the fish had died in each of our tanks. Savannah now keeps a food brick in her tank. This has to be purchased with coins, unlike regular fish food which is free, but a food brick will keep the fish alive for at least a week (depending on which size she buys).

Savannah’s tank also shows her propensity to collect things. The collection is very eclectic to the rest of us (the only part of her collection that I understand is that most of the items make her fish happier and consequently more profitable) but once something grabs her attention she collects it. Once collected there is no rhyme or reason to where she places it in the tank.

Alyssa’s tank shows her artistic streak. While the plants in her tank make her fish happier I doubt Alyssa really cares about that. She cares to make her tank beautiful so the background and the placement of each item are chosen very carefully.

Alyssa tends to keep a limited variety of fish in her tank at any one time (I suspect that is also subconsciously for artistic reasons) and she tends to prefer ocean creatures.

Mariah does not care for decorations. Her fastidious personality demands simplicity although, like Alyssa, she chooses her background carefully. That is her one decoration and she enjoys changing the background regularly. She chooses her fish purely based on which ones are pretty to her. Like the background, the fish she stocks tends to change fairly often which is why she does not stock much in the way of ocean creatures which tend to take weeks to mature rather than hours or days.

Carefree little Isaac loves to browse the stores and just buy anything that catches his attention. His interest in specific things is often short lived but he’s not discerning in what he buys. When coins were tight he had a habit of buying expensive creatures that matured slowly and then selling them long before they were profitable. He finds things, like the elephant and the eagle, that I did not even know existed in the game. Generally speaking it would be perfectly fine with him if I went through his tank and randomly sold things behind his back (I don’t but I know I could).

Isaac’s personality shows up not only in what his tank looks like, but also which tank he has. At first he had the last tank (we went in age order) but then he would get on the game when I wasn’t looking and start selling my fish. I learned to keep my fish out of the first tank until they were ready to sell and eventually I just let him have that first tank for his own while I adopted his old tank.

It’s always fun for me to write welcome posts when we are expecting a new arrival. We’ve done this enough times now that as we prepare for number six there would seem to be nothing new to say. That might explain why we have decided not to find out in advance whether this will be a boy or whether we have a girl coming our way.

When we went for the ultrasound the doctor captured a cool image of baby’s arms crossed in front of it’s face as if rubbing it’s eyes while waking up from a nap.

That last sentence should have been awkward enough to prove why almost everyone these days chooses to find out the gender of their coming baby in advance. I have suggested that we use male pronouns in odd months and female pronouns in even months when talking about baby but I don’t know if we’ll actually do that. The only thing we know for sure is that if this is a boy he will be named Noah and if this is a girl we have not yet settled on one name.

I got the exciting news that I am a new uncle again as my brother and his wife had their new baby girl this morning. I expect she’s beautiful but I haven’t seen any pictures yet. On the other hand, I thought it was very funny to see the baby statistics for Katherine right above a tax advice disclaimer – as pictured above.

Congratulations to Katherine … and Mom and Dad … and Jack (big brother) and Mariann (big sister).

In case you can’t tell, that shell of the egg opens and closes to reveal the picture.

Things she is thankful for: Mom and Dad, Alyssa, Mariah, Isaac, and Bell (not sure of the reference there)

So without further ado, here is the whole family:

Enoch Miller

We had been expecting him for weeks since his two older siblings each came three weeks early – never again. My new motto is “be ready a month early and don’t plan on anything before the due date.” Enoch was not very late as he was due the last week of October, but he held on long enough to make it into November – boy month in our house since Dad, Isaac, and now Enoch all have November birthdays. Unfortunately siblings (under 14) can’t come to the hospital to visit so we can’t get a great little family picture like we had when Isaac was born. We’ll post the best we can get after Enoch gets home.

Aside from very clear images we got a good look at a very active little boy, turning his head, moving his hands and feet – he was almost constantly in motion. Hopefully that means that Enoch will be a very well-matched playmate for Isaac (once he is more than half Isaac’s size that is).

I was laying in my bed at 5:00 AM (when most people should be in bed) and my brain started reviewing the images of the roads I commute on. I began to think of how such a complex road system would be entirely unnecessary if we were not able to travel at the average speed of today’s normal commute. Consider this a stream of semi-consciousness about the impact that our speed of movement has on the kind of life that each of us lives.

Then

Let’s place the year 1889 as the baseline of a slower lifestyle. I choose that year because it predates the advent of the car, it is late enough that we had the ability to move faster than horse and wagon with the use of railroads, and it’s 120 years ago – a nice round number.

In 1889 most travel was done by horse or on foot. As I recall traveling 30 miles in a day was generally about as far as a person could expect to go. In the late 1870′s the Transcontinental Express was able to average about 35 miles per hour traveling across the country. That would appear to be the functional limit of traveling speed for that time.

Now

Today people regularly travel 70 miles per hour on their daily commute (outside of rush hour) only because we have created an artificial speed limit of 65 mph on our roads – without that speed limit most vehicles could easily travel at 90 mph.

For the sake of simplification let’s consider the differences that we would see if we were to limit our physical traveling of people to 5 mph (a fast walk) with a limit of 30 miles per day, as compared to today when I can comfortably make a trip of 600 miles in a long day and regularly commute 20 miles each way to work.

Comparison

In our modern situation the only real limitation on where I work (physically) is how much time I am willing to commute – I can choose to live 50 miles or more from my place of employment so long as I am willing to take the time to commute. In the slower lifestyle if we assume that I am willing and able to spend 6 hours of my day commuting in addition to the 8 hours I need to work then I could work as much as 15 miles from home.

From a community standpoint I could not reasonably interact with anyone outside a 7 mile radius on a reagular basis in the slower community whereas in the modern-speed community I could with no more effort interact with people anywhere in a 100 mile radius. If we had an even population density over that whole area that would mean that I have access to 204 times as many people on a daily basis. If we assume that there really is a limit on how many people I can know well then there I can really only know ½ of 1% of the available information about those I can interact with on a daily basis compared to the slower society

Conclusion

I am really not trying to suggest that our society has gone all downhill since some utopian point in our past, but I do like to think about the real results of what we think of as progress. As I was looking around (on the internet – there’s a new kind of speed there) I discovered an entry in WIkipedia on car culture that focuses on cars and addresses this same mindset of “what has really changed with this progress.”

What are your thoughts on the effect of rushing about in our society?

I have long known that there are many David Millers around (such as the Mayor of Toronto – yet one more reason I should go visit there) and I assumed that I was getting tweets from people who assumed that “davidmiller” on twitter belonged to a David Miller that they knew. Finally today I noticed that more than half of the tweets directed at me from people who obviously don’t know me contained links from blip.fm – I know nothing about the site except that fromt he content of the tweets it is obviously oriented around listening to music. I finally got curious and asked the people who recently sent me blip related tweets why they were sending them. The answer I got was:

holyshadow@davidmiller cause they have integrated twitter and blip, and since you have the same nick, you receive the blips on twitter. that answers?

So now I know why I may be the only person on twitter who has blocked more people than he follows (blocking people means that I don’t get informed every time they send a tweet my way) – due the the mashup nature of so many social networking services I am getting random tweets because some other David Miller has the same username on blip.fm as I have on twitter.com – I wonder if I can just block tweets that contain a url from blip?

Last night after Laura and I got home from our date Laura called me down as she heard Moonlight at close range in one of the basement walls near another cold air return. I took off the cover but there was no Moonlight. We decided that she must not be in the vents but in the walls themselves. We went into the spare bedroom and cut a hole into the wall where we heard her. She was not in the place where we cut, but we continued to hear her. She would begin climbing the walls every time we called her name. When we were confident about where she was located we finally performed the rescue operation (at 11:00 pm):

After two days of being trapped in the walls we had our Moonlight back. She was happy to see us and very happy to start drinking some water.