A long, long, time ago...

I can still remember when.

I tell my kids I used to have to walk two miles through the snow uphill just to get to the bus stop. Some of that is even true. But truthfully, times have  changed, and I'm not even really that old.

Here's a comparison of what my kids have for entertainment versus what I had when I was a kid.

My Kids	Me as a Kid
Ipod	AM Radio – Casey Kasem's Top 40, Records – We had a cool autoflip player thing (okay, that hardly ever worked), cassettes, reel-to-reel tape recorder
Computer	Commodore Vic 20
Wii	Board Games, Football, Basketball, Tennis, Reading
Television	Television with 4 stations: ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS
Digital Video Recorder	Live television with 4 stations: Miss it and never see it again.
DVDs	Talking about movies with friends who also haven't seen them.
Internet	Not so much

An update on my daughter's blog: Frustrated by blogger and blogspot web pages being blocked by default in Vista parental controls, she's not even trying to use it now. I think she can make modifications to her existing blog and get what she wants. She wants to create a new blog. Still working on her.

My Daughter's New Blog

So I finally got around to showing my daughter blogger, and she set up her own blog. She had already told me she wasn't very happy with the web page she had done through Uverse, mainly because it had a long convoluted, unmemorable name. Her blogger blog doesn't have much content right now, but she's moderately excited for two reasons. First she was able to pick out a name for it, one that she can remember and give easily to her friends. Second, there is a comment feature, and she envisions being able to use it to have online conversations with multiple friends. I know you can do the same with email, but I guess being easily able to have threaded conversations appeals to her.

She hasn't posted any pictures yet, but we did finally get around to getting pictures on the digital keychain she got for Christmas. My kids may not be as teched up as some others; I guess I'm just too mean and cheap; but they do have a few gadgets: Digital keychain, Wii, Ipods, plus time on the computer. Entertainment for kids these days is a far cry from what I had available in my day. Maybe I'll get around to comparing here sometime, but for now it just makes me feel old.

My Daughter the Web Author

I'm getting started because my daughter asked me if she could have her own web page. She's 9. I'm not even sure what I was doing when I was nine, but I'm pretty sure it involved baseball cards in the spokes of my bicycle. Personal computers were still ten years in the future. The web would wait another ten years after that.

I've dabbled with web pages in the past, because as a tech geek kind of guy it seemed like the thing to do. I don't have the time to make anything really interesting or useful though. I started with one of the free web hosting services and used Microsoft Frontpage to design. The free service is gone now, as is Frontpage from my current PC. I moved on to Comcast because it was included in my service. Now I'm using UVerse, so I thought I'd start there. This was not as easy as I expected. There was no link or information on the AT&T account pages on how or even if I could create a web page using the service. I did track down a way finally based off of a message board posting I found from Google. It was ugly though. Still I let my daughter create a page, and she seemed pretty happy. I haven't looked at it yet.

I'm going to try Blogger now. It looks like it might be better suited for what my girl wants to do, which I think amounts to posting pictures of her friends and goofy stories about her dogs.