Good morning friend happy Monday. “I feel like Monday is the peak of a hill and after that everything gets easier,” Jane said in the car this morning. I fear my dislike of Mondays has rubbed off on my daughter. She still likes school, though, so it’s only some light grumbling. She even brushed her teeth.

Excellent weekend all ‘round. Got a lot of chores chores chores done. Continued troubleshooting the turtle cam, I think it’s the very end of the Cat6 cable, has a crimp in it. Need to put a new plug on it. Hopefully that’ll fix it. Hopefully.

Did some gardening, got some tomatoes, zinnias, peppers, basil. I forgot to plant my fall cucumbers I am sad.

Mostly, of course, I worked on the studio all weekend. You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but I got a lot done. Wiring wiring wiring. I ran the wiring for four sets of ceiling speakers, two cameras, and two APs from their spots in the floor all the way round to the server room. I used my patented slap-bracelet-as-wiring-conduit technique. I was using a hand-stapler to staple the slap bracelets to the joists, but it sucked and my hand hurt and it didn’t put the (extra-long T-50) staples in far enough. So I lugged the compressor up the attic and started using the pneumatic stapler and oh boy was that very exciting. Worked perfectly.

Eventually ran out of slap bracelets, though, so I sucked it up and used velcro at some strategic points just to get everything run. I will go back and add the slap bracelets next weekend.

So I got the garage Ethernet all wired and I set up a new Unifi AP in the garage and it is so exciting because I’ve had crap wifi in there for ages and it’s been kind of a pain and now it is a gig up and down and it rules and everything magically works better. There are these giant steel beams protruding from the garage ceiling. I mean, they’re boxed in, but they make it so placing things on the ceiling can be a bit tricky, don’t want the signal getting blocked. But I think in the end, it looks rather neat, what do you think?

But by far the most exciting thing about working in the attic this weekend, is that Jane came and helped me! Oh man, it was the best. I have taught her how to caulk the gaps in the subfloor, and explained all the layers of the subfloor and how much caulking there will be. And she really enjoys it, fits her personality well. It was just so fun. May have shed a tear. Parenting dreams coming true, right there.

She’s gone about two weeks without iPad since her last meltdown, and she has been GREAT. So of course it’s time to ruin our lives again and re-introduce the iPad. I had a long talk with her about addiction by design, how it’s not her fault the thing sucks her in, it was designed to do that. We’re not mad at her for getting sucked in. We agreed that Youtube Kids was the problem, and we didn’t mind her using her iPad to make stop motion videos or draw. So we mutually agreed upon a 1-hour time limit on Youtube. We had a “soft” one hour limit before, but you could hit ignore and, well, she hit ignore too much.

So then I spent like two hours reconfiguring the iPad, getting all the parental controls set up, again, with the correct user ID and all this shit. My god Apple parental controls are…. well, they’re more robust than people give them credit for, they are very granular and thorough. But they’re all in a section called “screen time,” no “parental controls” label at all, so most people don’t even know they’re there. But you can basically limit anything and everything, so the whole thing is super locked down. Nothing social, no browser, only specified apps, content ratings all set to G, no Apple ID, no data sent out, no analytica, no, no, no.

The problem is that while they’re very thorough and granular, there is no real help, no real interface to see what the experience is like, no aid in understanding what you’ve done.

So on Sunday morning Jane sat up in the attic while I worked and we beta-tested the whole thing together. Everything mostly worked.

Her Nintendo Switch, when you run out of time, gives her a five-minute warning and then subsequent one-minute warnings. It is very find and friendly. Apple? One minute warning, then boom. All written in copy like the engineer put it in as placeholder.

Also it has an “ask for more time” button but the only thing it does is ask for a screen time password. It doesn’t, like, text the owner, which is stupid. It does that for app downloads — not that I have app downloads enabled. Fuerthermore, the only options are 15 minutes, one hour, or turn off the limit. Why can’t I just type in a number?

Mysterious.

Anyway, she seems to be mostly fine, it worked okay, she is fine when a machine tells her to stop watching Youtube. Unlike when her parents tell her.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

We’re listening to one of the most criminally underrated 90’s bands, Smashing Orange. Bad wrap with the name and the rise of the contemporary Smashing Pumnpkins. The Pumpkins’ first label release was 1990, Smashing Orange 1991, but man who could have predicted from the Tritessa 7” how big the Pumpkins were gonna get. Alas.

Smashing Orange is Nuggest/Psych-influenced rock shoegaze. Heavier than Ride/Slowdive, more along the lines of, let’s say Swervedriver meets the New Seekers or something. I love them so much. They did ultimately get signed for their fourth album to MCA, but that seems to have gone nowhere, a late shoegaze signing in an era where America forgot about Shoegaze, damn them, and turned their attention to grunge.

I really don’t know much about this band, but I got a promo copy of their second album The Glass Bead Game at my radio station job in ‘92 and I have been a giant fan ever since. They deserve a Numero box set or something. They deserve their place in the shoegaze pantheon.

So this Ai thing.^* Look, Ai sucks, Ai companies suck, but the slowdown is probably wise. I do not particularly care to 3D chess the thing, “oh this is all a PR stunt, they’re running out of money so they have to slow down,” so what, man. Take em up on it. Take em up on it for a few reasons:

First, Ai sucks as a whole so anything slowing it down is good.

Next, you know China is yes, keeping up, but struggling and not into it, so they’d probably be fine with it.

Also: Ai might not end the planet in some sort of genocidal superhuman godlike stroke. But my day job does run a SOC-audited, giant financial tech platform, and I gotta tell you, man. Ai has made “cyber” security a nightmare. So many more patches, so many more phishing and hacking attempts. The amount of time we have to spend keeping the platform secure has grown exponentially in the age of Ai. It fucking sucks. Basically the thing is like script kiddies times one million. Ai dosn’t have to be some godlike supergenius to fuck the world.

All Ai has to do to fuck us is make something like Wannacry a thousand times more easy and a thousand times more prevalant and boy do we seem to be on our way there. The entire world runs on interconnected computers these days and while it wouldn’t be an apocalypse per se for them to all break, or 50% of them to break, all at once, it would be fucking bad bad bad. And maybe we should not let that happen.

HOWEVER I don’t think any of this needs new laws, I don’t think we need to stop the world and figure it out. I am in the Lina Khan camp here: we have laws now. We have CSAM laws and we have product safety laws and liability laws and unfair competition laws and hacking laws and companies are liable for the products they make. We are already failing in this so bad: these companies are routinely putting out press releases that say, effectively “oh hey we committed a crime this weekend.” If you build code and goes and hacks something, you committed a crime! People go to jail for that sort of thing!

Make a few examples, man. Let’s go.

Hrm I’ve done this all out of order today. Tales from Chore House are usually after the music break, I usually end with my Jane stories, but I already did one. OH.

Last night instead of our usual race to the dinner table, Jane made the house into a restaurant and she served Emma and I dinner, a dinner she “helped” Emma make. It was so cute. First time. Just the best.

AND oh right on Friday she sat us down in the living room and proceeded to do a 30-minute-or-so presentation-slash-play about her day. How her day went, acted out according to a timeline. It took forever.

It went on so long we started to get antsy. The irony of both of us feeling so antsy when we were finally getting what we asked for was not lost on us.

But it was pretty interesting! So out of the blue after months of silence when you ask “how was your day.”

A+ parenting weekend.

Except for the meltdown Friday night when we were at Lowe’s buying a new washing machine, because it was “boring” and she wanted to go look at the Halloween stuff.

But even that! 1) This was her first time back at Lowe’s since she shattered her teeth there, so that was brave, and 2) I managed to talk her down and she did it. I just kept saying “I’m not mad and I know you’re having trouble stopping this. I love you I love you” and eventually it disarmed her. And I have done this before, mind you. I’m not, like bragging about my amazing parenting. It just worked this time. Because she tried and made it work.

Amazing.

No playlists ready today. We are close on a lot of them, but not quite. But I did watch a fair bit of music Youtube Friday night, so how about you enjoy this live clip of ABC doing “Look of Love” at T In the Park. Martin still sounds pretty good!

Righty-o, off you pop. Jolly-o.

^*My friend Patty has proposed styling it Ai instead of AI because they don’t deserve the second cap and I am here for it. We have made the corresponding change to the GMHHAY style guide.