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I replaced the battery on my Ensoniq KT-88 electronic keyboard today. It wasn’t hard. Took about 45 minutes of unscrewing, fiddling with connectors, and soldering. (actually, the keyboard is on long-term loan from a good friend :-) )

I bought the battery from Syntaur. Maybe I could have found it for a few dollars cheaper but it wasn’t expensive and I wanted to make sure it was a good battery and had the right tabs on it! These guys rock.

After I was done replacing the battery, none of the controls worked! Argh! I did a factory reset thanks to the internet (local archive), to reset the Ensoniq KT-88 “PRESS EDIT/SEQUENCES (PRESETS). PRESS AND HOLD THE UPPER 9 BUTTON AND THEN PRESS THE LOWER 9.RELEASE BOTH AND PRESS YES AT THE PROMPT.”. That didn’t actually fix it. But I now find that if I turn it on and power cycle it once quickly (off for about 1/2 second) controls respond perfectly until I turn it off for a length of time. It’s finicky but it works! Hurray!

One of my oldest friends is writing a homesteading book. He’s literally an award-winning author which is pretty awesome. I ordered a copy :-)

“Seven years ago I moved from the city to a farm where I taught myself to garden, raise animals & cook “farm to table”. I show you how”

Find out more about the book and pre-order it.

I’ve been using a Chrome extension called Video Speed Controller to speed up boring videos and TV shows. It works great, I’d definitely recommend it. I use it on Netflix and Youtube, often bumping the speed to 1.2x. Sometimes to 2.5x on slow lectures.

If you’re concerned about giving it permissions to view all of your content on all of your sites (I was!), you can go into your Chrome Extensions menu, and give the extension limited “site access”. I gave mine access only to sites when I click on the icon in the Chrome toolbar.

I use the hotkeys “S” and “D” to change the speed of the video dynamically. It’s weird when I slowly crank the speed up. Like the proverbial frog in a slowly boiling pot, I hardly notice the gradually building heat!

Summary: If you want to win friends and influence people, treat them with Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.

I use a lot of psychological models and theories to conceptualize my world. The ones I refer to most often are Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, and Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development. Look them up, memorize them, use them. They are useful!

I just heard about the SCARF Model and I’m pretty excited about it (a model isn’t as generalized as a theory but can be useful nonetheless!)

The SCARF Model was developed in 2008 by David Rock, in his paper “SCARF: A Brain-Based Model for Collaborating With and Influencing Others.” SCARF stands for the five key “domains” that influence our behavior in social situations. These are:

• Status — our relative importance to others.
• Certainty — our ability to predict the future.
• Autonomy — our sense of control over events.
• Relatedness — how safe we feel with others.
• Fairness — how fair we perceive the exchanges between people to be.

The model is based on neuroscience research that implies that these five social domains activate the same threat and reward responses in our brain that we rely on for physical survival. So, in brief, look at each of the domains above and think. For example, if a person places you in a lower status than you, that stress can easily trigger your fight-or-flight response (imagine a boss talking down to you). If they put you in a higher status, that can trigger your reward system (imagine getting an award). This works in more situations than you’d initially consider. And there’s lots to consider. If you want to win friends and influence people, treat them with status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.

Here is the original paper about the SCARF Model by David Rock

There’s many sites that talk about the SCARF Model in more depth, here’s a pretty good one.

update 7-29-20, I came across a random “How to influence people” post on Imgur and about 3/4 of the items are applied versions of the SCARF model, nice. (though admittedly, some of the tactics in this image are ethically questionable!)

You’re going to think this image is just a mock-up. It isn’t. As the top review on Amazon says, “This is not a good movie, but it’s a wonderful movie”!

I saw it tonight on Amazon Prime fer free. Highly recommended!

See the trailer so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Consider watching it stoned.

I just heard about this service. It’s totally brand spanking new so don’t fret if there’s not many people on it yet. This could be helpful for building your “pod” for the school year! We’re trying it.

Podmatch

If you’d still like to get email notifications from me, please sign up again in the upper right corner of my site at Lee.org. I had gotten so many fake email subscribers that I’m going to wipe the whole list and start over.

I just turned email notifications on today after some 7 months. You can go back to the site or the archives to catch up. It took me a while to get around to fixing it.

I love and hate how new TV shows come out a full season at a time now. It’s nice that it’s all “just there” to watch. But there’s a lack of excitement and discussion about what’s going to happen next. Would you like to watch some shows together… SLOWLY?

This was brought to a head for me when I saw episode  4 of The Witcher the other night. I thought “Wow, that was awesome! I want to talk to somebody ab…. wait. Most likely any of my friends have either seen the whole season already or they haven’t seen the show at all.”

Thoughts?

After several years, I’ve fixed the Archives page. You can now see a list of all the posts on the site. You can find the link in the sidebar and here.

I’m glad to have found the Simple Yearly Archive plugin by Oliver Schlöbe!

Abigail went back to preschool this week. The school is doing a lot to minimize the spread of Coronavirus. This is her last 5 weeks of preschool and Step One School has been amazing to promote her growth! I am truly bothered that the pandemic robbed Abigail of part of this experience. At every pick-up, I was learning more about how to become a better pediatric occupational therapist and dad!

Megan and I are going back to work in what will assuredly be a “complex” working environment in about a month in the school, so we welcome the quiet prep time. To give you a taste, here’s the update from her main teacher on the first day back:

Dear Room 1 Families,

We are in the midsts of having such an amazing day back at school. It has been so wonderful to feel the love, joy, and energy of the kids being back.

Our day started at circle, where they met our pet “Queenie”. Ask your child if they can remember what kind of snake she is. She was also feeling shy and nervous, which helped some kids feel better. Here is a picture from circle. We went over some of the new procedures. Ask them if they can remember some of them, like where do they put their toy when they are done or what airplane arms mean.

After circle the kids were so busy playing around the room. Some of the activities were:

• Making placemats
• Playing with their own ball of play dough
• Building with Magnatiles
• Playing in the playhouse
• Playing with the trains
• Listening to stories
• Swinging on the rope ladder
• Jumping onto the pillows
• Painting
• Playing at the water table
• Building on existing friendships and making new ones

After playing inside we headed up to the deck for snack. Here is a picture from snack time.

After snack was our first outside time. Some of the activities outside were:

• Washing babies in the water table
• Swinging on the swing
• Playing on the monkey bars
• Riding the bikes and scooters
• Playing under the gatehouse
• Playing in the waterfall (ask your child if they were part of the big leaf removal at the waterfall)

After our outside time we were back to the deck for lunch and to listen to a story. The kids had fun using their placemat that they had made in the morning. After lunch is another outside time and nap time for a few (more rolling around than napping so far). That’s a summary of our day so far.

A few reminders:

• Please remember to sunscreen your child in the morning. We are doing it when we first come out.
• Please send your child with a hat. We have the sun shades around the yard but a hat could help.
• Check in with your child about how they felt about being at school. It’s a big change for all of us.

We are so excited to have your child in our class and look forward to all that is yet to come. Please email us (please cc all of the teachers) if you have any questions.

Peace,

Steve, Raquel, and Leticia