Last weekend, I discovered that Earthfare has a decent selection of beers I hadn’t previously found elsewhere. I picked up a Fort Collins Brewery chocolate stout and a Left Hand Brewing Company milk stout (Gabe, I won’t let your derision keep me from trying these!). It turned out that Dave came over on Saturday or Sunday, and he stopped at Leaf and Ale on the way over to pick up a few more stouts (they’ll let you mix and match) to round out a full-on tasting party. (Incidentally, here I’ve been hankering for a year or two for a place to get beers not available at Ye Olde Kroger, and it turns out that Leaf and Ale, which I thought was way down in Fountain City or somewhere, is within about three miles of my own front door.) I jotted down the list of beers we tried, but I’ve misplaced the list and forgotten the names. One of them stands out to me still because it tasted like it was brewed with red wine in it, and that was a little gross (sort of the way brandy is gross because it tastes like whiskey and wine; don’t get me wrong — I like red wine, but these combinations just don’t do it for me — it’s sort of like pouring orange juice over your cereal; speaking of breakfast, it occurs to me that among my favorite beers these days are a milk stout and an oatmeal porter: if I could find a bacon brew or an egg lager, I’d have a pretty well-rounded breakfast beer trio). By far (and I believe by consensus), the best of the beers we had was the Fort Collins chocolate stout, with the Left Hand milk stout probably a respectable second. It looks life Leaf and Ale’s got a number of other stouts I haven’t tried (though not even they seem to carry the Rogue Shakespeare and Chocolate stouts). Once I get those under my belt, I don’t know what I’ll try next. Pale ales have never been my favorite (then again, I used to have trouble stomaching a stout), so maybe I’ll explore them next.

I recently upgraded an install of phpbb to phpbb3. Shortly thereafter, I moved the site that the forum runs on to different hardware after several days of downtime on the original hardware (and an unresponsive vendor). To move to the new hardware, I dumped the database to a text file, compressed it, and shot the database and all site files across the network to the new hardware. Then I uncompressed the database and slurped it into mysql. Simple enough. What I hadn’t considered in advance was the fact that I was moving from mysql4 to mysql5. Accordingly, some weird things started happening when I started testing the site on the new hardware. I googled around a bit to discover that some of the problems were a result of the mysql upgrade, and I finally found this script, which purports to solve the problems by modifying the database structure. The script seemed to work just fine. The problems I had seen went away, and I figured the migration was a success.

But then somebody in the forums pointed out that bbcode throughout the site was messed up. And sure enough, all posts that had been imported had weird extra characters appended to bbcode blocks, which kept the bbcode from being converted into the appropriate html. For example, a block of bbcode might look like this: [quote="username"scd]stuff[/quote:scd]. But the characters were never consistent across posts. A bit more googling turned up the fact that phpbb has a field called bbcode_uid that is supposed to allow eight characters, but either when moving from mysql4 to mysql5 or as part of that nifty script I ran (I’m not sure which), the field gets truncated to five characters, which lops off the last three characters of an eight-character bbcode_uid, which ultimately results in the weird display we found.

What’s going on is that parsing nested tags (e.g. “[quote][b][url][/url][/b][/quote]“) can become laborious for the server, especially when tags don’t get closed properly. To make it more surefire and to simplify the process, phpbb appends a bbcode_uid to any bbcode inserted. So when you type “[url]http://daryl.learnhouston.com[/url]“, what actually gets inserted into the database is something like “[url:d98cJ1pv]http://daryl.learnhouston.com[/url:d98cJ1pv]“. This makes it so that you’re not having to figure out arbitrary nesting, because every opening tag has a corresponding unique end tag; you don’t have to find a beginning tag’s mate by parsing a string recursively, in other words. It’s a really cool idea. Of course, to remove the bbcode_uids from posts as a page is built, you need to store the bbcode_uid associated with a given post, so that it can be stripped out once tags are matched to one another. This is the bbcode_uid field in the posts table. And this field has just been truncated to five characters by the database move. Which means that when phpbb tries to find the bbcode_uid value within a given post, it finds and strips out only the first five characters, which results in three weird characters being appended to bbcode tags and the improper display of bbcode. In every single post and every single signature of your forums, which in my case was nearly 200,000 posts.

The fix is rather daunting to implement. Basically, you have to script something that looks at every single post and every single signature, finds bbcode_uids therein, matches the first five characters to the bbcode_uid field in the posts table (just as a check), and then updates the bbcode_uid for each post to the match found (this is after altering your table to make the bbcode_uid column accommodate eight characters, of course). If you get this wrong, you’ve basically wrecked your whole database, and bbcode for posts in the past will never render correctly. Of course, if you’ve discovered this problem before anybody has posted to your site, then you can alter the database and reimport the data, but this isn’t an option if people have been using the site for a few days before the issue was reported. Luckily, I was able to come up with a pretty simple script to fix the issue. Of course I was terrified to push the start button, so to speak, but push it I did, and it worked.

If you’re having the same issue, you can try my fix at your own risk.

I spent much of my 11-day holiday break either horizontal or wishing I was horizontal thanks to a back strain that’s still giving me fits. I took advantage of the time to get some reading done. Mleeka and I had gone to see The Golden Compass, and in anticipation of it, she purchased and read the trilogy of which that movie composes roughly one third. She was somewhat disappointed in how the movie chopped off the end of the first book and how it left out some of the back story about Dust. Having not read the books yet, I thought it was a pretty engaging movie, if it was a little slow at times (especially when Kidman was onscreen). In any case, watching the movie and hearing Mleeka talk about the books prompted me to read the books. Steinbeck they’re not, but I enjoyed the whole set. Oddly, where Mleeka found the second book to suffer from what she calls second book syndrome (wherein a second book in a set serves primarily to set up the more involved politics and relationships that drive subsequent books but are of limited interest on their own in terms of actually moving the plot along), I found it to be pretty interesting. On the whole, not a bad bunch of books for a quick read.

I had heard about an author named Zadie Smith. She made waves a few years ago with her first novel (published when she was 24, I think), and I’ve been meaning for a while to pick up some of her stuff. Her On Beauty was on my amazon wish list, and Ashley got it for me for Christmas. It was a good book, though somewhat different from what I had expected based on comparisons of her work to other authors I like. It felt a bit like a modern day take on the old comedies of manners. I don’t mean to pigeon-hole Smith here in the almost patronizing way it’ll probably come off, but the book felt a bit like Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility for the 20th century (which probably isn’t terribly flattering given that I find those sorts of books tedious and dull and light). And yet it wasn’t tedious or dull or light, and in fact, there was much to appreciate. Smith writes really great dialogue, and especially argument dialogue. So the book wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was well-done enough that I decided to get her first novel, White Teeth. This I finished reading last night, and it’s the sort of book I expected based on what I had read about Smith. It was different than any of the old white guy fiction I’ve read, and it dealt with its subjects in what felt like really honest, informed ways across cultures, religions, races, genders, and ages. And it did so with wit and beauty and absurdity and sometimes sadness. On Beauty isn’t a book I’ll likely read a great many times in my life, but White Teeth I can imagine myself re-reading every few years, as I do with most of my favorites. (Uh, which is not to detract from the gift itself of the former book; had I not read that one, I might never have gotten around to reading the other.) If you happen to like reading contemporary literary fiction, this one should go on your list.

Next up I think is George R. R. Martin. I’ve never been much on sci-fi or fantasy, and I guess he’s a fantasy author. Three or four people have separately recommended him to me even knowing that I’m not much of a fantasy reader. Mleeka gobbles the stuff up, so I got her the first in his big series for Christmas, and she dug it and has since read the rest of the series that’s been published to date. She seems to validate what others have told me about him, so I’m thinking I might broaden my horizons a bit and see what I think of his books.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the Knoxville Brewer’s Jam and mentioned in particular the Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery’s milk stout, a type of beer I hadn’t tried before and found pleasing. I had never seen this beer (or any milk stout) around town (not that I’m really a mover or shaker in Knoxville beer circles) and figured I’d next have a bottle of it at next year’s Brewer’s Jam. I recently went to Three Rivers Market (otherwise known as the Food Coop) to stock up on inexpensive spices and honey, and when I checked their beer selection, they had at least two milk stouts, of which one was the Duck-Rabbit (the other was from Left Hand Brewing) and a number of other beers that will be new to me when I try them. So if you’re in the Knoxville area and want take-home beer that’s not Bud or Coors, be sure to swing by the Food Coop to sample their selection. At a glance, it looked like the beers were priced about the same, and this makes me wonder if one could build a mixed six-pack. Next time I’m there, I’ll be sure to ask.

A long time ago, I blogged elsewhere about Flock’s shelf feature and how it made my life easier. The feature is a little drag-and-drop area where you can dump images and snippets from web pages for later use in blog posts (or, I suppose, just as reminders).  I never used it much for assembling blog posts, but as a quickie spot to take notes, it actually helped me out. When I just wanted to jot down a quick thought that I wasn’t ready to flesh out into a blog post yet, I’d add a note to the shelf. I found that doing this actually prompted me to blog more because it reduced friction; I felt like I could write a quick note without committing to trying to write a whole blog post just yet. Not too long after I developed this workflow, the shelf changed, and the ability to add a typed note was removed (you could only drag things).

This week, wanting to take some notes about a book I’ve been reading, I found myself missing the feature again. Now that we’ve released 1.0, I think the feature has probably reached something close to its final form, so I felt comfortable writing a little addon to include the functionality I wanted. It adds menu items under the Tools menu and to the main context (right-click) menu inviting you to create a note. Selecting the item pops up a simple two-field dialog box that includes the note text and an optional title (the first 30 characters of your note are used if you specify no title). This gets added to the shelf (we call it the web clipboard now, though), and you can get to it later when needed. The web clipboard doesn’t allow you to edit notes once you’ve added them, but you can otherwise use these notes as you would any other web clipboard item (blog them, stick them in folders, delete them, reorder them). You can enter HTML if inclined, and it’ll render in the preview and in blog posts, though if you do this and don’t specify a title, the item itself in the web clipboard sidebar gets some weird formatting.

So there. Friction-free note-taking right there in your browser. Hope somebody besides me finds this useful. This won’t work in Firefox, unfortunately, as Firefox doesn’t have the web clipboard feature.

Blogged with Flock

This weekend, I conquered my fear of the circular saw. I tried using two different saws to help cut lap joints for a compost bin I started work on. The first is a little battery-powered deal that’s light-weight and easy on the wrist but that loses juice pretty fast and won’t cut very many boards. When it wore out, I decided to try my dad’s old circular saw, which I’ve had for a couple of years now but have never tried using because it’s huge and old and seemed maybe a little dangerous. But I had 32 lap joints to cut and was darned if I was going to do it all the old-fashioned way (which after a couple of hours wrangling various tools I figured out would have been easier anyway, at least for the part I was using the circular saws for). So anyway, as I got my dad’s saw out, I took a minute to think about what I’d do if I happened to chop a finger off. I’ve seen on TV or read that you can transport small amputated appendages to the hospital for reattachment in milk (why milk and not just ice I’m not sure). But this actually represented something of a dilemma for me, as we have two sorts of milk these days, the cheap skim stuff that keeps me from cultivating big floppy man boobs and the 2% creamy organic stuff that we think is probably less likely to make Lennie bear children with extra limbs and radioactive teeth. Which milk should I stick my amputated (and as I pictured it, still twitching) finger in once I picked it up from where it lay partially buried in a drift of sawdust? When I was relating this train of thought to a coworker this afternoon, my dilemma deepened as I realized that breast milk represents a third option in our home, though not one as readily available for amputated appendage transport. I’m happy to report that I didn’t wind up having to make this difficult decision, having kept my fingers intact and having only one close call with the circular saw. Sadly, I’m still not sure which would have been the best option.

Just over four months ago, I finished Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and did a quick read of DeLillo’s Falling Man before taking on Pynchon’s latest, Against the Day. His very short The Crying of Lot 49 aside, this is the first of Pynchon’s book I’ve read in one go, if plodding through it over 4 months can really be considered a single go. I went through start to finish with no stamina-loss-related break, in any case. My slowness was the result primarily of a paucity of time to read for long at a stretch (that reality TV’s not gonna watch itself, you know). When you’re reading in 10- to 20-page increments, it’s hard to get through an 1,100 page book very quickly.

So, what did I think of it? I’m not sure. The first 700 or so pages were for the most part very engaging, and it’s the easiest long Pynchon I’ve read yet. Whereas GR was hard to follow a whole lot of the time, AtD was pretty manageable. The next 300 pages were harder to get through because the dominant plot line just wasn’t as interesting to me as some of the others. As Pynchon closes up the book (which he really does with more tidiness than I might have expected) in the last 85 or so pages, it’s a more fun read again, though not nearly as much so as earlier parts of the book. I guess I liked it well enough. Although it’s physically heavier, it didn’t feel as content-weighty to me as GR did. Something about it doesn’t seem as important to me as GR did, though I can’t articulate what the difference is or why GR has a feel of importance (maybe I’m swayed by its having won an award?). I’m sure my enjoyment/slogging ratio in AtD was higher than it was in GR, but GR I think is the better book.

One thing that really hit home for me during this read was a difference in the way I appreciate certain books. Some authors or books make me wish the whole time I’m reading them that I were able to go out and write long fiction. They inspire creativity in me. Steinbeck in his best books and Richard Powers in The Time of Our Singing make me feel this way. An author like Pynchon doesn’t. I appreciate the complexity in his books, but they don’t inspire me to want to do my own creation. Both sorts of appreciation are valuable to me; too much of the former would continuously highlight my personal creative deficiencies and make me feel like crap all the time.

I’ve been pushing really hard for the last week or so to get through to the end of AtD because I’m traveling a week from today and didn’t want to have to carry that brick around with me the whole time. Now I’m off to do what I predict will be reading of a lighter style in Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish and Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. I’m also picking through Best American Nonfiction for 2007 (edited by David Foster Wallace, one of my faves). From there who knows? Maybe the book-length study of Wallace’s Infinite Jest that should arrive in 30 days or maybe another reread of the subject of that study. Maybe back for a second shot at Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Zadie Smith and Gass are on my wish list, so maybe they’ll round out my year. Or more likely I’ll punctuate hours and hours of TV with the occasional batch of poems or shorter fiction. Recommendations always welcome.

For nearly three years now, I’ve worked for a company called Flock. For nearly three years, we’ve been working toward releasing a 1.0 version of our product. And yesterday, we finally did it, amid much less fanfare than I might have expected (not even a company blog post). Starting as far back as version 0.5 just under two years ago, I’ve been using Flock as my primary web browser (that’s what we make, a web browser built on the same platform that drives Firefox), so I’ve been around to see all the changes the product has gone through.

Our first public beta was released to much hype with subsequent fizzle. It had a neat skin, a photo viewer/uploader, a rudimentary blog authoring tool, and something we called the shelf, and that was it, besides the basic browser functions. Although we had many early enthusiasts (some of whom are still with us), reactions tended to be along the lines of “this is what the hubbub is all about?”

In June 2006, we released version 0.7 of the browser and saw lots of downloads and a lot of press (I worked 20-hour days for a week to keep the new web site from dying under the strain of our traffic). We were thinking at the time that we’d have a 1.0 version by the end of the year, but change was in the air, and after some executive turnover, the end of the year had come and we didn’t have a 1.0. In the first couple of months of this year, I feel like we really hit our stride and started executing. We pushed a 0.9 version with subsequent updates that got tolerable reviews, and our 1.0 beta releases over the past few weeks have been met with the customary skepticism, but for the first time, a lot of that skepticism is beginning to turn over. People are posting that though they found our product either not compelling or too buggy in the past, they’re loving it now. And plenty of newcomers are saying that they’re addicted.

I’m going to do a little sidebar here on the social web. I’ve always been pretty cold to it. What need do I have to send to Twitter every half hour an update about what I’m doing, or to read in real-time that my social-web-addicted buddies are going out for coffee or sitting through a dull meeting? Do I really want to read another “20 Questions” type post on MySpace? Basically, I don’t often have time or the compulsion to fool around on social networking sites. I spend my day working on the computer and so don’t typically like to spend much time playing on it. A year or so ago, I signed up with MySpace and Facebook basically because my work compelled me to. It was another way for Flock employees to consume our own dogfood, so to speak, and to network with users of these sites who were interested in Flock. But there wasn’t much personal value to me in signing up on these sites. I had a profile but I didn’t use the sites with any regularity.

The latest version of Flock has changed this because it brings the social web to me. The nifty services sidebar notifies me when I have new messages or pokes in Facebook, and it lets me drag content from the web to friends’ avatars to share it with them. I can find individual friends within my network more easily than by using Facebook itself because I can type part of a name in a textbox embedded in my browser to filter my friend list. I can see updated statuses easily, and an icon lights up for friends who have uploaded new media. When I click a person’s media icon, a media bar appears and is populated with thumbnails of their media that I can scan at a glance, clicking through to actually view only the things that interest me. Probably the best thing is that Flock tells me when there are updates so that I engage only when I have a good reason to rather than having to remember and bother to visit Facebook to look for updates. Since I’ve been using Flock 1.0, I’ve been engaging with people in my network, sending messages I wouldn’t have sent and viewing photos I wouldn’t have bothered to view. Flock 1.0 for me is like the Reader’s Digest of the social web. I’d never go out of my way to read a full-length bio of Meredith Baxter-Birney, but if I’m sitting on the can and have read all the jokes in my Reader’s Digest, I might thumb through the RD condensed interview with her, and I might even enjoy it a little.

That’s the main thing that differentiates Flock 1.0 from previous versions for me. I’ve long been a fan of the built-in feed aggregation, and it was Flock’s Flickr uploader (which also works with Piczo, Photobucket, and I believe Facebook) that prompted me a year ago to buy a Flickr Pro account. It previously hadn’t been worthwhile because, as a Linux user, I had no painless way of uploading photos in bulk. Flock also has built-in del.icio.us integration, the aforementioned shelf (now called the web clipboard, basically a little drag/drop area that lets you store dragged items for later use in blog posts), the blog editor, and all the goodness that comes with Firefox 2.0’s underlying engine.

I’m an employee of the company, of course, and so I have a vested interest in our success. But I really really do like the product and would use it for the built-in feed reader even if I weren’t an employee. (I’m not only the president of the hair club for men…) I suspect that there are plenty of people for whom Flock provides no benefit that Firefox doesn’t. If you don’t upload photos or read news feeds or belong to social networks, Flock’s probably not for you unless you just think it looks pretty. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for my dad, but I probably would for my sister and most of my friends. If you do do any of those things, why not give Flock a shot and let me (or our talented support staff) know what you think?

Lennie was born on June 24, less than two weeks before July 4. As happens with new parents, we hadn’t been sleeping very well, and though we expected your standard whistley firecrackers in our neighborhood, some neighborhood kids had more in store. Sometime late on the night of the 4th, we began to hear great reverberating booming sounds issuing from the cul-de-sac a few doors down. As in our windows rattled. There was definitely no ignoring these sounds, and as we had finally gotten Lennie to sleep, it was time for us to rest some. I angrily tossed on some clothes and stomped down to the cul-de-sac to see what was going on, and the son of my retired-military neighbor began hastily packing up whatever gear he and his buddy had been using. I confronted them and asked if they were making all the racket, and they denied it, looking rather panicked. I suppose I probably did come off as a little deranged. I glared at them and told them that if I heard the noises again, I’d — I’m a little embarrassed at both the fact and the wording of this statement — “call the law.” Then I stomped back to my house and got back in bed and probably was awakened shortly by my crying child. We later reflected on the incident and giggled over my phrasing and the picture I must have made, all but shaking my fist at the good-for-nothing whippersnappers who had robbed me of my sleep. That, over three years ago, was the first sure sign for me that I was beginning to show some age.

Fast forward to this evening for sign number two. Since before we had Lennie, we’ve done Halloween at our friends Dave and Karen’s neighborhood. The neighborhood we moved into last November has its own big Halloween bash, though, and we wanted to participate in that this year, as we’re trying to do better about letting Lennie out of the basement during daylight hours so that she can interact with neighborhood kids near her age. So our neighborhood has a cookout for Halloween, and everybody runs around with their kids for a while and hands out candy for a while and eats hot dogs at some point, and it’s all very hectic and disorganized, which is fitting for a holiday like this. With two small children and with three mouths to get fed, we had at some point to leave our Halloween candy unattended, which seemed safe enough from where we sat in the dark outside our next-door neighbor’s house. Oh, we figured there’d be some overzealous kids who’d take more than two or three pieces of candy, but the abuse we discovered after dark was really shocking.

At one point, I went over to check our candy level and found some teenagers sifting through the bowl to find the good stuff, which they were taking liberal helpings of. They scattered as I approached. Even after this pilfering, the bowl was nearly full, and full of good stuff (it hadn’t been too long since we had set some more out). Satisfied that we weren’t going to be short-changing the neighborhood kids, I went back over to eat another hot dog. A few minutes later, we packed up to bring Lennie home for bed, and as we approached, I saw a couple more teenagers hovering around our bowl. I could see in silhouette that they were each taking multiple great big handfuls of candy. I made some noise as we approached and they scattered, and I couldn’t help saying something snide to the effect of “try to leave some candy for the little kids” as I passed. Even having witnessed the greed in silhouette, I thought surely there would be some good candy left to hand out to honest trick-or-treaters, but the bowl was empty save for a few cheapo suckers.

Later, I was stewing over this a bit and found myself thinking things like “what could you possibly do with all that candy anyway,” for surely even as a teenager with unfetterable desires, I would have known that double-handfuls of candy times a few dozen houses would be more than I could be up to glutting myself on in any reasonable amount of time. And from this bit of retrospection, I thought about greed generally and supposed to myself that perhaps part of growing up was learning to balance greed vs. what’s reasonable (though I think this is probably flawed, as there are plenty of grown-ups who can’t seem to do this). And from there I got to thinking about it in terms of empathy and how maybe that was the actual defining characteristic of maturation, for while I was a little personally miffed that there weren’t a couple of sleeves of Whoppers and a Reese’s cup or two left over for me to enjoy, what really bothered me was the fact that any more trick-or-treaters I had to face for the evening would get the filler candy because a bunch of teenagers couldn’t see far enough past their own desires to understand that they’d really be as happy with 5 pieces of my candy as with two dozen at no cost to the pleasure of little kids who would come behind them.

There was no shaking of fists, but I can’t help seeing this series of thought processes as sign number two that I’m getting old. In fact, I wonder if becoming introspective about the nature of greed and maturity isn’t itself a sign of maturity into a different phase of adulthood. Surely sleep deprivation had something to do with my previous fist-shaking, but perhaps a certain general hot-headedness was at play as well; I was assuredly more hot-headed about other things when I was a slightly younger adult. Of course, the most famous of fist-shakers are the real old-timers, and if my brief history to date as an old-timer in training is any indication, I’ll be a righteous fist-shaker indeed. This is fitting enough if the old cliche about starting and ending life in similar states of mind and body is true. As I was born and will die incontinent and toothless, it appears that the beginning and end of my adult life may be book-ended by mirrored behaviors as well.

Well, Finn is an eater now. About a month ago, I wrote that he’d nibble on a carrot if one was offered, but at the time, he still wasn’t very much into eating spooned food. The last couple of weeks have seen a lot of progress on that front. At first, I could jam a spoon of rice cereal into his mouth and he’d sort of gag but keep most of it down. This past weekend, he really turned a corner and started opening up his little bird mouth and even moving his head (like a cobra?) to get to the disgusting purees I offered. So far, his favorites are brown rice with peas (shudder) and sweet potatoes. He’ll eat a medium jar of the former in two meals, which still doesn’t represent too hearty an appetite, but it’s a big step forward. We also have these barley teething biscuits that are, post-teething, the nastiest thing I’ve ever voluntarily touched. They dissolve pretty quickly into a light brown sludge that coats his chest and hands. I’m not terribly squeamish, but even I wince a little to pick one of these slimy things up for him when he drops it. Once we’re through this box, I think we’re switching to Zwieback toast.

Finn is also a full-on crawler now. Mleeka and others wanted to allow that he was crawling long before I would accept his movements as crawling (I mean, c’mon, wallowing and spinning around on your butt to get to things within a 3-foot radius is impressive for a little tyke, but crawling it ain’t). Finally, a couple of weeks ago, he started doing real crawling, and now he gets around without any trouble, often making a bee-line for the cat’s water dish, which he delights in turning over. He also pulls himself up on things and can stand up assisted. This weekend, he woke up and crawled out of our bed and fell to the floor (which is a 3-foot-plus drop). We installed a gate at the top of our stairs and are trying to decide now what to do about his out-of-bed crawling, whether we can think up some sort of preventive measures or whether to see how long it takes him to learn a valuable lesson on his own about depth perception and exploring a bit more carefully.