Yesterday I drove an hour away to a rendezvous at a cheap hotel.

The reason? To pick up a 50 gallon aquarium from Glass Cages. I drove around to the back of the motel, and found a large truck with a couple of guys unloading aquariums, stands and sheets of glass on the dirt parking lot. Mine (36″x17″18″) was one of the smallest there. It barely fit into the backseat of my Civic.

My son has been fascinated by reptiles from an early age. His favourite of my made-up stories at bed time follow the adventures of a dragon and a giant snake. He’s wanted a snake, but the idea of feeding them live mice and such was more than we were willing to take on. This spring, we’d been reading up on Bearded Dragons. They’re a medium-sized lizard from Austrailia. Unlike a lot of tropical reptiles, they’re active during the day. The need live food, but insects and worms will do the trick, and as adults they eat mostly vegetables.

I had agonized quite a bit about whether or not my son was ready for the work and responsibility of caring for a reptile pet. I’d ask him if he was up for spending some time each day with feeding, cleaning and other tasks. He’d be generally positive, but would say, “I’ll have to think about it”. At one point, I’d decided that he needed to show more enthusiasm before we’d take this on.. But in a major bout of soul-searching on parenting and life in general, decided that this was one fo those times to push my son into a new experience. After all, the last thing I want to teach him is to be afraid of work, and the possibility that new adventures can be disappointing. Life shouldn’t be about staying in the comfort zone.

As you might guess, there’s a substantial on-line community of Bearded Dragon owners and breeders. I’ve been lurking on beardeddragon.org’s Forums, where there are a lot of really helpful folks. My son and I also attended a reptile show, which was pretty overwhelming, both in terms of the number of people and reptiles. I can’t say that I’m a fan of these things; there were a lot of animals crammed into small plastic containers that made me doubt that they were properly cared-for. Fortunately, we found some breeders specializing in bearded dragons that were a cut above the general chaos of the show.

Today, we’ll be working on getting the tank set up. The necessary lighting is on the way, and we’ve got a shopping list of other items necessary. Hopefully we’ll be ready to start shopping for an actual dragon soon.

Sorry about the title – we just watched Annie last night, and I couldn’t help myself.

I set my 12 year-old daughter up with Fedora 9 and KDE 4. Her initial experiences are proving to be thought-provoking. What little computer experience she has is mostly with Windows, but she has run iTunes on OSX.

Her mom’s (my ex-wife) first question was, “Can’t it run Windows? That’s what she needs for school”. I explained that the system didn’t come with Windows, and that Fedora was free, and easy to keep up to date. Also, any documents could be saved in formats readable by Microsoft applications. It’s really a shame they don’t run Linux/OO at school.

Still, I have to admit some misgivings about this experiment. Is Linux ready for teenagers? I like to thing that subjecting my daughter to an environment where she has to figure things out will be good for her, as opposed to letting her run Windows, where she can go ask adults for help (often getting bad advice) at every turn.

We’ll see how this goes