We got off to a rough start this year with Kindergarten but since the Christmas break things have been going great at school and his after school child care. They informed me today that he has been picked to be the Star of the Month at the child care because he did so well in January and his Kindergarten teacher gave him a reward for his good behavior. I’m so happy that he is finally adjusting to all the changes he had this year.

Most of all, I think he has learned the most important thing in life…that chocolate will always put a smile on your face!

It’s been another eventful year for us here at 2Dolphins. Our blogging might have slowed down but we certainly have not. Below are some of the highlights of the year:

March – trip to Washington DC and Liam got to climb the steps and see Abraham Lincoln (something he had been asking to do for months)

June – my Mom passed away. This was bittersweet as you’re never ready to lose a loved one but you also never want to see them them suffer with a horrible disease like Alzheimer’s.

July – Corpus, time to heal at the beach.

August – another year older and wiser. Rob & I celebrated our 15 year anniversary.

September – San Diego, it had been too long. Also, Liam started Kindergarten and it just about broke my heart. It has definitely changed him and not all for the better. He went from being my sweet innocent baby to all boy picking up some bad attitude from the other kids at school.

November – after 15 years, we finally had to buy a new washer & dryer and got the front loaders that we had been eye-balling for years. Luckily they stopped working on Thanksgiving Day so we could cash in on some Black Friday deals.

December – we had a white Christmas for the first time since 1997 and the ghost of Steve Jobs visited and converted me to an iMac user. I’m looking forward to learning the new photo capabilities it has to offer.

So as we say goodbye to 2011 and hello to 2012, we want to say how thankful we are for our friends and family and all the blessings we have received this year!

Liam is in super hero mode these days so of course, he was Spiderman for Halloween. I really didn’t expect him to leave that mask on for more than 5 seconds or I would’ve picked a costume with a different kind of mask that didn’t go over his head. We spent a great deal of time adjusting it so he could see through the eye holes. Lesson learned!

We went to 2 carnivals over Halloween weekend and then trick or treating in our neighborhood on Halloween night.

Here’s a couple of pictures of Spidey Liam getting into character:

Spidey Liam swings from his “webs” at sunset:

Trick or treating was an adventure and Liam was really into the “trick or treat smell my feet…” chant this year. Someone (me) regretted teaching him that one. About half way through the neighborhood, we were told to be careful that there had been a coyote in the neighborhood the day before. Yikes! We survived and after 3 days of Halloween activities, I was ready for it to be over.

Banks are making the change because revenue from lucrative interchange fees paid by merchants (a.k.a “swipe fees”) is being cut in half by a new rule issued by the Federal Reserve Board that takes effect Oct. 1st. So, instead of an average of 44¢ per transaction, banks will only be earning 24¢. Bank of America estimates that it will lose $2 billion annually because of the change. So, what’s a poor bank to do? Well, they’ll negate their losses by shifting their costs onto consumers, of course.

Even beyond avoiding the aggravating new monthly fee, using a credit card has distinct advantages.

Federal laws protect credit card users from fraud much better. The Fair Credit Billing Act ensures that you bear no liability for fraudulent purchases, damaged goods, and products that were never delivered. And you generally have 60-90 days to report fraudulent or erroneous charges to the bank.

The Electronic Transfer Act does provide debit card users some protection during a dispute or error but only if you catch and act upon the issue quickly. If you notify your bank within 2 days of a questionable charge, your liability is limited to $50. However, between 2 – 6 days your liability could increase to $500. Beyond 6 days, you may have no coverage. And to dispute a debit card transaction, you may be required to prove that the card has never been used online on an unsecured network.

And remember that with a credit card dispute, you’re questioning fraudulent or erroneous transactions before you’ve paid the bill. With a debit card, the money has already been withdrawn, so recovery is going to be much more difficult.

Given that debit cards are directly linked to your bank account, a thief who obtains or clones your debit card along with its PIN may be able to clean out your bank account, and you’d have little or no recourse.

By the way, many banks claim that their debit cards can also be used as a credit card. While it’s true that these transactions may take slightly longer to post to your checking account, they’re still a debit transaction. So, using your debit card in this manner does not afford you the same protections or deferred payment opportunity as a “real” dedicated credit card.

The biggest disadvantage of using a credit card over a debit card is self-control. You have to make sure that you’ve saved enough money to cover your purchases when the credit card bill arrives in order to avoid finance charges. Since the money is not being taken out of your bank account immediately as you make purchases, there’s a high risk of overspending and accumulating interest-bearing debt. But with a little self-discipline you can actually avoid the finance charges and earn money on your purchases.

So, do you use debit cards? And if so, will these needless new fees affect your debit card usage?

Today, subscribers were treated to a personal message from Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix, with as backhanded an apology as you may have ever heard. He feigned remorse for how they handled the rate hike but still did nothing to earn back customer trust or instill faith in his leadership. He explains that the company is rebranding the DVD mailing portion of their service as “Qwikster” while retaining the “Netflix” brand for streaming only. This divisive maneuver is sure to aggravate customers who’ll have to bounce back & forth between the two sites, never knowing which movies will be available for streaming vs. delivered. Beyond that, this just seems like a feeble effort to distance the now-disgraced Netflix brand name from the price hike debacle. It’s a desperate move by short-sighted, greedy, leaders whose faulty management and slap-in-the-face customer service have just cost them the keys to the kingdom.

Netflix is embedded in TVs, DVD & Blu-ray players, videogame consoles, and well… just about everything but your toaster yet rather than continue to gradually build on the captive audience within that already-installed base, they spurned their loyal fans, got greedy and blew a phenomenal, once-in-a-lifetime market lead. Especially given how flippant the company’s management has been about all of this, it’ll be nothing short of a miracle if they ever fully recover. This is pure, swift consumer karma in action. Make room on the loser’s bench, TiVo & Palm!

Were you a Netflix subscriber before the price increase? Did you stick with ‘em or jump ship?

Be sure to check out Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander put a hilarious spin on this situation:

iTunes nixes network rentals

Sadly, there are some things you just can’t get via Netflix (either streaming or disc) so Dede is relieved that we squeaked in Glee: Season 2 just before the hammer fell. According to the ZDNet article Apple Finally Drops TV Rentals From iTunes, Apple quietly pulled the option to rent television episodes from its iTunes online store in the the past few days.

Kick it up a notch with Kickstarter

Kickstarter is an innovative new website that lets would-be entrepreneurs submit a pitch about a project they need help getting off the ground. Via crowd-sourced fundraising, projects have a set amount needed and defined funding levels—most start at very affordable $5, $15, $25 levels—and in addition to helping get the project going, all “investors” (that’s you and me) get a little something extra as a reward for having some faith in the product and/or its creator. And a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands, which protects both project creators and investors.

So with Kickstarter you can help breathe life into cool ideas like:

• A DIY 3-string guitar kit for kids,

• Fun little clips that turn CD jewel cases into art,

• A lens for the iPhone 4 to make 360º panoramic videos, or

• A documentary film on the art form of comics by Dave Kellett, creator of Sheldon.

World Gone 2 the Dogs

My brother Rich has jumped into the fray with his own World Gone 2 the Dogs blog. Head over there and join the conversations!

Khan Academy – Free online tutorials!

Speaking of Rich, he sent me a link to Khan Academy several weeks ago and I never took the time to check it out. But then just this weekend I read an article in Wired Magazine by longtime fave writer Clive Thompson called How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education and it really grabbed me. Khan Academy features a library of over 2400 free videos by Sal Khan covering K-12 math, science, finance, history, and many other topics. Each instructional video presents material in easy-to-handle chunks lasting 7-15 minutes. Students can watch videos at their own pace and can even practice math problems online. Be sure to read Clive’s article for more info!

One of the really interesting by-products of Khan Academy and other online video tutorials is that they are enabling teachers to flip the classroom. That is, some teachers are experimenting with the idea of inverting traditional school model, delivering instruction online outside of class and using interactive classroom time for homework.

Planking?

Have you heard about this? We were completely unaware of the concept of planking until our friend Ryan explained it to us last night. You can read all about it here but basically, planking is to lay down (like a plank) in some unusual setting and take a picture to post on the Planking Facebook page. I looked at a few of the pictures and found them amusing. It seems like harmless fun but some do take it to extremes and put themselves in danger to take the photo. Ryan is into a variant called owling instead of planking because as this poster sums it up, planking is just so two months old!

Update:   According to Rich, we’re still behind the curve—planking & owling are out, Batmanning, is in!

The Shoebox division of Hallmark Cards has ramped up their web presence in the past couple of years and they’ve got some hilarious stuff on their Shoebox Blog. Brian’s weekly Chuck & Beans is terrific:

And be sure to check out Dan’s Newsdroppings, also on the Shoebox Blog, for a stiff dose of daily news satire. Just don’t be drinking any milk when you click that link!

We walked him into school this morning and stayed until the bell rang for class to begin. He waved goodbye and was ready to begin the day. I’m very thankful that I was not one of the parents that I saw in the hallways that had their children clinging to them in tears. I don’t think I could’ve handled that.

According to Liam, in the end, it was an awesome day and he can’t wait to go back again tomorrow!

As a parent, I’m thankful for all of the efforts to shed some light on this problem and I fully support both punishing bullies and helping kids learn to better cope with pressure-filled situations. But maybe we should put forth as much effort looking at some of the root causes. I believe a big contributing factor is how acclimated we’ve become to violence.

Horrific, explicit, oppressive violence is now an accepted part of our everyday lives.

Remember the movie Robocop about a terminally-wounded Detroit cop who returns to the police force as a powerful cyborg? What you may not recall is that the 1987 movie was initially given an X rating by the MPAA due to its graphic violence. Right, the movie was rated “X” not because of explicit sexual content, but for its shockingly-violent imagery. To appease the requirements of the ratings board, writer/director Paul Verhoeven pulled back on the significant blood & gore in 3 scenes so the movie could be released with an “R” rating instead.

Yet compared to what we routinely see on TV, movies, and video games now, the uncut version of that movie is tame by today’s standards. Within a 20 year span, what was shocking and socially repulsive has become acceptable, commonplace entertainment. Movies have become gleefully gruesome and morbidity is now mainstream. Consider the “Saw” series that let us watch as people are brutally murdered in twisted, torturous manners. Compare the likes of a Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris martial arts movie to that of the endless barrage of bloody carnage shown in contemporary movies like “Kill Bill.”

Likewise, TV shows even feature a stunning degree of graphic violence. Procedural cop shows like C.S.I. are far more realistically gruesome than that X-rated version of Robocop. Even when the violence isn’t necessarily visually graphic, there’s still some extremely negative behaviors at play. Consider that toddlers now watch wrestling on TV, which was strictly the guilty pleasure of Dads when we were kids—much to the disapproval of most Moms.

And where playing video games in our teen years meant shooting squiggly blips to make pixelated aliens disappear, now video gamers are immersed in battles where they fire super-realistic weapons at convincingly-real, three-dimensional opponents who yowl in agony when hit, spurt blood, limp, and finally collapse in a nauseating mass on the ground when they’ve sustained too much damage. (Until recently, this is the sort of thing that only soldiers would have to endure—and sometimes suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result.) Other video games reward players for beating up women, stealing cars, pistol-whipping passers-by, and inflicting varying degrees of terrible carnage on, well, anything that moves. According to some estimates, by the time typical American children reach the age of 18, they’ve already seen 200,000 acts of violence and 40,000 murders on some sort of screen.

We’ve allowed our society as a whole to become fully engulfed, acclimated, and accustomed to horrendous, gratuitous violence as a normal component of daily life. Perversely, our society actually savors and glorifies extreme cruelty and destructiveness! And as we’ve become numb and indifferent to negativity and violence, bullying has escalated to epidemic proportions. Surely, that’s no coincidence.