Shift-A

This morning, Amy wanted to type her name again, so I fired up MS Word, the way I usually do, selected a big font size, and hit Caps Lock (since she's more familiar with capital letters).

After she was finished with that, she spotted the punctuation keys at the bottom right and asked whether she might press them. I said yes.

She pressed , a few times first, and then wanted to make a ; by pressing on the top part of the key, which didn't work, of course. So I showed her the left Shift key and told her to press and hold that and then press the other key, and she made some semi-colons.

Then I showed her how she could use the right Shift key to make a capital A when Caps Lock was off, and she played around a little with upper-case and lower-case letters.

I can see that she still has to practise a bit, since she had a hard time releasing the letter key before it autorepeated. Though since she mastered that fairly quickly before, I think she'll get the hang of doing so while the other hand stays on the Shift key, too.

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ISO standards

There are a couple of ISO standards whose numbers I have memorised.

These include 639 (language names), 646 (ASCII), 3166 (country codes), 8601 (dates and times), 8859 (8-bit character encodings), and 10646 ("Unicode", kinda-sorta).

(I feel as if I "should" know the ISO standard specifying the "A" series of paper sizes such as A4, but I don't.)

Oh! And there's also ISO 2022. But I had to hunt a while in my memory and only vaguely remembered there were several 2's involves, and tried out 2212, 2122, 2022, to see what would fit, but had to confirm my memory on Wikipedia. So that doesn't really count. And there's also one that gets referenced moderately often that includes terminal emulation codes, I think, but I can't think of it right now.

What about you?

Meeting Mrs McVeigh

I dropped Amy off at the kindergarten an hour later this morning because Stella had a doctor's appointment at noon and so would be an hour late picking her up.

That meant Mrs McVeigh was already there when I arrived and I had the chance to speak to her briefly.

At first I thought she was American; I obviously still haven't got used to the concept of rhotic accents in the British Isles. (See also this old entry where I was disappointed by an actor with a rhotic accent playing Dumbledore.) But no, she's from Ireland.

She said Amy will occasionally talk to her in one-word sentences, but very quietly, and usually not at all. Which fits: she's pretty shy around people she doesn't know (yet) at the best of times, and she seems especially reluctant to use English with people other than me.

Whether that is because she's unsure about her command of the language, or because she feels it's a language to be used only to me, or what, I don't know, but it's certainly something I've noticed.

Ah well. Let's see whether she'll open up to Virginia (as the children call her—they're on first-name terms with all the teachers there) eventually.

(She's certainly become more open and daring since she's started kindergarten.)