Zeigen

This is going around, and it’s been a while since I did a meme theme, so… Why not! Here’s a hundred random foods, and you bold the ones you’ve eaten, and cross out the ones you’d never try.

“Never” is a very strong word. (What if you were trapped in the Andes with a rugby team? Marooned in a life raft in the Atlantic? Competing on Survivor?) So, I took “never consider” to mean “probably would not consider,” but even so there are not many cross outs.

Most of the ones that aren’t crossed out I’d genuinely like to try, although it didn’t seem worth the effort to score each item on how tasty I considered it or how much I wanted to try it; I did add some comments in parentheses here and there.

My score is only 54, which doesn’t seem that high to me. Post in the comments your score if you don’t have a blog to do this yourself!

1. Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3. Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4. Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

(Links are to Wikipedia. FAQ here, analysis here.)

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich (allergic to peanut butter, that vilest of substances)
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream (allergic again)
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava (ate this once by mistake, not knowing it had walnuts in it)
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi (tried a tiny sip once, didn’t like it)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (nope, not going to try any form of smoking)
37. Clotted cream tea (probably had this as a kid but can’t remember)
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O (at a memorable TiVo celebration in 1999 was the last time)
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian (really want to try this some day)
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis (once was enough)
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini (I’ve tried each separately but never together)
73. Louche absinthe (thanks to an absinthe bar at Burning Man)
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. (Someday, I hope.)
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox (I’m allergic to salmon)
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake (Garlic Festival for the win!)

“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.” — Wynn Catlin

By publishing that quote (it’s frequently misattributed to Will Rogers, but I have no idea who Wynn Catlin was), I’ve just eliminated any chance that I could ever become a genuine diplomat. During the vetting process, the hiring committee would doubtless read my blog, find this quote, and thus find my character incompatible with proper diplomatic bearing.

Any post to a blog, to twitter, to a forum or newsgroup, and any photo posted to flickr or facebook or myspace can come back to haunt you. (Quite a few people have written me over the years to say that their name came up in a web search with the first result pointing to someplace on my old personal web site where I quoted them about some Tori Amos thing or random kibology thing, and could I please remove their name because they were applying for such-and-such a job and they did not wish to appear as the type of person who approved of Tori Amos or kibology or whatever.)

A few days ago, I published an essay about the dilemma between public and private personas when participating in web 2.0 sites. One point I didn’t mention, however, was that ultimately many people prefer to be private to the extent of not sharing anything about themselves at all, which by definition means not participating in public forums. While many sites allow anonymity, many do not (because anonymous users tend to contribute less positively).

Probably this is the genuinely biggest barrier to adoption.

So, as a social media site, how do you overcome this barrier?

1. Well-constructed trials. Allow users to participate and share anonymously in a walled garden or with a subset of the features so they can get a sense of the site and how it’s fun or valuable, and dangle features in front of them that require registration. Make sure existing users have a way to easily hide the anonymous folks.
2. Privacy guarantees. Allow users real control over who gets to see their content, be explicit about how long the content will be archived, and describe exactly which search engines will index that content.
3. Make sure there’s a way for new users to get their questions answered. The very first, most prominent content on the home page must be a concise description of what the site is about, who it’s for, and a link to the FAQ. Follow that with either a new users forum (that allows anonymous posting), or live chat session with either vetted guides or mentors who are advanced users of the site.

Engaging with prospective users is a diplomatic balancing act. Treating privacy concerns as nice doggies only to crush those concerns with rocks isn’t the right approach; the only answer is open and complete disclosure.

The truth is, since having kids I’ve not been exercising regularly.

The real truth is, I stopped exercising regularly even a year before Sammy was conceived.

The sad, genuine, unvarnished truth is, my weight is not where I want it to be.

Technology perhaps to the rescue? After reading reviews and testimonials about Wii Fit, and seeing the Wii in action at my brother Phil’s place, I managed to find a Wii and Wii Fit (thanks to Zoolert), ordered online, and all three boxes arrived today.

Setting up the Wii involved surprisingly large amounts of waste packaging and cardboard recycling, but the process was easy. My wife was quite skeptical at first, but a quick game of bowling won her over. (”This is fun, isn’t it!” Sure is, especially when she beat me 126 to 95.) Then it was time to get going with Wii Fit.

Much has been written elsewhere about Wii Fit itself. There are some curious UI decisions, an odd mix of a cartoon aesthetic on some screens and 1970s fitness brochure aesthetic on other sections.  I agree that there’s a bit too much time spent loading and explaining when I’m standing there tapping my foot and just want to get going with exercising. I’m also extremely skeptical of the “Wii Fit Age” (took the body test twice today, before and after exercising, and was first put at 49, +8 from my actual age, and then put at 52. Kimi was put at +11 years. If repeating a test generates results that vary wildly, how accurate can that test be?

But the activities seem (after day 1 at least) to have some variety, and the format is perfectly suited to appeal to my desire to unlock things and complete things.

Some may feel the constant unlocking of hidden exercises and activities combined with the corny motivational screens and dubious emphasis on balance is just so much rat-maze navigation, but to me it’s like a game, and anything encouraging me to view exercise as a fun activity can’t be too bad.

Microsoft has reportedly claimed that 60% of Wii Fit users try it exactly once. Seems like sour grapes to me.

So, my poor long-suffering reader, I’m about to embark on the most banal of all blogging activities, and keep track publicly of my progress against my Wii fit goals.

My BMI is at 26.06, which is overweight. My goal is to reach a BMI of 22 (normal) in two months, losing twelve pounds in the process.

Day 1: After setting things up, I tried a couple of exercises in each of the four areas, starting with Aerobics. The step exercises impressed me immediately. Running seemed less well implemented but the scenery made it interesting — my problem was that I kept trying to game the system by trying to shake the remote in order to figure out how it calculated my pace. In the Strength category, the first activity, leg raises, made me feel very uncoordinated. For Yoga, I tried just the breathing and half moon poses; it seemed fine but I’m unlikely to put a lot of emphasis on this section. I did notice that just doing the half moon made me sweat. Finally, for balance, I was terrible at soccer ball headers, but not too bad with the ski slalom. And then I rounded things out with some hula hooping. I have to say I enjoyed myself.

Day 1 stats: 30 minutes of banked exercise, Wii Fit age 49, BMI 26.06.

“Web 2.0,” if it means anything at all, is a term usually used to reflect the modern trend of interactive web sites that encourage users to create and share content. Blogs, wikis such as Wikipedia, forums, social networks, podcasts, comment streams, RSS feeds — all these approaches and technologies form the backbone of the web 2.0 universe. (The term also reflects the second decade of the web’s existence, and the transition of web users from dialup speeds to broadband speeds.)

Web 2.0 today is in a state similar to the state of the web in 1998. Back then, four years into its rapid growth period, the “World Wide Web” (as we still called it then) had proven itself to be much more than a passing fad, and the vast majority of major organizations had created a presence. URLs had become a common sight on billboards. While mainstream and popular, there were still many people who had not really used the web extensively.

Today, almost everyone has heard of blogs, and most have used one or more of the vanguard web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, etc. But even the most popular of these sites sign up only a small fraction of their visitors as users.

The central dilemma I see as a barrier to future growth is an adoption paradox: Coming up with incentives for users to create accounts and to start generating the content that in turn attracts more users to sign up. Peer pressure is an effective motivator, but many potential users don’t sign up because they don’t get what their role is, what the site is about, or how it would benefit them. In the meantime, they either avoid the site or lurk there.

(The lurker phenomenon is prevalent: A popular Flickr photo will have tens of thousands of views, but very few comments or links. A popular Twitter user’s page might be read by 100 times more people than actually sign up to follow that person. YouTube has hundreds of millions of viewers, millions of registered users, but less than a million users who have uploaded a video. For zeigen.com, according to my server logs, more than 5,000 unique visitors came to this site last month, and an unknown number more viewed the content via an RSS reader — but only 20 unique users left a comment.)

A user’s role at a web 2.0 site falls along a continuum between what I’ll call “public” versus “personal” personas.

Let’s take Flickr as an example. When you sign up for Flickr and begin publishing photographs, you’ll be doing one of these things:

• Publishing artful or beautiful or technically proficient photographs intended to be appreciated by a general audience
• Publishing photographs of a particular subject matter (such as, say, model airplanes) intended to be appreciated by fans of that subject matter (such as model airplane enthusiasts)
• Publishing photos of your friends and family, intended to be appreciated by people who know you
• Some combination of the above

YouTube follows the same pattern: Many users are uploading family videos, others are uploading things they find generally amusing or interesting, or a series of videos on a particular topics, or anywhere in between.

Similarly, blogs can be personal and intended for friends/family (journal sites), or public but general (such as a celebrity’s blog), or public and focused on a particular topic.

With some sites, such as Digg, the expectation is that there is no “personal” content — everything is for public consumption. You’d never promote stories about your family, only stories of interest to just about everyone.

Other sites, such as Facebook, are the opposite: Other than corporate or celebrity profiles, everything a user puts there is personal, about you, so almost no Facebook profiles are for artistic purposes. It’s all about your personal life.

Some Twitter users highlight the personal even to point of banality (”Ate lunch at sandwich place again. Had Turkey. Was good.”) while others spread breaking news, one-liners, observations, or punditry in an effort to attract more followers and support their public persona as a blogger or artist.

I’ve written about FriendFeed previously. and it continues to be the web 2.0 site I’m most interested in. The dilemma for me (and therefore I presume for most users) is where to draw the line.

For example: A friend posts a picture of their new haircut or has a status of “sad.” Because it’s a friend of mine, I want to compliment the haircut or ask them why they’re sad. Sometimes I just want to post what I had for lunch.

BUT — I have a few different types of followers on FriendFeed (co-workers, friends, business acquaintances, online contacts, random strangers). The people who subscribe to me who don’t know the person involved won’t want to follow that conversation. Sure, it’s fairly easy for them to skip it, but if my goal is to acquire more followers, I need to do so by keeping my persona public. So part of me becomes reluctant to post “personal” comments or links on FriendFeed, because the role I’ve so far taken on there is more public than personal. (I’m usually interested in starting conversations with a wide variety of interesting people about topics that I care about, and the items I share there are generally not about me.)

One prolific FriendFeed user, the notorious Robet Scoble, discussed creating a second account that’s more private, just for personal items — but that’s far from an ideal solution. Fragmenting yourself into different accounts is difficult to manage (especially when you start getting into the weeds of managing duplicate feeds, remembering to unsubscribe or subscribe to different people and join certain rooms on both of your accounts), and the UI of the site presumes that you only have a single account.

Yesterday FriendFeed launched a beta test of their new interface, and it’s a great improvement. In addition to improved aesthetics, there are a plethora of new features. The most important is the ability to categorize the people you follow into whatever labels you assign (Personal, Coworkers, Interesting, Noisy — whatever). Two of the default labels are “Personal” and “Professional,” which supports the observation I’m trying to make here.

However, I think FriendFeed has it almost backwards: It’s not so much that I want to categorize my friends based on how I know them (although I do want that) — much more, I want to categorize what I publish. Let me label the things I share as “Personal” or “Public” (and use even more tags if I want to assign them). That way the people who subscribe to me can decide if they want the full feed (complete with my lunch plans and haircut comments) or to automatically excise those parts they won’t care about.

For all web 2.0 sites, the first job is to clearly explain what the site is about, show how it benefits the prospective user, and ease new users up the learning curve. Once that’s done, helping users understand and manage their role along the public/personal continuum is essential to making the site sticky and successful. Tagging and categorization is the answer for that. Smart tools and good design will be needed to make this task intuitive and easy.

With Flickr, you can subscribe to a user’s entire photostream, or just to an individual series (as tagged by the user). The next step for many other web 2.0 sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and most of all FriendFeed, is to catch up to that concept.

Steve Lacy, a friend and former co-worker, has created BayDad, a blog by, for, and about dads in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ll be blogging there a bit, and I just wrote my first post there, about The Baylands park in Palo Alto.

If you’re interested in parks, parenting, kids activities, tech useful for parents, and/or you happen to live in the area, please give BayDad a read — and if you’re interested in contributing, let me know.

Yeah, I was just kidding about that “returning 8/25″ thing. That was just excuse-making. Please to excuse.

In the meantime, here’s the number of posts I’ve managed each month.

Seasonal variation appears to apply.

Why, we’re watching the Olympics too. We’re all watching! Your favorite shows and blogs will return after the Olympics.

Zeigen.com — returning on Monday, August 25.

And now, back to our live coverage of the prelim quarterfinal qualifications of the men’s indoor short track handball 400 meter speed dressage beach trapshooting, where the welterweight Latvian team is in the medal hunt against a field of veteran Olympic athletes, including superstar Zbgnw Klrnzxst. But first, we check in with women’s table tennis. Bob?

Now that I’ve updated this blog to the latest software and ironed out all the wrinkles, it’s very apparent how little I posted in July: Just six articles prior to today, and five of them work-related and one blog-software-related.

Partly, work has been very busy and we accomplished quite a bit in the last couple of weeks

• YouTube
• Product Purchase
• Launched in Australia
• Major web site update
• New software release for Series3 and HD units
• A bunch of other internal stuff that I can’t put here

I’ve been using FriendFeed quite a bit, sharing a few articles and comments there, and that’s the other part of why I haven’t posted here as much.

That means I didn’t write up anything at all about our trip to Pine Mountain Lake for the Fourth of July, or about Sammy’s and Sophie’s battles with impetigo (warning: Wikipeida always chooses horrific photos to accompany their disease articles; that link is not for the weak-stomached), or about our staying with three different families during our house remodeling, which is now stretching into the fifteenth week. Or even about having sushi on Friday with Steve and Andrea and Isaac, and learning their exciting news.

We’re definitely grateful to the Vallone family and to Garry & Marilyn’s family and now to my brother Rob and sister-in-law Kelly. Their hospitality is very generous, and we endlessly appreciate not having to stay in a hotel. But we’re so homesick it’s driving us all crazy.

So today we’re hoping to verify that Wednesday is our move-back-in day (when the chaos REALLY begins). And lo and behold, I’m posting here again.

The theme of my posts here this week will be “changing gears.” More on that idea to come.

If all went well, you won’t see any difference.

However, it seems to have blown away all of my categories. Hmm.

EDIT: Fixed my categories, what a pain. I fixed them by following steps at this article. If you happen to have this problem with your blog when updating from 2.0x to 2.6, only the last step is actually needed (you don’t need to mess around in your phpMyAdmin page) — but you do have to repeat the step for each category. I have 30 categories, so this was annoying, but it’s done now. If you see anything else about the blog acting funky, please let me know.

EDIT THE SECOND: I’ve switched on avatars and converted from the default permalink structure to a month-and-name-based structure. (Old links will still work.)

EDIT THE THIRD: I’ve installed a plugin to make it easier to read this blog on an iPhone/iPod Touch.

If none of the above makes any sense to you, ignore it.

Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle is a very polished online tool that takes a bunch of words and turns them into clouds, where the most-frequently-used words are displayed proportionally larger. Paste in your favorite song lyrics to get a result like this.

Here’s what I get from the words in recent posts on this page. (Click to enlarge.)

A few months ago, a friend of mine left his position at Google and went to join a startup called FriendFeed. He invited me to join while it was still in beta, and now that it’s open to the public, it’s quickly moved up to become my favorite web site.

So what is it? My submission for FriendFeed’s “describe FriendFeed in 2-8 words” discussion was, “Your friends make the news.” When you sign up for FriendFeed (which is free, and is currently without any advertising), you can choose which online services you use (such as Flickr, Netflix, Twitter, Amazon wishlists, shared blog posts on Google Reader, and much more). Once set up, FriendFeed automatically creates a news feed of your activity on those services. This feed can be public (i.e., anyone can see it), or private (only you approve who can read your feed). You can also submit items for your feed, by sharing URLs using FriendFeed, or just creating general comments, perhaps about what you’re doing or thinking.

Then, you choose which people on FriendFeed you want to follow (your friends, relatives, and/or people you find interesting). If your friends aren’t yet using FriendFeed, you can invite them to do so, or you can create an “imaginary friend” for them as if they had actually signed up.

FriendFeed turns out to be a great way to see in one consolidated place what’s going on with your friends, whenever they add an Amazon wishlist item, submit a photo, write a blog post, or whatever else.

The interesting part comes with the social aspect: your friends can “like” and comment on the different feed items. Discussions begin. And in your feed of news from your friends, you can also see the items that your friends have liked and commented on, even if that item didn’t come directly from your friend — so you start seeing interesting updates from your friends of your friends.

What’s striking about the site is both how simple it is to use as well as how much it changes the game. Before, to find out about different things your friends were doing, you may have visited dozens of different sites. Being able to instead view all of that news in one place means you feel more up-to-date and closer to different people, and learn more about what they’re interested in.

While the site works in different ways for different people, I find that it’s most effective when you’re following people you are actually friends with in real life. Interesting people share interesting things, but the level of meaning and the degree to which you care is enhanced a great deal when you care about the person. For example, if an interesting stranger shares an item about, say, cat grooming, you may or may not find that engaging. Probably you’d just skip past that item in your feed. But when your co-worker shares an item about cat grooming, even if you don’t care about the topic, now you know that they either have a cat or want to get a cat, and the next time you see that co-worker you now have something to talk about.

New features are being added at a rapid pace. It’s easy to hide items you don’t care about and control the experience to make it what you want. The web page is responsive and the service is reliable.

I say that last because, in contrast, I’ve also started using Twitter.

Long-time twitterers please forgive me as I explain the basics, since Twitter is very old news to many blog readers, having launched in late 2006. Twitter is a remarkably popular service in terms of its growth and its number of users (well over a million at this point). However, in real life, very few of my co-workers, none of my family, and a tiny fraction of my friends are using it and many have not even heard of it. And this is despite being in the heart of the Silicon Valley, working for a high-tech company full of early adopters, surrounded by tech friendlies. Part of that gap is because it’s a generational thing: Twitter seems to immediately appeal to college students, while those older seem to take longer to “get it.”

So, what is Twitter? Brief (140 characters or less) updates about whatever you want. These updates, or tweets, constitute micro-blogging. Instead of long-winded posts like this one, brevity is the soul of Twitter. Dashing off to a coffee house? Twit it, and now your friends know, and if they’re in the area, perhaps they’ll drop on by. Thought of a great one-liner? Share it on Twitter. Mad as hell about dropping your laptop and breaking it (like I did earlier this evening)? Just had the greatest ice cream cone ever? Can’t believe what McCain just said? Twitter, twitter, twitter.

The 140 character limit, instead of being a barrier, becomes liberating, since you’re freed from having to cite your source, defend your premise, or define your terms. You can write about the most trivial of things since it’s stream of consciousness, and the basic idea is to share with your friends what’s going on at the moment, as uninteresting as that may be.

Where Twitter excels is in the number of ways you can interact with it: You can submit updates from your cell phone via SMS, from an instant messenger application such as AIM, via a browser at twitter.com, or via other social networking sites. Conversely, you can set up the level of notification for updates from your friends. Biff in accounting might be your Twitter friend but you can set it up so that you only see what he’s up to if you go to twitter.com. Your spouse, on the other hand, can have updates sent directly to your IM or cell phone.

While Twitter really feels like a subset of FriendFeed, the bigger issue lately seems to be its lack of reliability, with numerous outages — growing pains for a site that’s exceeding user adoption expectations.

Neither site yet displays any hint of a business model. They’re free to join, with no ads. All those developers and servers are expensive, so somewhere along the line one or both of those things must change or else the service implodes. But in the meantime, they’re both interesting sites.

In contrast, Facebook is a well-known social networking site, and it’s full of ads — they clearly know what a business model is. Originally for college students only, Facebook is now open to everyone, and it’s a social networking site. Despite having a friend or two working there, I have to say that after I’ve been using it for a while, I don’t find any value offered that’s not better handled elsewhere. The semi-public communication in “Walls” is not a good way to converse (with most walls showing half of a conversation). The private messages are better handled with traditional e-mail. The countless applications are generally time-wasting (hunting zombies, answering easy trivia questions) without being deep, and many seem to actively trick you into adding them. (One promoted itself with the tagline saying that a co-worker called it “the best application on Facebook” when he’d really never said any such thing. Most require you to add the application in order to view whatever doodad or message your friend is trying to send you.) Is it better than Friendster and Orkut, the social networks that I tried out previously? Demonstrably so. It’s certainly more attractively presented than MySpace, which I’ve not used. But the main drawback is that there’s nothing compelling there, and the Facebook interface actively interferes with productivity, while Twitter is more streamlined and FriendFeed adds value and interest.

I’ve been using the web now for 14 years. So much has changed in that time (and not always for the better). These days, very little makes me excited about the web the way I felt in the early years, but FriendFeed certainly comes closest.

Follow me as zeigen on Twitter and zeigen on FriendFeed. Befriend me on Facebook if you like.

If you’re long-time users of these sites, I’m interested in what got you started using them, which you like best (or which other one you think blows these away), and what you like/dislike.

If you’ve never heard of these sites before, what’s your reaction? Is it, “Why? What’s the point?” as I suspect most people feel? (Especially if you’re over 40…) Well, people felt that about the web and blogging too. Both are here to stay.

Today I attended Jack and Andy’s fifth birthday party at Hoover park, and watched Bob get pelted by water balloons and shaving-cream-filled sponges by ten ecstatic kids. (How I escaped that fate, given I’m a co-godparent? Dunno! But I am oh so grateful.) Aunt Beth made two cakes, one a race car, and the other a chocolate volcano with lava made from melted orange lifesavers. Amazingly beautiful cakes.

* * *

While I was feting twins, Kimi took Sammy and Sophie to the Hiller Airplane Museum, which never gets old for Sammy.

Me: Sammy, what did you see at the airplane museum today?
Sammy: Airplanes.
Me: What kind of airplanes?
Sammy: Old airplanes. With wings!

* * *

Yesterday was Sophie’s eight month birthday. She babbles incessantly now, has the tiniest of teeth buds coming in, gives a smile to everyone, likes to wave somewhat erratically at people, and can roll over, but seems to show no interest in crawling. We’ve started the ferberizing to break her of her 3 a.m. feedings, and so far so good; she slept through the night for the last two nights.

* * *

Yesterday was also photo day at Sammy and Sophie’s school, and in addition, teachers’ lunch out for Sophie’s class. This semi-annual event asks the parents to donate their time and a little money for the teachers to get an escape, while parents come in during the lunch hour to watch the kids. There are eight kids in Sophie’s class, ranging from four months to almost a year old. For the noon to 1 shift where I helped out, we had five parents. When we first started our shift, the teachers had left us well-fed, happy, clean-diapered kids. Within about, oh, ten minutes, half of the kids were bawling, and most had dirty diapers. We parents just looked at each other and laughed. What a profoundly difficult job. The two teachers handle four infants each, with aplomb. We parents were having difficulty with less than two each. Things soon settled down though, and the hour ended up flying by.

* * *

While the photographers set up outside the school and we lined the kids up to have their individual and class photos taken, smoke and haze filled the sky from the nearby Santa Cruz mountains fire. Yesterday morning over 3,400 acres had burned, dozens of homes were destroyed, and the fire was less than 1% contained. Even though we were fifty miles away, kids rubbed their eyes and coughed; and the strange air reminded me of a smell from my childhood, in London: walking down the street in winter evenings, with seemingly every house having a fireplace with a blazing wood fire, smoke pouring out of chimneys, getting on your clothes.

Chim chimminee, chim chiminee, chim chim cheroo.

I was very glad to see the unexpected and unseasonable light rain today, giving the firefighters the break they needed to control the mountain blaze. The dull weather was not so much fun for five-year-olds attending a birthday party, but everything in life is a trade-off.

* * *

Earlier in the week, I caught Speed Racer and then snuck in to a showing of Prince Caspian. It took me about thirty minutes to catch on to Speed Racer’s vibe, but once I did, I loved it. I think this is a vastly underrated movie. The critical smackdown is somewhat intense; I guess most of the critics never watched the original cartoon, because I think the movie catches the goofy tone of the movie pretty much perfectly. And the visuals do not disappoint, exceeding even the hype.

Prince Caspian, on the other hand, is a dreadful bore, missing all spark of charm and whimsy of the first Narnia movie, laying the religious theme on over-thick, and really missing the point of the book (which I read probably twenty times before I was 12).

Speed Racer is over two hours but feels like 60 minutes. Prince Caspian is over two hours but feels like three or four.

* * *

Rob and I have been playing a new card game, Race for the Galaxy (which Steve and Larry introduced me to when they visited a couple of months ago). We play whenever we get a chance. I love this game. It’s a bit fiddly to learn, and the fact that you’re not directly interacting with your opponents takes a few plays before you understand how you can actually have a huge effect on your opponents’ play — but it’s such a short and intense game, I find myself even dreaming about it. Get this game!

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Kimi gave me the new Flight of the Conchords CD for my birthday (among a lot of other CDs, thanks sweetie!). Although I loved the first season of the HBO show, I had thought some of the songs were hit or miss. But I was able to really listen to the lyrics (thanks to the iPhone making it easier for me to carry around music), and now I love all the songs. Buy this CD. Please mister, you won’t regret it.

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There’s a friends-and-family deal at TiVo right now for a TiVo HD. If you’re a friend or family and want a new HD DVR, drop me an e-mail.

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While I do aim to generate content, rather than pass along content from elsewhere, here’s a link. I have to say I applaud these two for their convictions and avocation.
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Kimi: “Your blog is so random. No one likes all the content. No one!”

Guilty — variegated miscellany is what this is. I do tend to be all over the place. Everything’s connected, somehow. Just think though — there are half of the categories listed on the right not even touched by this post. But comments are what I like best, so let me know what you’d like to see more of, and less of.

To round out today’s TiVoCast news, starting today we’ll be posting a new feature here on the blog.

John T., one of our TiVoCast team members, is a production specialist, and he watches EVERYTHING we publish on TiVoCast each week. Every Wednesday he’ll pick the five best TiVoCast programs and tell us why he liked it.

Welcome to the blog, John!

I don’t have the highest opinion of Wal-Mart (in part from watching this Frontline episode), and I admit I associate Wal-Mart with “low brow” and “middle America.”

(Even setting aside any anti-competitiveness, gentrification, and globalization issues, I don’t really like shopping there, because the one near us is always very crowded, and the shelves don’t seem well maintained to me. It always seems to be in disarray.)

But there’s no denying Wal-Mart’s importance as a retailer, so for a while I’ve been reading their Check Out blog.

I was startled the other day when I read this entry, which starts with a reference to philosopher Thomas Kuhn and one of his groundbeaking works (a book which profoundly influenced my way of thinking after I studied it in college).

The juxtaposition of Wal-Mart and deep thinkers: Not what I expected. So boo on me for my stereotyped perception that a Wal-Mart blog would be written to appeal to the lowest comment denominator.

Don’t actually read this entry. Skip on to something else.

Some of my favorite long words include dithyrambic, exothermal, disambiguate, ostentatious, loquacious, and confabulate. In business, we frequently hear phrases such as de minimis, the word “architect” used as a verb (a vile neologism, to be sure), discussions of emolument, and other variegated farrago and miscellany.

I inscribe this with stoic fervor solely to determine if I can unduly influence The Blog Readability Test, which previously rated this blog at the Junior High School level, a lachrymose result which induced acrimonious umbrage.

EDIT: No effect? Still Junior High? I didn’t know any of these words in Junior High. Feh.

Now that we’ve got two kids, the previous heading image (of Sammy) was out of date. A new image now appears at the top of each page, again thanks to Jason “Xyne.” Details in a separate page about the heading image.

Let me know what you think! Are the eyes too big? I made Jason enlarge them from his first draft, but maybe I had him go too far.

I just learned on Boing Boing that Anita Rowland lost her years-long battle with cancer. I never met Anita in person, but we corresponded years ago over stylesheet bugs when she was working for Microsoft on IE 4 and I was writing an HTML book. After collaborating over bugs, we happened to read each other’s web sites and exchanged e-mails for a while.

I was always inspired by her site — one of the very first web journals ever, and a precursor more than ten years ago to the blogs of today. Anita was a pioneer, and I’m sorry to hear of her passing.

Richard Bullwinkle, known to some as “TiVolutionary” (because of his former role as TiVo’s first evangelist), recently started writing a blog about his sister Amacker after she suffered a terrible motorcycle accident. If you know Richard or Amacker, please visit Richard’s Amacker’s Page to learn about her progress and recovery. It’s a harrowing tale and ordeal. My thoughts are with Richard and Amacker and their family, and I hope she makes a full recovery.

My blog is back in spring, and so’s my brother Harry’s! Check him out!

Will fill in some empty spots for March here and there, and goal is to have a post for every day in April, even if I have to cheat and put in some retro posts there and here.