I’ve always felt that I had about the best timing for a birthday possible. Mine is in June, which means that growing up, I never went more than six months without a crapload of presents. From the parental perspective this is a pretty sweet deal as well. You have six months to think up good present ideas inbetween festivities. Two of my own monsters are not so lucky. We’ve got one birthday right before Thanksgiving and another right after Christmas. That’s a long dry spell. More importantly (because it is *my* problem) that is a lot of pressure to come up with good ideas all at once.
bah.
These kids also have a pretty big family, so ideas must also be provided to aunts and uncles. I’m just not very good at ideas. That’s a lie. I’m pretty good with ideas, but I’m GREEDY as all get out with them. I want to be the one giving them the awesome present that will define their childhood, like my growing up skipper doll or my white plastic record player.
You know how I managed to acquire those two magnificent gifts? The Sears Wishbook. I basically used it as my own personal shopping list. I just circled what I wanted, and sometimes it would magically appear. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that this was probably as good a deal for my folks as it was for me. They never had any question what I wanted. It was right there. Circled. Multiple times. In pen. With a big “E” next to it. By the way, some benevolent soul on Flickr has managed to scan several Sears Wishbooks of that era in their entirety. If you are so inclined, you really should check them out. It is such an outstanding trip down memory lane. Here’s 1977, 1979, 1980, but he’s got tons more.
There is no equivalent now for the Sears Wishbook. We get tons of catalogs, sure, but they just aren’t of the same weight. Anyway, on Sunday I had this idea that I would take the kids to Toys R Us, and bring a notepad and we would walk around doing basic recon on what kinds of things they might like for Christmas. No surprise, they were totally into it. I ended up with some really good ideas, written in pencil, in my own little wishbook.
Saturday Art Show
Nov 8
Much time was spent Saturday morning drawing an assortment of monsters for the art show in our kitchen. Along with the monsters, there was a variety of sculptures made from brightly colored hexagonal wood, which I believe was a past Christmas present that never saw the light of day after opening.
As in all good galleries, there was an expectation of some level of decorum.
After the two ticket holders were allowed entry, a couple new rules were added.
The new caveats: “No Excessive Laughing” and “No Photos”.
Remember when the Tech Museum of Innovation opened in downtown San Jose, and it was SO VERY COOL and a huge destination when you had friends in town? That was a little over ten years ago. Sadly, we all know that ten years might as well be 100 years in software. Sometime in the last ten years The Tech has become crazy dated, and nowhere near as “innovative” as it’s moniker would have you believe.
Some of the exhibits are still pretty cool. The earthquake simulator is a good example of that. The robot deal that spells your name out of wooden blocks…very cool. In fact, many of the more mechanical exhibits are definitely worth seeing and playing with.
But…
What the hell has happened as far as keeping current with the software exhibits? Nevermind the seemingly high percentage of these things that just. don’t. work. (hardware failures, crashes and reboots on WINDOWS 98, I might add) The things that *do* work are often hopelessly out of date. Particularly glaring is one exhibit where visitors can make their own personalized web page, with a few customizations in the colors and backgrounds, sort of like a rudimentary blog. They can even put their photo on it, snapped by an attached webcam. They can use a bar code scanner to load in the exhibits they have already visited, and then give a little summary of their experience about each of them. That sounds pretty good, right?
EXCEPT THE WEB PAGE YOU PRODUCE IS STRAIGHT OUT OF GEOCITIES CIRCA 1998.
It’s bad, friends. Really bad. Is this really representative of innovation? HERE?? We are smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a web developer and *THAT* is the personalized web page we are showing off at the Tech Museum of Innovation? WHAT KIND OF MIXED UP WORLD ARE WE LIVING IN???? I’m sure it was great when they launched it, but come on…there are a bazillion free websites where kids can set up a personalized page about a million times snappier than these with about four mouse clicks…maybe using only their FEET.
How about the spam whack-a-mole machine? Did we pick that one up at a Chuck-E-Cheese that went out of business? Why not an exhibit where kids have to design their own filter and then have hundreds and then thousands of pretend words hammer at it, complete with L33T spelling variations to demonstrate the vigilance required, and how easily a system can be totally swamped with spam? Let kids try to keep up adding new variations to their filter. It would be so much more interactive, so much more realistic, and most importantly, NOT OF THE STONE AGE. Kids are not stupid. Remember that the kids playing with this stuff probably have email addresses of their own. They’ve likely been on computers or online since they were toddlers in one way or another. Give them more value.
Let’s talk about the roller coaster build simulator. It’s pretty simplistic, but the kids dig it because after they build their own roller coaster, they can take their little barcode over and sit down in what is essentially a hard bench in front of a large tv and “ride” their roller coaster. Great! Except for the part where IT DOESN’T WORK. Two of the kids spent fifteen minutes building their coaster, and tweaking their designs only to walk over, stick their barcode in the reader and be told there was no file found. Total. Letdown.
You know what *is* neat though? The big software driven marble labyrinth where you tilt a large flat computer screen from four sides to move the marble through the maze. Oh wait…that didn’t work either. The marble was stuck in one corner.
These place needs a total reboot. Apple? Google? Ebay? Everyone? All you folks here in the valley that pave the way for the rest of the world, how can you guys let this place represent the valley in which we all live and WORK?? This is totally embarrassing. I am calling on you to get your marketing people down to The Tech and see what you can sponsor. If we want to let the museum continue to morph into a glorified lobby for the IMAX theater, great, but it’s ridiculous and sad that with all the real innovation in the valley, THIS is what we are presenting to the rest of the world.
We can do better. To quote @aaronh , “There isn’t a single thing here more impressive than the free apps on my iPhone.” He couldn’t be more right.
I don’t want to abandon this place, but I can’t abide membership renewal if this is the way it stays.
Grandma Jane, Aunt Ginny and Uncle Bill circa 1928
Wisconsin is for Lumber
Nov 4
So while Medium and I were working on that project about our family together, I was spending copious amounts of time online trying to get myself back up to speed on the research I’d done years ago. There was, of course, more information easily accessed now than there had been when last I dug in. Among the yearbook photos, newspaper clippings, google street view of our family’s old houses, I found this on EBay.
My great great grandfather started that lumber company. I bid on it, and I bought it.
That was pretty great in and of itself, but as much as it meant to me to get my hands on this tangible artifact, this physical bridge to my long gone family, it wasn’t the best part.
When I won the auction, I paid for the apron and I included a note to the seller to tell them how excited we were to get it because the lumber company had belonged to our family. I’ve got no idea how old the apron is, but it’s old enough that the phone number on it only has four digits.
She replied with:
That’s awesome! I was selling it for my friend’s father so I’ll let him know. He and his wife are in their eighties and just moved out of their house of 50+ years into a retirement community. You could imagine the stuff that they had saved all those years. Sadly, a lot of it ended up going into a dumpster, but some items he just wanted to get into the hands of their rightful owners. So…I’m helping him.
Thanks so much for letting me know. You’ll be sure to put a smile on a nice old man’s face :)
That last bit at the end? That was the best part.
Some people call her “that poor cat”.
She really didn’t mind. Much.
She wore it for a couple minutes. Tops.
Judging by an entirely unscientific polling of my parenting cohorts, I fall just about in the middle as far as what age I will allow the kids to have their own email address. They want it so badly, so very badly. Large, being the household guinea pig for all privlidges that come with age, was anxious, doomed to eternal nerdity among his peers (or so he thought) if he didn’t have an one, and despite the fact that we are of the last generation that can tell their kids, “When I was your age, I didn’t have email, and I didn’t die of deprivation in a lonely pool of my own frustration and burgeoning tween angst, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.”, he got one. He was 9.
We didn’t use an email platform designed for kids. We used Gmail. The spam filter is actually pretty darn good, which was concern number one. I didn’t want V14GR4 ads showing up in his email inbox. Having been around the internet block a few thousand times, we set up some conditions under which this account could exist. I think they are pretty good guidelines, so I’m sharing them here. Some are about safety online and some are just meant to keep a kid from being THAT KNUCKLEHEAD that you never want to obtain your email address for correspondence.
1. I will have your password and access to your email account 24/7, whenever and wherever they want. You will have zero privacy. None. Zilch.
2. I will have your email sent directly to my phone, so I will see not only every message you send, but every single piece of mail you receive. I can and will block particular senders (read as your friends) from being able to send you mail when they send things I don’t think are appropriate.
3. Your email address will not be your actual name, nor will your last name appear anywhere on your account. This is non-negotiable.
4. YOU WILL NOT FORWARD CHAIN MAILS OR STUPID JOKES.
5. If you break rule no.4, you will NEVER forward anything anywhere while including anyone else’s email address as a cc. Doing so is akin to providing a perfect stranger all your friends’ names and cell phone numbers, and it is a violation of their privacy and EXTREMELY LAME NETIQUETTE. Know how a bcc works if you MUST forward something.
6. If you persist in breaking rule no.4, do not ever forward any email sent to you from another person without their permission. That is another violation of their privacy and just plain rude.
7. You will not talk about any of your classmates in anything but extremely polite terms via email. EVER. You NEVER KNOW where your emails will end up. Don’t be that kind of tool.
8. Do not ever share your password, and do not ever click “remember me” when logging into your email from someone else’s computer. In fact, just don’t log into your email on anyone else’s system.
9. Do not sign up or register at any websites with your email address without my EXPRESS PERMISSION and SUPERVISION or your ASS IS GRASS.
10. Danger, there be dragons. Do not enter the realm of the SPAM folder. This one is actually managed better now, with the advent of the latest GMail tools release which allows you to hide entire folders from view. Monkey no see. Monkey no do.
Plenty of the kids’ friends and classmates have had email from a very early age, while some friends of Large *still* don’t have it. There is really no reason they need it, other than they will likely use it to communicate with other human beings for most of their life and their classmates is a good a place as any to practice. I’d rather they learn the ins and outs while I still have them under my thumb. Come to think of it, I think we probably all have some adults in our address book that would have been well served by having these sort of rules beaten into habits for them. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t play dumb.
ahem.
I know I’ve forgotten some of our rules. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
Bored to Death
Nov 1
No, not me…probably you if you are reading this, but I’m talking about the TV show. If you have HBO and you haven’t started watching, you are truly missing out. Jason Schwartzman is just so great, as is Zach Galifianakis and Ted Danson.
This all means that Sunday night is flush with TV possibilities, at least for the time being. Which leaves me very little time to think of any thing good to write. So you get this, a recommendation.
Here is a clip.
Enjoy.