Thinking The Sounds

Happy, happy, joy, joy!

Can you imagine watching anything lovelier than this?

Laptopograms: Expose prints with your laptop screen! | Photojojo.

Here’s the gist:

Aditya Mandayam developed this exciting new way of making prints: press photo-paper against your laptop screen, flash the screen, and dip the paper in developer, stop, and fix.

I’m always excited by seeing how people mix digital and analog technologies to come up with new ways to create.  There are so many possibilities for those who can look at technologies in unexpected ways.

I’m the father of two girls.

My life has been surrounded by various shades of pink.  Lots of shades of pink.  I have changed lots of baby doll diapers.  I have had to put tights on dolls.  I have spent time in what my brother John calls “the pink aisle” at the toy store—Barbie central.  There’s ballet shoes and dress up skirts and fairy wings all over the place.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love being the father of girls.  I don’t think I could handle the crazy rambunctiousness of boys.  (I’ve taught a kindergarten class of 80% boys.  I know, trust me.)  And while my two girls love all things princess-ey, they’re not fashion crazy (yet…).  They are actually both very broad in their tastes and interests.  They’re really cool and unique little people.

And while we’re on gender roles, we all know I’m not the most macho guy on the block.  I don’t follow sports.  At all.  I love Broadway.  I cook.  I was a stay-at-home dad.  I saw Jewel live.  (Okay, that one was a total accident.  She opened for Peter Murphy of all people.  And this was before she was well known, so cut me some slack.)

But there are times when I wish I had a boy.  I see pictures (and video) of my friend Paul and his son making these crazy creations with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings LEGO’s and I get all misty.  The nerd fanboy in me has wanted to pass on to my nerdy boy offspring tons of arcane and useless sci-fi geekdom.  Ultraman, Batman, Middle Earth, Johnny Socko, and—of course—Star Wars.

Now, my 10 year old has been a die-hard Harry Potter fan for several years now.  Devouring books, games, trivia, costumes and finally the movies.  She’s been building her nerd pedigree quite well.  And primarily on her own.  Sure, I think it’s a great alternative universe, ripe with imagination and creativity.  If it had come out when I was a youngster I would have totally devoured it.  Like she has.

So I started thinking that it might be time to introduce her to that long ago and far away galaxy.  Naturally I started with what is now known as Episode IV: A New Hope but which I still call Star Wars.  And she took to it like a Taun Taun to snow.  She’s now completely obsessed.  We got the Star Wars LEGO Wii game and she wants to play all the time.  She goes on StarWars.com and spends time with her head deep in the Star Wars Encyclopedia.

And I’m a happy camper.

My 6-year old has jumped on the bandwagon.  Leia and Amidala have supplanted Ariel and Jasmine as her new favorite princesses (I know, the latter is a queen, but so what).  She’s only seen Return of the Jedi, but now she wants lots of Star Wars LEGO’s.

And so I’m enjoying sharing one of my childhood joys with my kids.  We play together and talk about characters.  We laugh and share inside jokes.  And I’m a happy daddy.

My wife goes back and forth between finding it cute and rolling her eyes.  She should just be glad at this point that we don’t have boys….

Okay, I’ve been a big fan and user of Facebook for a long time.

I have really enjoyed connecting with some amazing people in really personal and meaningful ways.  I’ve reconnected with old friends from the past.  I’ve been more involved in the day-to-day lives of my extended family.  I’ve found friends who share my interests and weird perspectives on life.  And I’ve learned from the experiences and opinions of my friends.

In short, I have enjoyed interacting in a community whose discussions happen to take place across cables rather than cafe tables.  And Facebook has provided that place for us.

But, oh, how the place has changed since I first came to the neighborhood.

I, like many others, was drawn away from MySpace which at the time was becoming way too slimy and weird, with lots of porn spam and just the sense that everything was a little too much in the open.  If MySpace was the Vegas Strip, then Facebook seemed to offer something a little more like Main Street where there was a simple private place to share time with friends.  And Facebook grew enormously because so many of us felt we were connecting personally to real people who we know and care about (rather than getting messages from what was probably a middle-aged guy posing as a hot 19-year old girl…).

Sure, then came the games—Farmville, Mafia Wars, Scrabble—that wasted so much time, but that still could be like sitting around and playing a board game with your friends.  And there were the countless remodelings that drove us all crazy (“Bring back the old Facebook!”).  But still, at the heart of it Facebook was a place to connect with friends (and organizations and products) that mean something to us.

The heart of the problem with Facebook has been the incremental removal of all of the safety and privacy that was so crucial to its growth (Here’s a great interactive representation).  I have repeatedly used the term “bait-and-switch” in referring to this process, but it may be more like the frog in the boiling water.  The “switch” has been so gradual that many people don’t see it as a switch.  It just seems natural.  And that’s what Facebook would have us believe (as it’s in their best interest to be able to sell our information to the highest bidder).  CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who’s all of 26) recently said “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”  (As if Facebook hasn’t been actively moving the goal post the whole time.

Look, I have loads of information about me all over the web.  There are sites and blogs and forums and comments that I have chosen to be public.  I’m no Luddite sitting in a barn in the dark, alone in a corner.  I believe in the power of public discourse and the need for more public interaction and engagement.  I don’t hide my feelings about many topics and don’t shy away from discussions of difficult issues.

But then there are aspects of my life and my world that are only for certain eyes and ears.  We all have many personas and we sometimes have aspects of our lives that we like to keep separate.  (I teach young kids and there are certain things that I “like” that are perfectly appropriate for the adults in my life but which I prefer not to share with them.)  Privacy isn’t an all or nothing operation (this great article has a quite a few good arguments about this…).  I doubt that I know many people who would be comfortable with having either all OR none of their information public.  We have different aspects of our life that we like to treat differently and that’s something that Facebook used to be good at doing.

Now, they want to let it all hang out.  And not just on Facebook, across the rest of the internet.  And now they allow their partners (makers of apps, quizzes, games and junk) to keep all the information about you that they want.  And if I want to include my hometown (go Philly!) or school (Explorers!), I have to automatically link to a page and that information goes to everybody.  (Now, obviously, I’ve already made those two facts public, but I don’t do so for everything that I “like”.)

So I’m very disillusioned with what Facebook is doing.  I know they’re a business and I know they exist to make money.  Again, I’d gladly pay a monthly fee to have the service as is but with real control over who sees what.  But for now I’m going to take a big step back.  I won’t delete my account just yet.  I’ll deactivate it and wait and see.

The upside is that I’ll probably be posting here more often….

See also:

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
More Reasons Why You Should Still Quit Facebook
Farewell, Facebook

I heard about this the other day, a magazine created entirely in 48 hours.  What I see looks really good.  I’ll probably pony up for a copy.

Magazine 48 Hour Magazine | Issue Hustle | MagCloud.

At this point if I’m not careful this blog may end up devolving into a Star Wars blog.  Just a fluke of timing at this point.

Anyway, as my Spring Break from school is coming up this week, I headed to the library with the girls to stock up on distractions books.  I was in the mood for some sort of simple sci-fi/fantasy to distract my tired brain and thought I’d look through the Star Wars books to see if anything might strike my interest.

Now, in the years since I was a major Star Wars fan (that would be be over 30 years for those of you counting…) there has been quite a boom in Star Wars related publishing.  And of course I have no idea what’s the good stuff and what’s the dreck.  (And no less than George Lucas himself has shown us that the Star Wars mythos is capable of producing quite a load of dreck….)

I figured the logical place for me to start would be the only Star Wars novel I had ever read—Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye.  Now I had read this book when it came out (1978) and perhaps a few times in the years after that.  At some point the paperback found it’s way to Goodwill or a yard sale and was left behind.  I had little recollection of the plot and activity of the book, save that it followed after the (original) first movie in the SW timeline.  I have on occasion looked for copies on Ebay and Amazon and a few times almost ordered one but never went through with it.  Perhaps it was the wisdom of middle age telling me that something that had meaning to me in my youth might disappoint in my later years.  (There have been enough books/movies/albums/etc. that have proven this to be true.)

So while at the library perusing the Star Wars novels I decided to try my luck and see if they might have SotME.  And I’m sure you can tell from the trajectory of this post that they did indeed have a copy, hardbound no less.  I added it to my stash and headed home.

I started reading it last night and thought I might just put down some initial thoughts and reactions.  I’ve only read the first 20 pages at this point, so these opinions may change under the weight of more data….

I have to say at first that I kind of like Foster’s writing style here.  There’s sufficient detail and description to render the scenes in “the mind’s eye”.  I tend to be somewhat of a visual person and so look for details that help me to visually navigate through the created worlds I encounter.  Foster seems to do this well enough for me.

There’s a lot of emphasis placed on Luke’s interest in Leia that makes one squirm a bit now that we know their heritage.  I’m sure I would have empathized much more with Luke at my original reading, what with me being 13 and this being long before they were revealed as siblings.  But reading it now seems a little creepy.

Some of the situations remind me of one of the difficult points in the suspension-of-disbelief necessary for any Star Wars fan—the entire R2-D2 Mobility Conundrum (or R2D2MC, for short).  In essence, we are asked to believe that a cylinder on three wheels can navigate through slime and water, over curved surfaces of spaceships (while operating in the middle of interstellar dogfights), across deserts and ice sheets, etc.  And for some unexplained reason (when we accept the timelines that the prequels set up), he loses the ability to fly.  As Luke crash lands on the planet of Mimban and has to navigate the swaps there, Artoo dutifully follows without explanation of how.  I suspend my disbelief with this in general, but it still bugs me.

I guess that’s really all I have to say for now.  I’ll post some updates as the book progresses.