…where jack sometimes does stuff, but mostly not

Urgh, I was going to do this earlier and totally lost track of it. I was tagged by Aprille to continue this pick-seven-things-about-yourself game. So somehow I am supposed to pick seven things that are a) interesting and b) not yet already known by the tiny handful of people who might conceivably see this post. Uh, here goes.

1. I have an very wasteful form of writer’s block. I have plenty of things to write about; stuff is bouncing around the inside of my skull constantly, but I usually don’t actually start writing. I am more disgusted with my self than usual about this, right at the moment.

2. When I was 3 or 4 my family’s house in Phoenix burned down. It was something to do with the water heater, I believe. I have a vague memory of being held by one of the neighbors, in my pajamas because it was the middle of the night. Most everything was lost but my parents salvaged a soot streaked teddy bear, which made a nice conversation piece.

3. I used to work for an aluminum foundry. It made small intricate investment-casted parts for, like fighter planes or something. I took carefully positioned x-rays of a random sample of these parts, wearing a lead vest and a dosimeter badge.

4. I blew up. Did you know you can build your own pyrotechnic stage effects? It’s true. Screw down a cleaned can (a soup can or 12oz paint pot) and run an electrical line into it; wire that to a flashbulb broken out of a disposable Polaroid flash bar. Then just dump about a teaspoon of gunpowder into the pot, and when you’re ready, plug in the cord (or even better, wire the cord into a switchbox). It makes a great effect! However, you should be careful not to be standing too close when it goes off. You should be extra careful not to be leaning down to make an adjustment, with your face directly over the pot, when someone flips the switch on accident. Fun facts: 1) you know in cartoons when something explodes and the character’s hair sticks straight out in all directions? Yeah, they didn’t just make that up, and 2) they can give you a local that totally keeps you from feeling anything when they are digging debris out of your cornea with a power tool.

5. I have a tattoo. There is very little chance you have ever seen it unless you’ve seen me in a bathing suit or something as it is on my leg and above the knee. It is of a cartoon penguin.

6. I was in a very silly movie one time. Among the things I have learned from this experience is that everybody gets an IMDB page. Also that one should not assume that no strangers have uploaded video to youtube of one making sort of a jackass of oneself, because one might just be surprised.

7. I seriously cannot believe how old I look. Mirrors freak me out at the moment. I don’t think I was mentally prepared to get this old. This problem recurs every few years, so I figure it’s an inbuilt personality trait: a deep-seated aversion to thinking about my personal future beyond the next year or two. When I was in junior high — say, 7th grade or so — I’m pretty sure I had no idea what happened to a person after high school. I know that I had heard of “college” but my mental model of that concept was practically a blank slate, and I didn’t care either. This came back to bite me in the ass later on.

Hmmn. Now I’m supposed to tag seven other people. Do I know seven people with blogs to tag?

I’ll say:
* my sister
* my brother
* this one lady who shall remain nameless
* my sister-in-law’s brother (there is no name for that relationship. guy-I-know?)
* Angie
* the white house
* mahmoud ahmadinejad

I kinda gave up a little at the end there.

The web nerds are all afloat on the whitehouse.gov redesign, especially the blog.

Kottke noted that the robots.txt is much smaller (meaning nearly everything on the site is now searchable, not hidden), and that all 3rd-party content on the site is CC-licensed. Gruber at DF reports that the new site passes markup validation. The most recent wayback archive of 43’s site, by contrast, has more than 100 errors.

This is of course chockablock with cheap metaphor about the differences between 43 and the new guy — he has nothing to hide, he asks people to contribute to the public good, he understands the importance of international standards — but I’m not trying to be clever, just noting that upon looking over the site I had a feeling of “wow, somebody over there really gets it” and this led me to cogitate on the nature of trust and appeal and charisma and so on.

Even though the new guy pisses me off in some ways, even though I think the furor over his nomination and the expectations for his presidency are all out of proportion, even though I’m apprehensive about the state of the nation, it’s nice to be reassured in small ways that somebody out there knows what the hell they are doing.

Look, it’s not like I think the big O is sitting down with a bag of cheetos and firing up a text editor to hack some HTML. I have not confused web design with leadership of the free world. I’m just noticing how the subtle cues have an emotional effect on how you react to someone.

I know some people found 43 tremendously reassuring, at least at first, and were inclined to believe him about basically everything, but I didn’t; I always thought that he had bad intentions, and my greatest hope was that he would be too ineffectual to really screw things up. That turned out to be optimistic. 43 has been an evil influence on this country and the world, and this is not something I say lightly.

I think the new guy has his head screwed on right, and has surrounded himself by smart people, and on an emotional level the website thing feels like confirmation of that, even if it’s a little ridiculous when you look at it objectively. It’s all about the details, which is why there was such a quick response to zunegate.

I know we like to go on about how awesome Daphne is and I know that it is smug and self-congratulatory. It’s annoying.

But.

Daphne just ranted angrily for five minutes about how her kindergarten class is too easy and how it makes her frustrated. She said her teacher spends all the time teaching kids how to read “high-frequency words” like “I, can, see, my, and, to, go”. Right this minute Daphne is pleasure reading, a 3rd or 4th grade chapter book with no pictures, while she eats her ice cream.

What the hell are we supposed to do about this? Serious question. As one of Holly’s fellow teachers pointed out, she is going to learn no matter what happens in Kindergarten; she learns more poking around by herself that she is likely to get from her classroom experiences. But that doesn’t mean her needs are being met.

One of the classic problems affecting kids who are early readers and the like is that bad habits are learned in the early grades (kids learn that they do not have to try hard to succeed, because everything is so easy for them) and those habits come back to bite them in the ass later on. At some point they get to a grade level at which they can’t skate by, where they actually have to study, and they can’t cope.

I don’t just mean that they have learned to be lazy — that’s part of it — but that getting near-perfect results with little or no effort bakes a poisonous attitude deep into kids’ psyches. A requirement to put real effort forth to accomplish something actually feels like abject failure. This turns into a sort of underachiever syndrome that can be very hard to overcome.

I think we’re ahead of the game in that we are aware of this danger at all, and in fact we are trying to do some things about it (e.g. finding things that challenge her and then making her keep doing them) but the thought of Daphne spending 6 hours being bored and annoyed in Kindergarten still freaks me out.

I think that I’ve twiddled the right bits to make the Christmas songs I’ve posted in years past show up in the embedded MP3 player that should be showing in the bottom-left corner of this page. So, try that. Unless you’re seeing this in a feed reader, in which case this has been a waste of your time.

an old playlist