Asymptomatic

Berta got me a home portrait studio kit for Christmas, and now I'm being drawn into the world of "professional" photography. I don't really aspire to taking photo portraits for money, but I have frequently talked about not blowing $200 on studio photos that I then have to pay them for reprints of because WalMart won't let me make copies of their copyrighted work. I digress.

I set up the studio in the basement. There are a few lights and two nice backdrops with a frame to hold them. What I'm lacking though, is a tripod. And that's where my adventure starts.

I used to have a tripod. Actually, I still have the tripod itself, but the quick-connect plate is long gone. I have no idea how to get a replacement, since it's just some cheapie off-brand tripod. And, if I'm going to start doing this, I want to have at least some respectable equipment. It would also be nice to have something versatile for when I want to take shots outside my house. I needed to shop for a new tripod....

As you might be aware, we have two kids. We also occasionally like to eat out at restaurants. Inevitably this ends up with an order of macaroni and cheese ordered from the kids menu. Abby is starting to order some more interesting things these days, but that's really not the point of what I'm writing here. What I'm interested in are the menus themselves.

Depending on the restaurant, you get a varying quality of children's menu. Some places simply have the menu as a box tucked into a corner of the adult menu, but the interesting ones are full-color activity booklets that come with a pack of crayons. I find these activity books interesting, and themselves widely varying.

There are some bad ones. For example, Uno Chicago Grill has one of the worst kid's menus around. It has a promising two-color outside, and a lousy activity center on the inside. The activities include basic maze that's so simple you can do it blindfolded, and a "find the differences" puzzle that is a poorly reproduced monochrome photograph too difficult to make out alone yet compare the two photos....

While Abby is a typical early-riser, and those genes don't come from Berta or me, neither of the kids have yet discovered the Christmas morning ritual of waking their parents at 5am with "Can we open our presents now?" Thankfully. No, I'm about to ruin my good fortune by saying we've been strangely lucky in our ability to sleep in until 9am or so before the kids stir. Still, there's a lot to do on Christmas day, and sometimes it seems more like work than a Holiday should bring.

We'll usually get up at say, 9am. I'm sure that as the kids get older, this will change and be earlier. We need to give a reasonable amount of time for Santa to place gifts under the tree, so we'll have to enforce some limit on the time before we can go downstairs.

We'll do our present opening shortly after we wake up. Our past years of gift unwrapping has been kind of odd. I've never met kids so unenthusiastic about opening gifts. I think they need to pace themselves. Maybe a better plan would be to open a few gifts at a time throughout the day. Not that they won't be opening gifts all day, as you'll see....

It's actually been a while since the last Harry Potter film, and even longer since the 7-book series ended. While we middling Potter fans look forward to whatever The Half Blood Prince brings in July, there are a bevy of movies that are aimed to fill the space of kid-friendly fantasy.

There is, of course, the classic Chronicles of Narnia, also based on books, but dredged up from C.S.Lewis' writings in the 1950's. The two movies so far are nice to look at, and have the same characteristic qualities of the books. As an adult, the story doesn't quite hold up in a few places. There are just a few too many strange moments where I'm left asking, "Why would that be?" And it's hard to avoid the religious undertones.

My kids really liked like A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is not a fantasy in terms of magic and monsters, but is itself somewhat fantastic and fits into this grouping if only because it's a movie based on a popular children's book series. We didn't read the books, but friends have, and I'm told that the movie has condensed several books into the single film. What irritates me about this movie is that there are so many high-powered stars in it, but all of them seem to pander their roles to children. Meryl Streep is the worst of the bunch, making me cringe just thinking about it. Nonetheless, the whole movie is worth the price of admission just to see the end credits and hear the soundtrack, which are amazing....

Skippy recently wrote a post about internet celebrity, personality types, and life balance in which he makes several great points about folks that live and breathe technology and the intarweb.

I've noticed people in my local circles who, even though they're not A-list bloggers, have a mass in terms of their presence in the IT community. Recently, and renewed again as a result of Skippy's post, I've asked myself whether these folks are really worthy of such adoration or reputation. For the most part, my local friends are also content producers of significance, although I think some of them have brushed up against fame enough to think they'd enjoy it, even if they don't actively pursue it. Still, I think there is a serious problem in the way celebrity and popularity works on the internet, perhaps mirroring the real world.

For one, many of the people who produce the content, many of the people who make the web go, are not on the A-list. You wouldn't even know who they were if you heard their names. For example, if Vint Cerf let a comment on your blog telling you you're breaking the web, would you listen? If Dries Buytaert left a comment saying that your idea for content management was unique and could probably make money if fleshed out, would that matter to you?...