Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Kids Menu
December 22, 2008

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.

Scheduling Holiday Stress-Reduction
December 21, 2008

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.

Life After Harry Potter
December 19, 2008

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.

Best Buy Support Questionnaire Backlash
December 17, 2008

I recently signed up for Reward Zone membership at Best Buy. Ever since they opened the nearby store, I’ve been shopping there more, rather than going to Circuit City. Could this be related to Circuit City’s economic problems? I buy a lot of electronic stuff. Anyway…

I was trying to log in to my Reward Zone account, and I failed. I think the reason was that I had given my old Verizon phone number when I opened the account. I sometimes do this to keep from getting sales calls. Anyway, I couldn’t log in, and I hadn’t thought to try that number to process the log in, so I filled out their support form and explained my issue.

Imbalance
December 17, 2008

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.