posted @ Tuesday, July 22, 2008 12:13 AM | Feedback (3)
I gripe about it enough that most people know that Melissa and I are not fans of camping. Unfortunately, we are a small minority with our family and friends so we end up doing our share of it. This year, we’ve managed to keep our camping commitments to a single outing to Cherry Campground near Springville, UT.
I brought a camera. As has happened in prior posts, I choose to share. This time, I’m using a photo sharing site so that you can click the images and choose how big you want to see the photos. Not many photo hosting sites would actually give me access after the fact to my originals, but Ovi turned out to have the right mix of utility and price (uh, free).
You can check out the whole channel if you’ve a mind (if you’re a member, let me know and I’ll add you as a "participant" to the channel so you can post comments, your own tags, view the original high-def images, and even upload your own photos to the channel). Below is the embedded slide show version of that channel (click on a picture to view it in full).
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Family
posted @ Monday, July 14, 2008 8:27 PM | Feedback (2)
We had a family dinner/weblos activity tonight. Since I had my new toy, I thought I’d share the results. The kids were completing their Outdoorsman Badge or something and that involved putting a pack together and putting up a tent and cooking an outdoor meal. I arrived late, so all I really have is the tent stuff.
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| Starting Out |
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| Spreading Out |
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| Leaving them to it (this is not me) |
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| Staking |
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| Threading the Poles |
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| Consulting the Expert |
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| Progress Inspection |
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| Setting the Awning |
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| Enjoying the Results |
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| Packing back Home |
posted @ Friday, July 11, 2008 6:43 PM | Feedback (0)
My mom wrote me an email recently saying that she missed reading my blog. Things have been sparse here lately, so I think I’ll crib one of those TMI memes from a friend of mine.
In five words, explain what ended your last friendship?
Not on last one yet.
How was your prom night?
It was good. I went with a girl I haven’t heard from since graduation. It was a “friends solve mutual problem” situation.
Do you have any famous relatives?
Not really. Had one fall off the Mayflower, but that’s more of an ancestor than a relative.
Have you taken out loans to pay for college?
Yes.
What did you receive last in the mail?
A bill of some kind.
What beverages have you drank today?
Water. And a swallow of milk this morning.
Do you leave nasty messages on people’s answering machines?
Never.
What’s the most painful surgical procedure you’ve had done?
I can’t remember ever having actual surgery. The stitches in my lip kinda hurt, but my memory of it is weak. When I was a baby, I had Pyloric Stenosis, but I don’t remember the surgery to correct that at all.
What is out your back door?
A deck and an awning.
Also some kids.
Do you usually go out on the weekends?
Most Saturday nights will find me playing D&D with friends.
Do you like what the ocean does to your hair?
No. I kind of hate it, actually. Fortunately, when you’re hanging out at the beach, who cares what your hair is doing?
Have you ever visited a planetarium or do you even know what one is?
How do you not know what a planetarium is? I went to Hansen Planetarium when I was a kid (when did it become Clark Planetarium? Clark, you do something last time you were up here?)
What is your favorite flavor of pudding?
Tapioca. Seriously.
Describe your keychains:
There are two rings, a lot of keys, and an LED flashlight that looks like a USB drive.
Where do you keep your change?
In Melissa’s purse.
When was the last time you got up and spoke in front of a large crowd?
Four months ago in Church.
What kind of winter coat do you have?
A big fluffy one with a lining I can remove.
What was the weather like on your graduation day?
I don’t remember. Since it was May in Phoenix, it’s safe to assume it was sunny.
Do you sleep with the door to your bedroom open or closed?
Yes.
Is there anything purple within 20 feet of you?
Yes. My daughter’s pencil case.
What is the strangest thing you’ve put in the microwave?
Uh. Cheese on a plate?
Can you speak any Japanese?
No.
Do you look good in the color yellow?
Surprisingly, no.
Do you spit or smoke?
Ew. And no.
What is your favorite color(s)?
Forest green.
Ever played an instrument?
Four years of piano lessons, a year of guitar, and a year of drums (in a band, not the cool kind). All when I was a kid. A better question would be if I’ve ever played an instrument well. That answer would be no.
Do you believe in Bigfoot, or Sasquatch?
No. I wasn’t aware that Bigfoot had founded a faith. I’ll ask him about it next time we talk.
Ever been to a palm reader?
Not formally, no.
Did they tell you the truth about your future?
Of course not.
What are you thinking about at this very moment?
People will believe any stupid thing.
Have you ever received a black eye?
No.
What is your biggest current disappointment?
My children. I kid! I kid! My biggest disappointment is more private than I’m going to share in a blog post.
What are some of your favorite drinks?
I like water. And Dr. Pepper. And milk. Not all at once.
Do you have anything that hurts on your body at this time?
Not really. My conscience a little over the children quip.
Have you ever ridden in a taxi?
Yes. Once in Las Vegas. A couple of times in both Italy and Germany.
What is the last alcoholic drink you had?
None. I’ve never actually drank alcohol. I’ve had rum candies and there was a nasty vodka-based glaze on some ice-cream I had once, but that doesn’t actually constitute drinking.
Did you do anything special last night?
We finished the first season of Angel with my oldest girls. Also, my Dark Templar made it off Tortage.
What is your very favorite food?
Good question. I’m not sure I have a favorite. Domino’s thin-crust pizza, maybe.
posted @ Friday, July 11, 2008 10:43 AM | Feedback (2)
Okay, ya’ll know that I’m a sucker for a new internet quiz, right? What I can’t understand is how I scored the same as my friend Tungsten. He’s way nicer/gooder/kinder than I am.
How evil are you?
posted @ Wednesday, June 25, 2008 7:07 PM | Feedback (4)
I always perk up when I see a list of books. A friend recently posted an interesting blog entry with a list of books with the challenge to highlight those she had read. I was all set to follow her example when the question occurred to me: “who the heck made this list?”
What followed was an interesting diversion in random weirdness. It started when I tracked down the original claim made by someone named Jill that “The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
This piqued my curiosity further, prompting all kinds of new questions. Like “What’s the Big Read?” and “What criteria for selection were used for their list?” and “How do they know that on average people have read 6 of their 100 books?”
Well, the eventual answers have proven interesting enough to make the rest of this blog post (though I do mark those I’ve read in the end).
What’s the Big Read?
The difficulty started at once because it turns out that while there really is an organization called The Big Read and it really is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, they unfortunately don’t actually have a list of 100 books. They have a list of books they recommend, but there’s only 16 of them with another 6 “coming soon” (though I can’t imagine what is holding them up since all of them are already in print—some of them for over a hundred years). That’s some 78 shy of the list of 100 books being put forth as admirable.
Undaunted, I searched some more. Eventually, I found a five-year-old initiative by the BBC that is also called “the Big Read”. Plus bonus: they have a list of 100 books. Even better, the list of books starts off roughly similar. The list was voted on by folks in the U.K. which turns out to be significant. Still, the list simply doesn’t match and the BBC seems to have abandoned the Big Read after the single go ‘round, so it is unlikely that I’m looking at a yearly variation that later (or earlier) produced the precise list in question.
What Criteria Were Used to Select the List?
Well, at this point I abandoned the Big Read as a likely red herring and went for list composition. The ordering of the list is specific and that should be something I can search against, right? After all, how many lists start off with Pride and Prejudice, right?
Well, more than you’d think.
However, this line of enquiry eventually turned up an article in the Guardian from March of last year. The article mentions a number of books and gives their ranking. Better still, the numbers and titles all match “my” list. Best of all, the Guardian tells us where they got the list right in the subtitle of the article, “World Book Day poll places enduring quality of classics ahead of recent triumphs”.
Awesome!
So the list was put together by a bunch of stuffy Brits. Unfortunately, World Book Day, while they have a spiffy website, doesn’t actually provide handy things like the results of their polls anywhere I could find (let alone anything so prosaic as how their list was gathered). The Guardian had another article that included the complete list so at least I was able to verify that they are the same. That’s something, right?
Still, I hate it when people/organizations don’t keep copies of things they’ve released to the public around. Have they no pride? No self-respect? And what about methodology? The best indication about their methodology that I could find is again from The Guardian. They include this little snippet in the original article “[the poll asked people] the most precious book they have read”. There’s no indication for how the people were selected or sampled, but I guess I’ll take what I could get.
On Average 6 out of 100?
Which leaves us completely in the dark for the claim that the average person has read 6 of these 100. Frankly, I can’t fathom where that claim comes from. It looks completely made up to me. I suspect that it comes from the common statistic that the average person reads six books in a year. (Being the suspicious sort, I looked that up, too, and it turns out to be true according to the NEA’s “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America” from 2004 (page 17 of the PDF document, page 4 of the report). I don’t know if that’s actually where this spurious-seeming number comes from, though.
My List
All that aside, I still like the challenge so here’s my rendition of the list. Books I’ve read are highlighted.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (well... most of them...)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
So there you go. 47 of 100, though I have to admit that a good many of those came as assigned reading while obtaining my sometimes-useful education. I might also mention that if I had actually done all the reading I was assigned, I could have highlighted an additional half-dozen. And hey, if you counted posh movie versions I’d chock up another one or two here and there...
posted @ Monday, May 05, 2008 4:59 PM | Feedback (2)
Well, Jannalee tagged me so I’ll respond, I guess. Um. Am I a procrastinator? Lessee, I meant to respond when I first read her post and that was very nearly a month ago. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that I qualify. What do I win?
I’m not a fan of these meme things as a general rule, so I’ll refrain from tagging others. Unless someone wants to be tagged...
posted @ Tuesday, April 29, 2008 6:17 PM | Feedback (0)
One of the joys of parenting is having the opportunity to mess with your children. I always wanted to be like Calvin’s dad (from Calvin & Hobbes
) when my children were young, for example. It’s no wonder Calvin has such a unique perspective on reality when his dad explains that the sun is really only the size of a quarter and that we know how much weight bridges can take by driving progressively heavier trucks over them until they fall down.
But that only lasts while they’re still gullible young.
Entertaining Young Persons
I’m discovering a new, related, joy as my kids enter adolescence. I might, if I were pretentious, call my new hobby "forming their taste", but I’d just as soon have the word with the bark on (as Georgette Heyer’s characters would put it) and call it what it is: indoctrination. I have the opportunity, as they begin exploring the worlds of art and entertainment, of expounding at length on those things I consider interesting or of value. The result is gratifying and evident in such things as Teleri’s latest school paper (a research paper this time, so I put it up in its own file).
I half expect to be brought up on charges of child abuse for things like celebrating Pratchett’s birthday yesterday with all the kids. Even so, I can’t express how fun it is to see Teleri devouring his latest, even if that means she becomes competition for the family copy (hey, being able to take her in a fair fight has to be useful sometimes, right?).
Family Entertainment
Our newest tradition, for which I fully expect to spend time in the hell of syrup and fire-ants, has been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the older kids. We haven’t set an age on the tradition, or anything. When we think they’re mature enough to be capable of rational discussions of sex and violence and moral agency, we watch our DVDs with them. We have a similar (sometimes concurrent) tradition with Firefly.
This is certainly a controversial tradition. I mean, both shows have sex and violence and many lifestyle choices we are officially against. The thing is, on a deeper level, I think that both shows are also deeply moral. They explore things like family, the nature of evil, and doing what you believe is right even when doing so is likely to be both hard and painful.
Which isn’t to say that we hand them the DVDs with a jaunty "Knock yourselves out." and hope for the best. We watch them together and discuss things we think are important or interesting. This probably robs some of the fun out of it for the kids, but hey, we are still parents and we have a natural right, obligation even, to be pedantic whenever fun threatens to obscure important life-lessons.
And heaven knows that Joss Whedon didn’t flinch from difficult moral choices, so our discussions are wide-ranging. It isn’t likely that any of us will face the particular choice between sending a loved one to hell and saving the world, but there are plenty of relevant topics there (starting with "love isn’t always enough" and "deus non machina"). I guess what I’m saying is that we palliate our consciences by pointing out the obvious. Hey, they’re kids. They might not connect all the right dots; my favorite of which remains "if you have sex before you are married, your boyfriend will turn into a monster."
posted @ Friday, April 18, 2008 3:31 PM | Feedback (0)
Okay, that was way too easy. If you were quick enough to catch the small warning post I put up before the change you can rest easy, uncross the fingers, and put the chicken down. It looks like we migrated seemlessly.
And in case you're wondering what happened, I'll explain a bit. My previous web host had an outage last week. They were pretty uncommunicative during the outage, referring all trouble tickets to a forum post that was a one-sentence "we're working on it" kind of post. After more than 24 hours, they finally updated that with "it should be fixed now". Which would have been good if it had been true of my account. Worse, my new trouble tickets were referred back to the same forum post that claimed everything was all right now.
You can guess how well that all sat with me. While they eventually got things working, the amount of time and complete lack of explanation left me feeling somewhat raw. In short, I went looking for a new hosting provider. It didn't take that long to find one that was about the same price range with the same features. As a bonus, it looks like some collegues are here as well.
I'm not sure if webhost4life is any better or not, but so far things seem to be working okay. Time will tell I guess. By all means, if something botches up, please let me know.
posted @ Sunday, March 16, 2008 3:49 PM | Feedback (3)
Yet another goofy quiz. This one was longer than most, but then, it had more to do.
I Am A: Neutral Good Human Wizard (6th Level)
Ability Scores:Strength-12
Dexterity-16
Constitution-12
Intelligence-16
Wisdom-15
Charisma-16
Alignment:Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.
Race:Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.
Class:Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard’s strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.
Find out
What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus
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posted @ Friday, February 01, 2008 11:35 AM | Feedback (10)
This post is the result of a school assignment Teleri had. The original assignment was to write a "letter to the editor". She modified the assignment to be a blog post. The topic, position, and composition are her own.
I really hate it when I hear someone argue that certain video games should be banned because they are EEEEVIL. Okay, they don’t use that word, but that’s what it comes down to. They might say “kids who play video games are more violent” or “video games make kids more likely to shoot someone.” Or they might say “video games encourage kids to be loners” or “gamers have no friends in real life.” They seem to think that video games only have negative effects on the people who play them.
With all the school shootings and violence going on these days, it makes sense that some people—especially parents—are concerned about how kids are behaving. Video games, especially violent video games, didn’t exist when they were kids, and neither did all this violence. So it makes sense for them to make a connection between the two. And because they think video games are the cause of the problem, it also makes sense that they want to ban them.
The thing is, I myself am a gamer girl. I’m almost fourteen years old and I have yet to shoot someone, let alone go on a shooting spree at the mall. I’m not any more violent than I was before I started playing video games. I have many friends and have no trouble making more friends. So either I am unique among all young gamers, or the assumptions people make about games are wrong. Based on the research done on video games and the people who play them, it turns out that the latter is true.
There have been studies that seem to prove that video games make people more violent. However, much of the research that says this has been proven inconclusive, or in some cases is actually flawed. The studies that are scientifically accurate and peer-reviewed tell a different story. A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study examined the effects of playing a violent video game and compared the results to a control group that did not play. They found that the players weren’t any more likely to argue with their friends and partners than the non-players, and they weren’t any more aggressive in general. This is the same result most studies are getting: there’s no causal relationship between violence and video games. MIT professor Henry Jenkins says “No research has found that video games are a primary factor or that violent video game play could turn an otherwise normal person into a killer.”
But what about all those shootings? Well, according to Jenkins, violent crime is actually lower than it used to be—even though 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls are playing video games. The reason we think there is so much violence is that we only find out about shootings because they’re covered in the news, and we hear about those relatively rare incidents a lot more than we used to. The kids who commit these crimes probably have personal or psychological issues that don’t come from playing video games; if video games didn’t exist, they might still have committed those crimes. And Jenkins also says that “researchers find that those serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population” (emphasis added). So video games aren’t to be blamed for crime. (Personally, I think gamers are just too busy to commit violence; it would cut into their game-play time.)
Another claim made by video game opponents is that children can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. In other words, a video game might teach them that it’s okay to shoot someone, so they might believe that shooting a person in real life is just a game and doesn’t really hurt them. But when you ask kids about this, they all say they know what the difference is. Game designer and play theorist Eric Zimmerman says that when people play, they enter what he calls the “magic circle,” which is how they distinguish between the game and reality. What happens while they are in the “magic circle” is always just a game, with only the smallest bit of reality to make it believable. Kids who would never hurt another person in real life have no trouble shooting bad guys in a video game, because they know it’s not real—it’s just a way of keeping score in the game.
But even people who don’t believe video games make kids more violent may still think video games have a bad influence on them. They might think that video games take up too much time and energy, or that they make kids isolated and unable to make friends or have a normal social life. If you’ve ever seen a kid staring bug-eyed at the screen while he shoots aliens, these arguments might seem valid. And it’s true that kids can spend a lot of time on the computer or the console with a favorite game. But that’s something that can be controlled by parents who are aware of their kids’ activities and work with their kids to figure out how much play time is appropriate. Just because there are games in the house, doesn’t mean that they have to play them all the time.
The other point—about gamers having a lack of social skills or being isolated—is so far from being true it’s almost funny. More than half of all gamers play their games with another real live person—often a family member. When you’re playing with another person, it’s usually as a team, and you both have to work together and strategize in order to succeed. This is the opposite of being isolated. Additionally, the hugely popular massively multiplayer online games encourage you to make friends and work with other people in order to have fun. Non-gamers often think that because you never meet these people in real life, it’s not a real friendship. But the hundreds of thousands of people who have participated in online guilds and other organizations would disagree.
What many people don’t realize as they’re focusing on these negative points is that video games can have very positive effects on players. One of these is how games encourage you to strategize and solve problems. These are skills that often come into use in real life. James Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, says that gamers are “active problem solvers who see mistakes as opportunities to learn and are encouraged to test new ideas.” Instead of thinking of mistakes as personal flaws, gamers often think of them as something to learn from. Another positive thing about video games is that they let children express feelings and impulses they wouldn’t be able to act on in real life. It’s better for them to work out anger by beating up a computer opponent than if they just went out and beat up a classmate who made them mad.
If you’re one of those people who think that video games are dangerous, I think you’re probably just worried about the safety of children. That’s a good thing to care about. But banning video games isn’t the way to keep kids safe. What I suggest is that you spend some time playing your kids’ favorite games. Get to know what games they like and why they like them. Your kids will think you are pretty cool if you do. You may find that there are some games that aren’t as awful as you thought just from the title or the box art. You’ll be much better informed about video games than if you just jump to conclusions. Who knows—maybe you’ll discover some games you like playing!