Superkids

In third grade, my teacher had an incentive program called superkids. Every time you did well on a homework assignment, or test, you were awarded a superkid certificate. Once you collected ten or so of these things, you could redeem them for a pencil or an eraser.

This program did not work on me.

My birthday occurs right at the beginning of the school year, so each year I received more than enough school supplies for my birthday to last me the entire year. So, each time I got one of these certificates, I saved it. I wondered if possibly I saved up enough, I might be able to redeem it for something amazing by the end of the year. That was a nice thought, but mostly I just didn’t know what to do with them.

The teacher’s policy for handing them out was perhaps a little too liberal, as I ended up with a lot of these certificates.

By the middle of the year, my teacher was getting rather puzzled about why she had to keep making more and more copies of these certificates. This all came to a head one morning when I was pulling out a sheet of paper for a test, and the teacher saw a massive pile of the certificates crammed into my binder. That wasn’t even with the two stacks of them that I was now leaving at home because they were breaking my binders.

“Michael!” she asked. “What are you doing?”

I had something of a frugal nature. I would use the same sheet of paper for multiple assignments until there wasn’t enough room left on the page for anything else before going to another sheet of paper. I really took that whole ‘Reduce Reuse Recycle’ mantra to heart.

At this point, I became the bank of superkids. Whenever the teacher needed to give some out to other students (she didn’t bother giving me anymore), she would come to me and I’d give her a stack of them from my cache. At the end of the year, I gathered up the plenty I still had and gave them all back to her.

I sometimes wonder if she, assuming she’s still teaching, uses that same method. If so, does she still have any of those superkid certificates left over from that year. She certainly had plenty!

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

It was raining that day. A hard rain. Actually, more of a light sprinkle, but that didn’t have as much dramatic effect as a hard rain.

After forty minutes of driving, Alex and Amelia arrived at ‘The Farm.” Much to Alex’s disappointment, it was not the CIA headquarters, but an actual farm. The parents said they were here for apple picking. Aunt Joy and Uncle Kevin came too.

Why they came all of this way to pick apples was a curiosity to Alex. After all, they picked apples every week at the grocery store, and that was only about ten minutes from the house. Yet here they stood, on the wet grass, under trees with leaves covered in droplets.

Alex insisted on carrying the bucket, so that he could more closely inspect these apples to figure out what made them different. Then he realized, there was no counter. Looking for the apples, he finally spotted them in the trees. This was only getting stranger! Why someone would hang apples in trees? At the store they were piled on a shelf, all together. Here they were all spread out!

Dad bent down and scooped up Amelia to where she could reach an apple. It took a few tries, but she finally managed to get her hands around one and pull it free. As she did so, the branch shook, pelting both of them in rainwater. Amelia squealed happily, and demanded that she be brought to another apple for pulling. Dad complied, and they dashed around the farm, scouting various apples for Amelia to wrench free of the tree and then carry back to the bucket all by herself. She had a bit of trouble in some of the wet grass, but overall thoroughly enjoyed herself.

Alex examined the apples closely as they went into the bucket, but could not figure out what about them made them so special. Mom and Dad helped him up to pull down apples as well. Aunt Joy and Uncle Kevin helped him when the bucket started to get too heavy, as well as reach more apples.

After an hour, with two buckets overflowing with apples, everyone quite soaked, only Amelia still wanted to continue picking, so they packed up and headed for Aunt Joy and Uncle Kevin’s house. There, they took off their socks and put them in the dryer, and Alex and Amelia changed into dryer clothes. The adults discussed uses of apples, and everyone had lunch.

Alex and Amelia both enjoyed themselves thoroughly, but never could quite figure out why someone would hang apples on trees.

CASE: UNSOLVED

Is Kickstarter part of the problem?

I recently listened to an interview with one of the head’s of Pimco. Pimco is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, with over two trillion dollars that it manages, and is the world’s largest bond investment manager. They know a thing or two about global trends and markets

One of the questions asked was what caused the financial crisis. The answer given, which is admittedly controversial, is that consumers took on too much debt. This is something that’s been said before, but consumers are supposed to take on debt, that’s part of how the economy grows. The clarification is that the debt they took on was predominantly consumption based, not investment based. People were spending money on nice things, fun experiences, trying to improve their overall happiness, but not investing in methods of improving productivity, or increasing domestic output.

This makes sense to me. One takes on debt with the presumption that it will generate a return greater than the cost of the debt with interest. A college education will generate a higher salary, a car will permit greater choice of living options and careers, etc.

If true, this is both compelling and frightening. Just because people have less money to spend does not mean that their appetite for new things and experience has gone away. If anything, they desire more because they can only afford less.

When the financial crisis really came to bear near the end of 2008, a lot of banks shut down their loan programs to small businesses, much to dismay of many economists. Without loans, these businesses cannot expand or grow their businesses. But something else did show up: Kickstarter.

Kickstarter launched in late April 2009, and it allowed people to ask for money from the public at large to produce things for the purposes of consumption: games, videos, movies, albums, etc. Looking at kickstarter, everyone and their grandmother has an idea for a 3D printer that they want to sell.

Pros: This effectively democratizes the creative process. You don’t have to know somebody in the publishing business to get your new album financed. So long as you have a means of demonstrating your talent and people are excited about your project, you have a decent chance of getting the funding you need.

Cons: This does not address our need to invest in small business capital expenditures that are important for growing the economy. The public at large has been trained by advertising agencies to view opportunities on a more selfish level. A sheet metal fabrication company is not going to have success on kickstarter trying to raise funds for a new stamping machine. It’s not very sexy compared to a new videogame by the creator of Mega Man.

There’s also no accountability. Donating to kickstarter does not guarantee that you will receive anything for your money. If a company fails to produce the good for whatever reason, you’re out of luck. Part of the vetting process for getting a small business loan was demonstrating one’s ability to handle funds appropriately, or at least be accountable if the company failed in it’s mission to generate profitability for those providing the loan. That vetting process has been thrown out the window. Say what you will about rich institutions, they can afford to take risks. The public is now bearing those risks, with less information, nickel and diming away our savings on neat things we may never even receive.

I hope I’m wrong. I’ve donated to a kickstarter campaign, helped a friend setup his own, and have several projects that might be good to bring to kickstarter to help get them off the ground. But is that the right thing we should be doing with our money?

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

Alex did not understand feet.

Feet seem to be inadequate for any real purpose, and need a lot of help to do anything. As Amelia demonstrated on a daily basis, they did not do a lot to support a person trying to walk upright. They’re simply too narrow to do the job effectively.

And even once you get decent with the whole walking thing, you need to cover them up to go anywhere. Mom and Dad insisted on Alex wearing both socks AND shoes whenever they went outside. Why not just one? But then inside, he could only wear socks, not shoes. Why not shoes?

As feet go, they seem to be really useless without at least socks and/or shoes. And the combinations and situations made his head hurt.

His sister’s selection was even more confusing. Alex had one pair of shoes. The socks rotated on a daily basis, but any random pair seemed to be sufficient, and you could always count on just one pair of shoes. If a pair got too tight or worn out, they disappeared and a new pair replaced them.

But for Amelia, she had at least three different pairs she could wear at any given time. Morever, she seemed to have opinions about which pair she should wear.

Amelia could not explain it, but the pink shoes with the ribbony lace were not for day to day use. Most of the time, you choose between the red or the purple shoes, depending on which onesie you’re wearing. But also the pants, or overalls, and possibly even the socks helping to determine which option to go with made for an absurd number of combinations to keep track. Sometimes, none of the options seemed right, and Amelia wished she had still more pairs of shoes to choose from to find a pair that was right.

Dad seemed just as puzzled by this as Alex, which worried him greatly. Dad seemed to understand a lot of things, but choice in clothing was not one of them. Often Dad might pick out an outfit, only for mommy to deem it unsuitable and go and choose something else. This never bothered Dad, it was simply beyond his grasp.

Alex sat by the door, waiting to go play in the park, while Amelia peered at the shoes on the mat in front of her. After a few moments, she picked up a pair and brought them to Dad to put them on. Once Dad finished, he proceeded to put on his only pair of shoes to also go to the park. But, while he did so, Amelia wandered over to the shoes again. After several moments, she picked up a different pair and brought them to Dad for him to swap out. He sighed, acquiesced, and then resumed putting on his shoes, slightly more hurriedly when he saw Amelia wandering back over to the shoes.

All of this to cover up things that don’t even really do anything? Feet are weird.

CASE: UNSOLVED

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

Of all the strange toys and all the houses in all the town, this one had to roll into Alex’s.

Dad presented Alex with a car, but not just any toy car. This one was larger than most. It was designed to look like a real car, with lots of little accents and details. The side mirrors had a chrome sticker to provide an actual reflection. The spoiler had a sticker that said “Zoom!” The only thing that seemed out of place was the radio antenna, coming out of the trunk, sticking up way too tall, completely out of scale with the rest of the car.

But the strangeness came with Alex realized it could drive without anyone pushing it. Dad flipped a switch on the bottom, and the car seemed to come to life on it’s own. Without anyone touching it, the vehicle would zip back and forth across the living room. It seemed to take a particular interest in the cat, which quickly vacated upstairs.

Amelia found herself so astonished, she needed to lean against the Ottoman to support herself.

After several minutes of wonderment, Dad walked over and handed a curious little box to Alex. A thin wire supported by a straw stuck out the front of the box. On top were two levers, one that could only go forward and back, and one that could only go left and right.

Alex fiddled with the levers for a bit, but noticed a curious thing as he did so. The car seemed to move about in unison with the lever. Screaming with delight, Alex realized that he could control the car from a distance. No longer would he be forced to get down on his knees and push things along himself! No longer would be struggle to convince his sister to bring toys back to him that rolled out of his reach (she never listened anyway)! The power! The incredible –whoops!

Alex, lost in the wonderment of his newfound power, accidentally drove the car into Amelia. Knocked off balance, she fell backward and sat on the car with a sickening CRACK! Dad ran over and checked on Amelia, who was fine, and even thought it was pretty funny. Then he checked out the car. The drivewheel could still spin, but the pinion system for steering was snapped in several places.

Dad shook his head, smiled, and apologized to Alex. “They’re not designed for little girls to butt-stomp,” Dad explained. “Good thing we got this at the dollar store.”

Alex wasn’t sure what that meant, but he sadly relinquished the control box back to his father. He’d need to practice driving some more before he did that again. Perhaps he’d go read up on driving on his dad’s computer….

CASE: CRUNCHED

The Alex and Amelia Mysteries

It was Dad’s turn for a mystery.

Like every modern day investigator, Alex began most of his searches by going to a computer to try and find new things, and the computer he could most easily reach would be the one down in Dad’s office. He’d figured out how to turn the computer on, but didn’t know the password. Dad added the password after Alex accidentally rotated the desktop and dad had to spend several days looking at the screen sideways before figuring out how to fix it.

Alex had a rough idea of what the password was. He knew it involved keys on the keyboard, so he tried different combinations in hopes of happening on the right one.

What his Dad did not understand, however, was how Alex managed to access the contrast settings from the lock screen, changing visibility to black and white, as well as locking out the keyboard, making it impossible to change it back without restarting the machine.

This made his Dad think that the real hackers were actually a bunch of three year olds in Germany whose childcare service provided them with a computer lab. The adults thought it was adorable, watching them tap away at the keys ‘randomly’, while they are actually conversing on Usenet, figuring out zero day exploits, and creating hacking scripts in a proprietary language called drool++.

Dad finished restarting the machine, logged in, and updated the visibility settings to return color to his machine. As he did so, he noticed that the machine’s fan had started making an odd sound. Peering around the case at the air intake, dad discovered where all of his paperclips had gone. Dad sighed with a smile. Make that two mysteries for him to solve.

The Alex and Amelia Mysteries

Alex sat in the recliner that faced the dining room. Having eaten his dinner, he now watched as his little sister experienced the wonder of freshly steam broccoli.

He also marveled at the strength of her throwing arm with said broccoli.

Watching her made him think of his first big case. It was hard for him to imagine that it had been only a year ago. Mom and Dad had gone to the hospital to see about doing something regarding mom’s weight gain. She’d been packing on the pounds, especially in the stomach area, for several months, and it was looking pretty serious. She’d been having trouble getting around and looked at the stairs going up like they were eight inch monsters she needed to crush to get to bed at night.

Alex had sampled the food, as he’d heard that eating too much makes people put on a lot of weight, but it didn’t have the same effect on him or dad. He started to worry that something might be wrong with Mom.

Nanna and Grandpa came to stay with Alex for a few days, which made things even more mysterious. It wasn’t like mom and dad to stay away overnight. Alex knew there was only one things to do: mount a search and rescue operation.

Alex made his way to the kitchen, and began stockpiling food stuffs for the long search. Unfortunately, the only thing he could reach was the salt and pepper. Next he went down to pack some clothes, but he could only reach the lower drawers, which had his pajamas, and he knew he wasn’t allowed outside wearing only pajamas.

After several hours, he looked at his pile of supplies: a pepper grinder, three chips found beneath a sofa cushion, a pair of pajama bottoms, a sock, and his toy piano, and concluded this would have to do. But, as he went to find a bag to carry his supplies, Nanna and Grandpa came and put him in the car.

To his surprise, they took him to the hospital, and mom and dad were still there! Mom had lost a lot of weight. Apparently, they found a baby inside her! Alex looked at the small figure as dad was holding her. He knelt down and showed the two to each other.

“Alex,” dad said, “Meet Amelia. Your little sister, and partner in crime.”

Alex looked at his dad, a little bewildered. Crime? Dad just didn’t understand. Alex didn’t commit crimes, he solved mysteries. He looked at his new little sister and smiled. At last, a partner to help him…

A shriek of glee from Amelia snapped him back to the present. Something new had appeared on her tray. Alex dropped down to look more closely. It looked like a cheerio, but there was something else spread on top of it that smelled sweet.

But before he could finish his examination, Amelia grabbed the cheerio and popped it in her mouth. They didn’t find out what it was, but Amelia knew it was delicious!

Case: UNSOLVED

Dusk

This is a story I told Amelia as she drank her bottle of warm milk just before she went to bed.

This is the quiet time.

All day the people have been pulling strands and strings, guiding their day this way and that. They make each day their own, not controlling, but influencing the day with their pulls. Some grab on to as much as they can and pull as hard as they can. Others find single strands and give light tugs.

But at the end of the day, the smart ones let go.

And as they let go, the day begins to unravel. The strands twist and wriggle free and the tapestry of the day falls apart. And as it does, the light gives way to dark, the blue gives way to black, the sun gives way to the moon, and the sky gives way to the stars.

This is the quiet time.

The air is heavier here in the quiet time, for it is filled with dreams. Breath in deeply, inhale the dreams. Take them into you and let them course through your veins. Milk feeds the body, but dreams feed the soul.

This is the quiet time. Let go of the day, breath in the night, and sleep tight.

Education vs. infrastructure

Hypothetical: You come stumble into a developing nation just hit with a disaster. The plight of the people moves you to act. You have millions of dollars and time at your disposal. What do you do?

A particular planet money podcast, referenced once already in a previous post, has had me thinking a lot about this sort of scenario. “Education is key to bringing these people to a greater level of independence and prosperity.” I would argue that is not sufficient enough to be true.

What good is calculus to a girl who hauls water for six hours a day for her family?

The education, one might argue, would allow her to leave and move on to bigger and better things, but would she be able to leave as long as the family depends on her for getting the water?

The Planet Money episode I refer to centers around one man’s attempt to build a school for a town in Haiti devastated by the earthquake. Originally, listeners raised about $3000 for the town to build it’s own school, but that money was used up before a foundation was fully laid. A volunteer with a long career in construction and planning then tried his hand. Ultimately, the school was built, but it took longer, cost more, and was tremendously scaled back from the original, but still modest beginnings.

People developed the use of roads and trade long before literacy became commonplace. Is it foolish to prioritize education over infrastructure? One of the main reasons the school took so long and had to have it’s scope of work reduced is that there was not sufficient industry to supply them with raw materials, nor roads to transport those materials to them.

There is the obvious trap that this is a guy living in a developed nation discussing solutions for developing nations, generalizing over a complex set of situations unique to each country. But, even industrial revolutions tend to happen before education becomes a priority.

There is also a need for balance, you can’t  focus solely on education or infrastructure, which is really what I worry is going on now. I also don’t think this contradicts my previous views on mission trips (though I had to stop and work on that for a bit). The best kind of trip involves education of the people going, while they help rebuild.

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

Alex knew this would be a tricky case. Every time he and Amelia tried to get close to it, one of the parents would step in and impede their investigation.

The item in question was a drink that mommy and daddy would both have on occasion. It looked a lot like his grape juice, but they always drank it in these clear glasses that started wide on the bottom, got super skinny in the middle, and widened out again at the top where the juice was.

Amelia tried to use her charms to get a sampling. By pointing and asking, she’d managed to sample different kinds of cheese, chicken nuggets, macaroni, bread with cream cheese, and on and on. But not in this case. Their refusal to let either kid try it only piqued their curiosity.

So, with some clever cunning, Alex and Amelia coordinated Operation Juicegrab. They had to wait for one of  the parents to be out of the picture, so both could focus on just a single one. At last, after waiting for brutally long three days, one evening daddy went downstairs to work on his computer, leaving mommy alone sipping from the funny glass on the couch. Alex and Amelia put their plan into action.

Alex cautiously made his way to the nursery, just beyond the living room, trying to act casual. Once there, Amelia took her place near the couch. The plan was for Alex to make a noise, mommy would put the glass down to check on him, leaving it free for Amelia to grab and crawl away with it.

At the signal, Alex cried out. Sure enough, mommy got up to check on him, but placed the glass on the counter, not the end table. Amelia scooted over as quickly as she could, pulled herself up, and reached out as far as she could, but the glass was too far away. She called to Alex to come help her.

Alex raced out of the room, saw the situation, and made a break for the glass. But, mommy emerged from the nursery with a puzzled look on her face. She saw where Alex was headed and took off in hot pursuit.

Alex leaned into the sprint, making every moment count. He was 8 feet from the glass! 4 feet! 1 foot!

But mommy caught him as his fingers brushes the clear, smooth texture. The glass tipped, and the juice sloshed around inside, but then settled as mommy reached out to steady it.

Both were heartbroken at the failure of the plan. Mommy looked at them both, still more puzzled. Then, daddy came upstairs to help put them to bed.

CASE: UNSOLVED

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

“Stairs! The Final Frontier! These are the adventures of Amelia Rose. Her one year old mission, to explore where she can’t get to. To seek out new toys and new things to chew on. To bravely go everywhere she’s seen her brother go before!”

Occasionally, Alex and Amelia’s Daddy would say this, or things like it when carrying Amelia around. Now that she could crawl, he didn’t carry her as much, so she didn’t hear it as often, but she still needed help with the stairs. But she did not understand why he said these things.

Alex had similar stories from when he was smaller. There were times that Daddy would be changing a dirty diaper and say, “In the words of JFK son, ‘Ask not what your diaper can do for you. Ask what you can do, in your diaper!’”

Daddy always had satisfied look when he said these things, believing them to be very clever, but Alex and Amelia simply found them cryptic. After comparing notes for several months, they arrived at the only logical conclusion: Dad is weird.

CASE: SOLVED

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

For a long time now, Alex was the primary investigator, with Amelia providing assistance, mostly in the form of determining what was and was not edible. But now, she could truly say they were partners.

Amelia could crawl.

No longer bound to the limitations of dad showing up to move her in for a closer look, Amelia could finally approach mysteries. Literally.

Her big break came with the appearance of the bag left on the floor. She’d seen her mother with it many times, usually when they were out, and from that bag came the most marvelous things.

Alex was not around, so she had to take this one on solo. Steeling her resolve, Amelia crawled over to the bag and began to examine its contents.

The findings were amazing. There was a treasure of wonders to behold. She pulled out a heavy black object that would occasionally ring, chirp, buzz, and glow. She pulled out an even heavier, smaller bag that was rolled up with lots of colorful plastic cards and some green paper with funny pictures on it. As she unrolled it, a little side pocket came open and small metal discs rolled out, making a wonderful sound as they hit the ground and rolled away in every direction. She pulled out a tissue. Then another. Then another. Peering in, Amelia found a little pouch full of tissues. Excitedly, she pulled them all out. She found a little plastic cylinder she’d seen mommy apply to her lips on occasion. She found bags of snacks that mommy would give her, but she couldn’t get them open. She could tell this was all only the top layer…

But then, disaster! Dad showed up, made a face, and pulled Amelia away right in the middle of her investigation. He picked up all of the things Amelia had found and returned them to the bag, except for the tissues, which he stacked up and placed on the counter, and hung the bag on the wall out of reach.

Amelia was crestfallen. Her first solo investigation, and dad ruined it! But then, dad picked her up carried her over to her favorite stuffed puppy dog toy. Within moments, the hurt went away and Amelia found herself laughing again.

CASE: UNSOLVED

What is the cost of being right?

We’ve all been there. The argument with the person who refuses to be convinced. Even with all of the evidence, data, logic, emotion that you throw at them, they stand their ground and remain true to their belief. It’s frustrating, because you know you’re right.

The problem is that whether you’re actually right or not is not what matters anymore. What matters is that you know it, and it is important for the other person to acknowledge it. Or, at least know that you were right.

I’ve been reading case studies about companies that fall apart because the leadership team got into an argument like this. The same thing has destroyed personal relationships as well.

There is a whole body of evidence surrounding what is known as the backfire effect. The premise is that, contrary to what logic dictates, instead of changing one’s personal opinion when presented with facts that contradict that opinion, we tend to believe more strongly in our opinion, and instead devalue the facts that run against us. By extension, we devalue the source of the facts, the methods by which they were gathered, etc, etc, etc.

So now you’ve got someone who needs the other side to understand how wrong they are, the other side refusing to concede, and actually becoming more and more certain that they are actually right. They will respond with arguments of their own, resulting in a backfire effect on the first person.

Two people who both now have to prove themselves right, and the other person wrong, both only becoming more and more convinced by how right they are.

Rock, meet hard place.

This isn’t something everyone does all the time, but I do think it is something any of us can fall victim to if we aren’t careful. I was tempted to use the word petty several times when writing this, but that suggests immaturity in a situation where their brain is actually taking them down a road without them realizing it. It’s okay to believe that you’re right, but be careful where that takes you.

Selling a mission

I’m currently in the market for a mission trip. Do you have any suggestions? Our youth have gone to South Dakota to help the Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation. They’ve helped renovate damaged homes in Katrina.

I heard on the radio recently that the number of volunteers in Oklahoma after the tornados hit are so plentiful that it’s getting hard for construction companies to get contracts.

When I was a teenager, I took several trips to Juarez, Mexico to build homes for the homeless there. It was one of those experiences that defines a person. Nothing makes you appreciate what you have like experiencing life without it. I strongly believe it’s the kind of thing everyone needs to do at least once. I used to argue it was because if you have the opportunity to do good, you have to seize it. Now, I’m not so sure. I think it may be much more self serving.

After the earthquake in Haiti, lots of groups went down to help rebuild. I know the exact sort of experience. A group comes in for a week, builds up a basic house, or perhaps a larger structure like a three room school or meeting house, working crazy hours and goes home feeling completely exhausted, but riding a high of having done tremendous good.

The truth is more complicated.

You can argue that giving a free home or school certainly doesn’t hurt the situation, but it begs the question: what does this group really need? Construction projects are popular because it’s hard work and you have something to show for your actions at the end of the week. In New Orleans, because a renovation takes more than one week, they stage the projects so that at least one home is getting finished each week, and cart the current teams to see a finished product, to visualize what the home they are working on will eventually be. It is important for people to feel like what they are doing is making a difference.

Every single one of these trips that I participate in, I toy with the idea of giving up what I have and making this particular mission my cause. I’ve got the skills and the will to throw myself at a cause until positive change occurs. But I don’t do it, and deep down I know that even if I offered, I would get turned away by the organizers. That’s not what they want, nor should it be.

The Susan G Komen foundation is arguably one of the most successful non-profits in recent history in terms of getting awareness of their brand and their cause into the public eye. Others have been around for longer, but it’s hard to turn around and not spot a pink ribbon somewhere, or see a commercial about one of their three day walks. For a long time I was puzzled by the walks. The Walk for Hunger, the Relay for Life, all have people walking for a cause. But walking doesn’t actually stride toward finding a cure for cancer. You can walk the entirety of your life, around the planet, and not a single step will advance the scientific pursuits behind the machinations of cancer. What they really need is your money.

But they can’t just ask for your money. That doesn’t work. What works is organizing the massive walks where volunteers ask their friends for money. It’s inefficient, because lots of the money donated ends up going into the cost of organizing the walk itself. T-shirts, drinks, zoning off an area with police protection for three straight days. But, because people finish the walk feeling exhausted and having a t shirt for having walked so far and so hard.

This is not a knock against the methods employed by these non-profits. They are simply employing methods that are effective. The knock is against our need to be sold an artificial involvement to better engage us, and make us open our wallets wider. They sell an opportunity for someone to exert themselves really hard, and feel good doing it because, their efforts are furthering a cause that, for at least that day, or three days, or week, is really important to them. A lot of the money goes to the cause you are supporting, but not as much as it could because you need to get something back for your efforts. You need a memory, a t-shirt, maybe a photo with a celebrity.

Admittedly, the alternate approach has its own pitfalls. There are plenty of examples of an individual or community receiving a cash windfall in response to a particular disaster, and that money is poorly managed and ultimately wasted. Planet Money had interesting coverage of the efforts to build a school for a small town that had lost theirs in the Haitian Earthquake. Both approaches were tried, and in the end it is questionable if either one really made a positive difference for the community.

I am still an advocate of mission trips. I think they’re very important learning experiences. Ignorance breeds over-simplification at its least and apathy at its worst. There’s no such thing as a big problem that’s simple. I believe in working hard to find your own limits can help you grow as an individual as well as a team. I believe it will change your decision making process, as well as improve your problem solving skills by making learn to do more with less.

I still believe in building something, but I want to find trips that have as much education as they do hard labor. That’s the only way we can fix the real problems.

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

The case of the disappearing bed.

For a hardboiled, seen it all detective, Alex sure did see lots of things he’d not seen before. One would think that, by the age of 4, there would not be that much left, but this old world still had a few surprises in store for the old boy. He could understand his sister, merely 9 months old, was still a new babe, but this flummoxed them both.

Alex’s bed had disappeared.

It was there in the morning when he woke up. He’s pretty sure it was there when he left for school. But, upon his return that afternoon, it was simply gone.

In its place was a new structure, one taller than Alex. He could easily walk underneath it Amelia could not. Not that she was taller than Alex. She simply could not walk. Amelia pondered the structure as well, then tried to fit it inside mouth. It did not fit.

As Alex examined the structure, he discovered  a ladder of sorts, and proceeded to climb up. Amelia watched with both envy and  concern, and made this known with a loud squawking sound. But Alex was an investigator, and this needed to be investigated.

The top of the ladder revealed a site not altogether different from Alex’s old bed! His pillow was there, his blanket was there, but everything else was much bigger. Above all of this was a blue vinyl canopy that felt good to run his hands along.

Amelia squawked for an update, but Alex could not hear her over the sound of the fabric rustling. She proceeded to eat her hand.

After a while, Dad come into the room, or perhaps he’d been there the entire time, it  was hard to tell with this mystery going on, and announced that it was time to go to sleep. He covered Alex in the blanket and left him up in the structure and turned out the light.

Alex began to get worried. Dad had left him in this strange structure…. but… so soft.

Alex awoke the next morning feeling quite refreshed, but still not sure what happened to his bed. Still, this new thing might work.

Case: UNSOLVED

Customize blogger’s layout with labels

Here is a fun little thing I figured out recently. I’ve long been a fan of using labels in blogger to organize posts and make them easier to find. But, you can use the labels to customize the appearance of the blog depending on which one you’ve chosen. It requires a bit of javascript, but it’s not especially difficult. For an example, look to uccburlington.blogspot.com. Notice how the leader text reads differently depending on which label you choose.

The trick with the javascript is to look at the url header for the blog. If it sees a particular label, apply a particular style or block of text.

To add it to blogger, log in and customize the layout:

 

Add a gadget. Specifically an html/javascript gadget.

Now copy in this code:

<script>
    if(window.location.href.indexOf("Announcements") > -1) {
    document.write("<h1>Announcements</h1>");
    }
</script>

The if statement checks the url for the word corresponding to your label (note: It is case sensitive, so Announcement and announcement are different). If it find its, it executes the code below. In this case, it writes the line “Announcements” in an h1 header format. If you are feeling adventurous you can delve into the realm of javascript to dictate styles, colors, and other things as well, but I’ll leave that alone for now.

Lessons in Parenting

This is a short one, but a couple of quick observations. Alex went to two birthday parties last Saturday, during which I learned several things:

1. Sandboxes can make quite a mess.

2. A moonbounce house is worth its weight in gold.

3. It is surprisingly difficult to get chocolate frosting off of a helium balloon with only a dry napkin.

4. Little girls are gifted at losing their hat when you aren’t looking.

5. Pushing a stroller makes you more approachable. People are more likely to jump out of their car to ask for directions.

6. Seriously, moonbounce houses are amazing!

Lessons in parenting

Which do you think is harder? Feeding a 7 month old, or docking to the international space station?

You can already guess where I’m going with this, but lets lay out some of the difficulties for each, shall we?

When docking to the ISS, the space shuttle moves to within 50 meters of the station, stops, waits for confirmation, then approaches at a speed of .05 m/s until it gets to within 9 meters of the station, stops again, waits for confirmation, and carefully lines up with a black docking target 30 cm above the docking port. Pilot and copilot have to control 6 degrees of freedom to ensure that the shuttle is aligned perfectly so that the two systems slip and hook together for a proper seal.

An exercise that Nasa recommends for young children to learn and appreciate the complexities of the motion is to tie a string between two kids. In the middle of the string, hang a small weight. Next, place a cup on the floor and instruct the kids to insert the small weight into the cup without using their hands. For added difficulty, blindfold the kids and have them do it listening to instructions from someone else.

In other words, it’s a pretty tricky exercise, and one that you really don’t want to mess up. But, now let’s consider some of the things that make it less difficult.

A couple of things that you have going for you are the masses oaf the shuttle and space station. They’re both really big and have an enormous amount of momentum. The forces the pilot is applying with the navigation thrusters is miniscule in comparison, so you aren’t moving in large steps. The docking area is clear of other modules, to minimize the risk of a collision. There is no gravity, so you aren’t at risk of your cargo spilling if you need to roll over to get a good seal. And finally, you only have to dock once.

Compare this to feeding a seven month old. You still have to control six degrees of freedom, but percentage-wise you are moving a much greater distance, and a lot faster. The dock is prone to sudden, unexpected movements when it gets distracted, occasionally turning away just as the spoon is entering. There are also two appendages that often flail about in the approach path, risking collision with every approach. You do have to deal with gravity, limiting your approach options lest you spill your cargo all over the station, yourself, or the floor. Neither you or the station are very heavy, so you really have to police how much energy you expend. And finally, you have to repeat this procedure many, many times.

It may not come with bragging rights, but there’s not a single mealtime I don’t walk away from feeling like I couldn’t handle being an astronaut.

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

The case of the mystery flap

Alex is nearly four years old. He’s no fool. He’s seen it all. But this? This is different.

In the door to the basement, there is a small plastic flap. Whenever Alex is trying to make friends with one of the cats, they would disappear downstairs. Finally, he figured they were disappearing through the flap in the door.

He’d heard his parents mention a ‘cat door’ before, but this did not look like any door. There was no handle, there was no light switch next to it, and it hinged on the top instead of the side.

Alex went to consult with his associate and little sister Amelia, but Amelia was busy with a mystery of her own. Namely, why she could not fit the entire plastic toy phone inside her mouth. Alex tried a few helpful suggestions, like taking the toy away entirely, but none seemed to help. On his own, Alex decided that the only way to understand the nature of the flap was to figure out what would fit through it.

Two hours later, having exhausted his supply of toys, towels, tissue boxes, remote controls, pieces of computer hardware, clothes and drinking cups, Alex found himself only certain that large blankets would definitely not fit through the flap. He retreated to the living room to think.

A short while later, daddy reported to mommy that the door to the basement could not be opened. Apparently, it had been barricaded.

Alex suspected the flap had something to do with this, but wasn’t sure. As soon as daddy retrieved all of his toys though, he’d try again!

Case: UNSOLVED.

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

The case of the strange cup

Alex and Amelia were playing in the backyard, enjoying the first warm day of spring after a long, cold winter. Amelia, only 8 months old, was too young to even remember when days were warm. She was also too young to walk, so had to be carried everywhere by her daddy. She was fine with this.

Alex, on the other hand, relished the opportunity to run around and play on his swing set. It was a simple affair with three swings, rings, and a slide. He was too short for the rings, but would play with each swing in turn before finishing his playtime with a few zips down the slide.

Today, however, was different. Alex noticed after getting off the first swing that there was a cup sitting on the second swing. It looked just like the cup he had been eating goldfish out of earlier, but he did not remember placing the cup there. Immediately, Alex moved in to investigate. Amelia, who had all this time been watching her brother, spurred on her daddy to come over and join in the investigation.

Together, the two of them peered at the cup. It did look like the cup Alex used to eat his goldfish crackers. In fact, it had goldfish crackers in it, but neither one could figure out how it ended up on the swing.

Suddenly, daddy wrinkled his nose and announced that Alex needed a diaper change. He gather the two of them up and began to herd them back to the house. Alex looked back to the swing, but saw that the cup had disappeared.

Later, after the diaper change, Alex’s daddy gave him his cup of goldfish. Alex wondered if the two cups had anything to do with each other, but could not be certain.

Case: UNSOLVED!

Perception of value

I have direct deposit. It’s great. Twice a month my salary gets deposited into my account automatically. I don’t have to to go the bank, I don’t have to wait for the funds to clear. It just works.

A lot of my bills are taken care of in the same way. The mortgage gets paid automatically. The credit cards are nearly automatic. I keep that manual in case there are ever charges that I need to dispute, same with the phone bill. But, in the end, finances are controlled by logging in to an online service and shifting funds from one entity to another.

I sometimes wonder if this is a bad thing.

Money has become an abstraction in my life. I do not carry cash anymore. Too often, when I did carry it, I’d end up giving it away to people begging for change in the subways or on the streets in Boston. I’m not opposed to helping people in need, but think that supporting institutions designed to get people off the street is a much better use of my funds rather than giving someone $5 because they tell me they need money for a bus ticket to get home. What little reading I’ve done into the subject gives me little encouragement that the $5 is actually going to a bus ticket .

So, life is easier with a credit or debit card, handling the finances in computerized transactions that are automatically recorded, removing humans and human errors largely from the equation, streamlining the system of payment to give me what I want exactly when I want it, without having to worry about the availability of funds.

It’s easy to see why this appeals to so many people. The simplicity and speed of gratification is a sign of modernity. Companies like it too. One would think it heretical that both sides like the exact same thing. After all, aren’t they both competing to hang on to the money? Except we don’t. Or, at least I don’t.

What is a dollar worth? For value propositions, we are often presented the worth of something in dollars, but without a baseline perception of the metric, how can we have any meaningful comparisons?

Example 1: An unlocked (purchased off contract, without a subsidy) smart phone for $200 is perceived to be a good deal, but why? The reason is that, compared to other unlocked cell phones, $200 falls on the low end of the spectrum. Higher end Android and iPhones unlocked easily broach $600. But what is the value of $200? For that, you could buy 200 loaves of bread, or 100 half-gallons of milk. Or split the difference and eat like a medieval peasant for a third of a year (and probably die by the end, that’s not the healthiest diet).

The point is, why has $200 for a smartphone been deemed an acceptable value? One could argue that the  market demand determines the price. Higher prices reduce adoption, lower prices eliminate profitability margin, and you’re sort of right. We don’t usually know how much things cost to make, in every sense.

Example 2: Health insurance. The Affordable Care Act, if nothing else, is forcing people to face the quagmire of health insurance. Lots of articles and news reports have shed light on the completely bizarre value propostion presented by health insurance. Money loses are sense of value when it comes to health insurance. Doctors and hospitals bill amounts mandated by the hospitals, get reimbursed a certain amount, patients get charged another amount, and then there’s other amounts that just sort of vanish. It’s called “funny money” It’s charged, but never collected, and never expected.

Say you go to the doctor because you don’t feel good. She takes your temperature, concludes you have a cold that needs to run its course, and send you home with some aspirin. It was worth going because now you know what you have and you aren’t worried you’re about to die of some horrible, obscure disease. (Hypochondriacs unite! But don’t hold hands.) Let’s say the doctor’s time is worth $100, plus the cost of the aspirin at $3. Rather than pay the doctor directly, you pay a co-pay of 7.5 half-gallons of milk. The doctor then bills the insurance company for 300 loaves of bread. The insurance company pays out a quarter of an unlocked iphone ($150 for those keeping score) to the doctor and take the copay, along with the monthly premiums that the person and their employer pays them. But the doctor billed for half an unlocked iphone. What happened to the other 150 loaves of bread? The doctor bills that much because she is contractually obligated to charge a certain amount to the insurance company for certain kinds of service, but the value in it is never clear.

Example 3: Dinner out at a nice restaurant plus a show plus a babysitter easily runs north of $200. Plane tickets for the family to travel to Texas for a week: $800. A brand new videogame $60. According to steam, the most time I’ve ever spent on a single videogame is about 200 hours (that was before I had kids), but people online have bragged about spending over 2000 hours on some Call of Duty games. Not a a statistic I would brag about, but to each his own. For one of those people, a video game breaks down to $.03/hr. A dinner breaks down to $67/hr. A week in Texas breaks down to $4.76/hr (not including food, lodging, etc.) Am I spending too much on dinner, or not enough on the videogame?

Market forces are supposed to determine the value people have for a good or service, but has the abstraction of money clouded our perception of value, rendering a market that is free to chose a price that it wants, and then simply has to convince us that we want it at the price it has set? Are we numb to the market?

Either way, I think I need to find a babysitter I can pay in loaves of bread.

Download an entire blog from blogger.com

*Updated table with some improvements*

I have been reading a site called Queryshark as part of the process to refine a query letter for courting literary agents. Most of the time that I have to read is on the bus, and while I do now have internet access, the connection is spotty along the route, and I am somewhat bandwidth constrained. As such, I opted to download the site to read it offline.

This is not as easy as I thought it would be.

Originally I tried a program called backstreet browser, but try as I might, I never got the settings to work so that it would download the entire archive. Out of 200+ entries, it only ever grabbed about 15 or so.

And I thought to myself, “there’s a better way, I just know it.”

So, here is a handy dandy guide if you ever wish to transform a blogger site into something that easy to read for offline viewing. I wasn’t going to post this, as it required some commercial software, but Microsoft just made Expression Web 4 free for all. If you want a free web page editor, you aren’t going to do better.

Disclaimer: These instructions assume that there is an RSS feed setup for the site, and you’re using windows.

1. Download and use blogger backup. The settings are fairly simple. One thing I had trouble with is downloading with comments to a single file. If you want the comments, I recommend you have one file per post. This creates a file for every single comment, but we can combine them later. Choose a date where you want to start, or get everything, and click the go button.

2. Go do something else for a while.

3. Once done, you’ll have a folder filled with xml files. The backup utility is designed for pulling all of one’s data from blogger for migrating it to a different blogging platform. As such, the files are not especially readable. There’s also a lot of them, but consolidating them is surprisingly easy.

4. Launch the command prompt and navigate to the folder where the files are kept. Now type in the following command:

copy *.xml consolidated.txt

This will convert all of the files in chronological order of oldest to newest into a single file. Although, the comments will be reversed for a given post, so that the most recent comment for a given post will be at the top.

5. Download and install Notepad++.

6. Open the text file. At the top of the file, add

<html>

<body>

At the bottom of the file, add

</body>

</html>

File –> Save As, under options choose “hypertext markup language”

Save as consolidated.html

7. Here’s where things get a bit hairy. Under Search –> Replace (CTRL+H)

Find	Replace
<id>	<!--<id>
</id>	</id>-->
<email>	<!--<email>
</email>	</email>-->
<updated>	<!--<updated>
</updated>	</updated>-->
<uri>	<!--<uri>
</uri>	</uri>-->
<published>	<!--<published>
</published>	</published>-->
<title type="text">	&lt;h2&gt;
</title>	&lt;/h2&gt;

This is commenting out a bunch of xml metadata that isn’t relevant to reading the posts and comments. These were determined by trial and error, so there may be more or less depending on the nature of the blog and when this is performed.

Save and close the file.

8. Open a web browser, preferably IE or firefox (I had trouble getting this all to work in Chrome), and open the file consolidated.html. If you aren’t sure how to open a local file, hit CTRL+O (the letter, not the number).

9. Go do something else. This can actually take a bit depending on the size of the file. The browser can interpret the XML and translates it into HTML code. It’s not going to look right, but that’s okay for now.

10. Once it’s done loading the site, Choose File –> Save As. Under options, choose a text file .txt. Called it consolidated2.txt

11. Open consolidated2.txt in notepad++.

Redo the html code listed above:

At the top of the file, add

<html>

<body>

At the bottom of the file, add

</body>

</html>

File –> Save As, under options choose “hypertext markup language”

Save as consolidated2.html and close.

12. Now go to the browser and open consolidated2.html.

You should now have something that is mostly readable, or at least you can tease the content out of the remaining cruft.

13. Here is where Expression Web comes in. Open the file consolidated2.html.

14. Split consolidated2.html into smaller pages with fewer entries. It was worth consolidating to do the bulk of the work all at once, but just 200 entries with comments is enough code to bring just about any browser to its knees. After a while, it gives up trying to parse the error prone html and the stuff at the bottom just looks weird. 25 entries seems to strike a good balance of readability and browser speed.

15. The nice thing about using a web editor like Expression is that you can have the page and the underlying code open side by side. It will also call out html code that was opened but never closed. In my experience, a lot of things that get italicized with the <i> command never get a closing </i> command. You can find those quickly and easily using this tool.

16. The one thing I never figured out is how to detect comments vs. actual posts, so they are treated equally. When cleaning up the document for easier reading, I opted to give actual posts Header 2 <h2> and posts Header 3 <h3>

17. That’s about it, but some handy dandy tricks for using the tool:

CTRL + (down arrow) jumps to the next header. If you have a lot of text and don’t want to scroll while editing, that gets you there a lot quicker.

If you highlight something and hit CTRL+SHIFT+S, you can change the header immediately.

You’ll get random characters at the end of some comment titles that happen to truncate at an apostrophe. I have no idea why.

Starting at the bottom of a page, near the top of the window you can see all of the open html codes that need to be closed. You can click on them to jump straight to that code wherever it is in the page. You can right click and choose remove directly. NEVER click on it and hit the delete key! The act of clicking on the code highlights everything on page between where you are and where that piece of code is, and hitting delete gets rid of all of that content.

CTRL+Z is your friend

Frustration with the publishing process

It’s not easy to get a book published if you want to go the traditional route.

1. First you have to write a book.
2. Then you have to throw it away and write a different, better book.
3. Then you have to get that book ripped apart, critiqued, and properly edited.
4. Then you have to find a literary agent.
5. Then you have to get it published.

I’m currently on step 4, and have been working on a good query letter for some time, ready heavily through a site called QueryShark. It’s run by a literary agent who has gotten fed up with how bad query letters can be, especially compared to how good the books can be.

Writing, I think for a lot of people, starts out as something for the ego. It feels good to write. I suspect this because the process of publishing is designed largely to separate the good books from those that are written purely for the sake of the author. Each of the above steps, aside from the first one, cause a lot of anguish and frustration. Who wants to throw away their first book, after all the time they put into it? Who wants to listen to a bunch of people who just don’t get your story? Why can’t the agent and publishing company just read the book, and know that it is as good as you believe it to be?

But, you suck it up, you throw away that book, you remove some of your proudest writing because it takes away from the story for the reader, you do your homework, you deal with rejection, and acknowledge that there is a very real probability that no publisher will greenlight your book.

And then, one day, while walking through the DVD section at Target, you’ll spot this.

Assuming that getting a movie made and into distribution is at least as hard as getting a book published, you’ll think to yourself, “I’ve gotta be doing something wrong.”

For those who can’t be bothered to click the link. The movie is about a bunch of people trapped in a flooded grocery store with a great white shark. No, I’m not making that up.

Parenting: the lessons you don’t expect

One of the things that I was not prepared for with Alex, that has since been reinforced with Amelia, is that a small child produces as much, if not more laundry than a full grown adult. Typically Julie handles one or two loads during the week when she has a free moment, and we tackle it together on the weekends. I originally expected our son’s laundry to be once every few weeks, because his clothes are so much smaller.

I did not account for the messes and redresses .

Sure, it’s smaller, but there are a lot more of them. Like army ants.

Kids go through a lot of clothes. They make messes when they eat, they make messes when they go outside, they make messes when they stay inside. They have to wear extra layers to say warm because they have much less thermal mess, and all of that has to get washed. More than once has the kids laundry exceeded the adult laundry, and folding all of those tiny socks takes quite a bit of time.

And it’s all worth it.