Month: July 2011

Chicago Public Library, you have let me down yet again

/ Shane / 2 Comments

::sigh::

As you know, we have had our differences with the library in the past. Today certainly wasn’t that bad. It was more of an annoyance than anything.

After braving torrential downpours with my two children, we finally made it into the library only to find that the entire children’s section was closed, due to “lack of air conditioning”.

Me: “Can’t we just go in for a few minutes and pick out a few books?”
Library worker: “There’s no air conditioning in there.”
Me: ::blank stare::
Library worker: “You could tell the librarian which books you wanted and she could get them for you.” (Assumedly in her fire-proof asbestos suit, or else how could she possibly?)
Me: “…we don’t really know what books we wanted.”
Library worker: “You could look them up on the computer.”

What good is a library that doesn’t let you look at the books??

Now I certainly can understand not wanting people to sit around all day in there on the computer or something. So put a sign up, by all means. But to blockade the place because it’s a little hot?

The building was built in 1896!! Did they wait until air conditioning was invented to open the doors??

16 Goats, Sitting in a Tree

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Well, it’s sort of self-explanatory, isn’t it? At least they weren’t k.i.s.s.i.n.g. Those things will climb anything.

No word on if they use trampolines to get up into the tree.

Link via Sara.

Google+

/ Shane / 8 Comments

I finally had some time to play around with Google+, the new social network from Google.

I was inclined to dislike Google+. Google got me twice recently with their over-hype of Google Wave and Google Buzz, both of which were awful. After those two debacles, I believe I was on record saying, “That’s two strikes Google!” Well, Google will be happy to know that they’re back in my good graces with this one.

Google+ is very, very similar to my preferred social network, Facebook, but it is, in fact, better. Although I am a Twitter user, I do not like their interface. I know there are plenty of twitter fans out there, but I’m not one of them. So Google+ has them beat by a mile in my book.

Basically, Google learned the lessons of those that have come before. Sleek, clean interface (sorry MySpace), and more-tightly integrated security over who can see what (sorry Facebook), while keeping all the good features, such as image tagging and “liking” a post (or +1 in Google+ lingo). And the best part so far? No annoying game messages! (sorry Farmville) We’ll see if that changes in the future. I have a bad feeling there’s no way to stop it.

The best part about Google+ in my opinion is the integrated concept of “circles”.

Basically, all of your friends are categorized into one or more circles, such as “friends”, “family”, “acquaintances”, or anything else your heart desires, such as “college friends” or “red-headed step-children”. Then, whenever you do anything on Google+, you decide which circles you’d like to do it in. For example, are you telling the entire world what you had for breakfast, or just your family? Are you sharing that picture with your co-workers, or just your close friends? Do you want to see the whole stream/newsfeed, or do you want to skip the updates of mere acquaintances?

I have been using the lists feature on Facebook for quite some time in this manner, and I love it, but it always sort of feels like a late-game add on. It is a bit more difficult to use and manage, not nearly so tightly integrated. Whenever I tell someone about it, they’re always surprised to hear it exists. And really, I think it more closely represents the way we *want* to use a social network. There are some things we want to share with some people, and not others. We need the ability to sort through the overwhelming amount of information and read the updates we care about.

So, +1 to you Google+!

The problem, however, is that the thing that makes social networks social is, well, people to socialize with. Since most of the people I interact with are on Facebook, then I have to be on Facebook too. I can’t just up and switch over because I feel like it, abandoning my entire existing social network. And, although Google+ is better than Facebook, it is not *enough* better, that everybody is going to up and move. So, for the time being, I guess I’m stuck with two websites to check.

So, if you’re on Google+, you can find me here. And if you’re not, drop me a comment, and I’ll send you an invite.

Harry Potter and the end of an era

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Over the weekend, Sara and I had to go to a movie to maintain our average of 1 movie in the theater a year since Evie was born. Just to recap, the other 3 moves were Slumdog Millionaire, Public Enemies, and Avatar. That’s right, we go to so few movies in the theater, each one is worth a blog post. Now, 2 of those movies were really good. But if you’re only going to see 1 movie a year, you can’t afford to have just an average movie in there. So this time, we didn’t want to waste it, so we saw the last of the Harry Potter movies.

I saw a lot of people being bummed about the end of the long-running series, and calling this the “end of an era”. I don’t know, I just didn’t feel any sentimentality over it. Maybe it was because I was into the books more so than the movies, so my era already ended. Certainly I was very excited to see the movie (but then again, that might just have been the fact that Sara and I were getting away from the kids for the 4th time ever), but I didn’t feel any sense of loss or absence or whatever afterwards.

The movie was really good. It was fast paced (after all, they had to wrap up an 8 movie series in just over 2 hours, which the shortest of all the movies), it was well done, it was superbly acted (especially Alan Rickman), and it did everything it needed to do, which is apparently harder in a series finale than you might guess.

Now that all is said and done, I doubt I’ll ever go back and watch the movies again. I tried watching the first one awhile ago, and man is it silly. I didn’t notice at the time, but now that we’ve seen the darker movies, it’s hard to go back to the early, goofy ones. It’s how they had to do them, however.

In fact, I’ll go on record saying that’s the single biggest reason why the Harry Potter series was successful.

The books (and consequently the movies) started out as kids books, but they didn’t stay that way. They grew with the audience. Children who read the first book at an appropriate age were 10 years older when the final book came out. If the books would have continued to be written for children, they would have ceased to be interesting to the kids who were no longer kids.

So the question is, will something like Harry Potter ever happen again? Well sure, in the sense that there will always be some sort of high-selling-cultural-phenomenon that everybody just has to go see. So in that sense, I guess Twilight is/was the new Harry Potter? There are a couple of significant differences though, and not the least of them is the fact that Twilight focused on a much narrower audience (mostly teenage girls)(and before you yell at me, I read them all, so don’t try to tell me they’re not focused on teenage girls), and Harry Potter has something for everybody.

I would certainly think that making 8 movies with virtually the same cast would be the hardest part of it. To me, that is the most amazing part, and I’m still impressed they were able to do it. Think of everything that had to go into that. You had to have actors that were able to carry on the roles that long (consider how many were unknowns, and how many started as kids and ended as adults). You have to have no scheduling conflicts or egos demanding more money (maybe that last is the hardest one). You have to have a studio that is really committed to doing everything right, with no egos on their end who demand changes or certain directors, etc. You have nobody who decides they don’t want to be typecast, or wants to move on to something new (I guess this goes back to the ego thing, but hey! This is Hollywood! Ego plays a big part.)

So that’s it I guess. I’m looking forward to someday reading the books with Evie and Oliver. That won’t be for quite some time I think.

Oh, a final note about seeing movies in 3D…I’m over it. The 3D in the movie was interesting, maybe even neat, but at the end of the day, it added nothing. It is certainly not worth paying a couple of bucks extra to see. Movie studios won’t stop doing it until we stop paying for it people. Stop them now before there are no 2D options left! (Of course, we can always go buy 2D glasses from ThinkGeek to down-convert 3D movies into 2D movies…)

Magic Land

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Evie and her friends hatched an elaborate plan today at school. When I got home from work, Evie wanted to know if I could drive her to school tonight, after it was dark. The plan was for the girls to meet at the playground so they could go to magic land. Some of the girls were going to sneak out and drive their Barbie cars, but Evie, not having a Barbie car herself, required a ride.

Evie informed me that, when she emerged from Magic Land, she would have green eyes and a neon dress. When I asked her why she wanted to have different colored eyes, she told me that she needed green eyes so that, “if the sisters come to Florence’s house again and bring a flower, then I’ll have something to pet.” “Is she on acid?” I asked. We were thoroughly through the rabbit hole here.

We tried to convince her that the other girls would not be allowed to go to school in the middle of the night either, but she’s not buying it. She’s convinced she is going to be left out; the only kid who doesn’t get to visit Magic Land. I mostly felt like she was speaking another language.