MichaelandChrissy.com

Legend has it that Orville Redenbacher lived in the same subdivision in Valparaiso as my Aunt Linda, before he sold off the company and moved away, so the town has had a Popcorn Festival ever since.  The Festival is situated downtown, with the Courthouse at its center, and they close off a bunch of streets for the event.  There are booths with arts and crafts, an annual parade, and lots of food.  Everyone that I knew would be there every year, so it was always nice to catch up with people and talk downtown.

I actually saw Orville Redenbacher once during a Popcorn Festival.  I was about 15, and he came out from behind a building, flanked by a bunch of businessmen, on his way to give an opening speech or something.  I remember thinking how old he looked in real life, since I had only seen him on TV prior to that.  He walked right by me, but I was too stunned to say anything or even wave.  I mean, this was Orville Redenbacher, in the flesh, and being a boy from small-town Indiana, I had never seen a famous person before.

Every year, for as long as I can remember, I’ve gone to the Popcorn Festival towards the end of the summer.  So I can say from experience that it has been going downhill in recent years.  There used to be lots of arts of crafts, but now it’s mostly infomercial crap.  For example, I saw three booths for bedsheets, several for cheap sunglasses, and a couple for back massagers.  There were only about a half dozen for the crafty kitsch that we dig, but we had already seen those same vendors at the Blueberry Festival last week.

The upside was that they have a kids area a few blocks east of the Courthouse with face painting and the duck game and some other kiddie attractions.  There was a huge inflatable slide, and Aiden and I went down twice.  Getting up there was a chore though, since the ladder was very steep and Aiden had to go in front of me.  It would have been easier to toss him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.  It was a tough climb, but worth it because Aiden loved the slide down so much.

There are certain things, like plants, that die almost immediately upon being placed in our care. Chrissy has never met a houseplant that she hasn’t killed.  As it turns out, we can add fish to this list of doomed items.  Today, Aiden’s pet fish died.  I’m not sure if, at age two, he comprehends death, but he seemed pretty unhappy about his unmoving aquatic compadre.  We pulled it out of the tank, and bagged up the corpse.

Clearly, the betta was defective when we bought it.  Aiden picked it out himself, but it was white.  Chrissy wasn’t happy with the white color, saying that bettas turn white just before they die.  A red one, or a blue one, would have been better.  Aiden’s pet fish lasted about two weeks, just under the fifteen day return policy.  Petco was pretty good about letting us exchange the dead one for a new one.

We announced a “fish malfunction” to the girl at Petco, and she showed us to the “Wall o’ Bettas” to choose a replacement.  There were about twenty of them in their own little plastic containers, and they all looked healthy.  Aiden wanted to hold each container himself, so I let him peruse a bit before making a choice.  Eventually, he got distracted by a bunny and walked off with a nice red fish with a fanned tail.  Let’s wish this one luck!

In honor of Aiden’s second birthday today and in retrospect of the hornet activity on the morning of last weekend’s birthday party, I wrote a fictional short story about a little boy who inadvertently causes an international honey shortage (among other things). It’s much longer than my usual blog post, so click “Read More” below to read the whole story.

I’ve been reading the Watchmen comic books, since there’s a movie coming out soon.  I saw the trailer during “The Dark Knight” last weekend, and had no idea who any of the characters were. Apparently, I took a hit to my geek cred because I’ve never read the series, which collectively is regarded as one of the best graphic novels ever.  Time Magazine even recognized it as one of the “100 Best English-Language Novels”.  Not bad for a comic book!

I’m about three issues into the twelve, and it’s an interesting story.  Watchmen may have been the first title to delve into the human flaws that exist in people, especially costumed avengers (a common practice among today’s anti-heroes in comics).   If masked adventurers protected the public, wouldn’t it be possible that one or two would be alcoholics or sociopathic killers?  Watchmen goes into these details, across two generations of heroes, while contrasting them against the changing times of America over the decades.

I especially like the metafiction that accompanies each chapter.   The first three end with printed excerpts from the memoirs of the first “Nite Owl”, previously retired. His book, “Under the Hood“, is a tell-all of the personal lives of his crime-fighting group, the “Minutemen”, which disbanded in 1947.  He describes his childhood and upbringing, then his break into crime-fighting outside of the law.  This helps to flesh out the character beyond the confines of the plot of the comic.

“Under the Hood“, fictional in real life but non-fictional in the Watchmen universe, also outlines how the political climate of America changed over time.  It goes from loving costumed heroes in the 40’s to loathing them as vigilantes in the 50’s, how it loops back again to the point where new crime-fighters appear in the 60’s.  And then back again when declining public sentiment causes the government to outlaw them in 1977.  Oh, and America won the Vietnam war and Nixon served five terms as president.

Now that I’m caught up on the back story, I’m looking forward to seeing the Watchmen movie when it comes out in March of 2009.  I’m also looking forward to finishing the series.  I’ve always enjoyed comic books, so I’m surprised that I’ve never read this one.  Probably because it was a DC title and the characters were not included in an ongoing canon (that would make them easy for me to skip).  Similar to “300″, I’d like to see how they adapt this comic to the big screen, and by that I mean IMAX.

When WordPress released version 2.6.0, I decided to wait until the next major patch before I updated our web site.  I never trust the big releases; better to wait until the inevitable bugs and security flaws are patched up first.  The process was relatively easy: back up your database (got a plugin that does that with one click), turn off your plugins (again, one click since 2.5.0), copy over the new files via Filezilla, update database schema (one more click), then restart the plugins.  However, the upgrade was not entirely without problems.

We have been using Gallery2 to store photos on our web site for years.  WPG2, the WordPress plugin that allows us to embed Gallery2 on our site, never wants to work properly after an upgrade.  The “Gallery” link always moves when upgrading WordPress, but that is easily fixed.  The big problem is that image thumbnails won’t build properly now (it’s hit or miss).  I probably should have waited to update WPG2 from 3.0.5 to 3.0.7 until I was happy with the WordPress update.

Thankfully, that’s the only plugin that gave me trouble.  I was worried about my many WordPress extensions not working after the update, but they all started right up, one after another.  A lot of people who jumped on version 2.6.0 as soon as it came out were disappointed when their plugins didn’t work right away.  Plugin authors, not WordPress developers, are responsible for testing the plugins against the latest version of WordPress.  I guess I got lucky, for the most part.

Now that I’ve started using the new version of WordPress, I’m seeing all sorts of new features.  For example, WordPress now saves previous edits of posts, like a built-in concurrent versioning system.  You can return to older versions easily.  Images in posts are now handled differently too, allowing for captions and image boxes.  Unfortunately, my WordPress theme can’t display these properly yet.  I’m going to have to learn how to use these new features to take full advantage of the new update.

We threw Aiden a birthday party this weekend, even though he doesn’t turn “2″ until next weekend (we had it early because next weekend is Labor Day and people might be out of town).  Aiden had a sports-themed party, complete with a White Sox baseball birthday cake, a basketball hoop in the yard, and decorative pennants for all sorts of sports.  Aiden’s favorite word (next to “Uh oh!”) is “Ball”, so sports seemed the way to go this year.

The weather channel said that it was going to rain on Saturday, so we had made alternate plans to pile everyone into the house.  Luckily, there was no rain.  The sky did darken a little bit, but that was kind of nice because it cooled things down (it had been muggy and powerfully hot all day).  Timely, that was when we let Aiden open his presents in the back yard.  He got plenty of birthday gifts, but he really wanted to run off and play towards the end.  Just a few more presents to open, buddy!

Everyone had a good time, especially Aiden.  The only ones who didn’t appreciate the party were the group of hornets that took up residence on our deck.  Chrissy noticed them in the morning and her dad “relocated” them (to hell).   Thankfully, they were gone before guests started to arrive.  There were a lot of little kids over that day, and bees would have complicated things.

Netflix has a star-based ratings system that goes from one to five, one being that you hated a particular movie, and five being that you loved that movie.  That sounds pretty straightforward, but it’s very subjective.  I doubt that most people put a lot of thought into this.  They see a good movie that kept them entertained for an hour while they enjoyed their popcorn, and immediately throw five stars at it. Will they even remember the plot tomorrow?  No?  Then don’t give it five stars!  They should give it three stars, to show that they enjoyed it, but it didn’t change their life.

Here is how Netflix suggests that you rate movies:

1. Hated it
2. Didn’t like it
3. Liked it
4. Really liked it
5. Loved it

That’s all well and good, but I am more objective in my ratings system.  Granted, whether or not I liked a movie is entirely subjective to me, but I try to rate each movie on the same scale.  Few titles will get five stars from me.  To get five stars, I would want to own that movie.  Keep in mind that I have a small, very particular, DVD collection made up of movies that have moved me.  I rarely watch the same movie twice.  No time for that.  I’d have to really like a movie to see it a second time, even on DVD.

Here is how I judge Netflix movies:

1. Shouldn’t be watched by anyone, ever
2. Didn’t enjoy it
3. Enjoyed it, might remember the plot tomorrow
4. Would recommend it to friends, might watch a second time
5. Near and dear to me, would buy it for my own DVD collection

While grading students in my class at Indiana University, I asked my mentor professor if it was normal to give “A”s to everyone in class.  He told me that grades should ideally be distributed in a bell curve, with a few students getting As at the bottom of the curve, more getting Bs as you go up, the majority getting Cs at the top of the curve, then back down the curve to Ds, and just a few getting Fs at the bottom again.  The ratio of As to Fs should be relatively equal, as should the ratio of Bs to Ds.  There are benefits to this type of grading system, but there are also shortcomings.

I don’t generally grade this way in my classes (most people get As, with a few slackers getting Bs, and the one kid who never shows up gets an F).  However, I think that the bell curve distribution is useful to keep in mind while rating movies.  You can’t quote every movie word-for-word (five stars), and you won’t walk out of every movie in disgust (one star).  In fact, the majority of the movies that I’ve rated on Netflix have gotten three stars.  Unrealistic movie ratings would throw off the curve.  I wish that more people would adopt a more solid method for rating on Netflix.

Flickr is an online photo management and sharing site. I upload a lot of our family photos in the gallery on our web site, so I had never bought into the Flickr phenomenon before.  However, it turns out that I get a free Pro account because I use AT&T as my internet provider, so it was worth a look. I found that Flickr is also a social media site, allowing users to join photo groups, designate other users as buddies, and comment on interesting photos.

“Project 365” is a gimmick that PhotoJoJo introduced.  To participate, you upload a photo a day for an entire year. Aiden grew up so fast in his first year that I decided to document Gavin’s growth this way.  Aiden will be growing too, so he’s got his own 365 project. For fun, I also joined the “365 Toys” group, and I’m taking a picture of a Transformer a day (in six years, I might have photographed my whole collection if I stick with it). It’s hard to keep to this plan, since it requires taking pictures every day, uploading three of them to Flickr, then adding titles and comments to each one. Too much like work.

All of the Flickr photos are parts of larger photo shoots, but I only upload a single photo per day to Flickr.  I may upload some of the complete sets to our web site gallery, but there are many sets that never make it that far (we’ve got twelve gigabytes of photos of Gavin so far, and he’s only three weeks old).  It will be interesting to look back in a year and see all the changes that our boys have made in that time.  I’ve put a link to our Flickr page on the navigation bar (to the right), so check out our 365 Projects!

When Aiden was born, I always called him “the boy”.  It was “Where’s the boy?” or “I’ll change the boy.“  People would sometimes criticize me because I didn’t say “my son” or “our son”, but it just came out as “the boy” when I referred to him.  Think of it as a “stylized pronoun”, since it’s used to refer to him, not something that we call him directly. “Hey, boy!” sounds too much like Homer Simpson.

Enter Gavin.  It started early, with me calling Gavin “the boy” on day one (three weeks ago, for those keeping count).  I knew that this would get confusing very quickly, since we now had two boys.  One might say that I shouldn’t have started calling Aiden “the boy” to begin with, but Chrissy calls him that as well, so it’s not just me.  The obvious step would be to call Gavin some else, like “the baby”. And that sounded right.

So now I have two sons, one that we call “the boy” and one that we call “the baby”.  It’s strange that we never called Aiden that when he was an infant, but then we didn’t already have a boy that we needed to differentiate from.  I find myself slipping often, but I’m getting better about referring to Gavin as “the baby”. And Aiden knows Gavin as “the baby” as well.  If you ask him where the baby is, he’ll point him right out.

Our stylized pronouns should not be confused with nicknames.  Each of our sons has their own nickname, and it’s not “boy” or “baby”.  That would be lame.  I often call Aiden “Hot Shot” or “Shotimus Prime”, and that has stuck since he was tiny.  Lately, I’ve been calling Gavin “Tiberius” because his middle name is “James” (get it?).  We’ll see if that sticks like “Hot Shot” did for Aiden.

* There’s no such thing as a “stylized pronoun”. I made that up!

I haven’t thought about my stock in Playboy in quite a while, but I recently found out that it’s down below $5! I have about 30 shares from back when I used to work there. It was my first job in Chicago, and one of the benefits was a discount on company stock. It was the first time that I had even owned securities, so I excitedly scooped some up. I should have merged them with the rest of my stocks by now, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

With the stock valued so low, it’s not really worth doing that right now. I’m waiting for Hef to kick the bucket. That should help the stock price. Some would say that Hef dying would kill the company and nuke the stock, but I think that Christie Hefner will rally the troops with new ideas to save the day. Ideas that would not fly while Hef was alive. I was really impressed with Christie the few times that I heard her speak.  I’m betting that she’s been waiting a very long time to take the company in a more profitable direction.

For example: imagine selling the Playboy Mansion and moving all operations back to Chicago. This would be a very cost-effective move that Hef would never agree to. Or better yet: move all operations from Chicago to New York, where the marketing team is currently located. That’s where most world-renown publications are headquartered anyway. In “an historic move”, Playboy relocates to NYC after selling the Mansion, leaving only their Playboy TV branch in Los Angeles as a satellite office. Bold new move, stocks soar.

And by soar, I mean at least to $30 per share, where I will sell my holdings for $1000. These were at $30 when I bought them, back in the height of the internet bubble with playboy.com about to go public (we were all going to be rich). In the end, I and my paltry sum of profit will claim vengeance over Playboy Enterprises for being snubbed so many years ago (but I won’t get into that story right now).