I love stuff like this:

…because I’m one of those crazy dad’s that thinks when it’s a rainy day, it’s just as much fun to go outside as on a sunny day…

Go ahead… call the Dept of Child Protective Services. I don’t care.

Posted: November 11th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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We don’t expect enough from our teens. And it’s hurting us as a society, says Newt Gingrich in last week’s Business Week.

“At age 13, [Benjamin] Franklin finished school in Boston, was apprenticed to his brother, a printer and publisher, and moved immediately into adulthood.

“John Quincy Adams attended Leiden University in Holland at 13 and at 14 was employed as secretary and interpreter by the American Ambassador to Russia. At 16 he was secretary to the U.S. delegation during the negotiations with Britain that ended the Revolution.

“Daniel Boone got his first rifle at 12, was an expert hunter at 13, and at 15 made a yearlong trek through the wilderness to begin his career as America’s most famous explorer. The list goes on and on.”

That was then and this is now? Times change? Well, he makes some pretty good points and maybe it’s time to change back to a model where we expect our kids to be more productive. Not back to sweatshops, but how about letting them do things that they love and letting them make money doing it? Our laws actually prevent able-bodied and willing kids from working part-time outside of lemonade stands, baby sitting, or newspaper delivery.

We’ve created adolescence to keep kids out of sweatshops but we’re past that now. We keep inner-city kids trapped in a lousy educational system and this contributes to gangs, drug problems, and irresponsible sexual activity. Even middle-class and wealthy kids have a lot more to contribute to society, but that resource goes untapped. Haven’t we noticed a shift with adolescence being pushed into mid-twenties and beyond?

What does this have to do with the Internet though? Let me hand it back over to Newt:

“Fortunately, innovations in technology and in financial incentives to learn offer hope.

“The Information Age makes it possible for young people to learn much faster than our current failed bureaucracies and obsolete curriculums permit. New systems such as Curriki, founded by Sun Microsystems and now an independent nonprofit, allow a community of teachers and learners to collaborate via the Internet to create quality educational materials for free—giving every American access to learning 24 hours a day.”

Makes it possible, yes, but only if somebody takes advantage of the opportunities will it make a difference.

What an inspiring story of Ashley Qualls, who started with $8 from her mom to start a website at age 14, and by the time she was 17 had a million-dollar business.

Most stories about teens and the Internet revolve around wasted endless hours, aimless social networking, instant messaging addiction. But Ashley decided to do something else. With a strong work ethic, she applied herself and lifted herself and her family from living in a one-bedroom apartment and insecurity into a $250,000 house and no more worries.

What are your kids squandering their time doing? Is technology controlling your kids’ time, or are your kids using technology to control their future, because the opportunities are there, and they appear to be endless.

[Hat tip to my friend Gary for pointing out the Gingrich article in Business Week. You should read the whole thing.]

Posted: November 9th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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More reason for parents to be staying on their toes and knowing what your kids are doing online.

Mr. Zuckerberg pinned his optimism on a change in behavior among Internet users: that they are ever more willing to tell others what they are doing, who their friends are, and even what they look like as they crawl home from the fraternity party.

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.” (NYT)

If the CEO of Facebook is right, then we need to teach kids what is appropriate to put online and what the risks are.

Have you had “the talk” with your kids yet? Do they let you see what’s on their page? How does it work in your family?

Posted: November 9th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Those Loud Headphones Will Hurt your Ears!. WHAT!!? ARE YOU TALKING TO ME?!!

The report said that those who listened for five hours a week at high-volume settings exposed themselves to more noise than permitted in the noisiest factory or work place. Maximum volume on some devices can generate as much noise as an airplane taking off nearby.

The study — from a team of nine specialists on the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks — also warns that young people do not realize the damage until years later. (NYT)

Later in the eighties, I remember hearing or reading that Kerry Livgren (keyboardist/guitarist from Kansas) put out his own PSA of sorts warning of hearing loss and he spoke from personal experience:

A recent occurrence in my life has compelled me to write this letter. It concerns a subject that is relevant to everyone — our sense of hearing.

I have been a professional musician since 1965. I spent years playing in clubs, schools, and all the other types of gigs that musicians do, not counting the myriad hours spent in rehearsals. As the
guitarist-keyboardist for Kansas, I have recorded ten albums with that group, two solo albums, and three more albums with the group A.D. In addition to all that studio time, my ears logged thousands of hours of high-decibel concerts, sound checks, etc., over fourteen years of touring.

I recently completed recording my first instrumental project for Sparrow records, and I was schedules to master it in Nashville. The night before my mastering date I was rudely awakened at 3 a.m. by a loud ringing in my right year. I had experienced something like this before, but never at so alarming a level. It was still there in the morning, so I had to rely on the ears of other engineers and friends at the mastering facility.

When I got home, I went through a battery of tests with doctors and audiologists who told me what I suspected anyway: noise-induced hearing loss. Even though for the last several years I have been monitoring at very conservative levels, my ears seem to have been seriously affected, and the prognosis for this type of damage to one’s hearing is not very encouraging.

Little or nothing can be done about it. Unfortunately, our lives do not have an “Undo” command. If I had one, I would most certainly use it, for in retrospect all those wonderful decibels that were so exciting at the time were destroying the very means I had of perceiving them. Now my career, and other areas of my life, are in question, for deafness destroys a great deal more than just the enjoyment of music. All of these wonderful toys we read about in this publication [Electronic Musician] become scrap metal without a God-given ear to hear them with.

It’s not worth it, my friends. Rock and roll takes its toll. I wish I had listened to my dad in 1965 when he opened the garage door and yelled: “Can’t you turn it down and still enjoy it?”

Kerry Livgren
Georgia

Posted: November 8th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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I have lots of friends. I don’t think I could count them all. You know, the types of people that you could go out to dinner with once in a while, have a few drinks at a happy hour with, and you see them every once in a while.

Then I have my really good friends. You know, the ones that will actually be there for you for the rest of your life. The kind that will drop everything for you when you really need something. These are the ones that you have fun with all of the time. And you can say or do anything to them and they might even get mad at you for a little while, but they’re loyal to you as you would be loyal to them. I could probably count those on my fingers and toes.

You make those really good friends by investing a lot into them over time. Being roommates. Spending endless hours on a team working the late nights to get a software release out the door. Sharing New Years Eve year after year, a ski trip, or regular road trips to fun places. Being part of the group that always helps each other move from one home to the next, or throwing baby showers for each other. Encouraging your friends to take a risk and being there for them even if things go bad. Good times. Bad times.

Hal in Toronto writes in the New York Times about how he was really proud of the fact that he had 700 friends on Facebook. Time to throw a party! He creates the event on Facebook and sends out his invitations.

Fifteen “Will Attends”, Sixty “Maybes”. Should be a good time!

“On the evening in question I took a shower. I shaved. I splashed on my tingly man perfume. I put on new pants and a favorite shirt. Brimming with optimism, I headed over to the neighborhood watering hole and waited.

“And waited.

“And waited.

“Eventually, one person showed up.”

Clicking on that “Accept Invitation to be Hal’s Friend” button wasn’t really much of an investment on the part of these so-called friends. Hal ponders the situation:

I would learn, when I asked some people who didn’t show up the next day, that “definitely attending” on Facebook means “maybe” and “maybe attending” means “likely not.” So I probably shouldn’t have taken it personally. But the combination of alcohol and solitude turned my thoughts to self-pity. Was I really that big of a loser? Or was it that no one wants to get together in real life anymore? It wasn’t Facebook’s fault; all those digital pals were better than nothing. For chipping away at past friendships and blocking honest new efforts, you really have to blame the entire modern world. People want to hang out with you, I assured myself. They just don’t have the time.

Hal, unless your last name is “9000“, I suggest that you leave the digital pals behind you. They are just made up of 1’s and 0’s and when you log off at the end of the night, they are erased from memory. Get back to the real friends that are in the real world and forge deeper bonds with them. They are probably sitting behind a glowing monitor counting their Facebook Fakefriends just like you were, and feeling about as empty as a result.

You might only have a dozen or so of those flesh-and-blood, loyal friends, but they are the ones who are really worth spending the time with. And when Facebook goes bankrupt some day and shuts down, you don’t have to worry about losing touch with your real friends.

Posted: November 7th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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“I had forgotton how… how simple beauty is, as nature… you know… taking something from nature and being creative with it. I had forgotten about how expressive that can be and I’m beginning to remember now. I want to try things.”

Posted: October 19th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Funny video: Watch Frank tell it like it is.

Posted: September 29th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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…or technology makes our lives better… worse… better… worse…

The recent post on television made a point that people will disagree until the cows come home about if television is good or bad. Or if it makes us smarter or dumber. But it’s not about the technology. It’s about how the technology is used. Television can bring educational material to you that you just can’t get in your local schools. That’s fantastic. But you can also get 24/7, inane Disney channel programming that can sap the life out of your family and reduce the kids to zombies who come back alive and freak out when you yank the plug. That’s horrible.

People continue to argue for one side or the other of that debate as if devices can change you, and as if there is one right answer.

Perhaps it’s not the devices (TV, computers, video games, cell phones) that actually change people. Maybe those devices merely accentuate or exacerbate a person’s preexisting tendencies to be distracted, waste time, and avoid doing other important and more productive things. If the person’s tendencies are towards being responsible and being focused on the right things, then they will make good use of the device.

A laptop, in the hands of an intelligent, motivated, focused person will allow the person to do wonders as they work towards goals. The same laptop in the hands of an unmotivated slacker that suffers from ADD will probably only get used playing online games, watching YouTube videos, and IMing their friends all day long.

In the end, they’re just tools to be used, and then can be used positively or negatively. Does it make sense to blame the tool for the outcome?

Posted: September 23rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2

Godfrey Reggio’s, Evidence.

The blank, comatose look. I’ve seen it myself. You can easily witness it too. Just watch your kids watching TV. Give them a few minutes to settle into it. It’s like watching a person go under hypnosis. I know that feeling too. I used to watch more TV myself years ago, even as an adult.

The debate always seems to be raging if television is good or bad for you and your family. What is it that people are looking for as proof? Dead brain cells? Some measure in the drop in intelligence that can be correlated with television watching? Given the number of variables that influences a persons cognitive ability, I don’t know that we could ever isolate television as an influence.

I certainly don’t want to subject my kids to being part of that study at any rate.

Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics co-author) blogged yesterday about What TV Does to You, with an image of a kid silhouetted against a glowing TV.

I am inclined to agree with him that educational TV has benefits. I like the technology. But the average American isn’t watching over 4.5 hours of educational TV daily. Most of them are watching crap. And most kids who spend hours in front of the TV are watching Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network.

The highlight of Dubner’s post is this excerpt which he took from a friends book:

That last year in New Haven, I could go out to friends’ houses more or less when I wanted to and watch television as often as I liked, only to find that now I agreed with my mother about TV. I had begun not to like what happened to me when I watched.

Given the chance, I stared like a guppy, immobilized for hours in somebody’s den on an increasingly itchy wall-to-wall carpet, intent on things I didn’t even enjoy, passive and yet also anxious, too aware of how soon the hour would be up when the little world in front of me would evaporate and I’d have nothing left but an uneasy regret and another new show beginning that I couldn’t get up and walk away from.

It was so easy not to resist because television was doing all the work for me, making all the decisions. That was especially true, I noticed, when I watched baseball. The field became reduced to the fragment that fit on the screen, minimizing the game into a fraction of itself, implying that everything happening off-camera was irrelevant. The players were minimized as well, because they did not exist unless the ball came their way. Then the lens swooped into their faces and there was too much of them — which weirdly created distance.

This nails it. I’ve had the same feelings. After turning off the TV after being sucked into a few hours of aimless channel surfing, I would think to myself, “Wow. I just wasted a few hours.” Things seemed interesting at first, and I would land on a channel, watch for a bit, move on to another channel. Maybe I did get sucked into something for a full hour. But when it was over, I thought, “That was lame.” I would recognize that I felt a bit drained. I bit disappointed that I wasted that time. I finally realized this and just about gave up TV. I still maintain a Netflix account and will watch the occasional movie. I still watch educational shows with my kids. But I still have to limit and sometimes pry my son off of Nickelodeon, Disney and Cartoon Network.

I still tell him that it’s going to shrink his brain. I don’t care what the researchers say on this one. I know it in my gut. I know what TV can do to a person in the short term if they watch low quality programming, so-called entertainment, or sit in front of it for too long even watching the better programming.

Instead of debating good or bad, maybe all we really need to do is ask ourselves, “Is there something my kid can be doing for these one or two hours that would be much better for them than watching TV?”

Posted: September 20th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2

The Wii has been great from my own perspective. All of the games I’ve played with my kids (or at least watched them play) have all been in the realm of fantasy, action, sports… or just clean fun.

Innocence will be lost soon, as Sega is planning to release an “ultra-violent” game for the Wii.

From Sega’s website, you get a sense that a total immersion in violence is the primary goal.

In this age of 1080p resolution, the best [way to] stress the idea of “blood” was to immerse users in a game wrapped in black and white.

MadWorld revolves around the themes of brutality and exhilaration. To give MadWorld the graphical edge to match its brutal theme, we tried removing all color from the world except for blood. As a result, we decided the best way to convey blood, and thus brutality, was against this black and white backdrop. Knowing that there are no other action games with this sort of avant-garde graphical style, our course was set.

Often times, brutality is expressed in a spiteful nature. There are already plenty of games out there that hit this mark; however, we decided that MADWORLD’s brutality should be aimed at providing the user with a sense of exhilaration during play.

To give you an example from gameplay, we have a scene where you can pull a street sign from the ground and shove it into a enemy’s head.

I really don’t know if and/or how this is affecting people, especially the younger generations. Still waiting for that definitive study on how violent games affect brains, but in the meantime, I plan to continue to keep things “safe” and stick with the non-violent games.

Posted: August 19th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2