Jim Lipsey

Little Snowballs

Jim — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:22:39 +0000

Zak and Wyn engaged me in an epic snowball fight on the walk to preschool this morning. At some point they acquired a healthy measure of good sportsmanship. Each throw is preceded by the shout “Daddy, look out!”, followed by a delay until I make eye contact with a little knuckleballer frozen in full windup. Only then does he unleash the projectile, always displaying those wide eyes and giant, unguarded grin little boys adopt while having a great time and living in the moment. It’s a gift they’re never aware of giving.

I’m not encumbered by their sense of fair play, though, and will happily pelt the back of any tyke bending over to scoop up his next snow grenade. Even after twenty times or so, the tactic still surprises them.

Mittened little hands aren’t yet up to packing or gripping a decent snowball, so most of the missiles either disintegrate in midair or fly off in a random direction. The safest place to be is an area two feet directly in front of the guy making an attack. None of this dissuades them, however. At one point Wynston uses both hands to heft a huge chunk of snow formed by a snowplow and proceeds to pound it against my thigh until it disintegrates. The object is to impact Dad with snow and if throwing snowballs isn’t working, then it’s time for Plan B. The little punk is quite determined.

Eventually I deliver two snow-caked, tardy kids to preschool and try to evade their teacher while getting them cleaned up. She’s terrific, but I avoid having to explain things to grownups whenever possible.

Google Charts and Microwave Timers

Jim — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 23:24:46 +0000

I’ve been playing with the Google Chart API, which is a neat way to graph data using a single URL. Here’s my first attempt:

This plot documents the behavior of our microwave. I even tested it. Your microwave may be different.

It’s About Time

Jim — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 04:35:57 +0000

This tome is long overdue. Unfortunately, the reviews on Amazon indicate the book may not live up to its cover.

Dumbledore Was a Replicant

Jim — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:42:37 +0000

Sunday’s Chicago Tribune features an opinion piece by one Stephan Benzkofer¹ arguing that literary characters are canonically defined only by the published works in which they appear. He contends that a press-conference announcement by the author carries no more authority in developing a character than the criticism of a university scholar or a piece of fan fiction written by a 13 year old. His inspiration for making this point was the recent flap over the sexual orientation of a fictitious wizard. The piece attracted ~~dozens~~ hundreds of comments. Most completely miss the point and many irately accuse the article’s author of homophobic bigotry.

This is of course quite amusing to those of us fortunate enough to know Stephan personally.

being a blogger, i’m not constrained by usual journalistic standards to disclose that Stephan is my brother-in-law ↩

Civic Duty Day

Jim — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:36:54 +0000

I got to both vote and pay taxes today. We do too little of the former in this country, which has led to too much of the latter.

They gave me an I Voted sticker at the polls, which basically says “I’m better than you” to anyone who did not.

CNN Goes Crappy

Jim — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:59:57 +0000

At some point, ‘crappy’ became an acceptable term for headlines from CNN. I’m not sure whether my surprise reflects changing societal standards or my continued descent into curmudgeondom.

I haven’t written for awhile, and claim a broken hip that put me on crutches for two months as an excuse, which is lame. However, I now have a shiny new Tablet PC that allows one to easily clip images from websites and complain about idiotic 23 year-old headline writers for major news outlets. So my six readers have that to look forward to.

I’d tell you all about my amazing new Lenovo X60T, but my wife might read this and she’s been enduring me telling her about all the wonderful details of this great machine for two weeks now, and she just might hit me over the head with it it if I keep carrying on.

update: The headline has been changed. It appears lousy is the new crappy.

Insomniac Bears

Jim — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:15:55 +0000

Insomniac bears are roaming the forests of southwestern Siberia scaring local people as the weather stays too warm for the animals to fall into their usual winter slumber.

I can sympathize. We’ve had a couple of insomniac bears to contend with the last few weeks, too.

James H. Lipsey, 1931-2006

Jim — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 23:01:57 +0000

He decided to go back to Vietnam for a few months to treat kids afflicted with Polio, though he had just landed a nice position in an orthopaedic practice in North Carolina, an opportunity that came after putting himself through medical school, serving in the Navy, and completing a difficult residency program in Chicago.

When his peers were contemplating retirement, Dad spent his evenings studying to become an Anglican priest.

He married Stephanie and me, and baptised our children.

And he wrote a novel.

Yesterday would have been his 75th birthday, though he wouldn’t have thought much of it.

There’s so much I’d like to share about Dad, and the wonderful father he was, but this is all I can manage right now.

We really miss him.

Boo Moo

Jim — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:34:07 +0000

Meet Moo, the newest online darling in the Web 2.0 age. Moo has all the fundamentals: a nice AJAXy interface, Web2.0 colors, gradient fills, rounded corners galore, and lots and lots of buzz. They even sell a physical product, which is downright revolutionary. Perhaps they’re Web 2.1?

So I spent a couple hours choosing, resizing, uploading and cropping 100 photos. Gave Moo $20 and waited 10 days for my 100 business-card-sized mini photos to arrive in their collectors’ case. Alas, Moo messed up and sent me only 11 photos, each repeated 9 or 10 times.

Time to contact support. Moo doesn’t have a phone number (that would be so 2003), just an online form that you fill out and hope for the best. I got an automated response:

Thank you for contacting the MOO Print Team. I’ve sent this mail to let you know that your inquiry is in our customer service queue and that a real live MOO Service Agent will get back to you within 24 hours.

It’s been three days and no avail.

Boo Moo.

update: Moo came through. Woo Moo!

Product Design Aimed at Limiting User Capability

Jim — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:38:04 +0000

In product development, a great deal of effort is made in specifying a product’s affordances - the capabilities and actions that it will provide to the user. A product developer in the UK recently launched Architectures of Control, a blog that documents the increasing practice of infecting products with ways to restrict, rather than expand, users’ capabilities. He has plenty of material to work with, from examples of planned obsolescence, to crippled software that forces customers toward more expensive options, to anti-skateboarding ribs that can be bolted all over public spaces.

Recently Canon launched the G7 digital camera. The G series has been a flagship brand for Canon, aimed toward prosumers who aren’t looking to plop down $2000 for glass in order to justify a dSLR. When we bought a G3 four years ago, it was considered a ground-breaking model. What does the G7 add to our model that is three generations old (they skipped the G4)? It has a higher resolution sensor that produces marginally better pictures because the smaller pixel size ads noise to the images. What else do we get by ‘upgrading’? The loss of a flip-out, rotatable screen, a slower lens, the removal of RAW support, shorter battery life, and the elimation of a remote control for family photos. All this for only $700. But it comes in a really nice black metal housing.

In other words, too many people were choosing the G series over Canon’s dSLRs and the model needed to be crippled. Canon is removing affordances to drive a more expensive product.

Dan Lockton is seeking a better name for Architectures of Control. My submission is to go with Disaffordances. The major domain names are even available.