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Baby Einstein: Meh

Experts don't like Baby Einstein.  I know parents who swear by it, but the reason child development experts don't is because you're not supposed to be plugging your kid into the TV, no matter how sophisticated it is.  During his formative years, your kid needs to be doing things interactively.  No matter how awesome the Baby Einstein video is, it's not interactive and therefore takes time away from something better.  For these reasons, I never allowed Baby Einstein into the house.

Until now.

I previously complained about how UStream won't work on iPhones.  (Well, it will, but only "featured" or "popular" webcams, so my babycam is out of luck.)  Thus I have embarked on a quest for free webcam software that will allow me to stream to the web and also to Yelena's iPod touch.  Curious?  Read on.

I'm a cereal reader.

I was introduced to this term by my LSAT tutor.  It means a person who can't sit still long enough to even eat a bowl of cereal, without some sort of external stimulus.  So I'll read the cereal box, carton of milk, whatever is within reach.

Lately I've been feeding Nathan a lot, an activity which entails sitting there with nothing to do and both hands full for 15-20 minutes (including burping).  My solution: watch TV.  I've already made it through the first five seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plus caught up on several new shows which deserve mentioning.

Thumbs Up

Movie adaptations rarely satisfy. This is true not just of written material (like Lord of the Rings) but also movie adaptations of TV shows. (Let's be honest: Serenity was not as satsfying as Firefly.) The same, naturally, applies to comic books as well. I think it's mostly due to the limits of the medium. A novel can be hundreds of pages, a TV show can go for years, and even a comic book is too long and complex to be compressed to a 90 minute film.

First the good news: Finished the bar exam.

Now the better news: I'm going to be a stay-at-home-dad.

And now the bad news: Actually, there is no bad news.  It's all good.

This is going to be a long post.

Two Thumbs Up

I was pleasantly surprised.  It had a great plot, very good actors, and great special effects.  It's hard today to have "great" special effects because CG is so ubiquitous.  We're used to seeing impossible things on the screen that look real but couldn't possibly.  In my mind, great special effects are only used only when actually necessary, and then they are integrated seamlessly

"If you, in your office, as an intellectual worker, were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?"

This is a demonstration of the original Graphical User Interface, given in San Francisco, by Dough Engelbart, a researcher at Stanford.  What strikes me the most is that we haven't come very far.  In fact, when I first looked at this very simple interface, and the ease with which Engelbart was able to do things, I found myself wishing I had an interface that simple and streamlined.  Look how many mouse clicks it takes him to create a new file.  Now ask yourself how many mouse clicks it takes you to create a new file.  Computer interfaces have gotten bigger, but I'm not sure they've gotten better.

The other thing that struck me is how we're still trying to catch up to some of those original concepts.  Engelbart easily shows how he can create a collection of shopping lists for different stores, and then link each shopping list to a map that shows the location of each store.  Click on each store on the map, and the list shows up.   I dare you to do that with modern computers.  In 1968 Englebert was able to do it with a few clicks.