Punderings

Although a bit rainy at the end, and chilly throughout, we all had a wonderful weekend away.  We ended up doing plenty of driving, partly because of the cold, and partly because we went to Menemsha twice – the chowder was soooo good we had to go back the next day to  get seconds.  Too bad Roxanne isn’t having shellfish yet: next summer definitely.

Oh, and it’s Larsen’s fish market, although their mail-order website is nearly impossible to find.  This is the Larsen’s market in Chilimark, not the one in the middle of the island.  It’s the kind of place where you can see thru the front door you came in, right out the back door to the fishing boats at the dock.  Yum.

Roxanne got to run around a lot, tried a couple of beaches, and wandered thru the Campmeeting grounds with the colorful houses.  She thought the ferries were pretty cool too – both the Steamship Authority one, and the “On Time III” we took over to Chappy.

Hey – if you do have time to be On Time, the Mytoi Japanese garden is well worth the trip.  They seem to even have an air pump (may be wrong, but it sure looked like air hoses) for fillups after beach excursions.

Amy got us reservations for a loooong weekend on Martha’s Vineyard at the Island Inn.  I’ve really missed going to the Vineyard regularly, but since JB’s place is gone (sold) it’s actually expensive to go down there, so we haven’t been for a while.  And Roxanne has never been, so I’m really looking forward to it.

The last time I was there was the last guy’s weekend at JB’s family’s place.  We actually stayed in a different Mattakesett unit, since his family’s unit had already technically been sold.  We were just there to help pack up the few remaining personal items they had – well, and to eat and drink, too.  The stories of that trip are another post, but the pertinent point was that was also the first time that I told many of my friends that we were expecting Roxanne…

I forget what it was, but it was well worth it.  Sorry!

This is worth a laugh – the Charlie card, a new automated fare system, recently had a new installation at the end of the Green line.  But not on the rest of the Green line yet!  The irony of the old song coming true – with Charlie’s own name on it – is wonderful.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/startsandstops/blog/2006/04/charlie_goes_gr.html

Even better: someone points out that Charlie actually may have gotten off that train by now.  See, he got on the train back in the 1940s, presumably as a young man.  In the intervening years, he’s gotten older, just like all of us.  So by now he’s eligible for the senior citizen discount, meaning he can finally get off the train with his original dime fare paid.  Hello, Charlie!
http://www.mit.edu/~jdreed/t/charlie.html

Although our timing for the trip wasn’t quite right, it was still a good day. Roxanne fell asleep in the car on the way there, so we drove around the South Boston waterfront for a while to give her enough of a nap. Once you’re in South Boston, it’s really easy to get to Fort Point! Cool park.

The Children’s Museum was… mostly the second floor, where we ended up spending all our time. She was happy enough to play in the little kids playspace for quite a while – long enough for the adults to get bored. I felt terribly stereotypical when I picked up a random copy of the Journal that was lying on a bench and started reading.

It was actually odd, in a nice way. The back of the Playspace is a separate ‘break’ room with tables (big-kid and little-kid), a fridge, sink, coffeemaker, and a couple of computers. It’s like a private club for parents: come down every Friday and bring the kids to run around, while the parents hobnob in the back room (big window to watch the kids) and have coffee and surf parenting sites.

We only had time (before we all ran out of calories from breakfast) to do a couple of exhibits, but Roxanne loved getting wet in the channel exhibit and was very happy to shop in the bodega and pick out the plastic fruit to bring to the cash register.

Thanks Susan!

Having listened to MIKE-FM (actually WMKK-FM, but their marketing department never ever actually uses that) for long enough, I’ve realized that they don’t actually have “less DJ time”.  They just TiVo, or timeshift, their DJs.

From their perspective, it makes business sense.  Instead of having several DJs on staff, they simply have a handful of voice talents on retainer.  DJs have to be on during certain hours, since they’re generally live (allowing weather, news, traffic breaks with banter).  Voice talents, in this modern age, can work anywhere and anytime, as long as the .wav or other files get delivered to the server before the broadcast.  MIKE-FM seems to have two main voice talents (the main snarky guy and the older, goofy comic foil), and a couple of other occasional ones (some community ad and other longer spots).

The thing that gets me is that Mike doesn’t really seem to have less talk!  I’d love to see someone do a time comparison of Mike vs. competitors for a certain timeslot.  While Mike’s automated voice talent bits are typically pretty short, they come along very frequently – every other song, usually; and sometimes they have a couple of blurbs together.  They have a fairly good repetoire of blurbs: they clearly record plenty of blurbs and then randomly stick them in.  They even have some blurbs that are very topical: they clearly shuffle the voice lineup at least weekly.  But they still have just about as much talk as other stations, overall.  So while it may be a “Voice Actor” they hire, they’re still doing the same job as a DJ – just timeshifted, and without any of the actual human connection.  Too bad.

If they could actually go the next step, it would be interesting to see some radio stations do that.  Imagine the Web 2.0 or Semantic Web or whatever applied to this model.  Timeshifted DJs, but where a music director actually choreographed entire sets of music (or styles of music) along with some semi-topic-specific blurbs.  Scatter a handful of daily-topic blurbs throughout (daily voice talent recordings of the previous days scandals, for example), and it would feel pretty ‘live’.  This needs a very rich semantic catalog of music (for automated style selection and matching), as well as improving current beatmatch technology (which I thought some radio station had a big proprietary way to do interestingly but I can’t find it right now) to really cross styles and be more accurate.
Although I still like my live DJs on some stations, please.

There are a lot of lessons I’ve learned as a dad. Many of these are obvious to you who are dads yourselves. Some wouldn’t make much sense unless you were a dad yourself. Many of them are probably quite surprising to those of you who’ve known me for years before I became a dad. Yes, it’s true, Shane now enjoys being a dad -quite a sea change, eh?

Today’s lesson learned as a dad is very simple, but surprising nonetheless. Cookie Monster is left handed.

In all my years of watching Sesame Street (admittedly most are awfully hazy as I don’t remember much of childhood), I never conciously thought about that before. But Cookie Monster’s current schtick of finding the cookie of the day and then agonizing over if he should eat it clearly shows he is left handed. Wow. Not that it should make that much of a difference; it’s just unexpected.

Back to Sesame Street. Eventually she’ll fall asleep…

OK, I’ve been holding off on actually telling anyone this blog is here until I have enough interesting stories to make it worth reading IMO. But of course it’s been winter, and work has been a bit unsettled, and no-one is reading this anyway, so I haven’t been posting enough content to be worth reading. A nice little cycle.

So it’s April Fools day, so I’m just going to bite the bullet and send you all an email tonight pointing to this blog. Hopefully someone will read this, and that will inspire me to write more. I spend far too much time at work these days both reading and digesting other people’s content, and doing too much business process stuff, and can’t actually spend enough time either writing code (which is fun) or writing interesting stories.

(Reminder: comments are moderated to prevent evil spam, so they may take a while to show up…)