I’m always looking for toys that will give the kids good exercise indoors for the winter. Last Christmas, we bought this climbing dome (on sale) and it’s been awesome. I can’t even count the number of rainy days, snowy days, even plain-old cold days when the girls have monkeyed around on it while I sort, fold, and hang laundry in our basement. This year I spent a bunch of time trying to decide whether or not to buy these fancy soft play forms. I’m so glad I didn’t, because I had something even better right under my nose (actually my butt) the whole time.

Our couch has three bouncy seat cushions and three cushy back cushions. It’s amazing how many cool things you can do with them. Just today, we piled them all up to make a cushion mountain. We surrounded it with pillows and tried jumping up and over the whole thing. Then we slowed down and made a cushion fort where the cushions were the walls and blankets were the roof. The finale was the cushion runway shown here.

Not only are couch cushions a ton of fun for all ages, the price is right and they don’t require any storage. Hurray!

Update: Here

Last week a whole bunch of people wrote really nice things about an amazing person who is no longer around to read them. Continuing in my series of thanking people who can still appreciate it, these are my three favorite low traffic blogs:

Think In Projects

I found out about Rafal’s blog when he commented on a post here, but it’s quickly become my favorite source for thoughtful advice about improving personal productivity. He reads widely and links to the best articles he finds on the topic. But the reason I keep coming back is his own writing. For whatever reason, he and I run into very similar issues and he has practical ideas for making progress on those issues. Recently he’s written good stuff about the value in looking back at our accomplishments, long range planning, and avoiding what’s important. He also happens to write extensively about Remember the Milk and Evernote–two tools I respect but don’t currently use.

Update: Think in Projects is now Creating Personal Flow. I love the new layout and you can find the content referenced above on the new site here:

• Celebrate
• On avoidance of stuff
• Planning 2013

It’s not a problem if you can’t solve it

This site is written by a former student of mine from Spain who has spent big chunks of this life in Africa and is now living in Japan. He has a unique perspective on the world and through words and photos he communicates a great sense for both the ordinary and extraordinary in Japan. Reading his blog I often feel like I’m watching a Japanese version of the Office. Alf also partakes in a tremendous number of extracurricular activities so I get to learn all about soccer leagues, concerts, themed restaurants, and video game arcades too. And seriously, how many people do you know that have taken a field trip to Hiroshima to play Dungeons and Dragons?

Byte Baker

Shrutarshi Basu is a computer science grad student at Cornell, but I started reading his blog back when he was “just” a nerdy college kid. He writes about what he’s doing (hacking, figuring out life) and what he thinks is important (e.g., programming languages, reading, productivity). While it’s true that we do share some interests, my favorite quality of the site is Shrutarshi’s earnestness. He consciously tries to achieve excellence in whatever he does and he’s open about what’s working and what’s not.

This post has moved to Teach Better.

This post has moved to Teach Better.

Fellow Americans, our country has come a long way in the last 50 years. We have had our first Catholic president, our first African-American president, and almost our first Mormon president. In a few generations we will almost certainly have our first gay president. I say the time has come for our first geek president and John Siracusa is the perfect¹ person for the job.

For those of you who have never heard of him, Mr. Siracusa is a software developer by day and an ace gamer, devoted father, loving husband, and nerd celebrity by night. He’s most known for his tour-de-force reviews of (Mac) OS X and more recently for his wide-ranging soapbox podcast Hypercritical. It is these venues where Mr. Siracusa has demonstrated he has the skills our country needs.

He is the ultimate natural analyst, able to glance at anything and quickly identify its strengths and (especially) weaknesses. While he typically applies his super-power to tech products², it will be amazing to see him use it to intelligently dissect and choose among potential public policies.

Mr. Siracusa is also blessed with big picture vision, a critical requirement for a successful chief executive. He can tell you about the future of computing, software distribution, TV, and even toasters. His ideas about using artificial worlds as petri dishes for social policy are exciting and promising (if not completely original). Once he throws off the corporation-imposed shackles banning political discourse that bound him on Hypercritical, I am certain we will see a beautiful clear vision for the future of America and indeed the planet.

Mr. Siracusa has the integrity, humility, and moral compass that the American public wants in a president but is so often lacking. He has a warm heart and is unafraid to defend unpopular groups–nerds, cosplaying-wanna-be-nerds, homosexuals, and trans-sexuals are all welcome in his big tent. He’s a humble every-man who is able to make fun of himself and his election season cameos on Saturaday Night Live will surely be hilarious. While a presidential campaign always brings out the muck rackers, I’d be shocked if they unearthed any Siracusa scandals.

December 28, 2012 was a sad day as the final Hypercritical episode was recorded, but think about it this way: John Siracusa now has a big hole in his schedule to fill. America needs him!

When I was a kid, a big part of the Christmas season was visiting my grandmother and immediately racing down to her basement to run the trains around the track. I loved the big styrofoam mountain, the rumbling of the engine on the metal tracks, and the feeling of industrial omnipotence when holding the controls in my hand.

Now that I have my own kids, I want them to have fun with trains during the holidays too. But my kids are little and a big Lionel rig isn’t good match yet. Traditional train sets are expensive, delicate, and a ton of work to set up. And I don’t feel good about having toddlers poking around in the miles of requisite electric wiring.

Last year my brother and sister-in-law sent us their old Fisher Price Geotrax and it’s absolutely perfect for kids under six years old. The exact set we inherited is no longer for sale, but the Timbertown Railway is pretty close. Ours is made up of a whole bunch of snap-and-go plastic tracks and includes bridges, a windmill, and even a station that will load packages onto your train. The engine is battery-operated and makes a pleasant chug-chug noise, while the remote control is big, wireless, and easy for small hands to operate. It looks good, is super-easy to put together, and happily chugs around our tree. We have enough track to try out several configurations and expansion packs are just an Amazon one-click away.

Another great thing about the set is that it’s seemingly indestructible. It’s been stepped on, kicked, and disassembled (by kids and adults) numerous times and nothing’s ever actually broken. You can’t even forget to turn it off and run down the batteries because it stops automatically after ten minutes of non-interaction.

Bottom line: We all love it!

When I started this blog, I chose a platform that would give me a site that looked fine out of the box so I could concentrate on the writing. Tumblr fit this requirement and even provided several nice features:

• Built-in search
• Organization with tags so visitors could easily find articles by category
• Easy integration with Disqus comments
• Built-in RSS feed for those who want to subscribe
• Automatic announcement of new articles to Facebook
• Easy integration with Google Analytics (for traffic statistics)

Now, a year later, I have more of a vision for what I want to do with the site and I’m ready to tinker a bit. Unfortunately, while there’s some flexibility in how a Tumblr site looks, but they don’t give you any real control. Ever since high school I’ve spent regular chunks of time writing code and bending computers to my will. I’ve done this as a professional software developer, as a research economist, and often just messing around. The last year has been less geeky than usual as I’ve concentrated on teaching and less technical research projects. It’s time to scratch my nerd itch.

I’ve chosen to switch to a particularly nerdy blog platform (Octopress) that requires using command-line tools, but it has the huge benefit of total control. Octopress is built on top of Jekyll which is written in Ruby and I can tweek it as much as I’d like. I’ve always wanted to learn Ruby and reading and modifying other other people’s code is a great way to learn a language.

In addition to Octopress/Jekyll/Ruby, this project gets me up to speed on several other modern nerdy technologies:

• Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS that lets you install all sorts of open source software including the latest version of Ruby.
• git is what version control will look like for years to come–it’s fast, collaborative, distributed, and flexible.
• Github is where all the coolest open source projects live these days. Any new software I write that I want to share will go here.
• Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) is a powerful layer on top of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) that allows for powerful adaptive layout of HTML pages.

While Octopress is in part an excuse to fiddle with new tech, it also feels very comfortable as articles are written in Markdown–a very lightweight text-based markup language that I lately find myself using for almost everything.

What’s New?

On the surface, the site shouldn’t look all that different, but beyond the engine being replaced, there are several subtle changes:

• A real About page
• Links up top for the main categories I tend to write about
• A search bar near the top of every page
• Quick links to my recent posts and my favorite posts.
• Much better layout for mobile devices
• Super-fast rendering since Octopress generates the whole site as static HTML which just sits on the server

Was it Easy to Migrate from Tumblr?

Two things helped a lot: The Octopress documentation is excellent and I already had all the articles on my local machine in Markdown. The only thing that was tricky was backwards compatibility as I wanted all my old URL’s to work and all my discussions to transfer over. I used the alias-generator plugin and a little elbow grease to make all my Tumblr URL’s redirect to my new URL’s.

Disqus (the service that keeps track of comments) says they will crawl your new site and use any redirects it provides to update their database. Unfortunately, while browsers can understand the redirects that the alias-generator creates¹ just fine, the disqus crawler does not. So I had to create a csv file that mapped all the old URL’s to the new ones and upload that.

Announcements of new articles on Facebook are now handled by IFTTT. It will likely take a little fine-tuning to get these right.

What’s on the Horizon?

The primary emphasis of this site remains the text, but I do want to integrate a little more media–even just a few pictures here and there would be nice. I want the category pages to have their own looks. Beyond that, all I know is that I’ve now got the power to do anything. Should be fun!

Our neighborhood is so awesome. For the last three years (at least) on the evening before Halloween nearly all the kids gather for the Pumpkin Parade. Everyone wears their costumes and brings their carved pumpkins in a wagon or a stroller and we all proceed to march around the block. Afterward we have hot cider and cookies and catch up with our friends.

This summer a new neighbor hosted the world’s greatest barbecue block party. There was terrific turnout and highlights included a hammock filled with up to 10 little girls at any given moment, a sunshine piñata, and a giant cannoli. The party gave birth to an email list which spawned a Facebook group which then led to last week’s first annual neighborhood Christmas caroling. We are positively swimming in social capital!

About 40 kids and grown ups arrived at Cathy and John’s house at 5:45 for cookies and hot cocoa and some warm up songs. R especially enjoyed belting out The Twelve Days of Christmas as she had been practicing it over dinner all week. Then we all walked and sang along the Pumpkin Parade route and finished with even more cookies and cocoa.

In the interests of making a super-fun event even better next year, I’ve done some thinking and I’ve got some ideas:

• Plan on singing a lot of songs. We had a printout of about 7 that didn’t last long enough and folks weren’t ready to repeat them after the first round. And very few people knew more than the first verse of even the most popular carols.

• Suggest that folks download a caroling app that has lyrics. I think the best one is Sing Along to 50+ Christmas Carols but it’s $4.99 which might be more than most folks (not me!) want to spend. It’s got the music and big fonts and karaoke style moving lyrics. A cheaper option is Christmas Carols for 99 cents that has they lyrics for more than 100 songs but no fancy graphics. The best part about having an app is that it only requires one hand–you don’t need a hand for the lyric printout and another for the flashlight.

• Have someone in front that sets a slow pace. Our group quickly spread out such that the back couldn’t hear what the front was singing.

• Put up signs so everyone in the neighborhood knows it’s happening. One of the best parts of the experience was when families would come out on their stoops to listen.

• Pick a charity and collect money for it along the way. This might make some people uncomfortable, but I think it would be worth it. Certainly to the folks who would receive the donations would appreciate it and this seems like a great opportunity to exercise (not exorcise) the Christmas spirit.

Merry Christmas everyone!

The first time I saw the World Wide Web, I was hunched over an 8 lb laptop using a text based browser and a 56k modem. There wasn’t much to see and it didn’t seem like a big deal. Then about three month’s later NCSA Mosaic (the first graphical browser) was released and I “got it.” Within a week we redefined our product line and turned a generic set of “network publishing” tools into a web server and a web authoring tool. Within a year we were purchased by America Online to show that they “got” the web too. My point is that I’ve been deeply embedded in the web for a long time.

And yet, not including my professional web-based resume/cv, I didn’t have my own website until exactly a year ago when High Variance was born. I’m not sure why it took me so long to get here, but after a year of any project, I think it’s important to step back and take stock to see if the original goals are being met. I had three:

1. Create more: As expected, the topics have been eclectic ranging from economic policy to kid book reviews to eighties pop music. The rate of production has been similarly irregular with a burst of activity last January (17 posts) and a summer hiatus. But the aggregate rate has been about one post per week. I’m happy with this.

2. Learn to write better and more comfortably: Perhaps my biggest surprise is how enjoyable the whole process has been. I don’t get anxious when I write here and my anxiety level when writing professionally has definitely decreased. When my mind is spinning about a topic, writing about it actually gets me to calm down and figure out what I actually think about it. As for the quality of the writing, I think I’m getting better, but it’s hard to tell.

3. Provide entertaining, useful, and/or inspiring content: My audience will need to be the judge of this, but I know I’ve given at least a few chuckles, a few bits of helpful advice, and even tugged on a few heartstrings. And in looking back on what I’ve written, much of the content seems to have aged well.

I suppose I should also say something about my readership. According to Google Analytics, over the past year I’ve have 2,070 unique visitors (5.7 per day) and 4,000 page views (11 per day). Not much, but if you squint at the chart, it does look like traffic is trending slightly up. There are even a few posts that get regular search engine traffic–zebras, pdf annotation on the iPad, and Mincer 1958 are the top three.

As I was about to blow out the candles on my birthday cake a few weeks ago I realized something very special: I didn’t have anything new to wish for. I have a wonderful wife and two lovely children. We’re all healthy and happy with our jobs and our house. I just want what I already have. That’s kind of true of this blog too. So here’s to another fun and fulfilling year!

I’ve been thinking a lot about conflict and sharing lately. First because we watch this Sesame Street video almost every night with the girls:

In case you’re video-averse and don’t want to watch the whole hilarious two minutes and seven seconds, Robin Williams and the two-headed monster “introduce” children to the word conflict. I put “introduce” in quotes because this is a concept with which every child older than 6 months is already intimately familiar. Some kids might use different terms–“fighting!” is quite popular in our house–but the concept is clear. The video also shows the two-headed monster doing something that’s a little less natural for kids: sharing.

Second, my blog-friend¹ Chris Blattman wrote recently about how they handle sharing at his daughter’s daycare. In a nutshell, they don’t push it and instead focus on developing a child’s sense of ownership. The idea is that when kids realize that their stuff won’t be rudely ripped away when friends express interest, they will start sharing voluntarily.

but mostly interact with through their blog. It makes for awkward conversations as you always feel closer to them than they feel to you.

Of course, the biggest reason I’ve been thinking about this subject is the conflict and relatively smaller amount of sharing that happens at home with the girls (4 yrs and ~18 months). We have developed our own fairly complex tri-partite system of communal rights, partial rights, and exclusive rights. Most of the toys are communal property–there is no “mine” for these. When one kid is playing with a toy in this category and the other kid wants in, we try to get them to say “Can I have a turn?” and then enforce a reasonably short time limit.

A smaller group of toys have owners (e.g., birthday presents) but still must be shared. These often come in groups (like fairies or ponies) where it’s fun to play with the whole group, but neither kid owns the whole group. Dividing ownership in this way provides incentives to play together–if you share your own stuff, you get access to your sibling’s stuff too. This arrangement is also designed to break down R’s hoarding tendencies.

The last category is the smallest: pure property rights. R has a plush pony and a groovy girl in this group and her sister has a set of 6 small plush monsters. The girls are certainly allowed to share these (R rarely does) but sharing is never required. Occasionally one girl will pick up the other’s toy, but when owner notices and demands it back, it’s always given up immediately.

Our system isn’t perfect and may in fact be more complicated than the girls’ little brains can handle. My bet is that if we reduced the number of categories, we would also reduce the amount of conflict. But I’m not sure what category(ies) would go. I don’t want to assign an owner to every toy–that would be miserable to keep track of and wouldn’t promote a cooperative spirit. I like that they maintain some ownership of presents that they’ve received individually. And the most extreme group is where we see the least amount of conflict–the last thing I want is more fighting! So we’re going to keep the system we’ve got and hope that the kids are learning about both property rights and cooperation. Check back in twenty years to see if it worked.