Saturday, January 19, 2013
Would you buy ice cream from this man?
Friday, January 18, 2013
Why "Harry Potter and the Sorcercer's Stone" works
I was surprised that "Sorcerer's Stone" started so slowly. For the first 40 or 50 pages, it really plodded along. If I had not been told by, oh, about a million people that the book was worth sticking with, I might have given up. I guess we're lucky that some early readers did stay with the book and spread the word of its charms, or the whole Harry Potter franchise may have died an early death without Voldemort even getting involved.
Indeed, after the slow start, the book does get better and author J.K. Rowling really shows her, ahem, magic. There are a lot of reasons this book works: An inventive story; likeable main characters; an intriguing mystery. Another reason are the imaginative little elements Rowling sprinkles through the book. Here are some of my favorites:
1. Great names. Albus Dumbledore, Severus Snape, Draco Malfoy, the Weasley brothers, Professor McGonagall, Hagrid. These names roll snappily off the tongue and seem to hint, even if you knew nothing else about them, at their personalities. The same applies to the names of the four houses of Hogwarts: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravensclaw, and Slytherin. Is there any doubt that the slimiest students will be found in Slytherin?
2. Clever use of animals. Rowling could have had the students simply send and receive letters, but instead they get owls. They fear a giant three-headed dog named ... Fluffy. And they help care for a baby dragon that doesn't breath fire, but is fearsome in its eating habits. Nice touches.
3. Quidditch. Rowling takes the witches-on-a-broom image and turns it into exciting game. And you can't just use any old broom – you gotta have a Nimbus Two Thousand!
4. Animating the inanimate. Rowling could have simply divided the student wizards into different houses with barely a mention of the process, but instead she brings a hat to life – the Sorting Hat – to do the job. Elsewhere in the book, characters in paintings move and talk, chess pieces come to life, and keys fly around.
I never got that can't-put-it-down feeling with this book, but there were so many imaginative touches that it was a pleasant read.
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Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Tournament review: Long Beach Mayor's Cup
My son's soccer team played this weekend in the Mayor's Cup tournament in Long Beach, Calif. Generally, the tournament ran fine, but a couple issues did bother me.
First, the pluses: The tournament seemed fairly well organized. Schedules were posted the Monday before, allowing time for parents to plan. The fields were set up and ready to go when we arrived. The people at the information table were helpful with a couple questions I had.
I really liked that they posted scores from the games online almost immediately.
I also liked that they allowed a comfortable 15-20 minutes between games, rather than trying to rush the next game onto the field like some tournaments do.
Now the minuses. First, they skimped on the referee coverage. All the first-round games, at least in the U10 boys division, had just a single referee. There were no assistant referees (sometimes called "linesman"), which are crucial to making accurate offside calls and out-of-bounds rulings.
I'm a referee myself and I know that it's almost impossible for a center referee, working alone, to have a good view of offside. Not surprisingly, in the games I watched, there were several wrong offside calls (the refs seemed to be perhaps overzealous, blowing their whistles for almost anything that could have been offside) and some bad out-of-bounds calls. I don't blame the refs; they were placed in an untenable position. It bothers me that a tournament where we've paid a substantial entry fee doesn't have full referee crews.
In the semifinals and finals, they did have three-person referee crews, but in the games I saw, the ARs were kids around the age 12-14. While I like to see kids getting referee experience, they should do it in recreational games, not in the semifinals or finals of a tournament. While I have seen youth referees who are very good, the ones in this tournament showed their inexperience.
My other concern is that the teams were just not evenly matched. In our bracket, there were games that ended with scores of 10-0, 7-1 and 8-1 (two games). Out of 10 total games, only three were decided by two goals or fewer. The results were similar in a separate U10 boys grouping.
In any sport, the competition is most fun and rewarding for everyone when the teams are evenly matched. A blowout isn't good for anyone.
Still, I'm not sure what a tournament organizer can do about this. In this tournament, they had two U10 boys brackets and seemed to make some effort to place some of the obviously better teams into the same bracket. But it wasn't enough. Somehow they need to do a better job of matching up teams of similar abilities.
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 | |
| The 2013 Mayor's Cup |
I really liked that they posted scores from the games online almost immediately.
I also liked that they allowed a comfortable 15-20 minutes between games, rather than trying to rush the next game onto the field like some tournaments do.
Now the minuses. First, they skimped on the referee coverage. All the first-round games, at least in the U10 boys division, had just a single referee. There were no assistant referees (sometimes called "linesman"), which are crucial to making accurate offside calls and out-of-bounds rulings.
I'm a referee myself and I know that it's almost impossible for a center referee, working alone, to have a good view of offside. Not surprisingly, in the games I watched, there were several wrong offside calls (the refs seemed to be perhaps overzealous, blowing their whistles for almost anything that could have been offside) and some bad out-of-bounds calls. I don't blame the refs; they were placed in an untenable position. It bothers me that a tournament where we've paid a substantial entry fee doesn't have full referee crews.
In the semifinals and finals, they did have three-person referee crews, but in the games I saw, the ARs were kids around the age 12-14. While I like to see kids getting referee experience, they should do it in recreational games, not in the semifinals or finals of a tournament. While I have seen youth referees who are very good, the ones in this tournament showed their inexperience.
My other concern is that the teams were just not evenly matched. In our bracket, there were games that ended with scores of 10-0, 7-1 and 8-1 (two games). Out of 10 total games, only three were decided by two goals or fewer. The results were similar in a separate U10 boys grouping.
In any sport, the competition is most fun and rewarding for everyone when the teams are evenly matched. A blowout isn't good for anyone.
Still, I'm not sure what a tournament organizer can do about this. In this tournament, they had two U10 boys brackets and seemed to make some effort to place some of the obviously better teams into the same bracket. But it wasn't enough. Somehow they need to do a better job of matching up teams of similar abilities.
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Monday, January 7, 2013
Instagram: The danger is in the details
I'm not an early adopter of technology, so many millions of people discovered and used Instagram before it caught my attention. But once I saw it in use by others, I liked it. I could see how the combination of pictures and funny comments could be entertaining.
So the other day, I decided to try it for myself. Going to the Instagram website, I found they wanted to send me elsewhere. You can't, apparently, register for Instagram at Instagram.com. So I chose the "Google Play" option and was sent there. As I tried to figure out how to get Instagram to work, I happened to click on a tab called "Permissions."
What I saw, well, shocked me. Remember how Greeks used the gift of the Trojan Horse to get inside the walls of Troy? If you install Instagram, you're allowing it:
Wow, it's amazing what people will give up just to see some funny pictures.
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So the other day, I decided to try it for myself. Going to the Instagram website, I found they wanted to send me elsewhere. You can't, apparently, register for Instagram at Instagram.com. So I chose the "Google Play" option and was sent there. As I tried to figure out how to get Instagram to work, I happened to click on a tab called "Permissions."
What I saw, well, shocked me. Remember how Greeks used the gift of the Trojan Horse to get inside the walls of Troy? If you install Instagram, you're allowing it:
- To "read data about your contacts stored on your phone, including the frequency with which you've called, emailed, or communicated in other ways with specific individuals."
- To save your contact data and "share contact data without your knowledge."
- To "modify or delete" the contents of your memory card.
- To "to get your precise location using the Global Positioning System (GPS) or network location sources such as cell towers and Wi-Fi."
- To use your device's camera – without you. "This permission allows the app to use the camera at any time without your confirmation."
- To "discover information about which applications are used on the device."
Wow, it's amazing what people will give up just to see some funny pictures.
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Monday, December 31, 2012
Air travel: The new normal is no fun
Periodically, an air travel horror story makes the news. It might be a plane full of passengers stuck on the runway for hours and hours, or flights suddenly cancelled and people stranded, or outrageous on-board misbehavior.
But the real issue of modern air travel is not the dramatic, headline-making events. It's the small irritants that add up, in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts style, to weaken the knees of even the toughest traveler.
Consider my family's recent flight home after Christmas. It wasn't the worst trip, certainly. In fact, with it's many little annoyances and frustrations, it was sadly typical of traveling by air today.
Arriving at Seattle-Tacoma airport for our flight we had two options for check-in: stand in line for a human or use an automated Alaska Airline kiosk. We chose to seek out a human, because our seat assignments were scattered in the plane and we wanted to see if we could get them together.
After several minutes, we saw that our line was not moving, so we dragged our belongings to a different line. Soon, an Alaska Airlines representative came along and told us that we should check in at the kiosk, then ask the person checking our bags in about seats. So we dragged our stuff to a kiosk.
I had everything we needed to check in – or, at least I thought I did. But because I had bought the tickets through American Airlines, with the first leg of the trip "operated by Alaska Airlines," the confirmation codes I had didn't work. This forced us into a longer process of entering a last name, a flight number and a destination.
We worked through that, and just as we were printing out the final boarding passes, the kiosk abruptly shut down. We flagged down an Alaska rep, who told us the machine had probably run out of paper and to try again with another kiosk. So back through the process we went again – in fact, twice more, because I forgot we need boarding passes for both legs of our trip. Eventually we got all the passes printed. Whew. This was just Step One.
We waited in another line to check our bags. Since the fee for checking each bag was $25, we decided to carry on one of our smaller suitcases. That still left us with $75 in bag fees; ugh. At the counter, we asked about moving seats but were told that nothing could be done. Sigh.
After wading through the security line – and fending off one rude man who tried to cut ahead – that small suitcase we had decided to carry on was pulled aside after being X-rayed. In it, they found a gel-filled plastic toy my 10-year-old son had received for Christmas. Not allowed, the TSA folks said, taking away the $8 toy.
Then we hit a smooth patch. Our flight left on time, arrived early, and soon we were walking the placid concourses of San Jose airport on our way to our next flight.
With some extra time, we stopped at a sports bar called the Shark's Cage where we encountered a leading contender for Surliest Bartender of the Year. He referred to my son as a thing ("Is this yours?"), and responded to simple questions about prices and offerings as if we had asked him to pack our bags up Mt. Everest. In the end, we were gouged for $11 for two Sprites and a small orange juice. Sadly, of course, outrageous airport food prices are hardly news.
Our next plane on Skywest airline was running late, but we boarded and were ready to go about 10 minutes after expected departure time. Then they discovered that a wheel was "a little flat" and needed to be inspected. You can't criticize them for the safety precaution, but you do wonder if they're pushing their equipment too hard and skimping on maintenance.
We finally left about an hour late. We gained back a little time on the way to Los Angeles International. But the surprises weren't over.
We taxied for 20 minutes after landing, eventually ending up at a isolated outpost that I never knew existed even though I've flown through LAX countless times. Exiting the plane, we discovered we had to wait in another line to board a crowded bus to get to baggage claim. After a surreal stop-and-go route through plane traffic on the tarmac, the bus finally turned us loose to retrieve our luggage.
And that was it. As I said, it could have been worse. But, boy, it sure could have been better.
--------------
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But the real issue of modern air travel is not the dramatic, headline-making events. It's the small irritants that add up, in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts style, to weaken the knees of even the toughest traveler.
Consider my family's recent flight home after Christmas. It wasn't the worst trip, certainly. In fact, with it's many little annoyances and frustrations, it was sadly typical of traveling by air today.
Arriving at Seattle-Tacoma airport for our flight we had two options for check-in: stand in line for a human or use an automated Alaska Airline kiosk. We chose to seek out a human, because our seat assignments were scattered in the plane and we wanted to see if we could get them together.
After several minutes, we saw that our line was not moving, so we dragged our belongings to a different line. Soon, an Alaska Airlines representative came along and told us that we should check in at the kiosk, then ask the person checking our bags in about seats. So we dragged our stuff to a kiosk.
I had everything we needed to check in – or, at least I thought I did. But because I had bought the tickets through American Airlines, with the first leg of the trip "operated by Alaska Airlines," the confirmation codes I had didn't work. This forced us into a longer process of entering a last name, a flight number and a destination.
We worked through that, and just as we were printing out the final boarding passes, the kiosk abruptly shut down. We flagged down an Alaska rep, who told us the machine had probably run out of paper and to try again with another kiosk. So back through the process we went again – in fact, twice more, because I forgot we need boarding passes for both legs of our trip. Eventually we got all the passes printed. Whew. This was just Step One.
We waited in another line to check our bags. Since the fee for checking each bag was $25, we decided to carry on one of our smaller suitcases. That still left us with $75 in bag fees; ugh. At the counter, we asked about moving seats but were told that nothing could be done. Sigh.
After wading through the security line – and fending off one rude man who tried to cut ahead – that small suitcase we had decided to carry on was pulled aside after being X-rayed. In it, they found a gel-filled plastic toy my 10-year-old son had received for Christmas. Not allowed, the TSA folks said, taking away the $8 toy.
Then we hit a smooth patch. Our flight left on time, arrived early, and soon we were walking the placid concourses of San Jose airport on our way to our next flight.
With some extra time, we stopped at a sports bar called the Shark's Cage where we encountered a leading contender for Surliest Bartender of the Year. He referred to my son as a thing ("Is this yours?"), and responded to simple questions about prices and offerings as if we had asked him to pack our bags up Mt. Everest. In the end, we were gouged for $11 for two Sprites and a small orange juice. Sadly, of course, outrageous airport food prices are hardly news.
Our next plane on Skywest airline was running late, but we boarded and were ready to go about 10 minutes after expected departure time. Then they discovered that a wheel was "a little flat" and needed to be inspected. You can't criticize them for the safety precaution, but you do wonder if they're pushing their equipment too hard and skimping on maintenance.
We finally left about an hour late. We gained back a little time on the way to Los Angeles International. But the surprises weren't over.
We taxied for 20 minutes after landing, eventually ending up at a isolated outpost that I never knew existed even though I've flown through LAX countless times. Exiting the plane, we discovered we had to wait in another line to board a crowded bus to get to baggage claim. After a surreal stop-and-go route through plane traffic on the tarmac, the bus finally turned us loose to retrieve our luggage.
And that was it. As I said, it could have been worse. But, boy, it sure could have been better.
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Monday, December 17, 2012
Gun control, Newtown and the unimportance of facts
I'm usually wary of getting involved in political discussions. Not only can you end up alienating your friends, I'm often discouraged because these sort of debates frequently descend into simplistic arguments and sound bites.
But the other day, shortly after the massacre of 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, I saw a posting on Facebook that caught my attention. A woman by the name of Holly Williamson posted this:
"I fail to see how keeping guns from being owned by law abiding citizens would have kept this from happening."
To me, this was not so much a political statement, but a question of facts, so I tried to answer her.
I said, "Well, the assault weapon the shooter used was owned legally by his mother; he took it from her home. If assault weapons were banned -- as they were from 1994 to 2004 -- she wouldn't have had the gun."
Now you may support gun control or you may not, but I was simply stating the fact: If assault weapons had been banned, than Nancy Lanza would not have been able to obtain one, and her son Adam would not have been able to use it to slaughter 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Holly immediately replied: "I stand by what I said. Period."
Huh? She stands by what? She said she didn't see how gun control could have prevented the shooting; I explained how it could have. So she chooses to ignore the facts and stand by her, um, ignorance?
Sigh.
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But the other day, shortly after the massacre of 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, I saw a posting on Facebook that caught my attention. A woman by the name of Holly Williamson posted this:
"I fail to see how keeping guns from being owned by law abiding citizens would have kept this from happening."
To me, this was not so much a political statement, but a question of facts, so I tried to answer her.
I said, "Well, the assault weapon the shooter used was owned legally by his mother; he took it from her home. If assault weapons were banned -- as they were from 1994 to 2004 -- she wouldn't have had the gun."
Now you may support gun control or you may not, but I was simply stating the fact: If assault weapons had been banned, than Nancy Lanza would not have been able to obtain one, and her son Adam would not have been able to use it to slaughter 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Holly immediately replied: "I stand by what I said. Period."
Huh? She stands by what? She said she didn't see how gun control could have prevented the shooting; I explained how it could have. So she chooses to ignore the facts and stand by her, um, ignorance?
Sigh.
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Friday, December 7, 2012
Lame website of the week: National Junior Basketball of Long Beach
Suppose you're a parent in Long Beach, Calif., and you're considering putting your child in the local National Junior Basketball league .
As you visit the group's website, you might have a few questions, such as: How many games will there be? Where will practices be and when? How many practices will there be a week? How long does the league run? Are the teams co-ed, or are there separate teams for girls?
NONE of those questions are answered on the website, and what's worse, there is absolutely no way to ask them. There's no phone number, no email address, no contact form.
If you're wondering who runs the league, too bad, because there are no names at all on the site, even on the "About Us" page.
The site does offer a way for you to give them money, however.
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As you visit the group's website, you might have a few questions, such as: How many games will there be? Where will practices be and when? How many practices will there be a week? How long does the league run? Are the teams co-ed, or are there separate teams for girls?
NONE of those questions are answered on the website, and what's worse, there is absolutely no way to ask them. There's no phone number, no email address, no contact form.
If you're wondering who runs the league, too bad, because there are no names at all on the site, even on the "About Us" page.
The site does offer a way for you to give them money, however.
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