Blizzo :: The Morgan Blog

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I love craigslist. In addition to lots of good job postings and a great way to recycle old stuff I want to get rid of (like my old BBQ grill), it can be a great place to find services. Amy and I are big photography buffs. We have taken Mason to several photo shoots at places like K-Mart, and generally they are OK, but not very interesting. So how can you get a good photographer to take quality family photos without spending a lot of money? Enter Craigslist.

I put up a craigslist posting in the Creative section of the Gigs area asking for photographers who want to build their portfolios and earn a little money. I was overwhelmed by the responses, I think I had almost 50 responses within seven days. April O’Hare offered a good deal. She would shoot a roll of film (24 exposure) and give us 4×6 prints of all of them as well as a CD with high resolution scans of the negatives for $50. Not a good deal, a GREAT deal. She has since raised her rates, $80 for the session and an additional $10 for the CD, but still a good deal.

Not only that, but she did not have a website. I ended up trading services with her. I am building her a website (its almost done, www.apriloharephotography.com) and instead of cash compensation I get a credit towards services from her. It’s working out great!

There are two things that make Craigslist more a societal culture shift than a website. The first is the trend towards recycling items that would normally be heading towards a landfill (SOMEbody wants my old patio chairs, I’m sure). The second is the reappearance of the bartering system. Not only can you haggle, but you can offer non-traditional forms of compensation. I actually saw a posting of a girl offering her… oral services in exchange for someone doing about 20 loads of laundry for her. I’m not saying thats good or bad, just interesting. If you have a skill, you can now get more for your money by trading that skill in exchange for goods or services from others. A plumber can fix someone’s clogged drain while the guy fixes his laptop.

Anyway, on to my adorable family!

For a white guy I think I’m pretty aware when it comes to racial issues. In our urban utopias we like to think that racism is less of an issue when compared to the water-logged south. These thoughts are dangerous, and misleading. About two years ago I bought a house in a neighborhood just outside downtown Denver. Apparently back when the KKK was a roaring force in Denver around the turn of the century they established a race line. African-American people were only allowed to live north of 23rd Avenue and west of (roughly) York St. My house lay smack in the middle of this area.

Thankfully our world today has a little more justice, and there are no such limitations. However, due to that historical fact, the neighborhood is still predominantly black. Obviously I have no problem with this, I mean, I bought a house there, right? It didn’t take long to realize we weren’t really welcome. While there were plenty of people, regardless of race, who smiled and waved as we went for early evening walks, just as many people, predominately the African-American neighbors, would not only glare at us as we walked by, but continue to glare even after I smiled and waved at them (So much for taking initiative).

On the way to work this morning I was staring absently out the window (no, I wasn’t driving) and we drove past a young black girl who was jaywalking. We couldn’t see her as we approached, and we were nowhere near hitting her, but it just so happened that I made eye contact with her as she drifted past my field of vision. Her face contorted into a scowl and she proceeded to yell something offensive at me as we drove away. I couldn’t make out the words.

I was quite angry about this exchange. I vented to my wife about it quite a bit for the rest of the drive. Guaranteed, if this girl knew anything about me, that would have been a smile and a wave, not a heated exchange. Prejudice is not born of color, but of misunderstanding. What percentage of people make an honest attempt to understand and know someone regardless of first impressions? How do you break the ice with a neighbor who lives not more than fifty feet away from you, who through the course of two years has never offered anything more in greeting than an icy stare.

So what is my response to this treatment? First I feel anger, and then I feel guilt for my anger. If my neighbor were a middle class Caucasian male, I could happily feel angry at him all day. But because of race, I feel like I’m not allowed guilt. Who am I to be angry at people that have been discriminated against by people like me all their lives. Conclusion, I am a racist. A new racist. I am a racist because I am not able to treat others equally. I cannot express my feelings honestly for fear of appearing to be an old racist. Where is this stupid melting pot they kept promising us?

Over the last couple of years Hollywood has churned out one disappointing movie after another. If they aren’t cashing in on the nostalgia craze (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dukes of Hazard, Bad News Bears, etc) or ripping off comic books (Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Elektra, etc) they’re taking potentially interesting movies and dumbing them down until they could not possibly offend anyone.

This post is spinning off of a conversation I just had with Jason regarding this article about the upcoming movie version of The Da Vinci Code. Apparently they are so scared of offending certain groups of religious people that they are going to take out references to religious aspects of the book that do not conform to current beliefs of the Catholic church. Has anyone read that book? There would be no point in making it without those references. I’m not a huge fan of the Da Vinci Code as a book, but as I read it I kept thinking what a great movie it would have made. I’m frankly surprised they didn’t release it in screenplay format to begin with.

So what is happening to Hollywood? I blame digital special effects to start with. Like any kid with a new toy, they have been rearranging their lives to find any excuse to use it. Special effects are great and everything, but why not actually, you know, try to write a good story first. They have become reliant on the special effects to distract the viewers from the pathetic storylines.

I don’t really see people putting up with this long-term. Eventually attendance to movies (which is already way down at the moment) will drop to the point that they have to try something else or go out of business. Part of the problem is that movies cost so much to make now. Corporate Hollywood would rather release a mediocre movie that stays in the black than release something that might not be well received. I remember reading somewhere that every major movie studio is something like 5 flops away from going bankrupt. That doesn’t leave much motivation to take risks or experiment.

The independent movie scene has been gaining strength while Hollywood’s wanes. This trend will continue until there is more money to be made in “Independent” films, at which point the corporations will ruin those as well.

The Time Traveler’s Wife
By Audrey Niffenegger

Rating: 5/5

I just finished reading this book by first time author Audrey Niffenegger. I thoroughly enjoyed her writing style. She has a nice voice, descriptive and enticing, and plenty of plot threads to keep you turning pages even when you start fighting sleep during those late night reading sessions.

The book is primarily about two people, Henry and Clare, who are friends and lovers. The catch is that Henry involuntarily time travels, and pops up anywhere in recent history sans clothing and usually feeling sick. This causes lots of interesting, as often good as bad, situations depending on where/when Henry appears. We find him visiting Clare as a child while he is middle aged, popping into his childhood bedroom and talking to himself, seeing intense moments in his life over and over from different angles.

The situation reminds me of the Cassandra Complex. If Henry sees something in the future, he knows that no matter what he does that’s the way it will turn out. As a result he guards this knowledge carefully, as sharing it with others in the “present” can lead to great frustration as they try to undo the future. The book goes on in an appropriate level of detail to describe the scientific rationales for his involuntary temporal leaps, but not in so much detail that you can pick it apart.

Beyond the time travel aspect, the book describes a touching and, for me quite familiar, love story between Henry and Clare. The characters are highly accessible and believable, and you experience their joy and sorrow as you read.

The book also lends itself to great conversation and it even has a couple pages of discussion questions in the back. While most of them are a little on the obvious side, they point out certain themes throughout the book that are fun to discuss.

All this translates to a rating of 5 out of 5. Niffenegger manages to combine the great American novel with a science fiction story, and it works. It works well. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy, at the very least you will find it interesting, if not a truly cathartic experience.

For several years now I have been working as a Web Application Developer. I started out working with my friend Jeremy reverse engineering and hacking up a PERL driven flat file database application to create a jobs website for Colorado State University.

Soon enough ASP came along and I moved up to creating true database driven websites with Microsoft Access and VBScript. I did a few projects with those tools before I woke up and moved on to using a LAMP environment. It was a lot like developing in ASP except with, you know, actual error messages and a heck of a lot more support on the web.

You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard all about AJAX if you are a web developer. Most every other technology worker has heard of it by now as well and it has been taking the internet by storm. One thing I find amusing are all the articles and examples I read of people who try and reject the term AJAX to describe a technique that they have been using for some time. I think they’re just jealous they didn’t come up with a name first.

Now on the cusp of releasing my first fully fledged AJAX based web application I feel like I have enough background to offer some comments and criticism. One major red flag that comes up for me are the use of SPI’s (Single Page Interfaces) and search engine compatibility. How can something spider and index your site, and provide links pointing back to it if there is only one URL for dozens of pages of content?

The other thing I have concerns about is usability. Working for a University means I have to be much more sensitive my potential audience than a corporate developer might be. I’m sure that these issues will be addressed as the movement progresses.

I love the way this new application feels. It’s so responsive and, well, it’s just cool. I wish I could share it with you but it handles confidential data. Once I got the hang of the mechanisms for communication the doors opened up and everything just got easy. If any of you are curious, here are some links that got me on the road to AJAX bliss.

Great PHP/MySQL AJAX Tutorial
Detailed Description of the XMLHTTPRequest Object
More XMLHTTPRequest Object Goodness
Working Examples of AJAX Applications
XMLHTTPRequest Usability Article
XMLHTTPRequest Wiki

Today is my birthday. I’m just shy of accumulating three decades of life on Earth. If you have been waiting for the perfect opportunity to give someone a lot of cash, or that rare exotic animal that is one of the last three in existence, send them now!

Last week I took my lunch hour to run down to the Social Security office on the 16th Street Mall in downtown Denver. After being turned away at the door for the Swiss army knife on my keychain I stashed it across the street behind a concrete trash bin and went back in. They gave me a number, 133, and there was no “now being served” sign to be found. I was told I could have a seat and wait or I could get in line and maybe I would be served before my number was called. In hindsight I cannot figure out why some people are given numbers and some are told to wait in line. It all seems rather silly.

So I got in line and stood there for some time. No numbers were called and no one in the line moved forward. Two of the four counters had plywood nailed over them and one of them was vacant. The center of the room had rows of hard chairs bolted to the floor and not one of them was vacant. I silently cursed at myself for leaving my book at the office. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” would be a cheery escape compared to the faces and ambience of this cramped little room with fluorescent lighting.

The minutes crawled mercilessly by. Five minutes. Ten minutes. The line remained the same, the crowded seats stayed crowded. From what I could see not a single person had been helped. It was right about then that a woman in line up ahead of me caught my eye. She looked Hispanic, but with very light skin so I couldn’t be sure. Her short, dark, curly, oversized hair was accented by some poor silky looking black shirt. The synthetic fabric was stretched across her skin like an explorer, leaving no fold or crack unfound. After what appeared to be 5 or 6 decades on the planet, there was plenty of creative terrain to be displayed too.
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