Architectural Psychology in The Shining

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If you’re at all interested in movies, Stanley Kubrick, Kubrick’s version of Stephen King’s The Shining, set design, psychology, or any combination of the above, you really should take twenty minutes to watch both of the following videos.

The Shining: Spatial Awareness and Set Design Part One:

The Shining: Spatial Awareness and Set Design Part Two:

(via Daring Fireball)

Awkward Family Photos: The Game!

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Long-time readers will know that my family has been featured on the Awkward Family Photos website not just once, but twice, and both photos were also featured in the Awkward Family Photos book.

Well, you can’t keep a good thing down — we’re now also featured in the Awkward Family Photos game!

Based on a popular website, Awkward Family Photos will be your new favorite party game! Combines classic and never- seen-before Awkward Family Photos with probing, open ended questions for a memorable game night full of laughter and creative discussion. Simply flip over an Awkward Family Photos featuring uncomfortable moments from weddings, vacations, and holidays and read aloud the open ended questions. Your hilarious answers guarantee a night of awkward fun…. and if you know your fellow players well enough, and impress them with your answers, you’ll get the last laugh.

Here’s the sales pitch, courtesy of AFP co-founder Mike Bender’s grandparents:

Mechanical Life and Intelligent Design

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From On the Origin of Transformers:

The advocates of ID, who are arguing that their belief should be included in science classes in Texas, Tennessee and other states, say that if a living organism has a design that cannot be explained by the theory of natural selection, it is proof of an Intelligent Designer. If you consider a Camaro, for example, wouldn’t it obviously have had a Designer? Could its parts have been assembled by a hurricane (or a trillion hurricanes) blowing through a junkyard?

Certainly not. Therefore, this is proof that Autobots were not assembled on Cybertron by hurricanes or any other means envisioned by Darwin, and were Intelligently Designed. That makes the Transformers series a compelling parable for ID, and I expect several of this year’s Republican presidential candidates to recommend the movies on that basis alone.

Roger Ebert, making the case for Intelligent Design…at least within the universe of the Transformers.

Life in Ellensburg: All Graduated and Employed!

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I know it’s been a long time since I’ve done much in the way of “real” blogging. Believe me, I know — it’s been bugging me. However, the reason for the delay has been for two very interconnected reasons: I don’t like blogging about things that are happening until they’ve actually happened, and I’ve been a lot busier here than I expected to be. It’s all for good reasons, though — Ellensburg has been treating me very well, as it turns out.

So. Last time I wrote much of anything, I’d just joined Prairie at our little apartment here in Ellensburg, had technically/officially graduated from CWU, and had picked up a temporary part-time job reworking the website for the CWU Department of Law and Justice.

Not long after starting that part-time position, the secretary for CWU’s Math, Writing, and Academic Advising centers left for a new job. Prairie put in a good word for me, and since working on the LAJ website had already put me into CWU’s system, hiring me was easy, so I added a second temporary part-time position covering the secretarial position for those three departments.

Right about the time I was wrapping up my work on the LAJ website, the LAJ secretary put in notice that she’d also accepted a different position. Once again, I happened to present the right combination of availability and ease of hiring — with the added bonus of already having started getting to know the Ellensburg LAJ staff and faculty — so I did a sort of sideways slide from the website work into filling in as the temporary secretary for the LAJ department.

So, for the past couple months, I’ve been working nearly full time in two temporary positions; part-time as the LAJ secretary for half the day, and part-time as the UMC/UWC/AA secretary for the other half of the day. It wasn’t what I was expecting — Prairie and I had both figured that I’d be spending this summer relaxing, goofing off, and generally bumming around Ellensburg — but it’s also felt good to be doing something. Plus, it seemed like both of these positions were great ways to get a foot or two in the door at CWU to see where that might lead.

June was in many ways all about graduation. Early in the month, Prairie and I drove over to the CWU-Kent campus for the annual end-of-year banquet for the Westside Law and Justice students, at which I was awarded Outstanding Graduating Westside Law and Justice Student honors. Then, in mid-June, Prairie and I took a week off of work for the formal graduation ceremonies.

My parents drove down from Alaska, and we started the festivities with the formal Honors Convocation here in Ellensburg, where I was recognized for achieving Dean’s Scholar status. Then we all drove over to the Westside so I could march in the Westside graduation ceremonies with all the classmates with whom I’d actually gone to school. I got my special silver tassel for graduating Magna Cum Laude, marched across the stage, and got my moment on the Jumbotron. Back to Ellensburg for a few days with my parents, a day in Olympia to meet Prairie’s newest niece, and then back to Ellensburg and back to work.

A couple of weeks ago, as soon as the position formally opened, I put in an application for the LAJ secretarial spot that I was filling. Just over a week ago I interviewed, and early this week, I was notified that I was the chosen candidate! Right now, I’m in the midst of my two-weeks notice for my UMC/UWC/AA position as the paperwork goes through for the LAJ spot, then as of mid-July, I’ll officially be the Secretary Senior for the CWU Department of Law and Justice. Not bad at all!

(And as a congratulatory prize, I ordered myself an iPad 2. It hasn’t shipped from Apple yet, but I should have it in another week or two. Yay, new techy geeky toys!)

Meanwhile, Prairie continues to do well running the Writing Center. At this point, we’re sure we’re set to be here in Ellensburg for at least the next year. Though we toyed with the idea of moving up to renting one of the houses nearby, we’ve decided to stay in our little apartment. It’s cute, we have it arranged so that it’s working quite well for both of us, and with both of us working good solid jobs, staying here will allow us to save a ton of money over the next year. At that point, we’ll reassess, decide what we’re going to do and where (if anywhere) we’re going to go, and our next move should be into a home of our own.

So, that’s where things stand at the moment — all in all, pretty darn good.

Markdown is the new Word 5.1

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From Markdown is the new Word 5.1:

There’s a way out of this loop of bouncing between cluttered word processors and process-centric writing tools, a way to avoid having cater to Clippy’s every whim while not having to hide your own work from yourself in order to concentrate. People have been saying for years that Word 5.1 needs to be ported to Mac OS X; that having that program running on current hardware would be the ideal solution to all of these problems with writing tools.

The truth is, there’s a solution now that’s most of the way there: Markdown and a good text editor. That’s the new Word 5.1. Think about it: a program like TextMate (I use TextWrangler. –mh) has almost no window chrome, and opens almost instantly. You start typing, and that’s all you have to do. I bring up Gruber because he invented Markdown, which lets you do basic formatting of text without really having to sweat much else. The types of formatting you don’t need aren’t even available to you when writing Markdown in a text editor, so you never have to deal with them.

Markdown will never be unreadable by a program, because it’s just ASCII text. It’s formatted, but if you’re reading the raw text, it’s not obscured the way a raw HTML file is. Any decent editor will give you a word count and can use headings as section and chapter breaks. With MultiMarkdown the options get even crazier: render your text file as a LaTeX document, or straight to PDF, or any number of other things. All from a text file and an editor with a minimal interface.

Almost all of my writing for many, many years now has been in a text editor using Markdown-formatted text. I’m using Markdown formatting for this blog post (which WordPress then automatically translates into HTML), I’ve written many, many discussion board posts for school in Markdown format before pasting them into BlackBoard, and I use Markdown formatting whenever I’m writing email messages.

I’m in that set of people who fondly remember Word 5.1, and miss the days of having a word processor that was actually a word processor, not an overblown attempt to do absolutely everything ever related to desktop publishing all at once (even Apple’s Pages, while far preferable to any post-5.1 version of Word, is far more than just a simple word processor). My senior year of high school, I booted my Mac Classic into Mac OS 6 with one 1.44 MB floppy; another 1.44 MB floppy held Word 5.1 and every paper I wrote that year.

Those days will never come again, admittedly. But a simple text editor and Markdown formatting is all that’s really needed.

A Real First-Class News Experience

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From Business Class: Freemium for News?:

I had a perspective changing talk on the subject of pay walls with the chief executive of a big publishing company…. He asked me what I think about pay walls. I told him what I always say: The main currency of news sites is attention and not dollars and that I believe that it is his job, as a publisher, to turn that attention into money to keep the attention machine running. He nodded and made the following, astonishing statement:

I can’t see pay walls working out either. But we need to do something before we lose all of our current subscribers. Sure. It’s a tough business environment, but… But the flight industry is a tough environment too, and they found ways. So tell me: Why do people fly Business Class? In the end, an airplane brings me to the same place regardless of whether I fly Economy or Business Class and the massive price-increase I pay doesn’t compare the difference in value.

People pay for Business Class because they don’t want to be tortured in Economy. They get faster lanes at the terror check. They get an extra glass of champagne. The stewards are more attentive. They get off the plane more quickly. They get the feeling of a higher social status.

He asked whether I knew of a way to apply this logic to online news. What would a Business Class news site look like?

Good stuff here. Since moving to Ellensburg, I’ve been frustrated with my lack of online access to local news. The one local paper is the Ellensburg Daily Record, which only posts a (very) limited number of stories on its website. If you want access to the full paper without subscribing to the dead-tree edition, they offer $5/month access to the full edition. However, from what I can tell, it’s presented in a specialized, locked-down format similar to a fancy .pdf file, through the Active Paper Daily service.

Now, I’m not a die-hard “information wants to be free” crusader, and I really don’t have a problem with paying a reasonable fee for media that I’m interested in. However, I do want to be able to use the information that I pay for, and a specialized browser system like Active Paper, which presents an “exact replica of [the] print edition”, which forces me to “browse through the pages just as if [I] had the newspaper in [my] hands”, is not something I’m willing to pay for. Give me text on a webpage, RSS feeds for my newsreader…information I can use, not something that locks it away.

If the Daily Record (along with many other news sites) were to move to the “Business Class” idea as proposed in the linked article, I’d find a subscription fee for access to a better-presented, ad-free (or ad-light) version of the site entirely reasonable. Let them slap as many ads as they want on the free version of the site, break their stories into as many pages as they want to increase click counts and ad impressions for the free readers, but give me the ability to subscribe to a premium version without all the crap. That’s a model for news sites I’d love to see gain traction.

My First and Only Online Handle

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From The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle:

Those of us who came of age alongside AOL must contend with something even more incriminating than a lifelong Google profile: A trail of discarded online aliases, each a distillation of how we viewed ourselves and our place in the world at the time of sign-on. The dawn of the Internet was an open invitation to free ourselves from the names our parents gave us and forge self-made identities divorced from our reputations IRL.

(via kottke)

I’m actually kind of lucky in this respect. I’ve only ever used one online handle, and while I’ve deprecated it a bit these days in favor of my real name, I still actively use it as a login name and occasional identifier. Most anyone who’s interacted with me online for any appreciable amount of time will recognize my online alias of djwudi.

A long time ago (though not in a galaxy far, far away), I was over at my friend Royce‘s house when his dad remarked that I “looked like a young Woody Allen.”

For a time, this little nugget of trivia was known only to Royce’s family and my own. At some point during my later high school years, though, a few things (namely, frustration at their being so many other Michaels in my age group, and a teenage-angst fueled desire to be “someone else”) led to my deciding to adopt the nickname of “Woody” full-time. It started with the yearbook and theater crew (both of which I was very involved with), and began to spread from there.

In the post-graduation years, I used “Woody” almost exclusively, in the social world and at my jobs. It wasn’t long before there were more people who knew me by “Woody” than by Michael.

Round about 1992 or so, the Anchorage alternative scene was somewhat in hibernation, especially for those under 21. I talked my way into a DJ spot at one club, then moved on to another, and then another, eventually spending around eight years DJing alternative/goth/industrial/retro/anything-but-pop for the Anchorage scene. My “DJ name” was obvious: DJ Woody, or, depending on how I felt when writing it out on flyers, DJ Wüdi, playing off Royce’s pseudo-Germanic version of my nickname.

The DJing eventually moved on into past tense rather than present, but as the world of the Internet grew, I soon found that short, unique names were both desirable and valuable, and that smooshing everything together into “djwudi” produced a string that, to date and to my knowledge, has not been used by anyone other than myself.

As the years have gone by, I’ve returned to using my given name in the real world and online, but I still claim djwudi on any site I sign up for.

Hey Look… Squirrel!

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From Yeah, Sure, We’re Underinvesting in Education, but Hey Look… Squirrel! | Slog:

Look… squirrel!

That’s pretty much the level of discourse we’ve been having over education funding in Washington state, the kind that’s designed to keep our eyes off the ball by assuming that voters have an attention span shorter than that of the average dog. Another $1.4 billion slashed from K-12 education, about $1,400 per student? Squirrel! 3,700 fewer teachers funded in WA’s public schools? Squirrel! A more than 50 percent reduction in higher education spending over the past two budgets? Squirrel!