Anyway, a little searching turned up some help in the WordPress forums, so hopefully this is all fixed up now.

When I started, the annual membership covered 6-7 presentations at which dinner was served. In the first season, they were at Mediterrano, and they were wonderful. The speakers were good, the food was fantastic and there was a cash bar. Then they moved the meetings to what’s now the basement at SPARK. It wasn’t as nice, but they had good catering and offered free wine and beer. And then they moved to Conor O’Neill’s, which was better, but then they went out to a hotel at the mall, which was abysmal. Now they’re back to the hideous SPARK basement. And as for dinner, the last meeting I tried to attend, I arrived 20 minutes late and there was no food at all present. None.

Dinner wasn’t the only benefit, though: in the first couple years, I got a number of clients from cold calls off the membership list on the website. It paid for my membership, in fact. I haven’t gotten any calls in the past couple years, though. Today I went to the Ad Club website, and tried searching for my listing, typing in ‘Mitten Artworks’ – all I got was an error, not my listing. No wonder there’s no business coming through that way.

I wrote a note today to let them know their member search was broken. Apparently, they’ll fix it this summer and if it I want it sooner, then I should volunteer. Well, um, no – I don’t think so. I pay dues and those dues are supposed to provide me benefits. If I’m not getting dinner and I’m not getting exposure, then what, exactly are you doing with my membership dollars?

So, no Ad Club next year. Maybe I’ll join the Chamber, but the more likely path is that I’ll be a member of a coworking space and put my money to good use there.

So we picked up Viva Pinata 2: Trouble in Paradise when it came out, and I was kind of excited to see what they had added. Unfortunately, I think they’ve broken it. It’s not fun anymore.

You see, in the first game, there were bad guys who would come in and break your decorations or smash your pinatas. Once you got to high enough level, however, there were enough tools at your disposal to ban all these bad guys from your garden and let you play in peace. You could do all sorts of fun decorating and landscaping, and you could raise very valuable rare pinatas without worrying that one of these bad guys would smash it all.

However, in the second game, they’ve changed the behavior of the head bad guy, Professor Pester. He comes into your garden once a ‘day’ (about every 15-20 minutes of game play) and smashes one of your most valuable pinatas.

Yes, I realize that it sounds ridiculous that I would be concerned enough about smashed pinatas to write a blog post. But it takes time and effort to get the good pinatas, not to mention in-game resources (chocolate coins). And thus, it is very frustrating to lose them.

And there’s the problem. There is no way to block Professor Pester forever, no matter how high a level you’ve achieved. There are two ‘normal’ ways to keep him at bay: you can  keep one of two very large pinatas in your garden, but that means fewer other pinatas, and it won’t stop Pester from smashing your buildings and decorations. Or you can buy an expensive decoy pinata – but that only works once, so you have to buy one every ‘day,’ which is brutal in terms of cost. There’s apparently a way to use a fence to trap him in one part of your garden, but then you have to listen to his grunting the whole time you’re playing. Blech.

Sorry Rare, but you’ve you screwed this one up. I suspect you just wanted to make the game a bit more challenging, but this has crossed into outright frustrating. The new romancing games and mini-games, as well as all the new pinata, are plenty challenging. It used to be really fun to build outlandish gardens full of crazy pinatas. But now that I either have to grind for cash or lose my best pinatas every time I play, it’s not fun anymore. You broke it. Please fix it. Give us a tool to keep Professor Pester out for good.

Now, I have been itching to get a MacBook now that my main machine is a Mac, but I don’t want to right this second. Rumor has it that the line is due for an update before the holidays, so it just doesn’t seem wise to buy one right now.

The two main uses of the PC laptop were Microsoft Money, where we keep all our accounting data, and the boys use it to look up walk-throughs for the console games they play while sitting in front of the tv. Only the first one is PC-centric. I do have back-up copies of the Money data files off-site, and I think that with an external monitor, I can probably get at them on the laptop.

And I do have a laptop I can use in the meantime, thanks to the good graces of the Toziers, who have lent me an old MacBook of theirs.

So. What to do, what to do. I’d like to move our accounting software to the Mac at some point, but QuickBooks seems like total overkill and Quicken for Leopard doesn’t exist right now. Having a PC around is useful for dev sometimes, but there are browser emulators online.

Argh. I’m so frustrated, I can’t even make a list of options. None are good. I just need a PC for this one stupid thing – we’ve got five years of financial data in there – otherwise, I’d just ditch the damn the thing.

Adverse conditions today dictate covert operations. We will be infiltrating several buildings, including one designed personally by the chief architect of the enemy forces, Gehry. His monstrous eyesores have struck fear and loathing into the hearts of thousands, and for an unlucky few, even caused blindness with their egregious ugliness. Pray that we return safely.

The problem with the phrase ‘global warming’ is that it’s a scientist’s point of view, not a citizen’s point of view. Yes, the planet as a whole may be getting warmer, but most people don’t grasp that – they see that they’ve had a unusually cold winter and laugh at the idea that their world is getting warmer. Why should they believe a scientist who says something they can clearly see is not true? The scientists were telling the wrong story. Their narrative was working at cross purposes to their goal. It allowed average people to dismiss them as wackos.

Imagine what would have happened if they had started out with the now fashionable phrase ‘climate change.’ The story the scientists could have told from the beginning was that the planet as a whole is warming and that will dramatically change weather patterns everywhere. Some places will see more storms, some will see less rain, some will be colder, some will be hotter. That narrative – change instead of warming – would have made it much more clear to the average Joe that it was an important issue that needs attention. Citizens everywhere could have seen that wow, there has been less rain (or more snow or stronger storms or whatever) in their world. It would have made more sense. It’s the right story, the one that helps rally people to their cause.

So if you’re out and about on this Earth Day trying to get people to fight global warming, consider rethinking your story. It’s not about the science, it’s about the people and how they will be effected. Tell them the story that lines up with their experience: climates are changing at a rapid rate and we need to slow that down.

Jack is in seventh grade and is taking the required Health class. It includes the dreaded Subject One Does Not Speak About With One’s Mother, but apparently covers other stuff like exercise and nutrition and so forth as well. He was feeling chatty after school yesterday and was telling me that they were covering why people eat the foods they do. For example, your religion may ban certain foods, your culture may have its own foods, certain foods may be convenient, etc. I asked him if they talked about economics – why you might make food choices based on how much some foods cost. Nope. Never mentioned.

As I watch the economy imploding in front of our eyes (you can’t even trade dollars for euros in Amsterdam anymore, as the dollar is falling so fast), I daresay that foods of economy should have been covered. Oh wait, we’re in Ann Arbor, which is naturally immune from reality.

And on the flip side:

Sam was cleaning out his backpack this morning and pulled out a little cardboard box, hideously decorated with purple felt and red & green plaid Christmas ribbon. I hesitantly asked if he made it (normally he has a fine sense of color and would never perpetrate such a crime of clashiness), and he said no, he bought it with pretend money on their ‘business day.’ Business day? Oh yes, the kids are split up into groups and they each have a business. His group makes things out of duct tape and string and sells them.

I asked him when this ‘business day’ was and he said they do it every other week. On the alternate weeks, they have auctions of items kids bring from home. I didn’t know whether to applaud or cry. On the one hand, I think it’s cool that they’re teaching kids about basic business concepts in a hands on way, especially for Sam, as he takes to it like a fish to water.

On the other, what about the basics? Sam *hates* reading – he struggles a bit with mechanics, which doesn’t help, but mostly he’s bored to tears by the material. When I was in fifth grade, we read cool, engaging books like A Wrinkle in Time (I remember it vividly*) and The Phantom Tollbooth. But because of this ‘integrated curriculum’ idea where math is supposed to cross over into social studies and social studies into reading and so on and so forth, round and round, the books they read are these boring things meant to teach them about time periods or locations or whatever. I’ve read some of his assigned reading – dull and turgid, to say the least. (He approves of the current read-aloud book, however; it has cat warriors and describes in detail how they kill things. Not sure how that fits into ‘integrated curriculum,’ but at least he likes it.)

So is it ok that there’s no time to teach lively novels but there’s time for commerce? I don’t know. If nothing else, it seems to prove that schools are meant to create employees (and consumers), not thinkers.

* In fifth grade, we read A Wrinkle in Time, and being the kind of child I was, I read ahead in the book. When called on in class to give a summary of events in the previous night’s reading assignment, I went farther than I should have – giving away events to come in chapters that hadn’t been assigned yet. I didn’t mean to, but the teacher was so mad. I was mortified and horrified and embarrassed beyond belief. Skipping ahead had never gotten me in trouble before.

But there’s a problem with railing against all that sameness. The web needs horizontal navigation bars and/or left/right side navigation. It’s necessary for usability. Given the amount of stupidity I watch people exhibit each and every day, especially at airports, they simply cannot be relied on to think. Sameness in navigation makes the web work.

Take cars for example: there’s a seat, a steering wheel, a brake pedal and a gas pedal (and maybe a shifting system, but no one uses them anymore). I can get into just about any car and drive it without any time to come up to speed on its navigational system. Oh, it might take me a moment to find auxiliary things like the wipers or the gas tank door, but even with those, I have a good idea of where to look.

And so, my internal devil’s advocate says to me, a Mini Cooper looks nothing like a Hummer, so why are you complaining about websites all looking the same? And I say back to it, those are extreme examples – there are precious few design differences in the sea of boring family sedans and minivans and ’sport’ ‘utility’ vehicles. They all look the same, just like all those dull, boring, repetitive, but usable websites out there.

And then there is a tiny voice in the back which says “What about go-carts? What about airplanes?” (I have found that it is unwise to ignore this particular voice when it chooses to speak up. It’s the one that, at least sometimes, leads to Big Things.) A go-cart is Essence of Car, to my mind. Engine, wheels, navigation/speed control system, driver’s seat, that’s about it. How can I apply that to web site design? What if I strip everything away but the essence, then what can I do with it? A go-cart doesn’t look too much like a family sedan, but I bet most people could drive it. Go-cart engines are very close to the driver – what would that mean in site design? They’re also very low to the ground compared to regular cars – what would that mean to a site?

And airplanes. I don’t know how to fly one, but there are at least some similarities – some kind of directional control, some kind of engine/speed control, a driver’s seat. I’m guessing that it wouldn’t take much instruction to learn what those controls are, even if it would take much longer to master them. So now we (my voices and I) are getting into the realm of vehicle control in an abstract sense. What does that mean to site design? If I were to provide abstracted site navigation, similar enough to regular navigation that a casual user could make a fairly accurate guess as to what the navigational tools might do, then what might a web site look like?

Don’t even get us started on boats.

People understand traditional website navigation now. It’s ingrained, it’s natural, needs no explanation. There must be a way to move to the next level. People figured out that ABS brakes work different from regular ones, they can figure out something new on the web, too. But what?

++++++

Or perhaps I just need a vacation from the web. SXSW was fun, but it sure as hell wasn’t that. In fact, it was the exact opposite of that.

Luckily, Keith and I are off to SXSW in the middle of this stupid AAPS vacation schedule. I can’t wait; both for the geek heaven which is SXSW and for the warmth of Texas.

But for the moment, I’m focused on this week. I see lots of Rock Band and other Xbox goodness, and I think we’ll probably head out for some of the library events like teen game play day on Friday, and I’m sure there will be some movies thrown in there too. Wish us luck!