Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at August 28th, 2004

I’d always intended to make commenting about online comics a regular feature of this blog. As with many things I’ve intended to do, I haven’t gotten around to it. Consider this post a down payment on good intentions (which pave the road to Hell?).

Note: In the process of telling people about the premise of this comic, I’m going to give away the major point of tension in the first chapter and possibly other minor points later on. So, if things sound interesting and you don’t want to know much about the comic before you start reading, stop reading as soon as you can.

Wish3 is a comic written by Sylvia T. Leung, a student in Digital Media at the Otis College of Art.

It’s about Basil, a high school student who discovers he’s the recipient of the family curse. The curse is that the third son of a third son can make three wishes, but, after the third wish will either go mad or die. Worse, he discovers that his family already knows about the wishes, is planning to have him make one wish for each of them, and didn’t tell him about the consequences.

The comic is about his attempt to break the curse before he (accidentally or intentionally) makes the third wish. Assisting him is one of his brothers, a friend, and a spirit associated with his family.

The art seems good (at least to me, a person untrained in drawing), though I sometimes find the fight scenes a little confusing. I’m guessing that this is because the story is drawn to fit print style comic pages as opposed to the web. In fact, like many an online comic writer, she’s selling print versions of her work.

The plot and characters feel real to me. We’ll see how things develop before I can really say what I think about that. Still, it feels right so far.

The author used to update quite sporadically owing to an understanding of copyright law which seemed to indicate that she would have to register each page separately if she published them separately. At $20 per page, it would get expensive. Thus, she updated a chapter at a time.

Now she’s updating weekly. I’m not sure what changed, but I’m assuming it turns out that she can probably copyright each chapter at once.

Whatever may be the case, I recommend the comic. As someone who enjoys history (real or imagined), I enjoy watching the characters find out about Basil’s family’s past in an attempt to learn how the curse came about and how to end it.

Of course, I tend to enjoy stories in which the characters slowly discover the causes of the situation they’re in and then can use that knowledge to solve the problem. That’s a pretty good description of most role playing games I’ve run. Judging from the forum, however, it seems pretty likely that the comic appeals to more people than just me.

It deserves to.

Posted by Jim at August 26th, 2004

One thing that I notice as a result of working downtown is the number of people asking for money. When I used to work at a market research firm out in the suburbs, I never ended up being asked for money at all. I’m sure this is largely because in the suburbs you park directly in front of the building you want to go to and you don’t walk anywhere.

By contrast, parking is much less common downtown. You park whereever you can and then you walk from there. Also, of course, property is much more private outside of the downtown area. You can easily call the police and charge someone for trespassing if they’re on your property. In the downtown, you have public property and a lot of rental property. As long as you’re not in someone’s shop, they don’t care what you’re doing.

Thus, if you work downtown, you will be more likely to be asked for money at some point than you are to be left alone.

I find that I have two competing impulses when asked for money. One is to give it (”…whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me…”). The other is not to. The “not to” impulse comes largely out of a dislike of being manipulated.

What I mean by that is that when people come up to me, they seldom have a frantic look in their eyes and don’t really display an outward sense of worry. Generally, they seem to have a practised line of approach. I often get the same feel from them that I get from salesmen in stores and over the telephone. Basically, I sense a script and a bunch of standard responses to calm objections.

Some Common Elements:

A small request: Usually the person asks for 20 cents or 80 or something small. Bearing in mind that it’s easier to hand over a buck than fish through your wallet for change, the people that do give probably give more than that. Also, psychologically speaking, once you decide to give a small amount, you can generally be asked for a bigger amount later.

Race: White people don’t like to consider themselves racist. When I’ve been asked for money, a number of the people who have done it have implied that if I don’t, it’s because they’re not white.

A memorable example of this came one day on the way to my car. I had noticed a black man waving at something as I was walking. Because I didn’t know the man from Adam and there were other people on the street, I assumed that he couldn’t possibly be waving at me and walked on. After a bit he caught up to me, beginning the conversation with “Do you know how racist you are?”

Being trained in sociology and psychology, I tend to assume that I have unexamined race related issues. Thus, rather than defend myself, I assumed that it was a rhetorical question and that he would soon launch into an explanation of how racist I was. Thus, I said nothing. Stymied by my lack of response, however, he stopped for a moment, then completely changed topics. Talk turned to money rather quickly nonetheless.

Interestingly, I’ve seen this in reverse as well. Once a white person asked for money saying, “Got some money for a white guy?” Presumably he felt that being white made him more deserving than a black person. That or he thought that I would. Possibly both.

Religion: I’ve had more than one person imply that they’re Christian or ask me if I go to church and then point out that they need help. Partly this seems an effort to point out that they are trustworthy people, partly an attempt to imply that I am not living up to my religion if I don’t help them.

Daughters: Every time someone has come up to me asking for money, it turns out that they have daughters. Daughters who are waiting in the car (which is out of gas). Daughters whose mother has died of AIDS. Daughters who desperately need money for something. Even in a society where women are viewed as capable of supporting themselves, the idea that a girl needs help somehow has more resonance than a boy needing help. At least that’s my explanation for the utter lack of boys in the stories I hear.

Actually, so long as I’m on the topic of gender, I should note that I’ve never had a woman ask me for money. Only men.

A Story That Breaks the Mold:
Though most stories seem to be created to assure me that the person is desparately in need of money for food and not the sort of person who would spend money on mind altering substances, I’ve talked to someone using the exact opposite technique.

“Do you have a buck, mister? I’m going to spend it on beer. It’s for my nerves.”

I’m going to assume that it worked, because I’ve talked to a number of people who apparently talked to the exact same guy.

My Conclusions (such as they are):
The ironic thing about the whole thing is that people can’t be making a whole lot of money off this. You could spend 5-10 minutes talking to someone and get 50 cents. Basically, if you have to walk up to someone and ask for money, you’re living in poverty at best.

As such, even with the manipulation included, you’re probably still giving to someone who desperately needs it. In that sense, it may be money well spent if you can afford it yourself. I’m more inclined to give to organizations that try to solve the problem of poverty than people who appear to be in it, but people do need help that organizations can’t or won’t provide.

I’ve heard of one person who set a certain amount of money she was willing to give per week. After that point, she’d say no. It’s a compromise, I sometimes think about trying.

Still, it’s a hard choice for me. I’m not naturally inclined to trust random strangers, but there are people in need everywhere and I don’t want to miss helping someone who genuinely needs it.

Posted by Jim at August 23rd, 2004

One of those things that no one bothers to tell you about having children (particulary toddlers) is that they don’t stop moving when you stop looking at them. One reason they don’t mention it is that it is blindingly obvious. Another is that you don’t really understand the implications until your children can run free in the house.

Or to put it another way, you don’t really understand the implications until you’ve left a child unwatched for a moment.

This is something, I might add, that you seldom do with infants. Infants can drown in remarkably small amounts of water, so you can’t leave them alone in the bath. Similarly, stairs can be death traps for crawling or just walking children. As such, Kristen and I never let the kids out of our sight when they were younger. We put up gates to prevent them from falling down either of our staircases and never walked away from the bathtub.

Now however, Abby and Rebecca have hit a point where they can almost be trusted. We can reasonably expect them to go up stairs without tripping and rolling down. We’ve taken down the gates, much to my relief (three pairs of pants ripped in the worst of all possible spots due to wear from stepping over them…).

Here are the results of freedom of motion:

–Rebecca and Abby can now “feed the cats,” filling the cats’ bowls to a point that they overflow to a distance of 6 inches on either side of the bowl.

–With some work, Abby can now climb to the top shelf of the basement closet, pulling out the chalk, crayons, and “Blue’s Clues” paper that I’d attempted to store out of their reach.

–Related to the above, it turns out that chalk is surprisingly easy to remove from the basement walls even if your kids managed to scribble practically from the floor to the ceiling.

–Also related to the above, it turns out that crayon will come off a television screen if you apply a hot, moist rag (you may want to turn off the tv beforehand).

Finally, it is also worth mentioning that once toddlers can get out of cribs, you might just want to consider buying a bed. It will be less messy. When a baby has a dirty diaper, it has to wait for you to do something about it. When a toddler has a dirty diaper, she can take the diaper off, climb out of the crib and inform you of the problem. If she continues to hold the diaper, she can splatter the bed, her sheets, the carpet, and the wall (to a height of three feet) with utter nastiness.

Not that the last event ever happened to me. If anyone, Kristen should probably be telling that story, but I think she’s still too traumatized.

Posted by Jim at August 17th, 2004

I recently discovered that the upgraded version of php (a language commonly used for creating web pages) that I’d installed no longer worked with mysql (a database). Owing to the fact that this was incredibly inconvenient (the combination of php with mysql is almost the whole point of using php), I’ve since been working to change the situation.

After a fairly quick search, I learned that I’ve got to compile the extensions to php separately (connecting to a mysql database requires an extension). So… I’ve done that now and things work.

It kind of disturbs me how easy and sensible it seemed.

See, unix-descended operating systems are still a pain when it comes to installing programs. You have to descend into the command line whenever you need to do things that are at all useful and important.

Personally, my ideal as always been that I install the program, it works, and I work on learning how to use it. With FreeBSD (and Linux for that matter), I seem to install, discover I have to reconfigure a text file/install another program/download a different library, and, only after that do I get to use it. Even then, that assumes that there’s not so much configuration that I get frustrated and take a few days off from bothering with it.

The fact that this much more detail oriented process seems easier and more sensible as time goes on makes sense in that the more I know, the more I’m comfortable modifying the system for my convenience.

That being said, on another level, it kind of offends me. When I don’t know anything and don’t have any opinions on wierd ways to configure the program, I just want the defaults. I just want it to work. After it works (and only then), I sometimes get involved enough that I want to be able to do non-standard things.

To the extent that people who use Linux/Freebsd are mostly people with degrees/background in computer science/IT, having piles of freaky options to consider just to get basic stuff to run is understandable. In the sense that you want to pull people into using Linux or Freebsd, it doesn’t.

Your average art major might want to try Blender or the GIMP out of curiousity, but they probably don’t want to compile them (if they know what compiling is). Ditto, open office. They also don’t want to go hunting down obscure libraries.

Personally, my bias would be to make everything as easy to install as possible and then make it equally easy for experts to reconfigure stuff later. It’d be cool to have the entry point be as low as possible.

This is partially for selfish reasons. The way things are going, I have the potential to become one of those horrible techie types who has no idea why people just don’t use bash to solve all their problems and have no idea why vi is completely horrible for non-techie types to use.

An example of this:

A few years ago, when I knew less about unix than I do now, I mentioned to the system administrator where I worked that I thought that vi was a massive pain. He could understand where I might have trouble with it and installed nvi because it might be easier. Unfortunately, I never found out in what way nvi was easier. It has the exact same interface as vi (so far as I could tell) and he didn’t bother to install the nvi man page.

I don’t want to lose track of what the average human finds easy. There are too many confusing computer programs out there as it is.

Posted by Jim at August 14th, 2004

GI Joe’s military record a fake (from Salon).

From the article:

Veterans group says military hero lied about his record; claims evil villains escaped his clutches during war against Cobra.

Posted by Jim at August 14th, 2004

Downtown Grand Rapids finally has a sushi restaurant.

Though I noticed it was going in a couple weeks ago, I only realized it was open on Wednesday. As it happens, it had opened on Monday.

It’s at 47 Monroe Center. That’s right next to Grand Rapids’ police department. Grand Rapids’ police department is in what used to be Mackey’s World (an attempt at a children’s mall) and was before that a mall for grown-ups.

Marado Sushi itself is in a space that I’ve visited in several of it’s previous incarnations. First as “Dr. J’s,” a Jazz themed coffeehouse that was sadly doomed from the start. First, because it charged a cover for live music while free live music was going on just a block away at an open city amphitheater. Second, because it tried to be a nightclub that served coffee. You can markup alchol much more than you can coffee.

The second restaurant was a combination sandwich shop/coffeehouse. It was also doomed, competing with a restaurant that did exactly the same thing just across the street. Also, it occupied a space much larger than it needed for what it did (large enough to host Jazz bands…) and I’m pretty sure they were paying rent by the square foot.

Still, you’d think that a place that sold coffee and donuts and was located next to the police department would survive.

So now we’ve got Marado Sushi in that same place. The sushi seems good. At least it did when I got take out on Thursday. I bought the very cheapest assortment of sushi they sell (10.95). The woman who took my order seemed unsure that I would be full on something that small and gave me a house salad for free. It turned out to be 6 pieces of sushi plus a tuna roll (cut in 6 pieces) plus the salad. For me at least, that’s filling enough for lunch.

Apparently, it’s the first time that the cook/owner has actually run a restaurant. Previously, she’s run a sushi stand (something like that). They’re currently still figuring out the system for getting the food to the diner in reasonable time and how many waitresses they really need.

Once they get their system down, it seems possible that they’ll survive. More spaces seem to be occupied downtown. The old Steketee’s department store looks like it will become the local offices for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The new art museum will be a short block away. This kind of professional, cultural environment might bring enough people who like sushi downtown.

At any rate, I hope so.

Posted by Jim at August 10th, 2004

I’ve mixed feelings about “fun family outings.”

When we attempt to take our kids out to do something, the experience generally falls into one of three categories:

1. Hilariously funny as we watch kids have their own unjaded takes on things we’ve done a lot.
2. Absolutely horrible as the kids run like maniacs in all directions, complain incessantly, or throw massive tantrums.
3. Both simultaneously at different points in the same outing.

Some example “fun” outings:

Rollerblading: Theoretically fun, but more likely to be fun if the kids are both full (having just eaten) and tired as they will tend to fall asleep in the burley (a small trailer/rolling cart).

Most definitely not fun if the kids have not eaten recently and are tired enough to be unhappy but not tired enough to sleep. On a recent trip, Abby and Rebecca both wailed for roughly the entire 4 mile return leg of the trip.

Watching Boats and Ducks at Reeds Lake: Fun up until the moment we decide to leave. Abby and Rebecca love watching boats. They love watching ducks. They do not want to go home.

Quote from Becca, “See boats NOW!” Also, “DUCK!” Or “BOAT!” Also, “NOTHER BOAT!”

Visiting Meijer Gardens: We’ve got a membership that allows us to visit as often as we want. Abby and Rebecca will happily run throughout the gardens, but are particularly interested in the pools that are roughly in the shape of the Great Lakes including an appropriate elevation. Children are allowed and even encouraged to float boats in the lakes.

Abby and Becca could stay there all day.

One bad point… A 20 minute car ride that is long enough for Abby and Rebecca to get bored but not fall asleep. Thanks to that, they have to entertain themselves by shouting, kicking the back of the driver’s seat, screaming at each other or me, demanding to go to Reed’s Lake and see boats, or advising me that they (or at least Abby) would prefer I take another route.

This sort of thing has the potential to get me to invoke the ultimate punishment:

Stopping the car and listening to the radio.

NPR talk/news shows work wonderfully for this. I’m entertained and they’re bored out of their minds–so bored that they’ll consider the possibility that kicking Daddy’s seat is not fun and that it might be time to stop now.

Otherwise, I’m going to make them listen to more Diane Rehm.

Posted by Jim at August 8th, 2004

It’s now official, geocaching has become mainstream.

The city of Grand Rapids now includes it as a class in it’s Parks and Recreation Guide. Take a look at the bottom of page six.

Posted by Jim at August 4th, 2004

I got my bike fixed last week.

I haven’t ridden it regularly in almost 10 years and probably wouldn’t have gotten it fixed now except that it’s my wife’s and my tenth wedding anniversary and Kristen wanted to spend some time riding bikes this weekend.

When I say that I got my bike fixed last week, what I really mean is that most of it got fixed last week. One key detail got left out. When I rode the bike home from the bike shop, I noticed that the chain would slip, then catch, then slip again. This would only happen in tenth gear–and even then, only if someone were riding the bike. Bearing in mind that bike shops tend to test/fix things on a stand, it would be easy to miss this particular problem.

Now that it’s fixed, I’m theoretically free to ride the bike. Theoretically in the sense that I’d love to ride it to work except that I have to drop by daycare with at least one kid in the morning. Bringing a kid (or two) while pulling a Burley through busy morning traffic strikes me as more bother than it’s worth. Not to mention finding a place to keep the trailer at work. Outside of that, I’d rather ride than drive.

Still, having the bike work again after years of disuse is a strange thing. It’s an object layered with memories of growing up in Holland (Michigan, not the Netherlands).

I look at it and think about:
–buying it with years of saved money in 6th grade
–biking to summer swim practise in middle and high school
–years of working on the grounds crew during the summer in college
–working on Padnos’ Blockcrusher (a machine that crushed engine blocks for recycling) one summer during seminary
–biking to school from middle school through seminary

At Ed’s wedding his sister Sue told a story about seeing Ed and I riding to his house after high school.

We were apparently riding right next to each other on the sidewalk. We both saw her and my sister Lisa at the same time. We both turned our heads and waved our hands at the same time.

Unfortunately, our ways diverged after that. I continued riding down the sidewalk, but Ed hit a flowerbed just to the right of the sidewalk and fell over.

This is the same bike I was riding then.

Posted by Jim at August 2nd, 2004

When my parents moved this spring, they found some things I hadn’t seen in years. Amoung them were Star Wars trading cards. Looking over the cards made me remember being 7 and the total fascination I had with Star Wars at the time.

A few trading cards:

A couple stickers (unused):