Some Blog Site

What did people give away before iPads?

iPods

What did people give away before iPods?

Who knows?

Where would Apple’s business be without surveys and raffles and publicity-grabbing ads (“Visit our store for a chance to win an iPad!”)?

And where would the raffle/giveaway business be without Apple products?

I’m sure we could survive without either of those businesses. They do have a nice symbiotic relationship going though –
with or without you.

Last year, our kids received the game Guess Who by Milton Bradley and/or Hasbro.

For those not familiar with the game, you need some context. Guess Who involves guessing which character the other person has chosen. Each player starts with the same pool of people. By asking yes-or-no questions (“Does your person have a beard?”), you eliminate groups of characters and are eventually left with one person.

The game necessarily has a limited number of characteristics – too much diversity and it would be hard to eliminate groups of characters. The people have two skin tones – light/dark or black/white or whatever/whatever.

Since my family is half Asian, one thing that I noticed while my kids were playing the game is that there are no Asians in the game. The European features are represented and the African features are represented, but there are no Oriental features.

To remedy this oversight, I have produced an new version of Guess Who. I call it “Guess Hu”.

Feel free to print out these sheets and use them the next time you play Guess Who.

View Guess Hu Sheet (or click on the image below)

I figured this is an opportune time to discuss Rich Rod. Or at least some things about him. Or at least just mention Rich Rodriguez because everyone else is doing that today.

For some reason, I got the idea to compare and contrast Rodriguez’ stint as the Michigan football coach with Obama’s stint as the President of the United States.

Quiz
For each item below, please mark whether it applies to Rodriguez (R) or Obama (O):

1. Appealed to the younger crowd
2. Was very polarizing – most people were either very for or very against him
3. Took over a program that was in decent, but not great, shape
4. Was brought in to shake things up a bit – change from the traditional ways of doing things
5. Neglected the duties of his prior job in order to transition to his new job
6. Brought in his own people as assistants
7. He had great plans and had great potential, but reality didn’t cooperate
8. In fact, the program got worse under his watch
9. Read fine from a teleprompter but said some controversial things in unscripted moments
10. Tried to make some shady deals and brought fraud to a previously clean program
11. The other power in the organization was replaced during his term and caused him to reconsider his ways
12. Believed you don’t need much of a defense
13. Didn’t care much for the kicking game either

Can you think of any other quiz questions about Rich Rodriguez or Barack Obama?

Random things to post before the end of the year:

• I was “randomly selected” to participate in the American Community Survey (ACS). I wonder how many of the “randomly selected” households are the ones that wrote “American” for their race in the general census…?
• The checkout guy at the grocery store complained to me. In the course of general niceties, I mentioned I was getting ready for New Year’s Day. He responded with “I’m not going to have a very fun New Year’s Day.” What do you say to that? Apparently he is scheduled to work that day. Employee training should teach them to be cheerful in their interactions with people. The store-to-customer interface should be happy, not frowny.
• I’m no longer the guy who provides food and shelter for the children. I’m now the guy who has the thing that lets them play Angry Birds.
• Shame on ESPN for being selfish. In the past, I could watch various and sundry bowl games on New Year’s Day. It was football all day, and it was very good. Then a 4-letter cable network acquired the rights to the bowl games and locked them away so that the general population could not see the games. And there was much sorrow.

Now that I’m vaguely familiar with Twitter… these seem like items that would have made good tweets. Now that I have a fancy-pants phone game-and-music-playing device, I might consider using Twitter.

Or maybe not.

Happy New Year!

I recently finished a project and tried a new (to me) product: combination stain and polyurethane in a single can.

It worked as advertised, but I’m not a fan. This happened to be PolyShades by Minwax, but I’m guessing that I wouldn’t like any stain-and-poly-together-in-one product by anybody.

The problem is that the simplicity takes away your ability to manage the shade of the stain.

In other words, you can’t keep sanding and applying poly to get a smoother, deeper finish, because each application results in more (i.e. darker) stain.

Here is what it looked like with zero, one, and two coats:

It turned out okay, but there were some spots that were rougher than I wanted, but I didn’t want to add more stain. And there were some spots where the stain had pooled and made the finish obviously darker than the surrounding areas, but I didn’t want to wipe off the poly.

I suppose it’s a fine product if you don’t care much about the finish. I didn’t think I would care as much as I did, but not having the ability to adjust little things frustrated me.

Go with separate stain and clear coat.

Those of you who received a Christmas card from us can skip this post. Everyone has probably already received the Christmas letter (not everyone everyone, just those on our list), so if you have the letter there is no point in viewing the image below.

If you haven’t received our letter yet, then either you’re not on our list or the post office has some explaining to do. If you’re not on our list, the best way to get on our list is to send us a Christmas card or letter. Then we will feel compelled to return the favor.

For those of you interested in what our Christmas letter looks like this year but don’t want to involve the post office, here it is (redacted and blurred version for internet):

Source (in CorelDraw format) available upon request and for a small processing fee.

Merry Christmas Chaos!

Tomorrow is Christmas Adam, followed by Christmas Eve on the 24th.

Thanks to some commenters on my guest post for SCL, I learned about Christmas Adam – the 23rd of December.

In order to help you celebrate each day, I put together this calendar. Think of it as a post-Christmas advent calendar thingy.

Read the rest of this entry »