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Image: A sign posted near every high roof at my school campus, reading “There is hope. We are here to listen.” (With a phone number to call.)¹

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
—Emily Dickinson

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¹ I’m feeling a bit somber contemplating the necessity for signs like that to be put up around rooftops but at the same time heartened at the thought that someone took the effort to place them there and to set up a support line people can call if they’re feeling overwhelmed.*

*I know it’s “Wordless Wednesday” but I’m pretty sure footnotes don’t count as real words, right?

Current Mood: contemplative

vaxhacker

IN today’s episode of “Famous Scams of the Past,” we’ll take a look at an item that dominated the airwaves with ads years ago—The Phonics Game. (“What’s that?” I hear you asking, “You never had ‘episodes’ of any such thing, what’s going on?” A fair question. I don’t know, it’s just a turn of phrase to introduce the topic. But talking about scams and history can be fun, so who knows? I might do more in the future.)

Anyway, back in the mid-1990s Dr. Greg Cynaumon came out with this revolutionary new way to teach kids to read. He called it “The Phonics Game” and he claimed it was so amazing, so unprecedented and powerful, that if your child didn’t get a full letter-grade improvement on their next report card after using the game, you’d get your money back.

Pretty cool, right? Well, there was some controversy that came to life along with the excited interest from parents looking for anything to help their kids who were struggling with reading skills. (And considering the game’s creator also suffered the embarrassment of getting in legal hot water with the FTC for selling diet pills that didn’t quite live up to their advertising, controversy seems to follow his business ventures more than I’m sure he’d prefer.)

I seem to recall it getting to the point where it was—at least in the circles I inhabited—increasingly viewed by consumers as something of a scam product. I just filed it away as a curiosity until I had kids of my own who were having a tough time learning to read too, and it occurred to me to wonder if something like this game might be helpful, or if indeed it was a scam or money-making scheme more than an educational tool. So we bought a copy for our kids and took a look first-hand.

In my opinion, I came to the personal conclusion that it was a bit of both: a viable educational tool and a bit of a scam as well.

What was actually wrong with it, then? They had this fantastic money-back offer, how bad could it be? The answer to that is foreshadowed by its name. It teaches reading using the phonics method (itself the subject of some controversy, but for people of my generation, this is better known simply as “the way we were all taught to read as kids”). It’s basic, it’s simple, whether or not there’s a better teaching method, phonics has been proven to at least work well enough for a long time now. And for this product they turned it into a set of entertaining games to keep kids’ attention. So far, so good.

Gamification of teaching materials is nothing new and is also a time-honored approach (even for adult education), so nothing wrong with that. Does it actually work, though? In our experience, yes. Yes, it does. It actually seemed to work quite well, to be honest.

So what’s the scam part of this?

I think the only part of this that’s shady is the marketing and sales of the actual game. They hyped it up as some amazing new thing that would work like magic in your kids’ lives, and for that they charged a premium price—over $225 for the game (about $500 in 2025 dollars). But then what price can you put on pure magic that teaches your kids to read, after all?

I learned to read before I went to Kindergarten by using something more or less akin to phonics. For free. As wonderful as this game is, it should probably more reasonably have a price around 10% of what they were charging for it. They made a nice game around it but not that much more to justify that price tag.¹

A little corporate greed ruined an otherwise nice idea. Can’t say that was the fist, nor will it be the last time that’s happened in this world.

Together, we can assemble amazing words and astounding tales.
—Ollie Kayuro
Fairytale Clues: Magic-filled Stories That Slip English Grammar into the Heart

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¹We got our copy for a much more reasonable price on eBay from another family who had used it and wanted to pass it along to someone else at that point.

Current Mood: tired

vaxhacker

THIS is a meme I’ve seen around here and there, offered as a fun way to introduce yourself to new readers, which seems about right as NaBloPoMo kicks off here. The idea is to pick 26 words that somehow describe you. Some of them may be a bit of a stretch since the letters that are worth more in Scrabble are harder to work into things like this.

A is for Aardvark, or more formally, the Aardvark Computing Society, the geekiest of the geek clubs in my high school. Legend has it that the name was chosen as a “hack” so they’d be listed first in the yearbook.
B is for board games. I have always had a love for playing interesting board games. “Interesting” in this sense tends to have a direct correlation to how many little pieces come in the box, and how many scores of pages the rule book is. Complexity can be fun! My current favorite is Return to Dark Tower, but there are many that have held my interest at this point.
C is for Computer Science, my field of expertise, what my degrees are in, and what I’m grateful every day that people actually pay me to do for a living, despite the fact I’d do it for fun anyway.
D is for D&D, a game I’ve enjoyed playing since I was a teenager. (Although technically we moved from D&D to Pathfinder a few years ago.)
E is for Eagle. I slid onto the plate with this one, finishing the requirements too close for comfort before my 18th birthday, but I’m glad now, looking back on it, that I put in the effort to get this rank while I was in Scouts. It proved to me that I was capable of doing something challenging and was something I encouraged my kids to reach for as well.
F is for family. One of the most important things in my life.
G is for The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a macabre little book by Edward Gorey that describes the unpleasant fates of 26 children in A-B-C style. (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears,” and so forth.) I had a poster form of the book up in my apartment at college, just showing off my darker sense of humor, but it ended up creeping out my roommates too much, which was also amusing but I took pity on them and took it down.
H is for hovercraft. As a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus since I was a teenager, I made sure that as long as I was going to the trouble to learn another language, I had to learn how to say that iconic phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” (Which, if you’re curious, is something like 我的氣墊船充滿了鱔魚—wǒde qìdiánchuàn chōngmǎn le shànyú.)
I is for ice storms, something we survived several winters when I was a kid. It usually amounted to a week without power sometime in January while the city was paralyzed with all the streets covered in a layer of ice.
J is for journal, this thing I’m writing in now, which has proven to be a great way to remember all the things that have happened in my life over the last few decades.
K is for Kermit, in tribute to how much I used to love the Muppets as a kid.
L is for labels. Our family started a tradition of using barcode labels instead of gift tags at Christmas, so the kids wouldn’t peek or open any gifts until Christmas Day (and more to the point, a reasonable time on Christmas Day) because they couldn’t tell which gifts were theirs until we unlocked the codes so they could scan them to find out.
M is for Magic: the Gathering, a great card game I’ve enjoyed. Also, an indicator of how geeky my wife and I are—we brought our Magic cards with us on our honeymoon and played a game or two in the card room on the cruise ship.
N is for nature, a place I like to occasionally go visit to relax and unwind.
O is for optimistic, something I tend to be, probably to a fault.
P is for programming, my favorite pastime.
Q is for quilts. A lot of my childhood memories involve my mom’s quilt frames set up in the living room as she worked on sewing one quilt after another.
R is for Ragnarok, the best Multi-User Dungeon game on the Internet. And where I met my wife, so it’s kind of special to us.
S is for Science Fiction, one of my favorite genres of fiction (along with Fantasy). Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Lathe of Heaven, so many more, each with an interesting story to tell.
T is for Tolkien, who contributed so much to Fantasy literature and folklore that I’ve enjoyed most of my life.
U is for unusual. I love being unconventional in creative ways.
V is for volcano, something I live in the shadow of. A few volcanoes, actually. Never gave them much thought until the spring of 1980, when one we thought had been extinct decided to erupt and wipe out the summer camp we were planning to go to that year. And dumped volcanic ash all over us just to complete the bargain.
W is for whodunit. I don’t read mysteries often enough, but I enjoy trying to figure them out before the big reveal.
X is sort of for eXtreme programming, a novel new way of organizing the work of a team of programmers, invented by a friend of mine and his associates.
Y is for Yendor. I spent many hours earlier in my life in pursuit of the Amulet of Yendor, the ultimate prize in the computer game Rogue.
Z is for zen. I don’t subscribe specifically to the discipline of that name, but the general appeal of finding my mental place of calm and focus is something I often feel, to recharge in the middle of the hectic chaos of my life.

My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!
—Dr. Seuss
On Beyond Zebra

Current Mood: exhausted

vaxhacker

I have been holding onto this Friday Fiver for a couple of weeks, mostly just because I haven’t got around to posting anything for a while. But somehow it seems apropos enough to bring out here as I start NaBloPoMo and have the topic of online journaling on my mind.

As usual, this Friday Five is brought to you by the letter F and the number 5, courtesy of sumrsue79 and posted to thefridayfive by anais_pf.¹

How long ago did you join LJ (or DW)?
I started my LiveJournal in October, 2003. This comes after a lifetime of growing up being taught that keeping a personal journal or diary is one of life’s highest virtues and something I was really strongly encouraged to do from an early age. The small stack of empty journals I was given as gifts over the years attests to how well that worked out. Having not had my ADHD diagnosed until much, much later in life may have been a factor, but generally speaking it was just very difficult for me to sit down and organize my thoughts in a permanent fashion like a pre-bound journal in ink. And when I did, I was paralyzed any time I missed writing anything because I couldn’t just carry on with a gap without completely and perfectly filling in all the missing bits first, so I could never catch up and thus every attempt was soon abandoned.
Fast forward to 2003. I’m allegedly a grown-up with a real life, job, marriage, pets, house, and as a father of young kids, I realized that there were a lot of memories, experiences, and thoughts going by that would be lost in the wind if I didn’t somehow manage to get myself to write them down along the way.
I found that a few of my friends were blogging on LiveJournal and on an impulsive whim I signed up, thinking I’d just post an occasional random thought here or there, but before I knew it I was full-on chronicling my life. Somehow I found the medium where that actually worked for me.
After a while, LJ was bought out by a company that changed the terms of service—including the concerning bit about everything posted there being subject to terms that were only available in Russian.² Plus, apparently it included something about how everything posted would be considered under Russian law as if posted by a media outlet with serious consequences if you said anything that in their view was controversial or restricted.
I didn’t sign up for any of that nonsense just to keep my personal journal, which isn’t a political media outlet at all, other than as a human being I have a few opinions about things. So along with a number of other LJ refugees, I moved my journal over to Dreamwidth, which is a nearly identical platform (technically) which still has the home-grown volunteer-effort feel to it.
How did you find out about LJ (or DW)?
I guess I already answered that in the previous question.
If someone introduced you to LJ (or DW), is s/he still on your friends list?
Yes, technically, but sadly times have changed. The crowds of people I used to follow and interact with between all our LJ and DW journals (and blogs on other sites as well) faded away as people were more drawn to quick sound bites on Facebook (etc.) over writing longer, more thoughtful discourse in the blogosphere.
So while the friends who were the ones who introduced me to LJ originally are still on my friends list, they’re not active there anymore (or on DW).
Have you introduced anyone to LJ (or DW)?
Yes, a few, mostly just in the same way I was introduced. In a casual conversation, something I wrote about in my blog would come up and I would suggest the idea of checking out blogs to them, or some similar way of introduction.
Is your LJ (or DW) public or friends only, and why?
It started out friends-only because at the time my kids were still growing up and I was writing a lot about our family activities and life experiences, and just for the sake of due diligence of online safety, I didn’t want the entire universe unchecked access to all of that, so I managed access to those who asked first so at least there was some sense I knew who my audience was.
These days, now that those days are past us, I’ve opened up my journal to be mostly public and the content is more focused on more general life topics since I’m not raising kids anymore at this point in my life.

The bravest journey is the one within.
—Amanda Lee

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¹To play along, copy these questions to your journal/blog, answer them and post a link back as a comment in

thefridayfive.
²They provided an English translation for our convenience but didn’t guarantee anything about its accuracy in any legally-binding way, so we were still at the mercy of whatever the Russian text said.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: VKunia—Reaction video to The Princess Bride

vaxhacker

NOVEMBER. Already? November. It was just November a little bit ago. And with the start of the month of course comes the commencement of National Blog Posting Month, which helps me get motivated to write down a few more of my thoughts and experiences in this, my journal of my life’s thoughts and experiences.

Trouble is, there’s so much going on that sometimes it’s hard to feel like I can justify the time to stop to write any of them down. And right now, I’m deep in the middle of work toward a deadlilne looming for my degree, so I can’t guarantee a post a day here, or that they will all be any kind of pithy or deep thought-provoking ideas but I’ll try to post something and maybe with luck a few bits of humor or interest will show up, purely by accident.

Your PhD is doing its best to grind you down. If you’re not careful, your PhD will take over your life.
—Maureen Lipman

Current Mood: busy

echan

I have spent the last week reading up on in-car technologies. I thought I had been paying attention the past 15 some odd years, but apparently I managed to miss the majority of the details. So here's a somewhat opinionated summary of what I've learned.

CarPlay (iPhone) and Android Auto (Android) let you use your smartphone on the car's infotainment screen. In the stone age you'd use a RAM mount on the dash to look at your actual smartphone screen. Now that cars have cameras and massive infotainment screens built-in, I guess it seems like a waste to not use that screen for your phone.

Android Automotive is a version of Android that IS a car's infotainment software. Considering how much people want to replace the car's native infotainment software, I guess it's not surprise that some car makers go for this option. Its got the usual android app permissions model. There's even an app store; only specific apps are supported, but that support extends pretty far, and includes "I swear I'll only use this in a parking lot" games like Candy Crush.

Android Automotive has multiuser support, via profiles. There's also a guest user profile, which seems like just another profile, but settings changes made to the guest user don't seem to persist, and get reset when the car is turned off. The active user profile can be changed at (mostly?) anytime; there's some lockscreen-style security options for auth when switching profiles that I haven't tried out yet.

It seems like profiles should be able to manage a whole bunch of settings. But actually... I have no f'ing idea what they manage because all I seem to find is exceptions. Ex: my car has an audio app, that combines AM/FM radio with SiriusXM and playing from USB. Every time I get in the car it forgets what I was listening to, and one time even forgot I had turned it off. Additionally, most (but not all!) of the settings that directly affect how the car drives are not even accessible from the infotainment screen's settings menu, they're only available from the speedometer screen's settings menu, and (AFAICT...) don't care about user profiles at all. So far the only setting I'm positive the user profile manages is the choice of animated background wallpaper for the speedometer screen. (WTH to every part of that sentence.)

I fully expect to spend at least another two months figuring out how to work everything in this car.