Christopher

25 things

2009-02-01T06:53:11Z

Originally published at cc.com. Please leave any comments there.

Via Facebook: Rules: You are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you.

My mother is dying of pancreatic cancer.
My mother’s father died when he was four years younger than my mom is now, and my mom was the same age that I am. Saddening as that is, it helps me know that for every bit as difficult as this time is for our whole family now, we will make it through together.
While visiting my family this week, I learned that in four generations of my mom’s family, someone has developed some form of cancer.
I’m usually not this maudlin; it may surprise some people who know me well, but my mom has described me as “the cheerful one in the family.”
I love travel, and moving to new places. If I could practically live somewhere new every year, I probably would. If nothing else, it would cure me of my inherited tendency to acquire too much junk.
I love living in Seattle, it’s a beautiful city, especially from the air. Flying into Seattle feels like coming home, in a way that no place I’ve lived in before has.
I want to learn at least two other languages; it doesn’t really matter which ones, it’s simply a personal challenge. And no, computer languages don’t count.
I miss acting, and the theatre in general. Though I was only ever an indifferent actor, and lacked the total commitment to make a career out of it, some of my dearest friendships were formed around the stage.
My two most coveted roles are the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance (sorry Lumpah, though I loved our duets of O False One!, I’m too old to play Frederick, but you’ll always be the perfect Ruth), and Harold Hill in The Music Man. The Russian in Chess would also be on this list, but I don’t have the range, I’d have to settle for Molokov.
I’m a sucker for liturgical choral music. The Thompson Alleluia, the Biebl Ave Maria, and the Barber Agnus Dei are still heart-stoppingly beautiful even though I’ve heard or sung each of them hundreds of times.
In high school, I was on the competitive speech team, and I competed in a curious event call Extemporaneous Programmed Reading. Half an hour before the event, you were given an undisclosed piece of literature, and in that time had to read it, edit it down to a seven-minute speech, write an introduction, and dramatize it to a judge. The slacker’s perfect event, because I did close to zero preparation in the weeks before competition.
This event introduced me to poetry in a serious way for the first time (one of the three rounds each competition was usually poetry) and though I don’t read as much as I’d like these days, I still love Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, and Whitman. But I studied far too much Robert Frost in 6th grade to really enjoy him that much anymore.
I want to learn how to sail a ship, and to someday sail from Seattle to Santa Barbara to visit Kelli’s family.
When I’m home alone, which is rare, my evening ritual often involves gin & tonic, Miles Davis, a thick book, and a warm fire.
My dream home has Henry Higgins’ library from My Fair Lady.
I’d like to open a bookstore with an attached cafe that could provide all of the above, but I think Kelli would be afraid I’d never come home.
I’m married to the Coolest Chick in the World.
I am a Grade ‘A’ nerd and serious sci-fi/fantasy/comics/anime/manga/roleplaying fan, and though my wife respects and appreciates that, I don’t think she’ll ever understand it. To be fair, I don’t think I’ll ever really understand what drives her to run marathons.
Many people don’t understand why our marriage works. I could write a book about it, but it boils down to this: we spent 20 years being indivduals with our own lives, and marriage hasn’t changed that. Our lives intersect more often than not now, but we each respect when the other needs to go do their own thing.
Exception to the rule: my evening routine is missing a cat. A concession to the greater good.
When given a choice between a movie made before 1985 and one made after, I’ll probably choose the former.
I hope to instill in my children a love of old movies, old books, old buildings, old roads, and old songs.
I am as proud of my son as any father, but I fear he has inherited my introversion. Hopefully his mom’s genes will carry the day.
I’m constantly amazed at parents who think that they can practically ignore their children and then expect them to listen or behave themselves.
The responsibility of being a parent still frightens me a little. We’re molding not just their lives, but the lives of their families. When you see an obnoxious child, look not only to the parents, but also to the grandparents.

Our kids are smarter than we are

2006-12-01T05:03:27Z

“The teacher's job is very simple. It's to help the children ask the right questions.”

My father called me today for technical help. First because he was adding images to a Word document, and wanted to wrap the text around it, and the second time because he was having trouble putting the resulting document on a CD. Operations that, because Word and Windows have lots of power but little consistency in how things are done, were difficult for him to intuit how to deal with.

Afterward, my co-worker Sandra and I were talking about the technology generation gap. Her parents have computer science degrees, but she still had to convice her mother that just entering her credit card on a website didn't mean she was buying the product.

I made the observation that it was surprising how often you find product makers “dumbing down” for children, when children are often most able to figure out how stuff works. Dillon, for example has a new toy music player, an early Christmas gift from Grandma Pat to keep him occupied on the flight back to my parents house. He loves it, and it didn't take him long to figure out which buttons switch songs and which button makes the music start. He still has trouble (he's not even two, after all), but he grasps the basics, even if the can't always figure out the right combinations.

Sandra, in response, sent me an interview with an India physicist (not an educator) who launched an experiment with poor, mainly illiterate kids in a New Dehli slum, and found that, despite their poverty, the children were surfing the web and drawing pictures, and once they were shown the thing could play music, hunting down all the Hindu music they could find, all on an English language machine.

I'm not a teacher, even though my whole immediate family and half of my other relatives are educators at one level or another. So I'm often made aware of how out of touch I am with modern teaching. The two things I hear complained about the most are:

There are too many incompetent, ineffective, and/or apathetic teachers

There are too few resources for the students to learn from

It's pretty clear to me that these two are related. Teachers, particularly in the public school system, are actually the least expensive resource (human or otherwise) in a school's budget. They're usually the most visible, most replacable, and the easist to blame when things go wrong.

Materials for the students, like books and computers, are expensive, take expensive physical space to store, and are more rapidly obsolete, and so expensive to keep current. Naturally, given this tradeoff, you're going to end up with lots of questionable teachers, and little for the teachers to teach with.

The Hole In The Wall article, aside from demonstrating quite convincingly how children have a natural desire and talent for soaking up information, argues that the answers to better education are more resources, better access to information, and fewer teachers. Fewer total teachers, and more of the right kinds of teachers that know how to direct a child's natural curiousity.

Now, there's a world of difference between functional skills like operating a computer, and academic knowledge usually covered in classrooms. The article has answers for that too, but even without that, remember the teachers you learned the most from? For me, it was not the ones that said, “This is the way it is.” They had nothing for me that I couldn't find in a book. The ones that I learned from are the ones that asked me, “What can you find out about this?” and had me go look for myself.

I can only hope that Dillon has the opportunity to explore the world he lives in, to ask his own questions, to find his own path, rather than having his world shaped and set for him. There's no greater source of creativity and imagination than in children, and no better way to discourage them than tell them, rather than ask them.

“... by the time we are 16, we are taught to want teachers, taught that we cannot learn anything without teachers.”

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New Paint, Same Old Shack

2006-11-13T05:18:57Z

Kelli is encouraging me to blog more. While in theory I agree, the geek in me is always more interested in poking around on the site itself than adding any less-than-insightful content. So, an-upgrading we will go.

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One Word

2006-07-06T19:57:54Z

From Muriel:

Please leave a one-word comment that you think best describes a quality that you and I have in common. Then feel free to copy and paste this in your own journal to collect responses from your own friends list.

I'm currently ignoring the fact that I have six top 5 lists to finish. So sue me.

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Top 5 Part 1

2006-01-20T05:21:54Z

Yikes! Only two comments, and both decided to hit me with three lists. Er, this is going to take a while. But here goes the first:

Top 5 Reasons I've Put Up With Kelli for 5 years and eight months (give or take a couple of days):

Because you do everything with your whole heart.
Because we can spend all night just talking.
Because you always know how to make me smile.
Because you gave me the best little boy.
Because you put up with me in return. :-)

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My First Meme™

2006-01-18T06:45:00Z

Choose Your Own Top 5 List: Post a topic, list, category, whatever, in the comments, and I'll post the top 5 according to me. Then post this offer in your own journal.

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New meaning for the Ivory Tower

2005-06-27T16:08:13Z

From Slashdot: The Wall Street Journal has an article about Amazon offering the Complete (and they mean complete) Penguin Classics. I must say I share the sentiment of the reviewer who wrote:

"I would easily and gladly send for them this minute, thrill at doing so, eagerly await their arrival, only to be shot dead by my wife when she found out I'd ordered them."

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Happy Father's Day

2005-06-20T01:24:39Z

Kelli decided we needed a treat for Father's Day, and for the first time we left Dillon with a babysitter that was not related to one of us. It was good for us to get out on our own again, and we had a fabulous dinner.

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It ... worked?!

2005-06-16T05:28:31Z

Wow. I'm shocked.

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Testing LJ interaction

2005-06-16T05:26:22Z

New (to me) WP plugin: LivePress.

Except that the version on that site doesn't work anymore, since WP was upgraded. A patched version exists, though.

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Awakenings

2003-12-21T00:34:32Z

Was just reminded by ladymurmur about LJ, and I remembered that I had this journal festering in a corner. The main purpose of this post is to point whomever might see this in the direction of the real website, which isn't updated any more frequently, but at the very least more recently.

http://www.christophercurrie.com/

Time to move...

2002-04-19T23:08:22Z

From MetaFilter comes a link to a Textism article about how the owner of Hoopla.com had her domain pulled out from under her, apparently by a series of shady faxes. I'll jump on the bandwagon and say Verisign/Network Solutions have had a horrible history of service, and advise anyone who uses them to transfer your domain as soon as possible. I'm probably going to lose two years of domain renewal on one of mine, but to me that's better than losing the domain.

</cgc>

Give a cheer, give a cheer...

2002-03-30T23:47:46Z

Ah, beer. Bill and I just did another batch today, this time a "British Mild," which according to the recipe is halfway between a brown ale and a bitter. We just found a great homebrew supply place run out of this guy's basement; he's a dot-com casualty pursuing the American dream, running his own business. So if you're in DC and you like to brew beer, check out Jay's Brewing Supplies.

Note to new brewers. Strain your beer after you boil. Somehow we missed that advice the last dozen or so batches we made, and we always wondered why the taste of hops was so strong in our beers. Turns out we've been letting it sit in the fermenter when we should have been straining it out. Oops! Maybe that brown recipe wasn't so bad after all...

ccurrie @ 2002-03-29T13:51:00

2002-03-29T18:50:19Z

Last night, my friend Scott Sweeney asked how many comics I read each month. For those who don't know, I got into comics after I graduated from college. When I moved in with Chris Herr, who is also an avid reader, I started reading some of his, then stopped in at his comic shop to take a look at the rack. I started with just one title, The Books of Magic, because the art looked good, and the story intrigued me.

That was in 1996. Now, each week I probably bring home between eight and twelve issues. The guys at Phoenix Comics must love me. I remeber when my old shop, Desting comics was still open, and they would offer a 20% discount for subscribers who had more than 40 titles on their list. I used to think that I would never be in that category.

But when asked, I really didn't know how many different stories I'm following, which made me curious to find out. So, my internal "Quest for Content" for this site, which has been languishing in the slums for a while now, will be answered with a page that will examine the question my fiancee most wants answered:

"Why am I spending so much money on these things?"

</cgc>

ccurrie @ 2002-03-01T20:07:00

2002-03-02T01:08:42Z

Stopping in at the Apple store. Kelli is making disparaging comments about me and my tendency to acquire "toys." I'll admit, with the wedding coming, we really can't splurge on another computer right now, but I want my own laptop so I don't have to keep using the one from work. And it's so much more comfortable to geek out on the couch in front of the TV than down in the cold basement where the rest of my computers are.

Christmas in July?

2001-12-13T00:36:23Z

...or at leat that's what it feels like. Having been sent down to Mexico City on a business trip, it's very difficult to remember that Christmas is less than two weeks away. (Yipes! When am I going to get my shopping done?!)

It's been too long a day. I had to get up way to early to drive to the airport and catch the one flight left that wasn't booked except for business class (i.e. something my manager could approve.) On the way, I learned a couple of things I never knew about traveling "south of the border."

First, all those "instructions" and "rules" that we've been following so meekly all of our lives are optional. It's amazing! The next time the gate agent announces that boarding has started for first class, just get up and get on the plane! Pretend you're flying to Mexico City and nobody cares. Oh, and by the way, that silly thing about staying seated until you're at the gate is optional, too.

The other thing I learned is that I really need to start learning to speak Spanish. I figure that if you can speak English, Spanish, and Chinese, you can work almost anywhere in the world. Which may become increasingly important as this whole "global economy" think kicks in.

And I've never felt as lost as I do now. Parents, start making your children take a language. Make them use it. Learn it with them. If you already speak two or more languages, pass that on to your kids, because they'll thank you for it. We as Americans are far too comfortable in our little expanse of sameness. Of course, most Americans hardly ever leave their home state, let alone the country...

But yo quiero Taco Bell doesn't quite cut it down here.

ccurrie @ 2001-12-10T12:02:00

2001-12-10T16:58:31Z

Hooray! It's Secret Santa day. If you're my secret santa, you're probably not finding much here to help you pick a gift. I've got lots of books listed, but I'm really wanting one of the Lensman Series. ;-) I hope you get what you're looking for, too!

ccurrie @ 2001-12-04T12:55:00

2001-12-04T17:52:31Z

Something cool that Kelli sent me: Secret Santa.

ccurrie @ 2001-12-04T12:42:00

2001-12-04T17:39:59Z

Work has slowed, finally. It was really busy there for a while, since our manager had set a deadline for us with no technical knowledge of the project and no input from us. Actually, the job itself wasn't really all that hard, we're just dependent on our counterparts in Spain getting us the proper information, which didn't happen (again.) So, down to the wire it was, until our contact got his head out of his butt and realized we were missing some code. Viola! It worked.

So now, to wait and see if our selloff turns out to be a good or a bad thing...

ccurrie @ 2001-10-07T03:23:00

2001-10-07T07:22:00Z

Woke up in a sweat and can't get back to sleep. Too much code running through my brain, which is odd because I haven't thought about work all weekend. Now I've just got stuff I want to do.

ccurrie @ 2001-10-06T19:38:00

2001-10-06T23:37:07Z

Thanks to Lura for the link and the well wishes. One result of that was last weeks flame, and the other was to get me off my butt to get this website updated. Watch for more posts, pages, etc.

Organization

2001-05-23T18:04:02Z

... or the lack thereof, seems to be a defining charactaristic lately. I'm just a non-planner. I don't know if I've just got a subconcious belief that everything will "just work out," or that I'm just lazy (my mom's favorite theory), but I really can't seem to make a habit of keeping a schedule.

Unfortunately, this usually results in me losing track of conflicts, and then having to back out of one commitment or the other, which I really hate doing. So every once in a while when I get super busy, I get fed up and swear up and down that I'm going to get a calendar and that this time, by all that's holy, I'll use it.

"And tomorrow, pigs will fly," is the usual response it get. And they're usually right. Once my schedule get's less busy, the calendar starts to gather dust, because it's just more trouble that it's worth. It's vicious cycle, one I'm having trouble breaking out of.

But some day, that pig's going to take off...

Management

2001-05-22T18:56:43Z

Apparently my boss has just yelled at our admin for some reason or another. Not that I haven't ever wanted to yell at someone and tell them to get it right, and I really have no idea what was really behind the whole situation, but still...

And people wonder why I never want to be a manger.

ccurrie @ 2001-05-22T11:36:00

2001-05-22T15:38:48Z

Technology is a wonderful thing, but why is it that those of us who are into it are never satisfied with the way it is? Everyone's gotta "tweak" it. I count myself among this group, as I play with livejournal's arcane formatting utility...

Getting started...

2001-05-21T18:32:03Z

Work is slow, so we revert to the time honored-tradition of working on one's website on the job.