Erich Stauffer

Tag: Generations

  • Perspectives from the End of a Generation

    As a person born in 1980, I fall at the end of Generation X and the beginning of Generation Y or the Millennial Generation. This gives me a unique perspective on life that I’d like to share from my generation.

    Sometimes it can be fun to get a little perspective. Age gives us this view. Some of these are related to people you may not know, but I’ll try to keep it as relevant as possible.

    Famous Births

    Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce Knowles, Kim Kardashian, and Paris Hilton are all around the same age as me (born either in 1980 or 1981).

    Space Travel

    The last time man left near-earth orbit was in 1972, 8 years before I were born, which was also the last time we landed on the moon during Apollo 17.

    The first time man left near-earth orbit was during Apollo 8 in 1968, 12 years before we were born and the first moon landing was a year later during Apollo 11.

    Civil Rights

    The American Civil War ended 115 years before I was born, but the Civil Rights Act was passed only 16 years before I was born in 1964.

    Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down 26 years before I was born, in 1954. If that seems like a long time, consider that I’m now 34 years old.

    Presidents

    In our lifetime we’ve lived through ~6 presidents (Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama) over a span of 33 years.

    In the 33 years before we were born there were ~7 presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter).

    Leonardo Davinci and Michelangelo were to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson what George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are to me in regards to age and perspective.

    Technology

    The first nuclear test was 35 years before I was born in 1945, the same year WWII ended. The ENIAC was built a year later in 1946.

    In 1986, 6 years after I was born, Earth experienced both the Chernobyl and Challenger Disasters. 27 years later Columbia disintegrated in 2003.

    2 years before I was born, GPS was invented in 1978. 22 years later in the year 2000, President Clinton granted nonmilitary users access to an unscrambled GPS signal. 7 years after that the iPhone was released.

    Famous Deaths

    John Lennon died in December of 1980. Albert Einstein died in 1955, 25 years before we were born. Pablo Picasso died in 1973, 7 years before we were born.

    War

    5 years before we were born, the United States lost the Vietnam War (1975). 27 years before we were born, the Korean War ended (1953). 2015 is the same distance from 1980 as 1980 is from the end of World War II (1945).

    If you liked this, you might like BuzzFeed’s 7 Mind-Shattering Facts About Time that includes things like how Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barbara Walters were all born in the same year. How’s that for perspective?


    7 Mind-Shattering Facts About Time by buzzfeedvideo

    Update March 13, 2015 from Reddit

    What 2 famous people lived at the same time in history that people wouldn’t think were alive at the same time?

    • Tom Selleck, Bob Marley, Rod Stewart, Bubba Smith, Micky Dolenz, Eric Clapton, Mia Farrow, and Tony Dow were all alive at the same time as Adolf Hitler
    • Cleopatra and Julius Caesar
    • Picasso and JFK
    • Hitler and Einstein
    • Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr
    • Eminem and Elvis
    • Justin Bieber and Andre the Giant
    • Abe Lincoln and Charles Darwin
    • Bill Nye and Ken Ham
    • Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx
    • Walt Disney and Adam Sandler
    • Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla
    • Salvador Dali and Walt Disney

  • Gross Songs Kids Love

    The first book I ever wrote was a collection of lewd songs children sing in grade school called Gross Songs Kids Love. However, due to file mismanagement and The White Album Problem, I no longer have the book.

    It was originally written in PFS Write on a Zenith personal computer with a 5 MB hard drive. It was written between the years of 1988 and 1994.

    It’s not like I didn’t have a version in Windows. My father helped me convert the files from PFS Write to a file that could be read in Windows by “printing to file”. I had to have a computer that could read the 5 and 1/4 inch floppies, which my Windows 95 computer did.

    I copied the files from the Zenith PC to the Gateway 2000 PC running Windows 95, which was used as the family PC. There the files sat as I got on with high school, swimming, and Shog.

    By the time I had my own Windows 98 computer I failed to copy the book to the new PC and therefore lost the digital copies. But what about the physical copies? After all, I printed it out on the attached dot-matrix printer. What came of those?

    In my physical file cabinet in my office I have not one, but four “Things I’ve Written” folders and not one of them contains a copy of the book. It may be somewhere else in the file cabinet, but it just goes to show that even paper copies can be lost (or is that more obvious – I can’t tell anymore).

    My children are now of the age when I started writing this book, but when I look at what they are creating, it pales in comparison. Even though I’ve bought them Snagit to record Minecraft videos on Youtube and it’s easier than ever to create content, they have little to show for the available resources before them.

    I blame myself for not pushing my children to create more works despite my own professional advice to business owners to create content to market their businesses online. How does that saying go, “the cobbler’s son has no shoes?” Don’t be that guy, Erich.

  • The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

    The Secret Life of Walter Mitty debuted in the United States on December 25, 2013. This review focuses on the how the film is an essay on the transition from analog to digital – made for and by the children of the 70’s (otherwise known as Generation X), the “analog vs. digital” and “disrespect for the past” themes, “the purpose of life”, and symbolism in the film. Most of this is from memory and is my own opinions. I have not read any other reviews on this movie, but have seen the movie and trailers.

    * Spoiler Alert * This article contains information about the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, please consider watching it first. * Photos credit 20th Century Fox *

    Walter Mitty and Cheryl Melhoff

    Generation X

    In #Mitty, the movie, the actors and the director are all Generation X. Stiller was born in 1965 and is currently 48 years old. To give you perspective on the person writing this article, I was born in 1980 which makes me part of Generation X, Y, and the Millennial Generation, however I’m most likely Generation Jones. While I was able to pick up on a lot of the references and music used in the film, there are still things that I didn’t ‘get’ like the name on the t-shirt Mitty’s mom kept for him.

    The movie is full of references to Generation X. Mitty’s sister is auditioning to be Rizzo in Grease, a movie that came out in 1978. She gets him a Stretch Armstrong (debuted in 1976) doll for his birthday. Mitty has a Jansport hiking bag (popular in the 80’s). At the end of the movie Mitty is wearing a hoodie sweatshirt, a leather strap necklace with a copper hex nut, and friendship bracelets. There are also several scenes referencing “Major Tom“, which is a fictional character created by David Bowie in the late 60’s.

    You can always tell about how old you are based on what music appears in commercials and it’s becoming apparent that the markets have begun marketing less to the Baby Boomers and more to their children, Generation X. No where is that more apparent than in this movie, which is filled with product placements tucked in and tied to the story line from eHarmony to Papa Johns to LIFE.com, but with nods to Conan O’Brien, TBS, Cinnabon, Dell, CareerBuilder.com, KFC, Instagram, the iPhone, and American Airlines.

    Generation X was the last generation to graduate high school and enter the workforce before cell phones and Internet access became ubiquitous. Ben Stiller’s directorial debut, Reality Bites, which came out in 1994, was the same year Netscape started. The World Wide Web had just begun and yet it was already clear that things were changing. It appears that Ben Stiller, despite the success he’s had since then, still longs for a time when things were more simple, more analog – and is betting his audience does too.

    The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Movie Review

    Analog vs. Digital

    When Walter Mitty goes to give Rich the longboard at Cheryl’s home, there are at least three 70s-era cars on the street, which is very unusual for a movie set in 2013. In that same scene, on a wall, drawn in chalk is the words, “Here Comes the Sun,” which is an allusion to a Beatles Song of the same name from the album Abbey Road, which came out in 1969. On the cab ride back to his mom’s house, Walter Mitty wants to turn the cab’s digital video off to which the cab driver says ominously, “It stays on.”

    Walter Mitty has an analog clock in his apartment (not pictured, but you can hear it ticking in the background) and he wears an analog wristwatch with a leather strap. Although the watch is never specifically referenced in the film, it plays a small part in the short story by James Thurber. For a sense of how Thurber thought about watches, in The Gentleman in 916, he writes, “Even the sound of a wrist-watch prevents me from sleeping, because it sounds like two men trying to take a wheel off a locomotive.”

    While Walter Mitty does have a computer, it’s an older model, Dell laptop, which echoes his cell phone, an older flip-style phone. In contrast, Cheryl’s character uses a modern smartphone with Internet access. She still uses terms like “buffering” when searching the Internet (something she probably doesn’t have to do and isn’t a term used much any more). On the flip side, the photographer, Sean O’Connell does not have a phone at all – nor does any place Sean is currently located (ie. a shipping boat).

    While on the shipping boat, a deck hand takes a picture with his smartphone for Instagram, and asks to be Facebook friends. This foreshadows Mitty’s meeting with Sean O’Connel in Afghanistan who doesn’t take a picture at all, instead choosing to remember the moment as “me”/himself without the camera. This lost desire to be ‘in the moment’ shares a sentiment with those who identified with Charlene deGuzman and Miles Crawford’s I Forgot My Phone video which  went viral in August of 2013.

    Ben Stiller's Secret Life of Walter Mitty Movie

    Disrespect for the Past

    Walter Mitty works with analog film, something Kodak stopped making in June of 2013. Mitty’s co-worker, Hernando (which means “bold voyager”) has a man-crush on the photographer, O’Connell for still using film, which acknowledges he is well aware that although he is surrounded by film negatives, digital pictures have largely replaced analog film. Mitty states that he has never lost a negative despite “over a million” negatives passing through his care over the last 16 years he worked at TIME magazine.

    “Negative Asset Manager” is Mitty’s job title, but it’s also a metaphor for the deprecation of ‘everything that’s come before’. In the final scene of the movie, Mitty tells his former boss that the magazine has been built by many people over a long time, which the new boss is now treating as a negative asset on the balance sheet that needs debited or written off. The message is that businesses are created and ran by people, not balance sheets, and should be treated with more respect, even when things change.

    When Mitty’s boss, Ted Hendricks asks Mitty where the picture was, Mitty says it’s in a “silver bath” to which Ted does not even try to understand. He later asks someone else to look it up only to conclude that it “doesn’t exist.” Of course it exists, but simply Googling “silver bath” will only give you shiny pictures of bathroom accessories. You have to know that it was a part of photo processing, which is something older generations, even Generation X, understood – even if only in context.

    The most visual disrespect for the past occurs as Mitty is entering LIFE magazine for the last time and movers are literally dropping art onto the floor as they violently remove it from the walls. All of the desks are empty and covered in drop cloths like dead bodies, a symbol for the lost jobs and the lost magazine.  After working at the magazine for over 16 years, during his 17th year, the job ended – a ‘death” which could be a metaphor for the death of his father, which happened when Mitty was 17.

    Walter Mitty Purpose of Life

    The Purpose of Life

    In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty movie, LIFE Magazine’s motto is, “To see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to, to draw closer, to see and be amazed.” This motto is written on the wall of the lobby and is repeated in the wallet O’Connell gives Mitty and in the background of the movie as Mitty leaves for Greenland. However, on the wallet, O’Connell added one more sentence, “That is the purpose of life.”

    Off the coast of Greenland when Mitty jumps into the ocean, the captain of boat yells, “Don’t fear the porpoise,” which sounds like, “Don’t fear the purpose.” In this movie, Walter Mitty is 42 years old. In real life, Ben Still was 47 at the time of shooting the film. While younger than Brad Pitt, he still may have fears about the purpose of his life, just like Walter Mitty. Just like us. Just like me. He doesn’t want to be the old man bringing the news on a telegram.

    Film Symbolism

    The most blatant symbolism used in the movie was with allusions to 35 mm film reels and negatives. From the lights in Mitty’s apartment hallway to the windows on the outside of his apartment building, to the dots on the glass in LIFE magazine lobby, to the fuselage of the Greenland airplane at night, the film perforations, also known as perfs or sprocket holes and rectangular acetone film frames themselves were apparent throughout the beginning of the film.

    The word “Life” was used throughout the movie, not just as the name of the magazine, but also in conversations Mitty had with Cheryl and his mother. It’s also referenced on the bottom of the longboard Mitty traded for in Iceland. In large print it says, “LIFIO”, which is Icelandic for “can survive”. Similarly, Cheryl comments to Mitty “last in, first out”, which is commonly shortened as “LIFO” in business process management. Find any more? Leave a note in the comments.

  • Are Common Sayings Useful?

    When something hasn’t been accomplished, a common saying is:

    We can land a man on the moon, but we can’t…”

    What would we be saying if this had never happened?
    When something new is released, a common saying is:

    The best thing since sliced bread.”

    Before sliced bread you had to slice your own bread. Was this a bad thing?
    When the work you’re doing ultimately doesn’t matter, a common saying is that you are

    Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”

    What would we be saying if we had never lost the Titanic? No one makes sayings about space shuttle accidents, but they do like to say:

    Houston we have a problem.”

    Are common sayings useful?

    In a world where we are more and more connected, but have less and less in common, maybe we need these old sayings. Of course my opinion is USA-centric and to an extent, generation-centric. While shows like Friends and Seinfeld are like cannon for my generation, they have little relevance with anyone who has graduated high school in the last 8 years. It’s been almost 18 years since I graduated high school, to give you context.

    Are Internet memes and viral videos useful?

    While there are gigantic swaths of the Internet that can avoid the gaze of a majority of the world, the closest thing to a chance for commonality is going to be the most “viral” elements, which are Internet memes and viral videos who can garner more eyeballs than even the most popular television show, movie, or video games. And since you brought up video games, while “Mario” was the Mickey Mouse of my 8-bit generation that title has since been replaced by Angry Birds. For perspective, my daughter has an Angry Birds t-shirt and plays it far more than Super Mario on her Wii, but she plays Minecraft more by far.

    Reasoning by analogy versus the First Principles reasoning

    In a TED talk on Tesla, SpaceX, and Solarcity, Elon Musk was asked by Chris Anderson, “How have you [built all of these companies]? These projects are so — Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they’re so spectacularly different, they’re such ambitious projects at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way? What is it about you?” and this was Musk’s response:

    I work a lot. I mean, a lot…I do think there’s a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are — what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn’t be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive. So I think that’s an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it’s incredibly helpful.”

    When we speak and relate in metaphors, we may be helping communicate with each other, but we are not creating anything new. So are common sayings useful? Yes, if you want to communicate, but not if you want to create something new.

  • Stereotypes

    Stereotypes of young professionals I learned last night from interaction with some college kids last night at a meetup:

    They think being an entrepreneur means coding an app. They don’t know how to make paper airplanes. They use their Mac laptops as word processors. They use Twitter to communicate (via app on their phones, not SMS). They think assembly lines are inneficient based on a paper they wrote in high school. They don’t like Mountain Dew because it decays stuff fast. They prefer cities that offer mass transit because they are hard wired to preserve carbon and cash.

    Here’s what hasn’t changed:

    They love pizza. They have passion. They have new ideas. They’re willing to drive to another city to learn more (road trip!). They think they know everything, but are still willing to learn. We need them.

  • Personal Computing

    I recently wrote about the first computer I ever used (a Timex Sinclair TS-1000), but recently felt inclined to share my personal version of the PC, Internet, and Mobile revolutions. Although much has been written about this period between 1980 and 2010, I felt that, like the rapid advances in transportation, we are in a period of rapid transition, and that those who experienced it first-hand owe those who follow the courtesy of sharing what happened.

    I have done my share of computer repair service calls and have heard the same stories over and over from a generation born between 1950 and 1960 about how they had to learn Cobalt programming on punch cards at their college or university. I just nod my head and wonder what they’re lives would have been like had they continued to use Cobalt. This is Bill Gates and Steve Jobs‘ generation, the group that got ‘into computers’ after they had become more accessible. Those two, along with the great ‘think’ers at IBM and HP, started the PC revolution that has made all of our lives easier, more efficient, and productive.

    Sopwith GameI mostly grew up with PCs, my first being a Zenith model with two 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives. It had no hard drive at first, but later we added a 5MB drive. It came with an orange monochrome CRT (cathode ray tube) screen that we later upgraded to full color. I remember playing games like Sopwith and Dig Dug. I used Print Shop to make banners and PFS Write to write letters and paper. I was quite the nerd.

    Later my dad bought several 386 and 486 PCs from his co-workers at GM. We connected them with Laplink and serial cables and practiced formatting and unformatting them with Norton Tools. The Internet still went “eeeeaaaeeeahhaeeaahhheaa” then when it connected via 14.4 Kbps modems using Windows 3.1 and Winsock TCP. Email was in HyperTerminal in a program called Pine and the whole family had to share the same email address. My dad actually toured the Internet Service Provider in our area before deciding on them over a competitor.

    Our first “new” computer was a Gateway 2000 PC with a Pentium 1.2 Ghz processor, 16 MB of RAM, and a 2 GB hard drive. It’s hard to imagine, but this was really fast at the time. It ran Windows 95 and I spent a lot of time just figuring out how to tweak it and how to use the file system. At the time, this system cost $2000. I used it mostly for word processing. 4 years later I would buy my first PC for $1600 from Best Buy. It was a Compaq PC with a 40 GB hard drive and a CD-burner. That’s all I remember about it because all I ever used it for was to burn CDs and get on the Internet.

    The first college I went to still didn’t have broadband Internet access in 1998 or 1999, but by 2000 (at a different college), I had broadband for the first time. I actually had to go buy a 10 Mbit ethernet card from the college bookstore and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work when I installed it. I actually had to call the college tech support department and as it turned out I wasn’t seating the card well enough. Lesson learned. I was running Windows 2000 by this point, but the only thing I was doing on it was burning CDs and getting on the Internet. That’s when I discovered CollegeClub.com.

    By 2001 I was in my own apartment at my third college and I bought my first cell phone. It was an Ericson bar phone from AT&T, which was “free” with a two-year agreement. The price had fallen for the first time to a price-point that almost anyone could afford one: $30 a month. There was no apps, no texting, and no data plan. It was a phone that you could use to call other phones with. If you went over your minutes, you were charged what’s called “overage charges”. I got a girlfriend using AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM for short) and those overage charges bit me more than once. I ended up marrying that girl so I can also share that she got a cell phone at the same time, too. In fact, most people did. 2001 was kind of a turning point in cell-phone adoption. In 2000, bag phones in your mom’s car were only to be used for “emergencies” and were relatively expensive, but in just one year they became accessible and the ‘killer app’.

    In 2002 I got married and bought my first laptop – a 14.4 inch Compaq. I bought it from Staples on a whim so I could use it at the library at my fourth college. I ended up selling it to my brother so I could pay my mortgage insurance to buy my first house. It turns out you have to have your mortgage insurance money as separate from your mortgage when you buy a house. I didn’t know that. In 2004, a friend and I started Neighborhood Geeks and started doing in-home computer repair. Windows XP was in it’s prime and hardware parts were still expensive enough that you could justify repairing a PC rather than buying a new one. We were still upgrading PCs from Windows 98 and installing ethernet cards. It was a hoot, but it didn’t last. By the the time Vista came out, computers had shrunk in price and people were storing their email and files in the cloud. When your computer broke, there was nothing to recover and the cost to replace it was less than the cost of the repair. The golden age of home PC repair was over.

    I got my first smartphone in 2007. It was the first generation iPhone. I ended up giving this to my wife and went back to a flip phone for a time before trying out an Android smartphone in 2010. I began texting in 2005 around the same time I started using Facebook and Myspace for the first time. Back then, not everyone did it so you kind of had to know who ‘had texting’ and who didn’t. Some people got mad even if they did have texting because they were charged 10 cents for every text. Eventually I learned how to auto-forward text messages to email in Android so I wouldn’t have to have my phone on at work. It was clear that the mobile revolution had shook my life in more ways than one. Facebook, the cell phone, and the Internet have all led to very good and very bad things in my life. I hate them for that, but I appreciate them for what they allow us to do. I’ve made my living for the last decade off of manipulating bits on the screen, but how much has the technology manipulated me?

    Read what’s next for smartphones.

  • The Future Was Now

    In the summer of 1988, my parents bought a Chevy Suburban and drove our whole family down to Walt Disney World (the only time we ever went). My dad worked for GM at the time and so when we got to the Epcot Center, we got to cut in line to the now closed, World of Motion ride. It was a view of the future. Or should I say, a view of a possible future – one that mostly hasn’t happened – but that’s not what this post is about.

    Rebecca Murphey, a JavaScript engineer at Bocoup, wrote in her blog about how her dad bought one of the first personal computers:

    “In 1982, Timex came out with the Timex Sinclair TS-1000…the computer, a few times thicker than the original iPad but with about the same footprint, cost $99.95.”

    My dad bought one too and I remember having to hook it up to a special data tape player/recorder that acted as the ‘hard drive’. It’s what loaded and recorded changes to programs that displayed on the screen. I remember piecing the parts together and waiting for it to appear on the black and white television screen. We could load BASIC and type in commands, but we didn’t do much more than that. This post isn’t really about my early exposure to technology, it’s more about the man who exposed me to it.

    While we didn’t have humanoid robots in our kitchen, we had dishwashers who washed our dishes for us – and a furnace that detected a sudden change in temperature and automatically adjusted accordingly. My dad grew up in a house with no running water. He took a bath in a metal tub in the middle of the kitchen next to the fire-burning stove. He used a Sears catalog for toilet paper in the outhouse out back – yet he was the only person in his class to build an automobile from spare parts.

    Silly Robot

    I can only imagine my son re-discovering a vehicle from today, trying to understand this “hard app” (car radio) he found. What is it like growing up with a computer in every room and in every pocket? What is it like to always be on the Internet, always knowing where everyone is and what everyone is doing? What is it like to have your entire childhood documented in status messages, online galleries, and Youtube channels? When I went to high school, we weren’t even allowed to carry beepers.

    I can only imagine how no running water, building your own car, learning how to program, and buying one of the first personal computers can shape the way you teach your children about technology. And I can only imagine how growing up with Timex Sinclair TS-1000’s, Atari 2600’s, Nintendo NES’, Windows 3.1, Netscape, Winsock, Windows 95, Nokia Cellphones, College Club, Myspace, and finally Facebook can change how I teach my children about technology. I worry that technology enables too much using and not enough doing. That’s part of what this blog is about – giving back to what I’ve learned from the Internet – and my dad.

  • The Epic Generation: From the Garden to the City

    “You know I always wanted to pretend that I was an architect.” – George Costanza, Seinfeld

    Nathan Norris recently wrote an article entitled, “Why Generation Y is Causing the Great Migration of the 21st Century” about ‘under 30’s’ moving into the cities and driving less – the new migration into urban spaces. Norris writes, “At the same time, television shifted from glorifying the surburban lifestyle in the 1960’s and 1970’s (e.g., Leave it to Beaver and the Brady Bunch) to glorifying the urban lifestyle in the 1990’s (e.g., Seinfeld and Friends). These cultural changes have pushed Generation Y to look for more adventure than previous generations, and they are less fearful of cities than previous generations.”

    I forwarded it to a friend and he wrote, “Art (used loosely here) imitating life or vice versa?”

    I wrote that I’ve been watching the TEDtalks “Building Wonder” curated channel on Netflix, which is mostly about architecture and it’s seemed to correlate with conversations I’ve had with him (in the past and recently) about the desire to be part of a community like Bloomington, Broad Ripple, or Nora. We sort of had that community in high school, now that I think about it, with Benjamin’s Coffee House or even to a small extent at Heiskell’s Restaurant (at the height of our takeover). We also had it at church and at college and we also had it for a time in Daleville (before the breakup began). Community is what you make of it – but physical constraints help.

    This “art” reference he mentioned made me wonder if I haven’t been yearning after that ‘public living room’ that Friends had in that apartment or Jerry’s apartment. People came and went as they pleased. There were four locks on the door, but they were never locked. They also had that other space, the coffee shop down below – Seinfeld had it with the diner. In Daleville, we had La Hacienda and Starbucks. We knew the people working there and they new us. Remember when George found the rubber band in his soup and playfully sprang it back to the cook who left it there? I think we all long for that sort of community where we all know each other on that level.

    Another friend wrote in reply, “I think it has to be ‘art’ imitating life. It isn’t like Seinfeld or Friends glorified New York as the central scene where all things are happening – that had already been the prevailing public opinion since at least the 1920’s. Although, I don’t think it is “imitating” so much as it is a broadcast company’s calculated offering of what the public will find interesting or novel. Green Acres wasn’t about the country, it was about the voyeuristic experience of someone foolishly leaving the wonders of the big city for the country – adding in the tension of the couple having different perspectives.. Beverly Hillbillies was about the opposite – people who don’t. belong in the wonderful urban/suburban area and the comedic tension. Andy Griffith played on the mundane and simpleton of the small-town, where previously there wasn’t any television that was centered on a “watch the paint dry” town. By and large, I think TV producers expect there to be curiosity and reverence for NY and LA from outsiders and appreciation from those who live there. Other than a few shows who are using the difference in location as a position separator or as central to the theme – shows and movies have generally been based in NY/LA/Other large metro.”

    Here’s the list of TED Talks for those of you who don’t have Netflix:

    1 Bjarke Ingels: Three Warp-Speed Architecture Tales 18m

    2 Thomas Heatherwick: Building the Seed Cathedral 16m

    3 William McDonough on Cradle to Cradle Design 19m

    4 Cameron Sinclair on Open-Source Architecture 23m

    5 Joshua Prince-Ramus on Seattle’s Library 19m

    6 Liz Diller Plays with Architecture 19m

    7 Alex Steffen: The Shareable Future of Cities 10m

    8 James H. Kunstler Dissects Suburbia 19m

    9 Kamal Meattle on How to Grow Fresh Air 4m

    10 Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2 15m

    11 Anupam Mishra: The Ancient Ingenuity of Water Harvesting 17m

    12 Mitchell Joachim: Don’t Build Your Home, Grow It! 2m

    13 Rachel Armstrong: Architecture That Repairs Itself? 7m

    14 Joshua Prince-Ramus: Building a Theater That Remakes Itself 18m

    15 Magnus Larsson: Turning Dunes into Architecture 11m

    16 Michael Pawlyn: Using Nature’s Genius in Architecture 13m

    17 Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting Suburbia 19m

  • 80′s Toy The Original Roller Racer Flying Turtle

    I have been searching for the name of this triangle-shaped, red seated toy that has a handlebar underneath that you move back and forth to go forward with, but because it existed prior to the Internet, I haven’t been able to find it – until now*.

    I was searching for things like, “80s racer red sit toy handbars”, “red sit scooter”, and “red triangle scooter”, but I couldn’t find anything. I knew it was red and sort of a triangular shape. It had handlebars that were attached to the front but curved around to the sides and you put your feet up on the front part of the handlebars while holding the grips that were off to the side. To make it go, you just had to wiggle the handlebar back and forth. I never owned one, but remember seeing the commercials on TV growing up. I later found out they were made by the Mason Corporation and named Roller Racers or Flying Turtles. I’ve also heard them referred to as The Rabbit.

    The Original Roller Racer

    It’s called a “Roller Racer” and Amazon defines it as a scooter. I suppose it is, but it’s not like any other stand-up scooter. You sit very close to the ground and instead of using your feet to push you forward, you have to move the handle bars back and forth, kind of like a snake.

    One Amazon commenter said it was good for preschool children with disabilities because even, “Kids with splints or whose legs are too short can ride with their feet on the T-bar connecting the handlebars and, again, enjoy a great ride.”

    According to Wikipedia, the Roller Racer was originally sold by WHAM-O brand name, but is now sold by the Mason Corporation and is available on Amazon.

    EDIT: I’ve recently setup a whole new website for these ride-on toy scooters with one post dedicated to Roller Racers and Flying Turtles.

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