Why, as adults, do we over-analyze holidays? Christmas is too commercialized, dressing up for Halloween might offend other religions, or Valentine’s Day is so hurtful to the single people. This weekend, it’s Mother’s Day that appears to be on the chopping block. I’m still trying to figure out where people came up with the idea that Mother’s Day is celebrated to recognize the perfect mother, with the June Cleaver pearls and the dust-free living room, whose devoted husband and children have placed her on a pedestal as the angel of the household. I don’t know what day they’re used to celebrating, but it sure as heck is not my vision of Mother’s Day.

The Modern Mother’s Day began to be significantly recognized in the US by 1914. There had been earlier 19th century attempts to recognize a day for mothers, largely due to the idea that there should be a “Mother’s Day for Peace” to protest the atrocities of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. However, the event that allowed this day to be formally recognized by governments began with two sisters mourning the loss of their mother. At a time when most women remained in the home, Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis worked tirelessly to teach American women basic nursing and sanitation skills, and her efforts helped to save lives on both sides of the American Civil War. When she died in 1905 her two daughters, Anna and Elsinore, missed her terribly, and felt that children fail to appreciate their mothers enough when they are still around to receive said appreciation. Therefore, a campaign to establish an official Mother’s Day began, concluding with President Woodrow Wilson encouraging United States citizens to display flags on the second Sunday in May “as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country”.

So, let’s summarize:

• Previous Mother’s Day celebrations were tied to a need for peace and a wish to leave a better world for their children
• The official holiday began as an act by two sisters who loved her mother deeply and wanted the kindness of all mothers recognized

Now, nowhere in that summary does the word “perfect” appear. We do not celebrate Mother’s Day because a mother is the epitome of womanhood. We celebrate to acknowledge that mothers deserve to be recognized. Now, some might argue that Mother’s Day is also too commercialized (and Anna Jarvis would agree with you, based on the way she protested this commercialization in her later years). However, if it’s the commercialization that bothers you, I say change your perception of the holiday. Forget the Hallmark greeting cards. Create your own family traditions. Just quit complaining about how Mother’s Day does not demonstrate “real” motherhood. We all have different definitions of what that “real” is, and we would do well to remember that mothering is the most important job a person can be faced with, and a little recognition now and then for a lot of hard work shouldn’t hurt anyone.

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If you happen to own your own website, you may have installed google analytics to track your web stats. You might write a kickass post that’s been dugg, retweeted, or otherwise talked about on your favorite social media site and thought to yourself, “I know there’s a spike happening in my traffic, but I want to see it nooooow!”

Well, whine no longer, my friends. It’s Woopra to the rescue!

Woopra is a real time website tracking service. You can either install its javascript code directly into your site, or install one of the many CMS plugins developed for it. You download the multi-platform desktop client and voila! You have real time access to all the visits on your website. You can sort users by geography, by referrer, and  just about any other statistic you can track. There’s a feature coming soon will enable to initiate live chat sessions with visitors on the site.  Woopra is also free up to 30,000 pageviews a month. Be careful though, watching your own meteoric rise to internet fame can be addictive.

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I’ve ranted before about overshare. I’ve disparaged people like Penelope Trunk because they employ the entire internet as an amateur therapist. I try to keep this blog free and clear of any of the drama that goes on in my life. Lately though, I’ve been having second thoughts.

When oversharers make the decision to start opening their life up to internet, something unexpected happens. They are not ostracized or passed by like a raving street preacher. People start to trust them because of this volunteered information. There are still detractors and critics, but they either remain silent or can be silenced by a draconic comment moderation policy. You might say that the oversharers only surround themselves with yes-men and sycophants, that this is only hollow tribalism, but consider this: Your only other option is to be invisible, a mere statistic on google analytics. By keeping guarded about our personal lives, and by extension our very individuality, we are ignored, we are downsized, and we are passed over.

I am trying very hard to convince myself that this isn’t true. My hardships are my own, I have no right to burden others with them. But I notice that rapport that forms around bloggers that offer their very bodily functions for public debate. Can we afford to remain aloof in such a society?

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Darth Vader would have been much more popular with the Admirals on the Death Star if he had displayed this handy info-graphic instead of Force-choking people, don’t you agree? A desktop version can be found at Gizmodo.

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Sometimes it just doesn’t seem real.

Aren’t those just numbers on a board, or ticks on a stopwatch?

Just what are we getting from all this?

Sure, we aren’t exactly solving the problems of the world out there, but sometimes challenges and competitions just need to exist for their own sake.

We need to be reminded.

It’s easy to keep things the way they are, to go through the motions. We have to remember what it feels like to not be satisfied with our lot in life. The joy of victory and the pain of defeat remind us of what it’s like to risk it all for a dream.

So Thanks goes to you, Team Canada, and all Olympic Athletes. Thanks for teaching us all to dare to be great.

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The computer industry implants in the minds of many the legend of the lone programmer, sequestered in a parents basement coding the next paradigm shift of technology. The myth is not that far from the truth, since many of the big names in software, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, were all created by hobbyists charting unknown territory in code.

I’m sure that everyone working in computers today, everyone, has some crazy project roiling in the back of their heads. But the majority of us don’t even start, let alone finish these projects out of fear that we aren’t qualified to do this, that we should let someone with “expertise” eventually make that app we want.  What we fail to realize is that the “experts” rarely know more than we do what unwritten programs look like. The only reason they are experts is that they’ve made their fear work for them. The frustration and uneasiness that comes from a new language and technology drives them forward instead of holding them back.

So if you’ve got an app or a script or whatever on the back burner, get it up on the monitor right now. Find that spot where you left off and feel that mixture of rage, terror, and embarrassment that made you shelve it. That feeling isn’t telling you that there is something wrong, it is telling you that you are working on something challenging and worthy of your skills. That feeling, right there, is the frontier of software development.

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My friend Jen over at Interface Media sent me this Economist article about a book called The Pinch: How Baby Boomers took their children’s future-and why they should give it back. Apparently, the number disparity between the baby boom and subsequent generations is more serious than I thought, at least in Britain. The entire population under 40 owns 15% of all real estate and financial assets in their country. At the same time, 20% of everyone in their 50’s owns a second home.

I don’t know if Canada is in the same situation, but these stats are something to think about. I don’t think this situation is entirely anyone’s fault. The Boomers acquired their wealth through years of accelerated technological advancement and industrial production. Now that technology has advanced and so much has been produced, the same sources of wealth that produced all that prosperity can’t be relied upon any more. The factories are either closed or moved to China. Mining and oil production is peaking all over the world. The rules have changed, but that’s okay. Your food budget (potentially) is a tenth of what it was a generation ago. There’s more public transit than there used to be. And computing power? A single paycheck from McDonald’s can put you in touch with the world. We might not make as much as our parents, but if we can make use of what we have available, it might not matter.

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Is it just me, or do open source software packages have this tendency to overload features until their control panels look like the dashboard of a 747? Granted, there are some open source products out there that are truly great. Simple to use, easy to customize and a cinch to navigate. But if you’re looking at what looks like a casualty of the feature creep wars, chances are it’s an open source product. Most of the setup involves turning off all the various features you are never going to use. It feels like the product of the same insecurity that informs Microsoft’s attempts to catch up to Mac OS. Someone ought to tell the developers of Blender or Zen-cart that people aren’t turning close-source products because they have more features. You don’t need to find a new user interface paradigm to wrest control of the market from Microsoft and Apple. All you really need is to stay open source, free to download for all.

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This voice acting makes so glad I never bought a PS1. Enjoy!

Found Via Jing

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Here’s some advice from Ralph Bakshi that bears repeating. There’s no question that the animation industry is in a slump along with the rest of the economy. The cartoons that get produced are often creatively diluted to the point where many animators are either contemplating suicide or grad school. This state of affairs confuses Bakshi, but not because he’s over 60. We’re all watching this video on boxes with a million times the computing power of the box that ran the Apollo missions. For someone like Bakshi, this box does the work of an editing department, a coloring department, and a whole host of other tasks that would take hundreds of man-hours 20 years ago. We are completely unaware of the technological power we take for granted on a daily basis. We can use it if we only give ourselves permission.

Found via BoingBoing

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