The world is more magical before you learn how things really work. And some of us have that natural curiousity to find out how those magical things do work (often by taking them apart, sometimes successfully putting them back together!). I do enjoy walking around with an inquisitive child once in a while, you know, the kind who asks how everything works (and, bless them, they actually think you know). But once in a while, it’s wonderful to be with a wide-eyed child who is entranced by the magic, who is enjoying the spendor of the experience, not someone who’s trying to explain it or deconstruct it scientifically, but who is just happily entranced. When I’m looking at a painting, I try to strike a balance between enjoying its beauty and stepping in closer to see the brushstrokes and palette. I used to just enjoy movies and books, but now I also think about how they were put together. I think that balance is important for education. But sometimes it’s best to just marvel over the results, not the means.

Surely someone has done a study of the different cultural effects of having Monday Night Football start at 9PM (east coast) vs 6PM (west coast).

Catching up on a year’s worth of National Geographic magazines is one of my usual holiday activities. Here are some interesting color facts from the July 1999 issue.

• To satisfy German preference, egg producers in that country feed chickens marigold petals and paprika to darken the yolks.
• Men in the U.S. respond most strongly to reds with yellow mixed in. Women prefer blue-based reds. (Remember this next time you’re picking a lipstick. Hmm I keep buying blue-based nail polishes. Maybe that’s my problem.)
• In 1985 the courts allowed Owens Corning to trademark pink for their Fiberglas insulation. However, Nutrasweet was denied the right to trademark pastel blue for their Equal packets (so, what if they had colored the Equal itself blue?).

It’s great exercising those memories stored in the dusty sections of your brain, like when I navigate my hometown roads. Strange things are shaken out as my mind accesses quality New England directions like “turn right a few yards after the Kiwanis Club sign”. I remembered which driveway belonged to my third grade teacher; when she lived in it there was a mailbox painted with cherries. I passed the sign where I got pulled over for executing a classic middle of the night “rolling stop”. Part of my Silicon Valley brain keeps popping up as I think “Ack! They changed the font on the street signs!” It’s a serif font now and, I think, less legible. I wish I had stolen the one for my road before they replaced it. They used to be these divinely rural black letters spray-painted on white using block letter stencils. So wonderfully small town.

My parents got new linoleum in the kitchen and the little bit of carpeting at the very top of the stairs is no longer there. Every time I head downstairs, this small change almost causes me to pitch myself headfirst down the stairs, screaming mantras from The Design of Everyday Things. I’m not sure what it is about the missing carpet that is turning me into such a klutz, but my mom says it took her a month to get used to it herself. When I’m at my parents’ I realize that my dominant memories of the house are from my childhood (well, duh), because everything looks like it has shrunk. I am reminded of Joan Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank describing her high school reunion: “It was as if everyone had swelled.”

I’m still musing about digital vs physical. Will the next generation form strong sentimental attachments to digital items? Let’s say a girl gets a cutely formatted HTML email (with neato graphics) from a guy who’s interested in her. She wants to keep it. She could store it in her mailbox forever, or (gasp) print it out to get a hardcopy. What does she do? In a box somewhere are dot matrix printouts of much of my college email. There was no other way for me to save it. But I wouldn’t have minded keeping it all online. Yet, it does seem more concrete to have the printouts. Somehow, though, deleting a batch of email and digital photos from a boyfriend who has spurned you doesn’t have as much oomph as igniting pieces of paper that are no longer palatable into raging flames. Product Idea: a web site that lets you upload files and electronically torch them with animated special effects.

The flow of time here lacks the cadences I’m accustomed to. It’s been almost nine years since I came to California, and I still feel incomplete without the usual landmarks of seasons passing by. Sure, in winter it gets colder and it rains, and Christmas decorations appear, but back in New England, when a season comes along, it revs up to hit you at full blast. It could be the relentless patter of the April rain, the deep colors of the autumn leaves, those nights you try sleeping on the floor because it’s just too hot and muggy to be in a bed, or those blizzardy mornings when you wake up extra early to listen to the list of school closings on the radio. Maybe it’s only because I was younger, but those four disparate seasons made the year seem longer. And I no longer have the regular rhythm of a school year to attach myself to. Software development schedules don’t move along in parallel with the seasons. Heck, some don’t move along in relationship to anything substantive at all! (This log entry inspired by the luminous snowy photos of the elf-freaked pb)

I was telling someone today about how I was always reading my mom’s cookbooks when I was little, and wasn’t I an odd child? He pointed out that a recipe is kind of like a computer program. I never thought of that activity as having any bearing on my programming skills. Hmmm, what else made my brain end up this way?

A friend of mine is auctioning off New Year’s Eve babysitting services on eBay. Need a babysitter within 75 miles of Sunnyvale, California for the 31st? I’ll vouch for her. There are at least two others auctioning off babysitting on eBay for that night. A guy in Austin has set his price starting at $1000, so my friend is a bargain at $200. When I mentioned this to my officemate he said her approach was too high tech and recommended that she instead post paper fliers around the neighborhood. (Oh but that just wouldn’t be as much fun!)

Happy Winter Solstice. As Seth, who happens to be in Scotland, wrote to me: “If I don’t stay up too late, I can wake up at sunrise (8:16) and catch all five hours of daylight.” (Correction: Seth subtracted incorrectly; it’s actually 7 hours. That’s what he gets for not using 24 hour time and also inventing chrons.)