Kevin Makice's Dandelife : The story of Kevin Makice's life

Boom. Boom.

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:05 UTC 2008

One of my favorite childhood memories is watching fireworks. Woodstock’s City Park was only about 7 blocks away, but we packed up the station wagon and headed in to park with the rest of the 12,000 residents of the town—4 hours early—to claim our bit of turf with a blanket. The best summers, though, were the ones spent watching the explosions from our rooftop.

Now in Bloomington, we’ve taken to a free and worry-free commute to the front yard.

Because Amy plays in the Community Band, the Picnic with the Pops is a Makice tradition, and we have managed to stay long enough to see some fireworks there. Unfortunately, not only is it usually a looooooong ordeal to get kids (and dad) from the setup to the pretty sky show, the Pops have progressively restricted where the boys can romp. Not so much fun as work.

We tried—once—to make the trip to Memorial Stadium to see the annual 4th of July show up close. Carter, then 4 and the proud owner of a little baby brother, demanded we get closer and closer and closer to where the fireworks would be shot off. We had just made our way through the crowd past Assembly Hall when the first rocket fired. One boom later, and Carter was bolting in the other direction. We couldn’t get far away fast enough. Never went back.

I loved the view from atop our porch rooftop as a kid. There were some trees in the way, and we always missed whatever was happening on the ground show, but it was free and easy to get to bed later. (Five year olds talk big, but by the grand finale I was lucky to still have my eyes open.) My dad was more relaxed about it all, too, since he didn’t have to worry about entrance fees, parking, and publicly keeping his two kids in check for a full evening. All he had to worry about was one of them sliding off the shingles.

I’m not letting Carter near the roof, but no need. We look northwest over University Elementary from ground level, waiting for the sky to explode.

Fireworks 2008, Part I (”Chameleon” by Rebirth Brass Band)

Fireworks 2008, Part II (”Captain Jack” by Billy Joel)

The importance of being connected

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:05 UTC 2008

The Internet made three big promises to humanity when it went mainstream over a decade ago. Most people focus on two of these—it was to provide universal access to information and revolutionize the global economy. For me, the Internet was always about the third promise: personal connection.

In 1996, Amy took her new degree in social work to Door County for a week-long workshop with Judith Jordan. Jordan, one of the current torchbearers for relational-cultural theory (RCT), proved inspirational not only to Amy but also, vicariously, to me. The simple concept that we humans are hard-wired for connection with others is a foundational idea that has permeated my thinking.

A few years ago, Boston Globe reporter Christina Robb wrote a great history of RCT in the form of a book, This Changes Everything. Robb chronicles the overlapping professional careers of three extraordinary women—Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, and Judith Lewis Herman—as they gain insight from their pioneering experiences bending gender boundaries, thus planting the seeds for a revolutionary feminist perspective on clinical psychology, psychiatry, and education. The title of the book is from a quote by Miller when reflecting on the impact these insights have. Miller, the founder of RCT, died in summer 2006.

RCT examines women’s creation of self around their relationships. This contrasts other theories of human development focusing on individuation and autonomy. Strength is in the relationship, a dynamic beast that incorporates a cycle of disconnection and reconnection. The outcome of healthy relationships are energy, clarity, a sense of worth and—most importantly—a desire for more connection. With disconnection comes confusion, lethargy and isolation. The trick to good mental health is not to avoid the latter, but to work through it back into a state of connection with others.

Mark Pesce’s talk on Hyperconnectivity

These themes again resurfaced in my informatics work, which deals with the dynamics of community building. On June 24, Mark Pesce gave a talk on the social nature of humanity at the Personal Democracy Forum, Lincoln Center in New York. The name was familiar to me as the author of VRML, and early 3D markup language, but I found his current project—The Human Network: Sharing, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century—to be much more compelling. His book is due out in mid-2009.

Pesce argues that the mixture of new mobile technology and our social nature is creating a fast-changing world we no longer can (or should?) control. The crux of his message is built on this key insight:

Children are experts in mimesis—learning by imitation. It’s been shown that young chimpanzees regularly outscore human toddlers on cognitive tasks, while the children far surpass the chimps in their ability to “ape” behavior. We are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers.

Our peers now number three and a half billion.

In short, connection is an inevitably useful evolutionary force that shapes our global culture.

USC researcher Mizuko Ito studied teenagers in Japan and found that kids engage in a continuous conversation, or co-presence, with and average of five other friends. These conversations are mostly trivial in nature, but they begin the moment the teens wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night. Led by Twitter, microblogging has shown that the interest in and value of short, phatic messages is cross-cultural. Those seemingly pointless answers to the core question, “What are you doing?” collectively form a dance of connection and disconnection upon which healthy people thrive.

Pesce puts this in the context of politics and democracy. Hyperconnectivity is producing hypermimesis, which itself leads to hyperempowerment. Because everyone has the potential to see what everyone else is doing, innovative notions spread quickly and spark action within the masses. Those who fight against these dynamics is tilting at windmills. As Pesce observes: “The mob, now mobilized, can do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, encourage or scold as the occasion warrants, but he cannot control. Not with all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men.”

This is precisely why finding a way to connect Jean Baker Miller to Stanley Miller and Scott Miller is so important. The genetic predisposition toward connection coupled with a technology that soon will reach 3/4 of all people on the planet adds up to the inevitability of a hyperconnected world. The ship can’t go back into the bottle. Instead, we have to understand what might come from having a boat on the desk.

Usability Consultant Kimberly Krause Berg lamented last fall that the social web is more about disengaging from others than relating to them. (”We’ve had the Internet to use to change the world for over 10 years now. They still pave Paradise and put up parking lots.”) She reiterated some of those same ideas more recently, specifically taking issue with the notion that people over 40 don’t “get” social media. Kimberly makes an eloquent case for the need to see, hug, and sense our social contacts.

In doing so, however, Berg backs up to the old argument that computer-mediated relationships are inherently inferior. Strong and weak ties, online and offline … each connection we make affords its own opportunities and limitations. To appropriate her own example, Woodstock was special not merely because people had pot, mud, nudity and music over which to bond. It was special because a small mass of individuals did manage to connect, despite exponentially fewer opportunities to do so. Perhaps Woodstock exists in a different form these days, through microblogs or Second Life parties, and—thankfully—the magic isn’t as unique in a hyperconnected world.

BlogSchmog goes to the spa

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:05 UTC 2008

Every now and then, you realize it is time to do a little spring cleaning, even when it isn’t spring. We have been publishing online since 2000, coinciding with the birth of our eldest son. Over those eight years, the face of BlogSchmog has changed several times. This weekend, with a jumpstart from one of Robert Ellis’ great themes, our site got another facelift.

BlogSchmog is on its seventh design in over eight years of publishing.

The web is rich with resources to help you spruce up your site. Starter kits are readily available for everything from CSS templates to color schemes. One interesting tool is JumpChart, an application for web site prototyping. JumpChart allows you to build working code through an online interface. While this doesn’t translate directly into a blog theme, it is a nice platform for trying out your ideas for structure and creating a foundation of solid markup to adapt into a WordPress theme. Similarly, you could go to Design Shack and browse for existing CSS layout templates.

Advice is plentiful. Expert tips help educate you on web design style, vertical rhythm, permalinks, and search engine optimization. SEO is somewhat controversial, but there is an indispensable plug-in for WordPress that takes care of the work (… as long as you remember to fill out the extra fields in the blog post form).

A byproduct of its huge user-developer community, useful blog themes and plug-ins are available for WordPress. Denver developer Alex King, for example, offers a suite of plug-ins built from the open source platform. Singapore programmer Lester Chan has his own list of tools.

Among my favorite plug-ins currently used in BlogSchmog are:

aLinks—automatically link keywords in your blog post.
All-in-One SEO Pack—out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.
FeedWordPress—simple and flexible (and scalable, it turns out) Atom/RSS syndication.
Get Recent Comments—display the most recent comments or trackbacks.
Google Sitemap generator—generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your blog.
Permalink redirection—redirects all crap away from the end of the URL.
Search Meter—tracks use of the search engine to see which terms visitors are using to search your blog
Twitter for WordPress—displays your latest public Twitter message on your blog.

Of course, no favorite plug-in list would be complete without Akismet, which comes as part of the WordPress installation. Rather than rely on manual detection and the redundant actions of individuals, Akismet pools all of the comment data and applies the collective wisdom of blog administrators to filter most of the 88% of all comments that turn out to be spam.

What I like most about this particular theme is how it treats our eclectic content on the home page. Each of our main content categories has its own thread of recent posts situated above the fold. The scrolling below the category columns isn’t overwhelming, taking readers first to “The Next Generation”—with links to quotes from our two boys—and further down into a very useful tag cloud, a recent addition to the core WordPress installation.

The overhaul isn’t completely finished, however. BlogSchmog seems to have passed through a check with Graybit, an accessibility tool to detect problems with color blindness and contrast. It has some validation errors, though, and needs some editing to fix the hiccups found by W3C in the HTML and CSS. I’ll run it through various browser tests in the coming week or two.

What do you think?

Horriblisms

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:05 UTC 2008

Here are links to the swell three-act miniseries, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog. If you haven’t seen it already, it will be too late by Monday, when the ephemeral show is yanked offline. What will remain is the cultural footprint left by the giant supervillain.

The Joss Whedon creation was a big hit this past week. It will still be available in iTunes form and as part of a reportedly kickin’ DVD in a future release. There are also Captain Hammer comics. However, it will be the use of catchphrases that will signal its impact as a shared cultural experience.

Back in spring 2000, a little-known actor named Chris Walken walked onto the set of Saturday Night Live and urged Will Ferrell to play the cowbell. Eight years later, the phrase “more cowbell” persists as a synonym for “remedy.” Dr. Horrible has eight times as much content—and therefore, opportunity—as the Walken-Ferrell SNL sketch. Something’s got to stick.

Here are my top ten Horrible phrases to get cowbelled into regular use:

#10) “Bring the frozen yogurt”
def. Intentionally unintentional; to stage spontaneity. As in, “Surprised when Angelina showed up at the party, Brad had to bring the frozen yogurt to make it through the evening.”

#9) “Homeless day”
def. A nice but ineffective gesture. Alternately, to view a small gift as a big cure. As in, “The new paint job proved a homeless day after the engine fell out of the car.”

#8) “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY”
def. A strong objection to being interrupted. As in, “WAAAAAAAAAAAY! Like I was saying, the trip to Tahiti was awesome.”

#7) “Freeze ray.”
def. To return from a tangent; to get back on topic. As in, “Sales are down in Chicago. You know, I love the pizza in Chicago. Tasty pies. Not the same kind of pizza you get elsewhere. … Right, Freeze ray. Sales figures can be improved with some creative marketing.”

#6) “Hamjet”
def. The means of seduction. Alternately, to seduce. As in, “Kris is hot. I think I’ll Hamjet her.”

#5) “Captain Hammer will save us”
def. When all hope is lost; a resignation. As in, “After missing three meetings with clients, Captain Hammer is going to save my job.”

#4) “Sporked”
def. To smile while being royally screwed, not in a good way. As in, “When they fired Jerry, they sporked him in a crowded restaurant.”

#3) “It smells like cumin.”
def. When something works, but only on a technicality. As in, “The badly damaged package of china arrived today. It smells like cumin, though.”

#2) “Pie”
def. A superficial jerk who is good at acting like he isn’t. As in, “When he’s around family, Russ is so pie.”

#1) “The hammer is my penis.”
def. Something so obvious it needs to be made explicit to emphasize its obviousness. As in, “Gas is expensive? Yeah. The hammer is my penis, man.”

SproutBox

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:05 UTC 2008

Tuesday night at the Baker Place, local startup SproutBox presented their business idea to a few dozen local movers and shakers in the political, tech and entrepreneurial community.

SproutBox is a startup for startups

The evening at the snazzy downtown digs had the feel of a Bloomington Startup Weekend reunion. At least ten participants from that event were on hand to christen SproutBox into the local business community. The fact that SproutBox exists at all can be considered the most important outcome of that weekend in February.

The mission of SproutBox involves two core goals. The first is to eliminate the obstacles preventing people from turning their ideas into viable enterprise. The second is to make Bloomington into a “hotbed of high tech startup activity.”

Transforming the local Startup culture
Mike Trotzke, the spokesperson for SproutBox Tuesday night, used a movie metaphor to describe what SproutBox does. Traditionally, investors and entrepreneurs place too much control in the hands of venture capitalists to do the scouting, investing and decision making. This “Hollywood” model mimics what movie studios do—they put many talented people together to work on a single project, and then move on to another when it is done. Trotzke wants to make the entrepreneur the director of their project with SproutBox being the producer.

“What venture capitalists want,” Trotzke said during his presentation, “is a paradigm shifting, socially viral, semantic networked, widgetized platform with integrated user-contributed synergies and enterprise ready monetization—sold to Google while in beta.” What SproutBox wants is to develop a sound million-dollar business first before considering it a potential billion-dollar one.

For the first time since 1978, not a single company backed by venture capitalists went public last quarter. Since VC firms typically invest in 10 ideas hoping to get one to take root, young businesses taking VC money are partnering with people who expect them to fail.

Part of the reason for this may be an accepted philosophy for startups that leads to questionable business decisions. It is not uncommon for money to precede a revenue strategy, for example, relying on a build-it-they-will-come plan. The money that is invested tends to be spent recklessly—buying a lot of equipment and making quick hires—as a tactic to scare possible competitors away from the field.

SproutBox wants to shift the focus from investing cash in probable failures to providing the services and skills needed to take the product to market. They will do this by being practical in their selection of development projects, emphasizing the cultivation of predictable revenue, and targeting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as the preferred business model.

Mike Trotzke introduces Bloomington to SproutBox

A startup for startups
In a nutshell, SproutBox is a startup company looking to develop startups. Like Y Combinator and Tech Stars, it is a form of incubator investing resources to get fledgling businesses off the ground. Unlike such organizations, however, SproutBox is trying to measure success by revenue and stability.

Investment of human and financial resources will be limited to two companies at any time—one in development, and another in transition to the permanent owners. Projects will undergo a selection process that ends when an offer is made. The development cycle lasts about three months, followed by three more months of transition.

The first “sprouts”—the term owners Trotzke, Brad Wisler and Marc Guyer give to the accepted applicants—will be internal businesses run by the principals and used by the company to help future sprouts. New external projects won’t be selected until late spring 2009, after the development process has been iterated and refined. (This works out very well for second-year masters students and undergraduates working on capstone projects to complete their degrees.)

Most importantly, SproutBox is committed to developing Bloomington businesses. The SproutBox Manifesto includes the following:

Good companies involve and enrich their communities.
Ideas are less important than the entrepreneurs that have them.
The Midwest is a great place to start a business.

SproutBox is counting on the IU School of Informatics and other university programs to become the seed for innovative new business ideas. As SproutBox becomes more successful in cultivating new sprouts, the hope is that students will choose Indiana after graduation because of the many opportunities afforded the local tech and business culture.

The team is also planning a new building located on Rogers and 11th, in the Certified Technology Park. The four story structure will sit on one of the highest points in Bloomington, offering office space to sprout companies and space for two retail stores on the street level.

Congratulations, SproutBox. Thanks for sharing.

Love and WarGames

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:05 UTC 2008

While my wife spent the evening swooning over Remington Steele, I got reacquainted with a love of my former life—Jennifer Kathryn Mack from the 1983 dystopian thriller, WarGames.

WarGames (1983) reappeared in the local movie theatre tonight

WarGames returned to theatres as part of a promotion for a 25th anniversary DVD that includes a sequel, WarGames: The Dead Code. Other than being set in more modern times and alluding to a plot device that takes advantage of the power of social gaming to defeat another computer gone mad, it looks to be pretty much the same movie. Without Ally Sheedy.

Ally Sheedy, as everyone knows, is hot. The featurette that, sadly, replaced all new movie trailers before the film, showed she still has her “It.” But it was seeing Sheedy’s WarGames appearance as the would-be girlfriend thurst into global thermonuclear war simulation angst that brought back the memories of one of my first on-screen crushes. She takes a back seat only to Olivia Newton-John in leather and pretty much anything Meg Ryan. I saw Maid to Order. Willingly.

All that summer love was not on the radar for my two sons, who accompanied me to the special $10 screening Thursday. Archie had to be talked into it, bribed to look the other way on the lack of animation by the promise of candy. Carter was up for it, however, and I was hopeful it would lead to a nice conversation on arms races and the global community. Instead,

Me: So, what did you get out of that movie? What’s the moral?
Carter: Don’t hack.

The highlight for Carter—who spent much of the evening perched on the arm rest between two seats—was recognizing the nerdy voice of Eddie Deezen, who play Malvin to Maury Chaykin’s Jim Sting. I was floored by how many recognizable faces were in this flick, including John Spencer and Michael Madsen as the two silo officers serving as the justification for automating the nuclear arsenal.

Archie climbed into my lap as the movie started, forced there by a couple who apparently couldn’t find any better seats in the half-packed house than the ones in front of my short little boys. He was asleep before Michael Madsen had pulled his gun on John Spencer.

The movie was 10-15 minutes longer than I recalled. It was probably due to the technical glitch that gave us a blank screen and brought up the lights for a while.

The sequel, The Dead Code (2008), is going straight to DVD

Monroe County Fair

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:05 UTC 2008

We spent Wednesday afternoon at the fair. It was, let me tell you, one fine day. The kids took turns at a tractor pull while moms manned the Lactation Station, then we hit the rides, hung out with a cardboard cutout of Obama and ate a lot of junk. Here’s our movie:

One Fine Day at the Monroe County Fair

Design C & A

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:05 UTC 2008

Since first being introduced to Design Q & A—a short interview of industrial designer Charles Eames—I have wondered about how other designers may have responded to those same questions.

Carter answers questions meant for Charles Eames

Charles Eames, best known for his architecture and furniture, explored film extensively with wife Ray. Design Q&A consists of 29 clever and concise statements about design, part of Eames’ contribution to the “What is Design” exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. Madame L’Amic of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs interviewed the designer for the piece.

The five-minute film is not available online, alas, and even the transcription of the interview can be difficult to find. It remains part of a multi-volume collection of short films by Charles and Ray Eames that include a personal favorite, Powers of Ten.

Carter did two takes answering these same 29 questions. In the first, I read the questions verbatim, getting a string of similar responses (”Yes, sometimes.”). In the second take, I paraphrased the intended meaning of the question into more accessible terms, prompting Carter not only to answer but to explain why he answered as he did. The resulting video, edited for content, more than doubled the length of the original film and had to be further trimmed to get under the YouTube limit of 10 minutes.

To prepare for her part, Amy did some research to practice her French accent, ultimately channeling Inspector Clouseau and the visiting dignitaries in The American President. Il était parfait.

My favorite response was to the question, “Is there a design ethic?” Carter replied:

“One code that they must follow is that they can’t go beyond needed.”

Indeed.

Six Million Dollar Dog

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:04 UTC 2008

Our Miss Snooks is a fairly resilient dog. When she was four months old, she ate rat poison. After a little vitamin K and some sort of diuretic, she bounced back—same puppy, only louder.

When she was about 8 months old, she broke into my toiletries bag and ate a bunch of vitamins. This time all she required was a little monitoring and a room with fewer chew temptations.

Our Miss Snooks is having another faceoff with death

A few years later, Kevin and I were relaxing after work when suddenly we heard a horrible dog cry and all the lights went out. Snooks shorted out the apartment while chewing on a lamp cord. Again, with diuretics and something for the scorch marks on her mouth, she was good as new—theoretically, more cheerful for the shock therapy, and definitely less likely to chew on electric cords. She never dances with death in the same way twice.

Right around Carter’s first birthday, Snooks got hit by a car. The driver hit Snooks only after swerving to avoid the beagle leading her out an open gate and into temptation. Despite being in shock by the time we got her to the vet’s, she survived without major surgery. Kevin slept in a playpen with her for two weeks while she recovered.

Less than a year ago, Snooks rapidly lost weight and wasn’t acting like herself. Our vet felt her stomach, looked at me and said, “Mmmm. Shit.” The result was a splenectomy that had immediate positive results—before she had recovered from the surgery incision she was acting three years younger. We’ve had a pleasant year enjoying the results of what seemed a veterinary gamble. She’s a survivor.

Out of the Bayou
We added Snooks to our family from the Orleans Parrish Humane Society before moving back to Illinois in 1995. We were hoping for a more snuggly animal, since both our cats were rather standoffish. We didn’t get snuggly. In fact, when our feet would accidentally touch her (back in the days she could still jump that high), she’d huff off to the other side of the bed. She wouldn’t leave the room, though—she always stayed within eyesight. Instead of snuggly, we got watchful.

Through four moves, two beagles, and two births, Snooks has watched over us. She communicates by making strange singsong throat noises if we fail to feed her promptly, and by less subtle growly noises if the kids are trying to sit on her head. She refuses to relax, pacing, singing and nose nudging until all visitors stop speaking to us and address her directly, preferably with a scratch and a treat.

She watches everything. With the birth of Carter she became even more watchful. Our beagle, Cleo, pouted for about a week, but Snooks immediately took charge of watch duty: making sure she slept within eyesight of Carter. She did the same thing when Archie joined our lives.

Yesterday she stopped drinking water. This morning she continued her water strike, had trouble standing, and had the dry heaves. I made an emergency appointment at the vet’s office (our actual vet is in China right now) and then urged them to see her early, as she was going downhill quickly over the course of a few hours. Labored breathing, pale gums and that calm, stoic manner she adopts when her life is in danger all contributed to my panic.

Right now she’s hooked up to an IV, getting fluids, maybe getting a little food over the next few hours. Something is in her stomach, looking suspiciously similar to the mass that prompted the splenectomy. I’m just not sure how many pieces of her we can remove. We want her to be comfortable, happy and alive. We could use help doing that, because the grad school insurance barely covers the humans in our family.

There’d be a hole in the Makice heart without Snooks’ watchful eyes.

Addendum: We just got home from the emergency vet in Indianapolis. Snooks is spending the night there. When we arrived in Indy I walked the boys down the street to get some food. Carter found a dandelion and picked it up, explaining to Archie how he could make a wish and it would come true if he blew off all the seeds.

Carter: Oh my gosh! I blew off all the seeds! I never imagined I’d be able to do it! My wish will come true!

Archie: What’d you wish for, Carter?

Carter: I can’t say or it won’t come true.

When we were getting ready to leave Snooks in the care of the doctors for the night, Carter insisted he needed to see Snooks first, because he had something to give her. Then he set the empty dandelion head by her bandaged paw.

The Lap Dog

Kevin Makice — Thu Jul 31 22:56:04 UTC 2008

Our elder dog, Snooks, died this morning. Already planning to get up early so Archie and I could go retrieve her from the Indianapolis emergency vet, I awoke at 4:48a to the phone call.

It was disguised in a cheerful ringtone, but I knew what it was about. There was a moment, though, when I considered other possibilities.

Me: Hello?
Vet: Kevin Makice? We’re calling about your dog.
Me: Is she …
Vet: Completely fine. Yeah, yeah. It’s a miracle. Could you come get her now? Her barking is driving us crazy.

Completely plausible, even at a more reasonable time of the day. Snooks had the bark of an elephant.

Amy already captured the life of Snooks quite well, but I wanted to share one more memory.

We drove up to Indy last night, the third pet visit to that clinic for us and second trip for Snooks. On the ride up, she lay on some blankets in my lap. All 58 pounds of her. She panted non-stop, at a rate of what we would discover a few hours later to be 287 beats per minute—more than twice the metabolism of a normal dog. Her coat, despite a recent bath, seemed perpetually flaky. I spent the hour-long drive stroking the black hair off her body and onto my white shirt.

Thirteen years ago, we took a different car ride with her.

We went to a local animal shelter in New Orleans back in late 1995. Amy was about to graduate from Tulane with her second degree, and we were longing for a dog to take back to the midwest with us. We were looking for an “authentic” bayou pooch known as a Catahoula. Instead we found a small room with about a dozen kennels separating the various stray or abandoned dogs on death row. We were going to save one, and proceeded to scan for candidates.

Amy was very attracted to a little yip-yip dog. It was a lot like her childhood pet, Ruffles, and it also fit my preference for small. Unfortunately, we were told it was in the pen because of a failure to get along with the previous owner’s cats. We had two of those. Thus, no Ruffles II. All of the dogs were equally appealing, equally flawed. Too big. Too old. Too drooly. Our choice was to be our first “couples” dog, so were were hoping for a perfect match.

In the first kennel by the door sat a small black and white dog. She just sat, wagging her tail and waiting patiently for us to make our inevitable decision. She didn’t bark or throw herself at the kennel door, like the others. She just watched us make the rounds.

The person on duty told us that the little dog had been found wandering the neutral ground on a local highway. She was a terrier, she told us, and probably nearly fully grown. They were off by several breeds and about 35 pounds, but we didn’t know that at the time. Probably wouldn’t have made a difference—we had found our friend.

We filled out the papers and left to make a pit stop at Pet Smart for some supplies. A bed. A bowl. A couple squeaky chewy things. Amy drove, and I held our little “terrier” in my lap. The dog had fleas. For the first few minutes, the excitement of a car ride kept her up against the window, looking at the crazy world go by at a much faster pace than when she had been hoofin’ it down the highway. Then, our little dog fell asleep in my lap, the kind of sleep that says one adventure just ended.

That’s the same dog that sat in my lap on the road to Indy. Heavier, now drooling. Still not barking, although it was probably the first time I longed to hear that distinctive, booming woof that could shake windows a neighborhood away. We named her after a local blues musician, Snooks Eaglin, to keep her connected with her Louisiana roots. She panted too much to fall asleep, but Snooks was in my lap.

Thanks, everyone, for the comments and tweets. This Web 2.0 thing worked out well for us this week. You’ve given us all some strength.

kmakice: @KellyAbbott Excellent summary!

Kevin Makice — Fri Jul 20 17:43:29 UTC 2007

I read Kelly Abbott's Twitter tweet about a story in Dandelife summarizing the past year of the community. This is a test of a pretty nifty story starter, where I can click on a like to a "drop" in my information stream and start typing a new story.

Although it has been difficult to find time to dive deeper into this site, DandeLife is one of my favorite communities. I'm expecting big things in the future.

Dandelife comes to Facebook

Kevin Makice — Wed Jun 27 17:53:10 UTC 2007

After a Tweet from Kelly Abbott and some debugging, I've successfully added DandeLife to my Facebook profile. I hope this has the same effect for this community as launching a FB app did for iLike.

Interning at Kosmix

Kevin Makice — Fri May 11 14:54:25 UTC 2007

The second semester of my first year of Ph.D. studies at Indiana University's School of Informatics concluded with a trip to CHI 2007 in San Jose and the start of my first internship, with the Mountain View startup Kosmix.

The Kosmix gig is ideal is practically every way. I get to telecommute from Indiana, visiting the California office every few weeks for face-to-face presentations and further brainstorming. The first week here has been very illuminating, with a number of projects bubbling up through initial conversations to make the summer quite promising. I miss my family, though, and am grateful to avoid traumatizing Amy and the boys with a prolonged absence. As it is, the 16 days I have been away will be the longest separation of both my marriage and my parenthood. Thank God for computer-mediated communication.

At Kosmix, I also am reunited with Shveta, one of my master's program colleagues and teammates in our winning CHI 2005 student design competition team, mPath. The financial considerations also meet my goals of having a "real" job for the summer downtime, to help pay for the academic work the other eight months of the year. Things will still be tight, but significantly better than the past two summers in Bloomington.

Best of all, I get to do the work I am trained to do. This isn't a summer of wireframes and CSS. I actually get to create strategic designs and ground decisions in user need. This is almost textbook (if we had one of those) project work learned at the School of Informatics. I couldn't have asked for a better match.

[Maybe on one of the future visits, I'll get to put faces to usernames of some of the other social networking folk I've met online. If you are one of them and live in the extended Mountain View area, let me know when you'll be around this summer, and I'll try to aim return trips for those weeks.]

I have an iPod

Kevin Makice — Thu Mar 15 22:37:38 UTC 2007

I got my Dandelife red iPod nano yesterday, my first. It took a while to get all of the iTunes sorted out and synchronized, but I now have ear buds in, volume cranked and basketball on (the music is better than the color commentary).

I worry about Apple's business model, of course. The intentional obsolescence of devices isn't a sustainable practice, even if is makes for sustainable revenue. However, I also really missed my music. I enjoy having my life soundtracked again.

Music and I have struggled to have a relationship at all. My family invested in 8-Track tapes, so I was off to a bad start as a kid. In getting my first cassette player, I confirmed Santa was a phony. Hurt by Debbie Boone's rise to the top of the charts in 1977, I swore off pop radio for a while, instead falling to sleep with a stack of records my parents gave me (including Barry Manilow and the Hooked On ... series). And since the 8-Track experience soured me on new tech for a while, I didn't pick up a CD player until the mid-1990s. As a result a lot of my music is trapped in cassette form on shelves deep in the bowels of the house. That's the music I really want to listen to right now. That's my soundtrack. (Hmmm, I wonder if the old Panasonic has blue tooth?)

I've had the iPod running more than not for the past 30 hours. With wife and kids away for the week in Florida, there isn't much conversation going on in the house anyway. When classes resume and family evenings return, the buds come out.

BlogSchmog

We are the narrative

Kevin Makice — Thu Mar 01 00:05:46 UTC 2007

People have been connected through storytelling for as long as campfires have been around. New experiences are shared and enrich the lives of the speaker and the audience. Shared experiences become the common threads that weave us together. Things haven't changed much in the past 790,000 years. Parents still remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot, and children will forever recall what they were doing when they first saw the Twin Towers fall on television. These are major experiences with international reach.

But what about the other stories important to me? They are smaller tragedies and deeper joys that one might not find worthy of a page in Wikipedia. In my lifeworld, they are monumental.

I lost my grandfather in 1989, the first funeral I ever attended. It was a traumatic year when I also experienced academic and relationship failures, too. I remember seeing Max Headroom show up on the television during a few seconds of a pirated signal during the evening news in Chicago. I got to play an extra in a couple movies (Dutch and Gladiator), meeting Robert Townsend's brother in the process. I went to the last series at Old Comiskey and 20 games in the new stadium the following year. My friends and I reveled in a Super Bowl march, and I paid $800 for the right to stand in United Center to see Michael Jordan's last home game as a Bull. A semi truck filled with frozen pizzas collided with another vehicle in the lane next to us. I won the math contest. Letters to the editor. TPing a friend's house. Speed Racer at 3:30p on WFLD. Loss of job. Graduation. The Freedom Train. Disneyworld. Driving to DePauw in less than 3 hours. Pretzel, the dog, and Caramel, the cat. Campaigning for Cleo Fields. My wife. My first son. My second son. My parents' divorce. A twenty-something friend dies of a childhood ailment. My screenplay is eaten by a Syquest drive.

Every memory I share is a potential shared memory of another. These stories connect to each other and bring together people with variations on the same theme. That exchange serves only to enrich. Although my stories have only begun to be told, I am thankful Dandelife exists to keep them present.

R.I.P. Hard Drive

Kevin Makice — Wed Feb 14 18:32:37 UTC 2007

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. ... Who's on deck to get shamed next?

I've been using computers since before the Mac. I pair-programmed with my friend Tim on his various Atari computers, mostly watching him make dungeon adventure games. I wrote 100 lines of assembler code using a cartridge on an Odyssey game system. I made a Yahtzee game on an Apple IIe my mom borrowed from her school principal. I collected $5 from various friends to give a Timex Sinclair 1000 to our friend, Bob, as a $60 bargain. Eventually, I talked my parents into getting me an Atari 800XL, which I used from the end of high school into the start of my sophomore year at DePauw.

In 1988, my parents bought me a second-hand Mac—an original 128K version, upgraded to 512K with an external drive and numeric keypad before it found me. The 'rents paid for it in three installments, totaling $650 ... about $1800 less than it retailed when first released in 1984. That machine still sits in a place of honor on my shelf.

Loss Causes
All the way up to this current machine, I have had data problems. I remember bashing a fist into the keyboard, cracking it in the process, in the spring semester of my freshman year at DePauw when it swallowed my creative writing assignment. My early Mac days learned from that experience. Thanks in part to the very-small storage options, I became very good at swapping disks and backing things up. Sure, there were file corruptions and frozen screens that caused data loss, but it wasn't until I bought a Syquest drive in 1995 that catastrophe became clinically depressing.

I began a freelance company, Real World Creations, in 1996 to serve the web needs local businesses in northern Illinois. The real impetus was (a) I didn't get a job I was angling for at Tellabs, and (b) I fancied the idea of working for money 4 days a week and writing for fun the other 3. I never did manage to self-organize to that schedule, but in late 1996 I did decide to take time off and write a screenplay. It didn't end well, as a BBEdit save problem came right before some drive clicking, and that was all she overwrote. I figured it was Syquest's fault (it was) and other companies, like Iomega, could do better (they couldn't). My Jaz drive crapped out on me, leaving about 3GB worth of data trapped on big, fragile discs. I've blocked out all that I lost from that experience, but I'd guess it was more traumatic at the time than it is now. My new catastrophic data loss, though, is very fresh.

Since we didn't have power last night, I slept soundly clinging to the notion that freezing the drive would allow me to somehow say goodbye. Nothing says goodbye like some vital data saves. I spent two hours researching a plan that would optimize my expected window (20 minutes) and get the data I would most miss. Low on the priority were the 6 gigs of iTunes files (all culled from CDs in my possession) and my email archive (which I desperately wanted, but size was probably going to get in the way). Highest were the recent documents written in the last 2-3 weeks, my research directories of hundreds of PDFs, documents for the HCI/d 2 class I help teach, and un-registering my copy of Final Draft. All was moot, as the only good that came from the morning was the realization that, without the hard drive, the computer would let me eject the CD trapped in the laptop since yesterday.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

No Hail Mary
There is still the option to manually spin the discs in a clean room. DTI Data is the most attractive company that does this, with a high recovery rate, marketing that promotes a lot of confidence, and a no-data-no-charge policy that makes the gamble risk free. While their prices are also competitive—one flat fee of about $1200 for clean-room work—it is money we just don't have. I think my lost screenplay is worth that much to me, especially since I never got a chance to re-write it. But for some largely disposable files that cost me time to replace? I just can't justify it on my lack of salary. So, to MacExperience I go to get the ball rolling on a replacement hard drive instead.

I'm way past the shame-on-me stage of this process. Rather than investing $1200 in file recovery, we're spending about 1/10th of that on the latest Mac OSX for the upstairs computer and a family .mac account. I think this is, finally, a behavior changing crisis. I'll make better use of that thumbnail drive, so my latest files are always in two places, minimum. Having three eras of email wiped out also means my odd dream of a lifetime of email as my journal is also gone. I'll be deleting email much more frequently. Use of my wiki and blog will increase, as the one really good outcome of this was what I didn't lose there.

This MacBook hasn't even reached double-digits measuring its life in months. Methinks Apple may have reinvented the Lemon.

BlogSchmog

Freedom Train

Kevin Makice — Thu Feb 01 17:13:52 UTC 2007

Way back when nearby Crystal Lake was just a small Illinois town instead of the sprawling mini-mall it has become, my family took me to the Eastern edge of the city to see the American Freedom Train. The AFT was a 26-car train pulled by three restored steam engines, a traveling museum that traversed all 48 mainland states in 21 months. The two-day stop in Crystal Lake came about four months after the train first left Delaware and was the first stop with a new engine after a change in Chicago just days earlier. I was one of more than seven million Americans to visit the train during its tour, although tens of millions more took time to watch it go by nearby towns on its way to its next stop.

Although I can't recall a product or billboard that didn't have the official Bicentennial logo on it, the AFT was apparently the only nationwide celebration of our country's 200th birthday. Larger than the one that ran around the country in 1947, this train featured twelve display cars, two of which were showcase cars visible to anyone in sight of the train (no ticket required). I recall seeing the Liberty Bell, or maybe just a replica of the same, but maybe that was just wishful thinking. I do remember Dorothy's dress from the Wizard of Oz movie and a moon rock, which was probably the highlight of the visit for me.

It was incredibly hot that day, and the lines were longer and less interesting than Disney. We got tickets for the second day's event; my dad said the first day was sold out. In Christmas that year, I got a train engine for my Lionel track, a short-lived hobby that is currently boxed up somewhere in the attic.

Two floors of Super Bowl fans

Kevin Makice — Wed Jan 31 19:20:57 UTC 2007

Fresh off two playoff shutouts, the Chicago Bears made their first trip to the Super Bowl to play the New England Patriots. A few of my friends had braved cold Illinois mornings to camp out in front of a Ticketmaster at Sears in Spring Hill Mall to buy what tickets we could for the Giants and Rams games. (We'd do the same the following year, with more people but a sadder outcome.) There was no hope of buying tickets to the game in New Orleans, so it was left to me to organize a party.

My dad offered to rent a big screen TV. In those days, that meant a mammoth projector-and-screen unit that required movers to install. We went to Ralph's Rent-all in town, but even ten days before Super Sunday there were none to be had. The best we could do is accommodate my pals with split-level viewing—a bunch of us watching a 30" set upstairs, and another watching on a 28" set downstairs.

The day is mostly a blur. As a fairly well-connected senior in high school, I managed to get about three dozen people barking at the T.V. with every sack. To celebrate the Rams win two weeks earlier, we stopped off at a restaurant and invested a couple bucks to invent kereoke with "The Super Bowl Shuffle" in the jukebox. I have no idea if there were other patrons in the building, but I sure hope they were Bears fans. We had our video of the Shuffle playing for our personal pregame, as well as recordings of "Bear Down, Chicago Bears" and numerous other songs with Chicago references. There was cheese. There were burgers. And lots of root beer. The chips were in a bowl shaped like a helmet, and the place was decorated with the plethora of orange pom-pons we collected from Soldier Field in the playoff run.

When Willie Gault scored on the bomb from McMahon, the party downstairs thought the one upstairs was going to crash through the ceiling and rain down on them. No such tragedy, thankfully. We also survived William Perry's touchdown—which by hindsight should have gone to Walter Payton. Festivities started about 2p with season retrospectives and pregame analysis. The final people didn't leave until about midnight (it was a school day come Monday, after all). The halls of Woodstock High were soon to be filled with barks and singing.

The buzz lasted about 36 hours before attention turned elsewhere. Most of these same friends and I were sitting in math class Tuesday when the principal announced the space shuttle Challenger had exploded.

Our Miss Snooks

Kevin Makice — Tue Jan 16 09:47:27 UTC 2007

A funny thing happened the other day on my way to town. My dog got hit by a car.

It’s not a “ha-ha” funny or even “peculiar” funny as much as just plain unexpected. My life seems to be brimming with that variety. Our evening plans involved a belated Valentine’s Day dinner in town, and I was already running late for a mall run that afternoon. A funny thing had already happened on my way out of my new office that delayed my errand. And prior to that came a string of funny things conspiring to put me in a constant state of tardiness. By the time I heard the doorbell ring Friday afternoon, I was hardly in the mood for funny things.

A woman stood at the door. Like a number of unexpected visitors on our busy street on the outskirts of Bloomington, she had the look of someone about to ask for directions. Instead, she asked if I knew who had the black and white dog in the neighborhood.

Immediately, I put two and two together and came up with three-point-five. When we had contracted some people to build my dream office in the basement, one of them had accidentally left our back gate open. Without thinking to look, we had let our two dogs out to play and poop. They like to romp, however, and when they saw the break in the fence, Snooks and Cleo bolted for the great unknown. We caught them shortly afterward joyously running through the front yards of various neighbors. Snooks had even found time to roll in something disgusting, prompting a corrective bath. Since the cable guy had shown up at midday with a free service upgrade, it immediately clicked that he probably left the gate open and freed our fun-loving animals.

The woman, Jane Collins, followed me around the side of the house as I tried to hide my embarrassment for my pooches being loose. I nabbed Cleo right away after he assumed the “yes, I did it” submissive roll to expose his considerable belly. Jane continued to speak, but I was only half listening as I focused on corralling the pets. It was only a moment or two after seeing Snooks lying down quietly by our back door that it sunk in.

“I hit your dog,” she repeated.

There was no blood gushing forth or grotesquely broken bones. Just a serene Dalmatian-Border Collie mutt laying by the door. Panting. Quiet. Maybe too quiet.

The next several minutes were blurred. I know I told Amy our dog got hit, indicting the cable guy with some disdain. I know I surprised Jane by asking for her phone number and address, which I’m sure might have been misconstrued as the first step toward a lawsuit or forwarding of veterinary bills. Seeing her puzzled look, I asked, “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

It wasn’t like I knew. Three dogs, five cats and several dozen rodents had preceded Snooks to the Isbister household. Though there had been some violent deaths among them — I once watched my favorite gerbil get gobbled up by a visiting Irish Setter — none have ever died on the street. If anything, it was the Vet I had to fear. Between euthanasia and a couple failed attempts to keep our pets breathing, emergency trips to the local veterinarian had ended in disaster. Still, neither Amy or I hesitated in rounding up Carter and a checkbook and heading to the clinic.

Snooks was definitely in shock, with eyes a bit glazed and skin startin to gray. I was in shock, too, not even noticing when she pooped on the way out of the car onto the stretcher. I stayed with Snooks while th vets spent the next hour stabilizing her and Amy scooted around town making arrangements for a possible vigil. Our dinner plans were scuttled. Now, we had only to worry about the inconvenience, the bill and how many pets we would have at the end of the day.

The answer to that last question is three. That’s the way it has been for a while now, and we’ve been given no reason to think that number will decrease in the near future. Snooks survived, even if it took a couple thousand dollars to improve the odds of that happening. At the end of this particular day, I will again be convinced it was money well spent when I rub the ears of my dog before I go to sleep.

The inconvenience also survives. Already tight trying to get our basement remodeling done, we lost an entire bathroom when that car hit Snooks. We lost an entire weekend, even if we managed to make it back to Bloomington with enough confidence to attend the Indiana-Illinois game. I lost a romantic dinner out on the town and a chance to recover between two weeks of grueling programming. At least we have the Noggin channel.

And our beloved Snooks.

Not everyone would do what we did for their pet. Since she was stabilized in Bloomington, maybe someone else might not have spent the time and money to whisk her up to Indianapolis and pay several hundred dollars for her care. Since she didn’t look too bad immediately after getting hit, maybe someone else might not have bothered with the local vet and instead just watched her to see whether she got better. Since she was only a dog, someone else might scheduled a trip to the pound next week for a replacement if things went south.

Everyone, of course, has their own approach when dealing with animals. Ours is to view them as a vital part of our family. Different than Carter in pecking order and potential to develop, but no less deserving of our love and respect. We wouldn’t have taken any chances if it had been Carter at the receiving end of a license plate, and we weren’t about to take chances with the care for Snooks.

Looking back, there were a lot of funny things that had to happen to allow us make our decisions.

Jane Collins could have driven differently — slower, more deliberately, louder — to avoid hitting our wandering beast. Our dogs could have been content to taunt neighborhood pets and roll in things and on this side of the street. We could have stepped outside our back door and confirmed that the gate we always leave latched still was before letting the two dogs free to roam the back yard. The cable guy could have shut the fence gate, leaving it in the same position he found it when he replaced some outside wiring. I could have declined the free cable upgrade. Or better yet, just don’t answer the phone.

We don’t have to look very far into the past to find ways we could have prevented the future. Life, however, isn’t meant to be served that way. It’s about how we respond to tragedy, not the lengths one may go to avoid it.

I’m pleased by the response to this particular tragedy. Amy juggled a distraught husband with a needy baby and a small SUV so skillfully we could have scheduled this in our Palm Pilots. She placed the necessary calls and made the arrangements for vets and hotels and food, all the while torn up inside over the same what-ifs I had. We got transportation, babysitting and pet care from our family when we needed it most. We got honest recommendations from the doctors charged with keeping Snooks in the family. Most of all, we had a neighbor who cared enough about what happened to stop and let us know our dog was hit by her car.

That is the one response that stands out for me. Not everybody stops to investigate after hitting an animal. Fewer still follow the dog to a nearby house and start canvassing for the pet’s owner. It is true had Jane not hit our dog, the downstairs bathroom would be ready by Mid-March. The bigger truth, though, is that had Jane not stopped to tell us about the accident, our Snooks would probably be dead. Jane Collins is why I am able to rub my dog’s ears before I fall asleep tonight. For that I am eternally grateful.

Funny thing, huh.

First Memory

Kevin Makice — Thu Jan 04 12:09:00 UTC 2007

There are white clouds in a bright blue sky. A range of mountains is in the distance, past a post-and-wire fence in the backyard of some apartment building. There are swingsets in the empty yard. The grass is green.

That's the first thing I can remember about my life. When this occurred, I don't really know. All I have is the image and the sense of a bright, sunny day with a breeze.

I was born in Boulder, Colorado on May 15, 1968. I only stayed there, though, until October of that year. My newly-graduated dad took his chemistry doctorate and young family east to Woodstock, Illinois to work at Morton Chemical. I've never lived anywhere else growing up, and any family trips went to places like Detroit and Maine. We went back to visit when I was much older (freshman in high school).

I have lots of clear memories of my first few years on Lucas Road, where we lived until I was 2-1/2, but it seems unlikely that a baby less than 5 months old would be able to remember anything. I think my mom said that we took a trip back to Boulder to visit some of my parents' college friends, maybe the summer after my first birthday. Even then, that would be stretching things. I have been told by those who know that kids don't start saving their memories for recall until about 2.

Yet, the image in my head is clear ... There are white clouds in a bright blue sky. A range of mountains is in the distance, past a post-and-wire fence in the backyard of some apartment building. There are swingsets in the empty yard. The grass is green.