[caption id=“attachment_6081” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Cities XL - Trio - buildings up close[/caption]

In addition to the game I played this month, I’ve decided from now on to  include a running total of the top games to see if/how they change with time. For example, when I wasn’t paying attention, Saints Row: The Third made the Top 7.  (Which, raptr, is a weird number.  Usually these things are multiples of five)

Today I heard a story on NPR’s Fresh Air about the state of child daycare in America.   Let’s just say it’s not very good. It was an interview with Jonathan Cohn who recently wrote a “The Hell of American Day Care” for The New Republic.  It was a story that had some details that rang too true for Danielle and I. One of the key points that Cohn makes is that daycare is very expensive - so expensive as to be a burden to those who need it the most, single parents.  That is a very, very true statement.  Danielle and I flip-flopped during the pregnancy about whether Scarlett would be going to daycare.  Around three months before she was due to be born, we decided to go with daycare so I set out to find all the daycare centers near our house that seemed reputable.I was quite surprised that it was hard to find one that was clean, provided stimulation for the kids, and wasn’t impossibly expensive . Eventually we found one that seemed good based on the tour. About a month before Scarlett was supposed to start, we went for a visit to meet the teachers. While talking with them, we realized that most of the kids were left alone and the workers weren’t washing their hands after changing the kids’ diapers. Disgusted, we decided to just take care of her at home.  The sad thing is that daycare at that place cost so much that we weren’t really losing any money with the loss of one income. That was what had made us so unsure of whether to go with daycare in the first place - the amount of money we’d still get to take home if she was in daycare was so small the only thing that kept us actually considering it was a fear of how expensive diapers and other baby products are.

I’ve had the same tagline for a long time, but it hasn’t always been the same.  In 2007 I had a focus on computer animation where I now focus on photography. I’ve been watching a lot of presentations from Wordcamp 2013 and one of them inspired me to focus on trying to blog every day (just as how I did photography every day for a year to practice photography and get better) and to focus on a certain topic per day.

I had something of an obsession with preserving history. It’s why I am constantly using photography to document my life. (And was doing so back when we had to use expensive film) A few months ago I wrote about how emulation can help us preserve our culture when it comes to video games. We’re in a weird place right now in our culture - everything is digital. If there were to be some sort of catastrophic apocalypse, any aliens that came to Earth would think we stopped inventing stuff in the Industrial Revolution.  (Only a slight exaggeration) Even if we just look at humanity - if something were to wipe out technology (see many sci-fi stories including the manga/anime Nausicaa and Trigun) all the information we know - all the petabytes on the net would be inaccessible and lost forever.  But if we dial it back a bit and forget about those doomsday scenarios - it’s important to see that culture is informed by what came before it.  (Super heroes are just modern day greek gods, and so on)  It’s why the Library of Congress collects important works of culture for preservation.

One day last week I was a little bored at lunchtime so I started clicking on the Wordpress Dashboard links to different developer blogs.  Turns out Wordpress 3.6 is coming out soon and it’s going to focus on bringing post formats to the fore and creating a consistent way of handling them within the database. I had no idea this was introduced back in Wordpress 3.1. I don’t know if I missed the notification or if it didn’t mean anything to me because I hadn’t used Tumblr yet. Here are two great explanations: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/post-formats/ and http://wpdaily.co/future-post-formats/ . If you don’t feel like reading those, basically think of how when you make a post on Tumblr it asks you if it’s an image, post, link, etc. That determines the interface it gives you and, depending on your Tumblr theme, determines how to present the information you put into it. Given that one of the post formats is Annotation (meant to be a short post) and given that I quickly grew tired of Tumblr and how it doesn’t have a proper commenting system, I’m probably going to use that for shorter, less fleshed out posts rather than having a Tumblr blog.

The slippery slope rebuttal can be pretty annoying depending on how dumb the person using the argument wants to be.  For example, many people say all the surveillance cameras we have everywhere are a slippery slope towards totalitarian governments.  While I think we still have a few tricks up our sleeves before we have to be worried, I give the argument some credibility because in the past one of the greatest tools totalitarian governments had at their hands was to create a snitch society.  When your neighbors (or even your kids) are going to potentially rat you out to the government, it means you really have to watch what they catch you doing.  Even something that is innocent (as far as the government’s rules) can be dangerous if your neighbor misinterprets what you’re doing.  So if you don’t have to worry about neighbors, but have video everywhere - all the worse!

It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post.  For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service.  Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

I took a long time to publish the previous post, so here we are again.  It’s mostly Scarlett Easter photos.  As I sit here and look at a photo of this year’s Easter photo, it’s pretty awesome to see how much she’s changed.  For one thing, she’s mobile now, so it was a challenge to get her to sit there while we took the photo.  For another, she can actually sit on her own.

In light of the semi-recent news that most kids nowadays use Youtube to discover music and that leading to Youtube views being counted for music charts, I thought I’d talk about how I discover and/or acquire new music.  For the record, the wife also uses Youtube to find new songs.  It’s one of the first things she thinks of and I’m always left thinking “Oh yeah”.  How I discover music to listen to depends on a few categories.

It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post.  For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service.  Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

The biggest takeaway which is SOOOOO crazy is how much Scarlett has changed in just 1 year.  Only 365 days.  And she looks COMPLETELY different!

[caption id=“attachment_5996” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Elites have some NICE houses in Cities XL[/caption]

I am really, really enjoying building up my city.  There are new zoning densities that open up as you get more and more populous.  For a while I was using a strategy similar to what’s going on in my in-law’s neighborhood - raze the single family homes to build apartments.  Then later raze those to build sky-rises.  But then I abandoned that for suburban sprawl since the map was so huge.  As most people (I think) do in these city simulation games, I started off with an area similar to what happens in real life.  In order to keep taxes low, you don’t want long roads separating your citizens from their jobs.  So the first residential area is kinda dingy and exists near some really dirty industrial manufacturing.  So I decided to build a nicer part of town, with more parks and cleaner air, across the river.  However, they still needed to get to work, so traffic started building up on the bridge.  So I had to make another and another and…..